On Saturday morning Chris opened his door to two police officers, fluorescent against the rain-soaked steps leading down to his flat.
He’d been sure it would be them as soon as he’d heard the brisk trill of his doorbell while he’d been failing to eat a slice of toast. He’d just sat there at first, swirling patterns in the cremated crumbs, until he’d heard Vicky moving around in their bedroom and had leaped up to beat her to the door.
“Mr. Watson?”
“Last time I checked.” He found himself speaking in the jovial tone he used for plumbers and electricians, which disguised his discomfort at being a homeowner, a bona fide member of suburbia. Somehow he always felt as though he was faking.
He tensed when Vicky’s voice sailed from the rear of the flat: “Who is it?”
“One moment . . .” he said to the police, abandoning them on his doorstep and hurrying back down their hall. “Just a student!” he called to Vicky, once he was out of the officers’ earshot.
He hoped that would appease her, but she appeared in the doorway of their bedroom. Chris put a hand on her shoulder to stop her getting any further. She looked startled—he’d grabbed her too hard. He loosened his hold and tried to smile. “What shift are you on today?”
“You never remember.” At one time she would have said this affectionately, but now it came out toneless. “I’m just doing eight till one to cover a gap. Should be back for lunch at Di’s. I’ll meet you there.”
She checked the watch clipped to the front of her tunic, and Chris remembered how it used to amuse him, for some reason, even though he knew it was part of a standard nurse’s uniform. A fob watch seemed so stuffy and old-fashioned, so un-Vicky. Lots of things about her nurse’s kit used to strike him as funny. The Bristol Stool Chart she often carried around with her, not least.
Glancing past her, he saw three new glossy magazines heaped up on their bed. Vicky wasn’t a celebrity-gossip kind of woman, but she had a thing about snipping pictures out of magazines, keeping them in the drawer of her dressing table, like tokens. He’d asked her about it once and she’d got defensive, saying he wouldn’t understand.
Maybe he would, though, if she gave him a chance. When had they stopped acknowledging the things that had first drawn them together? The confidences they’d whispered as they’d squashed into her single bed in her grotty student dorm, giggling and clinging to one another as they’d wriggled around trying to get comfy.
Fifteen years later they owned a flat with a Surrey postcode (admittedly one in need of a lot of work), Vicky had made senior nurse, and he had his own (not exactly thriving) business. Yet it felt like they had so much less. Sometimes he grew nostalgic for that lumpy single bed, for the stains on the ceiling that they would discuss as if they were constellations.
“Isn’t your student waiting?”
Vicky was already walking back toward her dressing table. He watched her squirt a blob of eczema lotion into her palms and wind her hands around and around each other, the ritual absorbing all of her attention. She was so introspective these days that she hadn’t yet realized their teenage neighbor was missing. Thirty-six hours now. And Chris hadn’t brought it up, hadn’t wanted to make a thing of the fact that he’d taken her for a lesson on the day she’d vanished. With luck he could keep the police on their doorstep, keep the visit brief.
He steeled himself to go back out. The sick feeling that had kept him awake most of the night squirmed again. The police were murmuring to one another, peering at the upper flats, but when he returned to the door their focus snapped back to him.
“Would you come down to the station, Mr. Watson? We need to ask you a few questions about your neighbor and student, Freya Harlow.”
The station. Chris hadn’t been expecting that. They gestured up toward their car, which shimmered with drizzle behind the Harlows’ his-and-hers BMWs. Chris silently fetched his coat. Outside, the street was quiet but the woman with the twins emerged from the large house opposite, gawping at him as she threw nappies into her wheelie-bin, and a wooden blind twitched in a bay window further down. He hoped Steph and Paul weren’t staring down from their flat—he didn’t dare lift his chin to see.
As he walked past his own car, he glanced inside. His eyes rested briefly on the glove box before he followed the police onward.
They insisted he wasn’t being interrogated. But the marooned desk in the stark white interview room didn’t exactly say “cozy chat.” The woman and the man sitting opposite were not the two officers who’d come to collect him. They wore black suits and introduced themselves as Detective Ford and Detective Johnson. Ford had quick feline eyes and a prominent collarbone, like something trapped beneath her skin. Johnson was fresh-faced, handsome, but there was a petulant downturn to his mouth.
“How well do you know Freya Harlow?” Ford began.
Chris could feel himself slipping into a familiar mode. Censoring his words before he said them. He did it with Vicky these days, he realized unhappily. Skirted around certain topics, no longer told her everything that was on his mind.
“I’ve been her instructor for six months,” he said. “And her neighbor for a year and a bit.”
“Are you friendly? The two of you?”
Chris shifted in his chair. “How d’you mean?”
“What do you talk about during your lessons?”
“Mainly her driving. As you’d expect.”
“Your last lesson with her was the day before yesterday.” Ford looked directly at him. “The day Freya disappeared.”
She left a pause as if for his response. But she hadn’t phrased it as a question. Chris was aware of breathing a little too heavily. He nodded, and she wrote something down even though he hadn’t said a word.
“Did anything unusual happen?”
“Not that I recall.”
“Where did you drop her off?”
“Back at school. It was her lunch hour.”
“Did you see her walk in?”
Chris paused, picturing Freya’s long stride, buoyant even when she was walking slowly, as though she was consciously charging each step with pent-up energy. “Maybe not right in. But I saw her go up the drive.”
“Toward the main school? Or the separate sixth-form drive?”
All his saliva seemed to have deserted him. “Um, the sixth form, I think. Could I get a glass of water?”
Johnson left the room. Alone with the woman detective, Chris felt her stare drilling into him. He shifted again in the narrow plastic seat. When Johnson returned, Chris gulped the water too fast and felt nauseous.
“How well do you know Freya’s parents?” Ford resumed.
Chris thought of well-groomed Steph, with her polished smile, and sandy-haired Paul, who shouldered a huge leather gym bag at all times. He thought of how Steph would wave from the window if he and Freya were leaving for an evening lesson, how she’d often be watching from the same position when they returned, as if she hadn’t moved in an hour.
Would the Harlows have told the detectives about the argument there’d been over Freya’s lessons? Would it look bad if Chris didn’t mention it? Would he even be able to talk about it without becoming hot with indignation?
He cleared his throat. “Of course, I see them around. Wouldn’t say I know them well.”
He didn’t add, My wife and I used to call them the Wholesome Harlows when we first moved in. Or the Blond Brigade. Chris didn’t really see them like that anymore, not since he’d started teaching Freya and everything had got so much more complicated.
Ford turned a page of her notebook. “Who was your next student after Freya?”
He had tried to prepare himself for this one. Had thought about it on the way over, how important it was to answer nonchalantly. The reality was difficult, though, especially when his mouth was a vacuum.
“She was my last student of the day.”
Ford stalled, pen in hand. A change in atmosphere fell across the room like a shadow. “Do you normally finish so early?”
“Depends who I’ve got booked in.”
“What did you do in the afternoon?”
“I went home, did some jobs.”
“Was anybody there with you?”
“No, my wife was at work.”
There was a loaded pause. Chris was sure he could smell himself now, smell his own anxiety.
“So you didn’t see anybody else all afternoon?”
“Not until Vicky came home.”
“What time would that have been?”
“Around eleven p.m.”
Ford exchanged a flickering glance with Johnson, then made a note. She waited, scribbled something else, pursed her lips as if in thought.
Abruptly she leaned forward. “Mr. Watson.” Her tone was cool but something strummed his unease. “Do you realize you were the last known person to see Freya?”
His face turned to rubber. “Wasn’t she at school in the afternoon?”
“We thought she was,” Johnson said, forcing Chris to shift his attention onto him. Was this how they were going to do it now? Turn-taking so Chris’s head would swing from side to side? “Freya had a free period after lunch and then psychology. The attendance records said she was there for psychology, but the teacher has since admitted he didn’t take the register at the start of the class as he’s supposed to. He filled it out from memory while the students were off doing research. He’s not convinced Freya was actually there. It seems he wasn’t exactly keeping tabs on his students while they did this ‘independent work.’ A lot of them have admitted the class is”—Johnson carved quote marks in the air—“‘a total doss.’”
“Sounds like you should be questioning this teacher,” Chris blasted back.
“We have done.” This was Ford again now. “But since nobody can confirm Freya made it back from her lesson with you . . .” She let the sentence dangle.
Sweat gathered around Chris’s neckline. For a disorienting second he felt a presence in the empty seat to his right. His feet pressed the floor as though he were braking.
“I dropped her off.” He peeled his collar from his skin. “She walked up the drive. Maybe she doubled back, I don’t know . . .”
“We’ll need you to submit the exact route you drove with her that day. And your movements after you parted ways.”
“I don’t know if I can remember the exact route.”
“You’ll need to try.”
Ford stared at him for a few more moments. Chris tried not to shrink away from her eye contact as he wondered whether she had more to say. He sensed there was a question she hadn’t asked, an angle she was saving. But she slammed her notebook shut.
“Thank you, Mr. Watson. I’ll ask somebody to take down those details before you leave. But if you think of anything else, please get in touch. Particularly any . . . irregularities from your lessons with Freya. Anything at all.”
He didn’t like the way she teased out the syllables of irregularities. It made him think of dodgy football managers or politicians under investigation. One of those euphemisms that meant somebody’s net of secrets was about to unravel.