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‘Who’s this Jasper bloke?’ Chris asked suspiciously.
‘He’s a made-up character. Sort of,’ said Will, wanting to bang his head against the wall. His dad was reading more or less about himself and still couldn’t see it.
‘I don’t understand why she’d want to keep a writing course secret from me,’ said Chris. ‘Why on earth would she do that?’
‘Maybe she didn’t think you’d be interested.’
‘Well, I probably wouldn’t be, but that’s no reason not to say anything.’
‘I think we should go to the police.’
Chris rounded on him. ‘Don’t be so bloody silly, Will.’
‘Dad, this is serious.’
Chris had watched enough detective programmes to know that the police always looked first of all to ‘home’ for the perpetrator. Even though he was totally innocent, they’d investigate him as a person of interest. They’d take his computer away and see he’d made quite a few visits to ‘naughtysluttyladies.com’. He went cold at the thought of a roomful of coppers laughing at that before they started digging up his garden.
‘They might frame me for murder.’
‘Have you murdered her?’
‘Don’t be so bloody silly, Will,’ Chris said again, with even more emphasis this time.
‘Then you’ve nothing to worry about.’
‘Anyway, the police these days are too busy fannying about dancing at festivals wearing rainbows.’
‘I wouldn’t go into a police station saying that, Dad,’ replied Will.
‘If we go to the police, they’ll do one of those TV appeals and all hell will break loose. They’ll film me and if I don’t cry everyone will think I know more than I let on, or if my eyebrow moves in the wrong way, or… or I put my arms in the wrong place or I say the wrong word. There are a load of armchair detective nutters out there who will have presumed I’ve done her in and come for me. They’ll spread a load of lies and wreck my business. They’ll paint murderer on the front door in red paint. I’ll be made into one of those memes.’ Chris was getting himself in a proper state now.
‘I don’t think—’
But Chris was still in a loop. ‘And it won’t just be me who suffers because the national papers will get hold of it and rake up the whole of Polly’s life and splash it on the front page of theDaily Mail. If all she’s doing is lying low – and I’ll put money on it that she is – then something like that could push her right over the edge.’
Will threw his hands up. ‘Okay then, what’s your alternative?’
‘I’ll email theDaily Trumpetand put an advert on their lost and found page for the next issue.’
Will blinked. ‘Are you joking? That’s for things like wallets and Labradors. And, Dad, come on, really – theTrumpet?’
‘They’ve got a massive circulation and everyone reads it. It’s worth a shot.’
Will thought about it and then nodded. ‘Okay, like you say, worth a shot.’
It was too, but one of Will’s old college pals was in the police and he’d ring her for some advice at the same time. Best-case scenario was that Polly saw theTrumpetentry and rang to tell them she was absolutely fine and not to worry. Worst case… he really didn’t want to think about that.
Chapter 44
Teddy was both gobsmacked and overjoyed to see Sabrina walk into his restaurant on the Sunday.
‘This place won’t clean itself,’ she said, snapping on her rubber gloves, but she wasn’t there because she had a compulsion to clean. She knew change was on the horizon and it scared her stupid and she would rather be busy than sitting ‘resting’. She didn’t want to rest, she didn’t want to think; she wanted todo.More memories had popped into her mind, their flow increasing since she’d met the scarecrow man. She now remembered that she’d had a large executive desk in an office before it was removed and replaced by one of the ordinary grey ones. She remembered playing some sort of tennis game over the divide with the young woman she sat next to at work, who had dark curly hair and eyes full of mischief.
There was a young man somewhere in her life who brought the same sort of warm wave with him, her partner’s son, she thought – not her husband’s; she knew she wasn’t married. And she could see herself loading many, many shoes into bags and feeling an all-consuming rush of anger as she did so. So many small memories with no weight attached hadsharpened to full HD colour, yet too many big, important ones remained shadowy. The man she had left either temporarily or permanently, for instance; he was there in her head without distinction or definition and she wasn’t sure if she was blocking him unconsciously or deliberately.
Teddy was humming absently as he was food-prepping in the kitchen. He sounded content, without a clue of what was about to fall on him. He didn’t know that the previous day Cilla had dropped an A-bomb on his mother’s life, how much she’d cried on Sabrina’s shoulder that the happy last years she’d spent back in England with Sal had turned out to be a lie, the biggest deception her husband had ever performed. Sylvie was up at the house with her at the moment talking it through as friends do, helping her to put it in order in her head so she could tell her son that Flick was his half-sister, because he had every right to know. God knows how Flick would take it. The onus had been unfairly put on Marielle to make the call whether or not to share or keep the secret, but once known, it was too big to fit back in the box. Sabrina wondered if it would ever have come to light had she not been there. She didn’t want to be the catalyst for something as cruel as that. Why, after giving out so much kindness, did Marielle have to be the one to get kicked in the teeth?
At half-past twelve Teddy bobbed his head into the ladies’ loo and said, ‘I’ve made lunch.’
