by S J Bolton
Felix put the last one down. Talitha stared at it, looked up at him, then picked it up.
The last picture on the film was a shot of Megan in Christ Church Meadow. In it, she smiled at the camera and held one hand up in a small wave.
Talitha was no fool. She got it at last. ‘This is recent,’ she said. ‘This is Megan now.’
Felix had spent a long time the previous night looking at Megan, smiling – in triumph, he thought – at the camera.
‘They’re all recent,’ Felix said. ‘I got a bad feeling when I saw this one, I just couldn’t place it.’ He put a finger on one of the shots of the city centre. ‘That car is not from twenty years ago,’ he said. ‘It’s a modern model. And the bus doesn’t look right either.’
‘What the hell?’
‘You didn’t take any of these, Tal, she did. Remember in the pub the other night, when Xav asked whether the film had been Kodak? Probably wasn’t. She’s got hold of a new film and taken a load of photographs of the city.’
Tal looked bewildered and, suddenly, years younger. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘Well, two reasons I can think of. The first is that she’s trying to recreate memories, going back to places where she spent her youth.’
‘She has a smartphone now – she’d take pictures on her phone.’
‘Yeah, I’m not sold on the first reason either. The second is that she deliberately found an old camera, bought a film and went around recreating shots that could have been on the original. And then she brought it into work, knowing I’d try to get a hold of it. She wanted us to find this.’
Talitha sank back against the window ledge. ‘She really is fucking with us, isn’t she?’
‘Yep. Question is, what do we do about it?’
29
It was the end of the week before they were all able to get together, and once more Talitha had cautioned against panicking. ‘We have to hold our nerve,’ she’d said to Felix before he left her office. ‘She might be trying to provoke a reaction. We can’t give her one. We have to act as though nothing’s wrong.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ Felix had snapped back. ‘You don’t have to spend eight hours a day with her.’
Somehow though, he’d made it through the week, being politely friendly to Megan and palming his wife off with promises that her employment wouldn’t be for long.
Now, at last, in the company of people he didn’t have to lie to, he felt nothing so much as relief.
The private room at the Rose and Crown in Summertown was tiny, cramped, like the rest of the pub. Amber and Xav were sitting some distance apart, the way they always positioned themselves in public; if Xav weren’t so clearly besotted with his young wife, Felix might long ago have suspected he and Amber of rekindling an old flame. Dan was on his feet, examining the contents of a bookcase – God alone knew why because the most recent thing in it was a ten-year-old Good Pub Guide.
Felix was by the window, looking out over the courtyard, on the watch for Tal’s arrival.
‘It’s still not proof,’ Amber was saying. ‘I know you’re upset, Felix, but it’s not. She may simply be trying to recreate some memories.’
For a politician, Amber was naive, verging on idiotic. Maybe it explained why she was so successful; her naivety made people believe her. Amber, he’d decided while they were still at school, was vanadium, strong and useful on the surface, especially when she had others to bounce off, but basically nothing under the hood.
Felix leaned across the pub table and gathered together the photographs. He felt like Megan was taunting him, even from a distance, and he didn’t need to look at them any more.
‘I mean, she’s been out for nearly a month,’ Amber was droning on. ‘If she was going to ask anything of us, she’d have done it by now, wouldn’t she?’
‘She’s made no contact with me,’ Xav said. ‘And if she really does remember what happened that summer, it’s me she should be most pissed off with.’
Small mercies, thought Felix. Megan’s wrath, once it was unleashed, would be aimed primarily at Xav.
‘Maybe she’s saving the best till last,’ he said, spitefully. ‘Still getting anonymous phone calls?’
‘They stopped after Ella phoned the company,’ Xav admitted. ‘Might have been nothing after all.’
‘Exactly, we shouldn’t be panicked into doing something stupid,’ Amber said. ‘Dan, tell us about the lunch you had with her. How was she?’
Daniel tore his eyes away from a Latin dictionary and looked round at the group as though not entirely sure what they were all doing together. ‘Shouldn’t we wait for Tal?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure how long I can stay,’ Amber said. ‘I’ve got a constituency meeting at eight.’
Felix glanced back out at the courtyard. No tall, dark-haired women striding in their direction. ‘We’ll fill her in when she gets here,’ he said. ‘Go on, Dan.’
‘So, I took her out to lunch.’ Dan topped up his glass from the bottle of red that he, Felix and Xav were sharing. ‘Turkish place on Iffley Road. I tell you what, there’s nothing wrong with her appetite.’
Daniel wasn’t looking his best. There were patches of eczema on his hands and blotches on his neck and lower jaw that could be an allergic reaction but equally might be stress related. Xav too looked thinner and paler.
‘How is she?’ Amber asked as Felix sat down next to her. ‘In herself, I mean. Before you get onto the other stuff, how do you think she’s coping?’
‘Looking a lot better than when she first came out,’ Daniel said. ‘Her skin’s lost some of that unhealthy, yellow sheen, and she’s not constantly looking over her shoulder, you know, as though worried someone might be creeping up on her.’
‘I noticed that,’ Xav said. ‘When we were at Tal’s. Jumpy all the time.’
Xav had become much the same, Felix thought, starting every time he got a text message or there was a loud noise outside.
‘She mainly wanted to talk about us.’ Daniel glanced Felix’s way. ‘How well you’ve done with the company.’
They were all reacting to the blow of Megan’s return into their lives. Dan was breaking out into weird skin conditions, Xav had become jumpier than a maiden aunt, Amber was driving them mental with her endless virtue signalling and Felix himself was getting to the point where even he thought he’d lost control of his drinking. He pushed his glass further away from him. The trouble was, his hand went to it automatically; he almost didn’t realise he was doing it half the time.
‘And she’s blown away by Amber’s success.’ Dan attempted a smile, but it looked odd and forced. ‘She’d asked me to bring photographs with me, of big occasions, you know. I showed her Amber’s wedding pictures – not yours, Xav, I’m not that stupid. I said I didn’t go to yours, so don’t drop me in it.’
‘She wanted to see my wedding?’ Amber glanced nervously at Xav.
‘Yeah, she made a big thing about how she’d have been one of your bridesmaids, or godmother to one of the girls. She wanted to know their birthdays. I couldn’t remember exactly – sorry, Amber, but they’re not my godchildren. I told her I’d find out. And she wants to know their favourite toys, books, films, and so on. For presents, she said.’
‘This feels a bit obsessive,’ Felix said.
‘Yes, that’s it exactly.’ Dan picked up his glass. ‘She asked a lot about Tal, too, whether her family still have that place in Sicily, why she never had kids of her own, were she and Mark happy? Every time I asked her about herself, she changed the subject as soon as she could.’
‘Trying not to be caught out?’ Xav asked.
‘Who knows. In the end, I asked her straight up what had gone wrong with her exams that summer. I told her it had been almost as much a shock to us as the accident, given how clever we all knew her to be. To be honest, I think I laid it on a bit t
hick.’
There was a pinkness around Daniel’s eyes, and even Felix, not known in the group for his sensitivity, could see the other man struggling. Amber covered Daniel’s hand with her own. ‘What did she say?’ she asked in a tone you might use to a child about to kick off. ‘About her exams?’
Daniel sighed. ‘She said maybe she wasn’t half as clever as she’d pretended to be. Well, she could see I wasn’t falling for that, so then she spun me this story about suddenly developing exam phobia.’
‘Is that even a thing?’ Xav asked.
‘Very much so.’ Daniel looked happier on a subject other than Megan. ‘There are very bright pupils who can’t perform in exams. We’ve got a couple in school now, and we’re working with psychologists to get to the bottom of it. It’s unusual for it to come on suddenly, though, which is what Megan claimed happened to her.’
‘How did she explain it exactly?’ Amber said.
‘She said that a few hours before each paper, she started to feel the onset of a panic attack. Her heartbeat would pick up, her stomach contents turned to mush, her breathing threatening to spiral out of control. In fairness, these are classic panic-attack symptoms.’
‘How come we didn’t notice this?’ Felix asked. ‘Megan was in every exam I took. Xav, you and she did the same papers. Did you spot anything?’
Xav shook his head. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary. I mean, we were all on edge; all feeling the pressure.’
‘Exactly,’ Daniel said. ‘We were all completely focused on ourselves, on what we could remember, what was likely to come up. We wouldn’t necessarily have spotted a problem with someone else.’
‘Where the hell’s Tal?’ Felix muttered.
‘When she got into the exam room, things got worse,’ Dan continued. ‘She needed the loo every few minutes, thought she was going to be sick. Even the papers went blurry, as though her eyesight had gone. If all this is true, then to be honest, it’s a wonder she did as well as she did.’
‘What brought it on, though?’ Felix asked. ‘You don’t go from being the most gifted student in the school to someone incapable of sitting a paper.’
‘Yeah, thanks, Felix, I do know something about exam psychology,’ Dan said. ‘If she’s telling the truth about her symptoms, something will have happened to cause them. But if she remembers what it was, she isn’t admitting to it.’
‘She aced her mocks,’ Xav said from the window. ‘I remember the master giving us both a lecture on the danger of complacency, about how kids who do well in January can mess up completely in June. She made us promise we’d keep our noses to the grindstone.’
‘So whatever happened, it must have been between January and June,’ Daniel said. ‘Anyone remember anything?’
‘Tal’s here,’ Xav said.
Talitha had inherited her father’s habit of striding into a room like a hotshot lawyer on a TV show, bursting his way into court. They heard her heels on the flags outside and then she flung open the door as though expecting to catch them in the act of something disreputable.
Felix got to his feet. He couldn’t cope with another orgy of air-kissing and pretend hugs. ‘I’m going to the bar. I’ll let Dan catch you up. Another bottle, chaps?’
Neither man took him up on it, which meant he probably shouldn’t have another drink either, and he felt a moment of envy of both Dan and Xav for being happy with a third of a bottle of red wine each. Amber, of course, got tipsy on Perrier water if you stuck a slice of lime in it.
‘Scotch please, single measure,’ he told the barman.
The Scotch and a jug of water appeared in front of him. ‘And a glass of white wine,’ he went on. ‘Chablis if you have it.’
He added a few drops of water before lifting the whisky glass and drinking down half of it. Wine and beer made no difference to him any more; he might as well drink sparkling water like Amber for all the effect either had. The Scotch, though, might take him through the next half hour.
‘So what have you got for us?’ he said, when he was back in the private room.
‘For the most part, very little,’ Talitha said, before holding her hand up to quash the moans of impatience. ‘Hold on, I’m getting there.’
She swallowed back a mouthful of Chablis that she hadn’t thanked Felix for and pulled a document from her bag. The report, probably the final one, from her private detective. In between sips, she began reading.
‘She goes to work, stays there all day, apart from the time she met me at the Five Arrows, gets home about six and mainly stays home. When she does go out, she walks around the open spaces, along the river, in the parks, that sort of thing.’
Talitha glanced up, probably to see if she had everyone’s attention.
‘She eats takeaway food and bought a second-hand car a few days ago from that place on the Abingdon Road,’ she went on. ‘She paid nearly fourteen hundred pounds for it. Legacy from her mum, before you ask.’
‘We didn’t,’ Felix muttered.
‘A couple of days ago, she had a hair appointment and went down to Westgate where she made clothes purchases in John Lewis and Hobbs. She’s also been to Finders Keepers three times. Flat hunting.’
Talitha put the report down on the table.
‘One reason for flat hunting may be that the media seem to have found out where she lives,’ she said. ‘There’ve been people hanging around outside her house for three nights, stopping everyone who comes and goes, and there was paint daubed on the front door two nights ago.’
‘I think people at work have found out who she is as well,’ Felix said. ‘No one’s said anything to me yet, but there’s been a definite atmosphere shift.’
‘It won’t make a difference though, will it?’ Amber said. ‘You’re not going to sack her?’
Felix almost laughed. ‘If I can cope with my wife treating me like I’ve just killed her puppy, I can deal with a few disgruntled lab technicians.’
‘I’m not done,’ Talitha objected. ‘Last night, she went out at a few minutes after nine. Possibly waiting until everything was quietening down and getting dark. She got into her car and drove out of town towards the ring road.’
‘Did your bloke go with her?’ Felix asked.
Talitha’s dark eyes flashed. ‘Of course, he went with her, I’m not paying him to let her drive off alone. She picked up the A40 London Road. He thought she was going to go straight on to the motorway, but she turned off towards Thame and stayed on the A40 back towards Milton Common.’
Felix sensed a subtle shift in mood around the table.
‘Your old house?’ Amber said.
Talitha’s dark curls bounced as she shook her head. ‘No, she went here. Small place just off junction seven of the M40.’
Talitha pulled a photograph out of the envelope and the rest of them leaned in to see a night-time shot of a large, white-painted building with red roofs. Two storeys, close to the main road; it had a narrow, paved area at the front.
‘Echo Yard?’ Daniel read the sign fixed high on the wall to the right of the door.
‘It’s an architectural salvage yard,’ Talitha said. ‘It rescues material from old buildings – stone, wood, marble, brick work, et cetera – and sells it on, usually for a massive mark-up. There’s a huge yard at the back, full of all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff.’
Amber said, ‘Mum loves it. Most of the doors and door frames for their extension came from there.’
‘Did any of you ever hear of Megan having a connection to the place?’ Talitha asked.
The others shook their heads.
‘So, you’ll be as surprised as I was to learn that Megan let herself in through the gates by punching in a security code,’ Talitha said. ‘Which rather gave our intrepid detective a problem, because he didn’t have the code and couldn’t follow. He carried on snooping around, though, and thought he saw a li
ght in a caravan towards the back of the yard. He made his way around the perimeter fence and happened upon a part of the railing that had the stump of an old tree alongside it. He managed to clamber over and got close to the caravan.’
Talitha broke off to show them more photographs: the salvage yard at night, a weird sort of cross between a junk shop and a gothic graveyard; a caravan with steam coming from a vent and several lights behind curtained windows.
‘One of her prison mates?’ Felix suggested.
‘Hold on to that thought,’ Talitha said. ‘In the meantime, you might all like to think back to one of the pictures on that film Felix stole.’
‘The stone angel,’ Felix said. ‘Was that taken at this place?’
Talitha drew out another picture and pointed to something in the background. Felix didn’t need to look for long. It was the same angel.
‘Last picture taken by our private eye,’ Talitha said, ‘because at that point what sounded like a large dog started barking inside the caravan and my man ran for it.’
‘So what does that mean?’ Felix said. ‘We never went to Echo Yard, did we? I mean, not as a group. It wasn’t one of our places.’
‘It means the pictures you stole could have been entirely innocent,’ Amber said. ‘Nothing to do with us at all.’
‘The PI did some digging the next day,’ Talitha said. ‘Seems the caravan is the official home of Echo Yard’s resident stonemason. He’s a part-owner in the business and the guy who goes out to rescue the various features from condemned buildings. He lives on-site, a sort of human guard dog, although there’s a canine one as well, and his name is Gary Macdonald.’
She waited for the news to sink in.
‘He’s Megan’s dad,’ she added, in case they hadn’t got it. ‘And he’s spent time in prison.’
30
‘Gary Macdonald has been a part-owner of Echo Yard for nearly twenty-five years,’ Talitha told them after a moment of shocked silence. ‘He owned it back when we were in the sixth form.’