by Ruth Ware
‘Will you express?’ Owen asks as he reaches for the pepper. I shake my head.
‘No, I’ll only be gone a couple of hours. It’s just coffee.’
‘No probs,’ he says. ‘It’ll be fun. I’ll take her to the pub and feed her pork scratchings.’
I know he’s joking – about the pork scratchings at least – but I also know he’s said it for the rise it will get from me, so I go along with it, mock-frowning and cuffing him across the table, grinning as we play out our little marital pantomime. Do all relationships have this back and forth, I wonder, as I clear the plates, these little rituals of call and response?
When we slump into bed that night, I’m expecting Owen to fall asleep as he always does – disappearing into unconsciousness with a speed and ease I’ve grown increasingly to envy, but to my surprise he reaches for me in the darkness, his hand straying down over my still slack stomach, between my legs, and I turn to him, feeling for his face, his arms, the streak of sparse, dark hair where his ribs meet.
‘I love you,’ he says afterwards, as we lie back, hearts still thrumming. ‘We should do it more often.’
‘We should,’ I say. And then, almost as an afterthought, ‘I love you too.’
And it’s true, I do, with my whole heart in that moment.
I am falling asleep when he speaks again, his voice soft.
‘Isa, is everything OK?’
I open my eyes in the dark, my heart suddenly quickening.
‘Yes,’ I say, trying to keep my voice sleepy and level. ‘Of course. Why d’you ask?’
He sighs.
‘I don’t know. I just … I feel like you’ve been kind of weird, tense, ever since that trip to Kate’s.’
Please. I shut my eyes, clench my fists. Please don’t do this, don’t make me start lying to you again.
‘I’m fine,’ I say, and I don’t try to keep the weariness out of my tone. ‘I’m just … I’m tired, I guess. Can we talk about this tomorrow?’
‘Sure,’ he says, but there’s something in his voice, disappointment maybe. He knows I am keeping something from him. ‘I’m sorry you’re so tired. You should let me get up more at night.’
‘No point, is there?’ I say with a yawn. ‘While she’s still on the boob. You’d only have to wake me up.’
‘Look, I keep saying we should try a bottle,’ Owen begins, but I feel frustration boil up inside me, and I let myself snap, just a little bit.
‘Owen, can we please, please not have this conversation now? I told you, I’m tired, I want to go to sleep.’
‘Sure,’ he says again, and his voice this time is flat and quelled. ‘Sorry. Goodnight.’
I want to cry. I want to hit him. I cannot cope with this, on top of everything else. Owen is my one constant, the one thing in my life right now that is not about paranoia and deceit.
‘Please, Owen,’ I say, and my voice cracks a little in spite of myself. ‘Please, don’t be like that.’
But he doesn’t answer. He just lies there, hunched and silent beneath the sheets and I sigh and turn to face the wall.
‘GOODBYE!’ I SHOUT from the entrance hall. ‘Phone me if – you know …’
‘We’ll be fine,’ Owen calls down the stairs. I can almost hear him rolling his eyes. I look up, and he’s there in the doorway, holding Freya. ‘Go. Have fun. Stop worrying. I can look after my own child, you know.’
I know.
I know, I know, and yet as the front door to our flat slams upstairs, leaving me alone in the hall, I feel that familiar tightness in my chest, the tugging pull of the bond between me and Freya stretching, stretching …
I check my handbag for my phone … yup. Keys … yup. Wallet … where is my wallet? I’m hunting for it when my eye alights on a letter in the rack, addressed to me.
I pick it up, intending to take it upstairs when I go back to look for my wallet, but then two things happen at the same time.
The first is that I feel the bump of my wallet in my jeans pocket and realise where it is. The second … the second is that I notice the letter has a Salten postmark.
My heart begins to beat a little faster, but I tell myself, there’s no reason to panic. If it were something from the police it would be franked, not stamped, surely, and would look like business correspondence – typewritten, in one of those envelopes with a plastic window.
This is something else – a brown A5 envelope, through which I can feel several sheets.
The writing isn’t Kate’s. It’s neat, anonymous block capitals, quite unlike Kate’s generous looping scrawl.
Could it be something from the school? Photos from the dinner, perhaps?
I hesitate for a moment, wondering whether to tuck it back into the rack and deal with it when I get back. But then curiosity gets the better of me and I hook a finger in the flap and rip it open.
Inside there’s a sheaf of papers, three or four sheets perhaps, but they seem to be photocopies – drawings rather than letters. I shake them out, looking for a top sheet to tell me what this is about, and as the pieces of paper flutter to the floor, it feels like a hand wraps round my heart and squeezes, so hard that there’s a pain in my chest. The blood drains from my face, and my fingertips are cold and numb, and I wonder for a moment if I am having a heart attack – if this is what it feels like.
My heart is thumping erratically in my breast, and my breath is coming sharp and shallow.
And then there’s a sound from above and an instinct of raw self-preservation takes over and I fall to my hands and knees, scrabbling for the pictures with a desperation I cannot even try to hide.
Only when they are back inside the envelope can I try to process what has happened, what I have seen, and I put my hands to my face, feeling the hot flush on my cheeks and a pulse beating hard in the pit of my stomach. Who has sent these? How did they know?
Suddenly it is more urgent than ever that I get out, talk to Fatima and Thea, and with hands that shake I shove the envelope deep, deep into my handbag and yank open the front door.
When I step into the street I hear a noise from above, and I look up, to see Owen and Freya standing by the open window upstairs. Owen is holding Freya’s pudgy little hand, and as he sees me turn, he waves it in a solemn goodbye.
‘Thank God!’ he says. He is laughing, trying to stop Freya from diving out of his arms. ‘I was starting to think you were planning to spend the whole afternoon in the hallway!’
‘S-sorry,’ I stammer, knowing that my cheeks are burning, and my hands are shaking. ‘I was checking the train times.’
‘Bye-bye, Mummy,’ Owen says, but Freya jerks against him, kicking her fat little legs, wanting to be put down, and he bends and lets her go. ‘Bye, love,’ he says as he straightens.
‘Bye,’ I manage, though my throat is tight and sore, as if there is something huge and choking there, stopping me from speaking or swallowing. ‘See you later.’
And then I flee, unable to face him any longer.
FATIMA IS SITTING at a table at Le Pain Quotidien when I arrive, and as soon as I see her, tense and upright, her fingers drumming the table, I know.
‘You got one too?’ I say as I slide into the seat. She nods, her face pale as stone.
‘Did you know?’
‘Did I know what?’
‘Did you know that they were coming?’ she hisses.
‘What? No! Of course not. How can you ask that?’
‘The timing – this meeting. It seemed a little … planned?’
‘Fatima, no.’ Oh God, this is worse than I had thought. If Fatima suspects that I was involved in this … ‘No!’ I am almost crying at the idea that I could have had something to do with this, and not have warned her, protected her. ‘Of course I didn’t know anything – how can you think that? It was a total coincidence. I got one too.’
I pull the corner of my own envelope out of my bag and she stares at me for a long moment, and then seems to realise fully what she’s suggesting, and covers her fac
e.
‘Isa, I’m sorry – I don’t know what I was thinking. I just –’
A waiter comes over and she breaks off, staring at him as he asks, ‘Can I get you ladies anything? Coffee? Cake?’
Fatima rubs a hand over her face, and I can see she is trying to order her thoughts and is as shaken as I am.
‘Do you have mint tea?’ she asks at last, and the waiter nods and turns to me with a smile. I feel my face is fixed, false, a mask of cheerfulness over an abyss of fear. But somehow I manage to swallow against the constriction in my throat.
‘I’ll have … I’ll have a cappuccino, please.’
‘Anything to eat?’
‘No, thank you,’ Fatima says, and I find myself shaking my head in vehement agreement. I feel like food would choke me now, if I tried to swallow it.
The waiter has disappeared to get our drinks when the entrance door flings back, the bell jangling, and Fatima and I both glance up to see Thea, wearing dark glasses and a slash of red lipstick, looking wildly around her. Her gaze fixes on us and she gives a kind of start and comes across.
‘How did you know?’ She shoves the envelope under my nose, standing over me. ‘How the fuck did you know?’ She almost shouts the words, the envelope in her fingers trembling as she holds it out.
‘Thee – I –’ But my throat is closing against the words, and I can’t force them out.
‘Thee, calm down.’ Fatima rises out of her seat – palms outstretched. ‘I asked the same thing. But it’s just a coincidence.’
‘A coincidence? Pretty fucking big coincidence!’ Thea spits, and then she does a double take. ‘Wait, you got one too?’
‘Yes, and so did Isa.’ Fatima points to the envelope sticking out of my bag. ‘She didn’t know they were coming any more than we did.’
Thea looks from Fatima to me, then puts the envelope back in her own bag and sits down in the free seat.
‘So … we have no idea who sent these?’
Fatima shakes her head slowly, but then says, ‘But we have a pretty good idea where they came from, right?’
‘What do you mean?’ Thea demands.
‘Well, what do you think I mean? Kate said she destroyed all of … of these kinds of pictures. Either she lied, or these came from the school.’
‘Fuck,’ Thea says vehemently, so that the waiter who has come to hover, waiting for her order, slides unobtrusively away to wait for a better time. ‘Fucking cunting twatting wank-badgers.’ She puts her head in her hands, and I see that her nails are bitten to the quick, blood speckling the torn skin around the edges of her fingers. ‘Do we ask her?’ she says at last. ‘Kate, I mean?’
‘I think not, don’t you?’ Fatima says grimly. ‘If this is a kind of blackmail on her part, she’s gone to the trouble of disguising her handwriting and sending them anonymously, so I hardly think she’s going to fess up the moment we ask her if she sent them.’
‘It can’t be Kate,’ I burst out, just as the waiter comes back with our drinks, and we sit, scarlet-cheeked and silent while he sets them down and takes Thea’s order for a double espresso. After he has melted away, I say, more quietly, ‘It can’t. It just can’t – what possible motive could she have for sending these?’
‘I don’t like the idea any more than you do,’ Fatima snaps back. ‘Shit. Shit, this is all such a mess. But if Kate didn’t send them, who did? The school? What possible motive could they have? Times have changed, Isa. Judges don’t condemn schoolgirls as no angels any more – this would be an abuse scandal, plain and simple, and Salten House would be right at the centre of it. The way they handled the whole business was shocking, they’ve got almost as much to lose as we have.’
‘We weren’t abused,’ Thea says. She takes off her sunglasses and I can see there are deep shadows around her eyes. ‘Ambrose was a lot of things, but he wasn’t an abuser.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Fatima says. ‘Whatever his motives were, he abused his position, there’s no two ways about it, and you know that as well as I do. He was an irresponsible fool.’
‘He was an artist,’ Thea retorts. ‘And he never laid a finger on any of us, unless you want to say different?’
‘But that’s not how the press will see it!’ Fatima hisses. ‘Wake up, Thee. This is a motive, don’t you get that?’
‘A motive for – for his suicide?’ Thea’s face is puzzled for a moment, but then I speak, spelling it out for her.
‘A motive for us to … kill him, right, Fatima? That’s what you’re saying.’
She nods, her face pale beneath the dark wine-coloured hijab, and I feel the constriction in my throat again, choking me. The images rise up in front of my mind’s eye – Ambrose’s delicate pencil sweeps, a curve here, a line there, a brush of hair … the body in the images has changed, but my face, my face is still horrifyingly, unmistakably mine, even after all these years, staring out from the paper, so unselfconscious and so very, very vulnerable …
‘What?’ Thea gives a shaky laugh. ‘No. No! That’s ridiculous! Who’d believe it? I just don’t buy the logic!’
‘Look,’ Fatima says wearily. ‘Seventeen years ago we weren’t thinking about ourselves, we were looking at the discovery of the drawings from one perspective – Ambrose’s. They were a disaster for him, plain and simple. But look at it in the cold hard light of experience. What would you think if you saw this in the press now, today? You’ve got a group of girls at a residential school being groomed by a teacher, one of them his own daughter. You heard Kate – people in the village are already speculating about whether Ambrose was abusing her. These pictures, surfacing now after all Kate’s attempts to erase them? This changes our relationship to Ambrose pretty radically, Thee. We go from being his students to his victims. And sometimes victims fight back.’
She is whispering, her words barely audible beneath the coffee shop hubbub, but suddenly I want to put my hand over her mouth, tell her to hush, for God’s sake be quiet. Because she’s right. We buried the body. We have no alibi for the night he died. Even if it didn’t get to court, people would talk.
Thea’s coffee arrives in the silence that follows and we drink, each of us lost in our own world, thinking about the possible consequences of this scandal to our careers, our relationships, our kids …
‘So who then?’ Thea says at last. ‘Luc? Someone from the village?’
‘I don’t know,’ Fatima groans. ‘Whatever I said before, I don’t think Kate sent these, I just don’t. But the fact remains, whether she sent them or not, she lied about destroying the pictures. These aren’t the ones that the school showed us, are they?’
‘Funnily enough,’ Thea says, almost snappishly, ‘admiring my pose wasn’t the first thing on my mind that day. Isa? Do you remember?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say slowly. I am trying to remember back to the spread of images on the desk. There were only half a dozen bits of paper, only one was of me alone, at least I think so … Christ, it is so hard to remember. But I am sure of one thing – the envelope I received today contained at least three or four sheets, many more images than were scattered on Miss Weatherby’s desk. ‘I think you’re right,’ I say at last. ‘I don’t think these are the ones the school had. At least, not unless they kept some back. The ones they showed us … there weren’t enough to cover these. But I think Fatima’s right too – there’s no motive for the school to send them, surely? They have as much to lose as we do.’
‘Who then – Luc?’ Thea demands. I shrug helplessly. ‘Mary Wren? And what, is it a warning, or is someone trying to stop us from getting hurt? Could it be Kate giving us back the images so we can’t get ambushed by them in the future?’
‘I doubt it,’ I say. I would love to believe that version – the version that doesn’t involve us looking over our shoulders for the demand that is coming next. ‘But they’re copies, not originals. Why post us copies?’ Though, even as I say it, I can imagine Kate being unable to part with the drawings. God knows, after all,
she has hung on to every other part of her father.
‘Could she be giving us a heads-up about their existence?’ Thea says, but her voice is uncertain. I shake my head.
‘She would have told us at the Mill. Posting them now … it doesn’t make sense.’
‘You’re right …’ Fatima says. ‘The timing’s all wrong.’
Her words trigger an uncomfortable echo inside me, and suddenly I remember my middle-of-the-night doubts, almost submerged by the arrival of the pictures and my fear over what they might mean.
I swallow my cappuccino, and when I put the cup down, it rattles a little on the saucer, betraying my nervousness about what I am about to say. I so want to be wrong. I so want Fatima and Thea to explain away my doubts – and I am not sure if they can.
‘Well, that’s another thing,’ I say reluctantly, and Fatima and Thea both look up at me. I swallow again, my throat suddenly dry and bitter with caffeine. ‘It – it’s something I’ve been thinking about, the timing of the pictures – not these ones,’ I add, seeing their puzzlement. ‘The ones the school found.’
‘What do you mean,’ Fatima frowns. ‘Timing?’
‘The day before Ambrose died was completely normal, right?’ They both nod. ‘But I don’t understand how it could have been. If the school knew about the pictures, if they’d spoken to Ambrose about them, then why did they wait twenty-four hours before confronting us? And why did they talk to us as if they didn’t know for sure who drew the pictures?’
‘B-because …’ Thea says, and then stops, trying to order her thoughts. ‘Well, I mean, I always thought that they spoke to us before they spoke to Ambrose. They must have done, surely? Otherwise they would have known they were his – he wouldn’t have denied it, would he?’
But Fatima has already got there. Her face is very pale, her dark eyes fixed on mine, and there’s a kind of fear in them that makes me even more frightened.
‘I see what you’re saying. If they hadn’t spoken to Ambrose, how did he know it was all about to come out?’
I nod, silent. I have been hoping against hope that Fatima – cool, deductive Fatima, with her clear mind and logical thinking – would see a hole in my reasoning. Now I know there isn’t one.
