Greenwich Park(78)
‘You said you’d been outside – there was a bit of something in your hair,’ Serena says, seeing my confusion. ‘You told me you’d … maybe disturbed someone. At the bottom of the garden? You remember that?’
‘Monty!’ I cry with delight. I thought I’d seen Monty, near the fire. He’d got out somehow. I’d gone to get him, to try and chase him away from the flames, get him to come inside. That’s why I’d been out there. I do remember that part. I do.
‘Yes, the cat, you said you’d been chasing a cat,’ Serena is nodding encouragingly. ‘And then you saw a couple or something – at the end of the garden?’ She hesitates. ‘You did say … that you’d had a bit of a row with Rachel?’
My sense of relief evaporates. ‘That’s the bit I don’t really remember properly. I mean I remember getting angry with her. I know I shouted.’ I ball my fingers into fists. ‘It wouldn’t matter if I could just know for sure she is all right, but –’
‘Hey, don’t get upset.’ Serena comes close, wraps her slender arms around me, like a necklace. I smell her perfume again, deep and sensuous. It makes me think of black flowers. ‘You’re under such a lot of pressure,’ she says. ‘Pregnancy does strange things to you – it’s stressful. Don’t read anything into it. I forget things all the time.’
I shake my head, feeling tears welling in my eyes. ‘This is different. People forget to turn the oven off, or take their keys with them when they go out. You don’t forget whole chunks of time.’ I pause. ‘What if …’ I lower my voice. ‘What if it was because of me? I should never have shouted at her, told her to get out. What if something happened to her, and it’s my fault?’
Serena’s eyes grow wide. ‘Helen, don’t be ridiculous! None of this is your fault.’
I wipe my face, sniffing into my cuff. ‘It’s so strange though. How can she have just disappeared? How can no one have seen her leave?’
Serena shrugs. ‘It was busy. People were drunk. Why would they notice a girl they didn’t know leaving a party?’ She stands up, places two hands on her lower back. Her belly looks so much bigger now. ‘If people aren’t looking for things, they don’t see them.’
I watch her as she gazes out of her window, massaging the bottom of her spine with her fingertips.
‘Serena,’ I say. ‘I need to tell you something. Something about Rachel. I should have told you ages ago.’
GREENWICH PARK
The rain scatters everyone, washes all the people from the streets. They do awkward crouching runs with makeshift umbrellas – magazines, newspapers folded in half. They cower in doorways, under the awnings of shops. They pull out their phones and call for rescue.
In this part of town, no one looks at anyone. I pass a pizza place, a jobcentre. In the launderette, the machines spin round and round like rolling eyes. It is a place and yet it is nowhere. Pavement puddles hold up a grey mirror to the metal sky.
The phone box is under a huge billboard, a peeling election poster for the side that lost. He pulls down his hat as he reaches it. There is no CCTV here, they have checked. There is only concrete, the roar of traffic, the skid of crisp packets across the pavements.
The phone box stinks of piss, but the phone still works. He takes a coin from his jacket pocket with a gloved hand. As he dials the number, the pornographic eyes of girls stare blankly back at his.
HELEN
Katie and I are sitting on her sofa, pizza boxes piled in front of us, an old romcom on pause. Rain is beating at the windows, a dull drum roll over the sound of the wind in the trees in Dartmouth Park.
I couldn’t be at home any more. Daniel and I are under siege, reporters knocking all the time, asking about Rachel. It’s the same for her flatmates too, apparently, and at Charlie’s club. I texted Daniel, told him I was going to Katie’s to get away from it all. He was worried, didn’t want me going so far from Greenwich with the baby due any moment. But I assured him I’d be OK. Even if I do go into labour, it’ll be hours before I need to go to hospital, I told him. As you would know if you’d come to the antenatal classes, I felt like adding.
It is cosy in Katie’s flat. Of course it’s silly to envy Katie her place – after all, it’s barely the size of our living room – but I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to have a little space that is just mine, not Daniel’s. Katie’s cat, Socks, is curled up on the sofa between us. As we pull slices of pizza away from the box, coiling the stray strands of mozzarella with our fingers, I ask her if she’d seen Charlie since I took him to the police station.
Katie shakes her head. ‘He called me that night – late, it must have been when he got back from the station with you. He asked me what I was doing, taking that photograph, showing it to you, instead of talking to him first. He was angry, we rowed.’ She looks down, fiddles with the blanket over her knees. ‘I haven’t spoken to him since.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault.’ She pauses. ‘Helen, what exactly did he say about how he knew Rachel? Did he just know her from the club? Or did something happen between the two of them?’