‘What if it wasn’t just mental? What if he hurt her physically, too?’ I said.
He crossed his arms around his body then, and bowed his head. ‘Can you expand?’ He looked quickly through to the back of the cafe. I turned my head too. The toilet door was still closed.
‘She always wore long sleeves, and trousers or tights, even when it was hot. I’m thinking maybe she had bruises on her legs and arms and was hiding them.’
‘Nothing you ever saw, on her face for example?’
‘He would have been too clever for that. I found some bloody tissues in their wastepaper basket and also a scarf with what looks like blood stains on it. I kept it and I found it again last night. I thought I’d lost it, but it was in a box under my bed along with . . . well, you don’t need to know the details, but here it is.’ I pulled the piece of grey fabric out of the pocket of my jacket and handed it across the table to him.
He took it, with some reluctance. ‘I suppose I could get someone to analyse it. Though I’m not sure what that will tell us. Even if it is blood, it could just be from a nosebleed.’ His mouth suddenly tightened into a smile. ‘Hello. All good back there?’
Ailsa had appeared next to me on the banquette. ‘What have you got?’ she said. ‘What’s she given you?’
I put my hand on her arm and kept it there even though she tried to shake it off.
‘It’s a blood-stained scarf. I found it in your house and now I’ve given it to Mr Standling.’
‘When did you take it from my house?’
I didn’t know how to signal to her I had her best interests at heart. Instead, I smiled quickly at Standling. ‘Ages ago.’
Something vulnerable flashed into her face and then vanished, covered over by scorn. ‘Verity, what is this? I thought we were past this.’ And then to Standling. ‘You do know she’s insane.’
I tried to laugh it off, and shortly after he stood up – he had a meeting to go to. When we got to the entrance of the station, I wondered if he would come on the escalator with us, but he took the stairs – leaping ahead with great lolloping strides. On the Tube, she seemed suddenly weak, so when we got out, I waited for a bus to take us up the hill. I didn’t trust her to make it on foot.
Chapter Nine
1 fold-up metal garden chair
1 Russell Hobbs Powersteam iron, flex broken
5 melamine plates with a sunflower pattern
1 child’s tin globe, rusty and with a divided Germany, but in working order
Gallimaufry, noun. A heterogeneous mixture, a
confused jumble, a ridiculous medley.
Ten days went by after the pub lunch without me seeing Ailsa. I wasn’t concerned at first. I had other distractions, viz the revisions to my most recent words – ‘angry’, ‘angst’, etc. The comments from my editor were unusually sniffy: ‘Old-fashioned phrasing’; ‘1838 needed’; ‘Three errors! This will not do, Verity’. Since the Tilsons had moved in, my concentration had lapsed.
I didn’t tutor Max the first week as he had a rugby match after school, so I had no direct contact with any of the family until Melissa let me in the following Wednesday. ‘Hiya!’ she said brightly. She was wearing school uniform, the grey skirt just reaching the top of her thighs, her black tights nearly all ladder. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m very well, thank you,’ I replied, scanning her face. She had just plucked her eyebrows and the skin above her lids looked raw. She looked very like Ailsa; the same tawny eyes, the same sculptural pointiness to her face. ‘Your mum in?’
‘No.’
‘Is she at her food bank?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Or another job interview?’
‘I don’t know actually.’
‘Is she all right, Melissa?’
‘Yeah. She’s good,’ she said in that fake-upbeat way I had begun to distrust.
She hovered, though, chewing the side of her thumb, as if she had something to ask. Finally, she said: ‘Verity, I just wondered. I’m doing a project for my GCSE Art. The title is Dreams and Reality. I’ve drawn the outline of a head, and I was thinking of filling it with newspaper articles – about global warming and stuff. It’s just Mum said I could ask . . .’
I waited, and when she didn’t say any more, I said: ‘Of course.’
‘It’s just, I need lots of newsprint, headlines and pictures from as many different sources as I can, to get different typefaces, and I don’t know whether you need them or anything, but those plastic crates in your porch area, they’ve got loads of old magazines in them. So I wondered . . .’
Carefully, button by button, I undid my jacket, as if I intended to take it off, which I didn’t.
‘If you weren’t using them, if you were thinking of throwing them out . . .’
On the table in their hall was a pile of that day’s post, a couple of bills, and some flyers in an untidy heap. I touched one with the tips of my fingers. It was an advert for a ‘top to toe’ cleaning service. I slid it along the wood until it was aligned with the pizza leaflet, and a stapled brochure promoting special offers at Lidl.
‘I’d love to be able to help, Melissa,’ I said. ‘I might need them so I’m not sure if I can give them to you today.’
‘OK.’
I pulled my fingers back from the table. ‘Let me have a little sort and I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Awesome,’ she said doubtfully.
‘OK.’ I nodded and she went upstairs.
The kitchen was spotless as usual. There was no sign of any supper; I suppose, looking back, that was odd. Out on the terrace sat two large bags of compost, and a black plastic tray of what looked like herbs. She had been in the middle of planting them out – one of the bags was open and there were several trails of earth on the stone slabs.
Max was on the floor. He had upturned his school bag and was rifling through his books; some of the lined paper had come detached from their stapled spines. ‘I’ve lost my maths homework,’ he said.
‘Do you need your maths homework this minute?’
‘It’s got to be done now. I’m supposed to have done it. I couldn’t do it yesterday and I meant to ask the teacher today to help, but I forgot. Now I can’t find it. Oh, here it is.’
He grabbed a loose sheet from the floor. It was crumpled, and he laid it on the table and tried to smooth it with the flat of his hand. ‘Can you help me do it? It’s equations.’
‘Not my strong point, maths,’ I said.
‘Can you Google it, like Mum does? Or BBC Bitesize. She said she’d be home in time to help and she isn’t.’
‘We’re here to do English,’ I said. ‘I’ve prepared for our lesson already.’
I produced a piece of paper from my own bag, on which I had typed: Tension in the room was rising. She looked from face to face and saw the same closed expression. They didn’t believe her. They didn’t want to hear her side of the story.
‘I’d like to see you continue this piece of writing.’ I put it down on top of the maths sheet. ‘Using your best sensory descriptions, the longest words you can think of.’
He tried to push it off. ‘I’ve got to finish my maths.’ His eyes looked small and anxious. There was a cut in the middle of his lower lip.
I wish now I had been more flexible, but mild anxiety about Ailsa had left me tired and scratchy and I told him I was here to do English and he could do the maths after I’d gone. It wasn’t a good session and it was with relief at 5.55 p.m. that I began to pack up my briefcase. Max was writing out his spelling corrections when the key turned in the front door. Max knew first, picking up like a dog those tiny gradations in timbre that exist when different people perform the same actions. What was the distinction? A slightly heavier touch – his hands always seemed rather clumsy – or a more, or perhaps less, forceful push? He didn’t have to get his weight behind it like she would.
‘He’s early.’ Max slid quietly off his chair and began to stuff his scuffed-up work back into his bag. I found my
self tidying the table. I’d already put my papers in my bag, but I straightened the matching wooden pepper and salt pots – one of them, I noticed, still had the price tag on the bottom.
‘Ah.’ Tom stood in the doorway to the kitchen. He’d had a haircut, and his newly shorn neck looked pale. He put his bag down. ‘La Verité. Looking very spring-like, if I may say.’
I suppose he was referring to the colour of my jacket, which was primrose yellow. I’d seen it hanging on the railings by the playground and, after three days, considered it unclaimed.
‘Thank you,’ I said, giving a little sweep of the table and standing up.
‘Where you off to?’ he said, as Max tried to slip past him. ‘No hug for your old man?’
Max briefly buried his face in the buttons of his father’s white shirt.
‘I’ll check over that maths in a minute, when I’ve had a word with Verity. I assume you’ve finally managed to finish it.’
Max ducked under his arm, muttering something that sounded suspiciously like ‘Bloody fucking no’. His footsteps on the stairs sounded light and fast, panicked; the scrape of his hand on the bannister, a thud when he jumped the last two steps.
Tom must have heard what he said because his face tightened. He turned to me: ‘No dog today?’
I knew I was being mocked, but it was hard to pin down exactly how. I said, ‘It’s my fault Max hasn’t done his maths. I’m the one you should be cross with. It’s just we were doing English and he’s doing so well.’ I took a step towards the doorway, but he was still blocking it. It was the first time I’d been alone with him since our initial meeting on my doorstep and I felt intimidated. I could sense the coiled energy, anger, and the unhappiness of the man.
‘I hear what you say,’ he said, which is what people say when they’re not listening. ‘It’s just the maths is important too. I’m doing my best to help him. Maybe you should give me some lessons. It’s very frustrating. He can be rude, as you just heard.’
‘Maybe just be a bit gentler?’
I could tell he didn’t like that because he breathed in sharply. ‘Anyway. As I’ve got you, I, um, I notice you didn’t find your way back to your front area the other day. I’m all for live and let live, but something’s blocking the drains. You must have noticed? The smell’s getting worse.’ He was about to say more, but his phone made the sound of a quacking duck and he took it out of his back pocket, holding his hand up, signalling to me to stay.
After a second or two, I sat down on the nearest chair.
‘Absolutely not,’ he said, brushing past me, turning his back. ‘He’s not to speak to the press. No one at all. OK? Keep him indoors if necessary. I don’t care what they’re saying. They are not controlling the story. We are. Until the police . . . Yup . . . I know.’ He was inspecting the surface of the counter, rubbing his finger over an invisible stain; then he walked to the back doors and slid them open. Frowning, he stared down at the spilt earth.
‘I don’t care what Fitz says. He should have asked her age.’ He spun round and came towards me then, sitting down in the chair next to me at the table. His mouth did strange things, I noticed, when he was talking, the teeth sliding sideways, one canine more prominent than the other. ‘Yeah, well, I’d recommend from now on he keeps his trousers zipped,’ he said.
He put the phone back in his pocket, then rubbed his forehead with the ball of his hand and sighed. I was aware of an exhaustion, a desperation even, beneath the surface. ‘One of my clients, a well-known actor who shall remain nameless, is in a bit of hot water. A one-night stand that went wrong.’
‘Oh dear.’
Fitz. Fitz Conroy, presumably. The Radio Times had just done a big thing on him.
He stared at me then, his stare intense. ‘What is it with people and fucking one-night stands?’ He sat back in the chair and breathed out from his cheeks, puffing out the small space above his upper lip then releasing the air with a squeak. He was wearing a button-down shirt today, pale-grey cambric with a crest on the top pocket. It was a replacement for another cambric shirt – a bluer one with a frayed collar that had been in the bag of jumble. The blue would have brought out his eyes. The grey made him look harsh and sallow.
He inhaled deeply. ‘So yes, I have concerns. I realised at lunch the other day that you and Ailsa have been spending a lot of time together, that you’ve become quite . . .’ He searched for the right word and when he found it, he emitted it with what was almost a little cry of surprise: ‘. . . close.’
I nodded to confirm his choice of words, feeling the heat rise in my neck. When I am anxious I sometimes clamp my left thumb in my other hand and tug on it. I’d been too aggressive; a muscle gave a crank of pain.
‘So I’m checking she’s talked to you again – about clearing up a bit, getting to the bottom of the drains, etc. Yes?’
‘I haven’t seen her since the lunch, actually.’ I weighed my words carefully. ‘We went for a walk when we got back. But I haven’t seen her since.’
His eyes had been flicking all over the room while he’d been talking – at the sink, where a tap dripped, at a torn scrap of ruled paper stuck under a chair leg – but for the first time, he fixed them on me. ‘Where was this walk?’
‘Just round the common.’
‘And she didn’t talk to you about anything in particular?’
‘No, nothing memorable.’
I stood up, muttering about Maudie and her supper time. My jacket pocket snagged on the chair, but I managed to get out of the kitchen and up to the front door and out and round, and to the security of my own house. Once in, I stood against the wall in the hall and felt the fabric of my own building – my post, my papers, my possessions – press in on me, like a blanket, like a protective vest.
That night was pub quiz at the Dog and Fox, and I was grateful. I’ve come to rather depend on it. It’s my ballast, my lode star. If I’m having a bad week, I only have to count the days until quiz night and life feels more manageable. I’m part of a random team – resident oddbods, put together by Phil the landlord early on: me, Maeve and Sue, who share a stall at the antiques centre, and Bob, who owns a lot of lockup garages. We don’t have much in common but when we’re round that table, with our minds, our memories, a few pens and some scraps of paper, things fall into place. They take me as I am without any baggage, and I like that.
In the five years I’ve been going, it’s become more popular. A gang from one of the local estate agencies has started coming, the agents in their late twenties and rather rowdy. There are teachers from Hazledown Primary, and some older couples, filling their evenings now their children have flown the nest. It’s a draw now, like a trip to the theatre or bowling. Something you might do as a one-off.
Which is why, that Wednesday, on the table next to us, I wasn’t surprised to see a group of women in silky tops and big earrings who hadn’t been before. They were drinking Pinot Blush and you could tell they were new because they were planning to order food, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt in my years of doing the pub quiz it’s not to order food. One of the women, a curvy brunette in tight skinny jeans, was standing up, waving a menu in front of her face. ‘OK – so let’s share the fried Camembert; the garlicky mushrooms and one Greek platter, but let’s ask them to skip the tzatziki and add extra halloumi.’ I was conscious that two of the women were looking at me. I could feel the heat of their gaze, the pulse of their concentration. But I kept my own eyes averted, a smile on my face, to show I was impervious to the attention. After leaving Tom, I’d had a go at cutting my hair. My mother and I kept our hair long – she thought it was cruel to take scissors to a living thing. I looked it up on the internet and I’ve adopted the traditional pudding-bowl method. I’ve got quite good at it, though sharp scissors help and I can’t always get my hands on a fresh pair. That night, my hands were shaky, and the shortness and irregularity of the fringe was, perhaps, more eccentric than I’d intended.
The curvy, tight-denimed brunette had
crossed to the bar and was in dialogue with Phil – thrashing out her various requests – when I heard my name.
‘Verity?’
At first I wondered if I might have misheard. I certainly didn’t want to look if so. But then it came again.
‘Verity?’
Bob and Maeve, who had been bent over the sheet for the picture round, raised their heads.
So I did look then, with mild panic, and scanning the group, recognised a couple of women on the next-door table: blonde hair, white-tipped nails – the mother who had objected with such officious self-congratulation to my appearance at the Tilsons’ front door; and next to her, lips scarlet, a bob of springy curls artlessly bouncing free from a large hair clip: Delilah.
‘I thought it was you.’ Delilah smiled. Her eyes lingered on my companions. Bob carries some weight and Sue, who has an issue with her thyroid, is never without her fingerless gloves, frayed and rather soiled. I felt a shameful lurch of embarrassment. How I’d wished I’d been on the table of narrow-trousered estate agents, or even the teachers with their bulging bags and general air of exhaustion. (How badly that wish reflects on me.)
‘What are you all doing here?’ I said, stupidly.
‘Class night out. It’s great, isn’t it? Not that I know anything. My general knowledge is terrible. I’ve warned these guys. I’m going to be hopeless.’
‘Not the whole class,’ Trish said. ‘Just a bunch of like-minded souls.’
‘How nice.’
The curvy brunette clomped back from the bar and sat down with a big collapsing movement, the air of someone who had just climbed Everest and been underwhelmed by the view. ‘They’re out of Camembert,’ she said. ‘And the Greek platter comes with nachos, not chips.’ I was poised to turn back to my table when I realised Delilah was still looking at me intently.
Finders, Keepers: The mesmerising new thriller from the author of LIE WITH ME Page 10
