Try Not to Breathe (35 page)

S
he’d been awake for hours but was still yawning as she approached the café doors.

It was harder than ever to sleep these days, and the few drops of wine in her system did more to agitate than relax her. Last night, thoughts of Tom and his dad’s name and Jenny and, as ever, Amy circled around like the ghosts and witches of
Macbeth.
The family photos she’d hastily snapped had flickered through her eventual dreams like a flip book, the pages chattering like teeth.

She’d fallen asleep late but woken long before the sun.

As Alex pushed the door to the café open, she spotted a new bruise on her forearm and self-consciously tugged at her sleeve. Bruises were no longer a product of one-off drunken mishaps, now they were a creeping reminder of the deeper damage done to her system.

The busy widows that made up the “friends of the hospital” ran a tight ship. Café doors opened at 7 a.m. sharp and were shut tight at 3 p.m. From Monday to Saturday, a series of eager older ladies in deck shoes and tabards provided hot drinks in uniform china cups. They carved thick slices of sponge cake and stuffed sandwiches with a range of timeless fillings. Egg and cress. Cheese and pickle. Ham and wet tomato.

Jacob was already seated when she arrived, two mugs of tea on the table.

“Thanks, I need this.”

Alex laid her iPhone out in front of her, and held her pen over her notepad. The name “Graham” was dancing on her tongue but she had to bide her time, pump everything out of Jacob before silencing him with this latest information.

“So I’d like to hear more about what Jenny said. Don’t worry about repeating yourself, just start from the beginning. Even if you don’t think it’s important, just talk and I’ll make notes.”

Jacob nodded wearily, “Okay,” and then suddenly looked up. “Fiona!”

Alex spun around to see a heavily-pregnant woman staring at her, nostrils flaring and chest rising and falling fast. She wore shapeless maternity pajama bottoms, a woolen cardigan and a thin white vest that made her look like a dusty lightbulb. But while she looked tired, and her lips were pursed, her eyes were pretty and her cheekbones were flushed. Her auburn hair was glossy and pulled back into a ponytail, and her index finger was pointing straight at Alex.

“Is this her?” Fiona said to Jacob.

“I’m sorry?” Alex asked.

“Is the baby okay?” Jacob stood up sharply and hobbled toward Fiona, who was leaning on the back of a chair. “What are you doing here? Is everything okay?”

She ignored Jacob’s questions, continuing to stare at Alex. “Is this her? Is this your other woman?”

“I don’t understand,” Alex said as she looked to Jacob to explain.

“Alex, this is my wife, Fiona.” Jacob looked down at his hands.

“Hi,” Alex said uneasily as Jacob turned back to his wife, who finally looked him directly in the eye, angrily wiping tears away.

“Fiona, I know this looks bad and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Fiona’s eyes blazed but she said nothing.

“I’m a journalist,” Alex said carefully, “and your husband’s been helping me with a story.”

At this, Fiona leaned on a chair for support and half smiled. “A journalist, right,” she said eventually.

Jacob stepped slowly toward his wife, as slowly as a bomb disposal expert.

“Fi,” he said, reaching out for her hands, which she snatched out of the way.

“Fi, I’m so sorry. I have lied to you and then I’ve denied it and made things worse. But I promise I’ve never cheated on you, I never would.”

“Bullshit.”

“Please, Fiona, sit down.”

Fiona sat on the hard chair with a humph and winced.

“I think I should leave you two to talk,” Alex attempted, and Fiona shot her a look. “You’re not squirming out of this.”

Fiona put one hand on the small of her back for support. “Don’t look at me like that, Jacob, I’m not going to drop any second. Now start at the beginning.”

“It’s a very, very long story,” Jacob said gently.

“You’d best get going, then, because this baby is going to be born at some point soon and I need to know what the fuck its father has been up to.”

Jacob cast an eye at Fiona’s bump and took a deep breath. “When I was at Edenbridge Grammar I was going out with a girl named Amy Stevenson.” He paused for a moment but Fiona didn’t react.

“We were both fifteen and I was very fond of her. We’d been going out for about eight months when Amy was abducted after school one day. She was attacked and left in a coma. Alex is a reporter; she’s been investigating what happened to Amy.”

“None of this makes any sense. If this was true, why wouldn’t you have just told me? Why wouldn’t I have known all along?”

“I don’t know,” Jacob answered, reaching out to touch her leg, pulling his hand back as she slithered away from him. “I should have told you right at the start but the longer it went on and the more time passed…I don’t know, it sounds stupid now.”

“You never know, Jacob. You never have a proper answer for anything. This fucking—I don’t even know what—this fucking
fairy tale
that you’ve concocted, or she has,” she glared at Alex, “it doesn’t add up. Just, please, Jacob, please tell me the truth.”

“Jacob,” Alex said quietly, “why don’t we show her the truth?”

“Amy?” Jacob grimaced.

“Why not?”

Jacob paused. “Fiona,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief, “I don’t know if this is a good idea or not, but if you come up to the ward, you can see Amy for yourself.”

Fiona’s eyes widened.

“You’re both fucking mental.” Fiona stood up with a groan. “I’m going, I don’t have time for this crap.”

Jacob scrambled to his feet. “I’m sorry, Fi, I’m really sorry.”

“I just need to go now.”

“Let me walk you out at least.”

“No,” Fiona snapped. “Just…” She took a deep breath. “Just let me go, Jacob.” Alex and Jacob watched as Fiona pushed her way angrily out of the café, the door swinging back toward them.

C
losing the patio door softly behind her, Sue stepped onto the deck quietly, the fur on her slippers ruffling in the summer breeze. Disgusting habit, she told herself. Just as she did every time. Closing her eyes to enjoy the minuscule fizz of the tobacco catching light, she dragged the warm, sweet smoke through the stem of the cigarette, between her lips and deep into her chest.

She hoped all of her boys had avoided this filthy habit in adulthood. She’d gone to great pains to hide her own smoking from them throughout their lives. Thomas was the only one she’d ever caught, although she had no doubt that Simon had had his moments too, he was just more cunning. She really wasn’t sure about Jacob. He was a stickler for following the rules.

Thomas had been fifteen when she’d caught him. Always such a good boy, such an easy, happy child. Until St. Cuthbert’s anyway. From the moment he started at that school, he’d become enveloped in a black cloud. Everything seemed to pain or offend him. Suddenly he was wringing his hands over every perceived injustice, feeling guilty about the family’s nice things and declaring himself a vegetarian until Sue had to put a stop to that. He was wasting away.

He would wear T-shirts with naive political statements on them and spend hours in his room listening to gloomy music. And then one day she’d had enough of the miserable music pouring over the top of the television and had gone upstairs and knocked sharply on Thomas’s door. When no reply came, Sue had gone in. At first, she’d thought the room was empty with the music left on, which was bad enough. Then she’d seen the curtains flapping, the window wide open. As she’d moved closer, the shape of her youngest son had come into view. He was outside the window, sitting in a heap on the roof of the bay below. She’d cried out in surprise, startling him so he spun around, a rolled-up cigarette dangling forlornly from his lips.

He’d stubbed it out on a roof tile and scrambled back through the window, standing in front of her with his head down and his hair flopping over his eyes.

“You should ground me, Mum,” he said.

“But you don’t go anywhere, Thomas, so what good would that do?”

“It’s what I deserve, I s’pose,” he’d said, and sat heavily on his single bed.

She’d left the room without another word. She’d not caught him again after that, but she’d not exactly tried.

She blamed that blasted school but she couldn’t uproot him another time. She regretted that decision in hindsight. The three years he spent at St. Cuthbert’s hollowed out her happy-go-lucky boy, replacing him with an anxious, guilt-ridden ghost. He’d become preoccupied with darkness, driven by an obsessive need to seek out the grubby and try to clean it. It set him on a path that had taken him further and further away from her.

Given how much he hated that school, it wasn’t a surprise when Thomas chose to leave and take his A-levels at college instead. But it was a surprise, actually a terrible shock, that he was adamant that he wanted to go to college in a deprived area of London. For God’s sake. Some wretched need to expose himself to those less fortunate. And less moral and trustworthy.

After a few months of two-hour round-trips on the train, he’d lugged his belongings all the way to a bedsit in a grotty corner of New Cross, refusing his parents’ help. He’d spent his evenings stacking shelves to pay his way.

Was it a surprise that he’d continued creeping away? After university in the Midlands, he’d got his first social work job in one of those old industrial towns that had dominated the news once upon a time and was now full of single mothers, undesirables and feral kids with no moral compass.

Ever since St. Cuthbert’s, Tom had embarked on a series of thankless tasks. And now he wanted to come clean, to undergo the ultimate in thankless endeavors. Just as Jacob was finally moving on and getting married. Sue had stood aside for a long time, allowed Tom to make his own mistakes, to fall on his own swords, but this latest plan…well, it wasn’t just his head on the block. It wasn’t just his guilt.

If he spoke up, the family would be permanently fractured and Sue wasn’t about to let that happen. Whatever it took. She’d sooner die.

“S
o, does your editor like what you’ve done so far?” Matt tested.

“I’ve not shown him yet. I promised you, remember?”

The brute force of a baby crying in the background came down the line. “I can’t really talk for long, Alex. I’m looking after Ava while Jane’s sleeping.”

For a moment, Alex said nothing. Too long a moment. She swallowed and pushed away the image of Matt gazing into the tiny face of a newborn. A newborn whose features she would recognize. She wished it was possible to have her evening nightcap now, without that throwing everything out of whack. Instead, she sat on her free hand as if it was likely to run into the kitchen of its own accord and pop open a bottle.

“Sorry, I’ll try to be quick. It’s just that I’m getting a serious sinking feeling about Jacob’s brother Tom. He just seems to be in the shadows everywhere I look. Metaphorically, I mean. He knew Amy, obviously, and he’s kind of a loner, works with vulnerable kids.”

“Okay. I mean, it’s not against the law to be a loner. We’d have our work cut out if it was. Does he have an alibi?”

“I don’t know. I know Jacob and his mum were out, and his dad worked long hours in London, so I’m guessing Tom was on his own for a few hours.”

“Well, you can’t guess that, he might have been at a friend’s house or playing football or something.”

“Yeah, I know that,” she snapped before she could stop herself.

“Okay, I’m running out of time here. What do you need?”

“Sorry. Look, I found something else out. It could be a coincidence, but the Edenbridge pervert shares a name with Tom and Jacob’s dad, Graham.”

“If Tom is involved, that would be one hell of a fuckup. It seems way too obvious.”

“He was only thirteen though, he would have been a novice, or maybe he was just an apprentice. Maybe his dad is involved somehow.”

“Look, the description of ‘Graham’ said he was mid-teens to mid-thirties, would a thirteen-year-old even be classed as mid-teens to most people? And as for his dad being involved, that seems like quite a leap.”

“Jacob’s a big guy, really tall; I guess his brother probably is too. How drunk was the bus girl—what did you say her name was?”

“Nice try.”

“All right, but you said she was really drunk, how reliable is her attempt to put an age on him?”

“If you start going down that route, how reliable is any of what she said?”

“But maybe that’s it, we don’t know what’s right and what was the drink obscuring things—if I could just talk to her…”

“Absolutely not.”

“What if I could show her a picture of Tom, find out once and for all?”

“Alex, I can’t give you her details. Besides, the fact is that they are well out of date; she lived in a halfway house for Barnado’s kids, so she won’t still be there.”

“A halfway house? You mean she was from a kids’ home?”

“Shit, I shouldn’t have told you that. I’m so exhausted I don’t know what I’m saying. Don’t take advantage.”

“I’m not trying to take advantage of you. Jesus.”

“I’m sorry, Alex, but I can’t give you her details. I just can’t.”

“It happens all the time, Matt, police sources are the backbone of newspapers. It’s when money changes hands that it’s a problem. You’d just be giving me a name, that’s all. Please think about it.”

“I don’t need to think about it. My baby is three days old, I can’t take risks with my job, the stakes are too high.”

“Look at your baby daughter, Matt. Amy was Jo and Bob’s little daughter. This girl was someone’s baby.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“Matt, please, just a name. I’m from around here, aren’t I? I could say I heard what happened from a friend of a friend. She would have told people at the time. I could say I had a friend at the children’s home.”

“Jesus, Alex, I don’t know. About any of it. I need to go. I can’t think straight.”

Alex sat on her knees on the sofa, her chest resting against the back, staring out of the window like a dog in the boot of a car. Her days had stretched three times as long now that the first drink on her self-imposed timetable was right before bed. Not that it was helping her sleep when it did finally get to that point.

It seemed too much to try to make notes when there was nothing new to say. As she started the afternoon’s internal monologue,
Just one won’t hurt/no, no, no,
her phone vibrated off the sofa cushion. She flipped it around to see a text message from Matt:

Caroline Mortimer. Delete this. Please.

Alex leapt up from the sofa and spun around, not quite sure what to do. Should she reply? Would she wake the baby? The phone would still be in his hand:

Thanks x

She pretended to herself that the kiss was a mistake. And waited for a reply that never came.

She scurried over to her Mac to visit 192.com and search for Caroline Mortimer in Tunbridge Wells. There it was. Electoral roll 1997. So Caroline hung around long enough to register but left before the next election. Or died. Or went to prison. Or left the country. Or just didn’t bother. Alex tried not to think about dead ends.

Eventually, after paying to access the complete records across every site she could think of, Alex reached the end of the digital breadcrumb trail. Caroline Mortimer registered to vote in 2010 in Malmesbury Mews, Greenwich.

“Found you, Caroline.”