by Rachael Blok
‘You know, I thought you were in for some reason. Oh shit, is that dinner?’ Will glances up as the top of the pot lifts with the steam, banging down hard.
He glances at Jenny. ‘Anyway, let’s not go on about it.’
‘It’s pretty hard not to think about it. It happened outside our door,’ Erin says.
‘I know.’ Jenny had picked up the olives but puts them down again, untouched. ‘I know. I can’t stop thinking about her. It almost feels wrong, somehow, to carry on with Christmas when it’s all so… so up in the air.’
‘Well, we can’t do anything about it,’ says Will, eyeing Jenny carefully.
Jenny sees Will watching her. He has urged her to relax, and not to ‘dwell’ on things. She has been doing too much dwelling, it seems. She is to enjoy tonight – it had been a gentle instruction. She had not told him about the voice she thought she had heard earlier. She had laughed it off to Sam, but her hands had trembled all through bathtime with Finn.
She had not told him how much she was missing her mother. That splashing water on Finn had made her voice, calling her name, ring in her ears: ‘Jenny! Jenny!’ Her hand had stalled for a second, to catch the last falling syllable. She couldn’t place the memory, but it was new, lurking, ready to peek through. It had caught her unawares and the halcyon glimmer had held until Finn had splashed, and the drops had brought her round.
‘What are you doing for Christmas? Still off to your parents, Connor?’ Will changes the subject.
The couple exchange a look and Erin pauses before answering.
‘We’re not sure now. Connor’s not been feeling too well so he’s decided we should spend this one at home and head up for New Year.’
‘Cold getting to you, Connor?’ says Will. ‘Getting a bit soft in your old age?’
‘Ha ha,’ says Connor, taking a drink. ‘I just need a restorative beer. Erin’s been trying to make me cut back. Wrong season for that!’
He looks quickly at Erin, and Jenny watches his smile not quite reach his eyes: dark anyway, they are like coal tonight. His chin, fashionable with stubble, is thick with shadow, a walking advert for the creative agency where he works: designer beers, expensive jeans, boys’ toys. A dark tattoo creeps from under the sleeve of his T-shirt, like a snake.
Maternity leave has provided a welcome break from the shiny world of advertising – she misses the independence, but not the job.
The pot lid bangs again, and Will leaps up to the hob which has started to hiss and fizzle. Rivulets of stew run down to the flames below the pot. The smell of the stock on the metal wafts around the kitchen.
‘Ready! Jenny, plates?’
Jenny stands up to help serve. As she loads the plates and turns to hand them out, she catches the end of a hiss from Connor in Erin’s direction. She pauses for a second, allowing them to finish whatever they had started.
‘No, I won’t be quiet, not if you’re going to tell me to be,’ she hears Erin say as she takes a step towards the table.
Erin finishes the wine in her glass in one swallow and then picks up the bottle. Connor’s expression changes swiftly from a frown to a smile as he sees Jenny approaching.
‘Wow, this looks great! You been working hard this afternoon, Jen?’
‘No, it was all Will. He likes to cook.’
Jenny glances over to Will, to see if he has noticed anything, but he is bringing over the salt and pepper. Instead of the traditional shakers, these tall, sleek-looking devices shed their loads quickly and discreetly at the press of a button. Jenny prefers the traditional wooden curved shapes, but these too had been a wedding gift. They would make good weapons, she thinks, and her mind balloons with an image of Erin hurling them at Connor’s head, one of them lodging, sticking out… the damage they could do.
‘Jenny? Ready?’ Will asks, looking up.
She realises she is still standing and holding the plates which have been warmed in the oven, suddenly hot in her hands. She bangs them down and blows on her fingers, glancing at Erin, whose eyes are fixed defiantly on Connor. Whatever is going on has gathered pace in the last few minutes.
She pours more wine for Erin, then holds out the plate. ‘Here we go.’
‘This looks lovely, thank you. I’m planning an Indian takeaway for the big Christmas feast. I think we only eat home-made food when we come to you.’
Laughter softens the tone and they begin to eat. Will describes their search for a house, now that they are thinking of staying in St Albans. Jenny observes the couple carefully but the sudden rancour appears to have quietened. Erin drinks quickly. She speaks loudly and laughs brightly, louder and brighter as the evening wears on.
Every time Jenny looks at her, she seems more and more like a figure from a child’s comic: every gesture exaggerated, words floating up from her mouth in speech bubbles, complete with exclamation marks. She holds her nose defiantly, as though she were balancing a book on her head; it rarely falls below a deliberate and sustained level, like a striped pole on a horse jump. Her hair bounces up and down on her back as she shakes her head, betraying her attempt at control, having now fully escaped its grips of earlier.
The evening passes with chatter about work, the snow, the murder, the snow.
The air gradually warms, and Jenny can feel the beginning of a headache.
The soft chimes of eleven sound, and Jenny glances at the clock with a yawn. Finn will be up at some point for a feed. There is something overdrawn and bloated about the evening now. She wants to strip down and curl under the covers. The smile she wears is heavy and sags the corners of her mouth.
Erin suddenly lets loose a baying howl of laughter and Jenny flinches, knocking over her wine glass. It flies off the table in a perfect arc and lands in the centre of the room, smashing, crystal slivers scattering.
‘Jenny!’ Will says, jumping up. His chair protests as it flings back. ‘No, don’t move; don’t worry, I’ll clean it.’
‘Too much wine, eh?’ Connor grins at her.
Jenny suddenly feels sick and dizzy. Connor’s face is wolfish and large. What big teeth you have, she thinks.
‘Let me help,’ she says and she stands to move towards Will, anxious to be further from the table. But as she takes a step forward, she swoons to the right, and falls against the wooden kitchen unit.
‘Jenny!’ Will speaks again.
She can feel him by her side, pulling her arm over his.
‘How much have you had to drink?’ he asks.
She opens her mouth to reply that she hasn’t had more than two glasses, but he has picked up the bottle from the centre of the table – empty – and gestures to the other bottles, awaiting removal to the recycling.
‘Bloody hell, Jen. You’ve put away a fair bit.’
She feels admonished, like a naughty schoolgirl, and to reply, ‘But it wasn’t me, it was Erin,’ will only compound the impression, so she says nothing. Her limbs are heavy and pull hard, a curious weight, encouraging her to lie down on the kitchen floor and curl up, close her eyes.
Looking at Will, to plead with him silently to end the evening, she is drawn to a movement behind his head. At the window, out of the darkness of the velvet night, appears a young girl’s face, pressing up against the glass.
The skin on her face is taut over her cheekbones and she has hollows under her eyes. The mouth is curled in an O shape, with her lips parted, stretched. Her dark hair sticks to her face, wet and clinging.
The green eyes are compelling: pools that swim up with an invitation to dive in.
The face pushes up against the window. The most terrible thing is not that she is there, but that Jenny is sure she is there to look for her. The girl she had heard in the cathedral. The icy whisper.
The noise of a waterfall – cascading, crashing – is deafening as she feels the scream release from inside of her throat. It stabs the soft tissue below the tongue, like pins into a cushion.
The sound of her cry: loud, crystal in the air.
Th
e face vanishes into the dark air. She tries to raise her hand to point. Her limbs feel as they do in a dream: heavy and unreal. She isn’t sure if she has managed to raise her arm at all.
‘A girl; there’s a girl outside…’ Her voice is parched.
Things happen around her. She can feel a sudden flurry of looking. The draught that enters the kitchen tells her that someone has opened and closed the door. At some point, Connor and Erin empty from the room, and she can hear words spoken, but she can’t make them out. They come from far away. She remains fixed upon the window, which now looks out onto nothing but blackness: the light from inside obscuring everything beyond the glass.
As her head begins to clear, she sits in her chair, with a pillow under her neck. The tall back of the wooden dining chair is bearing her weight, but threatening to spill her sideways.
The room clarifies around her; the dizziness passes. She feels as she did: tired, but sober and in charge of her body. Her top is wet – she has spilt something and her wrist aches. She can’t remember banging it.
‘Better?’ asks Will, looming over her. ‘I’ve cleared up the kitchen. You’ve been a bit out of it for the last five minutes. Are you OK?’
She nods. His brow uncreases. Recreases.
‘Connor and Erin have gone – who knows what they thought. One minute you were fine, and the next practically passing out. And that scream – did you think you had seen a ghost? There was no one outside. I think you just caught your reflection in the window. You drank too much.’
‘Does it matter? Was I awful?’ she asks. She tries to raise her head to look him in the eye, but her neck aches.
Yes, she thinks to herself, that’s what it must have been. I’ve seen a ghost.
‘What? Does what matter?’ He crosses his arms, then uncrosses them and crouches to her level.
‘Does it matter what they thought?’ she asks again. ‘Was I so very awful? Erin was drunk – she put away most of the wine. There was something going on. I don’t want to have ruined their night, but they were having a row about something.’
‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He kneels before her. ‘Babes, I can’t be doing with much more of this. Can you not just get it together a bit?’ He reaches out his hand and takes hers.
The room is silent.
‘I do, Will, you know.’
He eyes her with suspicion.
‘What? You do what?’
‘Think I might have seen a ghost,’ she says.
He rocks back on his heels. His hand slips.
A silence stands up and demands to be taken notice of. They observe it, obediently and a tiny bit fearfully. It is difficult to look over its head, or peer around its side. It stands between them, and Jenny doesn’t have the energy to wait it out.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ she says, not looking up at him as she rises from the chair and heads towards the stairs.
The clock ticks their way out: step, lift, step, lift.
*
Cleaning her teeth, Jenny feels the sweep of the toothbrush over her gums and teeth, toothpaste foaming under her tongue. Her reflection in the mirror is misted. She can’t quite make herself out. She wipes it with her hand.
Holding her toothbrush aloft, she turns to Will. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. She’s unsure why she’s apologising, but he hasn’t spoken to her now for about fifteen minutes and she’s tired.
Will dries his face and hands and turns. ‘You’re fine, Jen. I’m sorry too. I think you just need to get a handle on things. And try not to drink so much; cut back a bit. A few glasses of wine and your imagination… Well, just because a girl’s been killed…’
‘Just because?’ She looks at him quickly. ‘Just because?’
‘You know what I mean. The girl dying is shitty, but it’s not really anything to do with us. It might have happened nearby, but it’s a world away…’
‘I don’t know how you can say that. I knew her, Will. I didn’t know her well, but I had met her and I knew her. And now she’s dead. If it can happen that easily, then yes, it’s got something to do with us.’
‘I didn’t fucking mean—’
‘I know what you didn’t mean.’ It wasn’t going well. She had felt contrite. And now she felt like hitting him. ‘There’s evil around.’
‘Evil?’ Will rolls his eyes. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Jen. You’re talking like some Harry Potter rip-off. We can’t go mad with worry over everything that happens outside or we’ll never set foot out of the door! You’ve just had a few drinks. Calm down. This isn’t about your mum, is it?’
His voice has risen slightly, in anger or exasperation, and Finn lets out a cry. There’s something sharp in the air. She winces, ignoring Will. She feels a pang, regret that she can’t speak to her own mother, about the enormity of this role – had she felt it too?
‘A few drinks? Didn’t you listen to me?’ she seethes, not speaking the words that fill her mouth like marbles: cold, hard, glass. If she does speak, it will be to provoke. They will spit out, hitting hard and wounding.
She listens; there is nothing else. Finn must have settled.
‘Come to bed, babes. Come on. We’ll have an early start in the morning.’
She leans forward, rinses and puts the toothbrush carefully back in its mug, forcing herself to calm. It isn’t Will’s fault the girl has died. She knows that. Whatever she has seen – thinks she has seen? – at the window is probably down to exhaustion.
‘OK,’ she says. And she follows him into the bedroom, pulling the cord behind her to turn off the light; the click sounds sharply in the silence of darkness.
Her head aches as she rolls over onto her side and stares at the shadows on the wall. Will snuggles up behind her and pulls her into him, his arm lying heavy over her stomach. In seconds, he is snoring. Jenny feels his breath blowing onto her cheek as she listens to the raspy expelling of air. She doesn’t mind the snoring; she isn’t ready for sleep just yet. Despite all the reason that Will speaks, the shadows and the shades of night-time are vividly louder. The marbles are in her mouth and she’s afraid of choking.
13
‘One more?’ Seb offers, and Maarten shakes his head.
‘Not for me,’ he says. He’s already drunk more than he needed, on an empty stomach. Thinking about it, he can’t remember the last time he ate anything. Breakfast? He remembers Liv handing him some toast as he was leaving.
‘So the phone comment is interesting from the boyfriend, then?’ Imogen says.
Seb tops her drink up from the bottle on the table. His dark head rests back against the glass panes, set in the deep oak panels.
The roof is low, the air warm, the draught beer heavy. Maarten is starting to feel sleepy. He drops his shoulders, non-committal. ‘It is, but finding the phone, that’s the next step.’ Lifting his pint, he takes a swallow, and glances out of the frosted window. The black sky looks clear and cold; an easy walk home now, once he can force himself to stand up.
‘I’ll set another call up, sir,’ Imogen says. ‘Give them a chance to recover – it must be a shock, and he might think of something.’
‘Yes.’ Maarten stretches. The quick drink to wind down had run late, and his eyelids are falling. It won’t do to sit in the pub and theorise about the case.
‘Points to Pickles though, doesn’t it?’ Imogen finishes her drink. The white wine has been depleted, and her eyes are red. Maarten isn’t sure if it’s that, or the exhaustion kicking in, if she feels as weary as him.
‘The phone, that’s going to be our key. For sure. Let’s hit it hard and early tomorrow.’ Maarten has less than half a pint left. He doesn’t want to talk about the case any more. ‘Sorry for the shop talk, Seb. What are you two doing for Christmas?’
Imogen and Seb glance at each other, and too late Maarten remembers that neither have family, that it’s just them. It’s one of the times Liv would usually recover the conversation for him, but then again, it is what it is.
‘A q
uiet one for us,’ Seb says.
Imogen nods. ‘Lucky for us, we get to escape all that forced family fun that you all complain about. A fire, a film, a few bottles of wine.’
‘We thought about going away, but with all this…’ Seb shrugs as he knocks back the rest of his driver’s Coke. ‘And you’re going to be busier than ever, now there’s the phone.’
‘Yes.’ Maarten nods. ‘We were lucky with the lead.’ He starts pulling on his coat. It’s late. ‘But, it might be almost impossible to trace it. If it was bought with cash, and loaded up with credit for Leigh to use, then we will have to have luck on our side. But we’ll go round the local phone shops that sell the make that Arjun mentioned, trace records, check CCTV…’ Looking outside, it’s started snowing again. He pulls his coat collar up. ‘I’m off. Have a good night.’
‘No, hang on; I’ve only had the one, so I’ll drive you back.’ Seb picks up his keys and steps forward. ‘If we head back now we can have one glass at home. What do you say, birthday girl?’
Imogen smiles, and Seb pulls her to her feet. Maarten thinks of their quiet Christmas, no family banging on the door, lying in bed, unwinding. It’s appealing, but he’d trade none of it for Nic and Sanne. He will be up before dawn Christmas morning to deal with stockings, and he smiles.
*
‘Maart, is that you?’ says Liv, her words thick and sticky with sleep.
‘Ja, who were you expecting?’ he says, gruff with beer, and he kisses her before stripping down and falling into bed beside her. He fumbles with the duvet, pulling if off her before managing to pull it over himself.
She tugs the duvet back. ‘I thought you might be Nic – she’s not sleeping so well – is it late?’
‘It’s gone midnight. Kak. What a shit end to the day. We’re loaded with suspects and no closer to a killer. Had a beer afterwards. Sorry I’m late.’
‘It’s no problem. You need to speak to the girls tomorrow though. Sanne’s too young to get it, but Becky and Nic were getting each other worked up about Leigh after the vigil. The idea of being a victim; it’s a lot for young girls to take in.’