The Perfect Girl

by Gilly MacMillan

  Beside her sits her uncle. He’s red-faced, sweating and he stinks of alcohol. I hope he hasn’t driven Zoe here because I suspect he’s probably still over the limit, but I reassure myself that surely somebody in this family would know better.

  But the worst thing is, that in spite of the bloodshot eyes and the oily, widened pores, and the untended shock of hair that’s just starting to grey at the temples, he’s quite obviously a very nice and also a good-looking man. His manner is lovely and gentle, though he’s surprisingly posh. I never imagined Tess with a posh husband, but I can see instantly why she married him and I have to stop myself from hating him for this. I must not make comparisons between us. Jealousy would not be appropriate.

  ‘She really needs her aunt,’ Richard says to me. ‘My wife. We’ve been trying to get hold of her for hours, but she went out somewhere last night and left her mobile at home and we don’t know where she is.’

  I know his name, but he doesn’t know that I know it, and I must be careful what I say.

  I extend my hand to him. ‘Sam Locke,’ I say.

  ‘Richard Downing.’ His handshake trembles, and his palms are clammy. He gives a two-handed shake, and his wedding ring, identical to Tess’s, clashes with my knuckle when he encloses my hand with both of his. ‘I’m sorry to turn up like this, but I know how much you helped them before. My wife, Tessa, told me about it, and Zoe was desperate.’

  I wonder why he never came to court in Devon, why he and I have never encountered each other before. I’ve no time to consider this, though, because he’s speaking urgently, almost furtively.

  ‘The thing is, I’m worried about her,’ he says. ‘I don’t know where she is. I’m sorry, I know it’s nothing on top of what happened last night, but it’s so unlike her. What if she’s come to harm too?’

  He’s wide-eyed and genuinely worried, but I don’t want this conversation.

  I glance at Zoe who’s looking at me with glazed eyes; I don’t think she’s taking in a thing that we’re saying.

  ‘I’m sure your wife will reappear,’ I tell Richard, rather shortly, because how can I reassure him that I know she’s OK. ‘Perhaps she stayed with a friend last night?’

  He begins to respond but I absolutely can’t let this continue so I turn to Zoe and I ask the question that’s been bugging me since Jeanette called me: ‘Why have you come to me?’

  ‘Because it feels like before,’ she says. ‘It feels like before.’

  And she breaks down into such awful, terrible sobbing that it’s as if the sound of it alone could wound you. But what I’m wondering, even while she vents her grief, is whether Zoe knows something and knows that she needs protecting.

  Richard tries to comfort her. He puts his arms around her and her head falls on to his shoulder. He looks as though he’s feeling like death, and when our eyes meet his expression is one of compassion and confusion with a ‘help me’ in there too.

  ‘Why is it like before?’ I ask Zoe when her tears ebb a little. ‘Do you feel responsible in some way?’

  Richard says, ‘Now hang on!’

  ‘I need to ask.’

  ‘She’s just lost her mother!’ Saying it chokes him up.

  ‘And I’m on her side, but I need to know why she wanted to come here.’

  Zoe is emotionally and socially immature, but she’s also exceptionally intelligent. All the reports on her at the trial stressed this. She has the processing capabilities equal to any judge who might sit on her case and she has experience of the system too. Yes, she’s in shock, yes, her mother has just died, but she’s come to me for a reason and I need to know exactly what that is.

  She peels herself from her uncle’s shoulder, which is now wet from her tears, and says, ‘Because I’m afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘Afraid of Tom Barlow.’

  I remember him from the trial.

  ‘Why Tom Barlow?’

  ‘They’re saying he disrupted the concert yesterday, and came to the house afterwards,’ Richard explains, as Zoe fixes me with deer-in-headlight eyes.

  ‘Do you think he hurt your mum?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s nice.’

  She always said that at the time: Amelia Barlow is horrible, although her mum and dad are really nice.

  ‘The police say they’re going to talk to him,’ Richard adds.

  ‘If the police know about him then you mustn’t worry,’ I tell Zoe. ‘They won’t let him hurt you. What?’

  She’s shaking her head madly. ‘But what if they blame me?’

  I sigh. Zoe’s mind has raced ahead down the path of somebody who has a victim mentality. I take a tough line with her in response: ‘Is there anything to blame you for, Zoe?’

  ‘Oh dear God, you poor child.’ Richard rubs her back. ‘You don’t have to answer that.’

  In her eyes I see she understands that I have to ask this, and that she’s ready to answer. It’s not the first time we’ve discussed her responsibility for somebody else’s death. Zoe and I have trodden these boards before and it doesn’t faze us, although Richard looks as though he might puke.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I was asleep. I fell asleep with my baby sister, my new sister. I went to sleep with her in her room. I didn’t hear anything because I had my headphones in.’

  I’m about to reassure her that if that’s the case, then she should have nothing to worry about, and that there’s surely no reason for the police to think she would harm her own mother, but Richard interrupts me.

  ‘Tessa went to the concert!’ he blurts out, as if the memory is a big fish he’s suddenly managed to hook out of the empty lake of his booze-addled brain.

  ‘And she came to dinner with us afterwards,’ Zoe tells him. ‘She was there.’

  ‘Yes that’s right,’ Richard agrees, as Zoe reminds him of Tess’s movements, his neurons firing their way out of his hangover now, and putting last night into some kind of order. ‘She went to the concert, and we spoke afterwards and she said she was staying for dinner, but I didn’t see her after that.’

  I did, I think, but I can’t say it.

  ‘We had bruschetta,’ Zoe tells Richard and tears still fall fatly down her cheeks. ‘But the police are there now, we’re not allowed home.’

  While I often think of her as having a head that’s far too smart for her age, in front of me today she is very much a child and I feel slightly guilty for taking a hard questioning line with her, though really I had no choice.

  What I realise is that I’m well beyond my professional remit here. This feels like more of a personal, not a professional visit, and that makes me feel extremely twitchy. If Tess had been with Zoe, she wouldn’t have let her come.

  I stand up, look out of the window. I need to order my thoughts.

  Various half-formed ideas scud across my mind: Zoe’s going to need huge amounts of help, but not the kind that I can give her. She’s here because she’s afraid, that’s all, not because she actually requires legal assistance. My gut tells me that she’s not involved in this as a perpetrator, and my gut is usually right, though not always.

  But what floods me with apprehension, on top of that, and makes me try to wrench the window open further, hoping for a gasp of fresh air from the dank gulley separating our small building from the towering block beside us, is the newly forming realisation that, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t possibly help Zoe in this, in any of it, neither in an official capacity, nor a personal one. This is because the fact that I spent the night with Tess means two things: firstly, that I’m a potential witness, and, secondly, that our relationship is bound to become known.

  I need, I think, a way out.

  ZOE

  Sam stares out of his office window at the building opposite for a long time, while I sit and lean against my Uncle Richard who smells strangely sweet, and I think about the men who are probably in the Second Chance House now, examining it for clues. I imagine it just like the wreck of the car in Devon: taped off, Pr
operty of the Police.

  I wonder if the butterfly is still crouched in a high corner of our landing ceiling at the Second Chance House or if, in the darkness, its wings open and shut enough times that it used up its energy stores, and fell to the floor. I wonder if the men in white suits will find a small pile of powdery scales and a spindly-legged carcass on the cream carpet of our landing.

  After a while, Sam clears his throat, says that he needs to make a phone call, and leaves the room. Richard and I stay where we are, and first he scrolls around his phone a bit, and then he puts it on the table, but he keeps picking it up again to check it and I can tell he’s willing Tess to ring.

  I just stare at the view that Sam was looking at.

  The windows on the building opposite are like little boxes, each one showing you a glimpse into somebody else’s day. I watch a lady at her desk neatly slitting envelopes open with a knife, before getting out the letters and unfolding them and then whacking down on to them with a big stamp. I can’t hear her, obviously, but my brain provides the soundtrack, and the whump of the stamp as it hits the paper is loud in my mind, as well as the sharp sound as the knife slits the envelope, and the slurp each time she sips from a takeout coffee cup. The sounds alternate in my head, crescendoing, building up like the panic I’m feeling, until Sam returns.

  I was right to panic, because he’s betrayed me.

  ‘I’ve phoned your dad,’ he says. ‘He’s on his way.’

  ‘No!’ I totally and absolutely don’t want my dad. He didn’t cope with me before, so how is he going to now that it’s even worse?

  ‘Don’t be angry, Zoe,’ Sam says. ‘You need somebody to look after you.’

  ‘You don’t know!’

  ‘I do know.’

  He’s nodding at me, as if that makes him more right, which it doesn’t, and I want to argue about it more, because I’m sharp scared of how my dad will be with me.

  I’m staring hard at Sam, thinking of what to say, when Richard’s phone rings and Richard lunges to grab it off the table where it’s skittering around on the shiny surface as it vibrates even faster than his tremor hands.

  ‘TESS MOBILE’ it says on the screen.

  ‘Oh God, it’s you!’ he practically shouts, once he’s fumbled hitting the screen to answer it. ‘Thank God! Thank God! Where the hell have you been?’

  She’s speaking to him urgently; you can hear that down the line, but not her actual words. Richard’s face goes slacker as he concentrates on what she’s saying.

  Eventually, he says: ‘I’m so sorry, darling, I’m so sorry about Maria, I just can’t believe it and I just thought you… no, don’t worry, I thought something might have happened to you too,’ he says, and his hand is on his chest, but he fully lies when he says, ‘God, Tessa, no, I’m not crying, no, I’m not, OK, yes,’ and then gets back on track when he says, ‘We’re at the solicitor’s place, Zoe’s solicitor, do you remember him?… Because she wanted me to bring her here… of course we told the police where we were going, honestly they were in chaos, it doesn’t inspire one with confidence… no, I didn’t think of it like that… no, sorry, no, perhaps I should have, but there wasn’t time to think… yes, she is… OK…’

  He passes his phone to me. ‘Aunty Tess wants to talk to you. She’s OK.’

  I can’t talk to her at first. The sound of her voice, and the way it’s strangulated and strange, makes me sob again.

  ‘What happened?’ she says.

  It takes me a few moments to get my breathing under control, and Richard’s arm wraps around my shoulders as I do. ‘I don’t know. She was in the shed. She never goes in the shed.’

  ‘When? What time?’

  ‘We went to bed. We all went to bed and Katya woke us up when she got back.’

  ‘Did Katya find Mummy?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Zoe, you’ve done nothing wrong, so don’t behave as if you have, whatever you do. I think you should come away from Sam’s office and come back to the police station to be with the others.’

  ‘I don’t want to be at the station.’ Like the courtroom, the station is a vipers’ nest, a place where I can trip myself up, say the wrong thing, dig my own grave, put myself behind bars.

  ‘I know, I understand, but I’m coming now and I’ll meet you there and then we’ll find out what’s going on and take things from there. You don’t need a solicitor. You’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘I don’t want to be with the police.’

  ‘But you don’t want them to suspect you’ve done something either, do you?’

  Sometimes people say things to you straight and I like that. I didn’t think that coming to see Sam might make me look worse, but I see suddenly that she might be right.

  In her silence, I ask, ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I stayed with a friend. I left my phone at home. I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier.’

  ‘Will I live with Daddy now?’

  She sighs before answering, and it’s a hollow sound. ‘Honestly, I don’t know what we’re going to do, let’s take one thing at a time. Zoe? Are you there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that now. We’ll take care of you, OK? I promise.’

  Sam is nice to me as he walks us out of the building, all of our feet thumping down flights of stairs.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a client just turn up before,’ he says. ‘It’s very unusual really.’

  Maybe nobody has ever needed you as much as me, I think. We’re standing on the steps of his building now, and the soft early morning shadows are already getting shorter and more brutal, as the sun rises and starts to superheat the city and turn every surface into a glare.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, Zoe,’ he says. ‘The police will protect you until they know what’s happened. They’ll do a better job of it than me.’

  I’m actually shocked that Sam, who saw how wrong things went for me before, could even think that, let alone say it to me. Until now, he’s never been in the category of ‘adults who don’t understand’, but he earns his membership badge right there on the pavement, and I feel sick with disappointment.

  On the drive back to the police station, my mind stays so blank with it all that I notice nothing apart from the fact that the air conditioning in Richard’s car is broken and his sweat is making half-moon shapes under his armpits.

  TESSA

  I arrive at the police station at the same time as Richard and Zoe. He practically falls out of their taxi in his haste to embrace me, but it’s her I want to feel in my arms first, because she’s my flesh and blood.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Richard says, as I clasp her. ‘I was so worried.’

  I’m shot through with irritation at this, because I don’t feel as though his concern is for me, but for himself. I’m already cross with Richard anyway, for taking Zoe to Sam. Cross because that’s risky for me, but also because it feels risky for her. She doesn’t need a solicitor. Why would we compound this desperate situation by publicly seeking legal advice for her? It makes her look suspicious. Richard has no common sense; he shouldn’t have given in to her request.

  ‘Later,’ I say. ‘For God’s sake!’

  I don’t meet his eye, but from the way he falls in behind Zoe and me, bringing up the rear as we walk towards the entrance to the police station, and then scurrying past us to hold open the door, I think: He doesn’t know about me and Sam, and for that, right now, I’m grateful.

  As a uniformed officer leads us down a corridor within the police station, we hear Chris before we see him. As we round a corner, his voice is loud, and almost uncontrolled, as he explains to somebody that enough is enough, and the family can’t stay at the police station.

  ‘Why are you incarcerating us?’ he asks. ‘What are you doing that’s in any way useful?’

  We arrive by an open doorway that leads into a small room where Lucas, Katya and the baby are seated on sofas around a long, low table. Grace’s face is tear-streaked an
d Katya holds her whilst wearing the expression of somebody who’s both physically and mentally exhausted. Chris is standing beside the doorway remonstrating with a female officer who appears cowed by him.

  ‘We’re just in the process of opening up the investigation into your wife’s death, sir,’ she explains in a sentence where the words sound very carefully chosen. ‘If you could bear with us while we do that, we will, of course, keep you updated on everything that’s happening. It’s a complicated —’

  Chris interrupts her. ‘I understand complexity. What I don’t understand is why we’re being held here. Why are we camping in your police station? What is the plan?’

  His voice is louder now and it sets the baby off again.

  ‘You could come to our house,’ I say. ‘If you’d like to?’

  Chris notices us for the first time, but he barely glances at Zoe.

  He looks back at the officer. ‘Is that allowed?’ he says. ‘Or are we under suspicion?’

  She’s careful with her response. ‘You’re not being held here, sir, we simply wanted to offer you somewhere to be while your house isn’t accessible to you. We thought it might be easier to conduct interviews while you were here as we’ll be needing to speak to everybody soon.’

  Behind Chris, Grace is having a low-level whinge and Katya is bumping her on her knee in a desultory way, which only makes Grace’s mouth hang wider in despair. Zoe slips past Chris and goes to the baby, taking her into her arms.

  ‘I have a baby!’ says Chris. ‘And children I’m responsible for. This isn’t right! Look at them!’

  They are a sight. Their bags are dumped all over the place, and baby paraphernalia has spread everywhere, including a pushchair, a nappy-changing mat on the floor, and a half-eaten jar of purée beside a bundle of wipes.

  They need help.

  ‘Officer,’ I say. ‘They can come to my house, if that’s allowed? It’s just over in Stoke Bishop.’

  ‘I’ll check,’ she says. ‘I expect they’d prefer you here just for now, but I’ll ask.’