32

KAREN’S PARENTS WERE on their way.

‘Christ,’ Bruce had said to Noel when he phoned earlier, ‘why didn’t you call yesterday? Why are we finding this out now?’

Noel could hear Mary whimpering like a whipped dog in the background.

If Karen was gone for good Mary wouldn’t get over it. Noel knew that. Bruce would. He’d soldier on, Noel suspected, as his military training had taught him to, and he would not be broken.

Mary would be torn apart.

‘We’d had a few cross words yesterday,’ Noel lied. ‘I thought she had gone off on her own to prove a point. I really didn’t want to trouble you with it. I suppose I was embarrassed, Bruce.’

‘So why not call us this morning, when she wasn’t back?’

‘The police came…and I needed to go into the station to give a statement. I’m really sorry, but time just got away from me. Before I knew it half the day had gone.’

‘What else did they say? Have the police found anything to suggest what happened?’

‘Not as yet,’ Noel said.

He did not tell him about the blood.

‘They told me to keep an open mind,’ he added. ‘Said to remain optimistic.’

Another lie.

Noel wasn’t a natural liar, but something about Bruce made the lies tumble out of him at an alarming rate. Ordinarily, it was harmless stuff. Yes, the gutters were cleared out at the end of November, Bruce. No, sadly my finances won’t stretch to any more investments right now…Yes, I realize it is a missed opportunity.

He’d tried to talk them out of coming to Windermere. ‘There’s really nothing you can do. There’s nothing any of us can do,’ he said to Bruce. ‘You may as well sit tight until we have some more news.’ He didn’t want them there. The last thing he needed was Bruce in his home, bossing him about, scrutinizing his every move. Which was why he’d delayed telling them in the first place, he supposed. Because he knew Bruce would say, ‘We’ll be on the road in an hour.’ Which he had. And so now they were.

Noel wondered idly if perhaps Mary would bring a fruit cake. She seemed to have a production line going from late September through to Christmas, each one progressively more booze-laden than the previous, and they would all coo over it during the grand unveiling on Boxing Day. (Though not Bruce. Too rich. Marzipan repeats on me something terrible.)

Would Noel still have to spend Christmas with them this year? He really hoped not.

Noel put the idea out of his head for the moment and opened the fridge. They were almost out of milk. Then he checked his watch. He should have been back at the surgery for three thirty, but of course he’d had to call and ask for someone to cover his appointments. Not that he wanted to. He’d far rather have been at work than dealing with Bruce and Mary, but he could see it wouldn’t look good. He could imagine Joanne Aspinall assessing him suspiciously in that way of hers: You went to work? Frowning at the same time, the skin between her eyes puckering a little, but still quite pretty all the same.

He wondered if she’d ever been married. She gave off an air of independence, but that didn’t mean anything. The divorcees he saw at work were fiercely independent. Suddenly, women who had been Tired All the Time would be out jogging at six in the morning, taking college courses in nursing and accountancy, and generally making the world go round.

He’d never been with a truly independent woman. Once Jennifer became pregnant, she gave up being on a career path, as her mother had, and as her mother had before her. In Jennifer’s grandmother’s day, in Ireland, it was not considered decent for a heavily pregnant woman to be seen at work, and Noel had questioned Jennifer about it, saying that surely she didn’t think this was still the case?

‘Absolutely not,’ she replied. ‘I hate my job. Always have. It’s boring as hell and I can’t wait to give it up.’

He didn’t mind. Why would he?

Karen, meanwhile, didn’t have a job when they met, and she gave the vague excuse of ‘It’s not quite the right time’ as the reason for this.

And then she found out she was pregnant, so that was that.

He wondered what it would be like to be with a woman such as Joanne. She was looking for love, he knew that. But a woman like her wouldn’t want his baggage. They never did. They wanted the dream, the fairy-tale. They didn’t want a twice-married heavy drinker who was responsible for three kids and an ex-wife with MS. (And there was also the small matter of her thinking he might have murdered his wife. Or else his daughter had.) Still, he reflected on that night they’d had together, and he couldn’t shake off the thought of her. Joanne was a woman starved of touch and he was a man starved of warmth, and the two of them had found each other in the most unlikely of places.

Would it happen again?

Doubtful.

From the way Joanne had questioned him earlier, he got the impression they thought Karen was dead. He assumed they’d found more evidence than they were willing to share. So he knew he had to tell Ewan and the girls of the possibility of Karen never coming home. They’d want to know what Bruce and Mary were doing there. And once news that Karen’s car had been found abandoned got round, the whole village would be talking about it.

How should he go about wording it? he wondered. He didn’t want to alarm Brontë unnecessarily, but he needed to prepare her, and it would be wrong to keep it from her. He wondered if he could drum up the emotion necessary and realized rather quickly he wasn’t sure he could. This could turn out to be one of those moments. A defining moment in Brontë’s life which, if played wrongly, she could use as a stick to beat him with when she was older and her life hadn’t turned out the way she’d wanted it to.

You didn’t even cry for her. Not one single tear.

The truth was, he wasn’t particularly sad that Karen had gone. The Catholic and father in him had been prepared to stick the marriage out for the duration. He’d screwed up one child’s life and he didn’t plan on screwing life up for Ewan and Brontë as well. ‘You can’t stay together if you’re not happy, just for the sake of the kids,’ folk liked to say, and Noel thought, Yes you can. You can do exactly that.

But now life had presented him with this way out. He was going to have to act upset if he was going to pull it off, or else there would be suspicion. Already Joanne had queried his initial response to Karen’s disappearance, so he needed to up his game. She’d actually been rather tough on him, relentless in her questioning, which should have had him panicked, but he’d found it all rather appealing. She’d become quite the school ma’am, and he expected she got results. One of those relentless detectives who never lost a case.

For a second he pictured her naked in his oval bath at the end of a hard day, her lovely hair spilling over the edge. He would bring her large glasses of red wine and small squares of cheese, and he would soap her feet while they discussed cases, and—

The doorbell was ringing.

Noel stood at the mirror in the hallway. The one that Karen would scowl into each day before leaving the house. Unusually for him, he looked quite healthy. A little too healthy, considering the circumstances.

Noel gave his eyes a hard rub with the heels of his hands. Then he unstraightened his collar, pulled his tie over to one side and ruffled his hair a little.

‘Bruce, Mary,’ he said solemnly when he’d opened the door, and gave a small shudder, as though a cry were trapped inside his throat. ‘Thank God you’ve come.’