by Tina Seskis
‘You all right, Jules?’ said Renée, glancing across from her Marie Claire article about ten ways to say no to your man without him losing interest.
‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks,’ said Juliette, forcing a smile.
‘You’ll like my Auntie Linda. She is one feisty woman.’
‘Where did you say she lived?’
‘In Camden, not far from the market.’
‘Oh,’ said Juliette. She couldn’t recall having been told that before, surely she would have remembered. She wondered what kind of place Linda had – the only time she’d been to Camden it had just seemed full of dirty-looking people with parrot-red mohicans and rings through their noses, or else drunks with uniformly grey beards and filthy overcoats, like they’d been dipped in ash, or dreadlocked hippies straight off the plane from Goa in tie-dyed trousers with the crotch around their knees. She thought it seemed an odd place for an auntie to live, and one who was a doctor at that. She thought of her own Auntie Deirdre and Uncle Peter in their neat semi-detached house in Amersham, and decided Linda sounded nothing like them.
‘Did she ever get married, or has she always been single?’ asked Juliette.
‘Hmm, I don’t think marriage is her thing,’ said Renée.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you’ll see,’ laughed Renée, and Juliette felt even more uneasy then. It all felt a bit much – going to somewhere as edgy as Camden, staying with an odd-sounding stranger, taking the first step to maybe finding her mother. She leaned back against the seat and shut her eyes and willed herself to feel the vibration of the train, the steady clackety-clack that grounded her again, made her feel more normal, and as she did so the buffet man said, ‘Two coffees, there you go, sir,’ and she realised with a jolt that he was from Birmingham, just how could she have missed that.
42
Hyde Park
Terry Kingston seemed like a dodgy sort of bloke to PC Ryan. What was he doing hanging about by The Serpentine cafe at this time of night? How could there possibly have been a splash but then no other noise, as he was claiming – surely if some drunk woman had gone and fallen into the water he would have heard a commotion, or seen some splashing, would have known where it had happened at least?
PC Ryan was fed up. It was his wife’s birthday the next day and they were meant to be going away, down to Ramsgate for the weekend, and he wanted to get home on time tonight of all nights, so he could get up early and not be tired and grouchy for a change. He walked up and down the river bank (was it actually a river, he wondered, does London have other rivers apart from the Thames?) although he knew there was no real point to it – if she really had fallen in at around 22:35, as Terry Kingston had said, then that was over twenty minutes ago, there was no way she’d still be alive by now. He sighed. He’d probably have to call in the frogmen, which meant he wouldn’t be getting home for at least a couple more hours. He thought he would try one last time.
‘Mr Kingston,’ he called.
‘Yes,’ said Terry, and as he came over he looked timid and frightened, his sallow face twitching, suspicion pouring out of his eyes like magician’s smoke.
There’s something not right here, thought PC Ryan. But if he’d pushed her himself, why on earth would he have called the police? Surely he’d have made a run for it?
‘Are you absolutely certain that a woman fell into the water?’ he asked.
Terry hesitated. His mind crawled across the facts as he knew them, like a beetle over dung. Six women. An annual reunion. One of them suspected by her husband of having an affair. Terry assigned to discover whether it was true. A row, a humongous one at that. Accusations flying, too numerous, too hysterical, too incoherent, too muffled mostly to understand. Someone having been raped? Someone’s husband being murdered? Just a load of hysterical nonsense, surely?
Terry knew it was better to say nothing about any of it. It could get messy. He regretted now that he’d even dialled 999, it had obviously been too late to save her if she had ended up in the water – whether she’d fallen in, or jumped deliberately, or even been pushed, whatever might have happened to the unfortunate woman. She’d be dead by now, and the thought filled him with dread. Implicating the others wasn’t going to help either – as they’d said themselves, they could simply deny they’d heard anything. Thirty seconds later, fifty yards closer to the road, and they really wouldn’t have heard it. Even if there was CCTV here, and Terry wasn’t sure about that – although it was sodding well everywhere else – no-one knew that they’d heard the splash.
Someone does. You.
Terry felt increasingly panicky. This was a mess. He’d definitely be implicated, if it turned out she had died. His client would get dragged into it, and that would go down unbelievably badly, would cause him, Terry, all sorts of problems. And conversely, what if she hadn’t fallen in at all, what if it had been a bird, like one of the women had suggested? This could all be a blinking wild-goose chase. He might even get done for wasting police time.
Terry became more furious with himself, the more he thought things through. He knew he should have turned down the job, no matter how much money he’d been offered – he could sniff trouble a mile off on this one. What the heck was he going to say to the police? What explanation was he going to give as to why he’d been in the park? He’d be the prime bloody suspect, he was sure of it, if there really was a dead body in there. Well, if it does come to that, Terry thought, I’ll have to sing, regardless of who I implicate, after all I’ve done nothing wrong. That will get me off the hook at least.
But would it? Terry knew that his client was clever, too clever to mess with, too powerful, in with the right people these days, a stitch-up could be just what he needed to keep his own nose clean – and, after all, there’d never been any love lost between them over the years.
‘I said, what were you doing in the park, Mr Kingston?’ asked PC Ryan, and his tone was definitely accusatory now.
‘Um, well … it was a nice evening,’ said Terry, his palms sweating and his heart pounding, much like at key moments during war-games conventions. ‘I … I thought I’d go for a walk.’
‘And you live where?’ asked PC Ryan. He was sounding even cockier now that his colleague, a little round Asian man (was there no minimum height for police these days, Terry thought idly), had joined him, and PC Ryan obviously fancied himself as the senior of the two.
‘In Dagenham,’ said Terry.
‘And so on a summer’s evening you come all the way from Dagenham to Hyde Park, on your own, just for a nice little stroll?’ The sarcasm was unbridled.
Terry didn’t know what to say. It was too late to admit he’d been lying, so he decided he’d just have to go with it for the moment. He felt sick. He knew he should have left it, simply followed his target as he’d started to do, made sure he got his money, kept his client off his back, and be done with silly drunk women who ran around shouting and screaming and drowning themselves.
‘Yes,’ said Terry in the end, and that one little word was the official beginning of his nightmare.
43
Camden, North London
Outside the Tube station it was noisy and dirty and full of people hanging around, looking either like they had dodgy business to do or nowhere better to go. Juliette wished she hadn’t put her purse in her rucksack now, she felt vulnerable with it zipped into the outer pocket, readily accessible for anyone to steal. She kept swaying from side to side as she walked, the bag following an awkward semi-circled arc, in an attempt to make pickpocketing her too tricky, but people were getting hustled and jostled, and someone even told her to mind the fuck where she was going. She struggled to keep up as Renée marched confidently through the throng, seeming to know the way – left out of the station, straight up a grotty, litter-lined street, past an unappealing pub with a horrible little courtyard teeming with black-drainpiped people with gravity-defying hairdos and painful-looking piercings, over the dankly pungent canal, until after four or fi
ve minutes they turned right into what seemed to Juliette like another world entirely, one of smart Georgian terraces and lit-up Christmassy trees. The house they were looking for was just a few doors up, on the left, and the door they knocked on was painted pale pink, the colour of a fairy’s costume. They waited for maybe twenty seconds, and then there was a deep, loud, ‘Coming’, and the door was thrown back so the warm air could come gushing at them, as if to say hello, and on the breeze drifted the smell of percolated coffee and freshly baked cake.
‘Hallo, Renée!’ said Auntie Linda. ‘And you must be Juliette! Come in, welcome. Don’t worry about your shoes, just get yourselves inside out of the cold.’ She was small but stocky, neatly oblong, her white T-shirt tucked into hitched-up Levi’s, bottoms turned up neatly to show off her polished Dr Martens. She beamed a smile across her oval face, and it sent her forehead creasing up towards her cropped dark hair, and the skin around her eyes darting out as if to meet her ears. Her nose was straight and her lips were thin.
‘Hello,’ Juliette said shyly – she had never met a lesbian before, not properly anyway. She shrugged off her rucksack in the hallway and untied her granny boots, and followed Renée and her aunt into the kitchen at the back. The room was small and cosy with painted floorboards and an old pine dresser full of floral crockery, and the table was covered in a polka-dotted oilcloth, surrounded by mismatched chairs with chintzy seat pads – and Juliette couldn’t believe that Linda was so boyish and yet lived in such a pretty house, in so delightful a street, a mere stone’s throw from the revoltingness of Camden, and which according to Renée she’d bought, owned, all by herself.
‘Now, what would you girls like – tea or coffee?’ asked Linda.
‘Oh, tea please, Auntie Linda,’ said Renée.
‘Um, yes, the same for me, please,’ said Juliette.
‘Milk and sugar?’
‘Uh, yes, please, thank you. Oh actually, no sorry … just milk please. I have sugar with coffee but not with tea.’ Juliette was embarrassed by her gaucheness, she wasn’t usually like this. But now she was here she was wondering whether she was making a huge mistake after all – taking on way more than she could handle, and betraying her parents to boot. She could hardly change her mind now though, Renée would probably go mad.
Renée was asking how Linda’s job was going, and Juliette thought it was amazing that Linda worked in A&E, Juliette couldn’t even cut her own finger without fainting. People like Linda tended to make her feel inadequate somehow – she seemed to have such a strong sense of purpose, a belief in who she was, in where she was going. Juliette thought she’d never feel like that. You won’t know where you’re going until you know where you come from, said a voice inside her head. She felt sad then, in Linda’s charming little kitchen, with its warmth from the oven and optimistic glow; like an outsider, which of course she was. It was obvious that Renée and Linda were related: they had the same straight nose, same colouring, an easy familiarity. Juliette wondered whether maybe she had a real aunt somewhere too, even a load of cousins perhaps, people that looked like her, had similar mannerisms – and she wished suddenly that she knew. Perhaps Renée had been right to push her into this, after all. And as Tracey Thorn sang softly in the background, comfortingly melancholy, Juliette finally acknowledged that no matter how good they’d been to her, Cynthia and Giles weren’t enough, could never be enough. She sat quietly, sipping her tea, doing her best to smile politely, as her thoughts spiralled inwards – and maybe because she felt as lonely as she ever had, at last she made up her mind.
44
Hyde Park
PC Ryan had called his sergeant, and his skipper had initially told him to just have a bloody good look round first – if this odd-sounding bloke was now saying he wasn’t even sure someone had fallen in the water, they didn’t want to waste time calling in the frogmen. It all sounded very strange to Sergeant Hunter from what PC Ryan had said. Flasher type calling 999, saying he’d been enjoying a stroll in the park when he heard a woman fall in the water, now saying that perhaps he’d imagined it, that maybe it was a sodding bird instead. What the heck were they dealing with here? In Sergeant Hunter’s experience it sounded most likely that this Kingston bloke was an attention-seeking weirdo, but in theory he could also be a murderer – or else he could actually be telling the truth and there really had been a tragic accident that he’d happened to witness. It was all a bit annoying, as he wanted to go off shift and get down his snooker club for a few frames and a couple of well-earned pints. Typical, he thought, it was only when he’d got something planned that anything interesting happened – usually it was just routine stuff like domestics or burglaries. He decided he couldn’t take any shortcuts on this one though, not when there was potentially a body involved, just in case.
‘Call up more units,’ said Sergeant Hunter. ‘Get a load of officers down there with torches. Call India 99, and the Marine Support Unit, I suppose. We can’t take any chances.’
Terry Kingston stood in his cheap grey suit watching PC Ryan’s bumbling response to this barrage of requests across the radio waves, and although he didn’t know what India 99 was, he could pretty much deduce everything else, and he knew that he’d well and truly had it now. The skin between his top lip and nose was moist and the twitch in his hands had grown into a full-scale tremble. He desperately wanted to be at home, in front of his miniature armies in the bedroom cum office that Maria never came into, ever, with Humphrey curled at his feet and Snoopy purring on the easy chair behind him, the rats whirring madly on their wheel to nowhere. He badly needed to relax, badly needed not to be here, and he wished he could just leave now, make his way home so he could get back to his Prussian general, which needed one final coat of varnish before it was finished.
‘Er, do you still need me?’ he said.
PC Ryan looked perplexed, not knowing what to say to this – he couldn’t let his would-be murderer just wander off, could he?
‘Um, well, can you wait for a while, just until we’ve completed our search,’ he said finally. ‘We may need to take a statement from you – if we do find anything,’ and he said it in such a way it was clear he thought that this was all a complete waste of everyone’s time.
Terry acquiesced meekly, and went and perched on a stone step outside the cafe, and as he watched the park fill swiftly with officers searching in the bushes, torches bobbing, and a van turn up with a load of scuba equipment in the back, and heard the ominous thrum of the helicopter overhead, he put his head in his hands and wished with all his heart that he had never called 999, even if she had bloody drowned.
45
Berkshire
Juliette’s mother looked across the table at her husband, or at his hands more precisely, which peered elegantly around the edges of The Times. She had debated whether to tell him, in fact had put it off for over a week, but she knew she couldn’t risk him finding out through anyone else. She coughed delicately, but Giles didn’t appear to hear her, just carried on reading the paper, occasionally tutting, the newsprint rustling quietly. She normally liked to leave him alone at this time, just after breakfast, in that brief moment of peace before he had to leave for work, but for some reason she found she couldn’t put it off any longer.
‘Giles,’ she said. ‘Giles, darling … Giles!’
‘Oh, sorry, dear,’ he said finally, angling the paper downwards, so he could look over the top of both it and his reading glasses, at his wife.
‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.
‘Yes, dear,’ he replied, and waited, and when she didn’t say anything, he hoisted the paper up a little, perhaps about to start reading again.
‘Juliette wants to trace her birth mother,’ Cynthia said, as if it were one word, one fast uninterrupted stream of letters, and this time Giles sighed and laid the newspaper flat on the table, its edge soaking up the remains of the milk from his cornflakes in the shallow beige bowl.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh.’
‘Exa
ctly,’ replied Cynthia, staring at him. ‘What on earth are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Giles. ‘What can we do? We knew this would probably happen one day.’
‘Yes, but not now,’ said Cynthia. ‘She’s not long been at university, she’s not ready for it.’ She stood up and paced back and forth, as though the room was too small for her. Then she stopped and leaned against the Aga.
‘Well, what’s happened?’ asked Giles. He shifted uneasily in his seat, and resignedly closed his newspaper and folded it in half. ‘How do you know she wants to? Did she actually tell you? Maybe you’ve got it wrong.’
‘She rang me last week and I knew there was something up, she sounded funny, and it wasn’t even the right day to ring. But she kept chatting on and I was even quite pleased that she sounded interested in my boring old WI stuff, and I assumed she was just a bit homesick – and then she came out with this story about needing to research her origins for an assignment, but it was obviously rubbish …’ Cynthia’s voice started to break a little. She sat down again, looking desolate.
Giles took his wife’s hand across the table, and the sleeve of his crisp striped shirt got a smudge of newsprint on it, just above the cufflink.
