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I drive us home in silence. Park up. Unclip the seat belt and lift Fred out in his car seat. It is after 5 p.m. The street is quiet, so quiet. I wonder if we will have to move away. Regardless of what happens now, I can’t imagine living here anymore.
We walk up the short pathway. At our door, Matt glances down the road, towards Neil and Bella’s house.
‘Do you think they’ve taken them in?’ he asks.
I shrug. ‘No idea. Do you think they’d do that?’
‘I don’t know.’ His face is stretched. Grim. ‘I’ve never turned in my best mate before. I’m not sure how it works.’
I touch him on the arm. ‘Try not to think about it.’
‘Oh, OK then.’
I turn away from his sarcasm and open the front door. Together we go inside. I have no idea what happens next. I am in a different kind of limbo. We both are. In this together but separate; floating but tethered to the same hook. We make tea. We make sandwiches. We pour fruit juice, which we leave. We open a bottle of red wine, which we drink. Just like the day our daughter went missing, all we have is this: waiting, waiting and the small domestic rituals of our life.
At around 8.30 p.m., the phone rings. I hear it from upstairs. I leave Fred in his crib and run downstairs. Matt is in the living room, on the phone.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Yes, thank you.’
He rings off. A long moment passes. I open my mouth to say his name but he crouches, bends over his knees and moans. His hands come up, cradle the back of his head. His knuckles are white knots.
‘Matt?’ My body fills with the familiar heat of dread.
‘Oh God.’ He begins to cry. ‘Oh God oh God oh God.’
‘What?’ I say, heart banging. ‘Was it Farnham?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’ My chest is tight. ‘Matt? Can you tell me? Matt, hon?’
‘Oh God oh God oh God.’ Slowly he straightens up, paces to the window, back to me. His face is red, glazed with tears, his eyes small. His arms are still cradling his head.
‘What? It’s not him, is it? It’s not Neil?’
‘It is.’ He meets my eyes, a sob breaking from him. ‘He’s confessed. Neil killed our little girl.’
Thirty-Nine
Neil
His street slides past the windows of the police car; the place where he built his life flickers like a crude cartoon made from the corner of a notepad: houses become one sole house, overlaid and overlaid again – different-colour doors, different shrubs, different curtains.
This is my home, he thinks.This is my town.
And as the town too slips by in the same flicking of a thumb, he knows that it is not his, not any longer – it is the place he was born and raised, the place where he laid the foundations and built his castle brick by brick, only to send a wrecking ball through it and bring the whole thing crashing down. That day. That terrible, terrible morning. Thirty-five years living as a good bloke, minding his own business, meeting Bel, proposing to her on holiday in the Seychelles, marrying her, working hard, never asking anything of anyone, only ever wanting as much as the next man without doing anybody over, trying to be a good mate to Matt, to encourage him, get him to believe in himself…
It doesn’t matter.Hedoesn’t matter. He is nothing. By doing what he has done, he has obliterated not only his castle but himself and anything he might have stood for, any good he might have done.
He tries to pinpoint when exactly he became nothing. The first seconds he can attribute to panic. The conscious part, he thinks, was the moment he pulled the zip over her pale and sleeping face. But maybe not. Maybe he was still senseless then. Blind. Deaf. Numb. Yes, maybe he was. Maybe it was later, when he emerged in fresh overalls from his home and began the great pretence.
It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t matter. Who the hell cares what he thinks?
He closes his eyes to the buzzing of the police radio, the rising hum of the gears, the bleeping of the pedestrian crossing, and sees himself standing over the bag in the cavernous shell of a half-built kitchen extension. It is out of his control now. There is nothing he can do to make this right. There is no going back; there never was. It is almost a relief. It was killing him, one day at a time, stripping him out from the inside. Better to have it out in the open, and some hours from now, it will be, once and for all. Matt and Ava will know what he’s done. Everyone will know what he’s done.
He wonders what Bella knew. If she suspected. Last night, she came in all upset, and when he went up to bed, she was propped up against the headboard waiting for him.
‘Why are Matt and Ava suspicious of you?’
