What We Did, page 24
She has a violin lesson two days later, at his house. She goes to it.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The sky was black as she hurried back to the shop, the rain coming in sheets, blown sideways.
“I want to meet her,” she had said to Carrie, holding her arm to keep her a minute longer. They had been standing on the pavement outside the steamed-up window of the café, in the rain. Behind it the stocky figure of the waitress moving between tables in the yellow light and the smell of bacon frying. Would that light, that smell, always be associated with this feeling? Everything had changed: The light had changed, sounds were different. A hole had opened up and something was rushing in, icy water. Smoke and feathers.
“I want to meet Magdalena.”
It was a risk. But Bridget needed to see someone else who knew. Carrie hugged her, quick, in the rain, smelling of last night’s booze and cigarettes, and was gone.
Anyone out in the rain was hurrying like her, head down, ducking into doorways. Coming around a corner, Bridget hit a gust, it knocked her sideways and she had to steady herself before moving on.
How could she have thought she would have a life? That it had been anything but pretend, all of it. She thought about twenty years of sex with Matt, whom she loved, who loved her, of his hand careful on her, gentle, the whispered words. It had been like something children do, tentative, cautious. She wanted it back. The last time had been dangerous. Had that been her, or him? Something had climbed into the bed with them, and she had brought it.
Finn wasn’t pretend, was he? Big, good, loving Finn. She hadn’t invented him. But she could lose him. Head down. Keep going.
On the threshold of the shop Bridget hesitated, peering in: it was busy. Took a breath and was inside, shaking the raindrops from her coat on the mat, parking her umbrella. Surveying the room.
Three sets of Saturday shoppers. A husband on the sofa with a fidgety small child on either side of him—looked like twins, one girl, one boy—while he read the paper. Laura, who was moving between the curtained changing room and a man and woman frowning together over a choice of two outfits in the far corner. Dark red knit versus black velvet: talking about Christmas Day.
“But can you imagine getting the turkey out of the oven in it?” Laura was saying earnestly. “That’s the key.” The man peered at his wife, hopeless.
Christmas Day. Only weeks away. Was it going to happen, ever again?
“Darling?” A youngish red-haired woman, frazzled, soft, had emerged from the cubicle in a pale green party dress in a gleaming satiny fabric: the children bounced off the sofa and ran to clutch at her. Mummymummymummy.
She stood at the center of the room and looked at her husband, anxious. The fabric rippled on her, showing a little bit of baby belly. “Mummy, you are a princess,” said the small girl, pressing a cheek against the satin. Her husband—ironed shirt under a sweater, big ears—set the newspaper aside, and for a second she only saw his smile. And then she saw the newspaper open on the cushion beside him, where a child had sat.
Laura would have brought it in with her, she always did on Saturdays. The magazine sections on the mirrored cube.
“Police Widen Search for Missing Boy.” She leaned to look, despite herself. There was a picture of a small, curtained house on a bleak but tidy estate: the boy’s home. He had gone out to meet mates and never came back. The estate was four miles from where she stood, in this small space with a happy family.
The world he had disappeared into was so much bigger than the safe spaces they thought they could make.
And abruptly she remembered. He was fatter now, but she’d known his smell, the thick sound of his voice turning his head to say something to someone else that had made her twist to hide herself, her face, in the sofa in Anthony Carmichael’s music room. Something about the Greeks. And then: There’s nothing like a boy, for pleasure. And then he had hurt her.
They had been younger then, Timpson and Carmichael. They’d have been in their forties. What had they done since? The internet had happened since. Pedophile networks. All of this had been the background radiation to her adult life, growing in the dark where she didn’t look, turning her face away from the newspaper, walking out of the room when the news came on. The internet: the big, wide world.
Matt hadn’t wanted to tell her what he’d found that made him think Gill Lawson was right about Carmichael.
Someone was saying something to her now, and she turned, making herself focus. The red-haired mother was talking to her and Bridget recognized her after all, from a while ago. She was looking down at her little belly in dismay and tugging at the fabric and they were all looking at Bridget, waiting for her to say something.
“You’re beautiful,” Bridget said, plucking the words from the air, and the little girl began to jump up and down in delight.
They had seemed the right words at the time, but she modified them, because they were all looking at her, it wasn’t quite what they had expected. “It’s perfect on you,” she said, politely enthusiastic, turning the woman in front of her to look at herself in the mirror.
Adjusting the lie on the shoulders, the fabric loosened, skimmed, and the redhead nodded at last. The Christmas Day wife was in the second cubicle with her husband outside, the older woman got up off the footstool to button her coat, and the focus shifted, everything subsided back to the everyday.
There was a lull at about two and Bridget picked up the paper quickly on the pretext of tidying, folding it very slowly. A photograph of the boy: No one she recognized. Not a child, maybe seventeen, eighteen. Alan Timpson had always liked boys: she had been low on his list, but he’d taken what Carmichael had offered, with the other men.
Laura was pink-cheeked and cheerful again, carrying her pregnancy lightly today, it seemed. She’d even been moving things around in the kitchen: going in after her, Bridget had seen a box sitting on the shelf where the log had been. Nothing heavy: the Easter decorations, painted cardboard eggs and sprays of paper cherry blossom. Nothing had been said; nor, it seemed from her blithe smiling composure, would it need to be. Nest-building had taken care of it, perhaps, and it occurred to Bridget that it covered a multitude of—what? Sins? Some women’s instinct to arrange, to tidy, to present an orderly face to the world. To conceal.
Only when Laura subsided into the chair in the stockroom, balancing a Tupperware box of salad on her belly, could Bridget see how close she was to term. She leaned down into the box, seeking out avocado, and, looking up, caught Bridget watching her. She seemed calm and untroubled, but Bridget glimpsed, in that second, the tiniest adjustment, as if her every effort was to eliminate worry.
Had Bridget done that? She’d been anxious throughout her pregnancy with Finn, terrified. Matt had gotten her through it. Stayed calm for her, protected her, at scans, with every twinge, every Braxton Hicks. His face when Finn was born: startled, joyful. She had to do this without him, now.
Then the bell pinged, not once but again and again, and a hen party was trooping through the door, deely bobbers and tinsel sashes, one of them lifting a pair of high heels from the window and brandishing them overhead, another one—under the influence, Bridget calculated from the way she was teetering on heels—cheerfully holding a five-hundred-quid ball gown up against herself in the mirror. When Bridget next checked her phone an hour later, there was a message from Carrie.
They’d just finished clearing the changing rooms and Laura was walking along the racks straightening everything to a regulation two centimeters apart, humming to herself.
Magdalena can do coffee this afternoon.
Laura was looking at her, and Bridget cocked a thumb at the door. “I’m just—can I—” She slipped out into the lane, pacing in the drizzle. Carrie answered on the first ring.
“Hey.” She was eager, excitable. “Magdalena says, why don’t we meet at the house? Like, Carmichael’s house.”
It took a minute for the implications to register.
“She’s not worried about being caught?” Bridget was hunched in the rain, Justine peering at her across a customer in the jeweler’s opposite. “If he came back?” Justine’s customer was a man in late middle age, sandy-haired, for a second, she thought, for a mad second—then he turned. No one she knew.
“She’s pretty sure he isn’t coming back,” said Carrie.
“So she knows … something?” She’d turned her back on Justine and instead could see Laura standing in the empty shop, both hands on her belly, feet apart, looking down at herself. Then her head lifted: Bridget could hear it, too, the ring of the shop phone. Behind the glass Laura moved off to pick it up.
“All right,” said Bridget. “At six, then.”
She looked up and down the lane: it occurred to her that she’d thought maybe Finn, out in town looking for a present with Isabel, might have dropped in to say hello. He used to do that, Saturday mornings, to ask for a fiver for lunch. Saturday afternoons was mountain biking with friends, he was never home early, not even on a wet November Saturday. As a small boy he’d needed running, like a dog, shaggy head bouncing ahead of them in rain or shine, to the swings, in the park, down the field toward the estuary. Since he’d gotten the bike he could roam free and come home with raindrops sparkling in his hair and soggy trainers, to crash on the sofa and eat a whole packet of cookies before dinner.
“I’ll be there,” she said. Laura was lifting a hand to her through the glass, beckoning her in.
Bridget felt numb: the cleaner might know already, somehow. Magdalena: Neither of them knew anything about her. She might go to the police, she might blackmail them. But she slipped the phone into her pocket and pushed her way back inside: Laura had hung up by the time she got back in.
“It was Matt on the phone,” said Laura. “He’s trying to get hold of you, you were on the mobile.” She grimaced. “Sorry, pregnancy brain, you know that, obviously.”
“No such thing as pregnancy brain,” said Bridget, frowning: hearing Nick’s voice—and Timpson’s. “Thanks, Laura.” She dialed him straight back, but it went to voice mail, tried again straightaway, but still no joy. This is Matt, sorry, I’m not able to answer the phone, just the sound of his voice made her throat close, but the message she left was quick and quiet. Home at seven, hope everything’s okay.
The rain set in and the shop stayed empty. No word from Matt, however often she looked at her phone. Just her and Laura, walking past each other, avoiding each other’s eye. At 5:15 Bridget turned the sign to CLOSED, locked the door.
When she turned, Laura was standing there in her coat, arms folded over the bump, submissive—and something else. Bridget took hold of her by the elbows. “What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong, Laura?”
Laura’s lower lip was between her teeth, like a kid. “There’s something I didn’t tell you yesterday.” She faltered. Bridget took her hands away, but Laura stayed hunched, so still and small the unwieldy bump looked almost grotesque.
“A woman came in, just after you went off to the post office,” she said, avoiding Bridget’s eye. “The one … that bought a white shirt. I told you that, didn’t I?”
Bridget did remember. “You said she was a pain.”
Laura chewed her lip. “Yes. I didn’t—well, I wasn’t sure if I should have talked to her, so I didn’t tell you. But it—the more I thought about it, the more it seemed you should know.”
“So,” said Bridget cautiously. “What should I know? I don’t know her, this woman?”
Laura shook her head.
“She said she was a writer,” she went on, frowning down at the bump. “She said she was writing a piece about small out-of-town boutiques. I think … there was something funny about her. She didn’t ask about what brands we stock or anything. Asking lots of questions about working here. I should have mentioned it, but I—I had a lot on my mind, you know. And it’s not like she was a shoplifter. There was nothing missing.” And only then did she lift her head, her shoulders dropping a little. She exhaled.
“Questions about working here,” said Bridget flatly. “About working for me?”
Laura tipped her head side to side. “Not really. She did say it was you she wanted to see, but when I told her you were out she just smiled and said she’d ask me some background and come back.”
“Background?”
Laura shrugged, uncomfortable. “Just stuff like how long I’d been here, what hours did I work. All sort of … friendly. But persistent.”
“What did she look like?” The two of them standing there in the middle of the empty shop, lights still on, and Bridget had to be at Carmichael’s at six—but this seemed important.
“A bit older than you. Like she hadn’t combed her hair. She pretended to be looking for an outfit, too, but she hadn’t got a clue. Obviously. She was wearing—” and Laura gesticulated, almost distressed. That might just mean, Bridget knew, that the woman had on bad shoes. “I think she only asked me to find her the white shirt so she could poke about while I was in the stockroom.”
“You left her alone?” said Bridget, aghast. “She could have been a shoplifter.” Although that wasn’t why. The idea of someone wandering unmonitored around the shop frightened her. Laura tugged her coat around herself defensively, but it didn’t come anywhere near covering the bump.
“Only for a minute or two,” she said. “But she wasn’t—I’m sure—she didn’t seem the kind.” Lamely. Hesitant. “She did seem to be interested in that, though, she asked what did we do if someone dodgy came in, she asked that. Dodgy guys.”
“And what did you say?”
But instead of answering, Laura moved her head, quick, a panicked look on her face.
There was someone at the door. Someone out there in the dark, shuffling from foot to foot. A pale face with stubble. Laura took a step, then stopped. Bridget looked closer.
Speaking of dodgy guys. It was Nick, his eyes dark against white skin, sliding over Bridget’s and away. Laura was patting her pockets, looking around for her bag, her umbrella. Bridget could hear her breathing.
Laura raised a hand to him through the glass. “I told her everything was on CCTV,” she said. “I mean, no harm in mentioning it, is there?”
“Even though ours is out of action,” said Bridget, but panic was beginning to hammer at her.
“No,” said Laura, peering into her face, bewildered. “The guy came to fix it. Didn’t I tell you? I was sure I’d told you. Three, four weeks ago?”
And pointed up at the screen. Bridget stood there staring up at it, not quite able to respond, as if winded by the information. How could she not have noticed? All that wondering about cameras in the street.
Laura was looking properly alarmed now. “She wanted to see how it worked,” she said, her voice rising.
Nick was tapping at the door now and she crossed to open it, head turning to monitor Laura just standing there. She stood back, reluctant, to let him across the threshold, and then he stood there, hands in his pockets, looking around airily. “All right, girls?” he said cheerfully.
Bridget didn’t answer, but Laura mumbled something, she had her handbag on her shoulder, a shopping bag in each hand, already shuffling toward the door with her head down. Nick didn’t offer to take the bags.
Bridget put up a hand to keep her back a moment. “Did you show her?” she asked. “How it worked?”
The CCTV sent images to the laptop, but she hadn’t really looked at the computer in days. She had been neglecting everything, orders, the MailShots, the on-off blog they’d started in order to advertise the shop. Everything what-if. What-if.
Nick was pretending interest in the jewelry cabinet.
Laura looked relieved. “Oh, no. I told her, but I’m not going to show our things to any old reporter, am I? No way. I did go on to the laptop after she’d gone, to have a look at the footage—just in case I’d been wrong about her being a shoplifter—but then I couldn’t find it.”
“Couldn’t find it? Couldn’t find what? The—the video?” The thought of what she might have seen.
Laura’s shoulders were sagging now. “The laptop,” she said, anxious again. “It wasn’t where it usually is. On that shelf under the till.”
Thank God, was Bridget’s first thought, and then she saw Nick crossing shamelessly to the till, to the desk, leaning to peer around under it to the shelf, stuffed with invoices, a pincushion, a jar of pens, things customers weren’t supposed to see.
Bridget glared at him and he withdrew amiably. Wandering the racks now.
She saw Laura’s face. “It’s all right, Laura, you’ve done nothing wrong.” She took a deep breath. “You get off, now. It’s Saturday night, you’ve been on your feet all week.” And as if on cue, Nick moved nimbly to reach her, solicitous. “Let me take those, sweetheart,” he said, and Bridget saw the surprise on Laura’s face, which softened into pleasure. She held the door open stiffly.
She paused a moment with her face to the glass to make sure they were gone. Laura and Nick walking away, Laura’s head down and his arm heavy on her shoulder.
Laura was right, the laptop wasn’t there. She tried to think, but her head was too full. Had she taken it home? She did that sometimes. She took it into the back room to check stock sometimes, too. She headed for the stockroom, glancing up at the cameras. Checking the angles: till, front door, back rack, stockroom door.
What could the cameras see? Not the tiny kitchen, but they would have seen him follow her in there, they would have seen him fail to emerge. If someone had dragged a body, however quickly, across the shop floor—the thought of replaying that moment in slow motion, over and over, made her feel dizzy.
