The Other People: A Novel(27)
If another girl could be mistaken for Izzy, then Izzy could be mistaken for her.
“She was Mary last night. They take it in turns.”
What if the other girl wasn’t missing?
What if Izzy was playing her part?
“That good?”
Alice nodded, stuffing an Egg McMuffin into her mouth. She was ravenous this morning, Fran thought, guiltily. Bad mother, her internal voice—which sounded a lot like her own mother’s—scolded. You’re neglecting the basics: food, fluid, rest—oh, and not letting her drown in the bath.
So far she had trodden carefully around the incident in the hotel room. Her first priority had been making sure that Alice was back up to body temperature, that her breathing and heart rate were normal. She couldn’t have been in the icy water for long (and, thank God, she had run the cold, not the hot tap), but this was a new and worrying development.
She took a sip of coffee. “Alice, can we talk about what happened in the bathroom?”
Alice glanced up at her from beneath her drapes of dark hair. Fran frowned as she stared at the roots. They needed retouching. Small things they couldn’t let slip.
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“Not anything?” Fran waited.
Alice sighed, looked down at her half-eaten McMuffin. “I saw the girl again.”
The girl. Fran felt her agitation increase. Who was she? Some kind of imaginary friend? A product of Alice’s mind, of the trauma? Or something else?
“Did the girl make you run the bath, get in the water?” Fran asked.
“No. She just wanted to show me something.”
Fran gritted her teeth, pushed her hair behind her ears. Try to stay calm.
“What did she want to show you?”
Alice fiddled with the rucksack on her lap. Clickety-click. Clickety-click. The sound made Fran’s fillings hum. She fought the urge to yell at her to Stop fucking doing that.
“Alice, you could have drowned, died of hypothermia. Do you think the girl wants to hurt you?”
Alice looked at her with wide eyes. “No. You don’t understand. It’s not like that.”
Fran put her cup down and grabbed Alice’s arm. The rucksack fell to the floor with a thud.
“Then tell me. Who is the girl? What’s her name?”
Alice wriggled. Fran held on tighter. Too tight, the internal voice tutted.
“I don’t know.”
“Try—think.”
Something vibrated on the table near her elbow. Alice yanked her arm away and rubbed at the red fingermarks.
“Your phone.”
Fran stared at it. Only one person had this number. And he knew never to use it unless it was important—an emergency. She snatched the phone up, stared at the text.
“He knows.”
Sleeping in the day was difficult, no matter how many years you’d been working nights. Katie had blackout blinds and ear plugs, comfy pajamas and memory-foam pillows, but it didn’t matter. You couldn’t fool your body clock. Your brain knew that it was daytime and it resisted sleep like an argumentative toddler.
Normally, a good book, some hot milk and cereal—and occasionally a couple of Nytol—helped to ease her off. Today, not even that was working. Her mind was too busy, too distracted.
Despite what she had told herself, she couldn’t stop thinking about the thin man. The Other People.
Why were those words written in the notebook?
She tossed and turned, thumped her pillow, kicked off the duvet, pulled it back on again and then, eventually, admitted defeat. She heaved herself out of bed and padded downstairs to her tiny kitchen.
She set the kettle to boil, plucked a couple of digestives out of the biscuit tin and pulled open a kitchen drawer. She fumbled among the detritus of takeaway menus, spare keys, paperclips and Sellotape and took out a postcard.
A view from a cliff overlooking a beach. The sun was shining, the sky was a deep azure, the waves tipped with white. Beneath the picture, swirly writing read: Greetings from Galmouth Bay.
They had gone there for a family holiday, their last one all together, staying in a whitewashed B&B run by an eccentric lady in her sixties with an alarming red wig and a snappy white terrier. They had eaten ploughmans at country pubs, built lopsided sandcastles on the beach and even had a photo taken on this very same cliff.
No such thing as a happy family, she reminded herself. She remembered standing there, clutching Lou’s pudgy hand as Mum wobbled on her heels, smile already blurred around the edges from one too many G&Ts at lunch, and how her elder sister had sulked and moaned about how she hated her picture being taken.
Only Dad had been genuinely happy and relaxed, wisps of his thinning hair caught by the breeze as he focused his old Kodak camera and tried to goad them all into saying, “Smelly cheesy feet.” The only solid, stable thing in their lives. The glue that kept them all together.
At least he was. And then, one day, he was taken away. Suddenly, brutally, violently.
And Katie was the one who found him.
* * *
—
NINE YEARS AGO. One of those bright spring mornings that fools you into thinking you don’t need a jacket and then whips up goosebumps on your arms with a bitter breeze.
Katie had arrived at her parents’ for Sunday lunch. It wasn’t something they did regularly—Mum was hardly the best cook, even when she was sober—but Katie appreciated that at least her parents tried to get them all together as a family every few months.