by Lisa Jewell
“I’m on my way. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
She turned off her phone and rested it on the table in front of her, smiling softly.
21
June 2012
Lives on 214 bus route
Kickboxing
Date with man called Matthew
Possible bag thief?
Lives/works near post office?
May be called Amanda (prob not)
London accent
30–40
Adrian wrote down each fact on a separate square of paper and moved them around his desk. He was hoping, somehow, to use his architect’s ability to break a pretty picture down into literal nuts and bolts and then build it up into something three-dimensional and functional. On another piece of paper he sketched out a visual map:
Ally Pally
UPPER STREET Strada
North Finchley <——214 Bus stop
Post office
ARCHWAY My flat
Community hall HIGHGATE
SOUTH LONDON (Bag theft)
He spread the pieces of paper around the map, cupped his lower face inside his hand and studied it for a while. The most helpful clue was the 214 bus route. But that might have been a red herring. She might just have jumped onto the first bus she saw to get away from Cat. And living in that direction made it less likely that she would have found her way to the post office in Archway where Adrian had put up the card about the cat.
His phone rang and he picked it up. It was DI Mickelson.
“We’ve been through your laptop with a fine-toothed comb and I’m afraid, as we both suspected, there’s nothing there. All trace of the e-mails has been removed. And we’ve looked into the e-mail address they came from. Unfortunately the address was used by someone with a dynamic IP address. In other words almost impossible to track down, though we can say for a fact that the e-mails were sent from the southeast region, i.e., anywhere between here and the south coast.”
Adrian sighed, waiting for the DI to say something else, the good news, after the bad news. But he didn’t. “So that’s that?”
“Yes, it does look like it. I’m very sorry.”
Adrian sighed again. “Well, thank you for trying.”
“It was no problem, Mr. Wolfe. I know it’s hard, not knowing, when you lose someone. It would have been nice to have shed some light.”
“I wonder,” said Adrian, “could I just ask you a quick question? About stolen phones?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well, it turns out that that woman I told you about, the one who was kind of stalking us for a while, used a stolen phone to get in touch with me. A stolen phone, but with the original SIM card reinserted. Have you got any theories about that?”
He heard the DI draw in his breath. “Hm,” he said, “that’s an odd one. How do you know it was stolen?”
“I traced it to the woman it was stolen from. She works at an estate agency. It was her work phone. Got stolen a few months ago. In south London.”
“Right. Well, maybe when you come for your laptop you could drop the phone off. We could take a look at it for you.”
Adrian groaned. “Too late for that. I gave it back to the woman it originally belonged to. She wanted it back in case her mum tried calling her on it.”
“Any chance you could get it back?”
“I don’t know.” Adrian thought back to sour-faced Sian at the children’s home, edgy Tiffany on the phone. “Probably not.”
“Well, usually with a stolen phone, the SIM card is destroyed before it’s sold on or recycled or whatever. Otherwise it’s traceable. Plus, of course, the end user will be plagued by phone calls from the original user’s mates. So it’s very odd indeed. Let me have a think about it. I’ll ask some questions.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much. And I’ll come after work, for my laptop, if that’s OK?”
“Sure. I won’t be here, but I’ll leave it on the front desk for you.”
Adrian looked back at the paper map on his desk after he finished his phone call. He held the piece of paper with “Lives/works near post office?” against the post office area of his makeshift map with the tip of his forefinger, sliding it back and forth gently, agitatedly. And then he jumped slightly in his seat. Of course. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t already thought of it. Another card. He needed to put another card up.
He left work early, collected his laptop from the police station in Kentish Town and made it to the post office five minutes before closing time.
He took a blank card from the pile next to the community noticeboard and he wrote down the following announcement:
DESPERATELY SEEKING JANE
YOU LEFT YOUR PHONE DOWN THE BACK OF MY SOFA!
PLEASE CALL ME!
ADRIAN
(AND BILLIE)
22
Pearl threw herself across the ice for the fifth time, finally nailing the double axel that had been eluding her for the past ten minutes. She looked up at her trainer, Polly, who was smiling encouragingly at her from the edge of the rink, her hands clasped together in applause. Cat whistled through her fingers from the bleachers and held her thumbs aloft. Pearl had got it. At least, she felt as though she had; her body told her she had in every neurological pulse passing through it. But she still needed that assurance. She allowed herself a small smile and skated towards the exit, grabbing a towel and a bottle of water.
“Nice one, Pearl,” said Polly, hugging her gently. “Well done. I knew you’d crack it today. That’s brilliant. We’ll build on it tomorrow, yeah?”
Pearl nodded, pulled herself out of Polly’s embrace, conscious of being damp and smelly. She waved to Cat, who was standing in the bleachers a few rows back, her hands tucked into the high pockets of a zipped-up cardigan, chewing gum and smiling at her. Cat waved back, and they walked together to the changing rooms.
“Totally awesome, Pearl,” said Cat, her big eyes wide with wonder. “I mean, I totally don’t believe I can be related to you sometimes, you know. Seriously.”
“Where’s Mum?” said Pearl.
“She’s going out tonight. Said she was going to have a bubble bath. Or something.” Cat shrugged and sat down on a bench, passing Pearl her shoulder bag.
Pearl nodded. Bubble baths and weekly waxes and dinners out and taxicabs and new bras and blow-dries. All for Paul Wilson.
She sighed. Once upon a time bubble baths had been something that she and her mum did together. A treat. Like ice cream. “I know,” her mum would say, “why don’t we have a bubble bath?” And Pearl would climb in behind her mum and marvel at every nook and cranny of her mother’s naked body, put foam peaks onto her own flat chest and say, “Look, I’ve got bigger boobies than you!,” spill water down her mother’s back and sponge it dry for her, with the heat rising around their heads, steam blooming on the bathroom mirror, the tap drip-dripping into the still water. Just her and her mum.
“What are we doing? Are we going home?”
“Yeah. Sure. Or we could go for tea? Somewhere cheap? McDonald’s?”
“OK.”
Pearl stuffed her damp training kit into her shoulder bag and changed into jeans and a tank top.
“It’s cool outside,” said Cat, passing over her hoodie.
Pearl braced herself as she let herself into the passenger side of her mum’s car. Cat was the worst driver in the world. She drove way too close to parked cars, two millimeters away from snapping off wing mirrors everywhere she went. If Pearl took an intake of breath, Cat would say, “What! What!” and then drive too close to the cars coming the other way. She also set off on journeys she’d never undertaken before with no forward planning, and would sto
p in the middle of the road to look for road names or turnings with no awareness of the queue of traffic building behind her until they started to hoot, at which point she’d get really cross and start shouting and swearing. And she did that thing that people usually only do on the television of turning to look at Pearl whenever she was talking to her. Pearl tried to keep conversation to a minimum when she was in the car with Cat.
Cat took her phone out of her huge bag and called Otis. “Hi, honey, it’s me. We’re going to Maccy D’s. Do you want a takeout?”
“Takeaway,” hissed Pearl. “Takeaway.” Pearl liked things said the proper English way. Her mum said she was about the most British person she knew.
Cat tucked the phone under her ear and began maneuvering the car out of its space, still talking to Otis about Big Macs and Pepsi Max. She hit the brakes quite violently as a pedestrian passed behind them and Pearl tutted. She sometimes thought her mother shouldn’t let Cat drive her around. She sometimes thought it amounted to neglect. She tried to imagine how guilty her mum would feel if she got killed or maimed in a car crash while she was lying in a bubble bath on her own with the door shut thinking things about Paul Wilson.
Cat got Pearl to McDonald’s without any misadventure befalling them and ten minutes later they sat face-to-face across a table. “So,” said Cat, half a Big Mac disappearing into her big, red-lipsticked mouth in one bite, “I had lunch with Dad today.”
Daddy, Pearl wanted to hiss. He’s not Dad. He’s Daddy.
“He’s put a card up in the post office. Desperately Seeking Jane.” She made the shape of a card with both hands and laughed. “Not that it’s funny, though,” she said, hurriedly. “But still, you know, what are the chances of her replying? She knows where Dad lives. If she’d wanted to get in touch, she’d have done it by now. And she certainly wouldn’t have run away from me outside her kickboxing class.” She shook her head and stuffed four chips into her mouth. “He also said he’s spoken to the police. And they couldn’t trace the e-mails. All they could tell him was that they’d been sent from somewhere between here and the south coast. So, not particularly helpful.”
Pearl pulled the gherkin out of her burger and let it drop onto the wrapping like a surgical waste product. She wiped her fingertips on a paper napkin and slowly arranged the burger between her fingers. She didn’t really like McDonald’s, but her mum had said something this morning about sausages and she really didn’t fancy sausages, especially if Cat was making them. She brought the flaccid burger to her lips and took a small bite. Cat had already finished hers and was casting her gaze about the restaurant, as if she was looking for someone.
“Who do you think wrote them?” said Cat, her fingers hovering above Pearl’s chips.
“I think it was the woman,” said Pearl. “Jane.”
“Yeah, but—why?” Cat took three chips from Pearl’s bag and held them halfway to her mouth while she talked. “Why the hell would some woman we don’t know want to hurt Maya?”
“We don’t know everything about Maya,” said Pearl. “When you think about it, she could have been absolutely anybody.”
Cat stared at her for a moment and then nodded. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, she did just kind of appear from nowhere, didn’t she? One minute the lowly office temp, the next minute our new stepmother. And her mum and dad are kind of weird. Don’t you think? I always thought that. And that spooky friend of hers. What was her name?”
“Sara.”
“Yeah. Sara. She always hated Dad. Was kind of jealous of him, jealous of all of us. Might have been her, you know.” She shuddered before eating Pearl’s chips.
“Yes, but why would she send Maya the evil e-mails if it was Daddy she hated?”
“To get her away from him? To make her leave? I dunno.”
Pearl shook her head and took another small mouthful from her burger. “It’s that woman. Jane. I know it was. She was just . . . not normal.”
“She’s very pretty though. Prettier than Maya.”
“Pretty isn’t everything, you know,” said Pearl sharply. She dropped a screwed-up paper napkin on top of her half-eaten burger and turned her bag of fries around to face Cat. “You want these?” she said. “I’m full.”
“How can you be full? You just did an hour and a half skating. You should be starving!”
“I had a sandwich before training. I’m not hungry.”
“Oh Christ, Pearl, you’re not going all anorexic, are you?”
Pearl tutted. As if.
“You know you’ve got the most perfect body, don’t you? An athlete’s body. I wish I’d been an athlete when I was young. You know they say muscles have a memory. So if you train your body well when you’re young, it’ll be easier to keep your shape when you’re older. That would have been really useful for me . . .”
Pearl nodded. She honestly didn’t care about bodies or muscles or eating disorders. There were girls in her class who talked about being skinny and being fat, but she couldn’t see what the big deal was.
They got home ten minutes later, and Cat gave Otis his takeaway, which he unwrapped and ate at the kitchen table with his homework at his elbow. The doors were open from the kitchen onto the garden and Pearl could hear the sound of adult conversation drifting through. She poked her head around the door and saw her mum and Paul sitting side by side in the sun, a bottle of wine on the table to their right, glasses in their hands catching the golden light of the lowering sun. Mum was wearing a pale-gold knitted dress, cap sleeves, just above the knee. It was the same color as her hair and her earrings and her strappy sandals. She looked, for a moment, in that golden light, like a goddess. She looked almost too beautiful, and it hurt Pearl’s eyes to look at her.
Paul Wilson was talking quietly, directly into her mum’s ear. Pearl couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then Pearl’s mum threw her head back and laughed at something, clasped her long throat with one hand and caressed it. Paul looked delighted to have made her laugh like that and squeezed her knee with his hand. They looked like film stars. Pearl, with her sweat-drenched hair, old jeans, half a cheap burger swilling about in her stomach, felt like an urchin peering through the windows of a gilded palace. She was about to head back indoors when her mother noticed her and called her over.
“Hello, darling,” she said, gesturing for her to join her, circling Pearl’s hips inside her outstretched arm, pulling her tight towards her. “I’m really sorry I didn’t come to collect you, Paul surprised me with a last-minute dinner invitation and we’d been rebuilding all day at work so I was filthy. Really needed a good soak.”
“Hi, Pearl,” said Paul, smiling his easy smile at her. “Had a good day?”
She shrugged. “It was OK.”
“How’s the skating?”
“It was good.” She wanted to tell her mum about nailing the double axel but the golden dress and film-star aura put her off her stride. If her mum had been where she was supposed to be, standing in the kitchen, in jeans and a top, prodding sausages in a frying pan, covered in a light film of plaster dust and lint from the rebuild, she would have told her. She would have told her everything. But this version of her mum didn’t look like she’d care about double axels.
“You’ve had supper?”
“I had a burger. At McDonald’s.”
“Oh,” said Caroline. “Good!”
“It wasn’t good,” said Pearl. “It was crap.”
Caroline laughed as if Pearl had said the funniest thing ever. “Oh my God,” she said to Paul, “I’ve created middle-class monsters!”
“I’m not a monster.”
Her mum laughed again. “No, of course not, darling. I was just teasing. Have you got any homework?”
Pearl sighed. “Yes,” she said. “I think so.”
“Maybe Cat could give you a hand with it.” She turned to Paul. “We’ve got to go soon, haven’t we?”
/> Paul consulted his mobile phone, glanced up at Pearl, gave her a strangely inquiring look and said, “Actually, we’ve got about twenty minutes. What homework is it?”
“Maths,” she said, “and some literacy.”
Paul smiled. “You can bring it out here if you like?” he said. “See if I can help you out?”
Pearl looked at her golden mum, inhaled the jasmine scent of her, glanced at her freshly painted toenails. “No,” she said, “thank you.”
“Are you sure?” he said, smiling. “I’m pretty sure I can still remember all that stuff.”
“Go on,” said her mum, and Pearl knew she was just saying it to make Paul happy. “You do your homework with Paul, and I’ll go in and make you some sausages.”
“What sort of sausages?”
“Chipolatas.”
Pearl thought of her mum tying an apron around her luminous gold dress and making herself smell of sausage grease. And then she thought of being on her own out here with Paul. She liked Paul but she did not want to be on her own with him. And Cat was rubbish at homework. She didn’t focus, kept picking up her smartphone and playing with it halfway through a sum. Pearl’s head swam with conflicting desires. In the end she said nothing, just shook her head and went indoors.
“Pearl?” her mother called in her wake.
“I’m fine,” she called back, exchanging a look with Otis. “Don’t worry.”
Cat had already gone upstairs to her room and Beau was at Dad’s. The kitchen was clean and tidy. Coming home usually provided the perfect counterpoint to the chill and the ice and the closed-minded focus of her training sessions. But today there were no toys anywhere, no dirty pans, no warm rumble of roasting food coming from the oven, no half-unpacked carrier bags of shopping on the counter. She switched on the TV, and found herself a suitably raucous and brainless show on the Disney Channel. Then she tucked her hair neatly behind her ears, took a stack of Marmite rice cakes from a packet in the bread bin, peeled open the Velcro fastening of her schoolbag and pulled out her homework.
