The Love of My Life(89)

Emma frowns, slightly embarrassed. ‘Actually, I do.’

I wait for her to expand, but she doesn’t.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. And here’s why: in her letter, she talks about Coquet Island and she keeps on saying she’s sorry for not telling me. “I should have told you years ago,” she says. It reads as if she’s talking about the crabs, but I think she’s actually apologising for not telling me the truth about the smothering.’

John pokes his head out from the duvet, suddenly, to look at Emma. After staring at her crossly, he stares at me, then withdraws again, muttering to himself. We’re being too loud.

In spite of ourselves, we both smile. Emma strokes the mound of duvet he’s huffing under.

‘Janice is clearly out of it in this letter,’ Emma says. ‘Whether she’s drunk, or on too much medication I don’t know, but she’s not right at all.’

I agree.

‘I think she’s up there. Alnmouth. With the island in sight, reminding her of what she’s done.’

‘But why would she be in a shed? Why would she not just stay at their house?’

‘Because Jeremy would have found her straightaway. And she wanted time out.’

‘I understand that. But why not a B&B, or a caravan or something – surely you can see Coquet Island from a whole bunch of places around there?’

She thinks about this, eventually pulling out her phone to study a map. ‘I think you can probably see it anywhere between Alnmouth and Low Hauxley,’ she says. ‘So yes, she could be somewhere between those two points – I’d say it’s an eight mile stretch, maybe ten. But something came to me earlier, when I was trying to sleep.’

I wait.

‘I was thinking about this lovely feeling between us, when we were sitting in that shed, and I suddenly remembered. Proper lightbulb moment. She said, just as the rain was clearing up, “Wouldn’t this be a perfect place to come and have a nice private breakdown? Just check out of life, sit and watch the sea, drink far too much wine?”’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. We were talking about how you could turn it into a little retreat, how you could kit it out. She said she was pretty sure it didn’t belong to the National Trust, how she was going to track down the owner via the Land Registry. It’s exactly what she was referring to in her diary entry.’

I look at her. ‘I’m not convinced,’ I admit. ‘I hear what you’re saying, but . . . well, it seems a little far-fetched. Apart from anything else, Janice doesn’t strike me as the type to rough it. I don’t know her personally, of course, but she seems very well groomed. Like she enjoys the finer things in life. Not cold stone sheds full of sheep shit.’

Emma gets up and sticks her head out of our own shed, as if listening. The wind has gone, now, the rain too. ‘Can we go inside?’ she asks. ‘I don’t like leaving Ruby on her own. I wouldn’t be able to hear her if she woke.’

She is a good mother.

No matter what I might feel about her as a wife right now, she is a good mother, and she deserved to bring up Charlie.

Inside, Emma shows me her computer, where she’s been looking at Alnmouth beach on satellite view. I see it straightaway, the hut; she’s zoomed right in. A small pock in the dunes near the golf course, above the beach.

‘The view of Coquet Island would be good from there,’ she says. ‘And she’d be able to walk to the shops easily. It’s not as if she’d be completely roughing it.’

‘But I thought Jeremy had already been looking up there? I thought he’d asked everywhere and nobody had seen her?’

After a moment, Emma sighs. ‘Ah, you’re right. There’s a million reasons why she’s anywhere other than this stupid shed. Even if she’d actually bought it, kitted it out, she’d have done it with Jeremy. Not on her own, in secret. That would be too weird. Everyone in the village would have known about it.’

She looks down at the letter in her hands. ‘But I just . . . I was there with her, that day, when all we had was hope. She said it was her private breakdown plan, and now she’s disappeared somewhere to have a breakdown, and she’s talking about Coquet Island. Surely that’s got to count for something?’

I agree, not without reluctance, that it does.

I go to the fridge and get out some ham. Emma watches me, and I’m nearly laid out by sadness. I don’t know if we’ll ever joke about failed veganism again.

‘But the thing is . . .’ I open the packet. ‘The thing I’m struggling with, is why you want to track her down in the first place. How can you find it in yourself to care about her, after what she did to you?’

‘I don’t care about her,’ she says, quietly. ‘Not really. Certainly not yet.’

I hover, not knowing what to say.

‘I don’t imagine I’ll ever forgive her. I don’t think anyone could. But this is about Charlie. He’s terrified she’ll take her own life, and he thinks it’s his fault. If I can help him find her, I have to.’

‘OK,’ I say, eventually. ‘Why don’t you message Charlie, ask him to call you when he wakes up.’

So she does.

Emma. Emily. I take some more ham out of the packet, roll it up.