The Family Remains(94)
‘What do you know about his first wife?’ they asked her. ‘Lucy Smith?’
‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘Michael never talked about her. All I know is that they split up acrimoniously many years ago and he hadn’t seen her again since.’
‘Interesting,’ they said, ‘because according to Mr Rimmer’s housekeeper, he had seen Lucy Smith recently. Very recently, in fact.’
Rachel’s heart had skipped a beat. How could Joy know about Lucy being there? She didn’t go to Michael’s house on Sundays.
‘Apparently Miss Smith visited Mr Rimmer about five days before his death. The very same day, in fact, that she said you visited Mr Rimmer. She came with her children and her dog and spent fifteen minutes or so in the garden with him. The housekeeper said it all seemed very convivial.’
Rachel tried not to let her confusion show and nodded, thoughtfully. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘maybe Michael lied to me about Lucy. He lied to me about everything else, so it makes sense.’
With no physical evidence to detain her, the police let Rachel go a few hours later. She pulled down her sunglasses and walked across this now familiar town towards the beach. Rachel resisted the overwhelming urge to walk the coast road up to Castle Hill, to knock on the door of the shabby blue building, and to see Lucy and tell her she was her hero and that she would protect her with every fibre of her being from here until the end of time. But she could not, in case it led the police to her. So instead she sat at a table overlooking the ocean and drank an Aperol Spritz served to her by a young man who looked like an aftershave model. She raised the glass to Lucy and prayed silently for both of them.
For many months afterwards Rachel was kept informed of updates in the case by the French detective called Avril. For many months afterwards Rachel knew that she was still considered a potential suspect and she also knew that the police had not yet given up on their search for Lucy. They had tracked down her last-known address via her children’s school and been told by the building manager there that they had gone on holiday to Malta, but no trace of her or her family was ever found on Malta or indeed anywhere else. Lucy had simply disappeared into the ether.
For many, many months Rachel slept restlessly at night, waiting for the phone to ring, for her presence in Michael’s house after his murder to have been uncovered. But also with the cold dread of them finding Lucy. She thought of the serious young boy, the angelic young girl, their tired eyes as they sat beside her in the square. She even thought of the dog and she feared for all of them if Lucy was ever to be caught. And then, one morning in early June, just under a year after Michael’s body was discovered by Joy in his basement, Rachel’s phone rang.
It was Avril the French detective.
‘We have an update for Michael’s case, Mrs Rimmer,’ she said. ‘Are you able to talk?’
65
June 2019
They arrive in London at 7 p.m. on Saturday night, Lucy, the kids and Henry. The stern-faced men at passport control waved them through disinterestedly at both ends of the journey, just as Henry had said they would. ‘That detective won’t have told anyone,’ he’d said to Lucy as they sat in the Uber heading to O’Hare. ‘He wants us in London, not stuck out here indefinitely.’
At nine o’clock they peel themselves out of the black cab they’d taken from Paddington Station and let themselves into Henry’s apartment block. The porter, Oscar, is not there – he finishes early on the weekend – and they move silently with their suitcases into the lift and up to the third floor.
Lucy drops her rucksack on to the floor in the hallway and glances around. Can it be only four days since she was last here? Only eight days since she was making fairy cakes for Stella’s cake sale? How is that possible? she wonders. How? She feels she has lived a thousand lives since then.
The cats appear at the sound of humans like ghostly shadows curling around the walls of the flat. Henry scoops them both up: the nice one rubs his face against Henry’s; the horrible one yowls and scratches him and Henry lets it drop to the floor. The cleaner has been and every surface is immaculate and clear.
That night they order fried chicken from Deliveroo and watch TV lined up on the sofa and Henry is different somehow, softer, as he sits with the nice cat on his lap, feeding fried chicken into his own mouth and joining in with Lucy and the children’s jokes. Stella at one point removes all the cushions from behind her back and puts them on the floor to sit on, and Henry doesn’t even notice.
They all go to bed as early as they can given the jetlag, at just after 2 a.m., and Lucy lies and listens to the sounds of London traffic outside the bedroom window and she feels it again, this awful feeling that has followed her for over a year, the tightness around her skull, the dull dread that blunts everything with its incessant chipping away at her sense of security. If the police can somehow find out that Henry was responsible for killing Birdie Dunlop-Evers with a single blow to the head a full twenty-six years after the crime was committed, then what else are they capable of uncovering? I am home, she thinks, I am in clean pyjamas in a big soft bed in a luxury apartment block in central London. But I will never ever feel safe, not until I know that the French police are not still looking for me.
66
‘Welcome home, Henry.’