That Night Page 8

  ‘You’re sure it’s sensible?’ she asks.

  He pauses. ‘I think so,’ he says. ‘We need to – we need to throw people off the scent.’ He winces as he says it. Cathy’s face is expressionless, but, as he walks down the stone corridor away from her room, he thinks he might be able to hear her heave a deep, sad sigh.

  In Verona, Joe inches into a stuffy alleyway and stares at the wallet in his hands. On the underside, in a disused flap, he sees the distinctive curl of a piece of paper in there. He inches it out slowly. Written on it, in pen, are four digits:

  8305.

  A PIN.

  Joe’s shoulders sag in relief. He has a PIN. He’ll go to a cashpoint, one without CCTV, and use it. Withdraw a hundred euros, to make it look like William was headed somewhere. Less risky. Less chance of a person asking him what he’s doing. Less chance of getting caught out.

  It has taken Joe half an hour, so far, to find a cashpoint without CCTV. He has bought an ice-cream and taken many crap photos, trying to look like a wandering tourist. He would never be this person in normal circumstances, has no interest in weird fucking nude monuments and ruins, not now that they have owned the villa for several years. He’s done the touristy stuff.

  He stands, now, scanning the bottom of the buildings. No cashpoints. A Jack Russell being pulled along too quickly by a dickhead owner catches his attention. He stares at it. It has a very obvious – to Joe – luxating patella. A tell-tale hind-limb skip, which makes it trot like it is a rabbit, not a dog. It probably needs an operation on its knee. Joe watches it for a few seconds more, thinking of saying something, but stops himself when he sees a cashpoint in the distance without any CCTV around it and BANCOMAT written in blue above. It’s time to focus, not to draw attention to himself.

  He hurries over and inserts William’s card into the machine with a satisfying plastic zip. The machine prompts in Italian for the PIN. 8305, he types dutifully, then waits.

  PIN ERRATO, the machine says, with three horrifying beeps. Joe’s shoulders are up by his ears immediately. His head drops. ‘Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, piss, fuck.’

  The machine says something in Italian. He sees BANCO. Communicate, is that? Communicate with your bank?

  Joe feels like his body is swarming with bees. His knees are buzzing. He can barely stand up straight. He staggers away from the cashpoint, past the luxating dog, and back to the bus stop, the wallet in his pocket feeling radioactive.

  The PIN was probably for another card, or an old one. How could he be so stupid? Why did he assume it was for the debit card?

  He’s fucked it, he thinks. He is fucked. They can’t afford to make mistakes, and yet he has. He flags down the bus, his arm feeling weak, and collapses into the air-conditioned seat, his head in his hands. After a few seconds, he stops himself. He’s got to look normal. He straightens up, looking around him, then sees the CCTV, an unblinking eye at the front of the bus, trained exactly on him. For a moment – just one – he is certain he will see this footage. Exhibited, somewhere, as evidence, at Frannie’s trial.

  17.

  Now

  Jason’s Office, late February, 5.00 p.m.

  Another Tuesday in endless February.

  I am waiting to see Jason. Five o’clock in his anteroom. Both heaters are on, pumping stinging hot air on to my knees. I’m glad of it. Even out here, I can smell his room. Old books, coffee.

  I’m checking Facebook for updates from my family. I don’t do it too often – it’s a kind of masochism, I guess – but I can’t resist it today. It’s been so long since I have seen any of them: since I have been permitted to see any of them.

  As I wait, I turn up the heaters, put my feet clad in tights on them – Jason won’t mind – and browse.

  To Joe, first. He never puts much on there, and especially not lately, but there are a few nuggets here and there for me to find. He signed a petition about Guide Dogs a while ago, which has remained on his profile since the last time I checked. Still the same profile photo, taken a few weeks before the holiday. The same sunglasses he wore the day after the cover-up. I bet he’s thrown them out now. He has taken Vets 24 off his current occupation, he’s just listed as a vet, location unknown.

  Paul has stopped asking for him. He used to, all the time, in that nonsensical way children do. The same way he asks often if it is his birthday. Paul is an information-hoarder. One day, after everything happened, he said, note perfect, ‘Joe won’t want to see us for a long time,’ an exact imitation of me.

  Jason greets me, notepad in hand, half a Mars Bar in the other. ‘Good week?’ he says, as he always does. He doesn’t have on any shoes today. I glance down, distracted by his pink socks. ‘Sorry,’ he says with a short laugh. ‘Shoes got wet in this pissing weather. Hope you don’t mind.’

  He sits down and crosses his legs in that way that he does, and looks at me, one pink foot bobbing up and down. ‘Why don’t we begin to talk about it, instead of around it?’ he says, his eyes directly on me.

  ‘Verona?’ I say.

  ‘Of course.’ He holds my gaze for two seconds, three, four, then gives a deliberate, disarming shrug.

  ‘Okay.’ I breathe deeply. I knew this would happen. Some of our meetings have been led by me, about emotions, things I wanted to talk about. But now I guess it is time to grasp the stinging nettle.

  Jason clicks the top of his pen, poised, finally, to jot anything down. Of course. The notepad. He intended that we discuss it formally today.

  I don’t speak for several minutes, and he lets the silence stretch on. A road gritter moves along in the rain on the street below.

  I close my eyes. It’s got to happen. It is happening. And I have to be ready to talk about it. Properly. Jason, the lawyer, must take my statement. He has been so patient, until now – once told me he has given me so much more time than other clients because he felt sorry for me, but here we are.

  ‘It was eighteen months ago,’ I start falteringly. Eighteen months since my family changed, and over a year since I last saw them. ‘It began on holiday.’

  18.

  Then

  Lydia

  ‘I can’t do this,’ Lydia says tearfully to Joe in their bedroom the second he walks in. He’s been taking back the hire car, to save money, which irritated Lydia. Holidays are not for saving money on. Holidays are for not really knowing what fifty euros is, exactly, in pounds, and spending it anyway.

  ‘What?’ Joe says, stopping dead, like he’s heard a gunshot.

  ‘Another negative test.’ She kicks her feet against the bed. ‘That’s all,’ she adds in a small voice, his overreaction making her infertility seem trivial, though she knows that’s irrational. She hates that this is ruining her holiday. That she’s letting it.

  Her infertility. That is how Lydia has begun to think of it. In the early months, she would tell herself that it would happen soon. That, if not, they would access fertility tests, IVF, even. She kept a note of all of this on her phone: a list of all of the reasons why things will be fine, why they will work out. And these things are happening, she tells herself forcefully now. They are accessing it. But, like a patient in a coma who has never once responded to any stimulus, lying there day after day as new things are tried, it’s hard to keep the hope alive. Rationalizing worry or lying to herself. She isn’t sure. Her mind chunters away at this particular worry, thinking and thinking and thinking about it. All pointless.

  Joe’s face falls into sympathy. ‘It’s me,’ he says immediately. ‘I bet it’s me.’

  ‘It’s not fucking you,’ she says. She turns away from him. His bluntness, his anxiety, it is so selfish, sometimes. ‘It’s nothing,’ she adds. ‘It’s neither of us.’

  ‘It is nothing,’ he agrees immediately, to his credit. ‘It’ll happen. Nothing ever stays the same.’

  He’s right. People conceive all the time, don’t they, even after they have struggled? People who go on holidays. People who have arranged the first adoption interview. Peo
ple who have one-night stands. Desperate people. Relaxed people. It can still happen for them. Lydia raises her eyes to the bedroom window. She will be a mother, she knows it, and she can’t wait to meet her children. Although she is certain they will be delinquents, raised by somebody who is – already – obsessed with baby-led weaning and the no-cry sleep method.

  Joe comes right up to her and kisses the very end of her nose. ‘Is my Lydia sad?’ he says to her.

  ‘She is sad,’ Lydia says back to him, leaning into him.

  ‘The end of your nose is wet now,’ Joe says, still kissing it. ‘Like a lovely little dog.’

  Lydia laughs. God, he can always make her smile. He’s as mad as she is.

  She wonders how it is for him. Infertility. She asked him, once, and he lolled his head against the doorframe like a teenager and said he was fine.

  The thing is, he has Paul. He is Joe’s compensation, but Lydia doesn’t have that, doesn’t speak to a single member of her family. It was shortly after she met the Plants that it all went wrong at home for Lydia. A prying teacher at school, asking how come Lydia sometimes seemed so sad. A concealed bruise uncovered. An accidental secret told, and then the rest. The social workers. The anger-management classes her father failed to attend and her mother laughed off. The temporary relocation a social worker told her would take place as she collected her from school on a Thursday one November. How Lydia watched temporary become permanent, as the trees lost and regained their leaves, though nobody said as much. A Christmas with a foster family who had different traditions, who did presents after lunch.

  Even now, when she finds herself socializing with the Plants, with these glamorous beautiful vets, whom she would only have ever admired from afar, she allows herself a small smile. For them, and their normal parents, but also for her, and how far she’s come. She is not there any more, back in her childhood, in that house where her mother never opened the curtains, where her father smoked so much the entire room looked grey, and thank fucking God for that. She is here, about to have her own child, and to right some past wrongs.

  But it isn’t quite the same. Paul is adorable, but he isn’t hers. She has nobody to anchor herself to.

  She lies on the bed and checks her phone. She might have a nap. The heat out there is too much at lunch-time.

  ‘Lyds,’ Joe says. He looks at her, a familiar expression on his face. ‘We can’t solve everything, you know? It’s a kestrel-in-the-shower situation.’

  Lydia feels a grin crack across her features. In the early days of Joe joining the practice, he began a pattern of behaviour that he has yet to break. Lydia still remembers that first time. It was only a few weeks after he’d started, his first set of nights. She’d woken in the morning, Joe sleeping next to her after getting in sometime after six. It had been a deep winter morning, the heating creaking, no light from outside. Lydia had stumbled into the bathroom, reaching for her towel in the half-light. All she remembers is turning on the bathroom light to find an injured kestrel sitting in the shower tray, staring at her in equal surprise. She’d screamed, and Joe had rushed in, and said, ‘Oh, yes, there’s a kestrel in there,’ and they’d doubled over in laughter. ‘He’s had better days,’ Joe had said, pointing to his leg. ‘I couldn’t leave him.’ Joe had turned and gestured then to a handwritten sign he’d attached to the door of the bathroom. Warning!!!!! it said. There is a kestrel in here! ‘Hardly an explanation,’ Lydia had said drily, and Joe had kneeled down to check the bird’s leg and said, ‘Don’t kick a kestrel while he’s down.’ Other animals had followed – most memorably, an owl sitting calmly on the arm of their sofa, which Lydia discovered when getting a glass of water – but a kestrel in the shower became marital shorthand for trying to take on too many problems at once.

  ‘I know,’ she says, flashing him a small smile. ‘We haven’t had one for a while.’

  ‘I’ll bring you home a real nice kestrel soon,’ Joe says easily, moving some clothes off one of the chairs.

  Her phone makes a noise, the BBC Breaking News noise. ‘Wow – have you heard this?’ she says, showing him. Joe finally stops tidying and looks at her.

  ‘A major search is under way in the hills just outside Verona, Italy, as British national, William McGovern, thirty-one, is missing,’ Lydia reads.

  ‘Oh.’ The bed dips with Joe’s weight as he sits down next to her.

  Lydia keeps reading. ‘He lived near here,’ she says looking up at Joe. ‘He was a policeman, apparently. An Italian policeman but half British.’ Joe is completely still next to her, as though she hasn’t even spoken, likely not even listening.

  Maybe the test was wrong. It was too early. Not enough HCG in her system yet. She calculates it. It’s possible. It’s just possible. Hope ignites for Lydia. Yes. She hasn’t yet had her period – due sometime today but still not here. She may yet be a mother. She might already be a mother, she thinks, wondering if sperm has met egg, after all.

  ‘Do you think I should do another test – tomorrow?’ Lydia says, putting down her phone. ‘I know I sound mad,’ she adds, expecting him to laugh, to indulge her as he usually does.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Joe says tightly. He reaches for her phone and reads the news article. Typical Joe. He can’t engage with difficult topics except about animals and his bloody sisters.

  No, she’s just jealous, Lydia tells herself. Stop being petty. They are not more deserving of their beautiful, cohesive family unit than her. It is just luck, just bad luck.

  ‘I haven’t had my period yet,’ she says, but that makes him stare at her phone even more intently.

  ‘I can’t believe about that policeman,’ he says.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s too hot in here,’ Joe says, opening a window. He leans over Lydia to do it, and she breathes him in. But, for just a second, she sees the Joe the rest of the world sees. Caustic, difficult. Not her Joe, interior Joe, soft as butter. Usually.

  19.

  Joe

  Joe hears Cathy sigh through her nose. ‘A policeman,’ she says. The three of them have locked themselves in the main bathroom in a panic, hiding from Lydia.

  The bathroom is hideous – truly, enough to give you nightmares, but not enough to make you renovate it when it’s hot outside. A monstrous white bath tub with three stairs leading up to it. The sort of bath you’d have an orgy in. Beige stone tiles everywhere, up the walls, up the steps to the bath, across the ceiling …

  ‘It shouldn’t matter,’ Frannie says from her position on the bottom bath step. She is fiddling with an expensive glass bottle of bath oil, taking the cap on and off. Joe wishes she wouldn’t, feels like a teacher with a fidgeting student. Every time she does so, the room is filled with the cloying scent of roses. Her gaze is fixed in the middle distance as she does it, and he wishes she would concentrate.

  Lydia isn’t pregnant. Lydia isn’t pregnant. She retreated into the toilet, came out pale-faced and wan. Her period had arrived. Amazing how much that fact still bothers him, even in this mad, surreal, murderous context.

  He and his sisters have been in the bathroom, discussing the fact that William was a policeman, and getting their stories straight. According to the news, local police in Verona are going to begin interviewing any potential eyewitnesses this afternoon. Joe had wondered why it was so fast, and now he knows: they haven’t killed a civilian. They have killed a fucking cop.

  ‘Do you have that piece of paper?’ Cathy says to Joe.

  ‘The incorrect PIN?’

  ‘No,’ Cathy says, her voice just slightly sharper than usual, the only variance Joe has been able to spot since he told her about his botched cashpoint attempt. ‘That piece of paper, remember, the thing from his pocket with the – with the blood on it.’

  ‘Oh,’ Joe says. ‘Sorry. Sorry, my brain doesn’t work as fast as yours.’

  ‘Nobody’s does,’ Frannie says. ‘Cathy is the hare and we are the tortoises.’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ Cathy says.

  �
�A beautiful hare,’ she says to Cathy. ‘And a handsome tortoise,’ to Joe, which makes him smile.

  ‘Can tortoises be –’

  ‘The paper?’ Cathy says.

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’ He unlocks the bathroom as quietly as he can and creeps down the stone hallway to his bedroom, sliding the wallet and the piece of paper out of the pocket in the lining of his suitcase.

  Back in the bathroom, he passes it to Cathy. She sits down next to Frannie – who is, typically, being of no assistance – and spreads it on the step between them, looking at it. Their tanned legs stretch out in front of them. They’re both in denim shorts, Frannie in a halter neck that exposes too many ribs, Cathy in a pale denim shirt that shows off her tanned arms.

  ‘Let’s just google it,’ Frannie says.

  ‘We can’t translate it online, remember?’ Joe snaps. ‘In case … in case anyone ever looks.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Frannie says. ‘Sorry. I forgot.’

  ‘Again.’

  ‘Look – I’m trying, okay? I’m sorry.’ She starts fiddling with her phone.

  ‘I hope you haven’t told the cavalry,’ Joe says, which is how he refers to her many friends and acquaintances. Frannie is the only thirty-something he knows who has a TikTok account.

  ‘Of course I haven’t,’ she says, hurt.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Cathy says kindly. ‘Look. This doesn’t mean we can’t decipher it in some way. He was a police officer. You know?’

  Joe stares at her, waiting.

  ‘We have new information,’ she says patiently. Joe feels a sting of shame that she is always three steps ahead of him.

  ‘He must have been off-duty in the market,’ Frannie says. She pulls the cap off the bath oil again and Cathy takes it from her. ‘What?’ she says.

  ‘Stop messing with stuff. Everything. Your phone goes off all the time.’ As if on cue, it makes a noise, and Frannie looks at it, her cheeks red.