Silence has descended by the time we arrive on the Heath, Oscar having driven me to the police station first, leaving me nursing a cup of strong sweet tea while he filled in the necessary paperwork. While he’d had his back turned, I’d returned the badge he must have already noticed was missing, though he hadn’t mentioned it, slipping it under a pile of papers so that it wouldn’t be immediately obvious.
Dusk is settling as we pass the duck ponds on Millfield Lane where huddles of fishermen in camo-trousers and fleece sweaters are lined up like oversized gnomes at the edge of the water, their rods stretched out in front of them.
Walking in silence a metre apart from one another, we follow the path round towards Kenwood House, turning right as the ground becomes hard and cracked, broken with thick roots which twist under our feet.
From here I can already see the forensics with their white boiler suits and their tents pitched against the light wind which whistles across folds of green and brown.
‘She buried him there,’ Oscar says, filling the silence as we approach, pointing to the shaded patch of land a couple of metres from the thicket where I saw the attack take place.
‘She did a good job of it. She must have had someone to help her. The theory we’re working with is that she initially hid the body and then came back with her sister and the tools needed to dig a shallow grave. Not even the foxes had found it by the time we got there. That might have been when she found your shoes and your purse, and decided to use them to scare you off …’
I frown before speaking for the first time in at least an hour. ‘But even I noticed the ground had been disturbed – surely when you followed up on that …’
Oscar looks away.
‘You didn’t even look, did you?’
He sniffs, refusing to meet my eye, ‘I should have done. I’m sorry.’
There is so much I could say but what good will it do now? Instead, I fix my gaze away from him in combative silence.
‘Issy, come on, you can hardly blame me. Do you know how many insane phone calls I’ve had from you in the past year? How many madcap theories you’ve tried to embroil me in, one way or another? Even after what you did to me? Besides, there was nothing to go on. But you wouldn’t hear it. What the hell was I supposed to do?’
‘Nothing to go on? You didn’t fucking look!’
This time it is his voice that grows louder. ‘Seriously, I’m sorry if I sound like a prick, but it’s been really tiring tiptoeing around you all the time … I know you’ve been through a lot and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry about Jess – but you can’t behave the way you’ve been behaving and expect to be treated … Anyway, you fucked me over, Is! Do you have any idea how much you hurt me? Do you have any idea how hard it was to lose you like that, and then, just as I was starting to move on with my life, to have to watch that happen to you, and not be able to be there?’
He stops, breathing in hard. Both of us are silent for at least a minute before he speaks again. And when he does, the strength of my enduring love for him, even after all these years, nearly topples me.
‘I’m sorry, Is. I wish I had listened to you earlier.’
‘Yeah, well, it probably would have been better if you hadn’t at all.’
‘You did the right thing,’ he says, and I laugh bitterly.
‘Getting a girl arrested for murder because she defended herself against a man who had trafficked her? That’s what you think happened, right? I don’t call that the right thing.’
‘Her situation will be taken into account. Her baby …’
The tears sting at the corners of my eyes. ‘Why didn’t she just stay in Brighton, once she’d escaped? It sounds like she had built a life there for herself. Why did she come back?’
Oscar pauses. ‘You really want to know?’
‘Of course.’
He inhales. ‘The father of Eva’s child was also her pimp – he was an old family friend from her village who persuaded her to come to London. He was a friend of her sister’s and they had trusted him. He joined a gang involved in trafficking women and he targeted Eva and her sister, promising them a good life in London. When Eva got here, he blackmailed her into prostitution. Eventually, he got her pregnant – she knew he was the father because he was the only one she slept with without contraception. When she discovered she was pregnant, she ran away to Brighton to start a new life.’
‘Fuck. She told you this? But it doesn’t explain why the hell she came back.’
Oscar nodded. ‘The baby was ill. Eva wanted to be near her sister, and so she came back to London and the baby went into hospital, in the Royal Free. She was sleeping at the hospital to be with the baby and one day, in the early hours of the morning, this prick shows up. She was terrified that he would hurt the baby, and so she went with him. When they were outside the hospital, he told her he was taking her with him, that she couldn’t take the baby with them and she tried to run. Apparently he caught up with her somewhere here, near where you saw them. They started to fight, he was saying she had to get back to work, that she had a debt to pay off. He threatened her and the child. She says she can’t remember what happened after that but the next thing she knew, she had hit him with a rock. Then she looked up and saw you …’
We stand in silence for a minute, watching the men in paper suits ducking in and out of the police line.
Finally, I say, ‘And the baby?’
‘The baby’s fine. It had pneumonia but it seems OK. That was the child at the house – and he’s stayed with her sister.’ He clears his throat. ‘For now at least. Social Services have been informed.’
Isobel shakes her head. ‘All this time I just thought that if I could just do this one thing, if I could just atone for Jess in some way … I’m a fucking idiot.’
I raise my eyes up to the sky, hating myself for not being able to keep it together, on top of everything else.
‘You know, the thing that happened with us … I’m not sorry,’ I say, before I can think better of it. ‘It was my body, my choice …’
‘It was my baby,’ he snaps, his voice breaking, and I shake my head.
‘You don’t get to choose.’
He takes a step forward. ‘I didn’t want to choose.’ There are tears shining in his eyes. ‘I wanted to know, I wanted to support you in your choice … I wanted—’
The sound of his phone makes us both jump and when he pulls it out, I see his girlfriend’s name flashing on the screen.
‘Just give me one second, OK? Don’t move, wait there,’ he says, motioning to me with one hand before turning to take the call.
‘Hi, babe …’
As he walks away, just far enough that his voice is out of reach, I move my gaze back to the London skyscape and take a deep breath.
Reaching into my pocket, I pull a cigarette from the packet. With one final glance across the horizon I turn and walk down the hill, away from the policemen with their dogs, and away from Morley, without looking back.