Standing on the station steps, she blinks into the low sun, which flashes off the car roofs like knives. She can see slices of Will Carter striding towards her – his hair, his chin, a black donkey coat and scarf, but not his eyes.
Will bedded down in her lounge in the early hours of this morning, after his police interviews were done, and when she’d gone in to draw the curtains around 7 a.m., while he was in the shower, the room smelled thickly of unfamiliar male. She folded his sleeping bag and laid the pillow neatly on top, and when he came in to get dressed, she retreated to the kitchen to brew them a pot of strong coffee. They sat at the breakfast bar, hollow-eyed, going over the night’s events.
He won’t want to stay with her after this. She can’t make out his expression – is there mistrust already? – because of the distorting shards of sun. She can hardly breathe at the thought of what he is about to find out. He jogs up the station steps.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks, taking her elbow. ‘You look awful.’
‘It’s just,’ she says, ‘a bit rough in there. Scary. What’s happening.’
‘I know. They want to re-interview me for some reason, God knows why. I’ve told them everything about five times already.’
‘I guess new stuff keeps cropping up,’ she says. She is grateful to the flash and glare for obscuring his face.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ll see you back at the flat. Is it OK if I stay another night with you? Our house is cordoned off.’
‘If you want to – why don’t you see how you feel?’ She puts both hands over her forehead to create a visor. ‘Listen, Will, the police – they’re saying all sorts, trying to poke about and stuff. Don’t listen to them – I mean, not all of it can be true.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘I’m just saying, some of it is just trying to get a rise out of you, y’know? See how you’ll react.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he says.
‘Doesn’t matter, forget it.’
‘Look, I better go in. I’ll catch up with you after.’
Helena strides headlong into the light, taking wide steps because the tarmac is flat and predictable, and with some steps the sun recedes and she can see, only for it to flash off a wing mirror or window – like peering through the slats of a blind. He’ll be going into an interview room, greeting the officers who will tell him what she and Edith have done together behind his back. He might look back towards the station steps, to where they have only just spoken, run a hand through his hair in shock.
A tree provides welcome shade and she can see gridlock on the road into Huntingdon. She reaches the concrete underpass, the sun slanting against its elephant grey-green hulk, almost painterly. The cars are bumper to bumper into town, and as she reaches the top of George Street, she can sense a frisson in the air. Perhaps it is the drivers craning to see what the hold-up is; the hooting of horns, as they grow tired of the delay; the slowing pedestrians on the pavement. Helena has to weave through a throng as she nears the house itself and then she is in front of the familiar gate, which she has pushed open without thinking so many times, now cordoned with police tape and guarded by a WPC in a fluorescent windcheater and regulation black trousers, her radio crackling with blurred voices.
Ten feet further down the road is a group of men – they appear from this distance to be a black huddle, like a murder of crows landed on crumbs, but as she gets nearer, Helena sees there are one or two women among them. She sees the cameras slung over their shoulders like handbags and the notepads. They are laughing, at ease. One of them smiles at Helena as she edges past them on the pavement and she increases her pace, pushing her chin down into her scarf. She edges around the next group – two women with toddlers playing about their legs, and a pensioner with a square wheelie shopper. ‘Was at the university, apparently,’ is all she catches, to which one of the women says, ‘Terrible.’
Helena stops herself from breaking in to a run. Her heart pounds at the thought of the women turning to look at her in horror, their faces ghoulish with opprobrium, the cameras pointed at her with sudden piercing focus.
Her breathing returns to a more normal rhythm once she is safely inside her flat, until she becomes aware of the beeps coming from the answering machine in the lounge. She unwinds her scarf. Perhaps it is Dr Young. Perhaps he has heard about Edith’s disappearance on the news and has rung to check she is all right. Beep. She holds the scarf against her chest. Or her father. If it’s her father, she can call him back, tell him what’s happened and ask to come home for the weekend to Bromley, get away from all the intrusion and the questions. Beep.
What if it’s Edith herself, explaining away all the confusion in that breezy way she has – ‘Lighten up, Hels’ – like the time she’d rung on the intercom at 2 a.m. Helena answered the door irritably in her tartan pyjamas, and when she saw Edith swaying there, said, ‘Is anything wrong?’
Edith, breathing tannin from some Shiraz or Merlot, her gums stained black, giggling and pushing her way through to the lounge. Edith’s tiny lace bra was lilac with a diamante stud at its centre and so pretty against her skin. Her bones were delicate, breakable, her breasts neat and perfectly round, her arms beautifully thin. Helena found she could circle her thumb and middle finger perfectly around Edith’s wrist like a bracelet. And Edith held out to her in those lovely hands the promise of excitement and discovery, as if the only thing holding them both back was the smallness of Helena’s horizons.
‘Let’s loosen you up a bit, Hel,’ Edith murmured, biting at the corner of Helena’s mouth while her hands worked down the buttons on her pyjamas.
Helena walks slowly to the lounge, placing her scarf on the end of the sofa, unbuttoning her coat. She presses play on the answering machine.
‘Hi, this is a message for Helena Reed. It’s Bethan Jones from the Mail on Sunday. We’re doing a special piece on Edith Hind and I wondered if you wanted to tell us, you know, what she’s really like – as her best friend. It’d really bring the piece to life. I’m sure you’re worried about Edith and obviously coverage like this raises her profile, so if you wanted to talk, you know, to help the police appeal, then you can get in touch with me on—. I really look forward to hearing from you, Helena. Thanks, then. It’s Bethan Jones, by the way.’