He shakes his head firmly and she sees a muscle in his cheek pulsing with anger.
‘Oh,’ she calls back to him, ‘by the way. I bumped into Keziah just now. Remember Keziah, who I went to primary school with? She’s invited me to a girls’ night, a reunion thing, at the Ducks. Tomorrow night. You’re all right staying in with Noah, aren’t you?’
There’s a dull silence from the living room and Tallulah holds her breath.
A moment later Zach is in the doorway of the kitchen, flexing and unflexing his fists. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Keziahwho?’
‘Keziah Whitmore. I went to primary school with her. She works at the Co-op now.’
‘Right. So. Let’s get this straight. After knowing you for nearly five years I’ve never heard of this person before and now you’re justgoing for drinks.’
‘Yes,’ she says, closing the fridge door. ‘Tomorrow night.’
‘And how are you going to pay for that?’
She shrugs. ‘I don’t know. Mum will probably let me have some money.’
‘So here’s me, working my-fucking-self to death, day in day out, never spend a penny on anything, not a fucking penny. Single-handedly trying to get us a place to live, and you’re just going to the pub with some slag calledKeziahwho I’ve never even fucking heard of.’
‘I don’t ask you to work so hard,’ she replies evenly. ‘I don’t expect you not to spend any money on anything. I don’t tell you you can’t go out. And, frankly, I don’t even want us to buy a flat. I like living here with Mum.’
She glances at him briefly. She can see the clenched jaw start to grind.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I don’t want to move out. I want to stay here, with Mum.’
He grunts. ‘Christ, you are such a fucking child, Tallulah. You still haven’t grown up, have you? You still think life is all swanning about, doing what you like, going to the pub, hanging out with Mummy. Well, it’s not. We have a child. We have responsibilities. We’re not kids any more, Tallulah. It’s time to grow thefuck up.’ He looms over her now and she can feel the heat of his breath on her face.
‘I think you should move out,’ she says.
A taut silence follows.
‘What?’
‘I think we should split up. I don’t want to be with you any more.’
Tallulah’s gaze stays on the floor but she can feel Zach’s rage coalescing in the air around her.
Another drawn-out silence follows and Tallulah waits. Waits to be hit, waits to be screamed at, waits for the anger that exists so close to the tight seams of Zach’s psyche finally to burst through. But it doesn’t. After a few seconds she feels his presence soften and shrink, sees his shoulders slope and then he is gone. She follows him into the hallway. He is leaning over Noah’s sleeping form in his buggy and whispering to him. Tallulah feels a terrible chill run through all of her. She moves closer and watches, her body primed and ready to do whatever it takes to protect Noah from Zach. She hears the click of the safety harness being unclipped and watches as Zach carefully plucks Noah from his buggy and lifts him towards his shoulder. Noah doesn’t stir; he is heavy with sleep. His big head flops gently into the crook of Zach’s neck and Zach kisses him softly on his crown.
His eyes meet Tallulah’s over the top of their child’s head and he says, in a voice hard with resolve, ‘I am not going anywhere, Tallulah, I am not going fucking anywhere.’
38
September 2018
Sophie sits at her desk in the hallway of the cottage by the front door. The weird burning petrol smell in the hallway that’s been there since they moved in has finally started to fade and she’s moved her work area here where the window overlooks the college campus so she can watch the comings and goings in the school grounds. Shaun told her last night what the detectives had found buried in the flower bed outside the accommodation block; he said it was a lever of some kind, a piece of metal with a handle and a bent tip, very old, apparently. Nobody knows what it is or why it was buried there or by whom. It’s a total mystery.
But there’s another mystery preying on Sophie’s mind.
The cardboard sign had been spotted by Lexie Mulligan, Kerryanne’s daughter, just hours after she returned home from a tripto Florida. She claims to have seen it while standing on her mother’s terrace, vaping. Earlier today, Sophie had gone for a walk around the accommodation block and stared upwards to Kerryanne Mulligan’s terrace and felt a jolt in the pit of her stomach at the stark realisation that the terrace was far too low down to see across the flower bed to the spot where the cardboard sign had been left, and she’d known immediately that, for some reason, Lexie had been lying.
Sophie flips open the lid of her laptop, now, and googles Lexie Mulligan. She clicks the link to her Instagram account, which is called @lexiegoes. Lexie looks very different in her photos to how she looks in real life. In real life she is attractive, but has a certain flatness to her features, a lack of delicacy, but in these shots she looks like a model. There she is in a black satin dressing gown printed with roses, cross-legged and sipping a cocktail on her Florida balcony with the backdrop of a heart-shaped swimming pool. The accompanying text is a thinly veiled promotion for the hotel, and is full of hashtags relating to the hotel and its parent company. Sophie glances at the top of the page and sees that Lexie has 72,000 followers. She assumes that the hotel was a freebie as recompense for the publicity and she assumes that with that many followers (Sophie herself has 812) Lexie must get lots of freebies and lots of pay-outs from the businesses she promotes and she wonders why a grown woman with what looks like a great career is still living with her mum in a tiny flat in a boarding school in Surrey.
As she thinks this she glances again through the window and sees Lexie herself striding across the campus. She’s wearingpatterned leggings and a black hoodie and her hair is in two plaits. She has a carrier bag that looks like the ones they give you at the Co-op and she looks a million miles from the girl in the Instagram posts. Sophie watches her as she heads towards the accommodation block. A few minutes later she sees the door open on to Kerryanne’s terrace and Lexie appears with a mug of tea. She gazes out across the campus and into the woods beyond for a moment, before turning and heading back indoors.
For some reason there is something unsettling about the way she does this, something strangely forensic. Sophie glances down at Lexie’s Instagram feed again and scrolls downwards and downwards, through Cuba, Colombia, Quebec, Saint Barts, Copenhagen, Belfast, the Hebrides, Beijing, Nepal, Liverpool, Moscow. Her head spins with the breadth of Lexie’s travelling. She keeps scrolling until she gets to something more familiar: it’s Lexie in front of the beautiful main doors to the school. Behind her the light from the stained glass in the reception area falls into coloured puddles on the tiled floor. She’s wearing an ankle-length fake-fur coat and a green woollen hat with a furry bobble. By her side is a pair of huge suitcases. The caption says,Home sweet home.