Finding Grace(36)

I can’t stop my voice rising. ‘No! They’re so tied up in red tape with all their boxes to tick, but we’re not. Can’t you see that?’

He looks at me blankly, and I turn away from him.

‘Fine. Well I’m doing this with or without you, so please yourself.’

I march from the room.

‘You might make everything worse,’ I hear him cry out, but I don’t stop walking.





Twenty-Five





I grab my coat from the hall cupboard and push my feet into my flat ankle boots.

Fiona looks up from her laptop screen. She’s taken over the breakfast bar; paperwork is strewn across the whole surface. I spot a Hello! magazine poking out from under a sheaf of documentation.

‘Everything all right?’ she asks lightly.

I pause a second, giving her stupid question some space.

‘Fine.’ She’s probably been skulking around at the bottom of the stairs, listening to our disagreement. ‘I’m popping down to Bev and Mike’s house. I’ll go the back way, so I don’t have to speak to the press. If Dad asks, can you tell him where I’ve gone?’

I walk across the room and reach for the door handle.

‘If you don’t mind me asking, is there any particular reason why you’re going down there?’ She slides from the bar stool and laces her fingers in front of her.

I feel like a pressure cooker about to blow. I’d like to yell that yes, I bloody well do mind her asking. I know she’s just doing her job, but I can’t shake the feeling she’s here to spy more than support us.

Still, I also feel it’s in my interests to maintain a stable demeanour, no matter how pent up I feel inside. Otherwise nobody will take me seriously and Blake will start trying to push Dr Mahmoud’s medication on me again. So I tell her the truth.

‘It’s just I feel like I don’t know everything about what happened today. I didn’t get a chance to talk about their trip to Alton Towers, or how Grace seemed to them today.’

‘I think the detectives have already covered that,’ Fiona offers. ‘I could ask DI Pearlman to go through what was said, if you like?’

‘Thanks, but I’d rather hear it for myself. We’re all good friends and I’d feel better for seeing them,’ I say tightly. ‘Obviously we haven’t had a chance to talk properly at all about what happened yet.’

A noise at the doorway makes me turn.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll go with her.’ Blake exchanges a look with Fiona.

Why do I feel like the outsider here? Surely it should be Blake and I who are tight together, and yet all of a sudden he seems to be the police’s best mate.

‘I’m perfectly fine speaking to our friends on my own.’ I turn the door handle and step out into the chilly night air.

The cloud cover is too thick to see any stars tonight. Grace loves to stand at her window before bedtime to spot the North Star, since my dad told her it watches over her every night to keep her safe. Where is the North Star now? I wonder. I hope wherever Grace is, she can see it.

I hear Blake step out of the house behind me and close the back door.

‘Why don’t you stay here,’ I say without turning around. ‘In case there’s news.’

He wraps his arms around me and places his chin on the top of my head. I stand stock still.

‘I know you’re hurting, Luce. We all are.’

Hurting? I’m dying. Dying inside.

‘I don’t want you getting yourself in a state, that’s all,’ Blake continues. ‘I can speak to Mike and Bev, ask them to—’

‘I can’t stop you coming, but I have to do this myself,’ I say curtly. ‘I can’t sit in the house a moment longer, just waiting and waiting for news that never comes.’

‘I hear you,’ he says, sounding beaten.

We walk down our long, narrow garden. Even though it’s a few days since we had rain, the ground feels marshy under my feet. When we get to the bottom, we both turn on the torch function on our phones and inch sideways, past Grace’s trampoline and through the slim space where our hedge meets Jeffery’s fence next door.

I glance back at Jeffery’s house. There’s a light on in his kitchen. I can’t see anything clearly because the blind is pulled down but a shadowy figure is moving around in there.

Out on the track, the hard earth is muddy in places. I lead the way and Blake follows. It’s quiet out here, with nobody in their gardens now that dark has fallen. It’s eerie, even though the light from my phone illuminates a good chunk of ground in front of me.

‘This all feels a bit cloak-and-dagger,’ Blake grumbles behind me.

I ignore him, but it does feel spooky. Wherever Grace is, I hope she’s not alone in the dark.

Five minutes later, we arrive at the end of Bev and Mike’s back garden.

‘Perhaps we should have warned them we were coming,’ Blake whispers as I push open the wooden gate in their fence.

Bev and I are always popping into each other’s houses at the weekend. I don’t see why this should be any different.

Their garden is the same length as ours, and we gingerly pick our way up the path strewn with overgrown weeds. Like our own, the lawn, when my feet catch it, feels unpleasantly marshy. I wait for an outside light sensor to kick in, but the garden remains dark, so I keep my phone torch lit up.