by Perks, Heidi
She had only just made it back to the house before Anna did, ripping off her sweatshirt and tucking herself under the sheet when she heard the key in the lock downstairs.
As Anna climbed the stairs Grace squeezed her eyes shut, forcing them closed, but Anna didn’t notice as she stumbled on to the mattress and shook Grace’s leg, sobbing at her to wake up.
Grace made a pretence of stirring and rubbing her eyes. ‘What’s happened?’ she asked as she sat upright.
Anna was shaking uncontrollably, her lip quivering. ‘It’s Heather,’ she finally said. ‘She’s fallen off the cliff.’
‘Oh my God,’ Grace replied. She automatically reached out her arms to Anna and held her, rocking her, the way she had done so many times before.
And Anna told her a story, though it wasn’t the one she had seen on the clifftops earlier because it did not mention an argument, a tussle on the cliff edge. Still, Grace silently listened to her friend as she continued to hold her.
‘What am I going to do?’ Anna was crying, worrying about her dad and Grace’s mum, of all people, worrying she was going to be in so much trouble and what they would say when they found out.
‘I won’t let anything bad happen to you,’ Grace told her firmly over and over again against Anna’s cries. ‘We’ll tell the police you were here all night. No one will ever know you were there.’
They will be in this together, Grace thought. And Anna would always need her.
Her words soothed Anna until she fell asleep beside her on the mattress on the floor. As Grace watched her best friend lying there, she tried to make sense of her own feelings.
On the one hand she had got exactly what she wanted. On the other she was still furious at Anna for having ever tried to leave her.
The following morning Anna said nothing of her argument with Heather. For a few days Grace was trapped by a desire to let Anna know what she had seen. She didn’t like that her friend was keeping secrets from her.
But by then they were bound by a different secret, one that would tie them together for life, and so Grace kept the knowledge to herself. Just in case she might ever need it.
Chapter Twenty
Wednesday 18 December
Anna
Another day passes before I summon the courage to take Ethan to school. I am flanked by Nancy and Caitlyn when I arrive, and we linger by the edge of the path, not quite inside the playground where the other mums huddle.
I can’t see Grace, though I have a permanent eye on the gate for the moment she walks through it. What I will do then, I haven’t a clue.
For now, my friends give me a certain amount of comfort, but I know I can’t live like this, too anxious to take Ethan to school. It surprises me that I haven’t heard from Grace since she turned up at the house on Monday. Her absence is more unsettling than reassuring.
Some of the mothers glance in my direction, offer me waves, but they seem to be giving me a wide berth. Nancy has told them I’ve had family problems, has reminded them the drama was short-lived – they all knew I was safe by Thursday afternoon, after all, even if some of them chose to believe that Ben hadn’t actually heard from me.
It is a relief when the bell rings and Ethan runs back for a hug before lining up with his classmates, and this is when I catch sight of Matilda among them. I sweep the playground for a sign of Grace. ‘Where is she?’ I mutter under my breath.
‘I don’t like that you’re so nervous, Anna,’ Nancy says. ‘You can’t be scared of standing in the school playground.’
‘Come on,’ Caitlyn adds, pulling on my arm. ‘Let’s go.’ The children are already disappearing into their classrooms. ‘Why don’t we grab a coffee?’
I shake my head. ‘I can’t,’ I say.
All through the night I have been lying awake, thinking about how I can pass everyone off with a story. My friends know about Grace now, to some degree – about her possessiveness, her need for control – although I haven’t told them about Heather. But it’s Grace herself who has kept me awake. She is my true problem.
I have two choices: either I confront her or I do what I have always done, and let her win. In many ways the latter feels like the simplest option.
‘Why can’t you have a coffee?’ Nancy asks. ‘What are you up to?’
‘I have things to do.’
‘Where’s Ben?’ she asks.
‘Working. Why?’
‘Then let us come to you.’
‘I told you I can’t,’ I protest.
‘Nonsense, we’re—’
‘Nancy, stop!’ I cry. I know they want more of my story, but right now I cannot give them what they need.
‘Okay.’ She holds up her hands. ‘I’m sorry. We’re worried about you,’ she adds, ‘that’s all.’
‘I know.’
‘We just want to help.’
‘You can’t,’ I say. Tears pool in my eyes and as soon as my friends notice them we pick up our steps again, walking up the street, away from the throng of other mothers who are fast approaching.
It might seem like the easiest option to let Grace win, but in the long run I know it isn’t the right one. If she isn’t at school, I need to find her.
It doesn’t take long to get to her apartment. I am still wondering how I managed to miss her this morning as I park outside the front of the Waterview complex and make my way to the communal entrance, where I press a finger on her buzzer.
My stomach is fluttering, butterflies furiously flapping, as I wait for her voice. The thought of entering my old friend’s flat and facing her makes me feel sick.
A man’s voice answers and I apologise. ‘I must have pressed the wrong number,’ I say.
‘Who are you after?’ he asks.
‘Grace Goodwin?’
‘No, you’ve got the right place. She’s not here at the moment, though. Who is it?’
I go to say a friend, but instead just say, ‘Anna.’
‘Anna?’ He sounds confused. ‘But I thought you were—’ He breaks off and then, ‘Anna, I’m Grace’s husband, hold on, I’ll let you in.’
The door clicks and I push it open, all the while wondering what Graham is doing here when as far as I knew he was in Singapore. The lift takes me up to the third floor, where he is waiting in the doorway to Grace’s apartment. His hand is held out in greeting and I shake it as he stands aside to let me in.
‘It’s nice to finally meet you. But I have to say I’m surprised to see you, Anna. Grace told me you were missing.’
‘I’m surprised to see you, too,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know you were back.’ I have seen photos of Graham, but he looks older in the flesh. His skin is puffy and wrinkled, and there are dark shadows under his eyes. He has wavy hair that is more grey than the light brown it must once have been. And yet he is smartly dressed in an open-necked shirt and dark jeans that look perfectly pressed.
‘Only as of yesterday,’ he says. ‘Can I get you something to drink?’
‘No, thank you, I’m fine. Will Grace be long, do you know?’
Graham rubs a hand either side of his chin. ‘I don’t know. She didn’t tell me where she was going.’ His mouth contorts into a grimace and now that I look closer, I see that it’s as if something is making him anxious. ‘To be honest, we needed to talk but she just told me she had more important things …’ He trails off.
‘Okay, well, maybe you could just get her to call me when she’s back,’ I say, eager to get away from the awkwardness.
Graham nods. ‘I will do. It’s nice to meet you, though, Anna,’ he says as I start walking back to the door, wondering why he brought me up here when he has no idea where Grace is. ‘It’s just, like I said, Grace told me you’d disappeared.’
‘I had,’ I reply. ‘But I’m back now.’
‘So I see. That’s good.’ He hovers by the door as I go to open it. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m glad I’ve met you at last. I’ve heard a lot about you.’
I pause, my hand resting on th
e door handle. I want to go home now that I know Grace isn’t here, but there is something about Graham and the way he is looking at me. He is nothing like what I expected from the images Grace has painted of her hard, career-focused husband.
‘I can see that you’re reluctant to stay,’ Graham says gently. ‘I can understand that.’ He shakes his head and laughs softly. ‘You know I was jealous of you at first,’ he admits, with a shy smile.
‘Jealous of me?’
‘When Grace and I first got together, she talked about you a lot, about your relationship with her. But now …’ He pauses. ‘Well, I’m pleased she has you.’
‘Pleased she has me?’
‘I know she spoke to you before she came back to England, that you were worried about her being on her own,’ he says. ‘She’s told me that it was you who convinced her to move back here, but the truth is I didn’t actually know she’d made that decision.’
‘Sorry, what?’ I say.
‘Whatever she’s told you about us,’ he goes on, ‘I just want you to know that I haven’t been as bad a husband to your best friend as she might have painted me out to be.’
I shake my head, confused. ‘But she didn’t talk to me before she came back here,’ I tell him. ‘We never had any conversation.’
Graham looks as surprised as I feel. ‘She said you begged her to,’ he says, ‘for her own sanity.’
‘Me?’ I say, incredulous.
Graham nods. ‘She said you told her she shouldn’t have to put up with being on her own.’ He hesitates. ‘You really don’t know any of this, do you?’
‘I didn’t even know Grace was coming back until she called me and said she was standing on my driveway.’ I remember the call now with frightening clarity. To think that Grace had planned it all, had told her husband the idea was mine. ‘I hadn’t had any contact with her in two years.’
‘Oh God,’ Graham says, thinking it through. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised. Grace has told me enough lies over the years, but somehow she still manages to catch me out. The thing is, when I was originally posted abroad, to Germany, we talked about moving to the UK. I’m from London and it’s what we both wanted.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ I ask.
‘To be honest, I never really understood why she changed her mind. Especially when she started telling me I was never there for her or our daughter. I couldn’t get my head round it, when we’d made this decision together and it was Grace’s choice to stay in Australia. Then the job came up in Singapore at the start of the year and I asked her to move out to be with me. She told me she didn’t want to go, so I agreed I’d take it for a year and then move back to her.
‘I don’t expect you to believe me,’ he says, ‘when you’ve only just met me—’
‘I do believe you,’ I say, still astounded at the depths of Grace’s manipulation.
‘I’ve never been able to make her happy. I’ve always known that, I suppose, but it hasn’t stopped me trying. I want you to know that.’
‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ I tell him. ‘We aren’t the best friends she seems to have made out to you we are.’
‘I’m beginning to realise that,’ Graham says. ‘I imagine half of what she’s told me about you isn’t true.’
‘What has she told you?’ I ask.
‘She used to taunt me with the way you have this link that will bind you together for ever. She loved telling me how you were wound together in ways I could never understand.’ He gives a small laugh. ‘She knew I used to be envious of your closeness and it was as if she used your relationship to make me feel worse.’
‘We were just friends, as kids,’ I say. ‘You know it was no more than that?’ The thought of the significance that our relationship still holds for Grace unnerves me; that so many years later, I could still have so much importance in her life. ‘And now, well, we hadn’t been in touch for a long while,’ I tell him.
‘Dear God, Grace …’ Graham raises his eyes to the ceiling. ‘So she has no one. I leave her and she actually will have no one. It’s sad, isn’t it? It’s bloody pathetically sad.’
‘I think I should go.’ I grapple for the door handle again. I cannot feel any sadness for Grace. The idea that she has travelled halfway across the globe with her daughter in tow because of me … It fills me not with sorrow, but with dread.
I drive home, too fast, my head spinning with what Graham has told me, so that I don’t even notice Nancy’s Land Rover parked outside my house until I need to slow down to avoid bumping into it as I pull into the driveway. By the time I get out of the car, Nancy is out of hers too and waiting by the gate.
‘I’m sorry,’ she is saying, ‘I was only here to drop these off.’ She is proffering a large bunch of flowers. ‘They’re a welcome-home gift.’
I take them and smile my thanks, admiring the red petals, running my finger along a holly leaf as it presses into my skin. ‘It’s up to me to get rid of her,’ I say.
‘Grace?’ Nancy asks.
‘I have to tell her to go.’
Chapter Twenty-one
Grace
It must have been karma that led Grace to get a second appointment with Sally at 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning, a time she would never usually have been able to make had Graham not been there to take Matilda to school for one of the few times in their daughter’s young life.
Sally had told Grace that she doesn’t work Wednesdays when Grace had phoned her the afternoon before, desperate to see her again.
‘Please,’ Grace begged. ‘I need to speak to you urgently.’
She could imagine the woman likely sighing as she heard her flapping the pages of a paper diary. ‘I can squeeze you in on Friday at three thirty?’
That was three days away, and Grace wasn’t prepared to wait. ‘Is there nothing you can do tomorrow?’
‘Well,’ Sally paused, ‘I suppose I could do something early in the morning. It would have to be eight; I need to leave by nine thirty.’
‘Thank you,’ Grace said. ‘That’s perfect.’
And it was perfect. Because having spoken to Sally for fifty minutes about the state of her marriage and anything else she could think of, half an hour after the end of her appointment Grace knows Sally’s house will be empty. She has told her as much.
During her session she has excused herself to use the bathroom and opened its window a crack again. She wonders if Sally noticed it had been opened on Monday. Now, as she leaves, she glances back at the house before getting into her car and driving to the end of the road, where she waits until she sees Sally pulling out of the driveway in her yellow mini.
As soon as the car has turned the corner and disappeared out of sight, Grace gets out of her own vehicle and walks back towards the house. There is a side gate at the front of the path, and she pulls the bolt open and walks through.
The bathroom window is still ajar, though you wouldn’t be able to tell if you didn’t know. Grace drags a bin underneath and pulls the window open, climbing on top of the bin and hauling herself through. When she is inside she hesitates a moment before entering the hallway. If Sally has set an alarm then it will surely be triggered when she steps out.
But no alarm sounds and so, regardless of the fact she is alone in the house, Grace tiptoes across the hallway floor and lets herself into the front room as quietly as possible. The grey-metal filing cabinet sits in the corner and she makes her way over to it, pulling out unlocked drawers, rifling through the folders until she finds the one she is looking for in the third drawer down: Anna Robinson’s.
Her best friend has gone behind her back, and Grace has no clue what she is up to and what she might tell people, but all of a sudden she is holding the evidence that will tell her what she needs to know: the therapy notes she had always planned to come back for anyway.
Grace pulls out the folder and flicks through the handwritten pages inside. There are notes that go back to Anna’s first visit three months ago in September, a few weeks
after Grace had returned to Clearwater.
Closing up the file she heads back to the bathroom, climbing on to the toilet to haul herself out through the window and on to the path. It has been ridiculously easy, breaking into Sally’s house, and with what she has come for tucked under her arm, she lets herself out through the gate, bolting it up again, for what little use that does.
Grace gets back in her car, flinging the file on to the passenger seat as she starts the engine. Its contents are so tantalisingly close but she wants to get away from Sally’s before she opens them, just in case the woman returns to find her sitting at the end of her road. She has taken enough chances already.
She does not want to take it back to her apartment. Graham will hopefully be gone by now, but she won’t risk it. She had a night of him staying in her apartment, having relented, when he begged her that he couldn’t leave immediately, having only just seen Matilda.
She tells herself she is doing this for her daughter, although possibly there is still some part of her that wonders if he might apologise, realise he has made a mistake and say that this is all his fault.
But he hasn’t, and now she cannot bear to look at him, and so instead Grace finds herself driving through Clearwater and towards the bottom of Crayne’s Cliff, which she knows at 9.45 a.m. on a blustery December morning will be pretty deserted.
As suspected, she easily finds a place to park on the side of the road, turning her engine off before picking up the file and opening it again. This time she reads Sally’s notes carefully, absorbing every word that picks up on Anna’s behaviours and mannerisms, what she has told her therapist and all the things she didn’t say too, as well as what Sally has inferred from what Anna has told her.
All of it paints a very clear picture of inside Anna Robinson’s head over the last three months. In a way, Grace is jealous of her friend for having spent so much time dissecting her thoughts; if she had spent more time with Sally then she might have had some for herself, but in many ways it is more satisfying to read Anna’s.