Cynthia slides it across to her, and watches it disappear into the folds of the woman’s tracksuit bottoms.
“You aren’t Anna, are you? Do you know where she is?” Cynthia takes care not to spook the young woman, who looks up sharply. She grimaces, but Cynthia pulls another note from her wallet.
“Okay,” the girl says quickly. “A guy came round here a month or so ago. I don’t know him. He just told me to say that was my name, if anyone I didn’t know came asking. But I haven’t seen him now for weeks.”
She taps at her phone distractedly, with the speed and deftness of the young. There is a whoosh as a message is sent, and her gaze falls back on Cynthia.
“I mean, he paid enough for rent for the next two months, so I mean you can’t blame me for doing it. He just told me him and his girlfriend were trying to get away from her mum. But I’m guessing that’s you and you seem fine.” The woman shrugs. “I was expecting worse.”
“Do you know where they are?” Cynthia asks, sliding an additional note across the table’s pockmarked surface.
“Nah, he never said.”
Cynthia ignores the immediate setback and pushes on. “Would you be comfortable telling the police what you just told me? About all of this?” she asks.
The woman absentmindedly pulls a cigarette from a crumpled packet on the table and lights it. As she inhales, she twists a longstrand of her blond hair around an acrylic fingernail. Time stretches. Cynthia waits. Finally, the woman looks at her again and shakes her head.
“No. Sorry. I’d love to help but he didn’t seem like someone I’d want to piss off. Plus lying to the police.”
Cynthia pulls another note from her purse. It isn’t a fifty—she has no more of them.
“Do you remember the man’s name?” she asks, sliding the money across the sticky table.
The woman lifts it, and wafts it, clearly disappointed by the denomination. “Yeah, I do.Simon. But I don’t think it’s his real name, you know?”
The woman’s phone pings, she glances at it.
—
By the time Cynthia leaves the woman’s flat, the light outside has faded.
She crosses the street quickly, this neighborhood rougher-looking in the evening light.
It is only now that Cynthia realizes how much her car stands out against the others on this road, and not in a good way. Its shiny paintwork and slick lines are gleamingly out of place.
She usually likes the feeling of standing out, having nice things, but now Cynthia recognizes that people here might see her car as a display of wealth or superiority. A car like hers seems to demand something from the onlooker, but it also reveals perhaps too much about its owner.
Cynthia does not like it here. As she reaches the car and depresses her key fob, her hand trembles. The sports car’s lights blink but when she pulls the door handle, it does not open. It is locked.
She must have left it unlocked the entire time she has been inside. Or she must have pressed the button accidentally inside.
Then she recalls briefly leaving her coat when she used the woman’s mildewed bathroom before leaving.
Why had she done that?
She hadn’t supposed the woman would be interested in her car, and she certainly couldn’t have had time to run outside and steal from it. Cynthia pops the key fob again and opens the door. Sheglances nervously into the car, her sunglasses remain in the cup holder, her tennis kit bag still in the passenger footwell, all seems well. She checks the empty back seats before sliding in.
It is only once she has started driving, once she is well on to the M25 heading home, that she feels the air in the car shift.
There is the creak of leather behind her, movement from the footwell at her back, up on to the rear seats, and then a voice comes close to her ear.
“Hello, Cynthia. My name is Simon.”
Day Six
Chapter 28
No One Is Helping
