Saturday 9th December 2023
Chrissy
The second phone call comes twenty minutes later. It comes to Amrit’s phone, again, but Chrissy can tell from her body language that it’s the one they’ve been waiting for, and all the breath seems to leave her body.
‘Okay,’ Amrit says into her mobile, nodding and glancing at Chrissy. ‘I’ll tell her … Could you repeat that, please?’ She draws a pen out of her pocket, uses her teeth to pull off the lid, and scribbles something down on a piece of paper.
She hangs up, turning to Chrissy.
‘The body has been provisionally identified,’ she says. ‘Pending a formal ID from the next of—’
‘Is it Leo?’ Chrissy stands up, blood rushing to her brain.
Amrit shakes her head. Chrissy’s legs fold and her sister holds her up – already braced, it seems, to do so. It’s not him. It’s not him. She wants to check, make sure she hasn’t misunderstood, but her throat has closed completely.
‘The deceased’s name is Frank Jordan.’
Chrissy manages to take in the name but she doesn’t recognise it. Does it ring a faint bell, somewhere in the fog of her thoughts, or is it just a pealing of gratitude to this dead stranger for not being her son? It isn’t him. Isn’t Leo. She stumbles back over to the table, sinks into a chair and releases a body-racking sob into her palms.
Tess and Amrit sit down quietly either side of her. Tess is crying too, her cheeks shiny. Amrit touches Chrissy’s arm, and then she says, ‘He was in the same prison as Leo.’
Chrissy shakes herself alert. ‘At the same time?’
Amrit nods. ‘Frank had been in prison much longer. Over twenty years, in fact, but he was transferred to Leo’s prison five years ago and their sentences overlapped.’
‘Jesus,’ Chrissy says, alarmed at the thought of this person living alongside Leo. And dying, it seems, in a place where Leo may also have been, not so long ago. ‘What did he do?’
‘Murder and arson, among other offences. He was released three weeks before Leo.’
Chrissy’s heart gallops. Arson. And a barn fire. It can’t be a coincidence. ‘Could he have … harmed Leo? Gone after him once he was out?’
‘We don’t know. We’ve sent some officers to the prison to conduct interviews with staff and inmates. We need to establish if there was any kind of relationship between Frank and Leo.’ Amrit pauses. ‘He never mentioned anything to you, Chrissy?’
Her head is throbbing with relief and worry. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t remember him ever talking about a Frank.’ She’ll ask Izzy, she thinks. See what Cliff knows about him. Frank Jordan. She rolls the name around, checking whether it bumps up against anything. He sounds like a serious criminal. Could he have been the reason Leo was so distressed, not because of Marianne’s revelation? Or is she trying to absolve herself?
‘But where is Leo?’ she asks, appealing to Amrit as though she has all the power, the knowledge. At the moment, she’s all Chrissy’s got. ‘We’re no closer to finding him.’ She feels Tess’s hand on her arm, firmer this time, and realises she’s shaking.
‘We’re looking,’ Amrit promises. ‘We’ve got a full-scale national search underway.’
‘It isn’t his body,’ Tess says softly, pressing Chrissy’s hand. ‘That needs to be enough for now.’
Chrissy reaches for her cigarettes with trembling fingers. Leo is still out there. She believes that; she has to.
‘I … should tell Peter,’ she says, and it feels strange, the acknowledgement, finally, that he’s Leo’s parent too. She picks up her phone but everything she thinks of typing sounds either too casual or too dramatic.
‘Peter is at Derby police station at the moment,’ Amrit says. ‘Being interviewed.’
Chrissy is half-ashamed of her own rush of nerves. All she wants is for them to find Leo, but the investigation is stretching to include all the complications of the past.
‘What about Alice?’ she asks tentatively. ‘Is she being interviewed, too?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Amrit says. ‘I haven’t been told that.’
Chrissy wonders about Alice’s state of mind. How angry is she about Chrissy and Peter’s secret? Enough to start spilling others?
Her breath quickens as her mind races on. Alice must resent not knowing something as important as the identity of the real father of her best friend’s son. But the thing she does know is huger by far. And Chrissy can no longer gauge if she’ll keep a lid on it. A lid that is already being nudged at, lifted in tiny fractions, every time Ethan’s name comes up.
She needs to swing the focus back to the present. But how? The prickle on the back of her neck has returned. The feeling that still, after all these years, Ethan is casting his shadow.
It’s not him, she keeps reminding herself, clinging to a splinter of hope. The body isn’t Leo.
But still, nothing is resolved. Nothing feels safe. She can’t remember the last time it did.