‘No. This is a small car. Never mind, I took the liberty of calling in a favour from an old contact at the DVLA.’
Olly and Tink exchange glances. Now they know Emma is probably OK, they’re enthralled.
Sheila swipes her phone again, then looks at me. ‘The car is registered to a Jill Stirling. Do you know this woman, Leo?’
Chapter Fifty-One
EMMA
Earlier that day
‘You’ll see,’ is all Jill keeps saying, when I ask where we’re going.
She’s enjoying this. She doesn’t say much, but I can see it in her face; her body language – she’s alive with purpose. The radio’s turned off but she keeps singing snatches of songs under her breath, and she’s running a full commentary on the road conditions as if we’re having a driving lesson.
It’s been more than twenty minutes since she picked me up outside nursery. We’ve just joined the North Circular, on the outskirts of London. Ahead, the M1 is signposted, for Watford and The North.
‘Look at the size of that man’s bum!’ she hoots, pointing at some poor specimen crossing the footbridge. ‘A symphony of an arse!’
It is generous, but it definitely doesn’t warrant this condemnation.
‘I really think I should call Leo,’ I say, after a pause. ‘I know you said he needs more time, but it ... It just doesn’t feel right not to check in with him. Please can I borrow your phone?’
‘No,’ Jill says. ‘I told you, I spoke to him.’
When she turned up outside Ruby’s nursery earlier, I thought Jill had just come to offer me some moral support before my meeting with Leo – a lift up the hill, perhaps, with a pep talk, a coffee and a hug. But instead she drove straight past our road and headed up and out across the top of the Heath, towards Golder’s Green.
‘I’ve got a meeting with Leo at 9.30!’ I said. ‘Stop! Jill, I can’t talk now!’
‘This is far more important,’ she replied, with a strange smile; so strange I almost wondered if she had taken something. In our first year at St Andrews we’d tried mushrooms, but Jill had declared the experience of being out of control to be so intolerable she never tried any drugs again.
‘Jill!’ I cried. ‘Seriously, I have to get out!’
When she ignored me, I undid my seatbelt at the pedestrian crossing by the entrance to Golders Hill Park and tried to open the door. What was she doing?
Like something from a hostage movie, Jill had activated the central locking. ‘Don’t be a lunatic!’ she said. ‘You can’t barrel out of the car like Bruce Willis; you’re an out-of-shape woman of nearly forty!’
‘Jill! I mean it! Let me out.’
But she carried on driving.
She’d spoken to Leo, she said: he was still in shock and needed a couple of days to think.
She repeated this again and again until, finally, I was able to hear her. ‘Which is why I came to get you,’ she said. ‘I thought it would be awful for you to go back to an empty house, thinking you were about to see Leo.’
I put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ I said, quietly.
We stopped and started for a while, passing by a rundown parade of shops, but I no longer made any attempt to get out. Leo did not want to see me. It would be Wednesday, maybe even Thursday, before he would be ready. By then he would probably have realised he’d never be able to trust me again, and that would be it: I’d have lost him. That precious man, the love of my new life. My beautiful Leo.
Now we are heading down the North Circular towards the M1 and I barely care where Jill is taking me.
For the fourth or fifth time I reach for my phone, to send a discreet message to Leo, but of course my phone is still in my handbag, on my bed. In my room, in my house, where I hoped to be able to persuade my husband just how deeply I love him.
The traffic thins and Jill puts her foot down.
Chapter Fifty-Two
We don’t turn up the M1. We stay on the North Circular until Wembley, where Jill turns off, and I realise she’s just taking me to her flat.
