The Girls (27 page)

‘She’s twelve!’ Clare said, unthinkingly.

Jo glanced at her in confusion. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I thought she was thirteen?’

‘Sorry, sorry. Yes. She is. Just. It was her birthday.’

‘Look, Clare. I’m a mum. I have an eight-year-old and a five-year-old. I cannot conceive of them getting any bigger. I cannot imagine a world where my children detach themselves from me and have secrets from me and do things that adults do. But Grace had been drinking that night. Hanging about with teenage friends. You can’t rule out the possibility that whatever happened to Grace happened to her consensually.’

‘But she was
drugged
! Why would anyone drug her if she was giving it away for free?’

‘That I don’t know, Clare. I can only talk about what I see, forensically. And that is a child with no physical signs of an assault, apart from a broken nose which could have been caused by any number of unrelated mishaps.’

‘But the drugs! What about the drugs?’

Jo Mackie sighed and sat back into her chair. ‘Until Grace wakes up, that is something for the police to investigate. And, once they’ve found out where the drugs came from and how they got into Grace, then they can look into the possibility of assault. But right now, Clare, it might be worth you going home and talking to your daughter’s friends. Find out how well you really knew her.’

‘Rhea,’ Adele called into the intercom. ‘It’s Adele. Mind if I come up?’

She’d tried Cece’s flat but there’d been no one home, as she’d expected.

‘Yes. Please do. Please!’

Rhea greeted her at her front door in a floor-length kaftan, her cat staring aggressively at the visitor from the other end of the hallway. ‘Come in. Please. Sit. Tea? Coffee?’ She reappeared a moment later with a bag of her favourite cheesy puffs and a large bottle of Coke.

‘Please,’ said Adele. ‘Don’t open the crisps on my account. I’m really not hungry.’

‘No,’ said Rhea sadly, putting the bag down. ‘No. I can’t say that I am either.’

‘Have the police been?’

‘Yes,’ she said pensively, sitting down next to Adele, smoothing out the front of her kaftan. ‘A nice Greek boy. He just left.’

‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘Yes. He said he was going to try Cece again. I told him not to bother. Told him she is a full-time social worker. But …’ She shrugged. ‘That’s for him to find out.’

She began to twist at the lid of the Coke bottle. Adele smiled and took it from her. Poured them a glass each but didn’t touch hers. She hadn’t drunk Coke since she was about seventeen, since she’d seen that trick where someone left a penny in it overnight and it virtually disintegrated.

‘What did they tell you?’ she asked.

‘They told me about the overdose. My God. I thought she’d knocked herself unconscious. I never thought … my God …’

‘What else did he say?’

‘Well, really he wasn’t here to talk, he was here to ask questions. And listen, Adele.’ She reached across and covered Adele’s hand with her own. ‘I have to be honest with you. I saw something on Saturday night. And really, it was nothing. But the nice Greek boy, he seemed to think it was important. He was asking me a lot of questions about it. A
lot
of questions.’

Adele waited for Rhea to continue.

‘At around nine fifteen I was sitting on my balcony and I saw Leo walking your dog up here, like he does every night. Around the Rose Garden. And then he went into the Rose Garden. And I noticed this because I could see that the dog did not want to go into the Rose Garden. He was pulling against the lead. And Leo had to drag him through the gate.’

Adele nodded, her hands clasped together on her lap.

‘I told the police boy that Leo and the dog were in there for about five minutes, but I really don’t know for sure. It was certainly longer than a minute. Then they came out again and headed down the hill back to your house. At which point I felt the cold a little and came indoors.’

Adele nodded again, encouragingly.

‘And that is that.’

Adele narrowed her eyes. ‘And the police seemed interested in that?’

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Very. Wanted the timings to the closest half-second.’

‘And do you have any idea why?’

‘Well, no, apart from the fact that the girl was found outside the Rose Garden forty minutes later. I suppose they need to place everybody.’

‘And, when Leo was in the Rose Garden, where were the kids? Could you see them?’

‘Which kids?’

‘Well, at that time it would have been Grace and Catkin, I suppose.’

‘Yes.’ Rhea’s face brightened with remembrance. ‘They
were
in the Rose Garden. I saw them go in, after the boy and his brother left.’

‘Dylan and Robbie?’

‘Yes. Dylan and Robbie.’

Adele turned her gaze towards Rhea’s balcony. ‘Would you mind if I …?’

‘Of course not. Please do!’

Adele stood on Rhea’s balcony and looked down. From here she could see the far end of the Rose Garden where the gate was, but not the near end, where the two benches were.

‘Could you see them?’ she asked, turning to Rhea, who was standing just behind her. ‘Could you see the girls?’

‘No. Not from here. And of course it was beginning to get dark around then, shadowy, you know.’

Adele turned back to the view. ‘And so Grace and Catkin were in the Rose Garden, then Leo came in with Scout, and then he left. And the girls were still there?’

‘So far as I know, Adele, yes. And then I came indoors.’

Adele frowned. ‘I can’t think why they would be so interested. I mean, if Catkin was there it’s not as if anything could have happened, is it?’

‘I did find it strange, yes. But you know, Adele, I did tell the police boy another thing. I told him about Phoebe. And I told him about Gordon. And I also told him that I had seen Gordon wandering about the gardens a lot that night. After the jazz. Just wandering about on that new foot of his. He caught my eye at one point; he looked up and you know what he said? He said, “How’s that lovely daughter of yours?” I said, “Gordon, she is fifty-six years old and has a grandchild.” And he said, “I’ve got seven grandchildren and one foot, what’s that got to do with anything?”’

Rhea rolled her brown eyes theatrically. ‘I know you say he has changed, Adele, but I don’t see any evidence of it. So, anyway, I don’t know. The police boy didn’t seem very interested in Gordon. Or in Phoebe for that matter. But’ – her eyes watered slightly – ‘in Leo, he seemed very interested indeed. And of course the idea, the
notion
that your lovely, handsome husband should be in any way involved or have anything to do with …’ She shook her head. ‘Preposterous. But I just thought you should know. So it doesn’t take you by surprise.’

‘Thank you, Rhea,’ said Adele. ‘I really do appreciate it.’

Adele let herself back into the garden through the gates on Virginia Terrace. She lowered her sunglasses from the top of her head and moved fast and stealthily to avoid unwanted conversations with nosy neighbours. She saw Catkin, still on the lawn outside their flat with her book and the dog. She would talk to her in a minute. But first she made her way up the hill, towards the benches and the Rose Garden. She sat for a moment on the benches where Grace and Dylan and her girls had been sitting for a while that night. From here you could see down the hill and towards her terrace and the playground. In front was the entrance to the Rose Garden. Behind was the wall dividing the garden from the backs of the shops on the high street. The wall was ten feet tall, topped with curls of rusty barbed wire and watched over by two cameras. In the whole history of the garden, no one had ever got in over that wall.

She got to her feet and walked to the Rose Garden. She passed the spot where Grace had been found on Saturday night, on the grass just outside the gate. A shiver passed through her and she pushed open the gate.

The Rose Garden had always been her favourite spot in the garden. It was a cliché, of course, but it really was an oasis within an oasis. Before they’d had children she would come here with novels and college work and nail polish and newspapers and sometimes with Leo to sit on the bench and kiss him for a while away from the gaze of his parents and brothers. She’d breastfed Catkin in here, too, at first, but then stopped once Catkin was older and more vocal, feeling that she didn’t want to spoil the peace and quiet of the spot for other garden residents.

She was alone in here now. The tall hedges muted the sounds of the garden and cut out the majority of the landscape. She looked up into a cloudless blue sky, watching a jet trace its way lazily from one end of the horizon to the other, leaving a thin hazy thread in its wake. She lowered her gaze to Rhea’s balcony and then lower still to the benches on the other side. There was Phoebe’s bench on the right. The bench on the left was dedicated to a dog called Sparrow who had died in 1987. Between the two benches was a waste bin. Adele stared at the bin for a moment, registering its significance.

She stood over the bin and inventoried what she saw. An empty bottle, not of champagne – Dylan had been well and truly duped – but a nasty cheap Cava in a black bottle. A stack of five clear disposable cups, ones she recognised from her own home. She came to a Coke can. She picked that out and sniffed it. No trace of anything untoward. Some screwed-up paper muffin cases, probably from the cake stall earlier in the day. Balled-up nappies in pale yellow bags. Sections from Saturday’s
Times
, read and discarded. She was reaching deeper and deeper into the bin now, through the flotsam and jetsam of the day, not sure even what she was looking for.

She pulled out the plastic cups, examined their bottoms for the residue of crushed-up pills. Because surely that was how they had been administered? They could not have been swallowed whole. But there was nothing. There was a rustle in the undergrowth behind the benches and Adele jumped slightly when a large tortoiseshell cat landed on the back of the bench and stared at her blankly. She stared back at the cat and then at the space from where he had arrived. A kind of tunnel in the hedge, a passageway with a dipped-out bottom scratched out of the dry earth by, she assumed, the claws of cats and foxes. It was a big hole; big enough, she mused, for a person to clamber through. If they needed to.

She shook her head, wondering why she was thinking this way. Then she stroked the cat’s head, her eyes just flicking over Phoebe’s memorial plaque, her thoughts grazing the spot in her consciousness where Gordon had suggested that Leo had something to do with her death, her breath held deep and icy cold inside her.

As soon as she and Pip had got back to the hospital from their brief trip home Clare had plugged in her phone to charge it. She switched it on now and found a phalanx of missed calls, text messages and voicemails. She would go through them later. For now, though, there was something more important she needed to do.

She found a number on her phone, one she’d programmed in a couple of weeks before. For a few moments she stood with her thumb over the call button. What she was about to do was irreversible. But, she now knew, inevitable. She focused on the image of the size-twelve feet in the thick woollen socks and pressed call.

‘Hello,’ said a woman with a small voice and a London accent.

‘Hi, is that Roxy?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Hello. My name is Clare Wild. We haven’t met, but I believe you know my husband, Chris.’

There was a beat of surprised silence. ‘Yes.’

‘I believe he may be staying with you at the moment.’

‘Well, yes, kind of. I mean, you know, on the sofa, it’s—’

‘I’m not calling to put you on the spot. He needed somewhere to stay and I’m grateful to you. But there’s been … there’s an emergency. Chris’s –
our
daughter. She’s in the hospital. It’s very serious. And I need you to tell me honestly – really, really honestly – how he is.’

‘He’s good.’

‘No, I need more than good.’ She’d raised her voice, frustrated by Roxy’s immediate retreat into the evasive, inadequate teenage parlance of her own children. ‘This is so, so important. Really. Before I bring Chris back into the picture, I need to know, properly. Is he well? Is he well enough to be at the side of his child’s hospital bed?’

She sensed Roxy on the other end of the line pulling herself up tall, and heard the tone of her voice change. ‘He’s been taking his medication. Every single day. Going to all his outpatient appointments. And counselling.’

‘Counselling?’

‘Yes. Post-traumatic stress counselling. Trying to come to terms with what he did.’ She paused. ‘To you. And the children. He cooks me a lovely meal every night. He irons my clothes. Looks after my plants. Looks after me.’

Clare felt herself rankle at this last comment. A flash of jealousy passed through her. She embraced it.

‘And for the last few weeks he’s even been talking to people about another documentary. I mean, honestly, I swear, if you didn’t know his history, if you didn’t know what happened last year, you would just think he was the sanest, normalest person out there. I mean, he’s like a teddy bear.’

Now Clare envisaged Chris as a giant teddy bear – in oatmeal socks. And as she did so she felt the residual traces of the image that stained her consciousness for so long, of the wild-eyed man in the wetsuit, begin to fade away.

‘Where is he?’ she said. ‘Right now?’

‘At home,’ said Roxy. ‘Probably.’

‘Are you with him?’

‘No. I’m at work.’

‘Do you have a landline?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could I have it? To call him?’

‘Sure, sure.’

Clare wrote it on the back of her hand.

‘What’s the matter’, asked Roxy, ‘with Grace? May I ask?’

‘She had a …’ She struggled for the words. ‘She was … There was an accident. We’re not sure what happened. And she’s in a coma.’

She heard Roxy’s intake of breath. ‘Oh, Jesus. Oh God. I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘So am I.’

She didn’t pause before tapping in the number for Roxy’s flat, gave herself no time to overthink it or find a reason not to do it. She acted on the ache inside her, the need to hear her husband’s voice, to bring him to the bedside of their sick child.