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‘Read it,’ Anna insists. ‘But promise me you won’t tell them I’ve told you.’
32
THE DAY OF HIS DEATH: 03:13
Tom
Tom wakes in the dark. The night air feels soft and warm on his skin. Nicole is beside him, sleeping on her back, her mouth open, snoring. He’s never told her that she snores; she would hate it.
He’s woken up because he’s hungry. Nicole has them both on a diet. She took all the ice cream out of the freezer last week and it melted in the sink. Tom thought it was a terrible shame, like watching pleasure itself ooze away. Last night they sat morosely over bowls of salad and chicken at supper, and now he’s ravenous.
‘Nicole,’ he whispers and, when she doesn’t react and he’s satisfied she’s out cold, he climbs carefully out of bed, taking care not to wake her. He picks his way across the floor and heads for the kitchen. Walking through the glass corridors at night is one of his favourite things to do. He looks up to see a brightscattering of stars and the moon, which is almost full and the colour of cream, casting a milky light over everything. He loves the moon; the sight of it makes him feel childlike, in a good way, the way you feel when you fall asleep at night knowing that your family loves you and there’ll be pancakes in the morning.
Maybe I should get a telescope, he thinks. He remembers a television show he watched about astronomers. They had huge telescopes, very cool. His thoughts gather: we could build a special observatory in the garden for it and invite friends and neighbours to come round and look through it. Olly might even like it, which would be good. Tom has tried to make friends with Olly but finding something they have in common has proved impossible even after six months.
Tom misses his old friends, misses meeting in the pub, watching the rugby together, playing pool and darts, even misses the lads he worked with at the garage. After the win, he treated his colleagues and mates to a big night out in the West End, but some of the lads got snide about the money. Patrick was downright nasty and the two of them nearly came to blows.
‘I thought you’d be happy for me,’ he said in the aftermath, when Patrick had been pulled off him. He was shocked by the almost-violence. Even as the words came out of Tom’s mouth, a little slurred, a little needy, he knew something had happened that would be hard to reverse. Positions had been staked. Tom no longer felt as if he was ‘one of the lads’.
‘Mate, we are happy,’ one of them mumbled but his words died in the air as Tom turned away and headed for the tube, forgetting the limo he’d hired, forgetting that he was richenough to take a taxi, thinking only about Patrick’s betrayal. That was a bond he’d thought couldn’t be broken. For the first time in his life, he felt lonely. It hurts to think back on it even though Patrick apologised within hours. Tom never told Nicole about it. She has a lower tolerance for Patrick than he does, and he feared she would want to cut Patrick out of their lives, when Tom didn’t want to do that. He couldn’t bring himself to sever their childhood bond completely. Ignorant, she went ahead and approved Tom’s suggestion that they give Patrick a gift of a lump sum. Tom hoped it would appease Patrick, but he can’t deny it left a nasty taste in his mouth that’s lingering.
He opens the fridge. The shelves present a bleak sight because Nicole has emptied them of everything unhealthy. He’s against the diet in general but Nicole won’t be swayed. She’s explained again and again how much it means to her that they slim down. All his arguments against it – that he adores her the way she is, that he’s happy with how he looks, that who-the-fuck cares? – have fallen on deaf ears.
It’s to do with their new neighbour, Sasha, Tom’s sure of it. She spouts all sorts of boring self-care crap, and she’s whippet-thin, not like Nicole whose shape he adores. She’s the sort of woman who makes Nicole feel lousy about herself. They couldn’t have had more unfortunate neighbours. All Nicole wants from a friend is to have a chat and a laugh and a glass or two of prosecco, and all Tom’s after is someone to share a few beers with, invite over for a swim, maybe play a round of golf with. As soon as he’s learned to play, that is. Instead, they got these two smug-as-hell characters out of a posh Sunday supplement.
We should buy another house in Swindon, he thinks, so we can see old friends and get our social life back. Maybe I could try again with the lads, treat them to an escape room or to Laser Quest. He decides he’ll talk to Nicole about it.
He shuts the fridge and checks the freezer in case the ice cream has miraculously replenished but the shelves are almost empty there, too. He bangs the door shut, grumpy because he won’t be able to get back to sleep unless he eats. It feels like enough of an emergency to raid his secret stash.
He makes his way through the Barn to the wing that contains his den and thinks, not for the first time, how amazing it is that Nicole knew exactly what she wanted to do with the money right after it landed. She told him she’d been visualising something like the Glass Barn her whole life. ‘I knew something like this would happen to us,’ she said. ‘I felt it in my bones. I could see this house.’
‘You have such an imagination,’ he told her. Since they met in childhood, she’s amazed him often. When he thinks about how he loves her, he comes up with two words that he’d never share with his male friends: sweetly and intensely.
‘Stop it, Tom Booth,’ she told him back, sternly, because she isn’t good at taking a compliment, but she blushed with pleasure.
He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that he would rather she’d dreamed of a grand town house, instead, where they’d have some life on the doorstep.
As Tom moves through the house, night lighting comes on; dim, floor-level lights that show him the way. He’s pleased to see them working. The system has been playing up lately.
He pushes the door of his den open. The digital clock projected on his wall glows red, informing him that it’s 03:29. He yawns and moves a wedding photograph of him and Nicole aside, revealing four chunky bars of chocolate hidden behind it. He opens one and swivels his easy chair so that it’s facing the window. He sits and breaks the first row of chocolate off the bar. It melts on his tongue, and he relaxes instantly.
The blinds are open, and he can see out to the side of the Glass Barn where a wildflower meadow planted by the landscaper is bordered by tall grasses. Tonight, they’re swaying gently, bleached by the moonlight, as if he’s looking at a sepia photograph. The sight is almost otherworldly. He breaks off another line of chocolate, steps outside into a warm, gusty wind and breathes in the soft, loamy air. He considers waking Nicole to enjoy the moonlight with him. It’s romantic.
Something catches his eye, a movement in the grasses. Curious, he steps off the deck into the meadow to see better. Fronds of dry grass tickle his ankles. There it is again: it looks like a person, walking through the long grass around the side of the Barn, coming from the swimming-pool area, heading towards the woods, just their head visible. But it’s hard to see clearly. It’s like trying to track a seal’s head in a choppy ocean as the grass undulates in the chalky light.
The person stops, as if he or she can feel Tom’s gaze, and turns towards him. He sucks in his breath sharply and stares back, but he can’t identify whether it’s a friend or a stranger.
33
THURSDAY
Anna
Anna walks slowly away from the police station. She feels as if all the strength it took her to get through that meeting is draining out of her and her legs might give way. She gave the detectives the journal and left right away, refusing to answer any more questions. She didn’t want to say more because she’s not sure she comes over as believable in person. She wants the journal to tell her story. She thinks it went about as well as she could have hoped and she’s as confident as she can be that they’ll keep this to themselves for now, because Sasha and Olly mustn’t know she’s done this. Not yet.
She crosses the road and walks towards the centre of town. It’s so long since she’s been here; in fact, she doesn’t think it’s more than a handful of times since Sasha and Olly moved in. Some of the shops have changed hands, but not everything is different. She walks past Dal Baffo’s, the restaurant where she and Nicksometimes used to eat. It’s empty now; a waitress is laying the tables for dinner service, the barman is polishing glasses. She wonders if he would even recognise her if she went in. There was a time when he greeted her and Nick by their first names.
She fantasises about looking through their reservations book – even though she supposes that these days it’s probably electronic – to see how often their old friends – if you can even call them that – still dine here. She asks herself, as she has done so often over the years, whether it was something specific she did that made them drop her after Nick died, but she knows in her heart that socially she was always hard work for those women. She was too serious; she wasn’t posh enough and therefore not fun or frivolous enough. Plus – the ultimate sin – she was childless. They only let her into their circle because she was married to Nick; that was the truth of it that she learned brutally quickly after he died.
