Cross Her Heart(52)

The welts on the back of her legs sting and it’s a cold night, but she hobbles to the window and opens it, hoping to blow the smell away by morning. She peels off her soaked underwear and wraps herself in the old parka jacket that’s too big for her but she loves anyway, and lies on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. She thinks about Katie until she falls asleep. In her dream they’re driving, fast and far, in a big pink convertible and laughing as they go. And in her dream they have blood on their hands.





42


NOW


MARILYN

It’s nearly midnight and I’m wide awake, staring at the ceiling and trying to get my thoughts and feelings into some kind of order. Whenever I close my eyes, all I see is the flash of worry on Lisa’s face when I told her I was having problems with Richard. As if she cared about me. As if we were still best friends. Ava’s missing and she was concerned because I was unhappy. How am I supposed to feel about that?

Someone isn’t who they say they are. Someone I know.

How crazy has Lisa become? Could she still be in love with Jon maybe, to come up with something that wild rather than think he took Ava? What sort of man is he anyway? Who would send those kind of messages to their daughter?

Too much thinking time, that’s my problem. It’s making the whole world murky and if I’m not careful I’ll start to see conspiracy theories everywhere. I’m too tired for this. I need to go back to work. Penny texted earlier to say Richard had called a couple of times but hadn’t caused any drama, and that there was some work to do on the Wharton account but if I wasn’t up to it then one of the others could manage. My teeth clench at the thought. No one’s stealing my client list.

Anyway, where else can I go? I can’t hide forever. That’s simply delaying the inevitable. If Richard shows up, I’ll call the police. I’m tired of living a pretence. That thought leads me straight back to Lisa/Charlotte. Did she ever get tired of living a lie? Had she ever been tempted to tell me about her past? I’m glad she didn’t. I wouldn’t have wanted to carry that. Even if I was her best friend.

Her name was Katie Batten. She was Charlotte’s best friend.

I give up on sleep and get up. I’ve got too many questions whirring around in my head to doze, and my broken ribs are throbbing, so I pull on some clothes, make a coffee in a takeaway cup in the machine, and pad downstairs. There’s a business centre on the ground floor near reception and I head there, wanting a computer. The lights buzz brightly against the night outside and the man at reception gives me a perfunctory smile as I pass by. This is the best thing about hotels. There is always someone awake. You’re never quite alone and it’s all so comfortingly sterile and impersonal.

I settle down at one of the desks, not too close to the window, although the chances of Richard being out looking for me at this time of night are remote, and turn on the computer. There are things I need to know and thinking about Lisa’s life is preferable to thinking about my own.

I search Charlotte Nevill and Jon John Jonathan lover and an archived tabloid comes straight up from early 2004. There’s no picture of Lisa, but one of Jon, Jon Roper, sitting in a garden. He’s thin and he’s got an earring in, and he’s scowling at the camera, no doubt as instructed, under the headline, I fell in love with child murderer Charlotte and it nearly killed me … He looks so young and there are dark circles around his eyes and his skin is unhealthy. It’s a salacious piece, as I expected, but between the details of their life together, it feels like he’s crying out for some kind of absolution. A lot of what he says is about Crystal – that must be Ava – and how when she was born the reality of Charlotte’s crime hit him and he couldn’t forgive her, and now he’s lost his daughter too, all because he took up drinking too much to cope. According to the article, he’d moved back in with his mum to try and clean up his life and start afresh.

I know how you feel, I think. If only it was so easy in your forties. I read the article again, where he makes a big deal about their sex life and their drinking, and I wonder how much of it is true and how much he’s embellished to make himself sound better. It all sounds so tragic and sordid. I almost feel sorry for him but for the fact he’s taken Ava.

I flick through a few more results, but they’re mainly different versions of the same article, and there’s just a couple of other pictures. I can’t find a Facebook account for him so I presume the police have shut it down already or whatever it is they do in these situations. Or maybe Jon himself deactivated it when he took Ava.

I start my next search. Katie Batten. Charlotte’s best friend. ‘Katie Batten drowned Ibiza 2004’ takes me straight to the story. God bless Google in all but medical situations. My coffee is growing cold but I take a sip anyway.

The search has been called off for Katie Batten, a British woman missing in the Balearic party island of Ibiza. Ms Batten, twenty-six, was last seen going for a dawn swim on the beach near the bar where she’d been working since May. She had been travelling in Spain for most of the year after the death of her mother in 2002 in a car accident. Friends say she was coming to terms with her mother’s sudden loss, but still had bouts of grief and has been described as nervous and fragile. Her colleagues stated that she spent much of her time alone.

On the night of her death, she was seen going into the sea, and two witnesses, a young German couple on holiday, who had been watching the sun come up in the secluded spot say they tried to call her back as she was weaving, and they thought she might be drunk. Miss Batten responded that she was fine. The young couple watched her swim out, but when they looked towards the rocks a while later, there was no sign of her. Despite the best efforts of search teams, Katie Batten’s body has not been recovered. A verdict of accidental death by drowning is expected from the inquest.