Sarah had not, as it turned out, been interested in a lazy afternoon on the sofa watching movies. When Jessamine had suggested it she had screwed up her face and told her she had other plans, specifically to go and hang out at Paris’s house. Jessamine had been hurt. She’d thought that, after the morning’s events, Sarah might decide to keep her company. Still, not wanting to rock the boat, she hadn’t made a thing of it and waved her off with a smile. Then she had finished the last of the wine and gone for a lie-down.
That had been when? Around midday? Now, as she emerged into the living room, she found that, at some point while she’d been asleep, Sarah had returned. Sitting at the kitchen table, she was hunched over a piece of paper, reading. Totally focused on whatever it contained, she would look up occasionally, apparently cross-checking what was there against her open laptop. At first Jessamine thought Sarah was doing homework but then she saw it was Cassie Scolari’s file.
Breathing through the pain at her temples, Jessamine came and stood behind her daughter. She saw that she had carefully arranged the contents into some kind of sequence and that she was currently focused on the CCTV images.
It took Sarah a few seconds to notice her mother’s presence. She got to her feet and motioned for Jessamine to take her place. ‘Sit. Look. I’ll make tea and toast.’
Jessamine did as she said and tried to focus on the papers immediately in front of her. The flat had a clean pine tang, thanks to the Christmas tree in the corner, and while she’d been asleep, Sarah had turned on the fairy lights and closed the blinds.
‘I’ve spent the last hour reading through this stuff,’ said Sarah, as she set the kettle to boil in the small kitchen that led off the living-dining area. ‘Once I started I couldn’t stop. It’s just so weird, don’t you think?’ She put two slices of sourdough in the toaster and the smell of the warming bread made Jessamine’s stomach growl.
A few minutes later Sarah presented her with a mug of tea, and toast saturated with butter and honey. Then she dropped two painkillers into Jessamine’s hand and drew up a chair.
‘Look.’ Sarah pushed the CCTV stills towards her.
Jessamine looked from her daughter to the photographs. The pounding in her head made it hard to think.
‘Tell me this. How does a woman vanish from the street in this day and age?’ Sarah tapped each photograph in turn. ‘Look at the pictures. She comes out of the door, she’s walking down the street towards the river and then, poof, just like that, she disappears.’
Interested to hear Sarah’s thoughts, Jessamine decided to play devil’s advocate. ‘The key piece of information there is “towards the river”,’ she said, through a mouthful of toast. She swallowed. ‘The police think she committed suicide.’
Sarah dismissed this with a shake of her head. ‘I’ve been cross-checking the pictures against this.’ She motioned to the laptop. It featured a map of central London. There were hundreds if not thousands of red spots dotted across the heart of the city. Jessamine squinted at the name of the website. It declared itself as a non-profit blog that existed to provide an unofficial database of the location of every private and public CCTV camera in London.
‘Vanishing into thin air like she did, it doesn’t happen. It can’t. Not any more. I mean, hello? GCHQ, surveillance state. Snowden.’ Sarah was getting excited, her voice climbing half an octave at the end of every sentence. ‘It’s not like she was in some village backwater.’ She tapped at a coordinate on the map. ‘She was in town. The Strand.’ She angled the computer so it was easier to see. ‘You don’t just disappear in central London without your movements being tracked. It’s not possible.’
Jessamine finished a triangle of toast, sucked honey off her fingers and picked up a photograph.
‘She leaves work and five minutes later she vanishes. See what I mean?’
Jessamine shook her head. The paracetamol hadn’t touched her hangover: maybe she should double up with ibuprofen. ‘There’ll be an explanation. A blind spot. A faulty camera, a power cut.’
‘Maybe,’ said Sarah, ‘maybe not. But aren’t you just a little bit curious? You could look into it. It’s not like you’ve got anything better to do.’ Jessamine gave her a look. ‘Sorry, but you know what I mean. It’ll keep you ticking over.’ She nodded at the empty Sancerre bottle on the side, waiting to go into the recycling. ‘And keep you off the sauce.’
‘Hey,’ said Jessamine.
Sarah smirked. ‘Too soon?’
Jessamine grimaced and Sarah took the photo from her hand.
‘Look, I thought it was interesting, but whatever . . .’ Her face was now a mask, her voice small and hard. She did this sometimes. Turned suddenly. It was like a switch flicking.
‘I agree with you – it’s intriguing. I’m intrigued,’ said Jessamine, trying to talk her down. She’d taken the devil’s advocate thing too far. ‘I had been looking into it. But now I have to ask myself, to what end? As of today I don’t have a team, I don’t have a job.’
‘The BBC? Please. They’re dinosaurs.’ Sarah stopped, struck by some thought, and clicked her fingers. ‘Do it as a podcast.’
‘Sarah, my love, I barely know how to access my voicemail.’
‘It’s simple. Anyone could do it.’ She paused, a smile sneaking into open ground. ‘Even you.’ And there she was again, the real Sarah. Funny, cheeky, brilliant. ‘Give me your phone.’ Puzzled, Jessamine did so. Sarah opened the Amazon app and typed some words into the search box. A selection of microphones appeared on the screen. Sarah scrolled through them, reading reviews and comparing price brackets, then settled on one and hit ‘add to basket’. ‘It should arrive in the next few days,’ she said, handing back the phone.
‘It’s a lovely idea,’ said Jessamine, trying to be supportive, ‘but even with a microphone, I wouldn’t know where to start.’
The mask was back. ‘You give up very easily, you know that?’
‘What? No, I don’t.’ Jessamine was suddenly paranoid.
Sarah spun on her heels. ‘I’m going out.’
Jessamine got to her feet. ‘Again? Wait.’ In her haste to get to Sarah she knocked the empty plate off the table. It smashed on the floor. Barefoot, she picked her way through the ceramic shards and toast crumbs into the hall – too late: Sarah was already out of the door, gone into the night.
Friday 23 December
Present day
Jessamine
Black Eye Friday. The last Friday before Christmas. The domestic-violence helpline’s busiest night of the year. The phones hadn’t stopped since Jessamine had arrived and she was glad of the distraction. The last few days had seen the fallout from her suspension rumble on, internally at the BBC and in odd news articles, and while she tried hard to ignore most of it, she had little else to fill her time now she had no job to go to. At least here she was still of use.
She finished a call and tried to relieve the stiffness in her neck with a few side-to-side head rolls. The latter part of her day had been fraught, never mind the hours she’d spent since on shift, and every tendon in her upper body was strung tight.
The problem was Sarah.
Tonight the argument had been over their plans for Christmas. They were going to spend it, as always, with her father, Sarah’s granddad, in Somerset. Sarah was usually happy to go. She liked the cobbled streets of Wells and the carols in the cathedral at midnight. But this year the prospect had incensed her. Why couldn’t they stay in London just this once? she’d asked. Why did they have to drive all that way, to the middle of nowhere?
At first Jessamine had tried to pacify her, to explain coolly and rationally why three days out of the city wouldn’t be that bad and why the alternative, leaving her elderly father to fend for himself over the holiday period, was neither festive nor humane. Her case had fallen on deaf ears and Sarah had become even more agitated. Jessamine had put her foot down: they were going whether Sarah liked it or not.
She thought of the look on Sarah’s face before sh
e’d had to leave the flat tonight. Sarah had had time to calm down and had accepted a hug, but when Jessamine had looked at her daughter’s expression she was sure something was still bothering her.
She gave her head one last roll and pushed away her keyboard. She was due a break. She should take it now, before she got caught up in the post-pub rush.
Just as she stood up the phone rang. She scanned the room but the other volunteers were already engaged, talking quietly into their headsets. It was her or the answering machine.
She moved towards the bank of square buttons next to the phone. The top one was flashing red. She pressed it and the light turned green. ‘You’re through to the domestic-violence helpline. My name is Jessie. Are you safe to talk?’
Her headphones crackled. The rasp of someone struggling to breathe in and out.
‘Please help me. You have to help me.’ The woman’s voice was adenoidal. It sounded like she had a bad cold. ‘I’m in the bathroom. I’ve locked the door.’
In the background Jessamine could hear whimpering. A child.
‘It’s okay, Ethan.’ The woman’s voice grew distant. She had moved her mouth away from the phone. ‘Don’t worry, baby.’
Jessamine adjusted the microphone on her headset, manoeuvring its foam nub to within kissing distance. ‘Are you safe to talk? You say the door is locked. If your partner is still in the property I cannot speak to you.’ She hated saying this, but it was the drill. Sometimes the caller tried to reassure her it would be fine, that their abuser was asleep or in another part of the house. Jessamine’s trained response was always the same: it’s too much of a risk. Phone back once you’re alone.
But these women were desperate and sometimes they refused. In that case she had no option but to hang up.
‘He’s gone. I think he broke my nose.’ A rustling and, for a second, everything was muffled. ‘There’s a lot of blood.’ She sounded surprised, as though she was only now examining the damage in a mirror. ‘It looks worse than it is. I’ve tried to clean myself up but it’s upsetting my youngest.’
The pubs had been full since early afternoon, everyone giddy at the prospect of the holidays. Jessamine had walked past the Hung Drawn & Quartered earlier, on her way here. Men and women had spilled onto the pavement and huddled under the orange glow of umbrella heaters, beer glasses smeary in their hands. The ground they stood on was compacted with dirty snow, the road lined with grimy drifts. Now it was almost midnight, half an hour past throwing-out time, and the men were starting to come home.
‘Do you want to tell me your name?’ She held her fingers in the air over the keyboard, ready.
‘Nicky.’ She huffed hard into the receiver. This small confidence had cost her. ‘My name is Nicky.’
‘This next question is going to seem odd after everything you’ve already said, but I have to ask, what prompted you to call us today?’ She kept her words slow and steady and stuck to the script they’d been taught to follow. Ask questions; give them options; never offer advice. ‘Keep to the script,’ Jackie always said, in her sternest supervisor voice. ‘Keep to the script and nothing can go wrong. It’s there to protect them and you.’
The woman at the other end of the line sniffed. The action must have hurt as it was followed by a wince-sharp intake of breath. ‘My friend, she said you have places we can go.’
Jessamine’s pulse quickened. ‘You’d like to go to a refuge?’
‘Only if I can take the kids.’ She was suddenly fierce, emboldened by the need to protect her children. ‘I’m not leaving them.’
This instinct, like blinking or breathing, was standard among the mothers who called the helpline. It had a ferocity that startled and fascinated Jessamine in equal measure. On the way tonight she had seen a woman trying to navigate the icy pavement outside Tower Gateway DLR station with a boy in tow. At one point he had lost his footing and the woman had scrambled to keep him upright. Her efforts were successful and he had regained his balance, but his safety had come at a price. To help him the woman had had to jeopardise her own precarious stability and had fallen. Unthinking, she had put herself in harm’s way. Jessamine had flinched as she watched the woman smack shoulder first into the pavement. As she recovered herself, Jessamine had expected to see her grimace in pain, but when she cleared the hair from her face, she was smiling. Her son was unhurt.
‘You can take your kids but to help you with that I need you to tell me where you live.’
Silence.
‘You don’t have to give me your address. Your local authority is enough.’ The helpline had a policy. Never send a woman to a shelter in the same area as that in which she currently resided. The aim was to get her to safety, as far away from her abuser as possible.
‘Cambridgeshire.’ She conceded the information with a sigh.
Jessamine brought up the relevant hub, excluded Cambridgeshire from the search, selected the two neighbouring counties and hit return. The results appeared on the screen. There were no available spaces in any of the listed shelters. She expanded the search to the entire south-east region. Nicky would have to travel some distance, but needs must. The next set of results filled the screen. A thin line of zeros. Everywhere was at capacity.
At the other end of the line, the child’s whimper turned into a sob.
‘Do you have any friends or family you could stay with?’ Jessamine was frustrated but she made sure to keep her voice bright. ‘Every refuge is full. If you can stay with someone else, just for tonight, and call back tomorrow at ten a.m., there’s a chance that a space might have opened up.’
‘He knows where my friends live, he knows my family. If I leave and he finds me he’ll kill me.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘He’ll kill all of us.’
Keep to the script.
‘Can you give me your number? That way, if we get cut off I can call you back.’
‘I’m not sure, I—’ Nicky was interrupted by a thud. Someone banged on a door. A man shouted. Swear words.
‘Nicky? Nicky, what’s happening?’ Protocol said Jessamine should hang up. That by continuing with the call she was putting her at further risk. ‘Nicky?’
It could have been the routine horror of the evening so far, and the routine horrors she knew were still to come, or maybe it was nothing more than sheer impulse, but in that moment Jessamine decided, just this once, that she was going to stay listening, acting as witness.
Her infraction was futile. She watched as the square button on her phone turned from green to red. The line was dead.
2003
Rowena
I finish my milkshake and then, even though the cup is empty, I keep sucking the straw for a few more seconds, making a loud, slurpy echo that I hope will make Millie laugh.
She smiles.
‘Aaah,’ I say, once the dregs are gone. I pat my belly. ‘That was good.’
A few people at the next table to us in the diner tut. Her smile breaks wide.
Nearly there.
I flick a curly fry at her head. She ducks and it sails over her shoulder, landing in the middle of the table where the tutters sit.
Her smile drops, a sudden intake of breath, as though she’s preparing to dive underwater, and then she does it: she giggles.
Success.
I join in and soon we’re laughing so hard that our sides hurt and we have to grip them in the same way I do after cross-country in PE.
It’s been two weeks since my termination. Two weeks since Raf agreed to come and collect me from the clinic. In that time I have neither seen nor heard from Leo. It’s almost as though, for him, I no longer exist. The same can’t be said of his daughter, Millie.
I ignored her first text but that didn’t put her off. If anything, it seemed to make her keener.
‘You want dessert?’ Millie offers me the menu.
I look at it and hand it back. ‘I’d like to order some ice-cream but I can’t think straight because my mind is still too full of images of Orlando-oh-oh-oh!’ I say
his name with my eyes closed. At the end I mix in a few of the moans the women make on the mucky videos that are sometimes on in the background at parties.
Millie’s smile disappears. She busies herself with the menu, her face red.
After that first text she sent me two more. I didn’t reply because I knew that if Leo were to find out he’d throw me straight to the wolves. But then I realised I liked her. I wanted to see her again.
I texted her back.
Soon we were texting all day every day.
We discovered we were both desperate to see Pirates of the Caribbean. She suggested meeting outside the Odeon in town. I agreed.
‘You got any brothers or sisters?’ she asks, once her blush has gone.
‘Mum and Dad reckon I’m enough of a handful,’ I say, enjoying the fantasy.
She stops and looks at me like she’s embarrassed to ask the next question. ‘What’s it like, going to school and then coming back at the end of every day?’
Millie goes to boarding school, and has done ever since she was seven years old. Earlier she told me how her school has these really long holidays, much longer than the state schools. She broke up for the summer four weeks ago.
‘It’s okay.’ I think of the TV room at the home. The ripped sofas and the mouldy carpet on the floor. ‘Mum always has the fire on for me if it’s cold and on Mondays she makes my favourite thing for tea, lasagne and chips.’
‘You have a fire?’
Millie still thinks I live on the Redbridge Hollow traveller site a few miles from her cottage.
‘The caravans have gas fires, toilets and showers. Everything a normal house has,’ I say, not sure if any of that is true.
Millie considers this, a dreamy look in her eye. ‘We always have games or homework till at least six. Then it’s supper.’
‘Don’t you miss them, your mum and dad?’
The Dangerous Kind Page 14