by Gytha Lodge
Michelle dipped her head, looking as embarrassed as he felt. But pleased, too. As if him being there meant as much to her as it did to him.
“Is it a stag party?”
Jonah glanced back at his table and found some kind of a voice. “Yeah,” he said. “Do you remember Roy?”
“Oh, I…Yes!” She leaned her head to look. “He had a Dutch girlfriend, didn’t he?”
“Yup! Wedding’s on the fifteenth.”
“Tell him congrats from me,” she said.
Jonah nodded at her. At the woman he’d spent six months unable to get over, until Jojo had reentered his life. He’d been so happy to feel hardened against her.
“What about you?” he asked. “What are you up to?”
“Engagement party,” she said. “They ran out of bubbles, so we made a break for it.”
She nodded to her friends. He realized he’d been rude to them, and held out a hand to each in turn. He had an impression of wariness and guessed Michelle had told them who Jonah was. They went back to their conversation immediately afterward, and he was relieved.
“How are you?” he asked then, in a lower voice.
“I’m OK.” Michelle gave a funny little smile. “I gave up teaching.”
“You did?” Jonah asked.
“Annoyingly, you were right,” she said with a little laugh. “I was starting to hate them all.”
“I wasn’t right,” Jonah replied with a rush of shame. “Everything I said to you was wrong. I was an arsehole.”
“Well, sometimes arseholes get it right,” she said with a shrug. “It’s been a massive relief having grown-up conversations at work.”
“I have those,” Jonah said. “But I think they’re sort of overrated.” Michelle laughed, and it was without any conscious thought that he said, “I miss you.”
“I thought you’d be happy I was gone,” she said, her eyes searching his face. “All I was doing was making you unhappy.”
“No,” Jonah said. “I was making me unhappy.” And then, after a pause, he said, “See? I need you. I can’t even do grammar anymore.”
Michelle laughed again, a louder, freer sound. She tucked her hair behind her ear, and said, “Do you want to get out of here?”
“Yeah,” Jonah said, trying not to grin too widely. “I do.”
* * *
—
HANSON HADN’T MEANT to work so late. At five, as everyone else was heading off, she had decided to have a brief look at the figure in the cap. A quick check. That was all.
The brief look had led her to think she might be able to tell who it was if she tidied it all up enough, and she’d spent a good two hours using the image-enhancement tool that their Intelligence team could probably use a lot better. The results hadn’t been great, but she ended up with one snippet where the lower half of the face was visible. After that, she’d gone online and searched images of all their suspects and tried to put them alongside, to see if their face shapes matched.
She’d eventually had to admit to herself that you couldn’t tell anything for sure from the image she had, and she’d shut her machine down with a feeling of exasperation. It was only then that she realized she would be catching the bus back, which meant a wait in the day’s constant rain.
Groaning inwardly, she decided it would be better to run to the bus stop and at least build up a little warmth on the way. She pulled her running kit back on, which was mercifully dry if crispy after many hours on the station’s bathroom radiator.
She eventually left the deserted station in a lucky dry spell. Putting her ’80s playlist on and slotting her iPhone into the sleeve of her running jacket, she started to jog across the small visitor car park.
She was halfway across when one of the few remaining cars suddenly started up, its headlights cutting across the air in front of her. She jumped, then laughed at herself. She nodded to the invisible driver as she ran across in front of them, out toward the entrance to the main road.
Once she had passed, the car eased its way out of the parking space and started to follow her. She could tell by the direction of its lights that it was now behind her. Turning her head, she diverted to run across the empty parking spaces to her left, giving it extra room to pass.
But as she ran on the car maintained its slow crawl behind her. There was another car parked ahead, so she had to dodge back into the lane the following vehicle was in. Despite there still being plenty of room, the driver made no effort to go past.
She began to feel a creeping sense of unease. Thoughts of Zoe’s body made their way through her mind, and she cut abruptly across a gap between two cars, running over the grass toward Southern Road. There were cars moving in both lanes, but Hanson chose a small gap and went straight across, and then sprinted round the corner of the Novotel and into the retail park car park. There, she slowed down, knowing that you couldn’t drive into the car park without going all the way around onto Harbor Parade. By the time anyone had a chance to follow her, she would be through it and at the bus stop by TGI Fridays.
There was a bus pulling in as she drew up to the stop, and by the time she was on it she’d started to feel ridiculous. Nobody was following her. She was just freaking out.
* * *
—
SHE GOT OFF the bus two miles from home, with two housing estates to run through before she arrived. She’d chilled off on the bus and was glad of the movement.
The darkness of the run was punctuated by visions of early Christmas lights. It was one of the oddly moving things about living in one of the less expensive areas of Southampton. Everyone seemed to want to light their houses up more brightly, for longer.
She liked to sprint the last section to her house, and she picked it up with a quarter of a mile to go. She started to count down as she got closer, knowing she could start from roughly sixty at this point. She pushed through the countdown.
Forty seconds. Come on.
The music playing from her iPhone was unhelpful. It was more a steady keep-it-going track than a sprint one. She was blowing hard, and her legs felt like they were being used by someone else. But she pushed onward to thirty seconds. To twenty.
And then, at eighteen seconds to go, she stopped. Not because of the pain in her body, but because there was someone standing next to the door of her house, just within the radius cast by the overhead porch light.
She thought of the car back at the station car park, and then for some reason she thought about Zoe, stopping to talk to someone as she arrived home. About the fear in the way she had stood and shifted, and how the figure had been waiting for her.
Hanson pulled her earphones out and backed up a few steps, then moved sideways into the driveway of the nearest house so that she was screened by the conifers on their front boundary. She hoped her neighbors weren’t watching.
She couldn’t see her own driveway now, but she could see the whole way down the road. She’d know if the person waiting for her left.
It might be the chief, she thought suddenly. Or Ben.
She slid her phone out of the pocket on her sleeve and brought it to life, silencing her music entirely. Lightman or the chief would have messaged, at least, before turning up. But there was nothing on her home screen, and nothing when she checked her messages, either.
She lifted her head and saw a figure emerging from her driveway. They glanced up the road toward her, and she moved farther into the shade, her view obscured by branches. But when she took another look a moment later they’d turned the other way, walking steadily off toward town.
Hanson watched them furiously, trying to work out if this was someone she knew. She was confident they were male. The short hair and the shape of the back in a dark jacket. The gait.
She found herself certain, as she watched them, that this was no friend. And she suspected this was someone who shouldn�
��t know where she lived, someone connected with the case.
She pulled out her front door key, thankful to find that she had remembered to lock the door when leaving for her run that morning. She paused inside with the door closed, and then, quickly and with arms that shook slightly, went to pack her overnight bag.
September—fourteen months before
September wasn’t supposed to be like this. The heavy blue skies and clammy warmth made Zoe imagine that Aidan had decided to take her with him to Kyoto. She daydreamed as she walked through Winchester with sultry music playing through her headphones, about the two of them leaving the conference behind and climbing a mountain to escape the heat. And then she would think about a wet, heated kiss. About his hands on her. And then she snapped suddenly awake at a pedestrian crossing, flushed and wondering whether anyone had been able to tell what she was thinking.
She tried to get her mind back on her work, which had been going so well that she didn’t want to lose momentum. She was keen to finish her new piece today, regardless of how long it took her. After that, she was going to take a photo and send it to Aidan so he could see it, this new work in which she’d captured him along with herself.
Walking from the muggy heat outside into the cool of the School of Art was like gliding into water. Zoe pulled her hair up to expose the back of her neck and shivered as a blast of cold from one of the air-conditioning units hit her damp skin.
She climbed the stairs to the first floor and pulled her earphones out of her pocket in readiness to retreat from the world. She wound the cable around the fingers of her right hand, enjoying the squeezed feeling in her fingertips.
There was a slightly strange atmosphere as she walked in. Mitz and Sinead were standing together near the door and by the way they grew silent immediately, she thought they had probably been talking about her.
Caz, one of the quieter girls who sometimes brought her coffee, stood and came over to her with a smile that was almost defiant. “I like the piece,” she said.
“Oh…” Zoe wasn’t sure quite how to respond. “Thank you.”
Caz trailed along beside her as she made her way to her corner.
“There’s something pretty great in destruction,” Caz said. “Isn’t there?”
And then Zoe was confronted with the reality of what she was talking about. Her current, almost-finished piece, Descent, had been cut through with vivid red. The angelic male shape in the background, which stood in its own different light, remained untouched. But across the pale figure in the center had been scrawled the painted word “Whore.”
* * *
—
THERE WAS STILL an awful feeling in her stomach as she arrived home and lowered herself onto the sofa. Annette had, of course, been wonderful as soon as Zoe had alerted her to the vandalism. Her art tutor had kicked security into action, and set about trying to find the culprit. She had also subjected all of her students to a threatening lecture about the integrity of art and told them they needed to come forward if they knew anything, before the campus security cameras made it obvious.
Nobody had confessed or revealed anything, however, and for all Annette’s reassurances that it was easily fixed Zoe felt like the piece had been ruined. She wasn’t sure she would ever feel able to work on it again, or spend time in that art department without being afraid of who was watching her.
She wished Maeve could have been home. She would have been so upbeat and direct about it all that Zoe would have been forced to cheer up, and the good feeling might have stayed with her until bedtime. But with Maeve out at her Alpha meeting and Aidan half a world away, she felt alone and vulnerable.
She was still sitting there when someone knocked on the door, and she felt a rush of affection for Maeve, who must have come home early and forgotten her keys. But as she opened the door, she saw Victor instead, with a fierce look on his face.
In spite of an immediate desire to close the door again, she asked him in. He clearly had something on his mind, and it might even help her to think about someone else’s worries.
“I’m sorry,” Victor said as soon as he’d sat on the sofa. He often apologized when he needed to talk about something, and Zoe smiled at him and shook her head.
“You don’t need to be sorry. Everyone needs a chat sometimes. Shall I put the kettle on?”
“It’s OK,” he said. “I…I’m not upset. Well, I mean, it’s hard. But not really for me so much as…” He gave a funny little sigh. “There’s something you need to see.”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket, then left her waiting in a state of gradually increasing nervousness while he loaded something up.
“Here,” he said after a minute, and held the phone out to her.
Zoe took it, unsure of what she was going to see but feeling a dull sense of certainty that it was going to be about Aidan.
It was a photograph on a Facebook page, she vaguely realized. But it was hard to register other details when what she was seeing was a photograph of Aidan and his wife with a panorama behind them. It was clearly a selfie taken by Greta, who looked outdoorsy and happy and utterly beautiful. Their arms were slung around each other, and they were smiling.
“It was taken this afternoon,” Victor said quietly.
Zoe saw that he was right. It was from today, and the location was tagged as Kyoto. Which was where the conference was supposed to be. And she realized that the view was familiar. He’d sent her a photo of it that afternoon, only there had been no Greta in it. No Aidan. Just the view and the words “Missing you.”
The adrenaline running through her made everything feel unreal. She started scrolling pointlessly down the newsfeed, and realized that it was Aidan’s. He’d been tagged in the photo. Greta was tagged, too.
“He must not have realized she’d tagged him,” Victor said.
“But…why didn’t it show up on my Facebook?” she asked blankly. “He’s my friend, and all his stuff should show up straightaway.”
“I’m guessing he’s got settings that block a lot of things from you, just in case,” Victor said. “But he forgot to block me.”
Zoe had to walk away from Victor. She couldn’t stand seeing the sympathy and triumph all mixed up in his eyes. She thought she might be sick, but couldn’t stop looking at that photo, scrolling up and down to see if the date changed. Checking to see if it was a memory from a previous year, but knowing that it wasn’t.
She picked up her own phone, and opened WhatsApp. Opening their last conversation brought up Aidan’s photo of that empty view, and it felt as though it were burning her. When she’d asked where it was, he’d written a cheery “Saga Valley viewed from above!”
Below her original reply that it was beautiful and she missed him too, Zoe started typing another message.
I’m breaking up with you. I’m doing it over WhatsApp, because you don’t deserve anything else. You fucking liar. You made me believe it was all legitimate now. But you’re on holiday with your wife. You never broke things off with her, and I know that now. I’m done with you.
She sent the message, and then used Victor’s phone to save the image of Aidan and Greta. She sent it to herself over Messenger.
“What are you doing?”
“Breaking up with him, and making sure I have proof so I can’t be talked round,” she said. She handed his phone back. “Thank you.”
Victor took it and nodded. And then he said, “I’m so sorry. Do you want me to make you a cup of tea?”
Zoe tried to smile at him. “That’s supposed to be my line. Don’t. Look, I…I need to be on my own for a while. OK? I’ll let you know when I feel up to having visitors.”
Victor nodded, but his expression was somewhere between disappointed and rebellious. “I always think it’s better to have company…”
“Not just yet,” she said firmly. “But thank you.”
>
Before he left, he gave her a hug. She couldn’t relax into it. She was too angry and hurt and tensed up against everyone, including Victor.
“See you soon,” she said.
She couldn’t sit down after that. Not until, twenty minutes later, Aidan had called back to ask what the hell was going on.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, and the anger in his voice was awful. Not just hurtful, but a little frightening.
Zoe hung up without speaking, and then sent him the photo of him and Greta, and then she silenced his messages so she wouldn’t have to listen to any more lies.
Jonah woke at six with a piercing headache and felt the weight of anxiety descend upon him. He was often like this when a hangover struck. He would feel a huge sense of regret and fear of everything he’d done, a seamless linking of the choice to drink too much with every other decision he’d made.
Being in a strange hotel room didn’t help. As he levered himself upright and glanced over at Michelle, who was still in a deep sleep with her hair spread over her face, he felt like he was in some strange parallel universe where they hadn’t broken up. Where the last year hadn’t happened.
He needed water, and Tylenol, and his own bed. Until he’d slept this off, he wouldn’t be able to think about all of it rationally. He could decide then whether he’d messed everything up or recovered something he’d considered lost.
Michelle didn’t stir as he gathered his clothes and dressed. There was no reaction as he pulled out the sheet of Tylenol tabs he had in his jacket pocket and popped four of them out, two of which he put next to her on the bedside table before he went to fill a glass with water from the bottle in the mini bar and placed it alongside. She only gave a vague murmur as he leaned down to tell her he’d better get going. He hesitated before leaving, worried that she’d think he’d used her somehow.
