First One Missing (21 page)

‘Where have you been?’

She had planned to be casual, knowing it was silly to put him on the defensive from the outset. But the words were out almost before she was conscious of saying them, in that accusing voice. Standing at the sink, she wiped a tea towel over a wine glass too tall to fit in the dishwasher and kept her head bent so her expression didn’t give her away.

‘Work,’ he said, as if the question was ridiculous. ‘I go to work every day. In case you hadn’t noticed.’

Emma wished she’d waited until they were alone before embarking on this conversation, but it was too late to turn back and anyway, his sarcasm inflamed her.

‘Only Denise rang here earlier in the week looking for you. She said you’d left early. She said you leave early a lot.’ Emma kept her back to him.

‘Why are you giving him such a hard time?’ Jemima, of course, had picked up on the tension in the room. Sometimes Emma could talk to her and it was as if she was wilfully deaf, her mother’s words sliding off the surface of her as if off an invisible force shield, yet if there was ever anything she wasn’t supposed to hear – a piece of gossip whispered by an indiscreet friend, an aside hissed under someone’s breath – she was suddenly all ears.

‘I’m not giving him a hard time, Jem.’ Emma tried to make her voice sound light. The fake jolliness jarred. ‘I’m just asking—’

‘Yes, but you’re asking in
that voice
.’

‘I’m going up for a shower.’ Guy was already moving towards the hallway. ‘I’ve had work stuff to do. Denise should have checked the diary before ringing up here bothering you. It was all down in there.’

It sounded so plausible.

‘See?’ Jemima hissed, vindicated.

But Emma was already halfway out of the room, following her husband, heart thumping in her ears like the drum ’n’ bass that boomed nightly from Jemima’s bedroom. Her thoughts were racing. On the one hand she longed to put Guy on the spot, to force him to tell her where he’d been going, to admit he’d been unfaithful. Not to her. Not that. But unfaithful to their grief, to Tilly herself. But more pressing even than this desire to make him admit to his transgressions was the need to tell him about the hair elastics. He was Tilly’s father –
is
Tilly’s father, she reminded herself. He alone would grasp the significance of what she’d remembered, maybe even tell her what it meant.

Guy was in the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands.

‘Oh,’ she said, taken aback.

‘For God’s sake, Emma.’ He sounded so tired. ‘I already explained. Denise got it wrong. That’s all.’

‘It’s not that. Well. Not just that.’

Emma explained as best she could. About the photograph, and how fastidious Tilly used to be. ‘Remember?’ she kept saying to him. ‘Remember how she was?’ Reaching into the top drawer of the low unit next to her side of the bed, she withdrew the Ziploc bag the police had given them. Guy physically flinched as he recognized it but she pressed on, sliding the black zipper across the top and withdrawing the two bands from inside.

‘See?’

She thrust her hand in front of Guy’s face, the two colourful elasticated rings resting on her palm. ‘They’re completely different. I know this one was Tilly’s. I remember buying her a set of these in different colours.’

She’d picked up the thicker of the two – bright blue with a yellow-duck motif repeated all the way round.

‘But this one’ – she raised her hand so the band, a plain dark-red thing that suffered in comparison to its brasher, more colourful companion, was practically touching his face – ‘I don’t recognize this at all. It’s not the sort of thing she’d ever wear, and definitely not paired with the other one.’

‘What are you saying, Emma? We know the killer had a thing about hair. We know he brushed their hair. We’ve always known that.’

‘Yes, but this is different, don’t you see?’ She was almost crying. ‘He must have gone out to buy different bands. Why? Why would anyone do that? OK, supposing the other one came off somewhere. Why not just leave her hair down, or put it in a ponytail with one band? Why go to the trouble of buying another one?’

‘I don’t know!’

The vehemence of Guy’s shout seemed to shock even him. For a moment in the silence that followed, he and Emma stared wordlessly at each other. Then his whole body seemed to slump.

‘I don’t know,’ he repeated in a tired, flat voice. ‘I don’t know anything, Emma. I don’t know why Tilly was killed. I don’t know what I could have done to save her. I don’t know what kind of a monster could do what he did. I don’t know why he brushed her hair or wrote on her leg. I don’t know and, d’you know what, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to understand, because evil can’t be understood. Don’t you get that?’

Emma did get it. She got that knowing what happened to Tilly wasn’t going to bring her back and that understanding how and why it happened wasn’t going to help her sleep at night. And yet she had to keep on trying to find out because that was all that was left to her.

‘Where were you?’ she asked Guy.

He raised his dark-shadowed eyes to her, the green eyes whose corners she’d once liked to probe with the tip of her tongue as he lay spent beneath her. Again they looked at each other, as if seeing one another for the first time in a very long while.

‘It was work stuff,’ he told her again. ‘I told you.’

There was a buzzing in the front pocket of Emma’s jeans, her phone vibrating against her hip bone. She tore her eyes from Guy’s and walked out of their bedroom.

‘Hello, Fiona,’ she said, amazed at how her voice came out level and steady, betraying no hint of the scene that had been interrupted.

‘Emma. Yes.’

Fiona Botsford had a very distinctive way of talking, her words coming out in staccato phrases like the clacking of an old-fashioned typewriter. Emma knew some people – Guy for instance – found her abrasive. ‘Spiky’ is how he’d described her when they first met. But Emma liked the way she didn’t ever try to be anything she was not. She didn’t pretend to like people or to be having a good time. She was unapologetically herself. And obviously they had never known her Before, just as none of the others had known Guy and her Before. They had no idea that once Emma and Guy had been so close he would call her from his car on the way to work in the morning. ‘I just wanted to hear your voice,’ he’d say as though it had been ten days, not ten minutes, since he’d left the house.

‘How are you, Fiona? Have you been coping with it all?’

She didn’t need to explain what she meant by ‘it all’.

‘Not really. I’m worried about Helen. She’s taken it very badly, our move to Australia.’

‘We’ll all miss you. It won’t be the same without you.’

Only now did Emma grasp the truth of this. Fiona and Mark weren’t part of her day-to-day life, but their not being around would leave a huge gap. Who else was there who understood? Only Helen and Simon, and this new family when they finally emerged from the pit they were in right now. If they emerged.

‘I know. And we’ll miss you too. But we need to get away. Find a new way of living. Here we’ll always feel like parents. Parents without a child. Maybe somewhere else we can just be people again. I hope Helen can understand that.’

‘Fiona, was there anything weird about Leila’s hair? After she was found, I mean. Was it tied back?’

If Fiona thought this an off-the-wall question, she didn’t show it. ‘No. It was loose. She always wore it loose. She used to say she liked the swishing noise it made when she turned her head from side to side. Why?’

For a moment Emma considered telling her about the hair bands, but the thought of explaining it all over again and being met once more with that blank, unspoken ‘And?’ stopped her.

‘No reason. Just forget I mentioned it.’

25

The dog had its nose in the crotch of Sally’s newly purchased crisp white linen trousers and was making a snuffling noise.

‘Oh, he likes you,’ said the woman at the next table, who was holding the end of the dog’s lead but making not the slightest effort to rein it in. ‘You should be honoured. Normally he growls at people he doesn’t know.’

Sally nudged the dog away and turned to the side so that her back was now to the table with the dog-owning woman. So what if it was rude? Really, as far as she was concerned, allowing your pets to attempt oral sex with random strangers was the greater social transgression. She snatched up her phone from the wooden table and tried Simon’s number. Again. Beep beep beep beep.

Crossly she looked around. It had been her idea to meet at the Kenwood House café on the northern edge of Hampstead Heath. She’d thought the setting – near where all the girls had been found – might make Simon more forthcoming. She’d imagined the two of them enjoying a quiet tête-à-tête in the sunshine, Simon unfurling like a flower under the blaze of her gentle but expert probing, revealing the secret that would unlock the case and reignite her flagging career. She hadn’t reckoned on the Active Retired cluttering up the place with their lightweight jackets and baseball caps and hiking sticks, nor the Scandinavian nannies giggling over cappuccinos while their charges munched their way through family-size bags of artisan crisps, nor all these bloody dogs, and of course, being Hampstead, they weren’t any old dogs, they were designer crossbreeds with those ridiculous names like cockerpoos and cavapoos and labradoodles. The place was jam-packed. She’d only managed to get a table by standing next to a middle-aged man and staring pointedly at his empty tea cup and crumb-strewn plate until he finally got up and moved away. And now Simon wasn’t even bloody well here. It was too much.

‘Sorry, sorry.’ He’d walked up from behind so she hadn’t noticed him. ‘There was nowhere to park. I’ve been driving round and round like a complete dick. Saturdays are a nightmare around here.’

Sally got to her feet to kiss him on each cheek. She got a whiff of cologne and couldn’t help feeling flattered he’d made an effort for her. But then she remembered about the letter and what he might be capable of and she felt angry with herself for even noticing. When Simon sat himself down opposite her and she got a proper look at him, she felt a jolt of shock. He’d really let himself go. There were pillows of flesh where his neck emerged from his just-too-tight yellow T-shirt, and his face was puffy, the cheeks stained deep red from what she guessed was a combination of careless exposure to the sun plus a serious wine habit.

‘It’s wonderful to see you again, Sally. You look great. Really great.’

‘How kind of you to say so. Even though I know I look like shit. Never could sleep well in a hotel.’

Why had she mentioned hotels? Now the memory of that hotel by Swiss Cottage with the white, clinical-looking lobby and the heating you couldn’t turn down was looming large between the two of them.

‘I have thought about you, you know?’

His pale eyes were sunken and Sally felt a wave of revulsion, remembering again the letter and what it implied. She looked at his broad, meaty fingers resting on the table and had a sudden awful memory of him thrusting one of those fingers into her mouth. She jumped to her feet.

‘Oh really? How nice. Now what shall I get you from the café? Tea? Coffee? There’s a yummy-looking carrot cake I could tempt you with.’

‘Yummy’. She hadn’t used that word in years.

By the time she re-emerged, balancing two Earl Greys and a slab of orangey-brown cake topped with thick white icing, she’d given herself a strict talking-to. She’d made a mistake with Simon Hewitt. But people were allowed mistakes. It didn’t make them bad people. She would get Mina to do some work with her on self-forgiveness. But in the meantime she needed to focus on getting Simon to talk – in whatever way possible.

‘How have things been?’ She reached out her hand and rested her fingertips briefly on his pudgy arm.

He glanced at her and then concentrated on adding two lumps of brown sugar to his tea, and stirring vigorously.

‘It’s not exactly a barrel of laughs at home. But what can you do? We make the best of it.’

‘Of course. Of course.’

‘I hope it goes without saying this meeting is completely off the record, Sally.’

Simon narrowed his already narrow eyes, and Sally could hear in his voice how much he enjoyed saying the phrase ‘off the record’. She had noticed that about him before, that propensity towards the pompous.

‘I don’t think Helen would be jumping up and down with joy if she knew I was meeting you.’

‘She knows about us then? How the fuck did she find out?’

Sally had guessed as much but it was uncomfortable having her suspicions confirmed.

‘She found the hotel receipt.’

Now Sally remembered how he’d insisted on paying for the room in that swaggering manner some men adopt when they’re trying to be macho, even though she’d told him she could put it on expenses.

‘I told her I was helping you with an article. That we needed somewhere quiet to talk.’

‘Ha! Bet she bought that one!’

‘Not really. But I stuck to it, and she didn’t push. Helen doesn’t push on anything. It’s not her style.’

No wonder Helen had seemed frosty at Fiona’s interview. It was all so tawdry in hindsight.

Simon picked up his fork and shovelled a wodge of cake into his mouth. A large ginger crumb fixed itself to his lower cheek.

‘Come on, Sally,’ he said through his mouthful of cake. ‘Don’t look so pissed off. You weren’t exactly an unwilling party as I remember rightly. It takes two to tango, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Whatever. Anyway, that’s not why I wanted to see you. Actually, there’s something I need to ask you. Something that’s come to my attention.’

A loud Latin samba suddenly cut across the table and Sally cursed herself for not having turned her phone to silent before sitting down.

‘Excuse me a moment,’ she said, clocking the name that had popped up on the screen. Clutching her phone to her chest like a newborn baby, she threaded her way through the tables and out on to the main path. To the right, the magnificent cream façade of Kenwood House rose up stark against a cobalt sky, its regiment of vast windows gazing out on to manicured lawns sloping down to the glittering lake at the bottom. Finding an unoccupied bench, she sat with her back to the building.