He nods, then slowly pulls himself off the bed. He takes a couple of steps towards her and then draws himself up tall. He looks down into her eyes and hooks a finger under her chin, tipping her face up towards him. His eyes trace circles across all of her. ‘You’re different,’ he says.
She pushes his finger away from her chin and turns away. ‘No I’m not.’
He pulls her back hard, by her arm. ‘Don’t walk away from me. I’m trying to talk to you.’
Her head rocks back slightly at the force of his words. ‘I’ve got college work to do. I haven’t got time for this.’
‘This?’ he says. ‘You meanus. You haven’t got time forus.’
‘No,’ she says, feeling her heart pump hard, ‘I haven’t got time for us. I’ve got time for Noah. I’ve got time for college. And that’s it. I don’t have time for us. You’re right.’
There is an immediate and profound silence. Zach shifts from one foot to the other. ‘What are you trying to say, Lula?’
‘I’m not trying to say anything. You said I don’t have time for us and I’m agreeing with you. I don’t have time. There’s never time.’
‘But – if you really wanted this to work, you’d find the time. So what’s the deal? Do you want this to work? Or not? Because I’ve got a job, Lula. I actually work to bring money into this family. Every day. And I’m hands on with Noah, twenty-four-seven. But yeah, funny thing, I’ve still got time for you. For us. So why haven’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replies. ‘I don’t know.’
There’s a beat of silence and then Zach sighs and pulls her towards him, pulls her so hard that she feels her rib cage bend under the pressure, her lungs contract, her breath stop halfway up her throat.
28
September 2018
The police have cordoned off the woods again. The sight of the plastic ribbon fluttering in the late-summer breeze sends Kim back in time to the hazy, frazzled heat of that June afternoon last year, the weight of Noah in her arms, the sweat running down her back, the blinding white glamour of the Jacqueses’ house in Upley Fold, the cobalt blue of the swimming pool, the empty eyes of Megs and Simon, the stale smell of lunchtime rosé on their breath, the eager rustle of the sniffer dogs as they headed into the darkness of the woods. She shivers at the sight of it, but then straightens up and smiles when she sees DI Dom McCoy climbing out of his unmarked car.
‘Hi,’ she says.
‘Nice to see you, Kim,’ he replies. ‘Here we go again.’
She rolls her eyes and says, ‘Indeed we do.’
He leads her to a spot away from the cars, in the shade of a large tree. ‘The sign has gone. I went to view it with Miss Beck this morning and it’s been taken down. The nail is still embedded in the fence, but the sign has gone. However, thankfully, Miss Beck did think to take a photograph of the sign, so we have that to send out for analysis. She writes detective novels, apparently, so I guess her mind works like that.’
Kim raises an eyebrow. ‘Does she, really?’
‘Yes. I know. She doesn’t look the type – not exactly Agatha Christie, is she?’
Kim smiles. ‘No, not exactly.’
‘Anyway, we’ve sent the photo for handwriting analysis, et cetera. But it definitely looks to me like someone is actively trying to draw us back to the case. Someone who knew that a new head teacher was arriving. Someone who wanted the engagement ring to be uncovered. Someone, it feels like, who wants to play games with us.’
‘But why would someone want to do that?’
Dom sighs. ‘People want to do all manner of things, Kim. If it wasn’t for people doing things that the likes of you and I would never do, I’d be out of a job. My theory, currently, is that this is someone who has known something all along whilst remaining in the shadows. Someone who knows what happened to Tallulah and Zach. And for whatever reason they’ve grown bored of the silence. Grown bored of nobody being caught.’
Kim flinches at his use of the word ‘caught’. ‘Caught’ suggests that someone has done something to her child. It suggests that her child is dead. And not once, not in all of the nearly fifteen monthsthat have passed since she watched her daughter leave the house in cut-off denim shorts and a smock top, an uncertain smile on her face as she kissed her baby son goodbye and headed out into the soft warmth of a sunny summer night, not once has Kim imagined that possibility to be anything other than a sliver of a bad dream that she could easily chase away with the power of her own thoughts.
‘Annoyingly the school’s CCTV doesn’t extend this far. It cuts off just on the boundary of the residential area. Miss Beck and Mr Gray have CCTV on the front of their cottage, but not at the back. We’re going through footage now, but unless we have a picture of someone flagrantly walking across the campus holding a cardboard sign, a nail and a hammer, it’ll be a little bit of a needle in a haystack. But’ – he shrugs and smiles, hopefully – ‘you never know.’
Kim closes her eyes briefly and musters a smile.
‘Are you OK?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I feel sick.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ says Dom. He reaches out and touches her arm. ‘But maybe this is it, Kim,’ he says. ‘Maybe this is the turning point. A little flame of hope.’