The Girls (28 page)

‘Hello.’

Oh, there it was. The baritone bear growl. The voice that said:
I am here; all is well.

‘Chris.’

‘Clare?’

‘Yes. It’s me.’

‘It’s you?’

She found herself laughing. ‘Yes. Me. Clare Wild.’

‘Clare Wild? My God. Clare Wild. Hello! Hello!’

‘Chris,’ she said, the name sounding raw and beautiful in her mouth. And then: ‘Chris. It’s Grace. She’s in hospital. At the Royal Free. And you have to come now. Right now.’

Twenty-eight

As soon as Pip walked into the waiting room after a trip to the toilets, she knew something was different. Her mum looked somehow supercharged, as if she’d had too much coffee, or someone had just told her the funniest joke she’d ever heard and she’d only just stopped laughing.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said. ‘Sit down.’

Pip blanched; she sat down with a dreadful heaviness in her limbs.

Grace was dead
.

‘It’s Daddy,’ Clare began.

Her dad was dead
.

‘He’s on his way. Here. To the hospital.’

Pip recoiled slightly. ‘What?’

‘He’s going to be here in a few minutes.’

She felt colour rise through her. The soft heat of joy.

‘But, how? Did the hospital give him special permission?’

She saw something pass through her mum’s eyes, a flicker of doubt. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They said he could come. Because of Grace. And stay as long as he needs to stay. And even maybe not go back if we need him here.’

Pip let out a small peal of laughter. ‘Oh my God!’ she said. ‘Oh my God! I’m going to see my daddy!’ And then she felt her stomach twist a bit and lowered her hands and said, ‘Is he OK? I mean – better?’

‘I’ve spoken to the person who’s been looking after him and they told me he’s much, much better.’

Pip looked at her mother, her eyes wide over the tops of the hands she had clasped across her smiling mouth. For the first time in eight long months, she was about to feel her father’s arms around her again.

Adele sat down next to Catkin on the lawn, regarded her for a moment and then gently pulled the too-long tangles of her waist-length hair back from her shoulders. Catkin had refused from a young age either to get her hair cut or to allow her mother to brush it properly. From time to time Adele had been forced to cut chunks of it out, matted locks of hair that could not be saved. Nowadays Catkin chose to keep them; she said she liked them. Adele found them hard to stomach, but she had never laid claim to her children’s bodies or their sartorial choices. If Catkin wanted to look like a feral street urchin, that was entirely her decision.

‘Hello, beautiful.’

Catkin looked at her mum over the top of her paperback. ‘Hi.’

‘How are you feeling?’

Catkin shrugged. ‘A bit weird,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Adele, tucking a few loose, baby-soft hairs behind Catkin’s ear. ‘I’m not surprised. It’s all been a bit shocking, hasn’t it?’

Catkin shrugged again and pulled the hairs back into their original position.

‘I’ve just been talking to Rhea,’ Adele said, staring into the middle distance.

She saw Catkin nod.

‘She says she saw you and Grace in the Rose Garden on Saturday night. After Dylan left to take Robbie home.’

Catkin nodded again.

‘So what were you doing, the pair of you?’

‘Not much. We just sat there for a while. Talking. Dad came over. With the dog.’

‘And what did you talk about with Dad?’

‘He told Grace that her mum was a bit tipsy. That Pip was on her own in the flat with her. Said she might want to go home. But Grace said she was waiting for Dylan to come back.’

‘And was there any drinking at this point?’

Catkin threw her an alarmed look.

‘It’s OK,’ she said, ‘I’ve spoken to Dylan. He told me about the champagne.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘That was all there was.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘Grace said she was going to wait by the garden gates for Dylan to come back. She said she wanted to say goodnight because she needed to go home.’

‘Did you go with her?’

‘No. I went to the playground. To see what the others were doing. She went to the gate.’

‘Then what?’

Catkin looked at her enquiringly. ‘Why are you asking me all these questions? Isn’t that the police’s job?’

‘Yes. It is. And they’re coming back later to talk to us all and we’d better know exactly what happened. Because …’ She paused, resisting the temptation to move the loose hair back behind her daughter’s ear again. ‘Apparently Grace was given an overdose. Of sleeping pills. And that’s what made her ill. Not a blow to her head.’

‘What?’ Catkin covered her mouth with her hands. ‘You’re kidding? Right?’

‘No. I’m not kidding. The policeman came back a couple of hours ago. He told me.’

‘Oh my God. But that’s awful. Who would have done that? I mean, you don’t think she did it to herself, do you?’

‘Well, that’s certainly not a line they’re pursuing. But, listen, can you see now why we must be absolutely certain about what happened out here, before the police come back? Can you see?’

Catkin nodded. She grew thoughtful for a moment. ‘When Dylan came back to the playground,’ she said quietly, ‘he had a bottle of water.’

‘And where was Grace, when Dylan came back?’

‘She must have gone home.’

‘Tell me more about this bottle of water.’

‘I don’t know anything about it. I just noticed he had it.’

‘So, starting from the beginning: you and Grace were in the Rose Garden. Dad came in and had a little chat. Then Grace left to wait for Dylan. And you went to the playground. Dylan came back, without Grace but with a bottle of water.’

Catkin nodded, shrugged, pale bones moving inside the thin skin of her shoulders.

‘Then what?’

‘Then we just hung out. Until Pip came past asking if we’d seen Grace. And then, well, you know …’

‘And all this time you were all in the playground: you, Fern, Tyler, Dylan?’

She nodded.

‘Anyone else?’

‘No.’

Adele squeezed the back of her daughter’s neck gently and got to her feet. ‘Thank you.’

‘Mum?’

She turned. ‘Yes?’

‘There was …’

She saw Catkin’s bony chest rise and fall, rise and fall. ‘Something did happen. Earlier.’ Her mouth sounded dry.

‘What?’

‘When we’d had the champagne. When we were all a bit tipsy. Tyler was teasing Grace. For not putting out.’

‘For what?’

‘She was calling her a prick-tease. Saying that she was thirteen now and it was time for her to stop mucking about and give Dylan what he wanted. She said—’ Catkin stopped abruptly. ‘Well, that was kind of it really. Grace and Dylan both got really embarrassed. That was it.’ She trailed off.

‘Are you sure?’ Adele asked.

‘Yeah. I’m sure.’

Adele stroked her back one more time and headed back inside, a terrible feeling of gnawing discomfort growing within her by the second. Because, according to Catkin’s account of things, the only time that Grace had been alone all afternoon and all evening was during the twenty minutes that her own husband had been walking the dog.

There he was. There, in the doorway. Backlit. Enormous. Clare pulled herself slowly to her feet. He was thinner than she remembered. And there was that beard, the beard he’d never had before but which looked so entirely a part of him that she already couldn’t imagine him without it. And the hair, the wild hair that had tumbled about his shoulders and fallen into his eyes, the hair she would badger and badger him about getting cut because it made him look like a mad person: it was gone. His hair now was short and sane. He wore a soft cotton shirt in baby pink, the sleeves bunched up above his elbows, with wash-worn black trousers and giant suede desert boots in a camel colour.

He looked first at Clare, then at his younger daughter and then at his elder. He was torn. Pip made the choice for him; she leaped to her feet and flung herself around his neck. She looked small next to him, Clare noticed. She looked little again.

She had briefed Chris. He knew that the official line for Pip was that he’d come straight from the hospital. There would be no talk of the month he’d spent living four miles away with a 26-year-old girl. No talk of all these weeks that Clare had been protecting her children from their father when all along the real criminal was lurking in their back garden. There would be no talk of the mistakes Clare had made and the lapses in her own judgement. The only talk would be of Grace and how to get her to wake up.

‘She’s still scared of you,’ she whispered in Chris’s ear as he came towards Grace, his hand outstretched. ‘I don’t know how she’ll react to the sound of your voice. Maybe it would be better …?’

He smiled at Clare. ‘I get it,’ he mouthed silently. He took Grace’s hand in his. With his other hand he caressed the bruised contours of her face. Then he turned to Clare again, his face soft with hurt, and said, in the quietest whisper a man of his size could manage: ‘
Who the hell did this to her?
’

‘Did you get my letters?’

‘I did get your letters. I loved your letters. I used your letters to work out where you lived. So that I could send birthday presents to you.’

‘Why didn’t you ever reply?’

Her father stopped and regarded the ceiling as though the answer were up there, Sellotaped to the water pipes. ‘I tried,’ he said. ‘I did try. I wrote you loads of letters, but every time I read them back to myself they sounded wrong. Mad. You know. I didn’t want you to get a letter from me that would make you worry. So I just screwed them all up. Chucked them in the bin. Decided to wait until I was all better, so that I could do this, instead.’ He brought his arms around her and squeezed her hard.

‘You’re thin,’ she said, pulling back and regarding him.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s the medicine. And missing you all, of course.’

‘Are you really allowed to stay out now?’

‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘I’m free.’

‘Forever?’

‘Hopefully,’ he said. ‘But you know, you’re twelve now, you’re a big girl, you understand that I’m ill. That I will never get better. Not properly. And I might get sick again and have to go back. But the doctors have found a much better way to treat me now, using much better medicine, so hopefully’ – he crossed two pairs of huge fingers – ‘I’ll never have to leave you for such a long time again.’

Pip stared at him, drinking him in, all of him.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘Grace told me that she and I could never take drugs because it might give us paranoid schizophrenia. Because that’s what happened to you.’

‘She told you that, did she?’

‘Yes. And she said it’s genetic so we might already have it and if we take drugs it might unlock it inside us. And now someone’s given her drugs. Do you think …? I mean, will she …?’

Her dad picked her hands up in his and brought them to his beardy chin, kissing the backs of them. ‘No,’ he said, softly, ‘no, sweetheart. She won’t. Wrong kind of drugs.’

Pip sighed with relief. Then she looked up at her dad, at the new finer contours of his face, the plush beard and the cropped hair and a memory came to her, from left field, fast and vivid. A man on Fitzjohn’s Avenue, weeks and weeks ago. She’d been on the bus. He’d been on the pavement. Their eyes had met. ‘I saw you,’ she said, throatily. ‘In Hampstead. A month ago. I was on the bus.’

He looked down at her tenderly. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you didn’t. It must just have been someone who looked like me.’ He kissed the crown of her head. ‘If it had been me,’ he said, ‘I’d have waved.’

Twenty-nine

Adele and the girls had had a rather subdued lunch around the kitchen table: home-made sandwiches and cold sausages and chicken leftover from Saturday night. The only child with any conversation to her name was, of course, Willow, who hadn’t stopped talking about the impending visit from the police, saying things like:
Right, we must all get our stories straight
, and,
Fern, where exactly were you between nine and ten?
The older girls had just tutted and looked away from her disdainfully.

But lunch was now over, the table was cleared and Adele was about to ask Fern just that question.

‘Fern, can I have a word?’

Fern looked up from her novel and pulled a bud from her ear, releasing a thin trickle of tinny music. Her eyes were circled with dark rings; she looked as though she hadn’t slept for days. ‘What?’

‘We need to talk about Saturday night.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, the fact that you were one of the last people to be with Grace before something terrible happened to her.’

Fern started to pluck at a piece of loose skin on her thumb. It came away leaving a bead of blood, which she sucked off. ‘None of us know what happened. We’ve already told you a million times.’

‘Hm.’ Adele sat down next to Fern. ‘Thing is, Fern, I’ve been talking to other people and there’s lots of stuff you and your sisters didn’t tell me yesterday. Like that there was champagne involved.’

‘Hardly,’ said Fern, finding a new piece of dry skin to tug at. ‘There was, like, one bottle. We all had, like, a mouthful.’

‘That’s not the point. You should have told me. It’s relevant.’

‘We all said we wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘So I was just going along with that. It was supposed to be, like, this big secret.’

‘Catkin also mentioned some teasing going on: Tyler telling Grace that she should be “giving Dylan what he wants”? I find that quite disturbing.’

Fern shrugged. ‘Well, that’s Tyler, isn’t it? She
is
quite disturbing.’

‘Is she?’

Fern shrugged again. ‘I guess. I mean, she’s not your average thirteen-year-old, is she?’ She turned her hands palms up and started looking for shreds of skin there amongst the patches of eczema.

Adele put out a gentle stopping hand. ‘Isn’t she?’

‘No. Course she’s not.’

‘And what is an average thirteen-year-old?’

Fern considered the question. ‘I don’t think there’s any such thing,’ she said eventually.