Then She Vanishes(42)

‘It’s a Friday night.’ She sounds puzzled. Of course. I should have realized. My mum has a better social life than I do. ‘I’d have thought you’d be out.’

‘You obviously are.’ I can’t help the note of bitterness creeping into my voice.

She sighs. ‘Yes. Yes, I am …’ Her voice is suddenly drowned by a burst of laughter. ‘Listen, Jess, I can’t talk now. Can I ring you back tomorrow?’

‘I … Yes, that’s great.’

‘Speak soon. Love you.’ And the phone goes dead.

I stare at the screen for a few moments before tossing it onto the sofa. It’s only seven thirty but now the evening looms ahead and I feel lonely and trapped in this apartment that doesn’t feel like mine. I wander into the bedroom with photographs of Aoife and her friends taken on various nights out over the bed, and open the top drawer in Rory’s side cabinet, retrieving the little square box. I sit on the edge of the bed and admire the ring again. It really is beautiful. I try it on to find it’s only a little bit big. Why can’t I be normal? Heather got married. Heather had a baby.

My mind goes back to when Margot let us spend the night in one of the static caravans. It must have been only a few months before that fateful summer and the caravan park was quiet, the season not yet kicking in. We took a four-berth right on the edge of the park, with views of the cliffs and the bay of Tilby. We could have had a bedroom each but we’d slept in the living-room part with the sofa folded down into a bed. It was early April and cold, and we’d huddled together in our individual sleeping-bags, talking of all the things we would do when we left school.

‘I never want to get married,’ I’d said, pulling the edge of the sleeping-bag up to my chin. It smelt mildewy. ‘I want to travel. See the world. Not be tied down by some man.’

‘Same,’ agreed Heather, wriggling like a maggot in her luminous yellow sleeping-bag. ‘I want to go to Paris and write and wander along the Left Bank and maybe take a lover.’

We’d laughed at this. Take a lover. It was something we’d heard in a film and now it was a running joke. We weren’t going to be tied down. We’d just take a lover.

Yet Heather never left Tilby or, as far as I can work out, took a lover. She met Adam at eighteen and married him at twenty-two. Margot had said he was her first and only boyfriend.

I’d been twenty-nine when I’d met Rory, and he definitely hadn’t been my first. Far from it.

I push the ring back into its padded box and hide it under Rory’s socks, so that I can no longer see it, as though the sight of it would burn my retinas. I turn off the light and I’m about to leave the room when my eyes catch something across the road through the bedroom window. I step forwards, half hidden by Aoife’s retro-print curtains. In one of the upstairs windows on the third floor of the derelict building I can see the faint silhouette of a person. I can’t make out whether it’s male or female but they’re holding a torch and directing it right at me. Can they see me? They probably could earlier when I was sitting on the bed with the curtains open and the lights on. I shudder at the thought. The building used to be an old granary and flour warehouse. Are squatters living there? Or is someone hanging out there to spy on me? I step forward and draw the curtains tightly.

As I head back into the living room I hear my mobile ringing. I grab it from where I’d slung it on the sofa, hoping it’s Rory, but I’m surprised when Margot’s name flashes up.

‘Jess?’

I’ve noticed she calls me Jess now, like she did when I was a kid.

‘Speaking. Are you okay?’ She sounds upset.

‘I – I know I’m interrupting your evening and you’re probably busy …’

‘I’m not busy.’ I give a fake laugh. ‘I’m actually home alone.’

There’s a pause. ‘Oh. Right. I thought you’d be out. You always were such a social butterfly.’

Was I? I suppose I was once. Now the only thing I seem to do is work or come home and slump in front of the TV with Rory, watching box sets, broken up by the occasional drink at the pub with Jack. ‘I don’t go out much.’ When did that happen? Since we left London? Or before?

‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘I had a call from the police. They’ve found another set of fingerprints on the gun Heather used.’

I stand up straighter. Now this is interesting. ‘Really? Whose?’

She sighs. ‘They don’t know.’

‘But,’ I begin pacing the room, ‘this is good, right? It means Heather might not have pulled the trigger. Someone else was there.’ I realize, with a jolt, that I’m desperate for Heather to be innocent. How can I be objective in my reporting now?

‘I – I’m not sure …’ She sounds lost and my heart aches for her.

‘Margot? Is Adam with you? Have you told him?’

The line crackles a little and I go to stand near the balcony doors. ‘He went to see Heather. And the …’ Her voice cuts out, then comes back in again, like a radio being tuned. ‘I think he’s at his mum’s with Ethan.’ She sounds very far away.

‘Margot,’ I shout, so that she can hear me. ‘Can I come over?’ It will only take twenty minutes to get there at this time of night.