“I owe you nothing,” he said, but he put his hands up in a gesture of surrender, then closed his eyes for a moment. “Zoe: I didn’t know Zoe so well; I hardly got the chance… I saw her first in a huge photograph from a newspaper that was put up on the wall at the station, you know, after she poleaxed a mugger with a watermelon. She was like a heroine to the guys, and a kind of dirty joke too.”
“What was she like, though?”
“I never met her.”
“What about Jenny? You must have known Jenny well.” I watched his face.
“Jenny was something else.” He almost grinned at the memory, then checked himself. “Small, too. You’re all small,” he added musingly. “But strong, energetic, dense, dark, angry. Coiled wire, Jenny was. Clever. Impatient. Seriously insane sometimes.”
“Unhappy?”
“That as well.” He put a hand on my knee and I let it lie there for a moment, though his touch sent a wave of repulsion through me. “She’d have bitten your head off for saying it, though. Bit of a dragon.”
I stood up, to be free of his hand; poured myself some more coffee, to give myself something to do.
“We ought to go soon,” I said.
“Nadia.”
“I don’t want to be late.”
“I lie in bed at night and I see you, your face, your body.”
“Keep away.”
“I know you.”
“You think I’m going to die.”
Before we left, I phoned Links, while Cameron was in the room with me, and told him that Detective Inspector Stadler was driving me to see my parents, and that we should be back mid- to late afternoon. I could hear the note of bemusement in Links’s voice: He couldn’t understand why I should be ringing up and telling him my arrangements. I didn’t care, though. I repeated myself loudly and clearly: So he couldn’t help but hear, so that Cameron couldn’t help but hear, either.
We didn’t talk much on the way there, up the M4 then along small lanes. I gave him curt instructions, and he drove and looked across at me with his heavy gaze. I sat with my hands on my lap and tried to look out my window, but I could feel his head turning toward me, his brooding stare.
“What do your parents do?” he asked, just before we arrived.
“Dad was a teacher, geography, but he took early retirement. Mum did odd things, but mostly she stayed at home and looked after me and my brother. Right here, at the T-junction. You’re not coming in, remember.”
The house was a thirties semi, much like all the others along the cul-de-sac. Cameron drew up outside it.
“Hold on one minute,” he said as I reached for the door handle. “There’s something I ought to tell you.”
“What?”
“There was another letter.”
I lay back in the car seat and closed my eyes.
“Oh God,” I said.
“You made me promise to tell you everything.”
“What did it say?”
“It was short. It just said, ‘You’re being brave, but it won’t do you any good.’ Something like that.”
“And that was all?” I opened my eyes and turned my head to look at him. “When was it sent?”
“Four days ago.”
“Have you got anything from the note?”
“We’re using it to augment our psychological evaluation.”
“Nothing,” I said with a sigh. “Well, I guess it doesn’t really change much. We knew he was still out there, didn’t we?”
“Yes, we did.”
“I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”
“Nadia.”
“What?”
“You are being brave.” I stared at him. “It’s true,” he said.
I looked at him.
“You mean brave like Zoe and Jenny?”
He didn’t reply.
Mum had made a neck of lamb stew, with rice-overcooked so it stuck together in lumps-and a green salad. I used to love lamb stew when I was a girl. How do you ever tell your mother you’ve gone off something? It was hard to eat, gristly and with too many sharp splinters of bones. Dad opened a bottle of red wine, although neither of them ever drink at lunchtime. They were so pleased to see me. They fussed over me, as if I were a stranger. I felt like a stranger with these two nice old people, who weren’t really old yet.
Always cautious, making their way through life in a gingerly fashion. They were careful with me, as well, waiting up for me every time I went out in the evenings, putting a hot-water bottle in my bed on cold nights, telling me to put on an extra layer when it was cold, sharpening my crayons for me before the beginning of each new school term. It used to drive me insane, their care, the way they thought about every detail of my life. Now the memory made me feel intensely nostalgic: a lump of homesickness beneath my ribs.
I thought I would wait until after lunch to tell them. We drank coffee in the living room, with mint chocolates. I could see Cameron sitting at the wheel of his car. I cleared my throat.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” I said.
“Yes?”
Mum looked at me expectantly, apprehensively.
“I… there’s a man who-” I stopped and looked at the pleasure flowering on her face. She thought I had a serious boyfriend at last; she had never thought much of Max as a long-term possibility. I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth. “Oh, it’s nothing really.”
“No, go on. Tell us. We want to hear, don’t we, Tony?”
“Later,” I said, standing up abruptly. “First I want Dad to show me what’s going on in the garden.”
The plums were ripening on the tree, and he was growing runner beans, lettuce, and potatoes. There were tomato plants in his greenhouse, and he insisted on giving me a plastic tray of cherry tomatoes to take back with me.
“Your mother’s got some jars of strawberry jam she has set by for you,” he said.
I took hold of his arm.
“Dad,” I said. “Dad, I know we’ve had our disagreements”-homework, cigarettes, drink, makeup, staying out late, politics, drugs, boyfriends, lack of boyfriends, serious jobs, you name it-“but I just wanted to say that you’ve been a good father.”
He made an embarrassed tutting sound in the back of his throat and patted my shoulder.
“Your mother will be wondering what’s keeping us.”
I said good-bye in the hall. I couldn’t hug them properly because I was holding the tomatoes and the jam. I pressed my cheek against Mum’s and breathed in the familiar smell of vanilla, powder, soap, and mothballs. Smell of my childhood.
“Good-bye,” I said, and they smiled and waved. “Good-bye.”
For just one moment, I let myself think I would never see them again, but you can’t be like that; you can’t walk down the path and get into the car and smile and keep on going if you let yourself be like that.
All the way home, I pretended to sleep. I told Stadler that he should stay in his car after he had done his check round the flat. I wanted to be alone for a while. He started to protest, but the pager strapped to the belt of his trousers bleeped, and I slammed the door in his face.
I sat on the edge of my bed with my hands on my knees. I closed my eyes and then opened them again. I listened to myself breathing. I waited, not for anything to happen but for this feeling to go away.
Then the telephone rang, as if it was ringing inside my skull. I reached out a hand, picked it up.
“Nadia.” Morris’s voice was hoarse and urgent.
“Yes?”
“It’s me. Don’t say anything. Listen, Nadia. I’ve found something out. I can’t tell you over the phone. We’ve got to meet.”
I felt the fear growing in my stomach, a great tumor of fear.
“What is it?”
“Come to my flat, as soon as you can. There’s something you’ve got to see. Is anyone with you?”
“No. They’re outside.”
“Who is it?”
“Stadler.”
I heard the intake of Morris’s breath. When he spoke again, he was very calm and slow.