29

It was late morning already, and Lizzie stirred in the single bed of her childhood. On a shelf opposite the bed were her running trophies and medals. She reached to the floor, picked up her phone and googled Mark Brannon. The search window filled within seconds. There was a video appeal and she tilted the phone to landscape and pressed the play triangle. A fat man in a grey striped suit, white shirt and shiny grey tie was addressing the camera. The strip beneath read: Detective Chief Inspector James Fedden.

‘Mark, I am reaching out to you. You must feel terrified about what is going on and you must be looking for a way to stop it. We know . . .’ The video buffered on Lizzie’s mother’s slow Wi-Fi and then resumed. ‘. . . how much you love your daughter, Skye, and we’re appealing to you to help us to help you . . .’

The DCI’s effort was palpable, and Lizzie understood from the words how hard they had tried to get this appeal right. They must be desperate. Three days after the murder of Georgina, Brannon was still on the lam and Skye was still missing.

The doorbell rang. Lizzie rolled over and ignored it. It rang again. She shouted out.

‘Mum, someone at the door.’

Another insistent ring. She got up, stood at her bedroom window in her pants and T-shirt. There was a white Mercedes A-Class on the drive and three people were standing beside it. One of them, a man in a grey suit, looked up and waved cheerily. Lizzie pulled on the pink-and-white-striped towelling dressing gown her mother had left out for her and padded down the stairs in her bare feet. She opened the door. The man smiled at her.

‘Denning and Reeves? We’ve got a viewing booked.’

‘Uh, yes, come in.’

They crowded into the entrance hall. The man in the suit had pimples. His shirt was white but the collar was light blue and matched his tie. He had a couple with him, both with gold bands on their ring fingers. The woman was pregnant.

Lizzie ran her hand through her hair. ‘Sorry, just got up.’

‘That’s OK,’ the estate agent said. ‘I can do the tour.’

‘Yeah, thanks.’

She wandered off to the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil and shovelled coffee into the cafetière. A note from her mother on the table. Shopping. Back soon. Her shirts and pants had been taken out of the washing machine and hung neatly on the rack. As the kettle hissed, she stood in the kitchen doorway, watching the estate agent in the sitting room commenting on the view beyond the window. She remembered how her father had loved it, how hawks used to hover there over the bulrushes and coarse grass before the wild land was drained for playing fields and a children’s playground.

‘It’s a good place to raise a family,’ the estate agent was saying. ‘It’s a bit tired, needs freshening up, but that’s reflected in the asking price.’

Lizzie cast her eyes over the sitting room. The adjustable reclining chair that her father had sat in like a rigid totem as he faced down death, the glass coffee table, the sash curtains, the contrasting green flowery wallpaper borders.

The estate agent turned back, saw Lizzie with her bare legs in her mother’s stripy dressing gown. The pregnant woman smiled with embarrassment. ‘It’s a lovely place,’ she said, unconsciously resting her hand on her bump. ‘Was it your childhood home?’

‘Yes. My father died here last year. That’s why my mother’s selling.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘That’s OK. I’ll leave you to it.’

Lizzie walked past them back into the hall and up the stairs to her mother’s room. In the wardrobe was a box of photographs that had not made it into the heavy albums that lived downstairs in a pine chest of drawers. She lifted the box onto the bed. The tour was already climbing the stairs, talking in low voices. If she wasn’t there, Lizzie thought, they could speak more freely rather than treating the place like a National Trust property that gave you a unique opportunity to encounter the full semi-detached suburban experience. She sat on the bed and began to look through photos. Her passing-out parade. Lizzie smiling and smart in white gloves, tunic and dress trousers. Her father in a wheelchair beside her, holding her hand and wearing his guarded but bursting-with-pride look. She leafed through the other pictures. Her sister, Natty, no more than a toddler, sitting on the newly made drive of the house on her tricycle. Herself burying her father on the beach, the light flaring orange across the print. A few photos from athletics competitions: Lizzie hurdling, another with her standing on a podium.

At the very bottom of the box was a single photograph: a man she didn’t know standing on an ornamental bridge over a river. The sun was diffusing across, but she saw a sensitive mouth, a slight kink in his blonde hair. He wore nicely faded jeans and a light cotton shirt and he looked calmly at the camera. Beneath the photo were a couple of heavy envelopes. Lizzie lifted a flap and saw cream paper, blue ink handwriting.

There was a tap at the door. She closed the box, put it back in the wardrobe, opened the bedroom door. The estate agent was waiting on the landing with the two prospective buyers. They looked nervous but keen, like missionaries from the Church of the Latter-day Saints. The estate agent said, ‘Is it OK for them to view the master bedroom?’

Lizzie tried to smile but feared that she was radiating hostility. ‘Of course. You finished with the bathroom?’

They nodded and smiled back at her warily, an unpredictable stranger in her own house.

Lizzie standing in the dim light that filtered through the blind in the bathroom put her hand between her legs. She withdrew her hand and looked at her fingers. Still nothing. She ran the bath, stripped to nakedness, picked up a square glass jar of bath crystals, opened the stopper and inhaled the perfumes of a different generation. She stepped into the hot water, keeping her injured arm resting on the side of the bath, and lay back. Worry spread over her skin like heat. She should get a pregnancy test, just in case. Her thoughts turned to the man in that photo in the box. The fragmented memory of her mother dancing too close to him at a grown-ups’ party when Lizzie was at primary school. Her mother’s head nestled into the crook of his neck, his arm curved round her waist. After that party her mother had been gone for five months. She’d seen him – Alan, his name was – the day her mother had returned home. Looking down from the bedroom window of this same house, she’d watched the car pull into the drive. It had been red and had a horse galloping across the radiator grille. Only much later, when she saw another similar car in the street, had she realized fully that it was in fact a cool car, a fun car: a small vintage American Mustang. How her father must have hated that. But there’d been no sign of any displeasure when he had stepped out onto the drive and helped Alan to get her mother’s cases out of the boot of the car.

She ran her hand over her stomach and a shimmer of feeling passed across her skin. She held her nose, lifted her injured arm into the air and plunged backwards so that the water covered her face. She thought of Kieran and his wife and daughter somewhere out towards the south coast. God, she hoped she wasn’t pregnant.

The sound of the estate agent leaving. Then another car pulling in and drawing up the drive. The front door opening. Lizzie dressed herself in a pair of her old tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt. She went downstairs. Her mother was in the kitchen unpacking bags of shopping. Lizzie reboiled the kettle. She took out the porcelain cups with the blackberries painted on the inside.

Her mother glanced over her shoulder. ‘Using the china, Lizzie? Special occasion, is it?’

There was that familiar twist of irritation. ‘Does it need to be a special occasion?’

‘I s’pose not.’ Her mother gave one of her tense smiles. ‘You’re absolutely right. They just sit in the cupboard. Better to use them.’

She abandoned her shopping, came and stood by Lizzie’s side while she poured the now boiling water over the coffee in the cafetière and into the cups to warm them. Here was the familiar search for intimacy.

Her mother said, ‘So, how are things?’

‘Fine.’

Lizzie moved away towards the washing on the rack. It was still wet and she began to put it in the dryer. Her mother said, ‘Will they be all right in there?’

‘I need a dry shirt for work tonight.’

‘But they’re good shirts. You could leave it another hour or so.’

Lizzie twisted the dial and pressed on. ‘They’ll be fine.’

She poured some milk into a jug and popped it in the microwave. Her mother’s eyes were on her as if her banal actions were in fact interesting.

‘Your arm not hurting you too much?’

‘No, it’s nothing.’

Her mother tried to catch her eye. ‘Anything to tell me about?’

‘What do you mean?’

A nervous laugh. ‘Well, that man who came to your father’s funeral, for example. Am I likely to see him again?’

She thought hopelessly of the missed period and of Kieran’s little girl and made a sort of grunt in reply. Her mother picked up on that and an anxious little frown creased between her eyes. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine.’

Her mother went back to unpacking the shopping. Even as she rejected her attempts at closeness, Lizzie regretted her own hard heart. She watched her mother: brave somehow in her tidy widowhood, still neat and slim in her blue cardigan and well-fitted trousers. She thought of the man in the photograph with his faded jeans and his red mustang. It was a possibility for her mother that she could never imagine.

She said, ‘Have you ever thought of trying to find Alan?’

Her mother turned to her. ‘Why have you brought that up? After all these years!’ She shook her head, turned back to the bags on the floor. ‘Really.’

‘Well, now that Dad’s dead. Where would the harm be?’

There was no immediate reply. Here were the tins for the high shelves. Her mother piled them steadily onto the work surface.

‘That’s a long time ago, Lizzie. Please don’t resurrect it now.’

The microwave pinged. Lizzie turned towards the sink and emptied the hot water from the cups down the plughole. ‘Our coffee’s hot,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we sit and drink it together?’

Her mother stopped, smoothed down her trousers, ran her hands under the sink, spoke brightly. ‘Yes, why don’t we?’

They sat at the table in the conservatory together. Lizzie tried to keep her tone nonchalant.

‘It’s actually quite easy to find people nowadays. Social media, Facebook, that kind of thing. I could help you.’

Lizzie’s mum pursed her lips, and Lizzie remembered the tidiness, the scrupulous organization, the stern tellings-off that had characterized her later years with her mother.

‘I asked you not to bring that up. He’s dead. He died a couple of years after I came back to your father. Can we change the subject now?’