Girl Unknown(96)
A week before she flew to France with Holly, Caroline had come in through her front door, picked up the post lying on the mat, tossed it casually on to the shelf, then taken off her coat. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed one of the envelopes slipping off the back of the shelf and sliding down behind the radiator. Getting a closer look, she saw there was a tiny gap between the wall and the lip of the shelf, a small sliver of space just wide enough for a slim envelope to slip through. Finding it impossible to retrieve the fallen letter, Caroline had rooted out David’s toolbox and unscrewed the shelf from the wall. The letter was wedged behind the radiator. Unable to reach it with her fingers, she had taken a knife from the kitchen and tried to poke it out. Eventually, it had slipped on to the floor along with some other post she hadn’t known was there. One was a letter from a charity, another a credit-card bill, but the last bore the insignia of the university. Caroline felt something drop in her stomach.
Opening it quickly, she scanned the text, dread spreading to fill the pockets of air inside her. The missing letter. The one she had blamed Zo? for destroying. All that time it had been lying in the darkness. Perhaps Zo? had shoved it down there, but it was unlikely. Caroline knew it was nobody’s fault, except perhaps her own.
Even now, back on the island, she isn’t sure whether to tell David about the letter or not. What would be the point? So she carries the knowledge inside her, a small additional burden alongside her guilt.
The juvenile detention centre is not far from La Rochelle. The car journey takes a little over an hour. David and Holly spend another hour drinking coffee in a nearby café, looking in some shop windows, before they return to the car to wait. From where he is sitting behind the steering wheel, he can see the doors to the detention centre open when Caroline comes out. The wind catches her hair, blowing open the flaps of her coat. She catches the sides and pulls it tight around her, head down, hurrying to the car. From the way she is holding herself, refusing to meet his eye, he can tell that it did not go well. She opens the door on the passenger side and gets in, exhaling as she does so, as if she has been holding her breath the whole time she was in there.
‘Well?’ Holly asks, and Caroline shakes her head. No.
David starts the car, pulls it out on to the main road and tries to imagine the hour she had spent in that little room: Caroline twisting a tissue in her hands, begging Robbie to talk to her, and all the while he sits still, hands cupping his elbows, keeping his gaze fixed on the windows up above and to the side, his face blank of expression, like the distant, beatific gaze of some dead saint.
David drives and Caroline cries. He reaches out and she takes his hand and holds it in her lap.
Caroline blames herself for Robbie’s silence. If that snap decision were reversed, undone, or done differently, she might have prevented it. Peculiar, the way the body takes over from the mind in a situation like that. She remembers being in the water, holding Zo? in her arms, knowing that the girl was dead and there was nothing that could be done to change it. Caroline can almost see herself standing there, waist-deep in cool water, the strangeness of Zo?’s limbs cast in a bluish light and seemingly at broken angles because of the refraction. She can see herself taking it in – the horrifying enormity of it. She feels the hammer blow in her heart, an instant shattering at the realization of what has happened.
The decision happens in her body more than her head. Quickly, she drags Zo? to the pool’s edge. David is on the terrace now, but he makes no effort to help her, frozen within his own shock. Weighted down with lifelessness and water, it takes every ounce of Caroline’s strength to push the body up on to the flagstones, then to haul herself up afterwards. Still Robbie stands there. An echo of her own shrieking voice seems to hang in the air. Jesus Christ, what have you done? He says nothing. Are the words beginning to jam up inside him already? Swiftly now, because there are lights coming on in the other houses, Caroline goes to her son, but she doesn’t take him in her arms. She doesn’t cradle his face in her hands, tell him it’s all right, it will be okay, murmur words of reassurance. She doesn’t do anything like that.
‘What happened?’ she demands, her voice firm but low. She doesn’t want the neighbours to hear. ‘Tell me quickly. What happened?’
He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even look at her. His eyes are fixed on the pool beyond, his face bluish in the early morning light. Vaguely, she is aware of Holly having appeared, and David, emerging from his trance. He seems to sleepwalk past towards the dark figure stretched out by the lip of the pool.
A car engine splutters somewhere out on the street. The sky is streaked orange with light. She moves away from Robbie so she can think. What to do? Call an ambulance? Call the police? For one crazy moment, she considers getting all of them into the car and fleeing the island, getting far away from the body lying stretched upon the terrace. A kind of madness is taking her over and she pulls back from it. She needs to think quickly, to put a story together and have them all agree on it. There isn’t much time. The sun is rising now, and in the early-morning light, dawn touching the innocence of the flowers, you might never think that a murder had just happened.
Murder. The word is in her head. She seems to fill up with it. She has been spared the sight of the blow but some shadow of it suggests itself in her imagination. When she had come into the garden, it was the rocking water that she saw first – the way Zo?’s body lay lifeless, a thread of blood, dark beneath the surface.