‘Does he know where she is?’ Aunty Betty interrupts.
‘No! He’s come to help look for her! … As I was saying, Mr B—’
‘Tell him hello from me!’ she interrupts again. ‘And thank you!’
‘For the love of … Yes! I’ll do that!’
Before I attempt to speak again, I wait a second, then another, to give Aunty Betty a chance to interrupt.
‘Lewis is out looking for her with his son. And I’ve driven around a bit, visited a few places in Brighton where she likes to go, but I came back to check on Aunty Betty. I’m about to go out again.’
‘Where do you want me to cover?’
‘I’m not sure. Mr Bromsgrove is doing out towards the marina and Saltdean. I think I’ll try up Preston Park way next.’
‘I’ll do Hove,’ Fynn says.
‘I’m really panicking. I know this isn’t your problem, but … What if something happens to her? What if someone’s taken her?’
‘Who would take her?’
‘I don’t know. Who would kill Joel?’
The same thought strikes us at the same time: Joel.
‘Have you … ?’ he asks.
‘No. It never even crossed my mind. I’m so stupid. Why wouldn’t I think of trying there? I’ve got to go there.’
‘I’ll drive you.’
‘It’s fine. I’ll go by myself.’
‘You’re shaking, you look as if you’re about to fall over – you’re in no fit state to drive. I’ll take you.’
*
‘How’ve you been?’ I ask him.
We have driven for five minutes but it has felt like five excruciating hours have crawled past without either of us speaking. I was leaving it to him, taking my cues from him and his cue has been silence.
Silence that has its hands around my throat and is suffocating me to the point where I may start to hyperventilate in order to breathe properly.
‘Fine,’ he replies. Succinct, formal. ‘You?’
‘Fine,’ I reply. This is the man who held me for hours after Joel died, who slept on my sofa so he could take care of me when my night terrors started, who I love with all my heart. He will not talk to me. He has nothing to say to me. From anyone else – apart from the kids – I could probably stand it. From him, it is like a drip-dripping torture at the centre of my forehead that is burrowing into my skull.
‘It doesn’t have to be like this, Fynn,’ I tell him. ‘If we could just talk properly.’
‘Is Zane at Imogen’s house?’ His formality remains secured over his words, and keeps the gap between us prised open. ‘Do we need to pick him up on the way back?’
‘No, he’s … he’s in London, staying with Joel’s parents for a while.’
The expression that passes over Fynn’s face is one I understand, I’d have made it too, if I hadn’t been desperate, if Zane hadn’t been quietly falling apart. On the phone I can hear his happiness, his relief. He’s probably not worried any more about being in the house. He misses us, but he can’t be with us. If things were normal with Fynn I could explain and he’d understand that. In this moment, I can’t explain anything. He has nothing to say to me, and he is not getting involved.
*
The entrance to the cemetery is a red-brick Gothic structure with five peaked arches, the largest at its centre. The outer two arches have fixed iron railings, the inner two arches are the foot entrances with iron gates, and the large centre arch has double gates for cars to drive in. On the other side of the locked gates, only a few feet away, is the admin office, another red-brick structure that looks like a shrunken Gothic mansion, where there are lights on. A huge, thick-trunked tree stands outside each foot gate, immobile and threatening like nature’s own bodyguards for the residents inside.
As we pull up to where the double gates are locked and chained, I see her, sitting with her back against the left-hand gate, her knees pulled up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs, her head resting on her knees. Every part of my inner being is simultaneously turned upside-down and inside out. I barely wait for the car to come to a standstill before I rip off my seatbelt and bolt out of the door.
I throw myself to my knees and gather her in my arms. She’s breathing, she doesn’t look hurt, I can still touch her. She’s not gone, she’s not ‘evidence of a crime’, she’s still here with me where she should be. ‘Are you all right?’ I whisper into her hair. ‘I thought something had happened to you. I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you. You’re my world, Phoebe. You and Zane are my world. Are you all right?’ I hold her as near as I can. She’s cold and shivering slightly.
‘I wanted to talk to Dad,’ she mumbles, her forehead against her knees. ‘But it was closed.’
When she was four, after a bright February morning in the garden, Phoebe was running to the house to fetch her new ball, when she tripped on an uneven flagstone. I watched it happen in horror as she fell forwards, hitting her chin and hands at the same time, the rough uneven surface of the patio stones scraping the skin off her chin and the palms of her hands. Joel, who was nearer to her, leapt out of his seat and ran to her, ready to scoop her up into his arms. ‘No,’ she wailed at him, while I, eight months pregnant, was struggling to become upright. ‘No, Dad, I want Mum. I want Mum. I want Mum.’
‘I’m sorry he’s not here, Pheebs,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Do you think he’d be ashamed of me?’ she asks.
‘Of course not! Why would he be ashamed of you? Your dad … he thought the Sun and Moon rose and set with you and Zane. Of course he wouldn’t be ashamed of you. Why would you even think such a thing?’
A shrug.
Shrugs always have their root in something to do with the man who got her pregnant. ‘Is this something to do with the person who got you pregnant?’ I ask.
‘No!’ she exclaims. She lifts her head to make sure I know the truth. ‘It’s just, Imogen texted me and said she wanted to talk so she’d meet me after school. We got in her car and we went to a café and she said all these things. And she said I’d already let Dad down by getting pregnant so young that if I killed this … you know, she said Dad would be ashamed of me. I don’t want Dad to be ashamed of me.’ She sniffs, her nose runs from being out here for hours in the cold. ‘She was so sure that I thought she must be right.
‘I didn’t know what to do. I’m so confused. So then, I thought if I did something like walk in front of a bus then I wouldn’t be pregnant any more and the problem would go away and Dad wouldn’t be ashamed. That’s why I came to talk to him. I wanted to say sorry for letting him down. And I wanted to ask him what it was like to be dead. And if he’d be waiting for me if that’s what happened to me.’
I have to remind myself not to breathe too quickly. Slow breaths soothe away the sickness enough to help me to find the right words.
‘It’s not true,’ I state. ‘You haven’t let him down. Don’t listen to Imogen. I knew your dad for so much longer than her. I loved him, I had children with him, I ate with him, I rowed with him, I even got to smell his farts and wash his dirty socks. I knew him. I knew him so well and I know, without a doubt, that you haven’t let him down and he wouldn’t be ashamed of you.’
Her young eyes search my face as her mouth crumples into a line of uncertainty: she’s not sure if she should believe me. She’s wondering if I’m saying what I’m saying because I want to help her or if her father would never be ashamed of her.
‘I did some pretty stupid things when I got together with your father,’ I say.
‘Drugs?’ she asks, aghast. More, I think, that I’d be the one doing them rather than the fact it was drug-taking per se.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ve never taken drugs – and you shouldn’t either. No, it was stupid though, and potentially dangerous.’ Fynn is watching us, and I flash back to what he said to me in the street and how I turned on him. ‘Well, your dad found out about it. And he confronted me and he told me that he loved me, and he wante
d me to get help. At no point – no point at all – did he say or act like he was ashamed of me. He could have been, but he wasn’t. When you love someone it takes a lot to make you ashamed of them. He loved you so much. You should have seen the pride on his face when you were born. He called everyone he knew, even people who he hadn’t spoken to in years, to tell them. Obviously that went down well with the woman he was on holiday with when he met me. She was overjoyed to get that phone call, as you can imagine. What I’m saying, Phoebe, is you’d have to do more than make a mistake for him to be ashamed of you.
‘He would have been upset that you’re in this situation and that you have such a hard decision to make, but he wouldn’t be let down by whatever choice you make if it’s the right one for you.’
She says nothing, but I think she believes me, the words have soothed part of her because she remembers what her dad was like, who her dad was.
‘Come on, let’s get you home, Aunty Betty was so worried. We all were.’
‘Were you an alkie, Mum?’ she asks as we get to our feet.
‘No. I’m not going to tell you what it was so you can stop asking.’
‘Do you think I’m a slut?’ she asks.
‘No,’ I reply. ‘I don’t think anyone is a “slut”. It’s horrible to call someone that. The things that were written about you were so horrible and not in any way true.’
Something shifts between us, something as ethereal as air, but as tangible as our bodies, and this newly formed connection between us is cracked, the fractures evident in multiple places.
‘You read my Facebook? Even though you promised you wouldn’t, you read it. I should have known I couldn’t trust you.’
‘Phoebe, you can trust me. I didn’t promise not to read your Facebook or Twitter or anything else, I said I wouldn’t look unless I had reason to. And I did have reason to, I needed to see what was written so I could work out how to help you. Mr Broms—’
‘He probably agrees with them, too, doesn’t he?’
‘No, he doesn’t.’
‘Why not? Everyone else does. They all think I’m a slut and a whore and really stupid for getting pregnant and that I should do anything to get rid of it. Why not you and him?’
‘Only stupid, thick, disturbed people who hide behind a computer to say those things think that. All the people who know and love you don’t think like that, either.’
‘Imogen does.’
‘That’s different.’
‘How is it different? She said what they all said but used nicer words. It all means the same thing. Even you were angry when you found out.’
‘I’m allowed to be angry, Phoebe,’ I reply. Memories of what I thought and felt at that moment aren’t easy to access, they slip away from me like running water through my fingers. ‘I don’t actually think I was angry,’ I tell Phoebe. ‘I was shocked and then I was disappointed because it looked like my beautiful, bright daughter who was going to university and then would go on to change the world had suddenly had her life shunted down a completely different track. I’m allowed to feel that and to forget for a minute that having a child doesn’t mean you can’t do those things, or having an abortion means you’ll be scarred for life, or that having a baby adopted means you won’t see them at some point in the future. I’m allowed to forget all that for a little while and to react not perfectly to one of the most shocking pieces of news I’ve ever had because I’m only human.’
‘But I’m not, am I, Mum?’ she retaliates. ‘I’m not human. I have to be perfect all the time, I have to do everything right all the time otherwise it’s the end of the world.’
She’s not talking about the pregnancy, she’s talking about the day Joel died. What she did on the day that picture secreted away in my bedroom was taken. ‘No one expects you to be perfect, Phoebe. I’ve never expected that of you.’
‘Yeah, right. I made one mistake one time and you act as if it’s a reason to go through my things.’
‘I don’t go through your things, Phoebe. I only looked because I was worried about you. And the agreement when you signed up for those things and when you were given your phone back was that I would look whenever I felt it necessary.’
‘Yeah, like I could ever trust you to stick to that.’
‘You, trust me?’ I reply. ‘What about me trusting you? How about every time I trust you, you pull some kind of stunt to obliterate that trust? Even tonight. You were told not to leave school without me so you go off with someone else. Before you start talking about trusting me, think about if I can trust you.’
Fynn, who must have heard the tail end of the conversation because we are right by his car, opens his door and gets out because things are getting out of hand.
‘I think we should all calm down,’ he intercedes. ‘I’ll drive you back and you can sit down at the table at home and talk this out.’
‘No. Thank you but no,’ I say before Phoebe can utter a protest about being in the car with me. ‘Fynn, can you drive Phoebe home? I’ll call a cab.’
Phoebe’s protest, which had grown rapidly on her face, withers where it began, replaced by a new crop: disbelief at what I am doing.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Fynn says.
‘I’m not being ridiculous,’ I reply. ‘I think Phoebe needs to spend time with her uncle Fynn and I need to either walk home or get a taxi. I’m not getting into that car so you can ignore me.’ I’m talking to both of them – I’m not giving either of them the chance to blank me.
My daughter is genuinely surprised, and a tiny shard of admiration lurks in there, too. I love her, I am so relieved she is all right, but I can’t be around her at the moment. Same with Fynn.
‘I love you, Phoebe,’ I say to her. I want to fold my arms around her as I say that. I want to envelop her and let her know that, like before, I will do everything I can to protect her. She won’t let me, though. The wall around her is definite, she has a boundary that she doesn’t want to be breached right now and I need to respect that.
She says nothing and gets into the car.
‘I’ll make sure she goes into the house,’ Fynn says.
I nod at him. ‘I love you,’ I mouth to him when he turns away to climb into the car. ‘You’re my best friend and I love you.’
I can’t watch them drive away, instead I drop to the ground, lower my head and give myself up to the agony that is expanding inside.
9 weeks after That Day (December, 2011)
‘I didn’t go to school that morning,’ Phoebe said to me, pausing between each word. ‘I bunked off to meet Molly in town because she was suspended. One of Dad’s friends saw me and called him. Dad came to get me before I found Molly. And his friend gave him a lift. His friend waited for him in Churchill Square car park until he found me, then they gave me a lift back to school and Dad came in and gave them a note saying I’d had a dentist appointment. He said he didn’t like lies and this was the last time he’d ever do that and that he was going to tell you later and I’d be in big trouble. But he didn’t want me to get in trouble with the school if I promised to never do it again.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Your mixing bowl, Mum. Dad bought it that day. It was on the back seat of her car and I sat next to it.’
‘Her?’
‘Yes. She was from his cooking class. He said he was going to explain everything to you, so I shouldn’t.’
‘I don’t understand why you’ve waited this long to tell me, though.’
‘Your mixing bowl. It was in her car. And then it was in the boot of Dad’s car.’
I suddenly realised what she was saying: his car had been in the garage that morning for a service and it was still in the garage after he was killed. The garage was miles away, and they remembered him arriving too early to collect it. They remembered him saying he had to leave the bowl in the boot because he had to go and find his lost phone. But they didn’t remember how he arrived or how he left, they only remembered that he didn’t come bac
k like he said he would.
He’d obviously been dropped off by his ‘friend’. He’d probably been taken to collect his phone by his ‘friend’. But the police never did find out where his ‘lost’ phone had been because it must have been off when it wasn’t with him, and from tracking its signal, the last time it was turned on was on Montefiore Road, where he died. And since it was beside him, wiped clean it seemed of fingerprints apart from his blood-smudged ones, it’d come to nothing; another unanswered clue in the mystery of why he died.
The police checked his phone records and everyone on the list who had called him that day – including me – had an alibi. No one except our family had seen him that day, apparently. Except now I knew that at least two people weren’t where they said they were: Phoebe, and his ‘friend’. Audra.
It was her. She had done it. She had lied to the police about why she spoke to him for those brief minutes in the morning, and then lied again about her whereabouts – if they had checked her alibi, they’d find out it was false. And she knew that Phoebe had lied to them, too. That Phoebe hadn’t told the police about her because they never questioned her again.
‘Are you going to tell the police?’ Phoebe asked.
‘I think I have to.’
‘But I’ll get in trouble because I didn’t tell the truth first of all.’
‘You won’t get in trouble, you did nothing wrong.’
‘But what if they think I did it?’
‘They won’t think that, Phoebe.’
‘Please don’t, Mum.’
‘But, Phoebe—’
‘Please don’t, Mum. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. I’m scared. I’m really scared.’
‘Phoebe, we can’t—’
‘Please, Mum. I’m really sorry, but please, don’t.’
‘Shhh, shhhhh. It’ll be OK, I’ll make it all OK.’
Phoebe was terrified, she was already traumatised and being eaten up by the guilt of what she’d done, with thinking she had caused this to happen to her dad – she didn’t need to speak to the police on top of it. I was going to tell them anyway, I had to. But then the FLO started asking about prostitutes, hinting that Joel might have had a secret life. And I knew they would destroy an already fragile Phoebe. Their questioning – brutal, crude and immensely unsympathetic – would be too much for her at that time. So I made the decision, one that I knew Joel would have approved of, to protect our daughter at all costs.