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The Find My Phone feature is enabled on both the kids’ mobiles. Even if Peter’s phone is switched off, it will give me his last location by pinging off other users’ phones. A minute later I have my answer: the school, which tells me nothing I didn’t already know.
My phone vibrates again.
It’s from Stacey this time: a photograph of my son sitting at her kitchen counter eating ice-cream.
The bird of anxiety takes flight.
We had a deal, I text.
Keep your hair on. He just turned up at my door. Come and get him.
Tom offers to collect Peter himself when I update him with the news, but I tell him I’ll go. I need to make sure Stacey understood I meant what I said yesterday.
I’m halfway down the stairs when I’m paged to attend an emergency cardiac tamponade. I text Stacey to let her know I’ll be there as soon as I can and head down to the Emergency Department. It’s only ninety minutes later, when the crisis is under control, that I realise I forgot to presssend.
I erase the redundant message and text a new one.
Held up at work. On my way.
Three grey dots appear, and then disappear. I wait a few moments but Stacey doesn’t reply.
I’m reversing my car out of its space when my mobile pings again with an incoming text.
Too late now.
chapter 59
stacey
Stacey meant every word of her promise to Millie Downton. She managed to spin the video Millie leaked online to her advantage, but the damage has been done: she’s back under the media spotlight just when she most needs it to move on. She has no wish to go toe-to-toe with Millie again. She’s enjoyed the hero-worship from Millie’s son – if only her boy, Archie, was as charismatic and enterprising – and taken no small degree of pleasure from Millie’s obvious irritation, but he’s not worth incurring her mama-bear wrath. The woman is a psychotic tigress when it comes to her children.
Most mothers are. It’s not something Stacey’s ever really understood.
So when she comes up from the cellar and finds Peter peering in through the heavy glass front door on Monday afternoon, she’s not pleased. The boy can keep secrets – he’s certainly proven that – but she doesn’t want to give Millie any excuse to resume hostilities.
On the other hand, she doesn’t want him telling his mother what he knows either.
So she lets him in, and feeds him Coke and ice-cream before texting Millie to come and collect him.
‘I told you this had to stop,’ she tells Peter, putting the tub of Ben & Jerry’s back in the freezer. ‘No more coming over here unannounced. Your mother doesn’t want you to see me. She thinks I’m a bad influence.’
Peter grins. ‘That’s funny.’
Stacey doesn’t smile back. It isn’t funny. It isn’t funny at all. But she certainly appreciates the irony: a freckle-faced ten-year-old boy and a thirty-eight-year-old grown-ass professional woman – of course people will assumeshe’sthe bad influence.
Her coffee has gone cold, and she pours it down the sink. Instead of draining, the coffee pools in the bottom, lifting small fragments of onions and peas on a tide of black caffeine. Stacey reaches beneath the sink for the plunger to clear it.
‘Harper’s going back home tomorrow,’ Peter says as she pumps the plunger.
‘I’m sure your mother must be relieved,’ Stacey says.
He spoons another mouthful of ice-cream into his mouth. She wishes this boy had been born hers. They could have done so much together. He reallyisan exceptionally good-looking child, with those amber eyes and sweep of tawny hair. At ten years old he’s already learned to weaponise his looks: she can only imagine how dangerous, howeffective, he’ll be in a few years’ time.
‘They know,’ he tells her, slyly. ‘Harper saw you in the car.’
The cold coffee starts to drain, and she puts the plunger back beneath the sink and straightens up. ‘Knowing and proving are very different things, Peter,’ she says.
‘You don’t have to worry about Millie,’ he says. ‘Shewon’t say anything.’
