Ray stuck his head round the door. ‘We’re off to my mum’s,’ he said. ‘Probably stay over.’
And leave me in the dark? My chest ached, I wanted him to stay. When I spoke, I tried to modulate my voice. ‘And when can we talk?’
A flicker of irritation pinched at his mouth. ‘Soon. Maybe tomorrow.’
‘This is really hard, Ray, you shutting me out.’
‘It’s not like that,’ he said.
‘It is.’
‘I need a bit of time.’
Stalemate. What was I now? The enemy? No longer the lover? Not even a friend? ‘Hold me.’ I hated the neediness but I wanted to be honest about my own feelings.
He hesitated. If he leaves now, I thought, without touching me, that’s it. It’s over. Whatever else, if he can’t give me that basic reassurance then why would I want him any more?
I met his eyes, tried to brighten my face a fraction, show a glimmer of hope in the misery. He came towards me. In silence we embraced. I drank in the smell of him, salt and musk, felt the soft, brushed cotton of his shirt collar, the breadth of his chest, the way the bones in his shoulder blades fit beneath my hands.
I could have slept there.
Then he left.
FOURTEEN
Diane came over, bringing food: a Moroccan stew. Chickpeas, turnips and dates in a glossy marinade full of garlic and spices.
Diane listened out for Jamie while I got Maddie ready for bed. I have to hang on to this, I told myself. Whatever happens with Ray, I still have Maddie and Diane. Count my blessings. I imagined Chloe Beswick putting her kids to bed, numb and trying to make sense of her brother’s death. And Libby, who had never been able to watch Charlie bathe Rowena, never seen him cradle his daughter or gaze at her. What of Laura, who had denied Ray the knowledge of his second son? Did she hate him? Had he broken her heart when he got entangled with me? And now that he’d found out about the child, what would she do? What would he do?
Diane was as frustrated as I was that Ray hadn’t gone into the details of his meeting with Laura. ‘And now he’s gone running home to mummy,’ she said, scathingly, ‘to avoid talking.’
‘To be fair,’ I pointed my wine glass at her, ‘that had been arranged for a while.’
‘If you have to be fair…’ she complained.
‘Well, I am,’ I insisted. ‘Renowned for it.’ The wine was talking. I’d already had several glasses and if social services had descended on me then I might well have been regarded as unfit to be in charge of a strange infant.
‘She’ll do her nut – Nana Tello,’ I said. ‘Frogmarch them down the aisle. Whisk the baby off for baptism.’
‘Will he tell her?’ Diane asked.
‘Maybe not yet.’ The more I considered it the more it rankled. ‘If he has – before even talking to me properly, well…’
Diane’s look was knowing. ‘You’ll do what exactly?’
I sighed. ‘I don’t know.’
‘And what about Jamie?’
‘Ditto. As far as the kids are concerned, she’s overstayed her welcome. I do realize I can’t let it drift on indefinitely – it’ll make it impossible for me to work apart from anything else – but I’m not prepared to pick up the phone just yet.’ Day six now. I tried to imagine making that call, some child protection worker on the phone listening to me try to justify why I had waited so long to report an abandoned infant. A social worker turning up in a car, taking Jamie. And perhaps the mystery of who that little girl was never answered.
‘I can’t believe her mother’s not rung,’ I said. ‘Not a word. She must be thinking about her, worried sick about her.’
‘Yeah.’ Diane stuck a bowl of grapes in front of me.
‘About work,’ I said, ‘if I get really stuck…’
She groaned and dropped her head in her hands.
‘Only if I can’t find anyone else,’ I rushed to say.
‘It was a one-off,’ she complained. ‘That’s what you said. Anyway, I’m away Monday and Tuesday.’ She grinned with relief.
‘Where?’
‘Dublin. New gallery have given me a room for the glass.’ Before her project on Cuba, Diane had spent time with a glass blower and out of that had created an installation. She used thousands of pieces of smooth, coloured glass to make a pathway and a ‘curtain’ that the viewer walked through. The resulting sound, first the crinkle and crunch of the path, then the resulting chiming of the curtain and the way light spangled from the suspended globes and icicles, was wonderful. We’d gone to the preview at the Lowry in Salford. Most critics had raved but one influential commentator had been less appreciative – ‘a tacky fly-curtain that will appeal to lovers of whimsy and the knick-knack brigade’.
‘He can sit on it and swivel,’ Diane had muttered darkly at the time. But she had complete faith in her work and its value. I envied her that self-belief, that confidence.
Diane listened while I talked about Damien Beswick, and where that left my enquiry. I admitted to her that I wished I’d given him a little more hope at that last meeting.
‘Would that have been misleading?’
‘Yes, I suppose. At the time I was still so unsure.’
‘Hindsight’s a bugger,’ she said succinctly. ‘But now you believe him?’
‘I’d be a fool not to – his dying message to the world,’ I said. ‘It’s such a waste; he wasn’t much more than a kid.’
‘What about the other man’s family, the Carters – they must be all over the place?’
‘They are. And the girlfriend, the one who hired me. Going through all that and then finding that everything they’ve been told, everything they believed about that day is suddenly meaningless. It must feel like it’s happening all over again.’
‘Mummy.’ Maddie stood in the doorway, her wrists and ankles sticking out of her pyjamas, shoulders hunched. Her face was white. ‘I had a scary dream.’
‘Come on.’ I got to my feet and went to her. ‘Let’s get you back to bed.’
‘I’ll get going,’ Diane said. ‘See myself out.’
‘Have fun in Dublin.’
‘I will, and let me know… anything… everything.’
‘Know what?’ Maddie yawned as we went upstairs.
‘Oh, nothing special. So what was this dream?’ She didn’t need to hear about any of the uncertainty swilling round in my life. Not until things were clearer and I was surer where we were heading. If Ray and I were over. And what would happen to Maddie and me.
I lay awake most of that night, any chance of sleep ambushed by Jamie, who woke each time I drifted off. My mind was chewing over my worries. I wasn’t the only person to miss signs of Damien’s fragility but I longed to make reparation. Eventually I persuaded myself that the best thing I could do for Chloe, and in Damien’s memory, was to actively support her attempts to clear his name. By extension anything I could find that helped the police catch the real culprit would also help Libby and the Carters.
I’m the sort of person who copes with anxiety by doing something. Problem solving. If I could focus on my investigation, work hard, it would help and give me the hope that I could achieve results and make things better. With that in mind, I set out to make good use of Sunday by combining business and pleasure. I loaded the car with baby supplies, packed Maddie and Jamie in and drove out to Thornsby to visit the site where Charlie had lost his life. I’d no expectation of entering the property – presumably it would have been sold on, the floor ripped up and replaced or professionally cleaned. There might be people living there, or perhaps it was still a holiday home for someone. Would they know the history? Would any of them get a funny feeling about the house, sense a cold spot near the door or a peculiar anxiety in the dark?