The Most Difficult Thing
The Most Difficult Thing
Charlotte Philby
WHAT WOULD YOU SACRIFICE TO UNCOVER THE TRUTH? ‘I devoured this’ Erin Kelly ‘Compulsive’ i Paper ‘Enigmatic’ Louise Candlish ‘A page-turning thriller’ BBC Radio 4 Open Book ‘Chilling’ Good Housekeeping ‘Addictive’ Joanna Cannon ‘Compelling’ Daily Telegraph On the surface, Anna Witherall personifies everything the aspirational magazine she works for represents. Married to her university boyfriend David, she has a beautiful home and gorgeous three-year-old twin daughters, Stella and Rose. But beneath the veneer of success and happiness, Anna is hiding a dark secret, one that threatens to unravel everything she has worked so hard to create. As Anna finds herself drawn into the dark and highly controlled world of secret intelligence, she is forced to question her family’s safety, and her own. Only one thing is certain: in order to protect her children, she must leave them, forever. And someone is watching. Someone she thought she could trust. Someone who is determined to make them all pay. Stylish and assured, The Most Difficult Thing is an irresistible combination of contemporary espionage and domestic suspense, and a compulsive, highly charged examination of betrayal.
Copyright (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Charlotte Philby 2019
Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photographs © Elena Alferova / Trevillion Images
Charlotte Philby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008326982
Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008327002
Version: 2019-06-03
Dedication (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
For Rosa
Epigraph (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
‘To know yourself is the most difficult thing’
Thales of Miletus
Contents
Cover (#u54e476a1-9fd9-5feb-8431-01c7a1843861)
Title Page (#u8f25a46c-56ce-5fe0-a9eb-8e1b8b7831f7)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1: Anna
Chapter 2: Anna
Chapter 3: Anna
Chapter 4: Anna
Chapter 5: Anna
Chapter 6: Anna
Chapter 7: Anna
Chapter 8: Anna
Chapter 9: Anna
Chapter 10: Anna
Chapter 11: Anna
Chapter 12: Anna
Chapter 13: Anna
Chapter 14: Anna
Chapter 15: Anna
Chapter 16: Maria
Chapter 17: Maria
Chapter 18: Maria
Chapter 19: Maria
Chapter 20: Maria
Chapter 21: Maria
Chapter 22: Maria
Chapter 23: Anna
Chapter 24: Anna
Part Two
Chapter 25: Anna
Chapter 26: Maria
Chapter 27: Anna
Chapter 28: Anna
Chapter 29: Anna
Chapter 30: Maria
Chapter 31: Anna
Chapter 32: Anna
Chapter 33: Maria
Chapter 34: Anna
Chapter 35: Maria
Chapter 36: Anna
Chapter 37: Anna
Chapter 38: Maria
Chapter 39: Anna
Chapter 40: Maria
Chapter 41: Anna
Chapter 42: Anna
Chapter 43: Maria
Chapter 44: Anna
Chapter 45: Maria
Chapter 46: Anna
Chapter 47: Maria
Chapter 48: Anna
Chapter 49: Maria
Chapter 50: Anna
Chapter 51: Maria
Part Three
Chapter 52: Anna
Chapter 53: Anna
Chapter 54: Maria
Chapter 55: Anna
Chapter 56: Anna
Chapter 57: Maria
Chapter 58: Anna
Chapter 59: Anna
Chapter 60: Maria
Chapter 61: Anna
Chapter 62: Anna
Chapter 63: Maria
Chapter 64: Anna
Chapter 65: Maria
Chapter 66: Anna
Chapter 67: Maria
Chapter 68: Anna
Chapter 69: Maria
Chapter 70: Maria
Chapter 71: Anna
Chapter 72: Maria
Chapter 73: Anna
Chapter 74: Maria
Chapter 75: Anna
Acknowledgements
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About the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
I felt my abdominal muscles twinge as I lowered myself to sit. The bench by the lamp post at the foot of the bridge, just as planned.
It had been almost two months since the surgery but still the scar was so raw that I felt tearing across my abdomen if I so much as lifted one of the twins at the wrong angle. Letting my eyelids drop for a moment, I pushed the thought of the girls out of my mind.
Open the box, close the box. Just as the doctor had taught me.
They were not so much benches that lined the stretch of pavement along this part of the Thames. More slabs, like a procession of concrete coffins quietly guarding the water.
It was dusk. Winter. The terminal gloom had long set in, and with it the sort of damp cold that gnawed its way into your bones. A thin gust of wind snuck through the opening in my cardigan as I pulled the grey cashmere closer across my breasts, still swollen.
‘For God’s sake, Harry,’ I cursed him silently, my eyes rolling up towards the stone-coloured sky.
For as long as I can remember, I have always been early. It is a pathological politeness that brings with it control; no one wants to be the last person to step into a room. It was one of the things we shared, at the beginning, he and I. How many times had I arrived early to meet him, before all this had started, only to find him already lurking under an amber glow at the end of the bar?
Yet it was nearly five, and the pavement around me was virtually empty but for a steady stream of deflated tourists and office workers scuttling towards the Tube.
What was he playing at? David would be home from work by six, as had been his wont since the babies had arrived and, almost overnight, he too had been reborn, his naturally attentive, easy parental love a reminder of everything I could never be.
I had told Maria I was just going shopping for babygros. What was Harry doing? Careful not to make any sudden movements, which I had come to accept would be followed by a sharp stab of pain, I pulled my phone from my navy leather handbag, my hand trembling.
No new messages.
My fingers were a bluish-red. I had hardly left the confines of the house since the birth, two months ago, aside from those ritualistic processions along the darker recesses of Hampstead Heath, under the instruction of the nanny. TheNanny. The truth was, she was always so much more than that. Ever-competent Maria silently heaving the double buggy down the front steps, seeing me off from the shadows of the doorway.
I loved the way the air chilled my lungs. Even the buildings on Millbank, which loomed over us from the other side of Lambeth Bridge, seemed to shiver. I had forgotten how cold it got out here. How easy it is to forget.
Hoping I’d maybe missed something in the string of messages that had passed between Harry and me, I flicked my fingers across the screen. Nothing. How many times had I reread his messages? How many times had I crept across the hallway while the girls slept, my toes curling into the carpet, sliding the lock closed behind me, carefully retrieving the phone from where I kept it, stuck behind the drawer of the cupboard where the bathroom cleaning products were kept – somewhere I could guarantee David would never look?
Telling myself I would wait five more minutes before considering my next step, I flicked through a stream of encrypted messages. Once again, my attention was caught by a single image: a photograph, blurred, but clear enough – my father-in-law, the grandfather of my children, shaking hands with a man in a dark suit – his thick black beard a smear of tar across a smudge of flesh.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the streetlights flick on along the river. Looking up, I saw him. Those fierce blue eyes drilling a hole in my chest. Breathing sharply, as if struck, I said his name: ‘Harry.’
PART ONE (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
CHAPTER 1 (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
Anna (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
Three Years Later
The house is still, as it always is at this hour. Once again, I have hardly slept, taking a moment to savour the peace, the calm before the storm: this moment in which I am neither who I was nor who I will become. My eyes skitter across the silver clock by my bed, the one that had belonged to David’s mother: 5.40 a.m. 1 May. The date is already firmly etched in my mind, as it will be for as long as I live.
Dawn has always been my favourite time of day. As a child I would wander the narrow hall of my parents’ house under a hazy bruise of light, gazing through the window overlooking a cul-de-sac of privets and exhaust pipes, imagining myself somewhere else.
David is still asleep. I sit, slowly, careful not to rouse him, his body a mound of flesh under a blanket of Marimekko florals.
I have spent most of the night going over the plan in my head, sealing every second of it into the recesses of memory, ensuring it could never be prised out again should I be caught. Caught. It’s not a word I allow myself to linger on too long.
Creeping from the bed, with its expensive linen sheets and tasteful throws, I sit at the stool in front of the small oak dressing table with its neat displays of family life. Trophies, trinkets of a world I have made my own. Among them, a bronze frame with a photo of David and me in front of the vista of his father’s house in Greece. One of many of his family’s boltholes that we have jetted between over the years, the planes leaving tracks like scars through the sky, visible only to those who glance up at just the right moment.
So young we were then, clinging to one another in front of the pool, the Greek sun bleaching out our features. David’s body turned towards mine, claiming me. Our first holiday together had been a victory, almost. This was where it all had really begun. I was his prize, he had said it a hundred times, but he never knew that he was also mine. Not yet, but he will.
The thought jars in my mind, and I lift my head, catching my reflection in the oval mirror. For a moment I am transfixed. The same light blonde hair, pale green eyes, high cheekbones. Hardened, now. The years of insomnia have caught up with me, in the hollows of my eyes. The corners of my mouth, cracked from years of fixed smiles.
My phone is plugged into the charger on the wall. Silently, I lift it, glancing at David’s sleeping body in the mirror – the soft line of which I could draw from memory – before tapping my password into a second phone, stashed in the pocket of my silk dressing gown. My fingers leave a streak of sweat across the screen. The phone is the same model, same sleek black cover as my other one. Same pin number – the date Harry and I first met. Fundamental differences you would have to peer inside to see.
Once again, I flick through a stream of messages from Harry, distracted for a moment by a chip in my blood-red nail polish. Hearing David stir in the bed, I expertly lock the phone while concentrating my face in the direction of the neat row of perfumes and creams in front of me, replacing it in the pocket of my gown as I stand.
‘What time is it?’
David’s voice drifts across the room, still thick with sleep.
‘Nearly six. My flight isn’t until twelve but I have work to catch up on; Milly’s off on maternity leave today.’
I picture my assistant, whose belly I have watched swell and groan under its own weight over the past months. I picture the young woman’s blotchy red cheeks, which she attempts, feebly, to mellow with slightly too-orange foundation; her increasingly uncomfortable gait.
Over the past weeks, I could almost feel her pelvic bones grating as she delivered proofs of the next issue of the magazine to my office.
Of course Milly believed she would be back within a few months of having the baby, four to six months’ maternity leave, she had told HR. I don’t believe it for a second. Not that it matters. Either way, I won’t be seeing her again.
‘I’m going to have a shower.’ David’s voice interrupts my thoughts.
Smiling convincingly back at him, I lay my hand on a pile of magazine pages, ‘Of course, I won’t be long with this.’
An hour later, I am standing by the door, ready to leave.
‘You look nice.’ David sweeps down the stairs, his polished brogues crushing against chenille carpet, nudging one of the girls’ scooters back in line against the wall in the hallway as he passes; the scooters he had insisted on buying them for their third birthday, a few months earlier, ignoring my concerns that they were too young.
I am dressed for the office. An Issey Miyake cream trouser suit fresh from the dry-cleaners. Shoulder-length hair tucked behind my ears. A slick of Chanel lipstick. The same perfume I spritz and step into every morning, the smell chasing me through the house, a reminder of who I am now.
It was what the papers always commented on, when a picture of me found its way into the society pages of some supplement or other. Perhaps they did not know what else to say: ‘Anna Witherall, editor wife of TradeSmart heir David Witherall, perfectly turned out in …’ Ethereal beauty. Enigmatic charm. These were the words they used. Lazy attempts to place a finger on my ability to stand out and disappear at the same time.
As David makes his way towards the open-plan kitchen – a wall of sliding glass at the back, lined with California poppies – I stand in the hall, making a show of the final check of my handbag. Inside my bag, my fingers are shaking.
Passport, keys, purse. Just another day.
‘I really think you should stay at Dad’s while you’re there, it will be much nicer than a hotel,’ David calls across the kitchen as I slip my feet into a pair of black leather mules, which stand side by side next to the girls’ shoes, Stella’s scuffed at the toe.
I feel the colour rise in my cheeks, and look down again so that he won’t notice. ‘Do you think?’
It is exactly what I have been relying on, of course. Knowing my husband as I do, I can predict that he will push for me to stay at his dad’s place; desperate for this connection to me, this ownership of my life, even when I am abroad.
‘There is actually a ferry, isn’t there, which runs directly from Thessaloniki to the island …’ I add casually, as if the thought has just occurred to me.
It takes four hours and fifty-five minutes, port to port. Not that I will be taking it, of course.
‘Honestly,’ I pace my words carefully, ‘your father won’t mind?’
David doesn’t look up from his newspaper. ‘I told you, he won’t be there, he won’t be in Greece for at least another month. I’ll send a message to Athena, tell her to make up the bed.’
Before I can answer I feel the phone purr in my pocket. I look down, keeping my breath light. WhatsApp message from Unknown Number.
Thinking of you.
Inhaling, I close my eyes before placing the handset in my bag along with my usual phone and house keys, and head into the kitchen, all tasteful teal cupboards and oak countertop. A chrome Smeg fridge plastered in naive children’s drawings, daffodils turning on the table, scattered with the detritus of breakfast.
Neatly dressed in matching pinafores, my daughters are slumped in their chairs, their eyes glued to the iPad their grandfather insisted on buying them. Their grandfather. The thought brushes against my knees and my legs bow. Feeling a rush of blood to my head, I place my hand on the countertop to steady myself, breathing deeply.
Looking up, I prepare to blame a stone in my shoe, a spasm of the spine, but no one has noticed.
This is it. I let my eyes shift between David, the competent father, and the girls. My girls. Still but not quite babies.
Something looms above them, a hint of the women they will become, the women I will never know. Rose’s left eye twitches as it always has when she is tired or worrying about something. Even now she is like a person with the weight of the world on her shoulders. A typical first-born, even if only by a minute. Stella, beside her, oblivious always. How long will she remain so? I feel the unwanted thoughts rise in my mind, and expertly push them down again, back into the pool of simmering acid in my gut.
‘Anna?’
I blink for a moment at the sound of my husband’s voice. How long have I been standing here?
‘I’ll get the door for you. Are you sure you don’t need a lift to the station?’ Is there a hint in his tone? Does he sense what is about to happen? For a second I wonder if I see something in his expression, but then I look again and it has gone.
Grateful for the distraction, I keep my voice light, though my lips are so dry I feel a sharp crack as they tighten. Keeping my hand steady, I shake my head and take a fresh slice of toast from David’s hand.
‘I’m sure.’
I thought it would really take something to kiss my children goodbye one morning and walk out the front door, knowing I wouldn’t be back. But in the end, it was simple. The door had already been opened; all I had to do was walk.
CHAPTER 2 (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
Anna (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
There is no going back now. The taxi glides away from the house, down the street towards South End Green, retreating effortlessly from my family home, away from the expensive brickwork and tended gardens I will never see again.
The sound of the indicator clicks out a steady rhythm. My body quietly shaking, I turn my head so that my driver will not look at me and see what I have done, I watch my life streak past through the window, the bumping motion of the car, the low hum of conversation from the radio.
The girls hadn’t lifted an eye as the horn beeped from the road. Why should they? To them, today is just another day. How long will it be until they learn the truth? How long until the illusion of our lives together comes crashing down, destroying everything I have created, everything that I hold dear?
‘Why couldn’t he get out and ring the bloody doorbell?’ These were David’s parting words.
I have called a different cab service from my usual. My face is automatically drawn to the locks on the car door as the motor flicks silently to life, the wheels rolling between the parade of five-storey terrace houses, into the unknown.
Moving through South End Green, I am bemused by the familiar bustle of London life – the sound of discarded cans rattling against the gutter, the boys in bloomers and long socks stuffed into the back of shiny 4x4s, an old woman with an empty buggy pushing uphill against the wind – the world still rolling on as if nothing has changed.
The traffic is heavy. When the car turns off, unexpectedly, at Finchley Road, my hand grips the door handle.
‘Short cut.’
The voice in the front seat senses my fear but it does little to allay my nerves.
As the car turns, my eyes are distracted by the sudden movements of the trees, the light sweeping over the rear-view mirror. When it levels out again, I see the driver’s eyes trained on mine for a fraction of a second, in the reflection, the rest of his face obscured.
It is an effort to keep my legs steady as I step out of the car at the airport, every stride pressing against the desire to break into a run.
The terminal is a wash of blurred faces and television screens. Slumped bodies, caps tilted over eyes, neon signs, metal archways. My body endlessly moves against the tide, my eyes flicking left and right beneath my sunglasses. There is a sudden pressure on my shoulder and I spin around but it is just a rucksack, protruding from a stranger’s back.
There is something satisfying about flying, I find: the routine of it, the rhythm; answering questions, nodding in the right place, yes, shaking your head, no. I am grateful for it now – for the process, a welcome distraction from what will come.
Nevertheless, my mind won’t settle. All I can do is run through the plan once more. There will be hours of waiting at the airport before my flight to Skiathos. My time there will be brief, a night at the most, and from there I will travel on using the ticket I will buy in person at the airport, a day later, in my new name – the one emblazoned in the pages of the passport Harry had couriered to the office days earlier.
By the time I reach security, the urge to get to the other side is almost as strong as the desire to stay.
The queues this morning are sprawling. Breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth, as the doctors taught me, I remain composed, even when confronted by an abnormally cheerful security officer.
‘Going somewhere nice?’
For a moment, my mind flips back to this morning. From this vantage point, I watch what happens as if I am a witness – soldered to the sidelines, my tongue cut out. Unable to intervene, I watch myself leaning forward to kiss my daughters on their foreheads, lingering a second longer than usual. Neither had moved, barely raising their eyes from the iPad, which David had propped up against a box of cereal, a cartoon dog tap-dancing on the screen.
I watch the corners of their mouths twitch in unison, their spoons suspended in front of their faces, engrossed in their own private world. Behind them, the glass doors leading out to the garden that I would never see again.
‘I love you.’ Had I said it aloud? I had tried to catch my daughters’ eyes for a final time, my fingers curled tightly around the edge of the breakfast table. But they were lost in their own arguments by then, oblivious to what was happening before them.
Startled, I blink, lifting my eyes once again so that I am now focusing on her face.
‘Sorry, I …’ Breathing in, I remind myself to stay calm. There is no reason for her to question any of this.
‘Thessaloniki. It’s for work, I’m a writer. There’s an art fair, I’m interviewing one of the curators.’ It is an unnecessary detail and for a moment I curse myself, but the security officer has moved on, no longer interested.
It is a balance; truth versus lie. The tiny details are the ones that guide me through. Things can be processed in small parts, after all. But too much truth and the whole thing comes unstuck.
It is true that the magazine is intending to cover the Thessaloniki event, and I am lined up to write the piece. That way, if on the unlikely off-chance David had ever bumped into one of my colleagues and mentioned it, I would be covered. What David does not know is that the show is not due to start for another three days, and by then, I will be long gone.
Once I am on the other side, I quickly check for my original passport, which I will dispose of once I reach Greece. I head to WHSmith to buy a paper. I can’t concentrate but I need something that will help me blend in, distract my eyes.
Scanning the neatly compartmentalised shelves, my attention is drawn to the luxury interiors title of which I am editor. Was.
I remember how the office building seemed to swell up from the pavement, the first time I saw it. Entering the revolving doors off Goswell Road, turning left as instructed, the palm of my hand nervously pressing at the sides of my coat. Acutely aware of how young and unsophisticated I must have seemed, I had forced my spine to straighten, my consonants to harden.
The office, a wash of soft grey carpet and low-hanging pendant lights, a wall of magazine covers, was a picture of good taste, framed on either side by views of the city.
At first I had felt like an intruder, following the immaculately presented editorial assistant through the warren of desks scattered with leather notepads and colour-coded books. But then there was a wave of pride, too, that I might finally feel part of something.
It had been a struggle not to fall apart when Meg told me, with a blush of shame, that she had been offered the chance to stay on at the paper, while I was thanked for my time and moved along. We had been having drinks with David at the pub near her flat when she announced it, before brushing it off as if it were no big deal.
I managed to hold it together just long enough to hug her before slipping away to the bathroom and weeping hot, angry tears into my sleeve. It would have been impossible for the two of them not to notice the red stains around my eyes when I emerged five minutes later, claiming to have had an allergic reaction to my make-up.
By the time I reached the Tube platform, later that evening, I was numb, unable to feel the tears dropping from my eyes. Would Meg have asked me to move in if she had not been feeling guilty about the job? I would question it later, just as I would question everything else. Back then, though, I was in no doubt – she was as committed to me as I was to her.
When David rang the day after Meg’s announcement about her new job on the news desk, I ignored his call before turning my phone to silent. It was a Saturday and the only noise from the street outside my parents’ house came from the neighbours herding their children, laughing, into the back of a black hearse-like car. Aside from the occasional movement on the stairs, inside the house stung with silence.
When he rang again, an hour or so later, his name flashing on the screen like a hand reaching in from another world, I pressed decline, too bereft to speak, and just like that he was gone. I was halfway to the bakery, to ask for my old job back, when I heard a ping alerting me to a new message.
Pulling out the phone, annoyed that he wouldn’t leave me alone with my misery, I read his words and stopped in my tracks.
‘She’s an old family friend.’ His voice rose above the swish of traffic when I called back a few minutes later, moving slowly along the grey paving slabs of Guildford town centre. ‘I hadn’t seen her in years but she is married to one of the bosses at my firm and we bumped into one another. I told her you had done a degree in English and about your internship at the paper, and … She wants to meet you.’
David’s voice was soft, listening intently at the end of the phone for my reply.
The interview had been arranged for the following week. Clarissa, I discovered, was exactly the kind of woman one would imagine to run a high-end magazine, exuding money and confidence and an overpowering smell of petunia. But she was kind, too, and generous. ‘Any friend of David’s …’ she had beamed, radiating warmth.
The memory of her words sends a pang of sadness through me. Picking up a magazine at random, I use the self-service checkout before making my way to the boarding gate.
I find my seat in Business Class, store my neat black suitcase overhead, and wait for the comforting purr of the engine. As the rest of the passengers fiddle with their seats, I draw out the phone from my bag and compose a message to Harry.
On my way.
‘Cabin crew, prepare for take-off.’
I raise my drink to my lips, the clatter of the ice vibrating against my glass. Gratefully, I absorb the captain’s words, their familiarity grounding me in my seat, creating a rhythm against which my breath rises and falls, in desperate chunks.
They are the same words I have heard on countless flights with David and the girls over the years. Maldives. Bali. The South of France. Of all the places we have been together, it is Provence that I think of now. Maria steadily marching the girls up and down the plane, her monotonous hush-hush enveloping me in a blanket of calm.
I close my eyes but the memory follows me. The girls’ faces trailing the cloudless sky through the car window during the drive from the airport to yet another of David’s father’s houses. This one is cushioned by lavender fields, the smell clinging to the air. The gravel crunched underfoot as we made our way from the cool air of the Mercedes towards the chateau, through a web of heat. My father-in-law was waiting under the arch of the doorway.
I watched him, my skin prickling as he swaggered out to meet us, the underarms of his crisp white shirt drenched in sweat. ‘My dear Anna!’
‘Clive.’ Had his name stumbled on my lips?
The panama tipped forward on his head, jarring against my cheek as he leaned in to kiss me.
‘Two times, darling, we like to play native around here …’ His voice was booming. ‘And where are my girls? Oh, let me have a good look at them.’
Clive blew an ostentatious kiss to Maria, and I worked hard to repress my jealousy at the thread that ran between them, the years their families had been connected in a way that would somehow always trump what David and I had. Maria, carrying one of my girls in the car seat, moving so comfortably alongside my husband, our other daughter asleep in his arms.
Clive took his son by the wrist, and as if reading my need for inclusion, said, ‘Well, I’m glad to see they still have their mother’s looks …’
Steadily, I let myself picture my daughters. Stella, all cheekbones and arch features, strident from the inside out. Her fall to earth padded by the arrival of her sister, a minute earlier.
Stella would be fine. Stella was always fine, always the one to take the best from a situation, and make it hers. But Rose. My eyes prickled.
There was something about Rose that demanded you take care of her, from that first day at the hospital. Even when it was Stella who had needed me. Even though it was Stella who had been the one to give everyone the fright, it was Rose whose cries, when they came, small and unsure, unnerved me. Everything about her was milder, from the delicate features to the way she hung back, always letting her sister wade in ahead, gung-ho. The truth is, I see more than just my own face in Rose, and that is what scares me most.
‘Can I interest you in any duty free?’ The flight attendant flashes a fuchsia smile, beside the trolley.
I am grateful for the interruption.
‘Thank you, I’ll take a packet of Marlboro.’
My fingers are shaking as I hand my card to the outstretched hand before me. Taking the cigarettes, I feel the weight of them in my hands.
SMOKING SERIOUSLY HARMS YOU AND THOSE AROUND YOU.
The warning on the cigarette carton goads me. Toxic. Just like you. I hesitate. Not me, I remind myself. This is not my doing.
I imagine Clive, the outline of his face filling my mind as a jet of stale air seeps through the vents above my head, the thought of him powering me on. A few moments later, I lean my head back, allowing my thoughts, once more, to drift to the girls. It is like that story Maria used to read to them when they couldn’t sleep.
We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it … We’ve got to go through it.
I think of the three of them, she and the girls, perched on their bed along the hallway from mine. Sometimes, in those early days when I could still hardly bear to look at my daughters, I would lower myself into the nook of the doorway, listening to her sing or read to them. Closing my eyes, I would imagine their little faces staring up at me instead of her, their tiny fingers resting on mine.
‘Anything else?’ The flight attendant’s eyes are fixed on me. Briefly, I imagine myself lurching forward to grab her by the starched collar of her shirt, my voice curdling in my throat as I scream so close to the woman’s face that she can smell the fear on my breath. I can almost hear the words I might say: Turn back, I’ve left my children and I don’t know whether they’re safe.
But my voice, when it comes, is clipped and courteous, the strains of Queen’s English I’ve assimilated over years of working under Clarissa providing the perfect camouflage for the cracks in my confidence.
‘That’s all, thank you.’
As she turns, I feel tears prick behind the folds of my eyelids, and this time I let them come.
Closing my eyes, I picture the girls seated next to me on this very flight as they have been so many times before. Their ears immediately clamped shut with padded headphones. The sound of cartoons seeping out from the side. David, as ever, oblivious to the sound.
I feel my throat close. Letting the tears roll, I turn my face to the window of the plane, giving myself a minute before I wipe my cheeks with the sleeves of my shirt, pushing my back straight upright and forcing the tears to stop.
Open the box, place the thought into the box. Close the box. Just in time.
I open my eyes again just as the roar of the engines kicks in.
‘Madam, would you mind putting your seat forward for landing?’
I manage a congenial smile, and swallow.
‘Of course.’
CHAPTER 3 (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
Anna (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
Then
The newspaper office at South Quay stood at the end of an otherwise barren street, set back from the road, not so much insalubrious as unloved.
‘You look smart.’ Meg winked at me after a moment as we made our way up the front steps, a piece of gum rolling lazily against her tongue.
She was being kind but still I felt my cheeks flush, cursing the cheap suit-jacket and shirt I had hastily bought the moment she told me about the internship she had secured us, picking it out in the shopping centre in Guildford, only to discover on the first day that no one at the paper wore suits to the office apart from the news editors and the receptionists.
It had been both baffling and also completely believable when Meg announced, within six months of leaving university, that she had secured us both a placement at a national newspaper. That was the kind of power she had in those days, the kind that meant she could do anything and it should never surprise you.
She had met one of the editors at the members’ club she had been working at since moving to London; she shrugged when I pressed her on how she had got me a placement too.
‘But he hasn’t even met me …’ I countered reluctantly, trying to balance my gratitude with the sense that something was not right.
‘I sent him your CV.’
‘You don’t have my CV.’
‘And?’ She grinned, lifting her chin as she pulled on her cigarette, and I left the matter there, knowing how easy it was to write a fraudulent résumé. Knowing how willing people were to believe.
The wind snapped at our heels as we crossed the bridge, Meg leaning into me, the warmth of her body soothing my nerves. How I envied the ease with which she moved; how comfortable she was in her own skin, her nylon mini-skirt hitched around skinny thighs, thick black tights, DMs.
Noting my expression, she snatched my arm and squeezed it against her own. ‘I’m serious! You look hot. You’re like Maggie Gyllenhaal in that film David made us all watch in Freshers’ Week, but less slutty, obviously.’
We had still been practically strangers then, the three of us, wedged awkwardly together on cushions in the hallway of our shared house, watching Secretary on David’s laptop, busying our fingers with a bowl of nachos. Unaware of the roots that were taking hold, blind then to how tightly they would bind us together.
Feeling my cheeks flush, I changed the subject as we made our way through stiff automatic doors.
‘Have you been given any actual writing to do yet?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Just more transcriptions for the Arts desk, it’s bullshit. I tried to talk to the Environment guy about a story idea but he just fobbed me off.’
I tried to hide my relief.
‘Still it’s better than a real job, I suppose. For now, at least.’ She moved towards the door.
My nails pressed into my palms as the familiar panic rose in my chest, fingers searching for a ledge to break the fall.
For now? The thought of how much I had already spent on the month-long train ticket from Guildford to the Docklands – almost all of the little money I had saved while working double shifts at the bakery in town – all that I had already done, on the basis that there would be a paid job at the end of this, a career, a chance to get away, made my gut twist.
‘You don’t really think that?’ I tried to sound calmer than I felt. Despite three years of friendship, I still could not let Meg see the true extent of my need. Had she spotted it, the day we left our shared flat in Brighton, she heading to London to chase the career she had always known was rightfully hers, while I returned to Surrey, my face burning with the loss of a life that had always felt borrowed?
I pictured it now, the flat we shared at the top of a crumbling Regency town house, wedged beneath two more of its kind on a thin strip of side-street leading from St James’s Street down to the sea. I loved that flat, with its slanting floorboards and faded magnolia walls; I loved my bedroom, which overlooked the back of the house and a tiny courtyard below – more of a pit than a garden, a dry rectangle well speckled with cigarette butts and seagull feathers. I loved the way I could look out of the window from our battered Chipperfield sofa, onto Kemptown with its bars and pubs which throbbed with noise no matter what time of day or night, and not recognise a soul.
If the worst came to the worst, Meg had told me one night not long after we arrived in London, then she would simply go back to Newcastle. She would take bar work there and stay with her parents while she worked on the book she was destined to write. Though we both knew it would never come to that. Meg was one of those people who appeared to create the existence they wanted, without effort.
I imagined her mother, a shorter, squatter version of my friend – the same ready smile, fiery red hair. I thought of my own mother, thin with worry, her loss etched into the corners of her eyes. The years of silent dinners behind neatly pruned privets, hedging me in together with the memory of what I had done, or, rather, what I had not.
The smile had been pulled tighter than ever across my mother’s lips the day I returned home, the day university – and its promise of escape – came to a crushing end. It clawed at the corners of her eyes as she watched me placing the box of my possessions onto my bed, the room having been stripped of any trace of me the moment I had left. Just as she had purged any trace of Thomas from the house within days of him leaving us.
My breath sharpened as I thought of my parents. Them, the only alternative to this. An invisible tightening around my neck reminded me that I could not let this opportunity slip through my grasp.
Meg’s voice cut through my thoughts, steadying my heartbeat as we stepped into the foyer where a TV screen was playing the BBC News channel on the wall above the reception desk.
‘Here you go.’ The receptionist handed back to us the security passes we were made to collect daily and wear around our necks at all times. Looking down at the hollow outline of my face on the paper print-out, my eyes moved instinctively to the word ‘Temporary’.
We stepped into the lift and Meg moved her fingers to press the button for Floor 1, the newsroom, before changing her mind and pressing Floor 2 instead.
‘We’re at least having a quick fag before we go in,’ she said, stepping out of the lift.
The smell of stale smoke hit us before the doors had finished opening. Turning left into the smoking room, there were plastic chairs edging the walls, rectangular metal tubs strategically placed across the blue carpeted floor.
Meg leaned down to grab a copy of the morning’s paper from a pile by the door, before crossing the room towards a seat by the window.
The room was airless, years of nicotine clinging to every surface.
Silver bangles jarring against one another on her wrists, Meg pulled out a ten-box of Marlboro Lights, drawing one out for herself and another for me. The cigarette was thick between my fingers as I leaned into the flame, holding back my hair, which had recently been cut from waist to shoulder length in an attempt at sophistication.
‘That’s a fucking scoop,’ she said, pressing the fag between her teeth as she pulled her phone out of her pocket.
My eyes moved over the front page of the paper. Below the headline ‘Exclusive: Leading Charity in Cahoots With Arms Dealer’, my attention was drawn by a small black-and-white headshot of a young man with thick, dark hair grazing his neckline. Next to his face, there was the name of the reporter on the piece – Harry Dwyer.
Beside me, Meg’s phone beeped again, but I was distracted by the man’s face, the arch of his nose, the full curve of his lips.
‘It’s David. He’s started his job at that bank in Canary Wharf … wants to know if we’re up for a drink after work … Oi, are you listening?’
It took a moment for Meg’s words to register and when they did I felt the familiar dull ache in my chest.
There was nothing more daunting than the prospect of going out and spending even more money I didn’t have, before running to catch the last train home. Nothing apart from the prospect of home itself – the deafening silence a constant reminder of the person who wasn’t there.
‘You know David will be throwing cash around,’ Meg laughed, reading my mind. ‘Why don’t you stay with me at my cousin’s flat after? She’s not going to be there. Save you going all the way back to your aunt’s house?’
I smiled, flushing at the memory of my lie.
‘Sweet.’ The silver ring in Meg’s nose rose up as she smiled, typing furiously into her phone.
Pressing ‘send’, she stood. ‘Right, I’m going to have a piss before we start. You coming?’
‘Yeah, I’m just going to finish reading this. I’ll see you up there.’
Something about the story, the man’s face, wouldn’t let me go.
Following an extensive year-long investigation, this newspaper can exclusively reveal that members of a leading social justice charity accepted a series of bribes from arguably the world’s most prolific warmongers …
After a moment, I stood and pulled the front two pages of the paper, Harry Dwyer’s piece in its totality, from the rest and folded it neatly, careful not to make an impression along the image of his face, as I placed it in my bag. Unaware of the chain of events I had, without the slightest comprehension, just set in motion; the wheels that were gaining traction, preparing to spin dangerously out of control.
David was waiting for us outside the pub, when we arrived later that evening.
‘Jesus, man, what are you like? Couple of weeks in the City and this happens?’ Meg ruffled his hair, where the undercut from just a few weeks earlier had been replaced by an expensive barber’s take on short back and sides. ‘Still haven’t lost the leather bracelet though, I’m glad to see …’
‘What? I thought you’d be into it?’ David raised his eyes as he pulled her into a bear hug, the flame of the outside heater licking against night air. He paused before moving to me, his expression shifting into something softer.
‘Anna.’ He took my hand, gently, pulling me towards him, holding me as if I was something that might otherwise break.
‘Right – drink, bar!’ Meg slipped her arms through mine and David’s, squeezing gently, the three of us falling into rhythm as we moved through the pub door, and I squeezed back, grateful that we were simply there, all three of us. Knowing, in my bones, even then, that it was too good to last.
‘What have you done with my lighter?’ Meg was scrabbling around the empty glasses and crisp packets an hour or so later, in the pub garden, when I spotted him, seated with his back to us at one of the far tables.
Despite the angle, I recognised him instantly – even from where I was sitting, which meant I could only see a sliver of his face, the same face I had studied on the front page of the paper that morning.
He would not believe me when I told him this later. How is that possible? he would shake his head and laugh, though not unkindly. Maybe he was right. Maybe what I felt then was something deeper; not so much recognition as a sense of foreboding.
Meg spotted him a moment later. I stayed where I was, rooted to the ground as she circled towards Harry Dwyer, in search of a lighter. I couldn’t see his expression as he held out the flame towards Meg’s face, but after a moment she pulled back, as if to get a better look, and as she spoke, a small smile curled at the edges of her mouth.
‘I’m Meg.’ The words blew off her lips, like kisses. My palms burned as he accepted her outstretched hand.
‘Come and join us.’ She was drunk, though she would have done the same thing sober.
‘Don’t be like that.’ I did not hear his reply but after a moment he stood reluctantly, his thumb scratching his cheekbone as he followed Meg back towards our table. His eyes were red and he looked tired. I wanted to hold his hand.
‘Guys, this is Harry. Harry works at the paper …’ Meg leaned into him, laughing. ‘He’s quite the star reporter, don’tcha know?’
Harry muttered something I could not make out. He was drunk too, and weary. When he smiled, I could see he wanted to leave. I could hardly look at him and yet I could not look away; there was something so powerful in my response to him that I could not trust myself to speak. But then I did.
‘Do you want a drink?’ My voice was louder than I had expected.
He paused, looking at me for the first time, before nodding, his mouth breaking gently into a smile as the moon behind his head disappeared into a cloud.
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_e9d9acbc-2ffb-5845-9da0-8c0fdbc35748)
Anna (#ulink_e9d9acbc-2ffb-5845-9da0-8c0fdbc35748)
In those early London days, the office was a bus ride from the flat Meg and I shared, a boxy two-bed above a kebab shop on Camden High Street. It was Meg’s cousin’s flat really. Although she had not lived there for months, Lucy’s presence was etched across the living room in cheap, colourful wall-hangings from her travels in Asia; ineffectual attempts to distract from the grubby off-white walls and the draught which rattled in from the road below.
To the outside world, it was a dive. To me, it was home. Mine and Meg’s.
It was a Friday night when Meg announced that Lucy had decided to stay on in Sydney with her boyfriend, leaving the flat in Meg’s care. The very same night that Harry landed back in our lives, like a bomb.
The two events, unconnected on the surface, squeezed me in from either side.
We were sharing a bottle of wine – my treat, courtesy of my new job – in the pub on Arlington Road, around the corner from Meg’s flat. As was her style, the offer for me to move in was presented not so much as a proposition but as a fait accompli.
‘How could you say no?’ She paused halfway through pouring my glass. ‘Even if the prospect of living with me isn’t enough on its own, which it obviously should be, then just think how much you’ll be saving on travel from your aunt’s house, presuming that’s where you were planning on staying … From the sound of it, your dad’s not going to be stationed back in the UK any time soon. I know it’s a tiny flat and it’s a shithole but it’s cheap – and you get to live with me!’
The pub doors swung open, a bluster of wind edging through the heavy velvet curtain.
‘Look, Lucy isn’t charging me full whack. If we split the bills, you’d be doing me a favour, and I want you to live with me … Fuck sake, man, say yes?’
Meg had this way of making me feel like I was the most important person in the world. I thought of my parents, the nights I had cried myself to sleep after it happened, desperate for one of them to hear my heart tearing above the sound of their own; for them to come to me and tell me it was not my fault. For a split second, my brother’s face flashed in front of me, but the spectre disappeared at the sound of Meg’s voice.
‘Shit, are you crying?’ She leaned across the table and took my arm. ‘I’m not that bad!’
I pressed my sleeve briefly at the corner of my eyes, laughing, and when I looked up again, my skin bristled like a fox catching the first scent of the hounds. Harry: the man who would be the death of me.
It was the first time I had seen him since that night in the pub in the shadow of Canary Wharf, though my eyes had sought him out at the office the following day, self-consciously pulling at the sleeves of the jumper I had borrowed from Meg – deep red with a slight scratchiness to the wool. I even stayed late, making excuses to move around the office, in the hope that I might spot him; propelled by a naive notion that he might be looking for me, too.
Rather than giving up, something in me accepted his absence as a challenge. That evening after work, my legs moved more briskly than usual as I made my way back from Guildford station, energised by the thought of him. It was just past eight by the time I closed the front door and already the house was swallowed by darkness, a low light emanating from the living room.
I walked purposefully across the hall so that they would hear my steps momentarily hovering outside the room, giving my mother the chance to call out, to ask if I had had a good day. But the door remained shut, the only sound the canned laughter clattering out from the television.
Upstairs, at the end of the corridor I flicked on the lamp beside my bed, the featureless room coming into stark focus. The single bed, neatly made, a single chest of drawers uncluttered by anything other than a small make-up bag and a stick of deodorant, which my mother had pointedly removed from the bathroom and placed on my bed on my first day home, without a word. The spectacle of my return flaunted in our shared spaces was apparently too much for my father to bear.
By the bed there was the computer I had been given my first week at Sussex, as part of my grant. Pressing the door closed, I turned it on, my fingers trembling as I typed ‘Harry Dwyer’ into the search engine, holding my breath as a photo appeared on the screen. The first image might have been a disappointment if I had not been so desperate for any trace of him.
It was taken from a news conference: Harry in the crowd amidst a small throng of reporters. The image was poor quality, Harry’s face distracted by a scene just out of shot.
After a moment, I pressed the arrow on the screen and another, less recent, photo appeared of Harry having just scooped the Young Journalist of the Year prize for a piece on internal wranglings at Number 10. He was twenty-three at the time, which made him nine years older than me. For a moment I thought of my own path: the year spent working at the chain bakery in town after leaving school with an unblemished if unremarkable academic record; fending off awkward advances from Tristan, the general manager, who snorted when he laughed, and stood too close behind me at the counter, making comments about the position of my hairnet by way of exerting his power.
The three years at university, where my greatest single achievement had been meeting Meg and David and having, for the first time in my life, found both friendship and the space to breathe, space to become the person I was beyond the frameworks by which others interpret and define us. The fact that Sussex had accepted me onto an English and media degree without asking for an interview had not so much given me confidence in my ability as it had confirmed to me that I would get by better in life if people weren’t given too much information. On paper, the surface facts of my life – childhood in Surrey where my father ran a local business; my mother, otherwise a stay-at-home wife, lending a hand – were acceptable: I was acceptable. Delve any further, and … I inhaled hard, not allowing my mind to slip back to Thomas. Look forward, I reminded myself, focusing on Harry’s face, absorbing his successes, allowing myself to live vicariously through them, even if just for a moment.
Admittedly, it was a long way from the life I was living now. If you were to line up our achievements side by side, and draw lines between them – a habit I found impossible to break – you would notice a distinct distance between where I was now – commuting four hours a day to transcribe other people’s interviews and make endless cups of tea – and where Harry had been at the same age. But a lot could change in a year; I was dependent on that possibility. Though of course back then I couldn’t have known quite how much.
There was a stirring on the stairs, and instinctively I sat upright, pressing open a new tab on my web browser. Though I need not have bothered; as always I heard the footsteps speed up as they passed my door, despite my father’s attempts to make his feet lighter in the hope that I wouldn’t notice him, urged forward by his terror of being made to look me in the eye.
Refusing to give my father another thought, I returned to the previous tab. With another click of the mouse, I was met by a brief journalistic profile of Harry and his time as a reporter at the paper, alongside the same byline photo that had first caught my eye on the front page that morning in the smoking room. And then, with another simple click, there it was, on the second page of Google, a brief mention in the media pages of a rival paper:
Harry Dwyer was unceremoniously sacked today, just hours after his most recent scoop. The paper’s editor, Eddy Monkton, is believed to have seen off the Irish-born writer in characteristically pithy style, telling his former star reporter, ‘Dwyer – you’re fucked’. A talented self-starter, Dwyer rose through the ranks after dropping out of school and taking a job in the canteen of his local paper. Monkton refused to comment on the parting of ways.
But … how? My mind searched for answers to the impossible question of how this could be. How our lives could have intersected as they had and then, just like that, have been torn apart again. This had to be wrong. Determined to prove it so, I continued to trawl for clues until long after the light in the hallway had been clicked off – but there was nothing else to be found. No other mention of his being sacked, and no further explanation.
It is a visceral memory, the sadness I felt in that moment; I can still feel it, the deflation at knowing that if this brilliant, beautiful man no longer worked for the paper, there would be no chance of bumping into him again. It was real, that memory, it is impossible to believe it was not – and yet I will question it later, just as I have learnt to question everything. In the darkness to come, I will ask myself if I could have felt so instinctively connected to him at this point – or was I simply retrospectively filling in the details to suit the version of events that I needed to create in order to justify what I had done?
In any case, the sight of him in the Crown and Goose that night, his arm propped against the bar, a pint in front of him as he scanned the pages of the Evening Standard, seemed not so much astonishing as merely confirmation of the connection I had felt in the beginning.
Of course, what I should have asked myself was, what were the chances of him turning up like that in our local pub? And the real question: if I had known the answer, would I have run for my life?
‘What are you staring at?’ Meg turned, following my gaze, a smile creeping over her mouth as she spotted him too.
‘No way.’
I could not be sure if she was smiling for herself or for me. Despite the special connection I felt to Harry, it was clear I was not the only one to notice his rough impression of beauty. It was hard to ignore the looks he elicited as we all sat together in the bar that first night, the flutter of eyes noticing him as Meg stood and moved towards him, seemingly unfazed.
When he looked up, an amused smile formed at the edge of his lips. It was a struggle to pull my eyes away. After a moment, I heard the scrape of a bar-stool and when I looked up again he was standing above me.
‘You remember Anna?’
‘Of course.’
Harry reached down and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, but instead he drew out a chair and sat.
‘We’re celebrating,’ Meg announced, leaning a hand casually on his shoulder, the intimacy of her movements making me wince.
‘Oh really, why’s that?’ It was David’s voice this time. Arriving straight from work, he was dressed in a Barbour coat and navy scarf, his shirt untucked. A matter of months since leaving university, the mutation had already subtly begun, the sartorial shift from trustafarian to trust-fund manager made in incremental steps. At this stage, he was still a boy doing a poor impression of a man.
‘Anna has just agreed to move in with me.’ Meg raised her eyes at me, flashing a smile and leaning in to kiss David’s cheek.
‘Cool. Well if we’re celebrating we better have champagne – and shots.’
David laid his coat on the chair beside mine before turning to acknowledge Harry. Something in his face shifted; I can’t have been the only one who noticed.
‘Hello again, I didn’t realise …’
‘Nice to see you.’ Harry held out a hand, his self-assurance filling the room.
David paused, a moment too long, before accepting it, briefly, and then moving towards the bar.
By the time we left the pub, Camden High Street was a heaving mass of bodies and light, the smell of lead clung to the air. We were moving in a line, a marauding army stumbling towards an unknown threat. Unaware that the enemy already lay within.
‘Where are we going?’ David’s voice followed Meg and me as we stepped into the road, the sound of horns blaring across the street.
‘Fuck knows!’ Meg called back and we fell sideways, in unison, our bodies crippled with laughter, the sound of us, warped and distant, blowing back at me as if from the other side of the street.
‘Watch out.’ Harry’s hand hooked under my arm, guiding us across Parkway. Only once we had reached the phone box outside the pub did he let us go.
Meg whispered something to David, linking her arm in his before turning back briefly to the pair of us.
‘We’re just going to get something,’ she winked.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to come with us, Anna?’
David’s eyes held onto mine.
‘She’ll be fine.’ Harry’s voice was assured, the sound of it steadying me.
I leaned back against the phone box, my eyes straining to keep him in focus, the sound of a bottle smashing in the forecourt of the Good Mixer pub, followed by a wave of laughter.
When he looked down, I turned my face away, self-conscious despite the sambuca, wary of how I must look under the sharp streetlight. Hoping that if I didn’t meet his eye, maybe he wouldn’t see me so clearly.
‘Why are you doing that?’ He seemed amused.
‘What?’ I laughed awkwardly, aware of my teeth.
‘That thing,’ he laughed, mimicking me, ostentatiously sweeping his head to the side.
‘I’m not.’ I pushed my hand out to quieten him and my fingers landed on his chest, the breath clamming up in my throat as he leaned slightly into my palm.
There was a moment’s silence then, the lights from the high street casting a golden haze that warmed the sky above our heads. The movement on either side of us slowed until it was just us, my face finally settling into perfect stillness under the softness of his gaze.
‘Sorted!’
Meg’s voice cut across us, and it was Harry who looked away first. Pulling my hand back, I turned to see David, his pupils black and bulging.
Within seconds of David and Meg reappearing, Harry had peeled away from me towards a door to the left of a bar with no signage, taking centre-stage on the short strip of terraced buildings running the length of Inverness Street. David’s grip held me back as a young man, slumped over and supported by friends, his top flaked with vomit, wobbled precariously in front of us.
‘Sorry, babe,’ one of them called out as we stepped back to make way.
Brushing past them as quickly as I could, I watched Harry and Meg disappear ahead of us into the club, Harry’s hand pressing against the small of her back as he guided her in from the street.
He is just looking out for her, I told myself. There is nothing more to it than that.
‘Maybe we should go somewhere else, it looks crazy busy in there. I’ve got some …’
David hesitated as we reached the entrance where little more than a handful of smokers gathered outside, hemmed in by a single rope. But I kept walking.
‘I don’t want to leave Meg,’ I replied without turning around.
Down a narrow flight of stairs, the club was heaving with people, a dark warren of rooms, loud and airless, house music vibrating against low ceilings and windowless walls.
The bar stood at the back of the central room, thick with bodies. The heat suddenly overwhelming, I wished I wasn’t wearing a shirt on top of my vest-top. David moved towards the bar, pulling me protectively by my waist. ‘What do you want to drink?’
‘Water,’ I called over the throb of noise, my eyes frantically weaving through the crowd, desperate to find Harry and Meg, but all I could see were strobe lights and contorted faces, spilling over one another.
When David finally handed me my drink, I sipped gratefully before screwing up my face.
‘What is this?’
‘Vodka and soda … I …’ he called over the noise, which drowned out his voice as I pushed my head back, so thirsty I drank it all in one go.
‘Steady,’ he pulled the drink away from me, laughing nervously, but I pulled it back and drank the dregs.
‘You should pace yourself … How are you feeling?’ he asked a few minutes later, his mouth pressed against my ear.
‘Let’s dance!’ I shouted back as the whole room exploded with movement, a wave of euphoria rising in one endless swell of rhythm and sound. Pulling off my top layer, I turned, my arms stretched wide, my teeth grinding out of beat, and found David, his arm around my back, his breath against my face, the smell of sambuca on his lips.
I cannot be sure how long we stayed like that, our bodies swaying in primal movements, before a sickness hit my stomach, acid rising, scraping at the inside of my throat, the walls suddenly pushing towards me.
Stumbling backwards, my leg pressed against a leather bench which I had not been expecting and I sank back onto it, grateful but also unable to sit still, my skin burning and then cold, so that I pushed myself to standing. I could feel the strap of my top slinking off my arm, but there was nothing I could think to do to pull it up again.
The room was a slush of noise by now, indistinct notes thrashing against one another as I felt my way along the wall towards the exit, my breath tightening as strangers’ bodies crushed against my own.
Finally, my fingers curled around something cold and angular. It was another wall, leading away from the crowd and into a smaller corridor, which was dark and thankfully cool. It was quieter here and I was alone. For a moment I half-stood, half-crouched, my back against the wall, the breath slowing in my chest, before, from the end of the corridor, I felt movement and I knew that I wasn’t alone. With an animal sense, I recognised the presence of another person, even as my eyes still struggled to adjust. Then a shuffle of feet, and another, followed by a voice.
‘Anna?’ It was Meg, her face moving towards mine, and then another voice behind her reaching in through the mist. Harry.
‘Shit, it’s Anna!’ Meg’s hands gripped my body as I slumped, David stepping in in time to break my fall.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_50c3786c-4a26-59ca-8f2e-1be4261043f3)
Anna (#ulink_50c3786c-4a26-59ca-8f2e-1be4261043f3)
When I came to, the room was quiet.
Even with my eyes closed I could register a sense of space above my head. My body, heavy and unfamiliar, pressed down against the springs of a mattress.
‘Anna? Thank God, man.’
I stretched my neck, my movements slow and unfamiliar as Meg’s voice emerged, along with her pale face as she bent over me.
Sitting, I pulled the sheets around a T-shirt I didn’t recognise. It was her flat we were in – my flat, now – the curtains sagging against the window.
‘I took your clothes off, they were covered in sick.’ She did her best to make it sound casual.
‘I’m cold.’ My voice was raspy and Meg nodded, seemingly pleased by the specificity of the instruction, jumping up and leaving the room without another word. Seconds later there were more footsteps, heavier this time, less certain, moving towards the bed.
‘David, maybe wait a minute, yeah?’
Meg followed him back into the room, the duvet from her own bed bundled in her arms. But he was oblivious, his bloodshot eyes trained on mine.
‘I’m so sorry.’
He lowered himself as I pulled the covers tighter around my chest, still dazed, distracted by the taste in my mouth.
The outside world was an uncertain grey, I couldn’t tell if it was dawn or dusk.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘The MDMA, it was just a dab in your drink, I warned you …’
I felt myself back in the airless bar, David’s voice mouthing words I could barely hear as my eyes scanned the room desperately for signs of Harry. I had smiled as I turned back to him, masking my disappointment as I took the drink from his hand and downed it, my eyes wincing at the bitter aftertaste.
‘Leave me. I’m fine, it’s fine, I just need to sleep …’
‘I’m sorry, honestly Anna, I thought you knew … I thought it was what you wanted.’ His face was stained with desperation.
‘Just let me sleep. Please.’ I turned away from them both, the sound of their footsteps moving into the hallway, fading again a moment later.
When I woke again, the flat was silent, and the memory of the night before came back to me in waves.
Placing a pillow in front of my face in a futile attempt to stem the flow of thoughts, tears of shame pricked the corners of my eyes, the humiliation churning in my gut, heavy and hot.
How much had Harry seen? Was I sick in the club or only once we had come home? Fucking David. I said the words aloud. I never took drugs, never risked putting myself in a position where I wasn’t in control. I couldn’t. And yet, how was he to know? I had let them believe that I did, him and Meg. I remember the sharp taste of a pill on my tongue, on nights out in Brighton, those few seconds before I turned and spat it into my hands, disposing of it before either of them saw, terrified they would spot that I wasn’t one of them.
The flat was empty, silence ringing through the air as I moved slowly towards the kitchen.
On the table, there was a note.
Hope you’re feeling OK. Pizza and juice in the fridge. Make yourself at home. Mx.
Beside it, my keys, purse and phone, which Meg must have pulled from my pockets after stripping me down.
Desperate for a distraction, I pressed the home button on my phone and watched the screen light up. Rather than a message from my parents wondering where I was, I was met only by the date and time flashing on the screen against the backdrop of a photo taken by David on Brighton Pier, two summers previous – Meg and me, the wind whipping against our cheeks, our faces contorted in a scream.
It was the same day Meg had first asked me about David.
‘So what you going to do?’ We settled ourselves at a table in the corner of the Hop Poles while David went to the bar.
‘What do you mean?’
Meg rolled her eyes disbelievingly.
‘About David …’ She waited, and when I didn’t speak, continued, ‘He fucking loves you, man.’
I snorted. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Oh please, tell me you’re joking.’
‘What?’
‘Jesus, you’re serious. Anna, the boy is infatuated. Have you noticed that he can’t be more than two feet away from you at all times?’
Along with incredulity I felt a prick of pride. My voice was less convinced as I continued, ‘Yeah well, I don’t know, maybe that’s because he likes you and I’m always with you—’
‘Anna.’ Meg slapped her hands against her face. ‘Honestly, do you really not realise … You don’t. Wow. I mean you’re smart but sometimes you’re so fucking dumb. He’s in love with you. If you can’t see that then you really need to learn to read people better.’
The digits overlaying the image read 20.12. Sunday night. For the first time in my life, I had slept through an entire day.
Sipping gratefully at a glass of too-warm water from the tap, I moved from the counter towards the sofa.
Meg must have had a clean-up while I slept as the detritus that was usually scattered across the floor had been stacked into a pile in the corner of the room, the remote control neatly aligned on the coffee table in front of the sofa.
Scanning mindlessly between channels, I settled on a film I did not recognise, my thoughts gradually fading into nothingness before a harsh buzzing noise reverberated through the intercom, causing me to jump.
Pressing the volume on the television to mute, I lay back on the sofa, holding the edges of the blanket I had dragged in from the bedroom, waiting for whomever it was to give up. A moment later, though, the bell sounded again, longer this time.
Aware it might be Meg, having forgotten her keys, I reluctantly stood, brushing away the covers before moving to the window.
The light inside the flat was off. The only potential clue to my presence was the glow emanating from the screen behind me as I nudged the curtain with my fingers, pressing my cheek against the glass. Looking down, my eyes ached as they struggled to focus, my breath forming a screen on the pane in front of me.
Using my thumb, I smeared the condensation away. As if sensing my movement, his face flicked up at me.
‘Fuck.’ I pulled back.
The buzzer sounded again. I couldn’t let him see me like this, but what choice did I have? Besides, I had already made the decision as I moved across the room towards the door. Pressing my hand against my thigh, I leaned forward into the mouthpiece, pressing the button before I could change my mind.
‘Hello?’
‘Anna?’
My palms were prickling. My face, in the reflection of the screen on the intercom, was hollowed out, and tacky with sweat.
‘It’s Harry.’ There was a pause, and then, ‘It’s bloody cold out here – are you going to let me in?’
My finger hovered for a moment over the button, before pressing down again.
‘What are you watching?’ Before I had time to fully register his presence, he was moving across the room as if being here was the most natural thing in the world.
‘A film.’ I turned to the counter, pulling desperately at my hair, twisting it into a bun.
‘You alone?’
‘Yeah.’
It was too late to turn away, to shield him from the circles under my eyes, the unwashed skin.
‘Would you like tea?’
He nodded, his eyes smiling. ‘You feel like shit, right?’
‘I don’t know what happened, I’m not usually—’
‘Course you’re not.’ His laugh was familiar. ‘I’m just glad you’re OK. That’s what I came to check. The club, I couldn’t find you anywhere and then I saw Meg and she said you weren’t well and had to go home and …’
The moment our eyes locked there was a rush through my body and I instantly felt like a fool for imagining whatever it was I had imagined might have happened between him and Meg in the time that they were lost in the club.
He settled himself on the sofa as my grip tightened slightly around the handle of the kettle.
‘How did you know where I lived?’
‘You pointed it out last night, on the way back from the pub.’
‘Really?’ It was unlike me to forget things. Besides, everything else from the night before remained clear, before the club. Or did it? How would I know – was it possible to intuit where the holes in your memory lay? Harry’s claims were hardly surprising given the number of shots we’d consumed at the bar. Something about his presence had lured me into a state of off-guardedness, my usual restraint failing to kick in. The drinks had been endless, David galvanised by the presence of another male into buying round after round, each more elaborate than the last. If nothing else, this was a lesson. Or fate, perhaps. If I hadn’t passed out, would Harry have been here now? At the time, the thought struck me as reassuring.
He took the cup of tea I had made for him from my hand and our fingers touched.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘I still feel pretty sick.’
‘You’ve got to eat.’ He stood up straight, pulling his wallet from his pocket. ‘And have a drink. Trust me, it will make you feel better.’ He winked, taking a sip of his tea and passing it back to me.
‘I’ll be back in ten, buzz me in?’
I watched him pull the door closed behind him, and it was all I could do not to scream.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_427f4b8a-9a02-52c9-9817-7bb5d5751ce9)
Anna (#ulink_427f4b8a-9a02-52c9-9817-7bb5d5751ce9)
‘So how’s work?’
The question came out before I realised what I was saying. We were facing each other on the sofa, the box of pizza wedged between us, a half bottle of brandy on the coffee table, alongside the mug of hot chocolate he had stirred it into at first, to soften the impact.
Harry’s face straightened all of a sudden, and he shrugged. ‘Ah, you know …’
It was silly to imagine he would want to go into the details of his being fired with a relative stranger, yet I could not help feeling disappointed at his lack of confidence.
Sighing gently, he placed a half-eaten slice of Margherita back on the box, taking a swig of his drink. ‘Well, if you really want to know, I’ve been sacked.’
He continued chewing, his eyes locking on mine, and I held my body straight.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Deadly.’
‘When?’
A half-smile appeared on his face.
‘The day before I met you guys, believe it or not. That’s why I was … You know, shit-faced, on my own … That’s not my usual style, I’ll have you know. I had come in for a meeting with the editor, trying to get my job back, but what can I say, the man’s a prick. Still, he ran my story the same day though, didn’t he? Not too moral to miss out on a final scoop …’
He shrugged again, taking another bite of pizza.
‘What happened?’
He paused then, as if he had changed his mind. For an alarming moment I thought he was going to stand, but he simply lifted an arm to his cheek for a moment before carrying on.
‘That story, the one about the undercover charity investigation? One of the protestors I embedded myself with is claiming we were in a relationship.’
There was an authority to his delivery that dampened the shock.
‘OK.’
‘Well, it might have been, except it turns out she was fifteen at the time.’
His words hung in the air.
‘The time of what?’
‘There’s a photo, she says it shows us “being intimate”. I mean, Jesus, it’s nothing. I’ve seen it, we’re just talking. But she says it was more than that. Her parents, they threatened the paper, said if I wasn’t disciplined, they’d take the case to court. It would be my word against theirs, but apparently that doesn’t mean anything. With things the way they are in the industry, there isn’t the kind of cash needed to defend a law case. And, like I said, the editor’s an arse. He had been looking for an excuse to get rid of me …’
Harry’s face lifted suddenly, turning, his eyes narrowing. ‘Shit, I don’t know why I told you that. I’m sorry. It’s intense, I know. I just … Something about you, I just felt I could … I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put that on you, we hardly know each other.’
His face was parallel with mine, something passing between us.
‘It’s bullshit, you should know that. I mean, Jesus …’
I nodded, my hand instinctively moving towards his, ‘I do.’
As he opened his mouth to speak again, a key jangled loudly against the front door. Lurching back, his legs swung forward off the sofa as Meg’s face appeared.
There was a moment of doubt and then she spoke, her features recomposing themselves.
‘Hi!’ Her eyes briefly flicked between the two of us, and then she smiled. She did not ask aloud what Harry was doing there. At the time I didn’t either.
Harry had suggested it, all of us meeting up again the following week. We had been saying an awkward goodbye that evening in the flat, he, Meg and me. By then, my hangover had been usurped by an urgent fizzing in my gut.
‘I’ll be working near here in the afternoon if you fancy a drink afterwards?’ Harry had looked at me and then, out of politeness, at Meg.
‘Bring your friend David too if he’s around …’
If he spotted my disappointment at the mass invite, he didn’t show it.
David was already there when I arrived at the pub, as planned, the following Friday. It was the first time I had seen him since the incident at the club and he was holding his hands under the table when I arrived. Standing up, he presented me with a large, purple, gold-embossed bag, the plush cardboard soft and soothing as it swept against my fingers.
‘I just wanted to apologise for what happened. I—’
‘David, what …’
His face fixed on mine as I tugged at the ribbon that had been pulled tight in a perfect bow, protecting whatever was inside, unable to keep the smile from lifting the corners of my mouth.
The material was a light grey wool, which hung just above my knees, with a soft shearling lining. From the label, it must have cost more than the rest of my wardrobe combined.
‘It’s – well, it’s perfect, but …’ He must have seen the flicker of uncertainty in my face as he stood, casually, wary of applying too much pressure.
‘It’s no big deal. If it’s not right the receipt’s in the bag. I just thought … Meg’s taking forever, shall we order? I’m starving.’
It was then that I looked up and noticed Harry and Meg, already seated at the bar on the other side of the pub, Meg facing away from us. At that moment, Harry looked up and our eyes met, his gaze followed a second later by Meg. I could have sworn it was disappointment I saw in her eyes, but then her face lifted into a smile and she jumped off the stool, striding towards us, her eyebrows rising as if to say, ‘Where the hell have you been?’
CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_167f3233-216a-5881-a390-7f6612b3d20f)
Anna (#ulink_167f3233-216a-5881-a390-7f6612b3d20f)
The air was heavy and damp that winter, the perfect backdrop to the months of boozy nights that followed in pubs across London, the four of us drinking until the small hours before falling away to our respective beds. But then, as time passed, the initial thrill of our weekly group gatherings was worn away by erratic working hours and office parties, until one night it was just Harry and me sitting across from each other at a table in the corner of the Crown and Goose, where an irate chef passed out plates of food through a minuscule hatch.
We shared one bottle of wine, and then another, our fingers resting side by side on the round wooden table, oblivious to the comings and goings of the other drinkers as they passed back and forth on their way to the bathroom, the urgent ring of the kitchen bell clattering above our heads.
By the time we rose to leave, I was surprised to find the bar swollen with people. Stepping out into the street, the twinkling fairy lights entwined along the shop fronts, Harry stopped and pushed me gently back against the wall of the pub. Holding me there for a moment, my neck in his hand, he paused before kissing me, his lips soft but persuasive.
And that was it, our fate sealed. I had waited for that confirmation of what I had felt for months, and when it came it was as if it had never not been there.
Meg had gone back to Newcastle for a couple of weeks, so the flat was ours alone, that first night together. I woke the following morning to a feeling of utter contentment, until I turned to find an empty space in the bed next to me. Running my fingers over the grooves where his body had been, I briefly wondered if I had imagined it all.
My sense of unease grew when I called his phone later that morning, and the next day, only to reach his voicemail, the recorded message playing a jeering loop against my ear. When he re-emerged, a few days later, he was apologetic but reassuring. There was a job he was doing, which had pulled him away unexpectedly. He was sorry he couldn’t be in touch.
‘You know what it’s like.’
It took everything I had to play down my disappointment, but I knew better than to let the extent of my feelings show. So instead I nodded along – even agreeing when he insisted that we could not tell anyone about us, swearing myself to secrecy.
The case against him was ongoing, he offered by way of explanation. If the defence found out he was dating a former intern – and that was how they would frame it, he said – then they would have a field day.
I was a consenting adult, it was ridiculous. But maybe something about the situation suited me too. It was not as if I was leading David on, exactly, but he had done so much for me already and the idea of him knowing I was with someone else … It would not have been fair.
What bothered me most, though, was how unjustly Harry had been vilified, how quick his colleagues had been to turn against him.
‘But you didn’t do anything,’ I raged one night as he reminded me once more of the charges he could be up against. My counter-arguments were always weak, and he looked at me like I was a child he cared for but who knew nothing of the world.
‘Oh, Anna, of course I didn’t sleep with her – but do you really think that means anything?’
He shook his head despairingly.
‘The girl who made this claim against me, or rather the girl whose parents made this claim … They don’t care that she had told me she was twenty-one. They don’t care that she was the one who duped me.’
To be honest, I could have contested him on that point if I had wanted to. He was the investigative reporter; it was he who had infiltrated the organisation, using whatever means he could to extract the information he wanted. Even if that meant earning the trust of a young woman who believed he was after her, rather than what she could do for him.
Yet how could I say any of that without sounding unsupportive? Harry did not need another person rallying against him. More importantly, I understood why he did it. What he did, it was about the story, the pursuit of truth and justice, regardless of the cost. That was simply the person he was.
The threads in my stomach pulled tighter as I stepped off the bus that morning in Bethnal Green, on my way to his flat for the very first time. My breath in the January air was a curling finger of smoke drawing me forward, as I followed the directions he had sent, past the coffee shop with the couples in beanies sipping hot drinks on a terrace makeshifted out of old wooden crates; young men with bloodshot eyes sucking on roll-up cigarettes, already weary of the winter that still had some way to go.
Hidden on the other side of a scruffy communal garden was a square of grand red-brick houses, stained black where they met the pavement by centuries of tar and a drift of pigeon feathers. Adjoining it, an elegant Victorian mansion block curved and disappeared towards the next street. Harry’s flat was on the second floor, that much I knew, and with that tiny detail I had already drawn a picture in my head, instinctively filling in the gaps.
So many times our evenings together had been curtailed by a sudden phone call that would see him downing his pint and standing to pull on his coat, leaning in to kiss me, reluctantly, his lips hovering over my mouth, telling me he wished he could stay. In those moments, I would picture him coming back to this flat, to the bedroom I imagined filled floor-to-ceiling with books, photos of his childhood stacked precariously on a mantel, shirts thrown over the back of an easy chair. But never did I question where he went in the intervening hours. Maybe I told myself it did not matter, or maybe I was scared what the answer would be.
On the doorstep, I took a moment to gather myself, a row of numbered buzzers in a panel on my left, drawing a deep breath before pressing the bell. There was a moment of silence then a crackle and Harry’s voice.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me.’
He paused and then his breath lightened. ‘Hello you.’
The sound of his feet drumming against the stairs echoed my heartbeat. When he opened the door, his face broke into a smile. Neither of us spoke as I stepped inside the hallway, which was even colder than the street.
He laced his fingers in mine and led me past piles of post and folded buggies and bikes, our feet quietly moving up the stairs.
It was another hour before we let each other go long enough for me to take in his flat.
The hallway, where our clothes now lay discarded, was tall and white, uncluttered by pictures or coat-hooks. At the far end of the hall, there was a kitchen, with a little round table and four chairs. Just enough cutlery and cups, a single frying pan and a sieve. Everything with its own place and purpose.
The only thing that was out of place was a single box of condoms, which he had gone to lengths to dig out; his ability to think so cautiously, even in the heat of the moment, pricked at me once it was over. At that moment, entangled in his arms, I would have risked anything never to let him go; it was the first clue, if only I had been willing to see it, as to how uneven the balance of power between us was.
‘Must be a reaction against my house, growing up,’ Harry said, watching my eyes react to the sparseness of it all, the precision. It was the first time he had mentioned his childhood and I stayed silent, willing him to carry on.
We were moving through to the living room now, my eyes scanning the original fireplace, unused; just a few books neatly stacked over purpose-built shelves. Hungrily, I drank in any detail I could latch my eyes upon.
Comparing the scene before me with the image of the flat I had created in my mind, I found my imagined version already slipping away.
‘When you’re one of six and there are other people’s things everywhere, I suppose a kind of efficiency grows out of craving your own personal space,’ Harry said.
I thought of the silence of my parents’ house, the endless space.
‘You grew up in Ireland, right?’
‘Galway.’ He turned to the door, the look passing over his face telling me he’d had enough of this kind of talk, and I was happy to follow him back to safer ground. Any question I asked him was liable, after all, to be turned back on me.
‘And this is my bedroom.’
Harry had moved across the hall and was standing in the doorway of the final room. There was a small double bed against one wall, a desk against the other, piled high with papers.
His eyes followed mine, over the bed, which was low to the ground, the sheets white and nondescript. Beside it, on stripped wooden floorboards, there was a square alarm clock and a notebook. Nothing else to betray the details of a life.
Moving towards the desk, my eyes trailed the papers neatly covering the surface.
‘So, what is it you’re working on?’
He moved to intercept me, pulling me towards him as I reached the desk.
‘If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.’
There was something so powerful about him, so far beyond my reach. And yet the truth was we weren’t so different, he and I. For all his bravado, for all his success. People like David, their lives were defined by what they had; Harry’s life, like mine, was defined by what he had lost.
‘It was a Saturday morning,’ Harry confided one night, our noses pressed together in the darkness of his flat, the occasional flash of a car headlight through the bedroom window the only sign that in this moment we weren’t the only two people left on Earth.
‘I’d been moaning on and on about a toy car I wanted. Little red thing I’d seen in the window in town a couple of days earlier. Wouldn’t quit. In the end, my pa says, “If it’ll shut you up, I’ll get you the damn car.” He walked out the house, and that was it. Ten minutes later, he lost control of the steering wheel and … Three people died.’
There was a pause and I felt the pain that moved across his face.
‘Oh, Harry.’ I moved so close to him that I could feel the muscles in his body contract with grief.
‘It was my fault.’ His voice was so quiet, but I felt the tears soaking into my scalp. ‘You can’t imagine what that’s like. To know—’
‘That was not your fault, Harry, don’t you ever think that.’ I clung him, hushing his cries with my own, as if soothing my younger self.
I squeezed him harder then, feeling my own confession pour from my lips; the relief of saying the words out loud tinged with fear. Our secrets reaching out for one another, their grip so tight I could hardly breathe.
CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_ee1f5ae0-8f79-5459-aa7d-0f12eb5cc24d)
Anna (#ulink_ee1f5ae0-8f79-5459-aa7d-0f12eb5cc24d)
If it had happened a few months earlier, I would have told Meg about Harry and me, regardless of what I had promised. How different things might have turned out if I had. There was nothing she and I did not share, back then, nothing we wouldn’t have told each other, until suddenly there was.
At first I put the cracks that began to show in Meg’s armour down to the pressures of office life – the spikiness that had always been offset by a natural generosity and easy humour falling away into something that would have been otherwise unexplainable.
David had picked up on it too, on the occasions when we still found time to hang out together, the three of us, between the various pulls of our respective working lives. He had tried to raise it with me but I had played the ignorant, telling myself I would not discuss Meg behind her back but knowing deep down that I just did not want to think about it.
And then, one day, the blinkers were torn off.
I was sitting at the table in the kitchen of our flat, typing up a piece on monochrome accenting. Behind me, a single panel of wall was lined incongruously with illustrations of botanical branches: a single roll of statement wallpaper which I had plucked from a box of samples at the office, with Clarissa’s encouragement; one of a number of disjointed acquisitions with which I had started to embellish the flat over the past months. I was squinting at the computer, trying to block out the churn of Camden High Street filtering in through the sash, when Meg walked through the front door, slamming her keys onto the counter, pulling open the door to the fridge and closing it again.
‘Where have you been? Are you OK?’
It had been two or three days since I had last seen her, only an unfinished cup of coffee on the counter when I woke that morning offering any sign that she had been home at all.
She looked odd, changed somehow, in a way that I could no longer ignore: her fingers scratching at her thighs, front teeth chewing her bottom lip. There was a darkness that had taken hold, its shadow stretching beneath her; an anger, barely contained, slowly tightening its grip.
‘Why?’
‘You just seem a bit … I tried to call.’
‘I’m fine, I’m tired. Work’s full on …’ Her eyes skittered around the room as if in search of an answer.
‘David rang, a minute ago, wanted to know if we were going to his party.’
Even as I said it, I knew I was setting myself up for a fall. Harry was away on a job, and although house parties were not my scene, especially not without Meg there to create a distraction, something had made me say yes.
‘Can’t, there’s something I’ve got to do.’ Meg’s voice was distant.
‘What is it?’
It stung that I even had to ask.
‘Just something for work.’
She walked out of the kitchen, and even though her bedroom stood directly on the other side of the wall, she could have been on the other side of the world.
When she came back out, half an hour later, her expression had softened slightly.
‘Sorry, I’m not myself at the moment, it’s just a lot of pressure.’
She held my gaze for a second before snapping her face away again. Without looking me in the eye, she stepped forward and kissed my cheek. There was a flicker of electricity between us and then she turned, the door slamming shut before I had time to reply.
The bus stop stood opposite our flat on the high street, illuminated in a sickly streetlight. Fifteen minutes later I stepped off the bus at South End Green, where the road veered right towards Hampstead Heath station.
Keeping the pub on my left I followed the right fork which led up to the Heath.
In all the years David and I had known each other, I had never been to his London house. After leaving halls, he had his own apartment in Brighton, on one of the smarter Regency squares, a very different proposition to the house we had shared the year previously.
The flat had been bought for him by his father, he let slip one afternoon. We were lazing on the nobbled rectangle of grass that stood between a U of buildings, sharing a bag of chips from soggy newspaper, the sea lapping at the shore on the other side of the main road. Back then, David still told himself he was uncomfortable with the level of wealth his father had started to accrue as his business grew from small-time independent to leading international trading company TradeSmart. The irony of his faux-liberal university lifestyle, banging on about the importance of fair trade while snorting lines of cocaine from supply chains involving child exploitation and murder, paid for by Daddy’s money, was not so much lost on him as ignored.
He had been the first person I met, the day I arrived at Sussex. Freshers’ Week, Falmer campus. Summer had stretched on that year, grass lining the lazy knolls that formed a ripple in front of the university, swarming with bodies, snatching up the final rays. Morcheeba drifting across the hills. Endless drum’n’bass.
My halls were on the far side of campus, just before rows of housing melted away into fields.
‘So, this is your room,’ explained the self-assured young man who greeted me at the door. He had watched my eyes for a reaction as I scanned the room with its worn carpets and fireproof doors.
‘Sorry, I’m David,’ he had added, stretching out his hand. ‘I’m your RA. This is my second year so I’m here to, you know, make sure you have everything you need …’
‘I’m Anna.’ I smiled self-consciously, trying out my new name for the first time.
‘What are you studying?’ His eyes were trying hard to catch mine.
‘English Literature.’
‘Cool, I’m doing Business Studies … Are your parents bringing the rest of your things later?’
I paused, shaking my head, and kept walking. ‘It’s just my dad but he’s abroad. RAF.’
I could hear the hesitation in my voice, but David never questioned it, and why would he?
As David continued talking, my eyes settled on a blur of hills rising to meet an expanse of blue sky, through the window, unaware of the dark clouds looming in from the edge.
The light was fading as David’s road came into view, in an enclave of North London reserved for old money and increasingly new.
The house was a four-storey Victorian semi-detached, three times the size of my parents’ home, chequered tiled steps leading up to the entrance. It was beautiful, the house a child might draw, plucked straight from a ghost story.
I took the stairs to the house slowly; light and voices emanated from the hallway through the open front door, music spilling over the wall from the garden.
David was there, waiting for me, a smile stitched across his face as I tentatively pushed at the open door.
‘You came!’
He kissed my cheek, his skin soft and grateful, my proximity to him reassuring.
‘This is your house?’
‘This is it.’ Leading the way, past a sweeping staircase with double-height ceilings and down through the kitchen, David paused to pour me a drink.
‘So here we are.’
We were standing in the garden, which was not much smaller than the ground floor of the house. The lawn stretched down to a red-brick wall with an arched doorway leading out onto the Heath.
On the terraced area, where we now stood, there were paper lanterns punctuating the view from one side of the house to the other. In the middle of the garden someone had attempted to create a pit and amidst the ash, a fire licked at the air. A group of people I didn’t recognise were sitting around it, flicking joint roaches into the flames.
‘Anna, I’m …’ Watching my face turn back to his, David took a step forward, a look stirring in his eyes. Ever since that night at the club, something had shifted between us and aside from the gifts that passed between us like relentless peace offerings, he had been careful not to push.
‘Meg couldn’t come,’ I changed the subject before I could stop myself, immediately feeling like a traitor to my friend for raising the subject.
‘What’s with her at the moment?’ David’s face changed. ‘Every time I see her recently she’s …’
‘She’s just, you know, work.’
David raised his eyebrow. ‘I don’t know, it seems like more than that. We’re all busy …’
‘How is work?’ It seemed fitting to change track.
‘Good, yeah, I mean it’s banking, it’s not exactly … But it’s good, you know, doing something for myself, making my own money.’
I nodded, wondering how much David earned. Not that he needed money of his own, clearly.
As if reading my mind, he continued, ‘My dad wanted me to go into the family business but … I don’t know, I want to do my own thing. The idea of just following my father’s footsteps …’
He blushed, shrugging.
‘Good for you.’ Discreetly, my eyes cast their way up the back of the house, the vast wooden shutters, creepers growing up the walls. The top-floor windows gazed out with hollow eyes over the black expanse of Hampstead Heath.
‘So this is the house you grew up in?’
David took a swig of his drink.
‘Yup. My grandparents bought it in the 1950s, and when they died, my dad inherited it.’
‘And he doesn’t mind you having a party …?’
‘He doesn’t live here any more. He’s got a flat in town, but he’s away most of the time, so it’s just me.’
‘How come?’
‘Work. He’s mainly working in Africa and Asia at the moment. His company has an office over here, but mostly it’s …’
The music stopped suddenly, as if someone had lurched the needle from the record, followed by a wave of indignation from the crowd. Behind David’s shoulder I could see more people spilling into the garden as the music started again, something soulful this time.
‘If you ever want to come over …’
‘Thanks.’ I smiled, not sure what else to say as I watched the party from a distance, David’s guests’ uplit faces devoid of features, like apparitions passing under a cloud.
It was nearly 1 a.m. by the time I left the party. David had called me a cab, his hand lingering on mine as I ducked into the car, his eyes following me down the road.
Within minutes of driving, the wide open streets of Hampstead gave way to Malden Road, sprawling council blocks obscuring my view of the sky. Camden High Street, with its all-night bars and the endless roar of the night bus trundling along tarmac scarred by hidden potholes, faded to a reassuring throb as I pressed closed the door from the street.
A strip of light gently glowed above the tatty carpet at the top of the stairs, warm and inviting, but when my feet reached the upstairs landing, something already felt wrong. I pushed open the front door to find the room darker than I had imagined. Meg’s body, her back to me, was unnaturally taut at the table, an open bottle of wine beside her.
In another life, I would have called out to her. I would have watched her turn to me, holding up the bottle, signalling for me to bring down a glass. Now, though, her body was still. For a moment I felt my joints freeze, imagining the worst, but then she moved, a small, almost imperceptible intake of breath, and my chest loosened, just enough.
Not knowing what else to do, I went to the counter to pull down a mug, waiting for her to make the first move. Holding the cup under the tap, I discreetly glanced at the window, catching an outline of her silhouette.
Taking a gulp of water, I turned to face her. From here, she looked pale and still.
‘Meg?’
When I ran towards her, her head collapsed into my chest, her body heaving with silent tears.
‘Sshh, what is it?’ It was the first time I had ever seen her cry. The first time in my life that I had been alone with someone in tears, whom I was allowed to touch.
Meg shook her head.
‘Anna … I …’
The words dried up after that. I briefly tried to speak, to fill the silence with the sounds she needed to hear. I wonder now how different things might have been if I had. But my throat clammed up. Instead, I led her to her bed and pulled the blankets around her neck, lying down beside her, my arms wrapped in hers, until her breath slowed into sleep.
Meg was standing by the counter when I emerged in the kitchen the following morning. She was facing the window, the glass streaked with rain.
‘I have to go.’ She did not look at me as I pulled a mug from a pile on the draining board.
‘OK, I’ll be off soon, too. I’m going into the office to catch up on a few things.’
Clarissa had assured me there was no need to work this weekend, but we had a big commercial pitch coming up and I knew she planned to go in and crack on – and I knew how much it would please her to see me there as she arrived, perched in front of my computer, notes neatly stretched across my desk. If I was going to climb the ladder the way I needed to, I had to show how keen I was, how much more I was capable of than endless admin.
‘I’m leaving London.’ Meg turned away from me, her voice matter-of-fact.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve been offered a job in Bristol.’
Finally, she turned back to face me, her skin bare, free of the heavy eyeliner she always applied within minutes of showering.
‘What? When?’ My eyes scoured her face for signs of something I could hold onto.
‘I can’t talk now. This flat, it’s—’
‘Bristol?’
‘You can stay on, if you can cover the rent on your own, or … It’s paid up until the end of the month. We’ll talk later. I’ve got to go.’
‘Meg, what the fuck? Where are you going?’
I followed her to the front door, willing her to turn around as she gripped the handrail, her free arm raised defensively as she reached the bottom of the stairs.
But I didn’t follow her. Instead, I went to the office, rather than waiting there in the flat for her return, making the effort she would have made to stop me from leaving, had the shoe been on the other foot. If I had, could I have saved us all?
Harry’s phone was off when I tried it at lunchtime, on my way to the noisy coffee shop where I ordered a salad box for Clarissa before heading back to the office. Again, I was met by the monotony of his answerphone as I wrestled with the front door later that evening, the smell of frying meat following me in from the kebab shop, my voice struggling to remain light.
‘Harry, it’s me, just seeing how you are. I’m at the office but I wondered what you were doing tonight, or tomorrow. Call me …’
I paused before I hung up, slipping the phone back into my pocket, darkness descending as I shut the door against the street.
Even before I reached the upstairs landing, something felt different. In the dark, fumbling for the light switch, my key turning quietly in the lock, I pushed the door open with a nervous hand.
‘Meg?’
Inside, the flat was still and instinctively I knew.
I called her name again, already knowing it was too late. Feeling it, the guillotine falling, severing the space between then and now.
CHAPTER 9 (#ulink_48c0acc3-c616-54d6-af8a-af6998e11926)
Anna (#ulink_48c0acc3-c616-54d6-af8a-af6998e11926)
It was October, that first year at university in Brighton, and a late burst of summer sun meant the city was awash with life: swarms of Italian tour groups smoking cigarettes in the grounds of the Pavilion; elderly couples walking in companionable silence along the shore, hands held behind their backs.
The beach had been a heaving mass of bodies by the time I arrived late that afternoon. Walking across the pebbles, I was aware of the glances from a group of guys sprawled out by my feet as I made my way towards the pub where we had arranged to meet. It was less than a month into our first term and Meg had suggested a group of us have afternoon drinks before heading to a drum’n’bass night at the club on the sea front.
Scared of getting it wrong, of being exposed for the fraud I was, I had spent the previous week watching the other students stumble along the path in front of my window, gathering hints about what to wear. In the end I had chosen denim cut-offs, a slick of pink lip gloss, hair pulled away from my face.
David’s skin was lightly tanned and his sandy-coloured hair shaven, self-consciously, into a low undercut on one side of his head.
‘So, what are your plans for Christmas?’ he asked that afternoon as we sat opposite each other outside the Fortune of War, the two of us the first to arrive.
I took a long sip of wine, watching his pupils dilate like two dark wells in the glare of the sun.
‘Not much. Studying. My dad’s still in Singapore, so I’ll stay with my aunt.’
‘You said your dad’s in the RAF?’
I smiled, taking a sip of my drink.
‘So where do you stay when you’re in the UK?’
‘I have an aunt, in Surrey. It’s dull but convenient.’
We were silent for a moment, him drawing lines with his finger on the sweat of his glass.
‘How about you?’
He looked up again, a flicker of embarrassment immediately succeeded by pride.
‘Maldives, probably. My dad has lots of international clients and that’s where they … It’s work for him, but you know, could be worse …’
My mind flicked to my parents’ dining room, the sound of my mother’s best cutlery scratching against our plates at the mahogany table laid for three – the empty chair filling every inch of the room.
I had nothing to say, but needed to push the conversation on, away from my life.
‘So you travel a lot?’
David shrugged. ‘We spend most of the summer between the South of France and Greece. My dad has a place on the edge of this island, in the Sporades.’ He looked at me, as if to ask if I had heard of them.
I took another sip of my drink, waiting for him to continue.
‘It’s a few islands along from Skiathos. Our one’s much smaller, though, low-key.’
‘Cool.’ I nodded, working to suppress my jealousy as a cube of ice slipped down the back of my throat.
By the time Meg arrived, followed by a stream of faces I didn’t recognise from campus, David had already bought three rounds, insisting he was closer to the bar whenever I made a half-hearted attempt to stand. The moon hovered precariously above the water as we made our way along the beach, hours later, towards Concorde 2.
‘Have you seen LCD Soundsystem live before?’ David asked, holding back as Meg and some of the others took off their shoes, screaming with laughter as they waded through the low waves, their voices drowned out by the thrashing beats as we approached the club.
The temperature had dropped dramatically and I felt ripples moving across my arms and legs as I pushed my hands into the pockets of my shorts. David at once started to unzip his hoodie.
‘Take this.’ His eyes worked hard to hold mine as I went to take the sweater. His mouth opened to speak but then Meg appeared, her wet clothes clinging to her skinny frame. Without saying anything, she laughed, tugging the hoodie from his fingers and wrapping it around her.
‘Jesus, Meg,’ the disapproval in my laughter was laced with awe, my envy of her total lack of inhibition so potent that I could almost taste it.
Even as I pushed open the door to Meg’s room, the rumble of Camden High Street clattering through the glass, I knew she was already gone. Even before my eyes adjusted to the light, to the empty wardrobe, the bed stripped bare.
‘Meg, where are you? You can’t do this. You have to call me. Please.’
My mouth pressed against the phone, tears streaming down my cheeks.
Harry’s number went straight to voicemail. The urge to run to his flat might have been overwhelming if I had not already known what a false move it would be. As he said himself, he was hardly ever there, his freelance investigative career taking him off in far-flung directions that he refused to discuss. Besides, from the time we had spent together, it was clear he did not respond well to being needed, always preferring to be the one to give chase.
Without Meg, the flat was too big and yet the walls seemed to press in on me, her absence everywhere I looked.
Outside, Camden Town was a drizzling sky, illuminated grey pavements, Saturday night drinkers passing by in a sea of strangled faces, their corners smudged.
I pulled out my phone. Other than work, there were four numbers in my past calls list. Harry, Meg, Mum, David.
Leaning my back against the wall to steady myself, I pressed ‘call’.
He answered after two rings. ‘Anna? What time is it …’
‘Hi.’ My voice broke then.
‘What’s wrong?’ I could feel him freeze whatever he was doing, his attention, as always, focused on me.
‘It’s Meg …’ The words caught in my throat.
‘Where are you?’
‘I don’t know what to—’
‘Anna, just tell me where you are and I’ll be there in a minute, just tell me …’
‘I …’ But the words wouldn’t come; the lights on the street were too bright, a blast of noise exploding from inside the Irish bar along the high street as the doors swung open.
David’s voice was calm and firm at the end of the line. ‘OK, look, just jump in a cab, OK? Find a taxi, I’ll stay on the line. Come to the house, I’m waiting. Everything’s going to be all right.’
Compared to the last time I had seen it, the wide entrance hall felt eerily devoid of life. As I stepped inside, the air lightly hummed with the smell of stale booze and stale bodies.
‘Sorry about the mess.’ David led me through the hallway, scooping up half-drunk glasses as he went, placing them on the kitchen table.
‘Can I get you a drink?’
He moved to the fridge, his hair flattened on one side from where he must have slept. When he turned, he was holding two bottles of beer. ‘There’s not much else. I could pop out to the shop.’
I shook my head, gratefully accepting the drink, wondering for a moment how he could live like this while holding down a job in the City.
‘What is going on?’
He leaned back against the table as I took a sip of beer.
‘Meg’s gone.’
He moved onto the other foot, ‘What do you mean, gone?’
‘She’s gone. Taken all her things. She said something about a job in Bristol this morning and then when I got home after work, she had cleared out.’
‘She can’t have done.’
‘She left a note.’
‘What did it say?’
‘Nothing. “Take care of yourself.” I just don’t fucking get it – why would she just leave?’ I raised the bottle to my lips again, the glass knocking against my tooth.
‘You’ve tried calling her? I’ll try now …’
He walked into the living room, the phone pressed against his ear, and I followed. There was something mausoleum-like about the inside of the house, like a set of family life, frozen in time. Framed pictures of David as a baby were neatly scattered across the surfaces of a huge pine dresser. Heavy woven rugs, William Morris curtains, an oil painting hanging above the fireplace.
‘It’s going to voicemail.’
‘Where is that?’ I was transfixed by a painting hanging above the fireplace, dusty strokes of blues and rusty greens.
‘That is the view from my parents’ house in Greece when they first bought it. It was just a shack really.’ He spoke as if to himself.
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘My mum fell in love with it, she did loads of these after we first moved in. For a while …’
‘Your mother painted this?’
‘That’s how they met. My mum grew up on the island and when she was in her early twenties she used to have a stall at the top of the village, selling her paintings. Dad was on holiday, stumbled upon her shop and …’
The thought of Meg popped back into my mind and I shook my head.
‘She said I have to move out, unless I can cover the rent on my own, which obviously I can’t …’
Pushing his phone back into his pocket, David looked at me.
‘Move in here.’ He said it straight away, as if the sounds had been poised on his lips all his life.
‘I mean it, why not? Move in.’
Even if I had wanted to hold back, my face would not contain itself. Lips curling at the edges, my chest lifted my whole body with something between gratitude and excitement, and something else too – an unease, a feeling I could not place, creeping in from the side.
‘Really, but …?’
David rose then, unwilling to hear it. ‘No buts.’
A moment of doubt, that is all there was. And then I felt myself nodding, pushing away the lingering sense of discomfort, stifling it with all my will until, just like that, it was gone.
CHAPTER 10 (#ulink_192acb6e-c4c8-554e-9781-70dbe66afca8)
Anna (#ulink_192acb6e-c4c8-554e-9781-70dbe66afca8)
The weeks passed slowly and then quickly in the months following Meg’s disappearance.
David spoke to Meg’s mother who told him she was surprised Meg had not been in contact with either of us directly and confirmed she was in Bristol, working for a paper, and was, for want of a better explanation, probably just busy.
Why had I refused to call? I told myself I was too hurt, but perhaps even then I was instinctively fearful of what I might find out.
There was a moment, one morning at the office not long after she left, when I found my hands hovering above the keyboard of my computer, her name at the tip of my fingers. But what would be the point? I moved my attention towards something else. I was not on Facebook, and neither was she; what would be gained from trawling the internet for her most recent press cuttings, other than confirmation that she had moved on – and that I should, too?
At first, I had taken Harry’s response to the news I was moving in with David as a form of contempt. There was a note in his voice that I did not recognise when I told him of my new living arrangements, and it pleased me.
‘I never knew you and David were so close …?’
‘We’re not. Well, not like that, obviously. He’s an old friend, and he’s living in this massive house on his own and … where else am I going to go?’
I swallowed, knowing I was crossing a line.
‘Anna, you know if I could, I would ask you to stay at mine. But it’s not …’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Would it help if I said I was jealous?’
‘Maybe.’ I smiled reluctantly, leaning forward to kiss him, but he was less easily distracted than I was.
‘So, this house, it belongs to David’s parents but they don’t live there?’
I was touched that he cared enough to want to understand my life.
‘Exactly. His dad is mega-rich, he’s usually away on business and when he’s in town he has a flat he uses. So that just leaves David and the house …’
‘And now you.’ He thought for a moment before nodding. ‘OK.’
It did not hint at anything out of the ordinary at the time, the excitement shining in his eyes as he raised his glass to his lips, his eyes holding mine as he drank.
It was a while later that he pushed the parameters of our relationship beyond the generally permissible limits, broaching the matter one night as we lay side by side, our legs entwined, between the sheets.
‘I know I said I was jealous of the idea of you and David sharing a house, but I wouldn’t mind if you and he …’
My body tensed. Sensing my reaction, he placed his hand gently in the small of my back.
‘That’s not because I don’t want you – you know that, right? It’s just … You and me, there’s no question over what we have.’
Swallowing, I chose to ignore that questions blew between us like sheets billowing precariously on a line.
His lips pressed against mine and the thought was pushed away. He was a free spirit, that was all it was. There was no reason to feel alarmed.
‘It’s just, if it makes life easier, you know? I have no problem with it.’
I tried to forget Harry’s words over the following weeks, but no matter how hard I tried to run from them, they chased me. The thought of his indifference, the ease with which he could accept the possibility of another man’s body on mine, following me into sleep … But there was an excitement too. The seed of a possibility of something I could sense if not name.
And over time, I suppose, the idea lost its menace. Was it that simple? Perhaps it wasn’t, but in the end it felt like little more than an inevitability.
We had been sitting on the sofa, David and I, flicking through magazines, a half-smoked spliff resting in the ashtray on the coffee table. It was not planned, not consciously at least. David leaned forward to reach his glass of water and I felt my fingers stop him, my hand on his shoulder. Then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, I was leaning in, my fingers lifting to his face, cupping his chin.
His mouth was dry from the weed, and I moistened it with my tongue, leaning him back against the sofa and lifting his shirt in slow, gentle tugging motions. His eyes were bloodshot and his face temporarily frozen. Throughout, I felt his want driving me, spurring me on, wondering how many times he had envisaged this moment.
Once he had finished I sat up and lifted the spliff from the ashtray, lighting it and inhaling deeply while he trembled on the sofa.
It was two months to the day after my first time with David that I stumbled upon the notes on Harry’s desk. We were lying on his bed watching a film on the laptop balanced on the duvet between us, the sound of a party flooding in from the flat above.
‘Do you want me to ask them to turn it down?’ I had asked as he fidgeted beside me, his hands refusing to settle.
‘What?’
‘The music …’
He looked confused and then batted his hand. ‘It doesn’t bother me.’
For a moment he was silent, and then he continued, shaking his head dismissively. His timing was perfect.
‘Sorry. It’s nothing, it’s just work.’
‘Anything I can help with?’
‘It’s just this story I’m working on.’ Leaning forward, he took a swig from his glass. ‘It’s nothing. Let’s just watch the film.’
The following morning I woke to find him already seated at his desk on the other side of the bedroom, his body folded over the table.
I loved watching him work, the way he argued with himself under his breath, chewing the tip of his pen, as he did now, absent-mindedly circling words on the page.
I pushed myself up to sitting. ‘What are you doing?’
‘You’re awake.’
He turned slightly from his chair, keeping his eyes fixed to the page. ‘I’m going to make coffee,’ he added without moving.
I smiled to myself, leaning back, breathing deeply, drinking in his smell, letting the coolness of the sheets settle against my skin.
‘It’s OK, I’ll make it.’ I went to stand but he got up first.
‘No, no, it’s fine. You stay there.’
I watched him walk through the bedroom door to the kitchen in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, the cotton rubbing against the curve of his shoulder blade.
Contentedly, I let my eyes drift around the room, soaking up the old press cuttings, a couple in frames against one wall, a thick stack of books on either side of the fireplace.
It was not like me to overstep boundaries with Harry. But it was in both our interests, I told myself as my toes pressed silently onto the floor next to the bed, the wooden boards soft against the soles of my feet.
Still, I was reassured by the sound of the kettle lightly humming in the kitchen as I wrapped the bedsheet around myself, turning slightly to the empty doorway before moving towards his desk.
I stopped again, giving myself a chance to back out; but it was not as if I was snooping, I reminded myself as I lowered myself slowly into his empty seat, which was still warm. It was hardly rummaging through his secret possessions; it was just a pile of papers and a pad, his writing, unconcealed, the thick, loopy scrawl of someone who thought too quickly.
I did not touch anything, I did not have to turn my head to read it. It was just there, in the middle of a series of words connected by arrows, streaking angrily back and forth across the page, the word ‘TradeSmart’ circled in pen.
My whole body tensed. That could not be right. I looked again, picking up the notepad this time, turning it so that the words were in sharp focus in front of my face.
As I raised the pad, a photo fell loose, landing face up on the floorboards by my feet. I looked down, and the image stared back at me. The single image of a boy, his extremities protruding from under a white sheet – a child of six or seven.
If it wasn’t for the skin, which was black, and the hair, which clung to his head in tight curls, it might have been Thomas. My own brother’s face, his skin unnaturally white that day, beneath a scattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose, had shared the same slackness of the jaw, the same unmistakable absence of life. His blond hair stuck to his forehead where he had pushed away the heat of the summer’s day with a tiny wrist.
‘Your coffee?’ Harry stopped when he saw my expression.
My eyes were unable to leave the photo. As if looking in from somewhere else, I heard myself gag, watched myself stand too quickly and then the chair falling away behind me.
‘Anna?’
Harry rushed towards me and I pulled myself away, making it to the bathroom just in time.
He had not been angry about me prying and, like a fool, I had taken his softness as a sign of his love. Rather, he had merely sighed, as if there was an inevitability about what was to come.
Leading me into the living room, he held a cigarette packet in his hand as we sat opposite each other on the sofa, spinning the box slowly between his fingers as he spoke.
After some deviation, we got to the point.
‘The thing is, Anna, for the past four years I’ve been part of a team looking at a company called TradeSmart.’
‘I know who they are.’
‘Of course you do.’
He dropped his eyes, looking away momentarily, releasing a small sigh.
‘Well, as you may or may not know, David’s dad’s company, they’re a massive FTSE 100 organisation. A leading logistics and commodity trading company, by their own account.’
He lit a cigarette, his forehead creasing, sliding the pack along to me.
‘Clive Witherall, David’s father, he’s …’ He paused. What was he thinking in that moment? Did he ever doubt me – did he ever wonder if it was safe to carry on? Or was I so clearly enraptured by then that he already knew what I would be prepared to do?
‘We haven’t met.’ I filled in the gaps.
He carried on after a moment, holding my eyes.
‘Well, as you might be aware, to the outside world, Witherall is a bit of a saint. Philanthropist, socialite … Runs a couple of orphanages in Central Africa, patron of several charities, friend to the great and the good, whatever else you like.’
He took a drag of his cigarette between words, exhaling a thin, steady stream of smoke.
‘You’ve probably seen him on TV. He’s a cocky fucker, always up on his soap-box, brazen as anything. What he’s less keen to stand up and talk about, though, is the fact that TradeSmart, for all its talk of corporate social responsibility and ethical foundations, is responsible for dumping a shitload of toxic waste at the edge of villages in Equatorial Guinea, through a series of local contractors. The fallout of which has meant thousands of people have died.’
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, unsure what to say.
‘Shit. That’s terrible.’
‘It is terrible. I mean, we’re talking babies, children, women … and hundreds more left with horrific health problems.’
I had no idea where this was going; I was just so happy, so grateful, to be party at last to his inner life. Perhaps once he learned he could trust me, then we could become a proper couple. I could move in, introduce him to my work colleagues …
Even then, my mind had skated to David but only for a second. The presents, the house? For Harry I would have given it all up in a second.
‘That’s so fucked up. I can’t believe it. I mean, seriously, to hear David talk about it, you would think his dad was like some kind of god. So you’re writing a piece about this?’
He pushed himself up from the sofa, moving purposefully back towards his desk, shoulders broadening.
He opened the drawer slowly, as if still unsure whether to show me or not. By the time he pulled out the folder, turning to face me with renewed purpose, he had me rapt.
‘It gets worse.’ His voice lowered as he sat. ‘A lot worse, Anna … The problem with people like Clive Witherall, you see, is that they have friends everywhere.’
I nodded along, the dutiful student.
‘And when you have the right friends in the right places and the means to take advantage of destabilised borders, there is no limit to what you can get away with … The problem is, right now, we’ve hit a wall. It doesn’t matter what we know, because if we can’t prove it—’
He cut himself off, his demeanour visibly shifting, as if suddenly aware of the line he had crossed.
‘God, Anna, I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear this.’
‘No, I do.’
I unfolded my legs, on cue, turning my attention to what he was holding. After just enough deliberation, he took a step towards me, taking in my silence as he handed me the file – an A4 folder, neatly stuffed with papers and photographs.
Amidst the horror of what was being revealed, there was something so natural about sitting there with him, the intensity of the secrets passing between us. I felt his eyes on me as I flicked through pages of transcripts, studying my reaction to the images of dead bodies scattered across a dirt track; weapons, lined up like contestants in a beauty pageant – caring what I thought.
Yet, as I turned the page again, I felt my chest contract. The image had hit me in the chest with the force of a hammer.
At first my eyes were hesitant to settle on the lines of the child’s face, but after that I could not wrench them away.
He would have been six or seven, the same age as Thomas, his eyes closed as if in sleep, peering out from under a white sheet. His mother’s arms were locked around her son, her face twisted; it was the same expression I saw when I closed my eyes at night.
Here, in Harry’s flat, in this image of someone else’s child, stiff and lifeless under the sheet, I saw the tiny mound of limbs on the driveway of my parents’ home, my own mother’s heart being torn from her body.
I dropped the file as soon as I saw it, turning from Harry, my fingernails running down my arms.
‘Anna?’
‘Who is that?’
Harry’s face gave nothing away, but clearly he knew he was safe to carry on.
‘This is one of the children who died after a TradeSmart contractor was paid to dump seriously toxic waste at the edge of a playground.’
He let the words settle, waiting for me to soak them in.
‘And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In that folder you’re holding we have transcripts from women, children who …’
He must have seen the unease that spread across my face.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be telling you this.’
Taking a step back, he took a final pull of his cigarette before smearing the butt across the windowsill and letting it drop from his hand.
We were silent for a few minutes. I don’t remember taking a single breath as I processed his words, leaning forward, the image of the boy’s body soldering into me, intensified by my desperation for Harry’s faith in me. Desperation not just to know, but to be the one he chose to confide in.
‘Harry, please tell me.’
I could feel the burning in my cheeks as he sat back at the other end of the sofa, cupping his face with his hands. Closing his eyes, he circled his fingers over the dark lids, tracing the grooves of his skull.
Eventually, his hands dropped away from his face and he bent his knees, lowering himself beside me. I moved closer in response, holding out my hands.
‘How can I help? Is there research, or could I …’
He shook his head.
‘Oh, come on, Harry. I could do it, you know I could. You know how committed I am, I could help …’
He looked away, clearing his throat, preparing himself.
‘Of course I know that, Anna. It’s not that I … It’s just …’
The more he resisted me, the more forcefully I pleaded with him.
‘Come on. What’s wrong with you? You have just told me this man is a child murderer, but you don’t want as much help as you can get in exposing him? I live with his son, for God’s sake, Harry. We’re sleeping together. How could you not want to use me?’
How, in uttering those words, did I not understand what was happening?
‘You would do that?’ Holding my gaze, he sniffed. ‘There are complications.’
I stayed quiet then, giving him the space he needed, the room to make the decision for himself.
‘OK.’ He had said it as if to himself. ‘You really want to know, then I’ll tell you. I don’t really know how to … So I’m just going to come out and say it. I’m not writing an article about TradeSmart.’
I stared back at him blankly.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m not writing a piece about Clive Witherall. I’m looking into him, yes, but it’s not for an article. Not for a newspaper. The truth is, I’m working for … an organisation, an agency, let’s say, to help bring down a man essentially responsible for genocide. And yes, we do need your help, desperately. I just don’t know if I can …’
He looked at me for a final time before continuing.
‘The problem is that Clive, he’s an extremely powerful man … What we really need is someone on the inside, someone who can get close to him …’
The realisation slowly dawned. Drawing a cigarette from the packet he had dropped on the sofa, I let it roll between my fingers as I listened.
‘Who is we?’
He held my gaze, unblinking.
My voice sounded more self-assured than I had expected, when I continued.
‘Harry, if you expect me to trust you it has to go both ways. You can’t ask me to be involved with something and not tell me who I’m getting involved with. You can’t think I’m that naive.’
The truth, of course, was that he hardly needed to say, and I hardly needed to push. We both knew what we were talking about. MI5, MI6 … Did it matter which? I wasn’t prepared to ask myself the right questions at the time, let alone to ask him. But the truth is, it can’t have been that easy. There must have been a moment in which I stepped back long enough to question where all this would lead, a chill grazing the bare skin of my forearms. Yet, if there was any doubt, I have pushed it so far into the recesses of my memory that I cannot get it back.
‘You wouldn’t have to report to anyone but me. You would be paid a retainer.’
He said it as an afterthought, having returned from the kitchen with a bottle of whisky and two glasses.
‘Obviously it would come from another source so it didn’t look obvious.’
Had a smile formed on my lips? Or was it something else I was feeling, a sense that I was stepping with each second that passed towards devastating self-destruction?
It was hard to say right now exactly how much money I would receive, Harry added, but enough to make my life comfortable.
‘Only this has to come from you. If you were going to get involved in this, Anna, it would have to be off your own bat. You hear me? For the right reasons – because you wanted to help.’
My expression must have sharpened, a pang of annoyance that he even needed to say this.
‘No one will think any less of you if you decide you can’t. Plenty of people know awful things are happening but choose – understandably – not to get involved. Even if they could help, they don’t. And that doesn’t mean that they’re bad people, it just means—’
‘I get it.’
He considered me for a while, as if noticing something in my face that he had not seen before. After a minute or so, he nodded.
‘If you’re serious … Either way, you need to go away and give it some thought. Let me know, when you’re ready.
‘More than anything,’ he added, drawing a line under the conversation, ‘you must know that I will always be there, if you decide to go ahead. If ever you need me.’
CHAPTER 11 (#ulink_a8543664-b7e8-5a7f-8459-8109033cecf1)
Anna (#ulink_a8543664-b7e8-5a7f-8459-8109033cecf1)
David had already left by the time I woke up. Drawn outside by the light spilling in through every crevice of the house, the sound of the birds perched on the feeder outside the kitchen window, I took my cup onto the patio.
Following the curve of the garden, I walked towards the ornate iron bench which stood next to the door leading out onto the Heath, settling to feel the morning sun brushing against my face, the occasional call of a dog walker, the gurgle of a toddler, rising over the wall.
This is where I was still sitting, nursing a cup of cold coffee, when David appeared through the French doors half an hour later. It was a Saturday morning and the promise of spring danced between puffs of light cloud.
He wore a look of appreciation as he approached, the sun lighting him from behind. With the halo effect of the light around his head, I had a flash of memory: that first afternoon drinking together on the beach at Brighton. It was the same look, one that I could now recognise as adoration, which he wore then. Without the affectations of his university brand – the Camden Market-style jewellery traded in for a simple leather watch; the hooded jumper replaced with a casual light blue shirt – he looked younger, somehow, like a boy who had raided his father’s wardrobe.
He was about to say something, I could tell, but he paused briefly, as if enjoying the spectacle of this moment together in the garden of the house he grew up in too much to interrupt. When he finally pulled up a chair, he pressed his lips on mine.
I smiled, pulling myself slightly away from him, meeting his eyes.
‘I was thinking, we should get a gardener,’ I said, once he had settled himself, leaning back against the bench, his legs splayed.
I had been working up to the suggestion over the past few days, still unsure whether it was within my remit to request such a thing. This was still very much his family home but, beautiful as it was, it had begun to feel frayed, the toll of David’s once steady stream of parties having worn into the edges.
He shrugged. ‘Sure.’ The glint in his eyes remained intact.
I nodded, pleased at his easy reaction, looking away for a moment before feeling my attention drawn back to him.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
He was staring, the smile pinched at either side of his mouth.
‘What, David?’ I tried not to sound impatient, pushing playfully at his arm. ‘What do you want?’
‘I bought croissants,’ he said, reaching down towards a shopping bag. ‘And juice.’
I arranged myself in my chair, ‘Excellent, thank you.’
‘And …’ he paused before reaching into his pocket, drawing out an envelope. There was a loaded silence and then he started to speak. ‘These past months with you … I know, I know, but humour me, please … These past few months with you have been the best of my life. I know it sounds horribly cheesy but it’s true. And …’
He made the sound of a drum-roll, then placed the envelope between my fingers.
Trying to read his face, I opened it and pulled out two tickets, feeling my heartbeat rise.
He watched me as I raised one hand to my mouth, the other hand clutching the plane tickets. ‘Oh my God, David, I can’t, this is too much …’
‘It’s not.’
He held my knee in his hand, squeezing harder with every second that passed.
‘I know sometimes maybe you feel I’m pushing things too fast, but I really mean it when I say that you are the most extraordinary girl …’ He corrected himself, ‘You are the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever met. And I know how hard you’ve been working, and, well, it’s a selfish act. I want you there, I want you to meet my family. My dad.’
He watched me, my teeth biting down onto my lip so that I could taste the blood inside my mouth.
‘Sorry, that sounded intense. I just mean I want to spend time with you, away from here. I want you to be part of my life. Properly.’
I swallowed, looking up at him, pausing just long enough to see his desire grow a little more.
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Say you’ll come?’ He moved closer.
Greece. I felt my stomach flip.
Placing my hand on the side of my chair to steady myself, I breathed in.
‘I’ll come.’
‘He’s invited me to Greece.’
I blurted it out as soon as I had stepped inside Harry’s front door, the reality of what was happening jolting through me in fretful waves.
It was only the third time I had been at the flat since I moved in with David, feigning overnight stays with friends; claims I had been waiting for him to question, and which he never did – trusting me implicitly from the very start.
Harry was still standing with one hand on the front door, but after a moment a smile crept across his face and he pushed it closed.
‘Really?’
He moved towards me and for once I moved away, unsure of what I needed, unable to stand still long enough to accept his touch.
He was gentle with me, careful not to push, always gauging his impact on me perfectly.
‘And Clive, he’ll be there too?’
‘Of course.’
‘You’re brilliant.’
This time I stayed put as he placed his hands on my hips, pressing his palms against the gentle roll of the bone.
‘What did you say when he asked you?’
‘What do you think?’
He nodded, absorbing my words. I felt his eyes weighing me up, the balance of power between us shifting imperceptibly.
‘And you are OK with this?’ He spoke quietly, but his words were weighted.
‘Yes.’ My voice was less steady now, less convinced. I felt my body shake, my face turning to the table where his cigarettes lay.
Harry followed my gaze and leaned over to pick up the packet, pulling one out and pressing it into my hand.
‘Are you sure? Because you don’t seem sure.’
‘Harry, for fuck’s sake, I’m sure.’
I stooped to accept his lighter before looking up sharply. His lack of faith had provoked me. What did he think I had been doing these past months?
Sensing my unease, he clamped his right hand softly around the base of my neck, my flesh tingling at his touch. Closing my eyes, I felt the words fall from my mouth, ‘I’ve missed you.’
CHAPTER 12 (#ulink_f31ea7d4-cf3d-5e8a-8b10-b6c135bd9b79)
Anna (#ulink_f31ea7d4-cf3d-5e8a-8b10-b6c135bd9b79)
The airport that first time was an assault on my senses. Keeping close to David, I followed the endless lines, past armed police officers, parents with toddlers on leashes, women with fixed smiles seizing bottles of perfume; the cacophony of beeps and hums taunting me as I scanned the customs hall for cues as to how to behave.
It had not occurred to me to leave my second phone in my suitcase, and it was not the kind of question I had thought to ask when Harry was talking me though the plan, mistaking my continuous probing for direction in best practice, rather than a plea for basic information. Short of admitting I had never been abroad before, how could I explain to someone to whom international travel was second nature that other than knowing to take my passport, I had no idea what to expect?
While I had never directly lied to Harry about my past, there was plenty I hadn’t mentioned. Our relationship, I was sure, relied on him believing me to possess a degree of sophistication that the full truth would instantly belie.
At security, I mirrored David’s movements, laying my possessions out in a plastic tray, feeling the customs officer’s eyes on me as she beckoned me through a metal arch that shot out a cry as I passed through.
Beckoning me forward, the woman pressed her hand against my body, her palms running up and down my thighs as perspiration stung the top of my lip.
‘Could you empty your pockets for me, please?’
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
David, a metre or so away, was repacking the contents of his rucksack. My hands shaking, I reached hesitantly into the lining of my jacket.
The woman raised an eyebrow, as if to ask, two phones?
‘One’s for work.’ I spoke quickly, my eyes moving to David, who was making his way towards me now.
‘Everything OK?’
Working hard to hold his attention with my eyes, to distract him from my fingers, I arranged my face into a smile, the blood pounding in my chest.
When the customs officer spoke again, I missed her words.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said, you’ll have to run them through the X-ray. Go back through.’
She was becoming exasperated, as were the family behind us, the toddler’s screams growing louder with each second that passed.
Giving David a smile, I followed the woman’s pointed finger back through the metal archway, moving as fast as was reasonable towards the stack of plastic trays, placing the phones side by side in the rectangular cradle. As I scanned my mind for possible explanations I could use to reassure David, all I could focus on was the sound of the child’s voice rising in shrill peaks behind me; the wail of the metal detectors going off one after another across the hall, rising and falling like an air-raid siren.
I could of course repeat that it was a work phone, but he would be instantly suspicious as to why I hadn’t mentioned it before. All of this, everything, relied on me giving him no reason to doubt anything I said. Ever. The moment he started to question me, even for something seemingly innocuous, would be the moment everything would start to unravel.
Besides, I wondered, could I lie to his face without giving myself away? It seems laughable now that I had credited myself with having so much integrity.
David’s eyes stayed on mine as he continued walking towards me, trance-like, and I held them there, willing him with every inch of my body not to look away. If his gaze so much as slipped towards the glistening line of tiny crystals of sweat that had formed above my lips, the spell would be broken.
As I opened my mouth to speak – to tell the only lie my mind could fathom – there was a sound like a gunshot and every eye in the room swooped towards me. Instantly, the room fell quiet. A second later, there was a wail from the child behind us and it was then that I understood the source of the noise: a bottle of milk the boy’s parents had been using in an attempt at placation being thrown and hitting the ground with the force of a missile.
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Charlotte Philby
WHAT WOULD YOU SACRIFICE TO UNCOVER THE TRUTH? ‘I devoured this’ Erin Kelly ‘Compulsive’ i Paper ‘Enigmatic’ Louise Candlish ‘A page-turning thriller’ BBC Radio 4 Open Book ‘Chilling’ Good Housekeeping ‘Addictive’ Joanna Cannon ‘Compelling’ Daily Telegraph On the surface, Anna Witherall personifies everything the aspirational magazine she works for represents. Married to her university boyfriend David, she has a beautiful home and gorgeous three-year-old twin daughters, Stella and Rose. But beneath the veneer of success and happiness, Anna is hiding a dark secret, one that threatens to unravel everything she has worked so hard to create. As Anna finds herself drawn into the dark and highly controlled world of secret intelligence, she is forced to question her family’s safety, and her own. Only one thing is certain: in order to protect her children, she must leave them, forever. And someone is watching. Someone she thought she could trust. Someone who is determined to make them all pay. Stylish and assured, The Most Difficult Thing is an irresistible combination of contemporary espionage and domestic suspense, and a compulsive, highly charged examination of betrayal.
Copyright (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Charlotte Philby 2019
Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photographs © Elena Alferova / Trevillion Images
Charlotte Philby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008326982
Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008327002
Version: 2019-06-03
Dedication (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
For Rosa
Epigraph (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
‘To know yourself is the most difficult thing’
Thales of Miletus
Contents
Cover (#u54e476a1-9fd9-5feb-8431-01c7a1843861)
Title Page (#u8f25a46c-56ce-5fe0-a9eb-8e1b8b7831f7)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1: Anna
Chapter 2: Anna
Chapter 3: Anna
Chapter 4: Anna
Chapter 5: Anna
Chapter 6: Anna
Chapter 7: Anna
Chapter 8: Anna
Chapter 9: Anna
Chapter 10: Anna
Chapter 11: Anna
Chapter 12: Anna
Chapter 13: Anna
Chapter 14: Anna
Chapter 15: Anna
Chapter 16: Maria
Chapter 17: Maria
Chapter 18: Maria
Chapter 19: Maria
Chapter 20: Maria
Chapter 21: Maria
Chapter 22: Maria
Chapter 23: Anna
Chapter 24: Anna
Part Two
Chapter 25: Anna
Chapter 26: Maria
Chapter 27: Anna
Chapter 28: Anna
Chapter 29: Anna
Chapter 30: Maria
Chapter 31: Anna
Chapter 32: Anna
Chapter 33: Maria
Chapter 34: Anna
Chapter 35: Maria
Chapter 36: Anna
Chapter 37: Anna
Chapter 38: Maria
Chapter 39: Anna
Chapter 40: Maria
Chapter 41: Anna
Chapter 42: Anna
Chapter 43: Maria
Chapter 44: Anna
Chapter 45: Maria
Chapter 46: Anna
Chapter 47: Maria
Chapter 48: Anna
Chapter 49: Maria
Chapter 50: Anna
Chapter 51: Maria
Part Three
Chapter 52: Anna
Chapter 53: Anna
Chapter 54: Maria
Chapter 55: Anna
Chapter 56: Anna
Chapter 57: Maria
Chapter 58: Anna
Chapter 59: Anna
Chapter 60: Maria
Chapter 61: Anna
Chapter 62: Anna
Chapter 63: Maria
Chapter 64: Anna
Chapter 65: Maria
Chapter 66: Anna
Chapter 67: Maria
Chapter 68: Anna
Chapter 69: Maria
Chapter 70: Maria
Chapter 71: Anna
Chapter 72: Maria
Chapter 73: Anna
Chapter 74: Maria
Chapter 75: Anna
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
I felt my abdominal muscles twinge as I lowered myself to sit. The bench by the lamp post at the foot of the bridge, just as planned.
It had been almost two months since the surgery but still the scar was so raw that I felt tearing across my abdomen if I so much as lifted one of the twins at the wrong angle. Letting my eyelids drop for a moment, I pushed the thought of the girls out of my mind.
Open the box, close the box. Just as the doctor had taught me.
They were not so much benches that lined the stretch of pavement along this part of the Thames. More slabs, like a procession of concrete coffins quietly guarding the water.
It was dusk. Winter. The terminal gloom had long set in, and with it the sort of damp cold that gnawed its way into your bones. A thin gust of wind snuck through the opening in my cardigan as I pulled the grey cashmere closer across my breasts, still swollen.
‘For God’s sake, Harry,’ I cursed him silently, my eyes rolling up towards the stone-coloured sky.
For as long as I can remember, I have always been early. It is a pathological politeness that brings with it control; no one wants to be the last person to step into a room. It was one of the things we shared, at the beginning, he and I. How many times had I arrived early to meet him, before all this had started, only to find him already lurking under an amber glow at the end of the bar?
Yet it was nearly five, and the pavement around me was virtually empty but for a steady stream of deflated tourists and office workers scuttling towards the Tube.
What was he playing at? David would be home from work by six, as had been his wont since the babies had arrived and, almost overnight, he too had been reborn, his naturally attentive, easy parental love a reminder of everything I could never be.
I had told Maria I was just going shopping for babygros. What was Harry doing? Careful not to make any sudden movements, which I had come to accept would be followed by a sharp stab of pain, I pulled my phone from my navy leather handbag, my hand trembling.
No new messages.
My fingers were a bluish-red. I had hardly left the confines of the house since the birth, two months ago, aside from those ritualistic processions along the darker recesses of Hampstead Heath, under the instruction of the nanny. TheNanny. The truth was, she was always so much more than that. Ever-competent Maria silently heaving the double buggy down the front steps, seeing me off from the shadows of the doorway.
I loved the way the air chilled my lungs. Even the buildings on Millbank, which loomed over us from the other side of Lambeth Bridge, seemed to shiver. I had forgotten how cold it got out here. How easy it is to forget.
Hoping I’d maybe missed something in the string of messages that had passed between Harry and me, I flicked my fingers across the screen. Nothing. How many times had I reread his messages? How many times had I crept across the hallway while the girls slept, my toes curling into the carpet, sliding the lock closed behind me, carefully retrieving the phone from where I kept it, stuck behind the drawer of the cupboard where the bathroom cleaning products were kept – somewhere I could guarantee David would never look?
Telling myself I would wait five more minutes before considering my next step, I flicked through a stream of encrypted messages. Once again, my attention was caught by a single image: a photograph, blurred, but clear enough – my father-in-law, the grandfather of my children, shaking hands with a man in a dark suit – his thick black beard a smear of tar across a smudge of flesh.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the streetlights flick on along the river. Looking up, I saw him. Those fierce blue eyes drilling a hole in my chest. Breathing sharply, as if struck, I said his name: ‘Harry.’
PART ONE (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
CHAPTER 1 (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
Anna (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
Three Years Later
The house is still, as it always is at this hour. Once again, I have hardly slept, taking a moment to savour the peace, the calm before the storm: this moment in which I am neither who I was nor who I will become. My eyes skitter across the silver clock by my bed, the one that had belonged to David’s mother: 5.40 a.m. 1 May. The date is already firmly etched in my mind, as it will be for as long as I live.
Dawn has always been my favourite time of day. As a child I would wander the narrow hall of my parents’ house under a hazy bruise of light, gazing through the window overlooking a cul-de-sac of privets and exhaust pipes, imagining myself somewhere else.
David is still asleep. I sit, slowly, careful not to rouse him, his body a mound of flesh under a blanket of Marimekko florals.
I have spent most of the night going over the plan in my head, sealing every second of it into the recesses of memory, ensuring it could never be prised out again should I be caught. Caught. It’s not a word I allow myself to linger on too long.
Creeping from the bed, with its expensive linen sheets and tasteful throws, I sit at the stool in front of the small oak dressing table with its neat displays of family life. Trophies, trinkets of a world I have made my own. Among them, a bronze frame with a photo of David and me in front of the vista of his father’s house in Greece. One of many of his family’s boltholes that we have jetted between over the years, the planes leaving tracks like scars through the sky, visible only to those who glance up at just the right moment.
So young we were then, clinging to one another in front of the pool, the Greek sun bleaching out our features. David’s body turned towards mine, claiming me. Our first holiday together had been a victory, almost. This was where it all had really begun. I was his prize, he had said it a hundred times, but he never knew that he was also mine. Not yet, but he will.
The thought jars in my mind, and I lift my head, catching my reflection in the oval mirror. For a moment I am transfixed. The same light blonde hair, pale green eyes, high cheekbones. Hardened, now. The years of insomnia have caught up with me, in the hollows of my eyes. The corners of my mouth, cracked from years of fixed smiles.
My phone is plugged into the charger on the wall. Silently, I lift it, glancing at David’s sleeping body in the mirror – the soft line of which I could draw from memory – before tapping my password into a second phone, stashed in the pocket of my silk dressing gown. My fingers leave a streak of sweat across the screen. The phone is the same model, same sleek black cover as my other one. Same pin number – the date Harry and I first met. Fundamental differences you would have to peer inside to see.
Once again, I flick through a stream of messages from Harry, distracted for a moment by a chip in my blood-red nail polish. Hearing David stir in the bed, I expertly lock the phone while concentrating my face in the direction of the neat row of perfumes and creams in front of me, replacing it in the pocket of my gown as I stand.
‘What time is it?’
David’s voice drifts across the room, still thick with sleep.
‘Nearly six. My flight isn’t until twelve but I have work to catch up on; Milly’s off on maternity leave today.’
I picture my assistant, whose belly I have watched swell and groan under its own weight over the past months. I picture the young woman’s blotchy red cheeks, which she attempts, feebly, to mellow with slightly too-orange foundation; her increasingly uncomfortable gait.
Over the past weeks, I could almost feel her pelvic bones grating as she delivered proofs of the next issue of the magazine to my office.
Of course Milly believed she would be back within a few months of having the baby, four to six months’ maternity leave, she had told HR. I don’t believe it for a second. Not that it matters. Either way, I won’t be seeing her again.
‘I’m going to have a shower.’ David’s voice interrupts my thoughts.
Smiling convincingly back at him, I lay my hand on a pile of magazine pages, ‘Of course, I won’t be long with this.’
An hour later, I am standing by the door, ready to leave.
‘You look nice.’ David sweeps down the stairs, his polished brogues crushing against chenille carpet, nudging one of the girls’ scooters back in line against the wall in the hallway as he passes; the scooters he had insisted on buying them for their third birthday, a few months earlier, ignoring my concerns that they were too young.
I am dressed for the office. An Issey Miyake cream trouser suit fresh from the dry-cleaners. Shoulder-length hair tucked behind my ears. A slick of Chanel lipstick. The same perfume I spritz and step into every morning, the smell chasing me through the house, a reminder of who I am now.
It was what the papers always commented on, when a picture of me found its way into the society pages of some supplement or other. Perhaps they did not know what else to say: ‘Anna Witherall, editor wife of TradeSmart heir David Witherall, perfectly turned out in …’ Ethereal beauty. Enigmatic charm. These were the words they used. Lazy attempts to place a finger on my ability to stand out and disappear at the same time.
As David makes his way towards the open-plan kitchen – a wall of sliding glass at the back, lined with California poppies – I stand in the hall, making a show of the final check of my handbag. Inside my bag, my fingers are shaking.
Passport, keys, purse. Just another day.
‘I really think you should stay at Dad’s while you’re there, it will be much nicer than a hotel,’ David calls across the kitchen as I slip my feet into a pair of black leather mules, which stand side by side next to the girls’ shoes, Stella’s scuffed at the toe.
I feel the colour rise in my cheeks, and look down again so that he won’t notice. ‘Do you think?’
It is exactly what I have been relying on, of course. Knowing my husband as I do, I can predict that he will push for me to stay at his dad’s place; desperate for this connection to me, this ownership of my life, even when I am abroad.
‘There is actually a ferry, isn’t there, which runs directly from Thessaloniki to the island …’ I add casually, as if the thought has just occurred to me.
It takes four hours and fifty-five minutes, port to port. Not that I will be taking it, of course.
‘Honestly,’ I pace my words carefully, ‘your father won’t mind?’
David doesn’t look up from his newspaper. ‘I told you, he won’t be there, he won’t be in Greece for at least another month. I’ll send a message to Athena, tell her to make up the bed.’
Before I can answer I feel the phone purr in my pocket. I look down, keeping my breath light. WhatsApp message from Unknown Number.
Thinking of you.
Inhaling, I close my eyes before placing the handset in my bag along with my usual phone and house keys, and head into the kitchen, all tasteful teal cupboards and oak countertop. A chrome Smeg fridge plastered in naive children’s drawings, daffodils turning on the table, scattered with the detritus of breakfast.
Neatly dressed in matching pinafores, my daughters are slumped in their chairs, their eyes glued to the iPad their grandfather insisted on buying them. Their grandfather. The thought brushes against my knees and my legs bow. Feeling a rush of blood to my head, I place my hand on the countertop to steady myself, breathing deeply.
Looking up, I prepare to blame a stone in my shoe, a spasm of the spine, but no one has noticed.
This is it. I let my eyes shift between David, the competent father, and the girls. My girls. Still but not quite babies.
Something looms above them, a hint of the women they will become, the women I will never know. Rose’s left eye twitches as it always has when she is tired or worrying about something. Even now she is like a person with the weight of the world on her shoulders. A typical first-born, even if only by a minute. Stella, beside her, oblivious always. How long will she remain so? I feel the unwanted thoughts rise in my mind, and expertly push them down again, back into the pool of simmering acid in my gut.
‘Anna?’
I blink for a moment at the sound of my husband’s voice. How long have I been standing here?
‘I’ll get the door for you. Are you sure you don’t need a lift to the station?’ Is there a hint in his tone? Does he sense what is about to happen? For a second I wonder if I see something in his expression, but then I look again and it has gone.
Grateful for the distraction, I keep my voice light, though my lips are so dry I feel a sharp crack as they tighten. Keeping my hand steady, I shake my head and take a fresh slice of toast from David’s hand.
‘I’m sure.’
I thought it would really take something to kiss my children goodbye one morning and walk out the front door, knowing I wouldn’t be back. But in the end, it was simple. The door had already been opened; all I had to do was walk.
CHAPTER 2 (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
Anna (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
There is no going back now. The taxi glides away from the house, down the street towards South End Green, retreating effortlessly from my family home, away from the expensive brickwork and tended gardens I will never see again.
The sound of the indicator clicks out a steady rhythm. My body quietly shaking, I turn my head so that my driver will not look at me and see what I have done, I watch my life streak past through the window, the bumping motion of the car, the low hum of conversation from the radio.
The girls hadn’t lifted an eye as the horn beeped from the road. Why should they? To them, today is just another day. How long will it be until they learn the truth? How long until the illusion of our lives together comes crashing down, destroying everything I have created, everything that I hold dear?
‘Why couldn’t he get out and ring the bloody doorbell?’ These were David’s parting words.
I have called a different cab service from my usual. My face is automatically drawn to the locks on the car door as the motor flicks silently to life, the wheels rolling between the parade of five-storey terrace houses, into the unknown.
Moving through South End Green, I am bemused by the familiar bustle of London life – the sound of discarded cans rattling against the gutter, the boys in bloomers and long socks stuffed into the back of shiny 4x4s, an old woman with an empty buggy pushing uphill against the wind – the world still rolling on as if nothing has changed.
The traffic is heavy. When the car turns off, unexpectedly, at Finchley Road, my hand grips the door handle.
‘Short cut.’
The voice in the front seat senses my fear but it does little to allay my nerves.
As the car turns, my eyes are distracted by the sudden movements of the trees, the light sweeping over the rear-view mirror. When it levels out again, I see the driver’s eyes trained on mine for a fraction of a second, in the reflection, the rest of his face obscured.
It is an effort to keep my legs steady as I step out of the car at the airport, every stride pressing against the desire to break into a run.
The terminal is a wash of blurred faces and television screens. Slumped bodies, caps tilted over eyes, neon signs, metal archways. My body endlessly moves against the tide, my eyes flicking left and right beneath my sunglasses. There is a sudden pressure on my shoulder and I spin around but it is just a rucksack, protruding from a stranger’s back.
There is something satisfying about flying, I find: the routine of it, the rhythm; answering questions, nodding in the right place, yes, shaking your head, no. I am grateful for it now – for the process, a welcome distraction from what will come.
Nevertheless, my mind won’t settle. All I can do is run through the plan once more. There will be hours of waiting at the airport before my flight to Skiathos. My time there will be brief, a night at the most, and from there I will travel on using the ticket I will buy in person at the airport, a day later, in my new name – the one emblazoned in the pages of the passport Harry had couriered to the office days earlier.
By the time I reach security, the urge to get to the other side is almost as strong as the desire to stay.
The queues this morning are sprawling. Breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth, as the doctors taught me, I remain composed, even when confronted by an abnormally cheerful security officer.
‘Going somewhere nice?’
For a moment, my mind flips back to this morning. From this vantage point, I watch what happens as if I am a witness – soldered to the sidelines, my tongue cut out. Unable to intervene, I watch myself leaning forward to kiss my daughters on their foreheads, lingering a second longer than usual. Neither had moved, barely raising their eyes from the iPad, which David had propped up against a box of cereal, a cartoon dog tap-dancing on the screen.
I watch the corners of their mouths twitch in unison, their spoons suspended in front of their faces, engrossed in their own private world. Behind them, the glass doors leading out to the garden that I would never see again.
‘I love you.’ Had I said it aloud? I had tried to catch my daughters’ eyes for a final time, my fingers curled tightly around the edge of the breakfast table. But they were lost in their own arguments by then, oblivious to what was happening before them.
Startled, I blink, lifting my eyes once again so that I am now focusing on her face.
‘Sorry, I …’ Breathing in, I remind myself to stay calm. There is no reason for her to question any of this.
‘Thessaloniki. It’s for work, I’m a writer. There’s an art fair, I’m interviewing one of the curators.’ It is an unnecessary detail and for a moment I curse myself, but the security officer has moved on, no longer interested.
It is a balance; truth versus lie. The tiny details are the ones that guide me through. Things can be processed in small parts, after all. But too much truth and the whole thing comes unstuck.
It is true that the magazine is intending to cover the Thessaloniki event, and I am lined up to write the piece. That way, if on the unlikely off-chance David had ever bumped into one of my colleagues and mentioned it, I would be covered. What David does not know is that the show is not due to start for another three days, and by then, I will be long gone.
Once I am on the other side, I quickly check for my original passport, which I will dispose of once I reach Greece. I head to WHSmith to buy a paper. I can’t concentrate but I need something that will help me blend in, distract my eyes.
Scanning the neatly compartmentalised shelves, my attention is drawn to the luxury interiors title of which I am editor. Was.
I remember how the office building seemed to swell up from the pavement, the first time I saw it. Entering the revolving doors off Goswell Road, turning left as instructed, the palm of my hand nervously pressing at the sides of my coat. Acutely aware of how young and unsophisticated I must have seemed, I had forced my spine to straighten, my consonants to harden.
The office, a wash of soft grey carpet and low-hanging pendant lights, a wall of magazine covers, was a picture of good taste, framed on either side by views of the city.
At first I had felt like an intruder, following the immaculately presented editorial assistant through the warren of desks scattered with leather notepads and colour-coded books. But then there was a wave of pride, too, that I might finally feel part of something.
It had been a struggle not to fall apart when Meg told me, with a blush of shame, that she had been offered the chance to stay on at the paper, while I was thanked for my time and moved along. We had been having drinks with David at the pub near her flat when she announced it, before brushing it off as if it were no big deal.
I managed to hold it together just long enough to hug her before slipping away to the bathroom and weeping hot, angry tears into my sleeve. It would have been impossible for the two of them not to notice the red stains around my eyes when I emerged five minutes later, claiming to have had an allergic reaction to my make-up.
By the time I reached the Tube platform, later that evening, I was numb, unable to feel the tears dropping from my eyes. Would Meg have asked me to move in if she had not been feeling guilty about the job? I would question it later, just as I would question everything else. Back then, though, I was in no doubt – she was as committed to me as I was to her.
When David rang the day after Meg’s announcement about her new job on the news desk, I ignored his call before turning my phone to silent. It was a Saturday and the only noise from the street outside my parents’ house came from the neighbours herding their children, laughing, into the back of a black hearse-like car. Aside from the occasional movement on the stairs, inside the house stung with silence.
When he rang again, an hour or so later, his name flashing on the screen like a hand reaching in from another world, I pressed decline, too bereft to speak, and just like that he was gone. I was halfway to the bakery, to ask for my old job back, when I heard a ping alerting me to a new message.
Pulling out the phone, annoyed that he wouldn’t leave me alone with my misery, I read his words and stopped in my tracks.
‘She’s an old family friend.’ His voice rose above the swish of traffic when I called back a few minutes later, moving slowly along the grey paving slabs of Guildford town centre. ‘I hadn’t seen her in years but she is married to one of the bosses at my firm and we bumped into one another. I told her you had done a degree in English and about your internship at the paper, and … She wants to meet you.’
David’s voice was soft, listening intently at the end of the phone for my reply.
The interview had been arranged for the following week. Clarissa, I discovered, was exactly the kind of woman one would imagine to run a high-end magazine, exuding money and confidence and an overpowering smell of petunia. But she was kind, too, and generous. ‘Any friend of David’s …’ she had beamed, radiating warmth.
The memory of her words sends a pang of sadness through me. Picking up a magazine at random, I use the self-service checkout before making my way to the boarding gate.
I find my seat in Business Class, store my neat black suitcase overhead, and wait for the comforting purr of the engine. As the rest of the passengers fiddle with their seats, I draw out the phone from my bag and compose a message to Harry.
On my way.
‘Cabin crew, prepare for take-off.’
I raise my drink to my lips, the clatter of the ice vibrating against my glass. Gratefully, I absorb the captain’s words, their familiarity grounding me in my seat, creating a rhythm against which my breath rises and falls, in desperate chunks.
They are the same words I have heard on countless flights with David and the girls over the years. Maldives. Bali. The South of France. Of all the places we have been together, it is Provence that I think of now. Maria steadily marching the girls up and down the plane, her monotonous hush-hush enveloping me in a blanket of calm.
I close my eyes but the memory follows me. The girls’ faces trailing the cloudless sky through the car window during the drive from the airport to yet another of David’s father’s houses. This one is cushioned by lavender fields, the smell clinging to the air. The gravel crunched underfoot as we made our way from the cool air of the Mercedes towards the chateau, through a web of heat. My father-in-law was waiting under the arch of the doorway.
I watched him, my skin prickling as he swaggered out to meet us, the underarms of his crisp white shirt drenched in sweat. ‘My dear Anna!’
‘Clive.’ Had his name stumbled on my lips?
The panama tipped forward on his head, jarring against my cheek as he leaned in to kiss me.
‘Two times, darling, we like to play native around here …’ His voice was booming. ‘And where are my girls? Oh, let me have a good look at them.’
Clive blew an ostentatious kiss to Maria, and I worked hard to repress my jealousy at the thread that ran between them, the years their families had been connected in a way that would somehow always trump what David and I had. Maria, carrying one of my girls in the car seat, moving so comfortably alongside my husband, our other daughter asleep in his arms.
Clive took his son by the wrist, and as if reading my need for inclusion, said, ‘Well, I’m glad to see they still have their mother’s looks …’
Steadily, I let myself picture my daughters. Stella, all cheekbones and arch features, strident from the inside out. Her fall to earth padded by the arrival of her sister, a minute earlier.
Stella would be fine. Stella was always fine, always the one to take the best from a situation, and make it hers. But Rose. My eyes prickled.
There was something about Rose that demanded you take care of her, from that first day at the hospital. Even when it was Stella who had needed me. Even though it was Stella who had been the one to give everyone the fright, it was Rose whose cries, when they came, small and unsure, unnerved me. Everything about her was milder, from the delicate features to the way she hung back, always letting her sister wade in ahead, gung-ho. The truth is, I see more than just my own face in Rose, and that is what scares me most.
‘Can I interest you in any duty free?’ The flight attendant flashes a fuchsia smile, beside the trolley.
I am grateful for the interruption.
‘Thank you, I’ll take a packet of Marlboro.’
My fingers are shaking as I hand my card to the outstretched hand before me. Taking the cigarettes, I feel the weight of them in my hands.
SMOKING SERIOUSLY HARMS YOU AND THOSE AROUND YOU.
The warning on the cigarette carton goads me. Toxic. Just like you. I hesitate. Not me, I remind myself. This is not my doing.
I imagine Clive, the outline of his face filling my mind as a jet of stale air seeps through the vents above my head, the thought of him powering me on. A few moments later, I lean my head back, allowing my thoughts, once more, to drift to the girls. It is like that story Maria used to read to them when they couldn’t sleep.
We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it … We’ve got to go through it.
I think of the three of them, she and the girls, perched on their bed along the hallway from mine. Sometimes, in those early days when I could still hardly bear to look at my daughters, I would lower myself into the nook of the doorway, listening to her sing or read to them. Closing my eyes, I would imagine their little faces staring up at me instead of her, their tiny fingers resting on mine.
‘Anything else?’ The flight attendant’s eyes are fixed on me. Briefly, I imagine myself lurching forward to grab her by the starched collar of her shirt, my voice curdling in my throat as I scream so close to the woman’s face that she can smell the fear on my breath. I can almost hear the words I might say: Turn back, I’ve left my children and I don’t know whether they’re safe.
But my voice, when it comes, is clipped and courteous, the strains of Queen’s English I’ve assimilated over years of working under Clarissa providing the perfect camouflage for the cracks in my confidence.
‘That’s all, thank you.’
As she turns, I feel tears prick behind the folds of my eyelids, and this time I let them come.
Closing my eyes, I picture the girls seated next to me on this very flight as they have been so many times before. Their ears immediately clamped shut with padded headphones. The sound of cartoons seeping out from the side. David, as ever, oblivious to the sound.
I feel my throat close. Letting the tears roll, I turn my face to the window of the plane, giving myself a minute before I wipe my cheeks with the sleeves of my shirt, pushing my back straight upright and forcing the tears to stop.
Open the box, place the thought into the box. Close the box. Just in time.
I open my eyes again just as the roar of the engines kicks in.
‘Madam, would you mind putting your seat forward for landing?’
I manage a congenial smile, and swallow.
‘Of course.’
CHAPTER 3 (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
Anna (#ued44c770-bc4d-5611-ba0b-508381081475)
Then
The newspaper office at South Quay stood at the end of an otherwise barren street, set back from the road, not so much insalubrious as unloved.
‘You look smart.’ Meg winked at me after a moment as we made our way up the front steps, a piece of gum rolling lazily against her tongue.
She was being kind but still I felt my cheeks flush, cursing the cheap suit-jacket and shirt I had hastily bought the moment she told me about the internship she had secured us, picking it out in the shopping centre in Guildford, only to discover on the first day that no one at the paper wore suits to the office apart from the news editors and the receptionists.
It had been both baffling and also completely believable when Meg announced, within six months of leaving university, that she had secured us both a placement at a national newspaper. That was the kind of power she had in those days, the kind that meant she could do anything and it should never surprise you.
She had met one of the editors at the members’ club she had been working at since moving to London; she shrugged when I pressed her on how she had got me a placement too.
‘But he hasn’t even met me …’ I countered reluctantly, trying to balance my gratitude with the sense that something was not right.
‘I sent him your CV.’
‘You don’t have my CV.’
‘And?’ She grinned, lifting her chin as she pulled on her cigarette, and I left the matter there, knowing how easy it was to write a fraudulent résumé. Knowing how willing people were to believe.
The wind snapped at our heels as we crossed the bridge, Meg leaning into me, the warmth of her body soothing my nerves. How I envied the ease with which she moved; how comfortable she was in her own skin, her nylon mini-skirt hitched around skinny thighs, thick black tights, DMs.
Noting my expression, she snatched my arm and squeezed it against her own. ‘I’m serious! You look hot. You’re like Maggie Gyllenhaal in that film David made us all watch in Freshers’ Week, but less slutty, obviously.’
We had still been practically strangers then, the three of us, wedged awkwardly together on cushions in the hallway of our shared house, watching Secretary on David’s laptop, busying our fingers with a bowl of nachos. Unaware of the roots that were taking hold, blind then to how tightly they would bind us together.
Feeling my cheeks flush, I changed the subject as we made our way through stiff automatic doors.
‘Have you been given any actual writing to do yet?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Just more transcriptions for the Arts desk, it’s bullshit. I tried to talk to the Environment guy about a story idea but he just fobbed me off.’
I tried to hide my relief.
‘Still it’s better than a real job, I suppose. For now, at least.’ She moved towards the door.
My nails pressed into my palms as the familiar panic rose in my chest, fingers searching for a ledge to break the fall.
For now? The thought of how much I had already spent on the month-long train ticket from Guildford to the Docklands – almost all of the little money I had saved while working double shifts at the bakery in town – all that I had already done, on the basis that there would be a paid job at the end of this, a career, a chance to get away, made my gut twist.
‘You don’t really think that?’ I tried to sound calmer than I felt. Despite three years of friendship, I still could not let Meg see the true extent of my need. Had she spotted it, the day we left our shared flat in Brighton, she heading to London to chase the career she had always known was rightfully hers, while I returned to Surrey, my face burning with the loss of a life that had always felt borrowed?
I pictured it now, the flat we shared at the top of a crumbling Regency town house, wedged beneath two more of its kind on a thin strip of side-street leading from St James’s Street down to the sea. I loved that flat, with its slanting floorboards and faded magnolia walls; I loved my bedroom, which overlooked the back of the house and a tiny courtyard below – more of a pit than a garden, a dry rectangle well speckled with cigarette butts and seagull feathers. I loved the way I could look out of the window from our battered Chipperfield sofa, onto Kemptown with its bars and pubs which throbbed with noise no matter what time of day or night, and not recognise a soul.
If the worst came to the worst, Meg had told me one night not long after we arrived in London, then she would simply go back to Newcastle. She would take bar work there and stay with her parents while she worked on the book she was destined to write. Though we both knew it would never come to that. Meg was one of those people who appeared to create the existence they wanted, without effort.
I imagined her mother, a shorter, squatter version of my friend – the same ready smile, fiery red hair. I thought of my own mother, thin with worry, her loss etched into the corners of her eyes. The years of silent dinners behind neatly pruned privets, hedging me in together with the memory of what I had done, or, rather, what I had not.
The smile had been pulled tighter than ever across my mother’s lips the day I returned home, the day university – and its promise of escape – came to a crushing end. It clawed at the corners of her eyes as she watched me placing the box of my possessions onto my bed, the room having been stripped of any trace of me the moment I had left. Just as she had purged any trace of Thomas from the house within days of him leaving us.
My breath sharpened as I thought of my parents. Them, the only alternative to this. An invisible tightening around my neck reminded me that I could not let this opportunity slip through my grasp.
Meg’s voice cut through my thoughts, steadying my heartbeat as we stepped into the foyer where a TV screen was playing the BBC News channel on the wall above the reception desk.
‘Here you go.’ The receptionist handed back to us the security passes we were made to collect daily and wear around our necks at all times. Looking down at the hollow outline of my face on the paper print-out, my eyes moved instinctively to the word ‘Temporary’.
We stepped into the lift and Meg moved her fingers to press the button for Floor 1, the newsroom, before changing her mind and pressing Floor 2 instead.
‘We’re at least having a quick fag before we go in,’ she said, stepping out of the lift.
The smell of stale smoke hit us before the doors had finished opening. Turning left into the smoking room, there were plastic chairs edging the walls, rectangular metal tubs strategically placed across the blue carpeted floor.
Meg leaned down to grab a copy of the morning’s paper from a pile by the door, before crossing the room towards a seat by the window.
The room was airless, years of nicotine clinging to every surface.
Silver bangles jarring against one another on her wrists, Meg pulled out a ten-box of Marlboro Lights, drawing one out for herself and another for me. The cigarette was thick between my fingers as I leaned into the flame, holding back my hair, which had recently been cut from waist to shoulder length in an attempt at sophistication.
‘That’s a fucking scoop,’ she said, pressing the fag between her teeth as she pulled her phone out of her pocket.
My eyes moved over the front page of the paper. Below the headline ‘Exclusive: Leading Charity in Cahoots With Arms Dealer’, my attention was drawn by a small black-and-white headshot of a young man with thick, dark hair grazing his neckline. Next to his face, there was the name of the reporter on the piece – Harry Dwyer.
Beside me, Meg’s phone beeped again, but I was distracted by the man’s face, the arch of his nose, the full curve of his lips.
‘It’s David. He’s started his job at that bank in Canary Wharf … wants to know if we’re up for a drink after work … Oi, are you listening?’
It took a moment for Meg’s words to register and when they did I felt the familiar dull ache in my chest.
There was nothing more daunting than the prospect of going out and spending even more money I didn’t have, before running to catch the last train home. Nothing apart from the prospect of home itself – the deafening silence a constant reminder of the person who wasn’t there.
‘You know David will be throwing cash around,’ Meg laughed, reading my mind. ‘Why don’t you stay with me at my cousin’s flat after? She’s not going to be there. Save you going all the way back to your aunt’s house?’
I smiled, flushing at the memory of my lie.
‘Sweet.’ The silver ring in Meg’s nose rose up as she smiled, typing furiously into her phone.
Pressing ‘send’, she stood. ‘Right, I’m going to have a piss before we start. You coming?’
‘Yeah, I’m just going to finish reading this. I’ll see you up there.’
Something about the story, the man’s face, wouldn’t let me go.
Following an extensive year-long investigation, this newspaper can exclusively reveal that members of a leading social justice charity accepted a series of bribes from arguably the world’s most prolific warmongers …
After a moment, I stood and pulled the front two pages of the paper, Harry Dwyer’s piece in its totality, from the rest and folded it neatly, careful not to make an impression along the image of his face, as I placed it in my bag. Unaware of the chain of events I had, without the slightest comprehension, just set in motion; the wheels that were gaining traction, preparing to spin dangerously out of control.
David was waiting for us outside the pub, when we arrived later that evening.
‘Jesus, man, what are you like? Couple of weeks in the City and this happens?’ Meg ruffled his hair, where the undercut from just a few weeks earlier had been replaced by an expensive barber’s take on short back and sides. ‘Still haven’t lost the leather bracelet though, I’m glad to see …’
‘What? I thought you’d be into it?’ David raised his eyes as he pulled her into a bear hug, the flame of the outside heater licking against night air. He paused before moving to me, his expression shifting into something softer.
‘Anna.’ He took my hand, gently, pulling me towards him, holding me as if I was something that might otherwise break.
‘Right – drink, bar!’ Meg slipped her arms through mine and David’s, squeezing gently, the three of us falling into rhythm as we moved through the pub door, and I squeezed back, grateful that we were simply there, all three of us. Knowing, in my bones, even then, that it was too good to last.
‘What have you done with my lighter?’ Meg was scrabbling around the empty glasses and crisp packets an hour or so later, in the pub garden, when I spotted him, seated with his back to us at one of the far tables.
Despite the angle, I recognised him instantly – even from where I was sitting, which meant I could only see a sliver of his face, the same face I had studied on the front page of the paper that morning.
He would not believe me when I told him this later. How is that possible? he would shake his head and laugh, though not unkindly. Maybe he was right. Maybe what I felt then was something deeper; not so much recognition as a sense of foreboding.
Meg spotted him a moment later. I stayed where I was, rooted to the ground as she circled towards Harry Dwyer, in search of a lighter. I couldn’t see his expression as he held out the flame towards Meg’s face, but after a moment she pulled back, as if to get a better look, and as she spoke, a small smile curled at the edges of her mouth.
‘I’m Meg.’ The words blew off her lips, like kisses. My palms burned as he accepted her outstretched hand.
‘Come and join us.’ She was drunk, though she would have done the same thing sober.
‘Don’t be like that.’ I did not hear his reply but after a moment he stood reluctantly, his thumb scratching his cheekbone as he followed Meg back towards our table. His eyes were red and he looked tired. I wanted to hold his hand.
‘Guys, this is Harry. Harry works at the paper …’ Meg leaned into him, laughing. ‘He’s quite the star reporter, don’tcha know?’
Harry muttered something I could not make out. He was drunk too, and weary. When he smiled, I could see he wanted to leave. I could hardly look at him and yet I could not look away; there was something so powerful in my response to him that I could not trust myself to speak. But then I did.
‘Do you want a drink?’ My voice was louder than I had expected.
He paused, looking at me for the first time, before nodding, his mouth breaking gently into a smile as the moon behind his head disappeared into a cloud.
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_e9d9acbc-2ffb-5845-9da0-8c0fdbc35748)
Anna (#ulink_e9d9acbc-2ffb-5845-9da0-8c0fdbc35748)
In those early London days, the office was a bus ride from the flat Meg and I shared, a boxy two-bed above a kebab shop on Camden High Street. It was Meg’s cousin’s flat really. Although she had not lived there for months, Lucy’s presence was etched across the living room in cheap, colourful wall-hangings from her travels in Asia; ineffectual attempts to distract from the grubby off-white walls and the draught which rattled in from the road below.
To the outside world, it was a dive. To me, it was home. Mine and Meg’s.
It was a Friday night when Meg announced that Lucy had decided to stay on in Sydney with her boyfriend, leaving the flat in Meg’s care. The very same night that Harry landed back in our lives, like a bomb.
The two events, unconnected on the surface, squeezed me in from either side.
We were sharing a bottle of wine – my treat, courtesy of my new job – in the pub on Arlington Road, around the corner from Meg’s flat. As was her style, the offer for me to move in was presented not so much as a proposition but as a fait accompli.
‘How could you say no?’ She paused halfway through pouring my glass. ‘Even if the prospect of living with me isn’t enough on its own, which it obviously should be, then just think how much you’ll be saving on travel from your aunt’s house, presuming that’s where you were planning on staying … From the sound of it, your dad’s not going to be stationed back in the UK any time soon. I know it’s a tiny flat and it’s a shithole but it’s cheap – and you get to live with me!’
The pub doors swung open, a bluster of wind edging through the heavy velvet curtain.
‘Look, Lucy isn’t charging me full whack. If we split the bills, you’d be doing me a favour, and I want you to live with me … Fuck sake, man, say yes?’
Meg had this way of making me feel like I was the most important person in the world. I thought of my parents, the nights I had cried myself to sleep after it happened, desperate for one of them to hear my heart tearing above the sound of their own; for them to come to me and tell me it was not my fault. For a split second, my brother’s face flashed in front of me, but the spectre disappeared at the sound of Meg’s voice.
‘Shit, are you crying?’ She leaned across the table and took my arm. ‘I’m not that bad!’
I pressed my sleeve briefly at the corner of my eyes, laughing, and when I looked up again, my skin bristled like a fox catching the first scent of the hounds. Harry: the man who would be the death of me.
It was the first time I had seen him since that night in the pub in the shadow of Canary Wharf, though my eyes had sought him out at the office the following day, self-consciously pulling at the sleeves of the jumper I had borrowed from Meg – deep red with a slight scratchiness to the wool. I even stayed late, making excuses to move around the office, in the hope that I might spot him; propelled by a naive notion that he might be looking for me, too.
Rather than giving up, something in me accepted his absence as a challenge. That evening after work, my legs moved more briskly than usual as I made my way back from Guildford station, energised by the thought of him. It was just past eight by the time I closed the front door and already the house was swallowed by darkness, a low light emanating from the living room.
I walked purposefully across the hall so that they would hear my steps momentarily hovering outside the room, giving my mother the chance to call out, to ask if I had had a good day. But the door remained shut, the only sound the canned laughter clattering out from the television.
Upstairs, at the end of the corridor I flicked on the lamp beside my bed, the featureless room coming into stark focus. The single bed, neatly made, a single chest of drawers uncluttered by anything other than a small make-up bag and a stick of deodorant, which my mother had pointedly removed from the bathroom and placed on my bed on my first day home, without a word. The spectacle of my return flaunted in our shared spaces was apparently too much for my father to bear.
By the bed there was the computer I had been given my first week at Sussex, as part of my grant. Pressing the door closed, I turned it on, my fingers trembling as I typed ‘Harry Dwyer’ into the search engine, holding my breath as a photo appeared on the screen. The first image might have been a disappointment if I had not been so desperate for any trace of him.
It was taken from a news conference: Harry in the crowd amidst a small throng of reporters. The image was poor quality, Harry’s face distracted by a scene just out of shot.
After a moment, I pressed the arrow on the screen and another, less recent, photo appeared of Harry having just scooped the Young Journalist of the Year prize for a piece on internal wranglings at Number 10. He was twenty-three at the time, which made him nine years older than me. For a moment I thought of my own path: the year spent working at the chain bakery in town after leaving school with an unblemished if unremarkable academic record; fending off awkward advances from Tristan, the general manager, who snorted when he laughed, and stood too close behind me at the counter, making comments about the position of my hairnet by way of exerting his power.
The three years at university, where my greatest single achievement had been meeting Meg and David and having, for the first time in my life, found both friendship and the space to breathe, space to become the person I was beyond the frameworks by which others interpret and define us. The fact that Sussex had accepted me onto an English and media degree without asking for an interview had not so much given me confidence in my ability as it had confirmed to me that I would get by better in life if people weren’t given too much information. On paper, the surface facts of my life – childhood in Surrey where my father ran a local business; my mother, otherwise a stay-at-home wife, lending a hand – were acceptable: I was acceptable. Delve any further, and … I inhaled hard, not allowing my mind to slip back to Thomas. Look forward, I reminded myself, focusing on Harry’s face, absorbing his successes, allowing myself to live vicariously through them, even if just for a moment.
Admittedly, it was a long way from the life I was living now. If you were to line up our achievements side by side, and draw lines between them – a habit I found impossible to break – you would notice a distinct distance between where I was now – commuting four hours a day to transcribe other people’s interviews and make endless cups of tea – and where Harry had been at the same age. But a lot could change in a year; I was dependent on that possibility. Though of course back then I couldn’t have known quite how much.
There was a stirring on the stairs, and instinctively I sat upright, pressing open a new tab on my web browser. Though I need not have bothered; as always I heard the footsteps speed up as they passed my door, despite my father’s attempts to make his feet lighter in the hope that I wouldn’t notice him, urged forward by his terror of being made to look me in the eye.
Refusing to give my father another thought, I returned to the previous tab. With another click of the mouse, I was met by a brief journalistic profile of Harry and his time as a reporter at the paper, alongside the same byline photo that had first caught my eye on the front page that morning in the smoking room. And then, with another simple click, there it was, on the second page of Google, a brief mention in the media pages of a rival paper:
Harry Dwyer was unceremoniously sacked today, just hours after his most recent scoop. The paper’s editor, Eddy Monkton, is believed to have seen off the Irish-born writer in characteristically pithy style, telling his former star reporter, ‘Dwyer – you’re fucked’. A talented self-starter, Dwyer rose through the ranks after dropping out of school and taking a job in the canteen of his local paper. Monkton refused to comment on the parting of ways.
But … how? My mind searched for answers to the impossible question of how this could be. How our lives could have intersected as they had and then, just like that, have been torn apart again. This had to be wrong. Determined to prove it so, I continued to trawl for clues until long after the light in the hallway had been clicked off – but there was nothing else to be found. No other mention of his being sacked, and no further explanation.
It is a visceral memory, the sadness I felt in that moment; I can still feel it, the deflation at knowing that if this brilliant, beautiful man no longer worked for the paper, there would be no chance of bumping into him again. It was real, that memory, it is impossible to believe it was not – and yet I will question it later, just as I have learnt to question everything. In the darkness to come, I will ask myself if I could have felt so instinctively connected to him at this point – or was I simply retrospectively filling in the details to suit the version of events that I needed to create in order to justify what I had done?
In any case, the sight of him in the Crown and Goose that night, his arm propped against the bar, a pint in front of him as he scanned the pages of the Evening Standard, seemed not so much astonishing as merely confirmation of the connection I had felt in the beginning.
Of course, what I should have asked myself was, what were the chances of him turning up like that in our local pub? And the real question: if I had known the answer, would I have run for my life?
‘What are you staring at?’ Meg turned, following my gaze, a smile creeping over her mouth as she spotted him too.
‘No way.’
I could not be sure if she was smiling for herself or for me. Despite the special connection I felt to Harry, it was clear I was not the only one to notice his rough impression of beauty. It was hard to ignore the looks he elicited as we all sat together in the bar that first night, the flutter of eyes noticing him as Meg stood and moved towards him, seemingly unfazed.
When he looked up, an amused smile formed at the edge of his lips. It was a struggle to pull my eyes away. After a moment, I heard the scrape of a bar-stool and when I looked up again he was standing above me.
‘You remember Anna?’
‘Of course.’
Harry reached down and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me, but instead he drew out a chair and sat.
‘We’re celebrating,’ Meg announced, leaning a hand casually on his shoulder, the intimacy of her movements making me wince.
‘Oh really, why’s that?’ It was David’s voice this time. Arriving straight from work, he was dressed in a Barbour coat and navy scarf, his shirt untucked. A matter of months since leaving university, the mutation had already subtly begun, the sartorial shift from trustafarian to trust-fund manager made in incremental steps. At this stage, he was still a boy doing a poor impression of a man.
‘Anna has just agreed to move in with me.’ Meg raised her eyes at me, flashing a smile and leaning in to kiss David’s cheek.
‘Cool. Well if we’re celebrating we better have champagne – and shots.’
David laid his coat on the chair beside mine before turning to acknowledge Harry. Something in his face shifted; I can’t have been the only one who noticed.
‘Hello again, I didn’t realise …’
‘Nice to see you.’ Harry held out a hand, his self-assurance filling the room.
David paused, a moment too long, before accepting it, briefly, and then moving towards the bar.
By the time we left the pub, Camden High Street was a heaving mass of bodies and light, the smell of lead clung to the air. We were moving in a line, a marauding army stumbling towards an unknown threat. Unaware that the enemy already lay within.
‘Where are we going?’ David’s voice followed Meg and me as we stepped into the road, the sound of horns blaring across the street.
‘Fuck knows!’ Meg called back and we fell sideways, in unison, our bodies crippled with laughter, the sound of us, warped and distant, blowing back at me as if from the other side of the street.
‘Watch out.’ Harry’s hand hooked under my arm, guiding us across Parkway. Only once we had reached the phone box outside the pub did he let us go.
Meg whispered something to David, linking her arm in his before turning back briefly to the pair of us.
‘We’re just going to get something,’ she winked.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to come with us, Anna?’
David’s eyes held onto mine.
‘She’ll be fine.’ Harry’s voice was assured, the sound of it steadying me.
I leaned back against the phone box, my eyes straining to keep him in focus, the sound of a bottle smashing in the forecourt of the Good Mixer pub, followed by a wave of laughter.
When he looked down, I turned my face away, self-conscious despite the sambuca, wary of how I must look under the sharp streetlight. Hoping that if I didn’t meet his eye, maybe he wouldn’t see me so clearly.
‘Why are you doing that?’ He seemed amused.
‘What?’ I laughed awkwardly, aware of my teeth.
‘That thing,’ he laughed, mimicking me, ostentatiously sweeping his head to the side.
‘I’m not.’ I pushed my hand out to quieten him and my fingers landed on his chest, the breath clamming up in my throat as he leaned slightly into my palm.
There was a moment’s silence then, the lights from the high street casting a golden haze that warmed the sky above our heads. The movement on either side of us slowed until it was just us, my face finally settling into perfect stillness under the softness of his gaze.
‘Sorted!’
Meg’s voice cut across us, and it was Harry who looked away first. Pulling my hand back, I turned to see David, his pupils black and bulging.
Within seconds of David and Meg reappearing, Harry had peeled away from me towards a door to the left of a bar with no signage, taking centre-stage on the short strip of terraced buildings running the length of Inverness Street. David’s grip held me back as a young man, slumped over and supported by friends, his top flaked with vomit, wobbled precariously in front of us.
‘Sorry, babe,’ one of them called out as we stepped back to make way.
Brushing past them as quickly as I could, I watched Harry and Meg disappear ahead of us into the club, Harry’s hand pressing against the small of her back as he guided her in from the street.
He is just looking out for her, I told myself. There is nothing more to it than that.
‘Maybe we should go somewhere else, it looks crazy busy in there. I’ve got some …’
David hesitated as we reached the entrance where little more than a handful of smokers gathered outside, hemmed in by a single rope. But I kept walking.
‘I don’t want to leave Meg,’ I replied without turning around.
Down a narrow flight of stairs, the club was heaving with people, a dark warren of rooms, loud and airless, house music vibrating against low ceilings and windowless walls.
The bar stood at the back of the central room, thick with bodies. The heat suddenly overwhelming, I wished I wasn’t wearing a shirt on top of my vest-top. David moved towards the bar, pulling me protectively by my waist. ‘What do you want to drink?’
‘Water,’ I called over the throb of noise, my eyes frantically weaving through the crowd, desperate to find Harry and Meg, but all I could see were strobe lights and contorted faces, spilling over one another.
When David finally handed me my drink, I sipped gratefully before screwing up my face.
‘What is this?’
‘Vodka and soda … I …’ he called over the noise, which drowned out his voice as I pushed my head back, so thirsty I drank it all in one go.
‘Steady,’ he pulled the drink away from me, laughing nervously, but I pulled it back and drank the dregs.
‘You should pace yourself … How are you feeling?’ he asked a few minutes later, his mouth pressed against my ear.
‘Let’s dance!’ I shouted back as the whole room exploded with movement, a wave of euphoria rising in one endless swell of rhythm and sound. Pulling off my top layer, I turned, my arms stretched wide, my teeth grinding out of beat, and found David, his arm around my back, his breath against my face, the smell of sambuca on his lips.
I cannot be sure how long we stayed like that, our bodies swaying in primal movements, before a sickness hit my stomach, acid rising, scraping at the inside of my throat, the walls suddenly pushing towards me.
Stumbling backwards, my leg pressed against a leather bench which I had not been expecting and I sank back onto it, grateful but also unable to sit still, my skin burning and then cold, so that I pushed myself to standing. I could feel the strap of my top slinking off my arm, but there was nothing I could think to do to pull it up again.
The room was a slush of noise by now, indistinct notes thrashing against one another as I felt my way along the wall towards the exit, my breath tightening as strangers’ bodies crushed against my own.
Finally, my fingers curled around something cold and angular. It was another wall, leading away from the crowd and into a smaller corridor, which was dark and thankfully cool. It was quieter here and I was alone. For a moment I half-stood, half-crouched, my back against the wall, the breath slowing in my chest, before, from the end of the corridor, I felt movement and I knew that I wasn’t alone. With an animal sense, I recognised the presence of another person, even as my eyes still struggled to adjust. Then a shuffle of feet, and another, followed by a voice.
‘Anna?’ It was Meg, her face moving towards mine, and then another voice behind her reaching in through the mist. Harry.
‘Shit, it’s Anna!’ Meg’s hands gripped my body as I slumped, David stepping in in time to break my fall.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_50c3786c-4a26-59ca-8f2e-1be4261043f3)
Anna (#ulink_50c3786c-4a26-59ca-8f2e-1be4261043f3)
When I came to, the room was quiet.
Even with my eyes closed I could register a sense of space above my head. My body, heavy and unfamiliar, pressed down against the springs of a mattress.
‘Anna? Thank God, man.’
I stretched my neck, my movements slow and unfamiliar as Meg’s voice emerged, along with her pale face as she bent over me.
Sitting, I pulled the sheets around a T-shirt I didn’t recognise. It was her flat we were in – my flat, now – the curtains sagging against the window.
‘I took your clothes off, they were covered in sick.’ She did her best to make it sound casual.
‘I’m cold.’ My voice was raspy and Meg nodded, seemingly pleased by the specificity of the instruction, jumping up and leaving the room without another word. Seconds later there were more footsteps, heavier this time, less certain, moving towards the bed.
‘David, maybe wait a minute, yeah?’
Meg followed him back into the room, the duvet from her own bed bundled in her arms. But he was oblivious, his bloodshot eyes trained on mine.
‘I’m so sorry.’
He lowered himself as I pulled the covers tighter around my chest, still dazed, distracted by the taste in my mouth.
The outside world was an uncertain grey, I couldn’t tell if it was dawn or dusk.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘The MDMA, it was just a dab in your drink, I warned you …’
I felt myself back in the airless bar, David’s voice mouthing words I could barely hear as my eyes scanned the room desperately for signs of Harry. I had smiled as I turned back to him, masking my disappointment as I took the drink from his hand and downed it, my eyes wincing at the bitter aftertaste.
‘Leave me. I’m fine, it’s fine, I just need to sleep …’
‘I’m sorry, honestly Anna, I thought you knew … I thought it was what you wanted.’ His face was stained with desperation.
‘Just let me sleep. Please.’ I turned away from them both, the sound of their footsteps moving into the hallway, fading again a moment later.
When I woke again, the flat was silent, and the memory of the night before came back to me in waves.
Placing a pillow in front of my face in a futile attempt to stem the flow of thoughts, tears of shame pricked the corners of my eyes, the humiliation churning in my gut, heavy and hot.
How much had Harry seen? Was I sick in the club or only once we had come home? Fucking David. I said the words aloud. I never took drugs, never risked putting myself in a position where I wasn’t in control. I couldn’t. And yet, how was he to know? I had let them believe that I did, him and Meg. I remember the sharp taste of a pill on my tongue, on nights out in Brighton, those few seconds before I turned and spat it into my hands, disposing of it before either of them saw, terrified they would spot that I wasn’t one of them.
The flat was empty, silence ringing through the air as I moved slowly towards the kitchen.
On the table, there was a note.
Hope you’re feeling OK. Pizza and juice in the fridge. Make yourself at home. Mx.
Beside it, my keys, purse and phone, which Meg must have pulled from my pockets after stripping me down.
Desperate for a distraction, I pressed the home button on my phone and watched the screen light up. Rather than a message from my parents wondering where I was, I was met only by the date and time flashing on the screen against the backdrop of a photo taken by David on Brighton Pier, two summers previous – Meg and me, the wind whipping against our cheeks, our faces contorted in a scream.
It was the same day Meg had first asked me about David.
‘So what you going to do?’ We settled ourselves at a table in the corner of the Hop Poles while David went to the bar.
‘What do you mean?’
Meg rolled her eyes disbelievingly.
‘About David …’ She waited, and when I didn’t speak, continued, ‘He fucking loves you, man.’
I snorted. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Oh please, tell me you’re joking.’
‘What?’
‘Jesus, you’re serious. Anna, the boy is infatuated. Have you noticed that he can’t be more than two feet away from you at all times?’
Along with incredulity I felt a prick of pride. My voice was less convinced as I continued, ‘Yeah well, I don’t know, maybe that’s because he likes you and I’m always with you—’
‘Anna.’ Meg slapped her hands against her face. ‘Honestly, do you really not realise … You don’t. Wow. I mean you’re smart but sometimes you’re so fucking dumb. He’s in love with you. If you can’t see that then you really need to learn to read people better.’
The digits overlaying the image read 20.12. Sunday night. For the first time in my life, I had slept through an entire day.
Sipping gratefully at a glass of too-warm water from the tap, I moved from the counter towards the sofa.
Meg must have had a clean-up while I slept as the detritus that was usually scattered across the floor had been stacked into a pile in the corner of the room, the remote control neatly aligned on the coffee table in front of the sofa.
Scanning mindlessly between channels, I settled on a film I did not recognise, my thoughts gradually fading into nothingness before a harsh buzzing noise reverberated through the intercom, causing me to jump.
Pressing the volume on the television to mute, I lay back on the sofa, holding the edges of the blanket I had dragged in from the bedroom, waiting for whomever it was to give up. A moment later, though, the bell sounded again, longer this time.
Aware it might be Meg, having forgotten her keys, I reluctantly stood, brushing away the covers before moving to the window.
The light inside the flat was off. The only potential clue to my presence was the glow emanating from the screen behind me as I nudged the curtain with my fingers, pressing my cheek against the glass. Looking down, my eyes ached as they struggled to focus, my breath forming a screen on the pane in front of me.
Using my thumb, I smeared the condensation away. As if sensing my movement, his face flicked up at me.
‘Fuck.’ I pulled back.
The buzzer sounded again. I couldn’t let him see me like this, but what choice did I have? Besides, I had already made the decision as I moved across the room towards the door. Pressing my hand against my thigh, I leaned forward into the mouthpiece, pressing the button before I could change my mind.
‘Hello?’
‘Anna?’
My palms were prickling. My face, in the reflection of the screen on the intercom, was hollowed out, and tacky with sweat.
‘It’s Harry.’ There was a pause, and then, ‘It’s bloody cold out here – are you going to let me in?’
My finger hovered for a moment over the button, before pressing down again.
‘What are you watching?’ Before I had time to fully register his presence, he was moving across the room as if being here was the most natural thing in the world.
‘A film.’ I turned to the counter, pulling desperately at my hair, twisting it into a bun.
‘You alone?’
‘Yeah.’
It was too late to turn away, to shield him from the circles under my eyes, the unwashed skin.
‘Would you like tea?’
He nodded, his eyes smiling. ‘You feel like shit, right?’
‘I don’t know what happened, I’m not usually—’
‘Course you’re not.’ His laugh was familiar. ‘I’m just glad you’re OK. That’s what I came to check. The club, I couldn’t find you anywhere and then I saw Meg and she said you weren’t well and had to go home and …’
The moment our eyes locked there was a rush through my body and I instantly felt like a fool for imagining whatever it was I had imagined might have happened between him and Meg in the time that they were lost in the club.
He settled himself on the sofa as my grip tightened slightly around the handle of the kettle.
‘How did you know where I lived?’
‘You pointed it out last night, on the way back from the pub.’
‘Really?’ It was unlike me to forget things. Besides, everything else from the night before remained clear, before the club. Or did it? How would I know – was it possible to intuit where the holes in your memory lay? Harry’s claims were hardly surprising given the number of shots we’d consumed at the bar. Something about his presence had lured me into a state of off-guardedness, my usual restraint failing to kick in. The drinks had been endless, David galvanised by the presence of another male into buying round after round, each more elaborate than the last. If nothing else, this was a lesson. Or fate, perhaps. If I hadn’t passed out, would Harry have been here now? At the time, the thought struck me as reassuring.
He took the cup of tea I had made for him from my hand and our fingers touched.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘I still feel pretty sick.’
‘You’ve got to eat.’ He stood up straight, pulling his wallet from his pocket. ‘And have a drink. Trust me, it will make you feel better.’ He winked, taking a sip of his tea and passing it back to me.
‘I’ll be back in ten, buzz me in?’
I watched him pull the door closed behind him, and it was all I could do not to scream.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_427f4b8a-9a02-52c9-9817-7bb5d5751ce9)
Anna (#ulink_427f4b8a-9a02-52c9-9817-7bb5d5751ce9)
‘So how’s work?’
The question came out before I realised what I was saying. We were facing each other on the sofa, the box of pizza wedged between us, a half bottle of brandy on the coffee table, alongside the mug of hot chocolate he had stirred it into at first, to soften the impact.
Harry’s face straightened all of a sudden, and he shrugged. ‘Ah, you know …’
It was silly to imagine he would want to go into the details of his being fired with a relative stranger, yet I could not help feeling disappointed at his lack of confidence.
Sighing gently, he placed a half-eaten slice of Margherita back on the box, taking a swig of his drink. ‘Well, if you really want to know, I’ve been sacked.’
He continued chewing, his eyes locking on mine, and I held my body straight.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Deadly.’
‘When?’
A half-smile appeared on his face.
‘The day before I met you guys, believe it or not. That’s why I was … You know, shit-faced, on my own … That’s not my usual style, I’ll have you know. I had come in for a meeting with the editor, trying to get my job back, but what can I say, the man’s a prick. Still, he ran my story the same day though, didn’t he? Not too moral to miss out on a final scoop …’
He shrugged again, taking another bite of pizza.
‘What happened?’
He paused then, as if he had changed his mind. For an alarming moment I thought he was going to stand, but he simply lifted an arm to his cheek for a moment before carrying on.
‘That story, the one about the undercover charity investigation? One of the protestors I embedded myself with is claiming we were in a relationship.’
There was an authority to his delivery that dampened the shock.
‘OK.’
‘Well, it might have been, except it turns out she was fifteen at the time.’
His words hung in the air.
‘The time of what?’
‘There’s a photo, she says it shows us “being intimate”. I mean, Jesus, it’s nothing. I’ve seen it, we’re just talking. But she says it was more than that. Her parents, they threatened the paper, said if I wasn’t disciplined, they’d take the case to court. It would be my word against theirs, but apparently that doesn’t mean anything. With things the way they are in the industry, there isn’t the kind of cash needed to defend a law case. And, like I said, the editor’s an arse. He had been looking for an excuse to get rid of me …’
Harry’s face lifted suddenly, turning, his eyes narrowing. ‘Shit, I don’t know why I told you that. I’m sorry. It’s intense, I know. I just … Something about you, I just felt I could … I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put that on you, we hardly know each other.’
His face was parallel with mine, something passing between us.
‘It’s bullshit, you should know that. I mean, Jesus …’
I nodded, my hand instinctively moving towards his, ‘I do.’
As he opened his mouth to speak again, a key jangled loudly against the front door. Lurching back, his legs swung forward off the sofa as Meg’s face appeared.
There was a moment of doubt and then she spoke, her features recomposing themselves.
‘Hi!’ Her eyes briefly flicked between the two of us, and then she smiled. She did not ask aloud what Harry was doing there. At the time I didn’t either.
Harry had suggested it, all of us meeting up again the following week. We had been saying an awkward goodbye that evening in the flat, he, Meg and me. By then, my hangover had been usurped by an urgent fizzing in my gut.
‘I’ll be working near here in the afternoon if you fancy a drink afterwards?’ Harry had looked at me and then, out of politeness, at Meg.
‘Bring your friend David too if he’s around …’
If he spotted my disappointment at the mass invite, he didn’t show it.
David was already there when I arrived at the pub, as planned, the following Friday. It was the first time I had seen him since the incident at the club and he was holding his hands under the table when I arrived. Standing up, he presented me with a large, purple, gold-embossed bag, the plush cardboard soft and soothing as it swept against my fingers.
‘I just wanted to apologise for what happened. I—’
‘David, what …’
His face fixed on mine as I tugged at the ribbon that had been pulled tight in a perfect bow, protecting whatever was inside, unable to keep the smile from lifting the corners of my mouth.
The material was a light grey wool, which hung just above my knees, with a soft shearling lining. From the label, it must have cost more than the rest of my wardrobe combined.
‘It’s – well, it’s perfect, but …’ He must have seen the flicker of uncertainty in my face as he stood, casually, wary of applying too much pressure.
‘It’s no big deal. If it’s not right the receipt’s in the bag. I just thought … Meg’s taking forever, shall we order? I’m starving.’
It was then that I looked up and noticed Harry and Meg, already seated at the bar on the other side of the pub, Meg facing away from us. At that moment, Harry looked up and our eyes met, his gaze followed a second later by Meg. I could have sworn it was disappointment I saw in her eyes, but then her face lifted into a smile and she jumped off the stool, striding towards us, her eyebrows rising as if to say, ‘Where the hell have you been?’
CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_167f3233-216a-5881-a390-7f6612b3d20f)
Anna (#ulink_167f3233-216a-5881-a390-7f6612b3d20f)
The air was heavy and damp that winter, the perfect backdrop to the months of boozy nights that followed in pubs across London, the four of us drinking until the small hours before falling away to our respective beds. But then, as time passed, the initial thrill of our weekly group gatherings was worn away by erratic working hours and office parties, until one night it was just Harry and me sitting across from each other at a table in the corner of the Crown and Goose, where an irate chef passed out plates of food through a minuscule hatch.
We shared one bottle of wine, and then another, our fingers resting side by side on the round wooden table, oblivious to the comings and goings of the other drinkers as they passed back and forth on their way to the bathroom, the urgent ring of the kitchen bell clattering above our heads.
By the time we rose to leave, I was surprised to find the bar swollen with people. Stepping out into the street, the twinkling fairy lights entwined along the shop fronts, Harry stopped and pushed me gently back against the wall of the pub. Holding me there for a moment, my neck in his hand, he paused before kissing me, his lips soft but persuasive.
And that was it, our fate sealed. I had waited for that confirmation of what I had felt for months, and when it came it was as if it had never not been there.
Meg had gone back to Newcastle for a couple of weeks, so the flat was ours alone, that first night together. I woke the following morning to a feeling of utter contentment, until I turned to find an empty space in the bed next to me. Running my fingers over the grooves where his body had been, I briefly wondered if I had imagined it all.
My sense of unease grew when I called his phone later that morning, and the next day, only to reach his voicemail, the recorded message playing a jeering loop against my ear. When he re-emerged, a few days later, he was apologetic but reassuring. There was a job he was doing, which had pulled him away unexpectedly. He was sorry he couldn’t be in touch.
‘You know what it’s like.’
It took everything I had to play down my disappointment, but I knew better than to let the extent of my feelings show. So instead I nodded along – even agreeing when he insisted that we could not tell anyone about us, swearing myself to secrecy.
The case against him was ongoing, he offered by way of explanation. If the defence found out he was dating a former intern – and that was how they would frame it, he said – then they would have a field day.
I was a consenting adult, it was ridiculous. But maybe something about the situation suited me too. It was not as if I was leading David on, exactly, but he had done so much for me already and the idea of him knowing I was with someone else … It would not have been fair.
What bothered me most, though, was how unjustly Harry had been vilified, how quick his colleagues had been to turn against him.
‘But you didn’t do anything,’ I raged one night as he reminded me once more of the charges he could be up against. My counter-arguments were always weak, and he looked at me like I was a child he cared for but who knew nothing of the world.
‘Oh, Anna, of course I didn’t sleep with her – but do you really think that means anything?’
He shook his head despairingly.
‘The girl who made this claim against me, or rather the girl whose parents made this claim … They don’t care that she had told me she was twenty-one. They don’t care that she was the one who duped me.’
To be honest, I could have contested him on that point if I had wanted to. He was the investigative reporter; it was he who had infiltrated the organisation, using whatever means he could to extract the information he wanted. Even if that meant earning the trust of a young woman who believed he was after her, rather than what she could do for him.
Yet how could I say any of that without sounding unsupportive? Harry did not need another person rallying against him. More importantly, I understood why he did it. What he did, it was about the story, the pursuit of truth and justice, regardless of the cost. That was simply the person he was.
The threads in my stomach pulled tighter as I stepped off the bus that morning in Bethnal Green, on my way to his flat for the very first time. My breath in the January air was a curling finger of smoke drawing me forward, as I followed the directions he had sent, past the coffee shop with the couples in beanies sipping hot drinks on a terrace makeshifted out of old wooden crates; young men with bloodshot eyes sucking on roll-up cigarettes, already weary of the winter that still had some way to go.
Hidden on the other side of a scruffy communal garden was a square of grand red-brick houses, stained black where they met the pavement by centuries of tar and a drift of pigeon feathers. Adjoining it, an elegant Victorian mansion block curved and disappeared towards the next street. Harry’s flat was on the second floor, that much I knew, and with that tiny detail I had already drawn a picture in my head, instinctively filling in the gaps.
So many times our evenings together had been curtailed by a sudden phone call that would see him downing his pint and standing to pull on his coat, leaning in to kiss me, reluctantly, his lips hovering over my mouth, telling me he wished he could stay. In those moments, I would picture him coming back to this flat, to the bedroom I imagined filled floor-to-ceiling with books, photos of his childhood stacked precariously on a mantel, shirts thrown over the back of an easy chair. But never did I question where he went in the intervening hours. Maybe I told myself it did not matter, or maybe I was scared what the answer would be.
On the doorstep, I took a moment to gather myself, a row of numbered buzzers in a panel on my left, drawing a deep breath before pressing the bell. There was a moment of silence then a crackle and Harry’s voice.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me.’
He paused and then his breath lightened. ‘Hello you.’
The sound of his feet drumming against the stairs echoed my heartbeat. When he opened the door, his face broke into a smile. Neither of us spoke as I stepped inside the hallway, which was even colder than the street.
He laced his fingers in mine and led me past piles of post and folded buggies and bikes, our feet quietly moving up the stairs.
It was another hour before we let each other go long enough for me to take in his flat.
The hallway, where our clothes now lay discarded, was tall and white, uncluttered by pictures or coat-hooks. At the far end of the hall, there was a kitchen, with a little round table and four chairs. Just enough cutlery and cups, a single frying pan and a sieve. Everything with its own place and purpose.
The only thing that was out of place was a single box of condoms, which he had gone to lengths to dig out; his ability to think so cautiously, even in the heat of the moment, pricked at me once it was over. At that moment, entangled in his arms, I would have risked anything never to let him go; it was the first clue, if only I had been willing to see it, as to how uneven the balance of power between us was.
‘Must be a reaction against my house, growing up,’ Harry said, watching my eyes react to the sparseness of it all, the precision. It was the first time he had mentioned his childhood and I stayed silent, willing him to carry on.
We were moving through to the living room now, my eyes scanning the original fireplace, unused; just a few books neatly stacked over purpose-built shelves. Hungrily, I drank in any detail I could latch my eyes upon.
Comparing the scene before me with the image of the flat I had created in my mind, I found my imagined version already slipping away.
‘When you’re one of six and there are other people’s things everywhere, I suppose a kind of efficiency grows out of craving your own personal space,’ Harry said.
I thought of the silence of my parents’ house, the endless space.
‘You grew up in Ireland, right?’
‘Galway.’ He turned to the door, the look passing over his face telling me he’d had enough of this kind of talk, and I was happy to follow him back to safer ground. Any question I asked him was liable, after all, to be turned back on me.
‘And this is my bedroom.’
Harry had moved across the hall and was standing in the doorway of the final room. There was a small double bed against one wall, a desk against the other, piled high with papers.
His eyes followed mine, over the bed, which was low to the ground, the sheets white and nondescript. Beside it, on stripped wooden floorboards, there was a square alarm clock and a notebook. Nothing else to betray the details of a life.
Moving towards the desk, my eyes trailed the papers neatly covering the surface.
‘So, what is it you’re working on?’
He moved to intercept me, pulling me towards him as I reached the desk.
‘If I told you that, I’d have to kill you.’
There was something so powerful about him, so far beyond my reach. And yet the truth was we weren’t so different, he and I. For all his bravado, for all his success. People like David, their lives were defined by what they had; Harry’s life, like mine, was defined by what he had lost.
‘It was a Saturday morning,’ Harry confided one night, our noses pressed together in the darkness of his flat, the occasional flash of a car headlight through the bedroom window the only sign that in this moment we weren’t the only two people left on Earth.
‘I’d been moaning on and on about a toy car I wanted. Little red thing I’d seen in the window in town a couple of days earlier. Wouldn’t quit. In the end, my pa says, “If it’ll shut you up, I’ll get you the damn car.” He walked out the house, and that was it. Ten minutes later, he lost control of the steering wheel and … Three people died.’
There was a pause and I felt the pain that moved across his face.
‘Oh, Harry.’ I moved so close to him that I could feel the muscles in his body contract with grief.
‘It was my fault.’ His voice was so quiet, but I felt the tears soaking into my scalp. ‘You can’t imagine what that’s like. To know—’
‘That was not your fault, Harry, don’t you ever think that.’ I clung him, hushing his cries with my own, as if soothing my younger self.
I squeezed him harder then, feeling my own confession pour from my lips; the relief of saying the words out loud tinged with fear. Our secrets reaching out for one another, their grip so tight I could hardly breathe.
CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_ee1f5ae0-8f79-5459-aa7d-0f12eb5cc24d)
Anna (#ulink_ee1f5ae0-8f79-5459-aa7d-0f12eb5cc24d)
If it had happened a few months earlier, I would have told Meg about Harry and me, regardless of what I had promised. How different things might have turned out if I had. There was nothing she and I did not share, back then, nothing we wouldn’t have told each other, until suddenly there was.
At first I put the cracks that began to show in Meg’s armour down to the pressures of office life – the spikiness that had always been offset by a natural generosity and easy humour falling away into something that would have been otherwise unexplainable.
David had picked up on it too, on the occasions when we still found time to hang out together, the three of us, between the various pulls of our respective working lives. He had tried to raise it with me but I had played the ignorant, telling myself I would not discuss Meg behind her back but knowing deep down that I just did not want to think about it.
And then, one day, the blinkers were torn off.
I was sitting at the table in the kitchen of our flat, typing up a piece on monochrome accenting. Behind me, a single panel of wall was lined incongruously with illustrations of botanical branches: a single roll of statement wallpaper which I had plucked from a box of samples at the office, with Clarissa’s encouragement; one of a number of disjointed acquisitions with which I had started to embellish the flat over the past months. I was squinting at the computer, trying to block out the churn of Camden High Street filtering in through the sash, when Meg walked through the front door, slamming her keys onto the counter, pulling open the door to the fridge and closing it again.
‘Where have you been? Are you OK?’
It had been two or three days since I had last seen her, only an unfinished cup of coffee on the counter when I woke that morning offering any sign that she had been home at all.
She looked odd, changed somehow, in a way that I could no longer ignore: her fingers scratching at her thighs, front teeth chewing her bottom lip. There was a darkness that had taken hold, its shadow stretching beneath her; an anger, barely contained, slowly tightening its grip.
‘Why?’
‘You just seem a bit … I tried to call.’
‘I’m fine, I’m tired. Work’s full on …’ Her eyes skittered around the room as if in search of an answer.
‘David rang, a minute ago, wanted to know if we were going to his party.’
Even as I said it, I knew I was setting myself up for a fall. Harry was away on a job, and although house parties were not my scene, especially not without Meg there to create a distraction, something had made me say yes.
‘Can’t, there’s something I’ve got to do.’ Meg’s voice was distant.
‘What is it?’
It stung that I even had to ask.
‘Just something for work.’
She walked out of the kitchen, and even though her bedroom stood directly on the other side of the wall, she could have been on the other side of the world.
When she came back out, half an hour later, her expression had softened slightly.
‘Sorry, I’m not myself at the moment, it’s just a lot of pressure.’
She held my gaze for a second before snapping her face away again. Without looking me in the eye, she stepped forward and kissed my cheek. There was a flicker of electricity between us and then she turned, the door slamming shut before I had time to reply.
The bus stop stood opposite our flat on the high street, illuminated in a sickly streetlight. Fifteen minutes later I stepped off the bus at South End Green, where the road veered right towards Hampstead Heath station.
Keeping the pub on my left I followed the right fork which led up to the Heath.
In all the years David and I had known each other, I had never been to his London house. After leaving halls, he had his own apartment in Brighton, on one of the smarter Regency squares, a very different proposition to the house we had shared the year previously.
The flat had been bought for him by his father, he let slip one afternoon. We were lazing on the nobbled rectangle of grass that stood between a U of buildings, sharing a bag of chips from soggy newspaper, the sea lapping at the shore on the other side of the main road. Back then, David still told himself he was uncomfortable with the level of wealth his father had started to accrue as his business grew from small-time independent to leading international trading company TradeSmart. The irony of his faux-liberal university lifestyle, banging on about the importance of fair trade while snorting lines of cocaine from supply chains involving child exploitation and murder, paid for by Daddy’s money, was not so much lost on him as ignored.
He had been the first person I met, the day I arrived at Sussex. Freshers’ Week, Falmer campus. Summer had stretched on that year, grass lining the lazy knolls that formed a ripple in front of the university, swarming with bodies, snatching up the final rays. Morcheeba drifting across the hills. Endless drum’n’bass.
My halls were on the far side of campus, just before rows of housing melted away into fields.
‘So, this is your room,’ explained the self-assured young man who greeted me at the door. He had watched my eyes for a reaction as I scanned the room with its worn carpets and fireproof doors.
‘Sorry, I’m David,’ he had added, stretching out his hand. ‘I’m your RA. This is my second year so I’m here to, you know, make sure you have everything you need …’
‘I’m Anna.’ I smiled self-consciously, trying out my new name for the first time.
‘What are you studying?’ His eyes were trying hard to catch mine.
‘English Literature.’
‘Cool, I’m doing Business Studies … Are your parents bringing the rest of your things later?’
I paused, shaking my head, and kept walking. ‘It’s just my dad but he’s abroad. RAF.’
I could hear the hesitation in my voice, but David never questioned it, and why would he?
As David continued talking, my eyes settled on a blur of hills rising to meet an expanse of blue sky, through the window, unaware of the dark clouds looming in from the edge.
The light was fading as David’s road came into view, in an enclave of North London reserved for old money and increasingly new.
The house was a four-storey Victorian semi-detached, three times the size of my parents’ home, chequered tiled steps leading up to the entrance. It was beautiful, the house a child might draw, plucked straight from a ghost story.
I took the stairs to the house slowly; light and voices emanated from the hallway through the open front door, music spilling over the wall from the garden.
David was there, waiting for me, a smile stitched across his face as I tentatively pushed at the open door.
‘You came!’
He kissed my cheek, his skin soft and grateful, my proximity to him reassuring.
‘This is your house?’
‘This is it.’ Leading the way, past a sweeping staircase with double-height ceilings and down through the kitchen, David paused to pour me a drink.
‘So here we are.’
We were standing in the garden, which was not much smaller than the ground floor of the house. The lawn stretched down to a red-brick wall with an arched doorway leading out onto the Heath.
On the terraced area, where we now stood, there were paper lanterns punctuating the view from one side of the house to the other. In the middle of the garden someone had attempted to create a pit and amidst the ash, a fire licked at the air. A group of people I didn’t recognise were sitting around it, flicking joint roaches into the flames.
‘Anna, I’m …’ Watching my face turn back to his, David took a step forward, a look stirring in his eyes. Ever since that night at the club, something had shifted between us and aside from the gifts that passed between us like relentless peace offerings, he had been careful not to push.
‘Meg couldn’t come,’ I changed the subject before I could stop myself, immediately feeling like a traitor to my friend for raising the subject.
‘What’s with her at the moment?’ David’s face changed. ‘Every time I see her recently she’s …’
‘She’s just, you know, work.’
David raised his eyebrow. ‘I don’t know, it seems like more than that. We’re all busy …’
‘How is work?’ It seemed fitting to change track.
‘Good, yeah, I mean it’s banking, it’s not exactly … But it’s good, you know, doing something for myself, making my own money.’
I nodded, wondering how much David earned. Not that he needed money of his own, clearly.
As if reading my mind, he continued, ‘My dad wanted me to go into the family business but … I don’t know, I want to do my own thing. The idea of just following my father’s footsteps …’
He blushed, shrugging.
‘Good for you.’ Discreetly, my eyes cast their way up the back of the house, the vast wooden shutters, creepers growing up the walls. The top-floor windows gazed out with hollow eyes over the black expanse of Hampstead Heath.
‘So this is the house you grew up in?’
David took a swig of his drink.
‘Yup. My grandparents bought it in the 1950s, and when they died, my dad inherited it.’
‘And he doesn’t mind you having a party …?’
‘He doesn’t live here any more. He’s got a flat in town, but he’s away most of the time, so it’s just me.’
‘How come?’
‘Work. He’s mainly working in Africa and Asia at the moment. His company has an office over here, but mostly it’s …’
The music stopped suddenly, as if someone had lurched the needle from the record, followed by a wave of indignation from the crowd. Behind David’s shoulder I could see more people spilling into the garden as the music started again, something soulful this time.
‘If you ever want to come over …’
‘Thanks.’ I smiled, not sure what else to say as I watched the party from a distance, David’s guests’ uplit faces devoid of features, like apparitions passing under a cloud.
It was nearly 1 a.m. by the time I left the party. David had called me a cab, his hand lingering on mine as I ducked into the car, his eyes following me down the road.
Within minutes of driving, the wide open streets of Hampstead gave way to Malden Road, sprawling council blocks obscuring my view of the sky. Camden High Street, with its all-night bars and the endless roar of the night bus trundling along tarmac scarred by hidden potholes, faded to a reassuring throb as I pressed closed the door from the street.
A strip of light gently glowed above the tatty carpet at the top of the stairs, warm and inviting, but when my feet reached the upstairs landing, something already felt wrong. I pushed open the front door to find the room darker than I had imagined. Meg’s body, her back to me, was unnaturally taut at the table, an open bottle of wine beside her.
In another life, I would have called out to her. I would have watched her turn to me, holding up the bottle, signalling for me to bring down a glass. Now, though, her body was still. For a moment I felt my joints freeze, imagining the worst, but then she moved, a small, almost imperceptible intake of breath, and my chest loosened, just enough.
Not knowing what else to do, I went to the counter to pull down a mug, waiting for her to make the first move. Holding the cup under the tap, I discreetly glanced at the window, catching an outline of her silhouette.
Taking a gulp of water, I turned to face her. From here, she looked pale and still.
‘Meg?’
When I ran towards her, her head collapsed into my chest, her body heaving with silent tears.
‘Sshh, what is it?’ It was the first time I had ever seen her cry. The first time in my life that I had been alone with someone in tears, whom I was allowed to touch.
Meg shook her head.
‘Anna … I …’
The words dried up after that. I briefly tried to speak, to fill the silence with the sounds she needed to hear. I wonder now how different things might have been if I had. But my throat clammed up. Instead, I led her to her bed and pulled the blankets around her neck, lying down beside her, my arms wrapped in hers, until her breath slowed into sleep.
Meg was standing by the counter when I emerged in the kitchen the following morning. She was facing the window, the glass streaked with rain.
‘I have to go.’ She did not look at me as I pulled a mug from a pile on the draining board.
‘OK, I’ll be off soon, too. I’m going into the office to catch up on a few things.’
Clarissa had assured me there was no need to work this weekend, but we had a big commercial pitch coming up and I knew she planned to go in and crack on – and I knew how much it would please her to see me there as she arrived, perched in front of my computer, notes neatly stretched across my desk. If I was going to climb the ladder the way I needed to, I had to show how keen I was, how much more I was capable of than endless admin.
‘I’m leaving London.’ Meg turned away from me, her voice matter-of-fact.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve been offered a job in Bristol.’
Finally, she turned back to face me, her skin bare, free of the heavy eyeliner she always applied within minutes of showering.
‘What? When?’ My eyes scoured her face for signs of something I could hold onto.
‘I can’t talk now. This flat, it’s—’
‘Bristol?’
‘You can stay on, if you can cover the rent on your own, or … It’s paid up until the end of the month. We’ll talk later. I’ve got to go.’
‘Meg, what the fuck? Where are you going?’
I followed her to the front door, willing her to turn around as she gripped the handrail, her free arm raised defensively as she reached the bottom of the stairs.
But I didn’t follow her. Instead, I went to the office, rather than waiting there in the flat for her return, making the effort she would have made to stop me from leaving, had the shoe been on the other foot. If I had, could I have saved us all?
Harry’s phone was off when I tried it at lunchtime, on my way to the noisy coffee shop where I ordered a salad box for Clarissa before heading back to the office. Again, I was met by the monotony of his answerphone as I wrestled with the front door later that evening, the smell of frying meat following me in from the kebab shop, my voice struggling to remain light.
‘Harry, it’s me, just seeing how you are. I’m at the office but I wondered what you were doing tonight, or tomorrow. Call me …’
I paused before I hung up, slipping the phone back into my pocket, darkness descending as I shut the door against the street.
Even before I reached the upstairs landing, something felt different. In the dark, fumbling for the light switch, my key turning quietly in the lock, I pushed the door open with a nervous hand.
‘Meg?’
Inside, the flat was still and instinctively I knew.
I called her name again, already knowing it was too late. Feeling it, the guillotine falling, severing the space between then and now.
CHAPTER 9 (#ulink_48c0acc3-c616-54d6-af8a-af6998e11926)
Anna (#ulink_48c0acc3-c616-54d6-af8a-af6998e11926)
It was October, that first year at university in Brighton, and a late burst of summer sun meant the city was awash with life: swarms of Italian tour groups smoking cigarettes in the grounds of the Pavilion; elderly couples walking in companionable silence along the shore, hands held behind their backs.
The beach had been a heaving mass of bodies by the time I arrived late that afternoon. Walking across the pebbles, I was aware of the glances from a group of guys sprawled out by my feet as I made my way towards the pub where we had arranged to meet. It was less than a month into our first term and Meg had suggested a group of us have afternoon drinks before heading to a drum’n’bass night at the club on the sea front.
Scared of getting it wrong, of being exposed for the fraud I was, I had spent the previous week watching the other students stumble along the path in front of my window, gathering hints about what to wear. In the end I had chosen denim cut-offs, a slick of pink lip gloss, hair pulled away from my face.
David’s skin was lightly tanned and his sandy-coloured hair shaven, self-consciously, into a low undercut on one side of his head.
‘So, what are your plans for Christmas?’ he asked that afternoon as we sat opposite each other outside the Fortune of War, the two of us the first to arrive.
I took a long sip of wine, watching his pupils dilate like two dark wells in the glare of the sun.
‘Not much. Studying. My dad’s still in Singapore, so I’ll stay with my aunt.’
‘You said your dad’s in the RAF?’
I smiled, taking a sip of my drink.
‘So where do you stay when you’re in the UK?’
‘I have an aunt, in Surrey. It’s dull but convenient.’
We were silent for a moment, him drawing lines with his finger on the sweat of his glass.
‘How about you?’
He looked up again, a flicker of embarrassment immediately succeeded by pride.
‘Maldives, probably. My dad has lots of international clients and that’s where they … It’s work for him, but you know, could be worse …’
My mind flicked to my parents’ dining room, the sound of my mother’s best cutlery scratching against our plates at the mahogany table laid for three – the empty chair filling every inch of the room.
I had nothing to say, but needed to push the conversation on, away from my life.
‘So you travel a lot?’
David shrugged. ‘We spend most of the summer between the South of France and Greece. My dad has a place on the edge of this island, in the Sporades.’ He looked at me, as if to ask if I had heard of them.
I took another sip of my drink, waiting for him to continue.
‘It’s a few islands along from Skiathos. Our one’s much smaller, though, low-key.’
‘Cool.’ I nodded, working to suppress my jealousy as a cube of ice slipped down the back of my throat.
By the time Meg arrived, followed by a stream of faces I didn’t recognise from campus, David had already bought three rounds, insisting he was closer to the bar whenever I made a half-hearted attempt to stand. The moon hovered precariously above the water as we made our way along the beach, hours later, towards Concorde 2.
‘Have you seen LCD Soundsystem live before?’ David asked, holding back as Meg and some of the others took off their shoes, screaming with laughter as they waded through the low waves, their voices drowned out by the thrashing beats as we approached the club.
The temperature had dropped dramatically and I felt ripples moving across my arms and legs as I pushed my hands into the pockets of my shorts. David at once started to unzip his hoodie.
‘Take this.’ His eyes worked hard to hold mine as I went to take the sweater. His mouth opened to speak but then Meg appeared, her wet clothes clinging to her skinny frame. Without saying anything, she laughed, tugging the hoodie from his fingers and wrapping it around her.
‘Jesus, Meg,’ the disapproval in my laughter was laced with awe, my envy of her total lack of inhibition so potent that I could almost taste it.
Even as I pushed open the door to Meg’s room, the rumble of Camden High Street clattering through the glass, I knew she was already gone. Even before my eyes adjusted to the light, to the empty wardrobe, the bed stripped bare.
‘Meg, where are you? You can’t do this. You have to call me. Please.’
My mouth pressed against the phone, tears streaming down my cheeks.
Harry’s number went straight to voicemail. The urge to run to his flat might have been overwhelming if I had not already known what a false move it would be. As he said himself, he was hardly ever there, his freelance investigative career taking him off in far-flung directions that he refused to discuss. Besides, from the time we had spent together, it was clear he did not respond well to being needed, always preferring to be the one to give chase.
Without Meg, the flat was too big and yet the walls seemed to press in on me, her absence everywhere I looked.
Outside, Camden Town was a drizzling sky, illuminated grey pavements, Saturday night drinkers passing by in a sea of strangled faces, their corners smudged.
I pulled out my phone. Other than work, there were four numbers in my past calls list. Harry, Meg, Mum, David.
Leaning my back against the wall to steady myself, I pressed ‘call’.
He answered after two rings. ‘Anna? What time is it …’
‘Hi.’ My voice broke then.
‘What’s wrong?’ I could feel him freeze whatever he was doing, his attention, as always, focused on me.
‘It’s Meg …’ The words caught in my throat.
‘Where are you?’
‘I don’t know what to—’
‘Anna, just tell me where you are and I’ll be there in a minute, just tell me …’
‘I …’ But the words wouldn’t come; the lights on the street were too bright, a blast of noise exploding from inside the Irish bar along the high street as the doors swung open.
David’s voice was calm and firm at the end of the line. ‘OK, look, just jump in a cab, OK? Find a taxi, I’ll stay on the line. Come to the house, I’m waiting. Everything’s going to be all right.’
Compared to the last time I had seen it, the wide entrance hall felt eerily devoid of life. As I stepped inside, the air lightly hummed with the smell of stale booze and stale bodies.
‘Sorry about the mess.’ David led me through the hallway, scooping up half-drunk glasses as he went, placing them on the kitchen table.
‘Can I get you a drink?’
He moved to the fridge, his hair flattened on one side from where he must have slept. When he turned, he was holding two bottles of beer. ‘There’s not much else. I could pop out to the shop.’
I shook my head, gratefully accepting the drink, wondering for a moment how he could live like this while holding down a job in the City.
‘What is going on?’
He leaned back against the table as I took a sip of beer.
‘Meg’s gone.’
He moved onto the other foot, ‘What do you mean, gone?’
‘She’s gone. Taken all her things. She said something about a job in Bristol this morning and then when I got home after work, she had cleared out.’
‘She can’t have done.’
‘She left a note.’
‘What did it say?’
‘Nothing. “Take care of yourself.” I just don’t fucking get it – why would she just leave?’ I raised the bottle to my lips again, the glass knocking against my tooth.
‘You’ve tried calling her? I’ll try now …’
He walked into the living room, the phone pressed against his ear, and I followed. There was something mausoleum-like about the inside of the house, like a set of family life, frozen in time. Framed pictures of David as a baby were neatly scattered across the surfaces of a huge pine dresser. Heavy woven rugs, William Morris curtains, an oil painting hanging above the fireplace.
‘It’s going to voicemail.’
‘Where is that?’ I was transfixed by a painting hanging above the fireplace, dusty strokes of blues and rusty greens.
‘That is the view from my parents’ house in Greece when they first bought it. It was just a shack really.’ He spoke as if to himself.
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘My mum fell in love with it, she did loads of these after we first moved in. For a while …’
‘Your mother painted this?’
‘That’s how they met. My mum grew up on the island and when she was in her early twenties she used to have a stall at the top of the village, selling her paintings. Dad was on holiday, stumbled upon her shop and …’
The thought of Meg popped back into my mind and I shook my head.
‘She said I have to move out, unless I can cover the rent on my own, which obviously I can’t …’
Pushing his phone back into his pocket, David looked at me.
‘Move in here.’ He said it straight away, as if the sounds had been poised on his lips all his life.
‘I mean it, why not? Move in.’
Even if I had wanted to hold back, my face would not contain itself. Lips curling at the edges, my chest lifted my whole body with something between gratitude and excitement, and something else too – an unease, a feeling I could not place, creeping in from the side.
‘Really, but …?’
David rose then, unwilling to hear it. ‘No buts.’
A moment of doubt, that is all there was. And then I felt myself nodding, pushing away the lingering sense of discomfort, stifling it with all my will until, just like that, it was gone.
CHAPTER 10 (#ulink_192acb6e-c4c8-554e-9781-70dbe66afca8)
Anna (#ulink_192acb6e-c4c8-554e-9781-70dbe66afca8)
The weeks passed slowly and then quickly in the months following Meg’s disappearance.
David spoke to Meg’s mother who told him she was surprised Meg had not been in contact with either of us directly and confirmed she was in Bristol, working for a paper, and was, for want of a better explanation, probably just busy.
Why had I refused to call? I told myself I was too hurt, but perhaps even then I was instinctively fearful of what I might find out.
There was a moment, one morning at the office not long after she left, when I found my hands hovering above the keyboard of my computer, her name at the tip of my fingers. But what would be the point? I moved my attention towards something else. I was not on Facebook, and neither was she; what would be gained from trawling the internet for her most recent press cuttings, other than confirmation that she had moved on – and that I should, too?
At first, I had taken Harry’s response to the news I was moving in with David as a form of contempt. There was a note in his voice that I did not recognise when I told him of my new living arrangements, and it pleased me.
‘I never knew you and David were so close …?’
‘We’re not. Well, not like that, obviously. He’s an old friend, and he’s living in this massive house on his own and … where else am I going to go?’
I swallowed, knowing I was crossing a line.
‘Anna, you know if I could, I would ask you to stay at mine. But it’s not …’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Would it help if I said I was jealous?’
‘Maybe.’ I smiled reluctantly, leaning forward to kiss him, but he was less easily distracted than I was.
‘So, this house, it belongs to David’s parents but they don’t live there?’
I was touched that he cared enough to want to understand my life.
‘Exactly. His dad is mega-rich, he’s usually away on business and when he’s in town he has a flat he uses. So that just leaves David and the house …’
‘And now you.’ He thought for a moment before nodding. ‘OK.’
It did not hint at anything out of the ordinary at the time, the excitement shining in his eyes as he raised his glass to his lips, his eyes holding mine as he drank.
It was a while later that he pushed the parameters of our relationship beyond the generally permissible limits, broaching the matter one night as we lay side by side, our legs entwined, between the sheets.
‘I know I said I was jealous of the idea of you and David sharing a house, but I wouldn’t mind if you and he …’
My body tensed. Sensing my reaction, he placed his hand gently in the small of my back.
‘That’s not because I don’t want you – you know that, right? It’s just … You and me, there’s no question over what we have.’
Swallowing, I chose to ignore that questions blew between us like sheets billowing precariously on a line.
His lips pressed against mine and the thought was pushed away. He was a free spirit, that was all it was. There was no reason to feel alarmed.
‘It’s just, if it makes life easier, you know? I have no problem with it.’
I tried to forget Harry’s words over the following weeks, but no matter how hard I tried to run from them, they chased me. The thought of his indifference, the ease with which he could accept the possibility of another man’s body on mine, following me into sleep … But there was an excitement too. The seed of a possibility of something I could sense if not name.
And over time, I suppose, the idea lost its menace. Was it that simple? Perhaps it wasn’t, but in the end it felt like little more than an inevitability.
We had been sitting on the sofa, David and I, flicking through magazines, a half-smoked spliff resting in the ashtray on the coffee table. It was not planned, not consciously at least. David leaned forward to reach his glass of water and I felt my fingers stop him, my hand on his shoulder. Then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, I was leaning in, my fingers lifting to his face, cupping his chin.
His mouth was dry from the weed, and I moistened it with my tongue, leaning him back against the sofa and lifting his shirt in slow, gentle tugging motions. His eyes were bloodshot and his face temporarily frozen. Throughout, I felt his want driving me, spurring me on, wondering how many times he had envisaged this moment.
Once he had finished I sat up and lifted the spliff from the ashtray, lighting it and inhaling deeply while he trembled on the sofa.
It was two months to the day after my first time with David that I stumbled upon the notes on Harry’s desk. We were lying on his bed watching a film on the laptop balanced on the duvet between us, the sound of a party flooding in from the flat above.
‘Do you want me to ask them to turn it down?’ I had asked as he fidgeted beside me, his hands refusing to settle.
‘What?’
‘The music …’
He looked confused and then batted his hand. ‘It doesn’t bother me.’
For a moment he was silent, and then he continued, shaking his head dismissively. His timing was perfect.
‘Sorry. It’s nothing, it’s just work.’
‘Anything I can help with?’
‘It’s just this story I’m working on.’ Leaning forward, he took a swig from his glass. ‘It’s nothing. Let’s just watch the film.’
The following morning I woke to find him already seated at his desk on the other side of the bedroom, his body folded over the table.
I loved watching him work, the way he argued with himself under his breath, chewing the tip of his pen, as he did now, absent-mindedly circling words on the page.
I pushed myself up to sitting. ‘What are you doing?’
‘You’re awake.’
He turned slightly from his chair, keeping his eyes fixed to the page. ‘I’m going to make coffee,’ he added without moving.
I smiled to myself, leaning back, breathing deeply, drinking in his smell, letting the coolness of the sheets settle against my skin.
‘It’s OK, I’ll make it.’ I went to stand but he got up first.
‘No, no, it’s fine. You stay there.’
I watched him walk through the bedroom door to the kitchen in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, the cotton rubbing against the curve of his shoulder blade.
Contentedly, I let my eyes drift around the room, soaking up the old press cuttings, a couple in frames against one wall, a thick stack of books on either side of the fireplace.
It was not like me to overstep boundaries with Harry. But it was in both our interests, I told myself as my toes pressed silently onto the floor next to the bed, the wooden boards soft against the soles of my feet.
Still, I was reassured by the sound of the kettle lightly humming in the kitchen as I wrapped the bedsheet around myself, turning slightly to the empty doorway before moving towards his desk.
I stopped again, giving myself a chance to back out; but it was not as if I was snooping, I reminded myself as I lowered myself slowly into his empty seat, which was still warm. It was hardly rummaging through his secret possessions; it was just a pile of papers and a pad, his writing, unconcealed, the thick, loopy scrawl of someone who thought too quickly.
I did not touch anything, I did not have to turn my head to read it. It was just there, in the middle of a series of words connected by arrows, streaking angrily back and forth across the page, the word ‘TradeSmart’ circled in pen.
My whole body tensed. That could not be right. I looked again, picking up the notepad this time, turning it so that the words were in sharp focus in front of my face.
As I raised the pad, a photo fell loose, landing face up on the floorboards by my feet. I looked down, and the image stared back at me. The single image of a boy, his extremities protruding from under a white sheet – a child of six or seven.
If it wasn’t for the skin, which was black, and the hair, which clung to his head in tight curls, it might have been Thomas. My own brother’s face, his skin unnaturally white that day, beneath a scattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose, had shared the same slackness of the jaw, the same unmistakable absence of life. His blond hair stuck to his forehead where he had pushed away the heat of the summer’s day with a tiny wrist.
‘Your coffee?’ Harry stopped when he saw my expression.
My eyes were unable to leave the photo. As if looking in from somewhere else, I heard myself gag, watched myself stand too quickly and then the chair falling away behind me.
‘Anna?’
Harry rushed towards me and I pulled myself away, making it to the bathroom just in time.
He had not been angry about me prying and, like a fool, I had taken his softness as a sign of his love. Rather, he had merely sighed, as if there was an inevitability about what was to come.
Leading me into the living room, he held a cigarette packet in his hand as we sat opposite each other on the sofa, spinning the box slowly between his fingers as he spoke.
After some deviation, we got to the point.
‘The thing is, Anna, for the past four years I’ve been part of a team looking at a company called TradeSmart.’
‘I know who they are.’
‘Of course you do.’
He dropped his eyes, looking away momentarily, releasing a small sigh.
‘Well, as you may or may not know, David’s dad’s company, they’re a massive FTSE 100 organisation. A leading logistics and commodity trading company, by their own account.’
He lit a cigarette, his forehead creasing, sliding the pack along to me.
‘Clive Witherall, David’s father, he’s …’ He paused. What was he thinking in that moment? Did he ever doubt me – did he ever wonder if it was safe to carry on? Or was I so clearly enraptured by then that he already knew what I would be prepared to do?
‘We haven’t met.’ I filled in the gaps.
He carried on after a moment, holding my eyes.
‘Well, as you might be aware, to the outside world, Witherall is a bit of a saint. Philanthropist, socialite … Runs a couple of orphanages in Central Africa, patron of several charities, friend to the great and the good, whatever else you like.’
He took a drag of his cigarette between words, exhaling a thin, steady stream of smoke.
‘You’ve probably seen him on TV. He’s a cocky fucker, always up on his soap-box, brazen as anything. What he’s less keen to stand up and talk about, though, is the fact that TradeSmart, for all its talk of corporate social responsibility and ethical foundations, is responsible for dumping a shitload of toxic waste at the edge of villages in Equatorial Guinea, through a series of local contractors. The fallout of which has meant thousands of people have died.’
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, unsure what to say.
‘Shit. That’s terrible.’
‘It is terrible. I mean, we’re talking babies, children, women … and hundreds more left with horrific health problems.’
I had no idea where this was going; I was just so happy, so grateful, to be party at last to his inner life. Perhaps once he learned he could trust me, then we could become a proper couple. I could move in, introduce him to my work colleagues …
Even then, my mind had skated to David but only for a second. The presents, the house? For Harry I would have given it all up in a second.
‘That’s so fucked up. I can’t believe it. I mean, seriously, to hear David talk about it, you would think his dad was like some kind of god. So you’re writing a piece about this?’
He pushed himself up from the sofa, moving purposefully back towards his desk, shoulders broadening.
He opened the drawer slowly, as if still unsure whether to show me or not. By the time he pulled out the folder, turning to face me with renewed purpose, he had me rapt.
‘It gets worse.’ His voice lowered as he sat. ‘A lot worse, Anna … The problem with people like Clive Witherall, you see, is that they have friends everywhere.’
I nodded along, the dutiful student.
‘And when you have the right friends in the right places and the means to take advantage of destabilised borders, there is no limit to what you can get away with … The problem is, right now, we’ve hit a wall. It doesn’t matter what we know, because if we can’t prove it—’
He cut himself off, his demeanour visibly shifting, as if suddenly aware of the line he had crossed.
‘God, Anna, I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear this.’
‘No, I do.’
I unfolded my legs, on cue, turning my attention to what he was holding. After just enough deliberation, he took a step towards me, taking in my silence as he handed me the file – an A4 folder, neatly stuffed with papers and photographs.
Amidst the horror of what was being revealed, there was something so natural about sitting there with him, the intensity of the secrets passing between us. I felt his eyes on me as I flicked through pages of transcripts, studying my reaction to the images of dead bodies scattered across a dirt track; weapons, lined up like contestants in a beauty pageant – caring what I thought.
Yet, as I turned the page again, I felt my chest contract. The image had hit me in the chest with the force of a hammer.
At first my eyes were hesitant to settle on the lines of the child’s face, but after that I could not wrench them away.
He would have been six or seven, the same age as Thomas, his eyes closed as if in sleep, peering out from under a white sheet. His mother’s arms were locked around her son, her face twisted; it was the same expression I saw when I closed my eyes at night.
Here, in Harry’s flat, in this image of someone else’s child, stiff and lifeless under the sheet, I saw the tiny mound of limbs on the driveway of my parents’ home, my own mother’s heart being torn from her body.
I dropped the file as soon as I saw it, turning from Harry, my fingernails running down my arms.
‘Anna?’
‘Who is that?’
Harry’s face gave nothing away, but clearly he knew he was safe to carry on.
‘This is one of the children who died after a TradeSmart contractor was paid to dump seriously toxic waste at the edge of a playground.’
He let the words settle, waiting for me to soak them in.
‘And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In that folder you’re holding we have transcripts from women, children who …’
He must have seen the unease that spread across my face.
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be telling you this.’
Taking a step back, he took a final pull of his cigarette before smearing the butt across the windowsill and letting it drop from his hand.
We were silent for a few minutes. I don’t remember taking a single breath as I processed his words, leaning forward, the image of the boy’s body soldering into me, intensified by my desperation for Harry’s faith in me. Desperation not just to know, but to be the one he chose to confide in.
‘Harry, please tell me.’
I could feel the burning in my cheeks as he sat back at the other end of the sofa, cupping his face with his hands. Closing his eyes, he circled his fingers over the dark lids, tracing the grooves of his skull.
Eventually, his hands dropped away from his face and he bent his knees, lowering himself beside me. I moved closer in response, holding out my hands.
‘How can I help? Is there research, or could I …’
He shook his head.
‘Oh, come on, Harry. I could do it, you know I could. You know how committed I am, I could help …’
He looked away, clearing his throat, preparing himself.
‘Of course I know that, Anna. It’s not that I … It’s just …’
The more he resisted me, the more forcefully I pleaded with him.
‘Come on. What’s wrong with you? You have just told me this man is a child murderer, but you don’t want as much help as you can get in exposing him? I live with his son, for God’s sake, Harry. We’re sleeping together. How could you not want to use me?’
How, in uttering those words, did I not understand what was happening?
‘You would do that?’ Holding my gaze, he sniffed. ‘There are complications.’
I stayed quiet then, giving him the space he needed, the room to make the decision for himself.
‘OK.’ He had said it as if to himself. ‘You really want to know, then I’ll tell you. I don’t really know how to … So I’m just going to come out and say it. I’m not writing an article about TradeSmart.’
I stared back at him blankly.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m not writing a piece about Clive Witherall. I’m looking into him, yes, but it’s not for an article. Not for a newspaper. The truth is, I’m working for … an organisation, an agency, let’s say, to help bring down a man essentially responsible for genocide. And yes, we do need your help, desperately. I just don’t know if I can …’
He looked at me for a final time before continuing.
‘The problem is that Clive, he’s an extremely powerful man … What we really need is someone on the inside, someone who can get close to him …’
The realisation slowly dawned. Drawing a cigarette from the packet he had dropped on the sofa, I let it roll between my fingers as I listened.
‘Who is we?’
He held my gaze, unblinking.
My voice sounded more self-assured than I had expected, when I continued.
‘Harry, if you expect me to trust you it has to go both ways. You can’t ask me to be involved with something and not tell me who I’m getting involved with. You can’t think I’m that naive.’
The truth, of course, was that he hardly needed to say, and I hardly needed to push. We both knew what we were talking about. MI5, MI6 … Did it matter which? I wasn’t prepared to ask myself the right questions at the time, let alone to ask him. But the truth is, it can’t have been that easy. There must have been a moment in which I stepped back long enough to question where all this would lead, a chill grazing the bare skin of my forearms. Yet, if there was any doubt, I have pushed it so far into the recesses of my memory that I cannot get it back.
‘You wouldn’t have to report to anyone but me. You would be paid a retainer.’
He said it as an afterthought, having returned from the kitchen with a bottle of whisky and two glasses.
‘Obviously it would come from another source so it didn’t look obvious.’
Had a smile formed on my lips? Or was it something else I was feeling, a sense that I was stepping with each second that passed towards devastating self-destruction?
It was hard to say right now exactly how much money I would receive, Harry added, but enough to make my life comfortable.
‘Only this has to come from you. If you were going to get involved in this, Anna, it would have to be off your own bat. You hear me? For the right reasons – because you wanted to help.’
My expression must have sharpened, a pang of annoyance that he even needed to say this.
‘No one will think any less of you if you decide you can’t. Plenty of people know awful things are happening but choose – understandably – not to get involved. Even if they could help, they don’t. And that doesn’t mean that they’re bad people, it just means—’
‘I get it.’
He considered me for a while, as if noticing something in my face that he had not seen before. After a minute or so, he nodded.
‘If you’re serious … Either way, you need to go away and give it some thought. Let me know, when you’re ready.
‘More than anything,’ he added, drawing a line under the conversation, ‘you must know that I will always be there, if you decide to go ahead. If ever you need me.’
CHAPTER 11 (#ulink_a8543664-b7e8-5a7f-8459-8109033cecf1)
Anna (#ulink_a8543664-b7e8-5a7f-8459-8109033cecf1)
David had already left by the time I woke up. Drawn outside by the light spilling in through every crevice of the house, the sound of the birds perched on the feeder outside the kitchen window, I took my cup onto the patio.
Following the curve of the garden, I walked towards the ornate iron bench which stood next to the door leading out onto the Heath, settling to feel the morning sun brushing against my face, the occasional call of a dog walker, the gurgle of a toddler, rising over the wall.
This is where I was still sitting, nursing a cup of cold coffee, when David appeared through the French doors half an hour later. It was a Saturday morning and the promise of spring danced between puffs of light cloud.
He wore a look of appreciation as he approached, the sun lighting him from behind. With the halo effect of the light around his head, I had a flash of memory: that first afternoon drinking together on the beach at Brighton. It was the same look, one that I could now recognise as adoration, which he wore then. Without the affectations of his university brand – the Camden Market-style jewellery traded in for a simple leather watch; the hooded jumper replaced with a casual light blue shirt – he looked younger, somehow, like a boy who had raided his father’s wardrobe.
He was about to say something, I could tell, but he paused briefly, as if enjoying the spectacle of this moment together in the garden of the house he grew up in too much to interrupt. When he finally pulled up a chair, he pressed his lips on mine.
I smiled, pulling myself slightly away from him, meeting his eyes.
‘I was thinking, we should get a gardener,’ I said, once he had settled himself, leaning back against the bench, his legs splayed.
I had been working up to the suggestion over the past few days, still unsure whether it was within my remit to request such a thing. This was still very much his family home but, beautiful as it was, it had begun to feel frayed, the toll of David’s once steady stream of parties having worn into the edges.
He shrugged. ‘Sure.’ The glint in his eyes remained intact.
I nodded, pleased at his easy reaction, looking away for a moment before feeling my attention drawn back to him.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
He was staring, the smile pinched at either side of his mouth.
‘What, David?’ I tried not to sound impatient, pushing playfully at his arm. ‘What do you want?’
‘I bought croissants,’ he said, reaching down towards a shopping bag. ‘And juice.’
I arranged myself in my chair, ‘Excellent, thank you.’
‘And …’ he paused before reaching into his pocket, drawing out an envelope. There was a loaded silence and then he started to speak. ‘These past months with you … I know, I know, but humour me, please … These past few months with you have been the best of my life. I know it sounds horribly cheesy but it’s true. And …’
He made the sound of a drum-roll, then placed the envelope between my fingers.
Trying to read his face, I opened it and pulled out two tickets, feeling my heartbeat rise.
He watched me as I raised one hand to my mouth, the other hand clutching the plane tickets. ‘Oh my God, David, I can’t, this is too much …’
‘It’s not.’
He held my knee in his hand, squeezing harder with every second that passed.
‘I know sometimes maybe you feel I’m pushing things too fast, but I really mean it when I say that you are the most extraordinary girl …’ He corrected himself, ‘You are the most extraordinary woman I’ve ever met. And I know how hard you’ve been working, and, well, it’s a selfish act. I want you there, I want you to meet my family. My dad.’
He watched me, my teeth biting down onto my lip so that I could taste the blood inside my mouth.
‘Sorry, that sounded intense. I just mean I want to spend time with you, away from here. I want you to be part of my life. Properly.’
I swallowed, looking up at him, pausing just long enough to see his desire grow a little more.
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Say you’ll come?’ He moved closer.
Greece. I felt my stomach flip.
Placing my hand on the side of my chair to steady myself, I breathed in.
‘I’ll come.’
‘He’s invited me to Greece.’
I blurted it out as soon as I had stepped inside Harry’s front door, the reality of what was happening jolting through me in fretful waves.
It was only the third time I had been at the flat since I moved in with David, feigning overnight stays with friends; claims I had been waiting for him to question, and which he never did – trusting me implicitly from the very start.
Harry was still standing with one hand on the front door, but after a moment a smile crept across his face and he pushed it closed.
‘Really?’
He moved towards me and for once I moved away, unsure of what I needed, unable to stand still long enough to accept his touch.
He was gentle with me, careful not to push, always gauging his impact on me perfectly.
‘And Clive, he’ll be there too?’
‘Of course.’
‘You’re brilliant.’
This time I stayed put as he placed his hands on my hips, pressing his palms against the gentle roll of the bone.
‘What did you say when he asked you?’
‘What do you think?’
He nodded, absorbing my words. I felt his eyes weighing me up, the balance of power between us shifting imperceptibly.
‘And you are OK with this?’ He spoke quietly, but his words were weighted.
‘Yes.’ My voice was less steady now, less convinced. I felt my body shake, my face turning to the table where his cigarettes lay.
Harry followed my gaze and leaned over to pick up the packet, pulling one out and pressing it into my hand.
‘Are you sure? Because you don’t seem sure.’
‘Harry, for fuck’s sake, I’m sure.’
I stooped to accept his lighter before looking up sharply. His lack of faith had provoked me. What did he think I had been doing these past months?
Sensing my unease, he clamped his right hand softly around the base of my neck, my flesh tingling at his touch. Closing my eyes, I felt the words fall from my mouth, ‘I’ve missed you.’
CHAPTER 12 (#ulink_f31ea7d4-cf3d-5e8a-8b10-b6c135bd9b79)
Anna (#ulink_f31ea7d4-cf3d-5e8a-8b10-b6c135bd9b79)
The airport that first time was an assault on my senses. Keeping close to David, I followed the endless lines, past armed police officers, parents with toddlers on leashes, women with fixed smiles seizing bottles of perfume; the cacophony of beeps and hums taunting me as I scanned the customs hall for cues as to how to behave.
It had not occurred to me to leave my second phone in my suitcase, and it was not the kind of question I had thought to ask when Harry was talking me though the plan, mistaking my continuous probing for direction in best practice, rather than a plea for basic information. Short of admitting I had never been abroad before, how could I explain to someone to whom international travel was second nature that other than knowing to take my passport, I had no idea what to expect?
While I had never directly lied to Harry about my past, there was plenty I hadn’t mentioned. Our relationship, I was sure, relied on him believing me to possess a degree of sophistication that the full truth would instantly belie.
At security, I mirrored David’s movements, laying my possessions out in a plastic tray, feeling the customs officer’s eyes on me as she beckoned me through a metal arch that shot out a cry as I passed through.
Beckoning me forward, the woman pressed her hand against my body, her palms running up and down my thighs as perspiration stung the top of my lip.
‘Could you empty your pockets for me, please?’
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
David, a metre or so away, was repacking the contents of his rucksack. My hands shaking, I reached hesitantly into the lining of my jacket.
The woman raised an eyebrow, as if to ask, two phones?
‘One’s for work.’ I spoke quickly, my eyes moving to David, who was making his way towards me now.
‘Everything OK?’
Working hard to hold his attention with my eyes, to distract him from my fingers, I arranged my face into a smile, the blood pounding in my chest.
When the customs officer spoke again, I missed her words.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said, you’ll have to run them through the X-ray. Go back through.’
She was becoming exasperated, as were the family behind us, the toddler’s screams growing louder with each second that passed.
Giving David a smile, I followed the woman’s pointed finger back through the metal archway, moving as fast as was reasonable towards the stack of plastic trays, placing the phones side by side in the rectangular cradle. As I scanned my mind for possible explanations I could use to reassure David, all I could focus on was the sound of the child’s voice rising in shrill peaks behind me; the wail of the metal detectors going off one after another across the hall, rising and falling like an air-raid siren.
I could of course repeat that it was a work phone, but he would be instantly suspicious as to why I hadn’t mentioned it before. All of this, everything, relied on me giving him no reason to doubt anything I said. Ever. The moment he started to question me, even for something seemingly innocuous, would be the moment everything would start to unravel.
Besides, I wondered, could I lie to his face without giving myself away? It seems laughable now that I had credited myself with having so much integrity.
David’s eyes stayed on mine as he continued walking towards me, trance-like, and I held them there, willing him with every inch of my body not to look away. If his gaze so much as slipped towards the glistening line of tiny crystals of sweat that had formed above my lips, the spell would be broken.
As I opened my mouth to speak – to tell the only lie my mind could fathom – there was a sound like a gunshot and every eye in the room swooped towards me. Instantly, the room fell quiet. A second later, there was a wail from the child behind us and it was then that I understood the source of the noise: a bottle of milk the boy’s parents had been using in an attempt at placation being thrown and hitting the ground with the force of a missile.
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Charlotte Philby
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: WHAT WOULD YOU SACRIFICE TO UNCOVER THE TRUTH? ‘I devoured this’ Erin Kelly ‘Compulsive’ i Paper ‘Enigmatic’ Louise Candlish ‘A page-turning thriller’ BBC Radio 4 Open Book ‘Chilling’ Good Housekeeping ‘Addictive’ Joanna Cannon ‘Compelling’ Daily Telegraph On the surface, Anna Witherall personifies everything the aspirational magazine she works for represents. Married to her university boyfriend David, she has a beautiful home and gorgeous three-year-old twin daughters, Stella and Rose. But beneath the veneer of success and happiness, Anna is hiding a dark secret, one that threatens to unravel everything she has worked so hard to create. As Anna finds herself drawn into the dark and highly controlled world of secret intelligence, she is forced to question her family’s safety, and her own. Only one thing is certain: in order to protect her children, she must leave them, forever. And someone is watching. Someone she thought she could trust. Someone who is determined to make them all pay. Stylish and assured, The Most Difficult Thing is an irresistible combination of contemporary espionage and domestic suspense, and a compulsive, highly charged examination of betrayal.