Saturday 9th December 2023
Alice
Alice sits on the edge of her chair in the police station waiting room. The central heating is intense, trapped by the nylon carpet and the stuffy air. Sweat runs down her back beneath her clothes.
She remembers sitting here with Chrissy in the aftermath of Ethan’s death. Holding her clammy hand until their palms were stuck together. And after Robbie was killed, she must’ve come here, too, to make a statement. She can’t remember whether anybody held her hand, whether she let them even if they tried.
She wonders how many lies have been told in this building. Imagines them all swirling in the air: the bigger the lie, the stronger the trace.
Peter has been in the interview suite for almost an hour, and she doesn’t know what to make of that. She’s been half-anticipating getting called in herself, but so far they seem focused on Peter. Her stomach still contracts when she thinks about him and Chrissy and the secret they kept, but he is her brother. She’ll wait.
On the drive over, they talked a little more. He explained that Marianne had told Leo that Peter was his real dad a few weeks before his release. ‘I don’t know why,’
Peter said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know why she did that.’ Now Peter and Chrissy are worried there’s some link between that and Leo’s disappearance. Alice had felt another petty urge to say, this is what happens when you aren’t honest, but swallowed it. She was no stranger to keeping secrets.
Talk to Chrissy, Peter had urged her as she squirmed in the passenger seat. Alice had shaken her head, turned her face away, but she knows she will have to, at some point. It’s like a weight she’s dragging around, getting heavier the longer she leaves it. But what would they say to each other? How can any of this, ever, be fixed?
A young guy sits down opposite her and she does a double take. He reminds her so much of Robbie, she can’t stop looking at him. The same long fingers – great for playing bass, great for gaming, he used to say – and the same near-black hair, so similar to her own, and to Peter’s.
The question inevitably follows: does Leo resemble Peter, too? But she just never saw it, never looked for it? And what about his temperament? It always went unsaid, each time Leo flew off the handle, that he might’ve got some of his less favourable traits from his dad – from Ethan. Alice always suspected Chrissy was thinking it, and was careful not to imply it herself, back when they were friends. But now she has to reframe those memories, too: it can’t have been genes Chrissy was worried about.
She is still sneaking glances at Robbie’s lookalike when Peter emerges. He stands over her, shoulders drooping with tiredness, and she wants to hug him but she’s still stiff with the remnants of her anger.
‘How was it?’ she asks.
‘Let’s get going,’ Peter says.
As they start to leave, a door swings somewhere behind them, and her breath hitches: is it her turn?
‘Peter,’ says a deep voice. Peter freezes, then turns slowly around. ‘Sorry, could you pop back in for a moment?’
Peter’s looks half-wary, half-impatient. The man who has come out to call him back isn’t familiar to Alice. He is a similar age to her brother, with an air of authority about him, and she wonders if he’s the SIO.
‘I thought we were done,’ Peter says.
‘Just one other thing. If you could …’ He jabs his thumb back the way Peter came.
Alice senses her brother might lose his temper. But she also sees the familiar signs of him reining himself in, doing a lightning-quick assessment of the pros and cons of getting cross. Eventually, he sighs, throws a glance at Alice, and strides away with the man.
So, she waits again. The Robbie double is gone and she stares at the empty seat where he’d been. She picks at the ragged skin around her nails, remembering the distant days when she used to get manicures and rub nutty-smelling hand cream into her fingers. Members of staff leave in their warm coats, waving to the desk sergeant, letting in gasps of cold night as they go.
When Peter re-emerges, his exhaustion has taken on a twitchy edge. Alice asks again if everything is okay, but he just gestures at the automatic doors, diving through them as they slide open. He walks quickly to his car, Alice taking long strides to keep up, but once they’re inside he doesn’t turn on the engine. He leans his head against the steering wheel and lets out a long sigh.
‘Did they give you a hard time?’ Alice asks.
‘It was so weird being on the other side of it. After all the interviews I’ve done in that room. I explained about the scrapbook …’
‘Why did they call you back in?’
‘Oh … no reason, really. Just dotting the i’s, crossing the t’s …’ He lifts his head from the steering wheel but curls his large fingers around it.
Alice squints at his profile, sensing there’s more to it than he’s telling her. But then he turns to look at her, and she sees his eyes damp and shining. ‘It wasn’t Leo, Alice. The body wasn’t him.’
She feels a surge of emotion, so powerful that she jerks forward and her seat belt tightens across her chest. She isn’t sure what emotion it is, exactly. A soaring release with a heavy drag of something darker.
‘That’s …’ She can’t find the words so she just reaches out to touch her brother’s shoulder, reminding herself how much this must mean to him. If she’d seen Robbie beginning to stir as he’d lain on the pub floor, it would’ve felt like a miracle.
‘It was a guy called Frank Jordan,’ Peter says.
Alice sits back. ‘Why does that name seem familiar?’
Peter rubs at his stubble. It’s more than stubble by now, actually. It’s a beard that looks as if it hasn’t been washed in a week. She looks at the bags under his eyes and feels another ripple of guilt. She’s been blind to the fact that, in the last few days, he’s been suffering more than she has.
It’s not a competition, he would say, but Alice turns it into one, sometimes; she knows she does.
‘I was the one who arrested him,’ Peter says. ‘I’m basically the reason he went to prison.’
Frank Jordan … Alice casts her mind back over Peter’s career, remembering the names and cases he would sometimes mention, the articles he would show her in the local paper.
‘The big arson case from about twenty years ago,’ he says.
It starts to come back to her. It was one of Peter’s first high-profile arrests.
‘You were celebrating …’ she says, as a faint memory surfaces: him and two colleagues getting drunk in the Raven. ‘Breaking the Law’ on the jukebox. Wanting to stay and celebrate with them – and make sure Chrissy was okay – but knowing she had an abstract to write for the next day. Back when her career meant almost as much to her as her friends.
‘Yeah.’ Peter’s hand drifts up to his greasy hair. ‘That was … that was actually the night that me and Chrissy …’
Alice blinks twice. Another reframing. She toasted her brother’s success that night, then went home to write twenty drafts of a 250-word abstract. Oblivious to the fact that her best friend and her brother were having sex. Conceiving the baby that would go on to kill hers.
‘Chrissy was upset, and I was a bit drunk, a bit full of it … We ended up—’
‘I don’t need the details!’ Alice breaks in. She knows she sounds prudish, bitter, but she doesn’t want to hear it, picture it.
‘Sorry.’ Peter shrugs. ‘It’s just a weird coincidence. I’ve often thought about that night … but I haven’t thought about Frank Jordan in years.’
‘Do you think it could be significant? That you were the one who got him sent down?’
Peter is frowning hard. ‘Maybe. He was released a few weeks before Leo. Wright and Colella have sent some people out to do interviews at the prison. And they’re looking for a link between Jordan and the guys who were in the car they were tracking.’ He puts a hand to his stomach. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling, though, Alice. A really bad feeling.’
Alice swallows and says nothing. Peter starts the engine, turns on his headlights and reverses out of the parking space. Alice stares out of the window at the dark, damp streets gliding past. She hadn’t noticed it raining, but it looks as if it’s been heavy, and she thinks of what she’s heard in numerous TV crime dramas, about evidence being washed away, stormy weather making manhunts harder. She can’t work out how she feels about the idea of Leo somewhere out there in the darkness and rain.
She opens Peter’s glovebox and rummages around for tissues. It’s full of old CDs, their scratched covers reminding her of happier days. Just as she’s about to give up, her fingers close around something at the back. For a second she think it’s the neck of a bottle, and her stomach clenches; she thought Peter had stopped stashing alcohol in his car. But it’s too slim for that, and made of plastic … She pulls it out and turns it in her fingers, then drops it back inside and slams the compartment shut.
Sitting back in her seat, she glances at Peter, whose attention is fixed obliviously on the road. She tries to slow her pulse by closing her eyes and breathing steadily. It doesn’t mean anything, she tells herself, as her thoughts start churning again. It isn’t that unusual to keep a red marker pen in the glovebox of a car.