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Hannah persuaded me to stay for lunch, which Milly insisted had to be a picnic on the lawn so that Fluffy didn’t feel left out.
‘That big storm they keep banging on about is supposedly on the way,’ Hannah said, looking up doubtfully into a clear, cloudless sky. ‘So we might as well take advantage of the sunshine while we’ve got it.’
She was busily tipping a bag of carrot sticks into a bowl, even though Milly would probably sneak them to Fluffy, when a thought suddenly occurred to her. ‘Silly question, but I suppose you are still checking all of Finn’s social media accounts?’
I nodded. ‘Only just this side of obsessively,’ I admitted. Hannah’s smile was wry, but I could feel the subtle shift of her changing sides. ‘There’s been nothing on Finn’s Instagram, and he hasn’t been online on WhatsApp either since the day before the stag,’ I said.
‘It’s hard to know what else we can do.’
The pronoun she used was enough.
I carried a tray into the garden and settled myself on the grass beside a clearly besotted Milly.
‘That fiancé of yours is very lucky that we’d already agreed on getting a rabbit or he’d have been in real trouble,’ Hannah muttered darkly as she passed me the plate of sandwiches. I took a cheese and pickle with a smile. Hearing her refer to Finn as my fiancé again lifted my heart.
‘Don’t you remember, you and William were talking about it when we were here for Sunday lunch a few weeks ago,’ I reminded her. I bit into the soft bread as my thoughts flew back to the four of us sitting on that very lawn, drinking tall glasses of sweet, sticky Pimm’s. I could practically smell the newly mown grass William had cut that morning and hear the lazy buzz of circling bees as Milly continued her ongoing campaign for a pet. Finn had been sitting in a deckchair beside me, casually leafing through the local paper, his attention seemingly focused on the property section. It was an inconsequential memory, one of thousands we would surely have made as a foursome over the years, but this one had me suddenly pausing mid-swallow.
The coughing fit that ensued was lengthy and painful, making my eyes water and Hannah rush to thrust a glass of water into my hands.
‘You okay?’ she asked eventually, when the worst of it had subsided. She peered at my red face with concern. ‘I thought I was going to have to do the Heimlich for a minute there.’
‘You should have asked Mummy to cut the crusts off, like she does for me,’ Milly said wisely, from her position beside the rabbit hutch.
My throat still felt sandpaper-raw from the coughing as I drained the water and jumped to my feet.
‘I have to go.’
Hannah looked down at my uneaten lunch. ‘What? Right now?’
I nodded as I hurriedly thrust my feet back into my sandals, my fingers clumsy as they attempted to work the buckles.
‘I’m sorry to rush off,’ I apologised, glancing at my watch with a worried frown, ‘but if I hurry, I might just be able to make it.’
‘You do realise you’re not making any sense,’ Hannah declared, trotting after me as I swept through her kitchen looking for my bag.
I snatched it up from the back of a chair and spared a few vital seconds to explain. ‘There are still a couple of hours until they go to press. If I’m lucky we might be in time to get something in tomorrow’s edition.’
‘OfGlow?’ Hannah asked, clearly confused.
I was at her front door, hand on the latch, but in my head I was already halfway towards my old place of work. ‘No.The Chronicle. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. They could run a full-page feature on Finn’s disappearance. It’ll reach far more people than the “Missing” flyers ever could.’
I didn’t wait around long enough to discover if Hannah thought this was an excellent or totally foolish idea. But as I backed out of her driveway, I’m fairly sure I heard her calling out something to my retreating car.
It sounded an awful lot like ‘Hold the front page’.
27
The smell took me right back. I likened it to the way stepping into a school building immediately transports you back through the years. Admittedly, there was less of the cooked cabbage odour atThe Chronicleoffices, but it was still an olfactory time machine. The local newspaper offices had a warm, musty smell that over the years I’d separated out into overheated office equipment, stacks of old papers, and nose-wrinkling BO from a few colleagues who still believed that deodorant was optional and the best way to measure hard work was from the oval sweat stains beneath your armpits.
Unlike atGlow, there was no fancy reception desk or state-of-the-art ID entry system. There was simply a bell on the door, which I pressed. I was immediately buzzed into the office with a shocking lack of security.
The drive from Hannah’s home to the newspaper offices had been just long enough for me to worry if I’d still know anyone who worked there. It was an unnecessary concern, because apart from a couple of unfamiliar faces – who had most probably still been at school when I was employed by the paper – I recognised practically everyone.
If the world of magazine journalism has a reputation for cattiness, then that of local newspapers is the polar opposite. ‘We’re one big happy family,’ I was told at my interview. And in truth I always looked back on my years atThe Chroniclewith nostalgia. Somehow, I’d managed to erase the memory of the antisocial shifts assigned to the newest reporters, and the feeling of dread when you handed in a piece to the sub-editor only to have it thrown back with so many corrections, you wondered if you’d even managed to spell your own name correctly.
‘Gemma Fletcher,’ cried Marjorie, the office manager, jumping to her feet with a speed that surprised me. Marjorie was impossible to age. I’d have put her in the retirement age bracket back when I was a cub reporter, and yet here she still was, larger than life and just as exuberant as I remembered. She enfolded me against her bolster of a bosom, and the need to maintain an airway took my mind off the fact that she’d hesitated for just a moment before saying the surname that should no longer have been mine.
