28

After the manager left the table the two women sat in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. Paula pushed the food around on her plate while Cara ate with gusto. When she’d finished her meal she placed her knife and fork on the plate.

‘What am I really doing here?’ Cara asked as she leaned forwards. ‘Am I just an excuse so you could come in and get your husband’s iPad?’

‘As I said…’ But then Paula reined in her irritation. They’d been getting on so well. ‘For whatever reason you seem to be involved in all the confusion that has surrounded me since Thomas died. I need some answers. I thought you might be able to help.’

‘Can you handle it?’ Cara asked. ‘Really?’

Paula looked down at her plate of food, pushed at a piece of chicken with her fork and her stomach gave a small churn of nausea.

‘I’m sure most of your friends are already busy sanitising Tommy’s memory. That’s not what you’ll get from me,’ Cara continued. ‘What I’ve got ain’t pretty.’

‘The truth, as you call it, might be difficult,’ said Paula. ‘But I’ve had enough of lies. I need to know what’s going on. Those … deaths. They’re bothering me.’

Cara’s face suddenly shone as if she’d just had an important thought. ‘Here, you don’t think Tommy’s death was suspicious, too, do you?’

‘Myocardial infarction,’ said Paula. ‘It literally means death of heart muscle. I looked it up.’ She studied Cara across the table. Looked at her empty, sauce-smeared plate. ‘Unless his brother, or that waitress slipped some poison into his lunch that would mimic a heart attack, what killed him was natural.’

Cara looked like she was biting back a reply.

‘What?’ Paula urged.

‘I was just going to say, what with Kevin Farrell getting killed, doesn’t that make you the least bit suspicious?’

‘Of course it does,’ Paula answered. ‘Thomas was a fit man for his age, but still, you don’t get much more conclusive than a death certificate.’ She cut off a piece of meat, forked it into her mouth and forced herself to chew and swallow, as if she was forcing down that particular truth. She felt a daub of sauce sitting just under her lower lip and dabbed at it with a napkin. ‘That guy, Danny, who accused Thomas of those horrible things? What happened to him? Why didn’t he show the last time? I need to talk to him.’

‘Dunno what’s happening there,’ Cara made a face of apology. ‘I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him since. It’s like he vanished.’ Cara took a sip of her water, and Paula read that she was trying to hide her disappointment. Danny had been a big part of her attempt to convince her that Thomas had been up to no good.

And another person goes missing, thought Paula.

‘That’s bad for your hips,’ said Paula, as Cara moved her seat away from the table enough to cross her legs.

Cara shrugged. ‘Sorry, Mum.’ She smiled.

‘Could go for a coffee,’ she said.

‘Me, too,’ agreed Paula, made a face at the cold food on her plate and pushed it away. ‘I’m not really hungry these days.’

‘You should eat. Keep your strength up,’ said Cara. ‘You don’t want to fade away.’

‘Never going to happen,’ Paula replied. ‘I like my food too much. Normally. You should have seen me when I was a kid. Porky Paula, that was me…’

‘You were never called that surely?’

‘My parents owned the baker’s shop so that made me popular with the other kids. I’m sure behind my back they were calling me all sorts.’

‘Wow. Your mum and dad owned a baker’s. That must have been cool.’

Paula thought about her parents. Dad with his sleeves rolled up. Mum with her hair back in a net. It almost always felt like her dad was visible only through a cloud of flour, while her mum was behind the counter, placing scones and pancakes into white paper bags as she exchanged the gossip of the day with her customers.

They worked all hours and as an only child Paula was often left to her own devices. Which meant books. Books and day-old Empire biscuits. Which was not a good fitness combination, and when a pudgy but handsome boy she fancied refused to kiss her under the mistletoe at the school disco because she was ‘too bloody fat’, she decided to bin the biscuits and take up jogging. She quickly got down to a size eight and stayed there until recently. But her trousers had been so loose when she put them on that morning, she guessed she was now about a six.

She had enough self-knowledge to be annoyed, now, that it was a boy who had given her the motivation to lose weight. But that was her teenage self. That particular impulse did still surface from time to time: be the girl that pleases those around her. She saw so little of her parents as she grew up and was so desperate for their approval, while making herself as easy on them as possible, she said yes to everything.

Be still.

Yes, Mum.

Be in bed before eight.

Yes, Dad.

Stop reading and turn that light out.

Yes, Mum.

That urge to say yes to everything, even when it was in her worst interests, took a long time to fade.

‘Both my parents worked,’ said Paula, waking up from her reverie. ‘Hard. It kind of felt like I was an inconvenience to them. Meeting Thomas and his lot came as a bit of a shock. All the noise and energy – I used to think I’d fallen in love with Thomas’s big, boisterous family as much as with him.’

‘Your parents are still alive?’ asked Cara.

Paula shook her head. ‘Dad sold the business on his sixty-eighth birthday. Decided he wanted to see a bit of the world. Wanted to go to Disney.’ She smiled with fondness. ‘He died the day after he bought the tickets. Mum died a month later.’

‘I can’t remember my dad,’ said Cara. ‘He vanished. Or was thrown out. Whatever. Mum’s still alive. She’s a grafter. I think that’s where I get it from. She had five jobs at one point … before the drugs got a hold of her, that is…’

‘Was it just you and your brother?’ Paula almost hadn’t asked, but Cara was so refreshingly blunt, why should her approach be any different?

‘There was a baby in between us. Brenda. Me first. Then two years later Brenda turned up. Didn’t survive the week. And then Sean arrived two years after that.’ Her eyes grew distant. ‘Mum still talks about Brenda. Constantly wonders where she would be in life if she had survived. Would she have gone to university? Would she have kids?’ Cara looked at Paula. ‘I think that’s a dig at me, cos I don’t have any yet. She’s desperate for a grandchild.’

‘Has one ever been a possibility?’

Cara snorted. ‘Never really had a reason to trust men. My dad was a shit. Mum’s subsequent boyfriends were all shits.’

‘In that case, any guys you meet can only win by comparison.’

Another snort. ‘Turns out I have similar taste in men as Mum.’ She grew serious. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I have plenty of male friends who are good, decent men, it’s just when my ovaries get involved everything becomes very, very messy.’

The waitress floated past. Cara attracted her attention and ordered a couple of coffees.

‘What about you, Paula? Happy you stuck with the one kid?’

‘I often wonder about that. If having more kids would have helped with Christopher’s loss? But to answer your question, one son was what life gave me.’ She closed her eyes as they began to sting with tears. ‘Being an only child, I wanted a houseful. We did try for other kids, but no more came along.’

Paula ran over Cara’s words in her mind. Felt the old, yet still new loss of Christopher.

‘Remind me,’ Paula said, despite herself. ‘How did Danny describe what … happened to my … to Christopher?’ She coughed to cover up the crack in her voice.

‘They were only supposed to frighten him…’ Cara’s eyes were less accusatory in this re-telling, more empathic. But she held nothing back, repeating everything that she’d said before. She was clearly keen to know the whole truth and being careful would only harm her purpose. ‘Then when Tosh Gadd eventually caught up with Sean…’

Paula studied Cara as she spoke and saw that she believed this story completely. And she couldn’t stop the image that popped into her mind. Thomas. Her Thomas. His shirt spattered in blood as he stood over a bloody and broken young man.

And she thought back to Thomas’s behaviour in the days and months after Christopher died. Yes, he was angry. Furious. But could that description of violence be applied to Thomas? Wasn’t his anger part of his passage through grief? Or was he, as Cara was accusing, capable of torture and murder?