Suzie’s heart sinks, but Cathy is sat bolt upright in her seat, her fingernails tapping against the table in agitation.
“But it’s notjustthe truck. Look what else is on the video.” She spools forward a few seconds until she reaches the frame with the weather vane. “See that? The fish thing? That’s a weather vane! There’s a fuckinghouseout there, Suzie. I bet you any money that’s where Hazel is. He drove her up there and she’s in that house, I swear it.”
Suzie stares at the image before passing it to Teddy.
He examines it carefully. “It’s a conger eel, not a fish. Horrible-looking thing.”
Suzie’s mind is racing but still she strives to be rational, pressing her palms together in front of her as if she is praying. “I see what you’re saying, Cathy, but we don’tknowthat Hazel’s in that house, do we? Let’s just take a breath, yes?”
“‘Take a breath’? Are you fucking kidding?”
Abruptly Cathy pushes her chair back and snatches the phone out of Teddy’s hand. Her color is high and hectic, chin lifted. “Why is everyone acting like this is something we can just wait on? She could be stranded out there in the snow right now and I’m wasting my time talking to you two! Jesus!”
“Cathy, just wait a minute. You need to be sensible. It’s alreadydark, and we’re talking about two hundred miles of woodland, most of it unmapped. The police will want to send up a drone and they’ll need to wait for daylight to do it. No search party will go out at night in the snow—you’d need to call a specialist rescue team, and that means going over to the next county.”
“Well, what then, Suzie? Just sleep on it? See how things look in the morning? You know I was starting to think maybe you’d managed to get that stick out your arse, but I guess not. Thanks for the whisky, Teddy. I’ll see myself out.”
Suzie looks at Teddy in exasperation, expecting him to agree that yes, the idea is crazy. To her surprise he is smiling.
“Take my car.”
Suzie stares at her husband. He removes his glasses and polishes them on his shirt, his smile crooked and knowing.
“What?”
“I put the snow tires on it yesterday. I know you thought I was being overly cautious, but it’ll take you all the way up to where Hazel dropped the pin. Besides, Cathy’s right. You can’t wait until morning.”
Suzie is stunned. Her mouth drops open, but then part of her had already seen this coming. The day she’d closed the pharmacy, she’d told Teddy all about Hazel going missing and how she’d been helping Cathy find out what had happened. She’d even gone so far as to tell him about breaking into Cathy’s parents’ house on Polmen Avenue. He’d pantomimed disapproval at that, but Suzie thinks he’d kissed her especially hard before they’d gone to bed that night, his hand roaming all over her body.
Cathy looks at Suzie expectantly. There is still that anger there, but Suzie sees desperation too. Worse than that, she thinks, she seeshope.
“Okay. On one condition. We’ll check out where Danny filmed this, and if we find the house,thenwe call the police. We absolutely do not go down there on our own. Agreed?”
Cathy nods, her jaw set. Suzie gets up, pushing the remainder of her whisky to one side. Stick up her arse or not, she doesn’t want to get pulled over on the way up to the Spit only to get Breathalyzed.
She tells Cathy and Teddy that she is going to get a coat, but while she’s in the little cubby that they use as a cloakroom, Suzie experiences a wave of dizziness strong enough to tilt the room around her. She leans with her forehead against the wall, pulse throbbing, blood roaring in her ears. Her hands sting as if she has run them through a nettle patch, and she wishes she could take a stiff wire brush to them to scrape off all the skin. She closes her eyes. Her mind is circling, but it’s not Hazel she’s thinking of. It’s Abigail, grinning as she picks the lock of the house on Beeker Street, teasing Suzie who is backing away onto the pavement. Abigail, still having procedures on her legs almost ten years later. Skin grafts and scar tissue, a lifetime of remembering. And that long shadow pooling beside Hazel on the pavement, where a shadow should never have been.
38
They are silent as they drive away from Suzie’s house, turning to take the road out of town, rattling over the packhorse bridge, tires kicking up a spray of muddy slush.
Cathy is the first to speak, her face lit in the glow of her phone screen. “This is the third time this week I’ve been in a car with you. Me and you, eh? Who’d have thought it?”
“Not me, Cathy,” Suzie tells her, and means it. She is on edge, jaw clenched, shoulders hunched. She is wearing smart leather gloves, not because of the cold, but because the skin of her hands feels as if it is crawling.
“You want to take the left just up here. Like you’re going up to the Spit.”
“You sure?”
“That’s what the map says. Danny and his friend were just a mile or so southeast of where Hazel’s pin was dropped.”
Suzie nods. Sleet patters against the windscreen. The dark clouds are windswept and restless. She slows as the lane winds between tall hedgerows, a narrow corridor of unpaved, stony road.
“Doyouthink I took that money?”
Suzie glances over at her. “What money?”
“The money from Hazel’s wedding.”