The Other People: A Novel(26)

“Then what are you saying?”

A long pause. A look on her face that almost tore the truth from him. Almost.

“I’m saying—I want you home on time tonight. Just once a week. That’s all I ask. One night when we eat together, you read your daughter a bedtime story and we pretend we’re a normal, happy family.”

Leaving that barb buried deep, she had shrugged her coat on, flung her bag over her shoulder and gone to say goodbye to Izzy.

Gabe had started after her then almost fell over Schr?dinger, who was winding around his feet and mewling for breakfast. Gabe had cursed, shoved the cat roughly aside with his foot and picked up his phone.

That was when Izzy had emerged into the kitchen, sleep-tousled and red-cheeked.

“Hi, Daddy!”

She’d yawned and bent down to pick up the cat…

“Owww!”

It had definitely happened that morning. He remembered the bright red blood welling in the shallow wound. Soothing her a little impatiently. Fumbling for the small Disney bandage to stick on the scratch. He remembered it all.

So where was the scratch on the photo?

He turned the question over and over, wrestled and wrangled with it, but he still kept coming to the same conclusion: if there was no scratch, the photo must have been taken later. After the scratch had healed. After the day that Izzy had supposedly been killed.

Which meant…the picture wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.

So, what was he saying—someone had set it up? Faked the photograph—to convince him Izzy was dead?

But why? And if Izzy’s picture was fake, what about Jenny’s?

His throat tightened. He felt an ache somewhere in the region of his heart, or where it used to be. Gabe had thought about this before. Many times. In his long treks up and down the motorway he had had very little else to occupy his mind. So he would run through all the possible scenarios in which Izzy could still be alive. The ways in which a mistake could have been made.

It always came back to one answer. One painful, brutal truth.

The only way Izzy could be alive was if Jenny was dead.

There had to be no doubt, not one iota, that the female body in the house was Jenny. Only then would the police have assumed that the little girl was Izzy. Of course, she would have to be the same age, build, coloring. But it wasn’t actually that difficult to confuse one child with another, if you didn’t know them.

He remembered Izzy’s first school nativity (or, should he say, Jenny never let him forget) when Izzy had told him she was playing Mary. He had arrived late, so had to sit at the back, several rows behind Jenny. But he had spent the performance dutifully snapping away with his iPhone and applauding every mumbled line. Afterward, he told Izzy what a brilliant Mary she had been.

She had burst into tears.

“What?” he had asked.

“I wasn’t Mary. I was a shepherd!”

Jenny had hugged Izzy and hissed at him. “She was Mary last night. I told you. They take it in turns.”

The memory still burned. But the point was, if he could mix up his own daughter with another child, then so could strangers. So could the police. They would have no reason to believe that the little girl in the house wasn’t Izzy.

It’s about your wife…and your daughter.

And, of course, the real rub: Izzy had been positively identified by her grandfather. Harry. A respected retired surgeon. But also, the more Gabe thought about it, a man who was hiding something; something that was eating away at him.

He gripped the steering wheel tighter. Harry. Fucking Harry. All this time. Lying. Pretending to everyone that Izzy was dead.

But why?

Gabe was under no illusion that his relationship with Jenny’s parents had never been anything but “strained.” Or, to put it bluntly, Evelyn had regarded Gabe as something she might scrape off her expensive Louboutins, and Harry had tolerated him, like a vaguely unpleasant smell. He could just about accept that Harry had used him, deceived him. Evelyn would probably have got a perverse kick out of it.

But to lie to the police, to risk his precious reputation, perhaps even prosecution? To go through the charade of a funeral, to lay flowers every month on another girl’s buried ashes?

Jesus Christ. There had to be a damn good reason.

And who was the other little girl? It was the point he kept stumbling at. For Izzy to be alive, then there had to have been another little girl in the house. Another body to identify. To cremate. But if another child had been killed, why the hell had no one reported her missing?

The police had spoken to the parents from Izzy’s school. They had to, because of Izzy’s birthday party that weekend. With so many people coming in and out of the house, it had pretty much blighted any chance of the police recovering anything useful from DNA traces. But no one had said: “Oh, by the way, Officer, I seem to be missing my daughter.”

His head throbbed. He rubbed at his eyes. A horn blasted, loud enough to jolt him out of his stupor. He had let the van drift. He yanked it back, out of the path of a truck thundering down the inside lane. Shit. Breathe, Gabe, concentrate. Think.

Two little girls. Alike enough to be confused. Almost interchangeable.

“I wasn’t Mary. I was a shepherd.”

Why had no one reported the other girl missing?

And suddenly he had it. He felt the neurons fire in his brain, making the connection. He had been looking at it all wrong. Arriving late to the scene, sat at the back, snapping away blindly but not really paying attention.