‘I’m going to stay at mine tonight, babe.’
Steve propped himself up on his elbow in bed next to me.
‘What’s up? You tired of me already?’
I smiled. Nothing could be further from the truth. ‘Don’t be stupid. I just need to get some sleep, I’ve missed the last three morning classes in a row. I’ll pop over after Economics.’
‘Okay, gorgeous, take notes for me, yeah?’
‘Always do.’
The next morning, freshly showered with a full night’s sleep and real food in the morning, I’d felt amazing and I’d paid attention during my lecture for the first time in two weeks, making detailed notes to share with my new boyfriend. On the way round to his flat I’d picked up coffee and bacon sandwiches, a gesture I knew he’d appreciate after the night of drinking he’d no doubt had. God he was lucky to have me.
We hadn’t got to the spare key stage so I knocked on the door of his flat and prepared myself for the twenty-minute wait it usually took him to get himself up. More surprising than the fact that the door opened after only a couple of minutes was the half-naked girl who stood in the empty frame.
She was Amazonian tall, with tanned legs that seemed to go on forever. Her feet were bare, as was the rest of her bottom half, save for a grey thong that at some point before the student-style one-load-fits-all washing had surely been white. On her top half she wore a short, baggy grey T-shirt that clearly had nothing underneath. Her face was as tanned as her legs, with a smattering of freckles that suggested her colouring wasn’t bottled. Her hair was dark blonde and tousled and she had the tired but relaxed demeanour of someone who had spent the night having sex. With my boyfriend.
‘I’m looking for Steve,’ I managed stupidly.
‘Shower.’ She opened the door wider to let me in and disappeared inside without even asking who I was.
When I mustered the courage to walk inside she was sitting on the sofa, rolling a joint. I sat down on the chair opposite her, self-consciously hugging the bag with the rolls in my lap.
‘Um, who are you?’
The girl studied me intently. Here she was, a thing of pure beauty, and yet she looked at me as though I was a rare butterfly under a microscope. Her eyes were the colour of mint ice cream. She lit up the joint and took a long drag.
‘Evie.’ Her voice was smooth, melodic. ‘Want some?’ She held it out, blowing smoke through lazily opened lips.
‘No, thanks.’
She lay back on the sofa and shrugged. I shifted in my seat.
‘Actually, yes, please.’
The look on Steve’s face when he came out of the shower was priceless. Clearly, he had no concept of the time, having spent the night screwing the goddess who was now lying on his sofa, and managed to splutter his way through an apology neither of us were really listening to. Evie was talking about cultural stereotypes in advertising with such passion on her face that my relationship with Steve was dead before the joint the three of us shared. At the time he thought he’d dodged a real bullet, me not freaking out and just stepping gracefully aside to let the beautiful Evie White take my place.
‘What are you studying, Evie?’ I asked while Steve threw bemused looks at me.
‘Photography. You can find the mind’s construction in the face.’ She leaned over the side of the sofa and picked up a fancy-looking long-lens camera, revealing more tanned flesh as she lifted the hem of her T-shirt to dust it off. Resting her elbows on her knees, she peered into the viewfinder. ‘They say that every time someone takes your photo they take a part of your soul.’
She pressed down on the shutter and the camera whirred.
‘There you go, now I have your soul.’
3
Rebecca
‘What the fuck is going on here?’
That thick French accent, the demanding tone – Evie’s father has arrived. Dominic Rousseau charges past Detective Thomas into the room and I cringe at the despair on his handsome face. The man who has had women falling at his feet over the years, such a dominating force in the business world, looks utterly broken. Michelle visibly shrinks back at his voice. After a few seconds Richard steps forward.
‘Dominic, they’re saying she jumped—’ Dominic rounds on him and Thomas takes a step forward, ready to step in if things take a turn for the worse – as if this night could get any worse.
‘Impossible! Today is Evelyn’s wedding day! Why the hell would she try to kill herself on what is supposed to be the happiest day of her life?’
‘She was seen, sir,’ Michelle stutters. ‘Two witnesses on the cliffs opposite called the police when they saw a woman in a wedding dress enter the sea. We’re doing everything we can to find her.’
‘Clearly that’s not enough. You,’ he turns to me. ‘Did she say anything about this to you? Was she upset about anything?’
‘I, no sir, she seemed fine the last time I saw her.’
In a way, it is harder to lie to Dominic than it is to Richard or the police. I feel like he can see right through me, into my thoughts, like a human lie detector.
‘What did you do to her?’ The treacherous coward inside me breathes a sigh of relief when he turns back on Richard.
‘What do you mean, do to her?’ Richard finds his voice and it’s a furious one. ‘I didn’t do anything to her! I love her. We just got married.’
‘Well you must have done something to make my daughter so miserable she would pull this stunt on her wedding day!’
‘Evie never gave anyone responsibility for her happiness, you of all people should know that.’
‘What do you mean, me of all people? What’s that supposed to mean? I wasn’t even here!’
For a fleeting moment, it crosses my mind that this is exactly what Evie would have wanted. She couldn’t have planned it better if she’d been here to throw the bait. The two men in her life fighting over who had loved her more, even as her body smashes against the rocks, even as her soul drifts out to sea, she is still the most imposing figure in any room. There you go, now I’ve got your soul.
And she had. For the next seven years Evie White had had my soul, and now she’s given it back and I don’t know what to do with it any more. She’d been the most important thing in my life, deciding where we’d go and what we’d wear so often that I no longer have any idea who I am without her. What films will I watch now I have to choose them alone? What music do I like? Every CD I own was recommended to me by my other half with her infectious enthusiasm. Try this, Becky, you’ll adore it. This would smell wonderful on you. Blue is absolutely your colour. What do I do now?
‘That’s exactly my point,’ Richard snaps. ‘Perhaps if you’d been here for the happiest day of her life . . .’
I suck air between my teeth, waiting for an explosion that doesn’t come. Instead Dominic looks weary, rubs a hand across his face and turns to Michelle.
‘What is being done? Is someone out there looking for her? Every second you wait is a second my daughter is on her own, in the darkness. She will freeze to death.’
‘There are helicopters scanning the area now, sir.’
‘Well they don’t seem to be doing enough.’ Michelle goes to speak but he holds up a hand and her mouth closes like a fish. ‘I don’t want to hear your empty platitudes. Have your superiors contact me in my room immediately. I want to know how they plan to find my daughter.’
And with that, he left, not even glancing at Richard or I on the way out.
One month later
4
Rebecca
The child behind me in the heaving queue grasps the corner of my bag of pasta and yanks. I realise too late – despite this being the thirteen hundredth time he’s done it – and he breaks into hysterical laughter as my conchiglie crashes to the floor. His mother doesn’t look up from where she’s thumbing the screen of her phone frantically as if she’s one of the Bletchley Girls. As I bend down to retrieve my food he throws his plastic figure at me, so close that I feel it snag my
hair. He laughs and holds out his hand for me to pass it back to him. With a swift kick I send it skidding under the checkout – small victories.
I heave the 5p bags into the boot of the car and slam it shut with a satisfying click. I seem to spend half my life at one supermarket or another lately, keeping my own house running as well as making sure Richard is fed. Because if I didn’t do it, let’s face it, he’d probably forget to eat altogether.
It’s been four weeks since the wedding, four weeks with no body, and no answers. We – Richard and I – spent the first week in the hotel, mainly sitting in his room trying not to look out of the window, waiting for the phone call to come.
It was Michelle who quietly suggested that Richard went back to Kensington and tried to resume some kind of normality – promising to call him at the slightest bit of news.
That was three weeks ago, and she kept to her promise, calling him every day at first, just to check how he was getting on. Then the calls slowed to every other day. I’m not sure he’s even had one this week.
No body equals no closure and we’ve returned back to London. I work from home as an online PA so at least I can keep a close eye on Richard. Until Evie is found, he can’t even begin to move on, stuck in some awful limbo circle of confusion, hope and guilt. How do you desperately hope for confirmation your wife is dead without feeling guilty? And yet while there is still hope there is no chance of moving past the denial stage of grief. He wants answers – the main question being, why?
He’s been snappy and surly, so much so that two weeks after we came home I was ready to ditch him altogether, let him ferment in filthy underwear and suffocating self-pity, but it was Evie’s voice that forced me to stay. We did this to him, I heard her whisper in my ear. Now you have to help him through it.
And slowly, there have been signs of change. He’s started to get dressed before I even turn up in the mornings now, and bit by bit I can sense the old Richard, with his dry wit and his infinite eighties cult movie references, beginning to surface. Every now and then, though, I catch him asking that same question in his mind. Why?
‘Maybe she was ill,’ he’d suggested to me just last night, as we’d watched one of the soaps that neither of us ever liked but Evie never missed. An old man on the screen was clasping the hand of a young woman – his daughter, I think – asking her to help him, when the time came. ‘Maybe she was like this guy, maybe she had cancer and she didn’t want any of us to suffer. That would be just like her.’
‘Maybe,’ I’d mused. ‘But it would be more like her to want us all to know about it first.’
‘Still, I’ll ask my solicitor about getting access to her medical records.’
Tonight I’m cooking spaghetti carbonara, fully aware that Richard will probably push his portion around the plate, take a couple of bites and make the obligatory yummy noises before scraping the lot into the bin.
Shoving the car into reverse, I’m about to negotiate my way out of the car park when my phone buzzes in the centre console. Cursing under my breath I swipe the screen, hoping it’s not Richard asking me to go back in; knowing I will if he asks. Grow a backbone, Rebecca, or are you going to let him walk all over you now? Unfair – his wife is missing presumed dead, he’s entitled to ask me to pick up some chocolate chip cookies, or whatever he wants now.
It’s not a text message, it’s a Facebook notification.
Evelyn Bradley sent you a friend request!
5
Evie
‘Papa! Papa! Mère est morte!’ the five-year-old girl threw herself through the door of her father’s work room. ‘Morte!’
‘Calm down, Evelyn,’ her father spoke slowly and in perfect English. He loved his native language but since moving to England he had acquiesced to her mother’s request that they spoke only English at home. We don’t want her growing up here as the French girl, Dominic. Girls around here, it’s important that they fit in. ‘Your mother is not dead. I just spoke with her half hour before. What is this silliness? English please.’
‘On the sofa . . . morte! Elle a. . . um, she has, she has eaten the sleepy pills and she won’t move.’ Evie collapsed against her father’s chest, tears spilling down her cheeks. ‘S’il te plaît, viens! Please come!’
Evie’s father sighed and laid down his pen. He lifted his daughter up under her arms and placed a kiss on a forehead besieged by messy blonde curls.
‘Your mother is very much alive, Evelyn Rousseau, and just to prove it I shall go and throw a cup of water on her silly face.’
Evelyn’s eyes widened. She was so very sure that her mother was dead, but it was still a risky plan.
‘If you do that, Papa, you had better hope Mama is dead,’ she warned him, her face full of seriousness.
Her father laughed. It was his true laugh, the one he laughed with her (although she didn’t always know why) and Emily, the English tutor he had bought for her before Mama had sent her away, but never with the businessmen that came, and not even Mama any more. They got the fake laugh, the bastard laugh. Evelyn called it that because when Papa was with these people he was a bastard, pretending they were funny and interesting and completely ignoring her. Touching the women when Mama wasn’t looking, or when she was unwell in her bedroom, thinking Evelyn was too young to realise what was happening when he leant in close to them and whispered in their ears, or when they put a hand on his chest, lowered their eyes and smiled. She knew what those dirty hors wanted. That’s what Mama called them, Daddy’s Dirty Hors and those Bastard Men.
And now, Papa marched her to the big house, and carried her into the kitchen where he put her on the floor and filled a glass of water.
‘Come, Evie.’
She hung back and shook her head. Mama was dead and Evie didn’t want to see her being dead again. It had been a heck of a shock the first time, her mouth hanging open and her fat pink tongue flopping out of the side of it.
‘Okay, sweetie, you wait there.’
She heard her father move into the drawing room where she knew Mama was dead. She heard him say one of the worst cuss words and heard the splash of the water hitting her mother’s face and her mother’s scream, then equally-as-damning cuss words.
She’s alive! So why is Papa shouting? Why is he so mad, Mama is alive, thank the Lord!
‘You stupid bitch! What are you trying to do to that poor girl? Do you want her to be as fucked up as you?’
‘If I’m fucked up, Dominic, it’s because of you! You and your dirty whores. You drive me to this, you know that? If I kill myself my blood will be on your hands. I’d rather die than lose you.’
Evie shuddered. Even at five years old she knew this wasn’t how love was supposed to be. And one thing she knew for certain – she would never let herself love someone enough that they made her want to die.
6
Rebecca
Sitting in the supermarket car park staring at the friend request on my phone, my first thought – as stupid as it seems – is that it’s her. It’s really her. She’s alive!
As quickly as my heart starts thumping in my chest, the normal, rational side of me kicks in.
Idiot. If Evie were alive she would not be contacting you via a Facebook profile you’ve never seen before. This was not part of any plan.
I click on the profile picture – it’s from a distance but there she stands, on the edge of a cliff in her wedding dress. Her wedding day; the night she died. There’s no way Evie could have taken this photo herself.
The only way to find out is to click ‘accept’. I know how weird it’s going to look if any of our friends see on my timeline ‘Rebecca Thompson is now friends with Evelyn Bradley’ but does it matter? If anyone asks I can tell them the truth – some weird troll has created a Facebook profile and I accepted the request to find out who it was.
I scroll down the profile. I am Evelyn Bradley’s only friend and the irony doesn’t escape me. Despite how everyone she met fell in love with her charm, her beauty and her wit, Evi
e trusted very few people with her love in return. There were a couple of girls in high school back in Wareham, posh totty types who had squealed and hopped up and down at the sight of Evie in her wedding dress, but for all of my best friend’s popularity, the number of people who really knew her could be counted on one hand. And Richard wasn’t one of them.
The profile is empty save from the picture of Evie on the clifftop and it doesn’t seem to have any real purpose. The caption reads: ‘When fair is foul, and foul is fair.’
Then, as I think I’d known it would ever since I saw the friend request, the phone buzzes and a circle pops up with Evie’s profile picture in it. A message. As I click on it an image of Evie emerging from the sea flashes into my mind. Her skin is encrusted with barnacles, chunks of flesh have been peeled away by birds and other scavengers. One eye protrudes from the socket. I think I might throw up. Four whole weeks of waiting for my best friend’s body to be dragged from the sea has taken its toll. For one brief moment I pray that this person is really her, that she’s alive and playing one of her silly games.
Long time no see, bestie. What’s up? You look like you’ve seen a ghost LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
I let out the breath I was holding in, a mixture of disappointment and relief. It isn’t her.
7
Rebecca
I scan the other cars in the car park. Sunlight reflects off the windscreens; they could all be empty, or any one of them could be masking an axe-wielding maniac. Scenes from countless horror movies run through my mind and I sneak a look over my shoulder into the back seat. Empty. I used to scoff cynically at the stupid girls running up the stairs screaming – usually with their heaving bosoms spilling from their teeny vest tops – and waiting to be saved by a heroic man. Evie would be cheering on the faceless killer and pointing out all of the ways that they could be more successful in their murderous rampages. Now I wish she was here to tell me I was being ridiculous, jumping at text messages – no killer ever struck in the middle of the day in a supermarket car park.
The Night She Died Page 2
