THIRTY-SEVEN

‘I just don’t understand why you lied, that’s all.’

‘I know.’

‘Why didn’t you want to tell me where you were?’

‘I’m sorry, Dad.’ The truth was that Helen did not understand either. Not completely.

She was alone in the living room. Linda had gone upstairs to spend some time with the kids and Carson and the rest of them were gossiping in the kitchen. She said ‘sorry’ again to fill the silence. She had known this conversation with her father was coming from the moment she had seen the front page of the newspaper.

‘I probably wouldn’t have known you were there at all, but one of the neighbours came round with the paper.’

Helen gritted her teeth. ‘Good of them.’

‘They thought I’d want to know, you know.’

‘I was going to call.’

‘I mean I’ve been following it on the news, obviously.’

‘Course.’

‘We talked about it before you went, didn’t we? When the first girl went missing.’

‘Yeah . . . ’ Helen remembered several conversations about the events in Polesford. Each time her father had insisted that ‘nothing like that’ would have happened back when he was living there. She wondered if rose-tinted spectacles got handed out to people on the same day they qualified for a free bus pass.

‘Nasty business.’

‘Can I talk to Alfie?’

‘He’s asleep, love.’

‘Oh.’

‘I thought I’d worn him out in the park, but he was still full of beans when we got back. Hang on, let me turn the telly down a bit . . . ’

There was a clatter as the phone was laid down. Helen moved to the window, looked out through a gap in the curtains at the crowd outside. A man was shouting something at one of the officers.

‘Right then. Maybe you can call back later, before he goes to bed.’

‘Yeah, I will,’ Helen said. ‘Thanks again for having him.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘I feel bad though.’

‘I’m just a bit thrown by this business of you being in Polesford, that’s all. Polesford of all places, and not telling me.’

‘I know,’ Helen said. She flopped down on the sofa. ‘I went to see Mum.’ She listened to her father breathing. ‘Tom came with me. It was nice.’

‘That’s good.’

Helen felt a rush of guilt at changing the subject, the way she’d changed it. ‘We took some flowers.’

‘See, I’d never have known that, would I? You not telling me you were there.’

‘I would have said eventually.’

‘I must be going senile, because I still don’t understand.’

The shouting outside was getting louder.

‘Everything that’s going on here,’ Helen said. ‘I just didn’t want you to worry.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Why?’

‘What you do. I worry every day, love.’

There was a loud banging on the front door and Helen heard footsteps moving quickly down the hall from the kitchen. Her father asked what the noise was and she told him that she would need to call him back.

She hung up, relieved.

Helen saw Linda coming a little nervously down the stairs and got to the front door just as Carson was opening it to an equally nervous-looking PC. Behind him, Helen could see two of his colleagues at the end of the front garden, fighting to restrain a well-built man who was shouting about his rights and knowing them.

‘What?’ Carson snapped.

‘This bloke,’ the officer said. He pointed, just as one of the struggling PCs took a firmer hold of the man and asked him if he was trying to get nicked. ‘He reckons he’s Linda Bates’ ex-husband.’