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Eri turns the radio off completely. The air is warm, the car a lit-up cocoon. ‘Are you following your husband?’
‘How do you know?’
Eri catches her gaze in the mirror, then helps himself to a second stick of powdery Wrigley’s. He holds one up for her, and she declines. ‘Usually is,’ he says.
Jen turns her mouth down, pleading the fifth. She’d usually make small talk, try to make the taxi driver feel okay about being nosey, but she doesn’t today.
They come off at a roundabout, take the second exit, then head out into the country. The track road is unlit, not even tarmacked. Just mud. The hairs on Jen’s arms rise as they travel down it. The smells of the countryside in summer drift in through the air-con. Haybales. Rain on hot pavements after a long drought.
‘Maybe I should get a role in the films,’ Eri says cheerfully. ‘Following husbands.’
‘Maybe.’
They head up what looks like a private drive, an unmarked hairline fracture on Google Maps.
‘Should we go all the way up?’ Eri asks. He takes his baseball cap off. His hair was perhaps once thick but has now thinned out, fine strands still curling like a baby’s after a bath.
Eri brings the car to a stop when Jen doesn’t reply. They are about three hundred feet from Kelly’s dot. Jen should get out, but she hesitates. Wanting to enjoy these last few moments until … until something.
With Eri’s headlights now off, Jen’s eyes adjust to the twilit drive. It winds to the left, then to the right. The sky is a bright mother of pearl, close to the summer solstice. The trees are full, shaggy, the leaves of one meeting the other.
Headlights sweep the skies like laser beams. ‘He’s driving,’ Eri says. He reverses quickly backwards and out on to the main road. Jen glances at her phone as the blue dot begins to move.
Kelly drives past them and into the distance, not seeming to notice them. ‘Shall we follow?’ Eri asks.
‘No. Let’s … I want to see where he was, what’s at the end of this drive.’
Eri heads wordlessly all the way to the top. It winds this way and that, the bends obscuring what lies at the end of it. Jen is expecting to see a wedding venue, a castle, a stately home, but instead a small and shabby housing development slides into view, one building at a time. Seven houses dotted around a shingled driveway. Eri pulls the car to a stop. The houses are old stone. The windows are illuminated in four of them; the others in darkness.
One is untidier than the rest. Roof tiles missing. An old-fashioned wooden front door that looks rickety, near rotten. One bay window on the first storey is boarded up, QAnon looped on it in pink spray paint. Eri sits in silence while Jen gazes up at it. That’s the house. She’s sure of it. It’s the only one without a car outside.
‘I have no idea what this is,’ she says.
‘Looks dodgy.’
Jen’s mind is spinning in overtime. A place to deal. A hideaway. A place to cut drugs. A place to kill people. A place to keep missing children, dead policemen … it could be anything. Nothing good.
‘He said he was going camping,’ she whispers to Eri instead of all this.
‘Maybe he is. Looks pretty outdoorsy,’ he adds with a laugh.
‘In the Lake District.’
‘Oh.’
‘Will you wait here?’ she asks, easing the door handle open. ‘I need to go and look.’
‘’Course,’ he says, but his facial expression has become more wary. Her fleeting friend the Uber driver, the person she has confessed the most to. She glances back at him as she goes. He’s lit up by the interior light, a snow globe in the dimness.
She walks tentatively across the grey shingle. The air outside is holiday air. Summertime smells, the sound of crickets.
And suddenly, she wishes to be back there, on the landing with the pumpkin, watching Todd kill a man. She’d just let it happen. Accept it. He’d do his time. He’d be able to have a life afterwards. She wants, for the first time, to re-cover this wound she has discovered. Stop discovering its depths. Move on.
She walks through the darkness, up to the house, and tries the front door, but it’s locked. It sits slightly apart from the other houses. None of them are boundaried, no fences, no front or back gardens. The neighbour has manicured their lawn up to an arbitrary straight line. After it, the wildness of this garden begins – nettles, weeds, two giant pink lupins which nod and sway in the breeze.
Jen pushes the letterbox open. It reminds her of the one they had growing up. It’s stiff and cold underneath her fingertips, and she thinks of her father and the day he died and how she didn’t get there in time.
Through the letterbox she can see an old-fashioned hallway. Uneven quarry tiles. She presumes Kelly has picked up the post from the floor and stacked it on the hallway table there.
