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65
June 2019
They arrive in London at 7 p.m. on Saturday night, Lucy, the kids and Henry. The stern-faced men at passport control waved them through disinterestedly at both ends of the journey, just as Henry had said they would. ‘That detective won’t have told anyone,’ he’d said to Lucy as they sat in the Uber heading to O’Hare. ‘He wants us in London, not stuck out here indefinitely.’
At nine o’clock they peel themselves out of the black cab they’d taken from Paddington Station and let themselves into Henry’s apartment block. The porter, Oscar, is not there – he finishes early on the weekend – and they move silently with their suitcases into the lift and up to the third floor.
Lucy drops her rucksack on to the floor in the hallway and glances around. Can it be only four days since she was last here?Only eight days since she was making fairy cakes for Stella’s cake sale? How is that possible? she wonders. How? She feels she has lived a thousand lives since then.
The cats appear at the sound of humans like ghostly shadows curling around the walls of the flat. Henry scoops them both up: the nice one rubs his face against Henry’s; the horrible one yowls and scratches him and Henry lets it drop to the floor. The cleaner has been and every surface is immaculate and clear.
That night they order fried chicken from Deliveroo and watch TV lined up on the sofa and Henry is different somehow, softer, as he sits with the nice cat on his lap, feeding fried chicken into his own mouth and joining in with Lucy and the children’s jokes. Stella at one point removes all the cushions from behind her back and puts them on the floor to sit on, and Henry doesn’t even notice.
They all go to bed as early as they can given the jetlag, at just after 2 a.m., and Lucy lies and listens to the sounds of London traffic outside the bedroom window and she feels it again, this awful feeling that has followed her for over a year, the tightness around her skull, the dull dread that blunts everything with its incessant chipping away at her sense of security. If the police can somehow find out that Henry was responsible for killing Birdie Dunlop-Evers with a single blow to the head a full twenty-six years after the crime was committed, then what else are they capable of uncovering? I am home, she thinks, I am in clean pyjamas in a big soft bed in a luxury apartment block in central London. But I will never ever feel safe, not until I know that the French police are not still looking for me.
