Jacob nodded. ‘’Course, guv. I’ll get that done before I leave.’
Kapoor yawned. ‘I’ll guess I’ll see you both in the morning.’
Gina nodded. They both needed a good night’s sleep. Hopefully she’d wake up to hear that Susan had come home. ‘See you then, for the big day.’
Kapoor smiled. ‘I know, I can’t wait. Eek, I’m so excited, guv. Catch you tomorrow.’
As she listened to Kapoor’s booted feet getting quieter, she pondered over any reasons that Susan may have for not telling anyone where she was. She was going through a divorce. Was it all plain sailing or had there been a lot of animosity? Maybe Susan was battling to stay afloat, having to manage her income closer, especially as she was self-employed with no fixed income. Maybe looking after three children alone had overwhelmed her. Gina had brought Hannah up singlehandedly. Doing that for one child had been a challenge, one she never regretted but still a challenge nonetheless. After Terry, she vowed never to bring a man into their lives. It was just her and Hannah back then.
Her mind wandered back to Mary. She couldn’t get the image of her twiddling her hair around her finger out of her head.
‘I’ll see you nice and early, guv. I called Ryan Wheeler and we need to be there at the crack of dawn. Then I called Mary Hudson. She said she was heading to her daughter’s house tomorrow. She said we could accompany her. That will be a bit later in the morning.’
‘Thanks, Jacob. You best get home then.’
‘I’ll meet you at his, shall we say at seven?’
She grimaced. ‘See you then.’
He took his and Kapoor’s cups as he left.
Gina’s thoughts flitted back to Mary and Clare. She hoped that Susan would come home safely and in one piece and whatever secret the family were holding back would forever remain none of her business.
‘You still here?’ She flinched as she felt DCI Brigg’s breath on her neck. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.’
She smiled and turned. He looked as tired as she felt. His hair had flopped over his forehead.
‘Fancy a drink on the way home? You can tell me all about the new case.’
‘Best not. I’ll update the system as soon as I get home.’
‘Okay. It was just about the case, not about us.’ He took a slight step back.
She knew he always held out hope of rekindling their secret relationship but she wasn’t going to encourage him, despite every bone in her body wanting him to come back to hers. ‘I know. It’s just I have something to do.’ She couldn’t hide the heaviness in her heart or the longing she felt to be somewhere else at that exact moment as she buttoned up her coat and stood there, ready to leave.
‘Are you okay?’
‘That question again. I’m not going to be okay if you keep asking me if I’m okay.’
His shoulders dropped. ‘I can just see that you have something on your mind. You’re doing that thing – your temples, they twitch like you’re grinding your teeth. That’s how I can always tell.’
She unclenched her teeth. ‘I need to go.’ She hurried past him and out of the station. What she had to do couldn’t wait.
Seven
Gina laid the carnations on the headstone and sat in the dark, alone. The only thing she could hear was the traffic in the distance. She flinched as an owl hooted overhead. A chill ran through her body but she wasn’t ready to leave, not for a while. She owed her mother this much. ‘Hello, Mum, I’ve missed you.’ She took a sip of the cooled hot chocolate that she’d bought from the petrol station, enjoying what was left as it slid down her throat. She closed her eyes and tried to picture her mother then gasped as Mary replaced the image she had in her mind’s eye. She opened her eyes again and shivered.
‘You wouldn’t believe how big Hannah is now. I have a daughter who is in her twenties and I’m a grandmother. That happened a bit earlier than I’d hoped, but she’s a wonderful little girl. She has our eyes.’ Gina smiled and took another sip of chocolate. As she tried to swallow, a lump stuck in her throat. ‘Gracie’s beautiful, Mum. I wish you were here to see her. We could have taken her to the park together, ate cake, fed ducks, all the fun things I remember us doing. You should still be here with us.’ She looked up at the stars as she willed the tears to go back to where they came from. At least in the dark, no one could see her crying – not that there was anyone around to hear her crying. She could double up and sob until she had nothing more to give and no one would ever know, but she wouldn’t do that.
‘You would have been seventy.’ She paused, placing her hand on the shimmering frost that had formed over the top of the headstone. ‘There’s something I want to say, I need to say it. I’m so, so, sorry that I didn’t come to see you when you were poorly. I didn’t expect you to—’
She couldn’t say it aloud, even though there was no one around to hear. She couldn’t risk the breeze carrying her words across the graveyard, delivering them to someone who could use them against her. She couldn’t tell her mother what Terry had done either, how he controlled her with fear, how he manipulated her to feel as though it was all her fault, how he’d broken her both physically and mentally. By the time her mother had died, she was a mere puppet and he controlled the script that was their lives in the tragedy that she had ultimately triumphed in. She tried not to think about how they had ended. An image of her dead husband flashed through her mind as she choked on the hot chocolate.
She had no words to express the regret that she’d been carrying around. Her mother had been right. She’d told Gina that Terry had seemed a little too demanding of her attention and time. Her lovely mother had always kept her door open, waiting for her return but going home would have been equal to admitting she’d failed. Instead, like so many people in her position, she’d stuck with Terry in the hope that he’d change. Gina wondered if her relationship with Hannah would have been better had Nanny Harte been in their lives.
Gina grabbed a stone from the grave and gripped it until she felt its jagged edge piercing the delicate skin on her palm. Regrets weren’t getting her anywhere and the pain in her hand wasn’t relieving the pain in her mind. Her mother was gone and Gina was all alone. She had let her mother down and she hadn’t been there for her father either when he’d turned to the bottle, eventually drinking himself to death. Both died in the same year. Blood seeped out of the gaps in her fist. The stone was sharp and she deserved every bit of discomfort that she was going through. As a tear trickled down her cheek, the shrill sound of her phone ringing felt as though it were filling the graveyard.
‘Harte.’ She blew her nose and waited for the caller to speak.
