I nodded. I didn’t have a choice.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘See you later.’
‘Bye,’ I said, lost in thought. Whoever this mystery caller was, it wasn’t Martin. He had my home phone number already. Could it have been Mo Khan, or the police? Surely they’d contact Martin before me.
Something I’d lost? Like what?
I searched through my bag – my wallet, my keys, my phone, all present and correct. Whoever it was had known I was a schoolteacher, but not where I lived.
Not where I lived yet, I thought with a sick little start. And he’d been after my phone number.
I’d been very naïve, I realized. I had been worried that this business might follow me to the school. I hadn’t suspected that it might also follow me home.
Whoever they were, they still hadn’t phoned back when I left for the Examiner offices. I was back in the car again, idling my engine at the painted, wrought-iron gates of the school, as I had a supermarket run to do – I loathe supermarkets, so plan each trip as comprehensively and rarely as possible, as though they were expeditions to the summit of Everest. Lily is constantly telling me to have my shopping delivered, but something about this seems, I don’t know, decadent.
I was waiting for a cream-coloured station wagon to get out of my way so I could pull out. Also idling at the kerb was a scruffy dark Megane with a single man at the wheel. He was casually dressed, but something about his demeanour seemed to suggest that he would be more at home in a uniform. His back was straight, his shoulders squared, and he stared at nothing so intently that he distracted me. When I looked back at the road the station wagon was gone and had been replaced by another car. I thumped the wheel in annoyance.
Gaggles of children swarmed out of the gates, making it even more difficult to drive out of the school. I scratched my scalp, leaning on the wheel, as someone pulled up right in front of me, boxing me in, and swung wide their car door, inches away from my front bumper. Bloody madmen – their children had to run into the middle of the road in order to get in. One, Alice Wright, turned to wave at me. I smiled in a strained fashion.
As the idiot took off I pulled out right after him, managing to cut up the guy in the Megane, who pulled away from the kerb at the same moment I did. I waited for the expected honk of rage on his horn, but it never came. I glanced in my rear-view mirror, and saw him, his face implacably calm, hidden behind large sunglasses and a baseball cap, his thick knotty arms crossed on the wheel.
I supposed I had wished the traffic upon myself. Usually I wait around at school, marking a few essays, until it thins out. But I very badly wanted to go home after shopping. I was tired, nervous, and I wanted a long bath, and then afterwards to sit in my bathrobe, drinking tea and watching Sherlock. The gridlock improved after the bridge, as the road forked. My temples were sore and I rubbed them. I must have been frowning again without noticing it.
It wasn’t until I’d actually got to the Examiner, or it might have been a little before, that it occurred to me that there was something strange about the man in the Megane. He’d parked at the gate, running his motor, for all the world just another dad come to collect his children from school, but when he’d pulled out after me there’d been nobody in the car with him.
There were no letters from Bethan, though there were a dozen messages from helpful folk who had watched the news segment, and while having no inside knowledge they definitely had opinions, which they were keen to share. Some claimed Bethan had murdered Peggy for an inheritance. Or that Bethan had had a boyfriend who murdered Peggy. Or that she had been mixed up with Satanists.
Wendy looked at me very strangely indeed.
Once I got home, and the shopping was unloaded and stowed away, I made myself a thrown together salad of halloumi and spinach and ate it at the counter in the kitchen, washing it down with a glass of Merlot. In the maroon depths of the wine I could see my own loneliness reflected back at me. It was the sort of thing that Eddy and I had always drunk together.
It was eight o’clock by now and it was dark outside. On the table were a pile of marked essays – I’d worked steadily to catch up on them – so all that was left were the letters for my column; the non-Bethan letters. I was looking forward to them. I could lose myself in them; pretend to an objectivity that I could never seem to apply to myself.
First, however, I’d have to go to the corner shop. I had bought pallet loads of supplies but forgot milk. I finished the salad and grabbed my coat, which I’d left carelessly lying on the back of one of the chairs. I took a tenner out of my purse and pocketed my keys.
It was freezing outside. I thrust my hands deep into my pockets and set off at a fast clip up the street. I could see the lights on in Marek’s shop, a friendly glow in the cold black night.
‘Hello,’ he said, as I entered the shop. A buzzer grizzled briefly, then silenced as the door shut behind me. Marek was seated at the counter – a large, roughly triangular-shaped mound of heavy-jowled middle-aged man with a perpetually mournful downturned mouth and thin, flat hair. With a little frisson of alarm I saw that the Examiner was open before him, with the feature they’d run on the filming of the reconstruction. A picture of me, looking wild-eyed and waylaid in the middle of my interview, was under his right hand.
‘Hello there,’ I nodded in response, and quickly picked up a plastic jug of milk from the shelf. ‘It’s bloody cold outside,’ I observed while he carefully poked the amount into his ancient till.
‘Hah. This is not cold,’ he said, frowning at the keys. ‘I have seen what real cold is like.’
Behind him, his teenaged son, who was stacking cigarettes along the back of the counter, rolled his eyes at his father’s back and offered me a grin.
‘Are you still off the fags?’ asked Marek.
‘Yep.’
He let out a tiny disappointed sigh.
‘I gave up three years ago, Marek. I think it’s going to be a permanent arrangement.’
Again he sighed. ‘People worry too much about being healthy,’ he said with disapproval. ‘You should enjoy life more. Buy more cigarettes.’
He held out his hand for my tenner, which I surrendered.
‘I see your picture was in the paper,’ he said, while he very carefully counted out my change. ‘You look good.’
‘Why thanks, Marek.’
‘Is that husband still gone?’
I felt the blush rise to my cheeks. ‘Um, yes.’
‘Not coming back?’ asked Marek, checking my change again, while his son looked pained and shrugged at me.
‘No,’ I said, and felt the truth of the words. ‘I think that’s going to be a permanent arrangement too.’
Marek rumbled out a long hmmmm that could have meant approval or disapproval. ‘A good-looking woman like you will not be single for long.’
‘I’m in no rush,’ I said, sparing him a smile, the jug of milk dangling from one hand. ‘Good night.’
‘Good night,’ he said, following me to the door to lock it for the night.
As the light went out behind me, the street seemed a more threatening place. The night was still freezing, at least to me. Whoever was it, I thought, that invented orange street lighting? It makes everyone look evil and the sky goes a horrid, lurid violet. It’s unnatural.
I was musing on this, and other, less weighty matters as I walked home along my street when I realized, with a shock, that someone was sitting in their darkened car, right next to me, as I passed it. I’d assumed that I was totally alone, and now there was a person, not three feet away, separated from me only by a car door. The engine was off, the headlamps were dark, but there was a man in there, in complete darkness, doing nothing, merely staring straight ahead, as though waiting for something. I stole a surreptitious glimpse of him as I passed by.