I’m alone.
I have to fight away the shivers as I hold my hands in front of the vents, wanting to be engulfed by the warm air. Tree branches sway back and forth in front and there’s a scratching on top of the car that makes me yelp with alarm. There are no street lights out here: only the dark and the trees and the rain.
What if Dad doesn’t come back…?
As I’m trying to force away that thought, there’s a clunk from behind and I jump as a shape in a dark coat almost falls through the back doors to the car. A moment later and the front door reopens and Dad slides back into the driver’s seat. A second more and the doors are closed again, sealing out the cold from the inside.
‘Thanks for this,’ says a voice from the back seat. It is a man, but not as old as my dad. It’s more like one of the bigger boys who hang around on the benches at the park and smoke. Not quite young but not quite old.
‘This is my daughter, Madeleine,’ my dad says. ‘Maddy, this is Alex.’
The seat belt is still stopping me from turning properly but, when the voice from behind says ‘Hi, Maddy,’ I reply with a ‘Hi’ of my own.
‘Alex lives close to us,’ Dad says, ‘so we’re going to give him a lift back. No one should have to walk home in this.’
Dad stops the indicator and then pulls away from the side of the road. He turns the volume up a fraction and then we all sit quietly for a moment until the man on the radio gets excited.
‘Do you support a football team, Alex?’ Dad asks.
The man behind me clears his throat and then says, ‘Forest fan.’
Dad laughs at this. ‘I saw them play Arsenal a couple of years back. Cloughy was in his pomp.’
‘Aye,’ the man says. ‘Those were the days. I’m not sure we’ll be winning European Cups anytime soon.’
Dad laughs again. ‘You never know.’
They go quiet again as we continue listening to the radio. Outside, and the trees have turned into houses, while the darkness has been replaced by a string of orange street lights. I know the route home but instead of going straight across the roundabout like he would usually, Dad turns right and passes a row of shops that I’ve never seen before. He must sense my confusion because he reaches across and taps my knee for a moment.
‘It’s all right,’ he says – and that’s all it takes for me to know that it will be.
A few minutes more and he slows to turn into a petrol station. The lights blur bright and white, making me squint as my eyes hurt after the switch from darkness to this. Dad stops the car next to the air machine and then turns to the back seat.
‘Is this all right?’ he asks.
‘Perfect,’ Alex replies. ‘Thank you so much. I’d been out there ages. Sorry for getting all the wet in your car.’
‘No problem at all. I hope Forest turn it around for you.’
There’s the sound of the car door, a ‘thank you again’, and then the door closes. I get my first proper look at Alex as he walks around the front of the car, gives a little wave in our direction, and then disappears behind the back of the pumps. He’s not very tall and his coat is almost as big as he is. He’s wearing a woolly hat, though there are sprouts of long hair poking out around his ears.
‘Do you know him?’ I ask.
Dad turns to me and squeezes my knee harder this time. He looks down and smiles, which makes me feel warmer than any vents could do.
‘Never met him in my life,’ he says.
‘Why’d you stop for him, then?’
My dad’s grin grows wider, before he shrugs his shoulders and turns back to the front. ‘Because, Mads, sometimes people need help. You can be one of those people who drive by and pretend they’re not there – or you can do your bit.’
He reaches for the gearstick but stops when I speak.
‘What if he’d been… bad?’
‘People are generally decent, Mads. It’s always best to give them the benefit of the doubt.’
Three
MONDAY
The sun is late to rise the next morning, not that it makes much difference to me. I was unlikely to sleep anyway but the consistent thumping of the rain was like a drumbeat into my soul. I’ve long told Richard that we should have taken a bedroom at the back of the house – even if it meant having a smaller one. This seemed ridiculous from his point of view: the master bedroom was ours, regardless of its positioning. That was an easy choice for him, seeing as he can sleep through anything. Also easy as he was here before I was.
There’s still no sign of Richard this morning. It’s been almost twenty-four hours since I last saw him and he hasn’t called or texted. I keep trying to tell myself that there’s an easy explanation for it all, although it’s hard to imagine what that might be. He’s not the sort of person who might disappear for days at a time.
My phone tells me I have made fourteen unanswered calls to Richard’s phone. I’ve thought about calling the police to report him missing – but it’s a small police force around here and they must have more pressing issues with what’s happened.
There’s also a voice that keeps telling me that he’ll come through the door any moment with a story about a dead phone battery and a car breakdown in the middle of nowhere. I’m old enough to remember the days before mobiles, when someone being late – significantly late – would always leave that growing twinge of worry. In this new, digital, always-on world, that worry is replaced by texts and calls.
It doesn’t help that I can’t remember the name of the person that Richard told me he was visiting. The first problem is that, like a father with too many kids, he’s reached the age where he’ll scroll through a good three or four names before arriving on the correct one. The second is that I don’t pay a great deal of attention when he starts talking about where he might be going. If he’s not lecturing, it’s a common thing for him to set off on a morning to visit an old friend or a colleague. One old friend that I’ve never met blurs into the next. Broadly speaking, we live different lives away from the house.
If it was any other day, I’d be talking to Theresa about what could have happened to Richard, but this is a day like no other for Leavensfield. I’ve already had three different messages, including one from Theresa, asking if I’ve heard more about what happened to ‘Little’ Alice Pritchard. That will be her moniker from now on, as if ‘Little’ is Alice’s official first name. Only Theresa knows that I was with Atal in Daisy Field. That call of ‘she’s breathing’ continues to haunt me, tempered only by the concern I feel for my missing husband.
‘Little’ Alice has been named on the village’s Facebook page, although nobody seems to know her condition. It’s a closed group for which people have to apply for membership in order to read about the comings and goings of this area. Most of the posts are passive-aggressive moans from people wondering who’s parked a car outside their house, or asking if anyone else heard a dog barking the night before. It’s a triumph of inanity, which doesn’t say much for me considering I devour every morsel with glee. Theresa and I will text each other links to new posts with added commentary about how society is in decline because the lid of someone’s bin blew off in the wind.
When it comes to this place, if it’s not on Facebook, then it didn’t happen. In the event of a nuclear apocalypse, then no one will believe it unless a friend has taken a thumbs-up selfie in front of a mushroom cloud.
As for this morning, someone has linked to a note on the local police’s webpage where it mentions that a girl of twelve was found with head injuries close to a stream a little outside Leavensfield. The police haven’t confirmed Alice’s name – but that makes little difference in such a small community.
I don’t reply to any of the texts about Alice and instead try to call Richard for the fifteenth time. It rings and rings, then blips through to his voicemail. He hasn’t recorded a message, so the automated voice reads out his phone number and then says I can leave a message. There’s little point considering the ones I’ve already left,
so I hang up.
I’d set aside today to get on with my work. There’s a box filled with new bakeware sitting at the back of the kitchen that I’m supposed to be testing and then writing about. It sounds horribly unexciting but the set was sent to me for free. After a day of cooking, I will put together a piece to send to the broadsheets or Saturday magazines and, if they don’t bite, it will go on my website. That will mean more hits in my as yet unfulfilled attempt to get a book deal out of baking and blogging. I’ve been trying for years. It’s as big a first-world problem as they come but hardly anybody seems to care unless a person has had a soufflé collapse on television, or has dumped an unfrozen pudding in the bin.
I unpack the box and then start to read the covering letter. Or, I try to read the letter. The words blur meaninglessly into one another, as if they’re written in crayon in another language. It’s impossible to focus on something so trivial when my husband is missing and a little girl was found face-down in a stream a little up the road.
So much for a work day.
I don’t know what to do with myself, so end up putting on my warmest clothes and heading outside. It’s colder today than it was yesterday, almost as if the heavens have decided to mark my mood with an arctic blast. There’s a light grey wash across the sky and a clamminess to the air that makes it feel as if the rain of last night could be back for a second go.
It’s hard not to be drawn to the gap on the drive where Richard would usually park. The whole scene feels wrong as puddles have formed in the divots where the wheels of his car would usually sit.
I head along the drive onto the deserted road. A slim creek of water is flowing down the hill on the other side but the verge nearest my house is still hard underfoot. I walk up, following the trail Atal and I took last night, until I notice the white of a police car blocking the gate that leads into Daisy Field. A single officer is sitting in the driver’s seat and appears to be reading a newspaper. He certainly doesn’t notice me.
Beyond the car, I can see a fluttering web of blue and white tape set up close to the stream. There’s a white tent as well, possibly two, although it’s hard to tell from this distance. Aside from the officer in the car, there’s not a single person in sight.
I turn and follow the road back down the slope, passing my house and continuing towards the centre of Leavensfield. There’s a gap from my house to the next and then a shorter distance to the one after that. There’s still no path here and the lane is barely wide enough for two cars to pass. That is especially the case when someone in one of those 4x4 urban tanks heads through. At busier times of the year, there is barely a day without some sort of stand-off between one vehicle going up the hill and another coming down.
At the bottom of the hill, there is a row of houses flanked by the drystone wall at the front – and then it’s the Fox and Hounds pub. There’s a banner up advertising the Winter Festival Masked Ball and I find myself stopping to stare. It was only last night that I was in the back room of the pub resenting Harriet and her stupid planning committee and now, hours later, it feels so inconsequential.
It’s only as I pass the pub that I realise I’m not the only person who has drifted to the centre of the village for no particular reason.
Alice’s mother, Gemma, lives a few doors from the pub. She’s probably in her early thirties, although I don’t know for sure. She has one of those burdened faces that could mean she’s anything from twenty to fifty. Either way, it’s notable because being a single mother in this village is like having leprosy. A woman can be as unhappy as she wants, especially if she’s on medication to help, but she damn well better be married if she wants to integrate. There are occasions when being in this place is like going back in time.
Nobody says anything to Gemma’s face, of course. She’s silently ostracised. Gemma moved here around a year ago and works on the checkout at the independent petrol station and shop, a mile or so past my house. It’s called Fuel’s Gold and is a short way outside the village’s borders up on the hill. Nobody wants something like that in a village that was shortlisted for the overall Britain in Bloom award two years ago.
The other reason that Gemma’s never quite fitted in is because nobody seems sure how she afforded her house here. There was no direct inheritance from within a family, which is what usually happens. Old money breeds old money in a place like this. Rumours are that she got some compensation from a car crash and used it as a house deposit. That’s what I’ve heard, though I wouldn’t know for sure – and I don’t particularly care.
There’s a police car parked outside Gemma’s house and a group of nine or ten villagers milling around on the pavement outside, chatting among themselves. Everybody is wrapped up in the full gamut of winter wear, from fluffy snow boots through to puffy goose-feather-filled jackets. There’s an urn resting on Gemma’s wall, and a neat row of teacups. It’s perhaps the most British thing I’ve ever seen – and entirely in keeping with Leavensfield. People want to appear supportive but nobody fancies a morning without tea.
I suppose I’m not that different. I’ve arrived here as if drawn by a homing beacon. I consider turning and heading home but the entire reason I’m here is that I couldn’t bear being alone at the house any longer. In the fraction of a second it takes me to feel torn, the decision is taken for me. Harriet appears from the back of the crowd and chirps an upbeat ‘Maddy.’ She’s always the first to speak.
Harriet is in her late-forties but could comfortably pass for someone a decade younger. I won’t pretend that there’s no envy there because she always manages to look perfect. She’s in all black this morning: hat, scarf, coat – the lot. She sidles across to me and, though we’re more or less the same height, it always feels as if Harriet is looking down upon me. It could be just me – and I’ve often wondered if it is – but Harriet is the sort that hears a word like ‘blogging’ and hears ‘blagging’. The men around here are lawyers and investment bankers, while the women are devoted housewives.
‘You heard then?’ Harriet says.
‘I think everyone has.’
She makes a deliberate attempt to look past me, up the road towards my house in the far distance. ‘Where’s Richard?’
I blink at her. It’s an odd thing to ask.
‘He’s away,’ I reply.
‘Oh…’ It’s only one word, a couple of letters, and yet there’s something unmistakably conspiratorial there. Like a girl at school singing ‘I know something you don’t know’. She has an uncanny knack of making a word or three sound like an entire paragraph.
‘Why?’ I ask.
Harriet purses her lips. ‘I thought you might already know.’
‘Know what?’
‘It’s just that I saw Richard last night…’ She pauses for a beat, relishing the moment, making sure everyone can hear, and then adds an almost gleeful: ‘He was with Alice…’
Four
I stare at Harriet, waiting for some sort of follow-up, or a punchline. This is some weird joke that I don’t get.
‘What do you mean?’ I ask.
Harriet shrugs, as if this is something that I should have known.
‘They were in the car park up by Fuel’s Gold,’ she says. This is accompanied by a vague wave towards the hill outside Leavensfield.
‘Do you mean inside?’ I ask. ‘Alice was up there with her mum…?’
A shake of the head. ‘I was on the way down to the meeting last night. It was maybe half-seven? Something like that. I wondered why Alice was getting into his car. I assumed he was giving her a lift home…’
I continue to stare, waiting for the ‘gotcha’ that will surely come. ‘She was getting into his car?!’
Harriet shakes her head and I can’t work out what she’s up to. ‘I’m just telling you what I saw…’
‘You must have made a mistake…’
Another shake of the head. ‘It was Alice getting into his car. I know what I saw.’
I wish she didn’t sound convincing –
but she does. There is no joke at the end of this, only questions. How could Richard have been barely a mile from home and yet never arrived? Why would Alice have got into his car? Does he even know Alice?
‘He must have been giving her a lift home…’ It’s a stream of consciousness because I can’t think of any other reason why a twelve-year-old girl would have been getting into my husband’s car.
Bob’s, the village shop, opens late, closes early and is often shut for an hour at lunch. It’s also closed on Sundays. As well as petrol, the small shop attached to Fuel’s Gold stocks a few groceries that people might want.
The petrol station is next to the ‘Welcome To Leavensfield’ sign and technically outside the village. The village centre, the petrol station and my house form a triangle, in that, if someone wants to get from the village to Fuel’s Gold or vice versa, the most direct route is across Daisy Field.
That’s the field where Atal discovered Alice’s body in the stream.
‘When’s Richard back?’
I flicker back to the present, though it takes me a second to realise Harriet has asked a question.
‘Oh, he, um… I’m not sure.’
I can hardly say he’s missing.
Harriet turns in a half-circle, taking in Gemma’s house and then the assembled crowd of support.
‘I should probably tell someone,’ she says.
‘About what?’
‘About seeing Richard with Alice. He might have been the last person to see her…’
I’m fairly certain that my mouth hangs open as I realise she’s right. It’s not just that she can’t wait to go and flap her mouth, it’s that she definitely should tell someone what she saw.
What My Husband Did: A gripping psychological thriller with an amazing twist Page 3
