by Mark Edwards
Darpak was great with the kids too. He often had Olivia and Felix over, babysitting when Jessica and Will wanted to go out. He’d babysat only a week ago so they could go to the cinema, and had said they could drop the kids off any evening. ‘I like having them here,’ he’d said. ‘It gets a bit lonely on my own.’
Before Jessica could tell them what Olivia had said, Felix piped up, ‘She said Izzy had been talking to her.’
Darpak and Nina gawped at him, then at Jessica, who tried to laugh it off. ‘I told you, it’s just a silly thing she said.’
‘What did Izzy say to her?’ Nina asked, pouring herself a glass of wine. ‘I mean, what does Olivia say she said?’
Jessica repeated what Mrs Rose had told her.
Darpak frowned and Jessica turned to him. ‘You’re not upset, are you?’
The frown vanished. ‘Why would I be upset? I think it’s sweet. And I don’t find it hard to believe. Isabel hated doing her accounts. I can easily hear her telling Olivia that numeracy is boring. I mean, it is boring, isn’t it? Even I think it’s boring and I’m an investment manager.’
‘I think it’s creepy,’ announced Felix.
All the adults turned their attention to him. He shuffled on his chair. ‘I read this story about this girl who becomes possessed . . .’
‘Are you letting him read horror stories?’ Nina asked, shocked.
‘It’s only a comic,’ Felix said. ‘This girl is murdered and her spirit is restless, roaming the earth along with all these other women. Avenging angels. Then she enters the body of her little sister and gets revenge on the people who killed her. It’s really cool, actually. It’s Romanian, and the woman who wrote it was actually abducted herself and—’
‘Well, luckily, there are no such things as avenging spirits,’ Jessica said, cutting him off.
‘No such thing as spirits, full stop,’ said Will.
Nina put down her glass. ‘But Jess, what about everything that happened when you and Izzy—’
Jessica interrupted. She didn’t want Felix to hear about that. ‘Felix, why don’t you go and watch the film with Olivia?’
‘Because it’s boring. Uncle Darpak, can I play on the PS4?’
‘Of course.’
Felix grinned and headed off to the living room and his uncle’s sixty-inch TV. Jessica watched him go with a sense of alarm. He would be a teenager before too long. He wouldn’t be her little boy any more.
But she didn’t have time to dwell on this because, as soon as the door shut, Darpak began to cry. He didn’t sob. His shoulders didn’t shake. But tears appeared on his cheeks and he swallowed hard, blinking furiously.
‘Oh, Darpak,’ Jessica said. ‘Are you okay?’
Nina did nothing but stare at him, apparently stunned by the sight of her usually stoic big brother crying. Will too seemed typically awkward in the presence of another man’s tears.
‘I miss her,’ Darpak said, and Jessica put her arms around him, hugging him until the tears subsided.
‘We all do,’ she said.
He found a tissue and blew his nose, smiling sheepishly.
‘I do think it’s sweet, though, what Olivia said. Hey, I’ve got a box of Izzy’s old jewellery upstairs – costume jewellery, I mean. There are lots of bags too. Purses. Lovely stuff for a little girl to play dressing-up with.’
Jessica wasn’t sure. She was about to say so when Will said, ‘That sounds great, doesn’t it, Jess?’
She looked at her husband. They had been together since she was twenty-three and he was twenty-eight. He was better-looking now than ever, the speckles of grey in his stubble and the crinkles around his eyes adding character to his face. Apart from that, he had hardly changed his appearance. He still kept his hair a little too long, though it was starting to thin at the crown, and wore the same clothes he’d worn when they met: jeans, hoodies, Converse and ironic T-shirts. When she mentioned it, he said everyone in the tech industry dressed like that, that he’d feel uncomfortable in a suit. He wasn’t lying. When she visited him in his office near Old Street, she saw dozens of men who looked like Will. On the rare occasion when he did put a suit on, for a wedding or christening, the novelty made her want to rip it off and jump on him.
‘I guess,’ she said.
‘Great. I’ll go and fetch it now.’ Darpak hurried from the room.
A cry came from somewhere else in the house. Jessica leapt up and found Olivia standing in the doorway of the snug. She was sucking her thumb, something she did only very occasionally these days, when she was anxious.
‘What’s the matter, angel?’
‘It’s the Bergens. They’re scary. I don’t like them.’ The Bergens were the bad guys in the film.
Jessica picked her up and hugged her. ‘Why don’t you come to the kitchen? Uncle Darpak’s got a present for you. If you’re lucky, maybe he’ll give it to you now.’
‘And can I have a snack?’
‘Are you hungry again?’
Olivia grinned, showing her perfect white teeth. ‘Mummy, I’m always hungry.’
Nina found a packet of crisps for Olivia, and Jessica let her play with her phone while they waited for Darpak to return. Will was playing with his own phone too, and Jessica had the urge to snatch it from his hand. Why couldn’t he stay in the room? She was aware, as she watched him, that her irritation level was rising rapidly. Maybe it wasn’t surprising. She was exhausted and worried about Olivia and, on top of that, she was really missing her sister. She could feel it bubbling up, the rage that lived inside her, and she tried to suppress it. But it was no good.
She never used to be like this. She never used to lose her temper. She remembered something Izzy once said to her when they were talking about stress. ‘Imagine there’s a gauge inside you, measuring your mood from one to ten, with one being utterly chilled out and ten being off-your-rocker furious. The more stressed you are, the higher the needle sits. You should be down at three or four most of the time.’
But these days, Jessica’s needle was always hovering around seven. It didn’t take much to send it soaring to ten.
Will must have sensed it because he glanced up from his screen and, seeing her face, put the phone away.
‘Sorry, just checking the football scores. Are you all right?’ he asked, but Darpak re-entered the room before she could answer. His face was slightly damp as if he’d just washed it, cleaning away the tracks of his tears. He set a cardboard box on the table.
‘This is for you, Livvy.’
Olivia dropped Jessica’s phone and the packet of crisps and peered into the box, her face lit up with wonder. ‘Oh, wow.’
‘This all used to belong to Auntie Izzy,’ Darpak said. ‘I want you to have it.’
Olivia squealed with delight and reached into the box, rifling through the old jewellery and purses. She pulled out a necklace with a silver pendant shaped liked a bat.
‘Can I put this on now?’ she asked.
‘Sure.’ Darpak put it over Olivia’s head. ‘It’s a little long for you.’
‘I love it!’ she exclaimed. ‘Thanks, Uncle Darpak.’
‘You’re welcome.’
She kissed his cheek. ‘Izzy says thanks too.’
She didn’t notice how his face crumpled as she held up the bat pendant.
‘This was her favourite,’ Olivia said.
They all stared at the necklace. It was a cheap old thing that Izzy had bought at Claire’s Accessories years before. Olivia grinned at them, then skipped from the room.
‘She’s right,’ Nina said in a whisper. ‘It was her favourite.’
Chapter 3
Jessica ushered Olivia into the classroom. Olivia hesitated at first, hiding behind her mum’s legs just as she had at the start of term, but eventually went inside. Jessica headed back towards the exit.
She took out her phone as she walked down the path. The Halloween decorations in the classroom had reminded her that she still needed to organise the children’s costumes.
She was so absorbed in the task of adding items to her phone’s To-Do list that she almost missed Mr Cameron, who was preparing to close the school gate.
‘Oh, hi, Mr Cameron,’ she said.
He smiled at her. He had a red mark on his neck. At first she thought it was a love bite but then she realised he had nicked himself shaving. He smelled strongly of deodorant, a cheap brand like Lynx or Sure. As always, he looked tanned and his hair was gelled into the kind of trendy, spiky style worn by many of the boys at the school, including Felix, even though Mr Cameron must have been in his mid-thirties, maybe two or three years older than Jessica. She had seen some of the other mums eyeing him up, but he wasn’t her type. There were rumours that his girlfriend was a hairdresser, hence the fashionable cut.
‘Can I have a quick word?’ Jessica said, seeing an opportunity. ‘About Olivia?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Though I have to be in class in five minutes. And please call me Ryan. It makes me feel ancient when parents call me Mr Cameron.’
‘Ryan it is. And please, call me Jessica. Not “Mum”. It makes me feel ancient when teachers call me that.’
He smiled. ‘Got it.’
She returned the smile. ‘I had a word with Olivia about sharing and calling other children names.’
‘Not calling other children names, I hope.’ He laughed, showing her his enviably white teeth. Maybe his girlfriend had got him to bleach them?
‘Oh no, I gave her a list of insults to use, all of them much better than “poohead”. I think you’re going to be very impressed.’
‘Can’t wait to hear them.’
The stream of parents exiting the school had dried up and Ryan looked meaningfully at the gate. It was time to lock the children in, and the world out, for the day.
Sometimes Jessica liked to think back to the days before she was most commonly addressed as ‘Mum’. She had gone straight from university into PR. That was how she’d met Will. The agency she worked for had landed the account of the dot-com that employed Will back then, a music download site that hadn’t lasted long. She and Will had worked closely together as he was the public face of the company, and she had accompanied him to interviews and photo shoots. The rest, like that company, was history.
Her life had been reasonably glamorous back then, when she was in her early twenties, living in a house-share in Camden. Meeting famous people, talking to journalists, going to parties and openings. And then, a few months into her relationship with Will, she had discovered she was pregnant, at the age of twenty-three. It was a shock, to say the least, but their nascent relationship had survived – thrived, in fact. Will was twenty-eight and already owned his own flat, so she moved in with him. Love and excitement got them through, and they had kept on going.
Now she and Will were married with two children – two-point-four if you included the dog – and the glamorous world of PR was a hazy memory. These days she was a one-woman band, operating from home. She had a few clients: local businesses and a couple of authors for whom she organised events and blog tours, as well as looking after their social media.
Things were quiet at the moment, though. Her authors were between books and her other clients all seemed to be cutting back on ‘unnecessary’ expenditure. Her best client, a horror novelist, had buggered off to Wales and there was still no sign of his second book. Consequently she had very little work on and not much prospect of drumming up new business before Christmas.
She texted a couple of local friends to see if they wanted to meet for coffee, but Katy was heading to the gym and Maria was on a work deadline. All her other friends had full-time jobs. If Jessica’s business didn’t pick up, she’d be looking for a job soon too.
She went into Olivia’s room to tidy up, but was distracted by the cardboard box that Darpak had given her. Jessica fished inside it and pulled out a pair of earrings and an imitation pearl necklace. Most of this stuff was ancient, from the days before Izzy could afford to buy proper jewellery. She spotted something shining inside the box and took it out. It was a sparkly butterfly brooch and seeing it made Jessica’s heart contract. Izzy used to wear it all the time when she was in her early twenties. In fact, she’d worn it a few times in the last years of her life, preferring it over the expensive items Darpak had bought her. That bat necklace too. There was something perverse but charming about Izzy’s insistence on teaming such cheap jewellery with the designer clothes she could easily afford.
Jessica was shaken from her thoughts by the sound of the landline ringing downstairs. Only one person ever called using the house phone, so Jessica knew exactly what to say when she picked it up.
‘Hi, Mum.’
They exchanged small talk for a few minutes. Mum lived in an apartment on the other side of Beckenham on an estate full of retirees. The way Mum described the goings-on there, it was like a student campus with slightly less sex and statins instead of cannabis. Mum, who was sixty-five, was ‘seeing’ a seventy-year-old gentleman named Pete who took her dancing at weekends and who still had, as Mum had revealed during a mortifying conversation, plenty of lead in his pencil.
Mum went silent for a moment and Jessica could tell she had something on her mind.
‘What is it?’ Jessica asked.
‘It’s probably nothing but . . . one of my magazines had a story last week about a woman who fell off her balcony and almost died. She was in a coma for six months.’
Mum was addicted to real-life magazines like Take a Break.
‘It wasn’t far from here,’ she said. ‘Tonbridge. When she woke up, she was brain-damaged – terribly sad – but the first thing she did was point at her husband and say “Him”. He broke down and confessed to pushing her.’
‘Mum . . .’
Her mother went on, slightly breathless. ‘Jess, listen. The thing was, until that point, everyone thought she’d fallen. She’d had a couple of drinks, you see, and the balcony railing needed fixing, and if she hadn’t come out of the coma, do you know what? The bastard would have got away with it.’
‘Mum. This has nothing to do with what happened to Izzy.’
‘How do you know that? There were no witnesses, were there? No one saw Isabel fall. Where was Darpak? That’s what I want to know.’
Jessica could feel a headache coming on. ‘Darpak was at work, Mum. We know this. He had a meeting in the morning and then went to his office. We’ve been over this before. Izzy had been taking drugs—’
There was a sharp intake of breath at the other end of the line. Mum was still in denial about Isabel’s drug use.
‘—and she and Darpak were happy. He loved her. He still loves her. Yesterday we were at his, and Izzy’s name came up and he started crying.’
‘Crocodile tears.’
‘Mum! Please. The coroner ruled that it was accidental death. Darpak had nothing to do with it. He loved her as much as we did.’
But she wasn’t listening. ‘We need to get the police to reopen the case.’
Exasperated, Jessica didn’t respond. Sometimes it was better to let silence kill the conversation. But Mum wasn’t finished. ‘Did you know that forty-four per cent of women are murdered by their partners?’
‘You mean forty-four per cent of women who are murdered are killed by their partners.’ Jessica wouldn’t normally be so pedantic but her exasperation was turning to anger, the needle on the gauge swinging towards the red zone. ‘Izzy wasn’t murdered. And you’ve got to stop thinking it and saying it. You used to really like Darpak. You should come to Sunday lunch with us.’
‘I can’t go to that house. I don’t care about his supposed alibi. They all stick together, don’t they, those City types?’
Jessica groaned. ‘He’d be heartbroken if he heard you talking like this.’
‘I thought he was already supposed to be heartbroken.’ She paused. ‘I just wonder what Izzy would tell us if she came back from the dead, like that woman in Tonbridge. I still can’t believe Izzy fell. Someone was there. Somebody pushe
d her.’
Jessica didn’t want to go over this again. She changed the subject. ‘Olivia said she wants to come and see you. She wants to give you her Christmas list.’
‘What, already?’
‘She’s been working on it since August. Shall I bring her round tomorrow, after school?’
‘That would be lovely.’
‘Actually, can I leave her with you for her tea? I need to take Felix to his swimming exam.’
‘Of course. You don’t need to ask. You know I love having her over.’
‘Thanks, Mum. I’ll pick her up as soon as I can because we’re going trick-or-treating.’
Jessica hung up before Mum could protest about how much she disliked Halloween and other imported traditions. Her heart was still beating hard as she went back into the kitchen. Caspar wandered over and lay at her feet, giving her that ‘pet me’ look, tail banging against the laminate floor. Stroking him calmed her down, but she couldn’t get what Mum had said out of her head.
She had lunch, then spent a couple of hours doing laundry, trying to get to grips with the enormous pile of washing that never seemed to shrink. When she wasn’t wondering when her life had become so dull, the conversation with Mum looped inside her head.
It was ridiculous to think that Darpak had pushed Izzy off that balcony. He was besotted with her, the most uxorious person Jessica had ever met. Of course, no one really knows what goes on behind closed doors, but Izzy hadn’t given any hints that there were problems in her marriage, and after Izzy’s death Darpak had been grief-stricken. He hadn’t shown any signs of guilt or unusual behaviour. Almost five years on, he still didn’t have a new girlfriend. He’d been on a number of dates but said none of the women could measure up to what he’d lost. And he had an alibi. The idea that his colleagues were protecting him was ridiculous.
