The Lies We Told(59)

As Clara listened she felt the creeping heat of anger inside her. Stupid, stupid Luke. What had probably meant nothing more to him than a bit of harmless flirting had clearly meant much more to this silly girl.

A silence fell as Alison crossed her arms defensively in front of her, her pale face closed and truculent once more.

‘Look,’ Clara said. ‘You helped save my life, I’m not about to give you a hard time for flirting with my boyfriend. Trust me, Alison, whatever went on between you and Luke is the least of my problems.’

Alison nodded.

‘Will you be all right?’ Clara asked.

She got up. ‘Yeah,’ she shrugged, ‘course I will.’ She made towards the door, but once there said stiffly, reluctantly, ‘I’m sorry, all right?’

Clara nodded, and she and Mac watched as Alison closed the door behind her.





22


Cambridgeshire, 1997

I’d kept the newspaper cuttings. I don’t know why. Doug had no idea, of course – he’d have been livid if he’d ever found them. We were supposed to forget all about it, pretend we’d played no part in the whole horrible tragedy. But it didn’t seem right to throw them away. I felt I owed it to her – Nadia – to remember, that I shouldn’t get away guilt-free or ever be allowed to forget what happened that day. Her poor family. Her poor mother. They never found out the truth. And I had to live with that – we all did. So I hid the cuttings in between the pages of a book tucked away at the top of the bookcase in our bedroom. I never looked at them, I didn’t need to. I knew what they said by heart.

But after I overheard Hannah on the phone to Emily, after it all fell into place, I took down the book – a thick Jackie Collins I was certain neither Doug nor Hannah would ever want to read – and there they were, the two separate folds of newspaper, yellow with age. It had been sixteen years since I’d last read them. I smoothed out the first one and even the headline brought it all back, those awful feelings, the guilt.

East Anglian Gazette, 25 April 1981

FEARS GROW FOR LOCAL MISSING WOMAN AND CHILD

Police have discovered no new leads on the whereabouts of Nadia Freeman, 19, from Bury St Edmunds and her three-week-old baby, Lana. Ms Freeman is said to suffer from complex mental health issues that had intensified following the birth of her daughter in March.

Nadia’s mother, Mrs Jane Freeman, 56, said, ‘We are all desperately worried for my daughter and granddaughter. They are both so vulnerable. I want Nadia to know that she’s loved, that we will help her, no matter what she’s done. I only want to see my daughter and my baby granddaughter again. We are all so dreadfully worried.’

Police are urging any members of the public with information to come forward.

It’s that bit from Nadia’s mother that’s so awful to read. Knowing the pain she must have felt, the uncertainty. Knowing I could at least have given her the information to end her suffering, that it had been my own selfish desires that had prevented me from doing so. The picture of Nadia, too, is almost impossible to look at, but I force myself to. That young, pretty face, so familiar. Those eyes that haunt me still.

The second article, written a month later, is almost too much to bear, but again I make myself read it. Why should I get to hide it away? I owe it to her to remember.

East Anglian Gazette, 30 May 1981

BODY OF MISSING LOCAL MOTHER FOUND

A coroner’s verdict of suicide has been reached in the case of 19-year-old Bury St Edmunds woman Nadia Freeman whose body was found a fortnight ago on the beach at Dunwich, by dog walkers. Earlier sightings had put Ms Freeman at a known suicide spot, ‘Widow’s Cliff’. She was last seen less than a mile away with her baby daughter, in a distressed state. Extensive searches are being held by police for the body of her three-week-old daughter Lana, but fears are growing that the baby might have been washed out to sea. Nadia had been suffering from poor mental health at the time of her disappearance.

So there it was. I knew what had really happened to Nadia of course, knew what really led to her death. And now, sixteen years later, the truth was about to come out. Why else would Hannah befriend Emily Lawson, if not to punish us all for what we’d done?





23


London, 2017

Mac smiled encouragingly at Clara from the driver’s seat of the battered Ford transit van. ‘Ready?’ he asked. As they turned the corner out of Hoxton Square on to Old Street the boxes of Luke’s belongings – his records, books and clothes that had survived the fire, along with the few pieces of his furniture she’d been able to salvage, slid and bumped heavily against each other in the back. She hadn’t known what else to do with his things. Her landlord, a middle-aged and heavily Botoxed Russian, had been clear he wanted the flat vacated sooner rather than later. ‘Decorators coming tomorrow,’ he’d said, eyeing her disapprovingly when she’d met him at the flat, as though he suspected the damage to his property was more down to carelessness on her part than anything else. She and Mac had packed up her and Luke’s stuff in one grim and depressing afternoon, and while Mac’s had seemed the most sensible place to store her own belongings, Zoe not having the room, they’d been at a loss at first about what to do with Luke’s.

‘How about taking them to Suffolk?’ Mac had suggested. ‘Rose and Oliver could look after them until …’ As his sentence tailed off their eyes had met briefly, then skittered away. The unanswerable question of how and when this nightmare would end hanging in the air between them.