“Where are Mark and Paul?” Ruth spits. “Did you ask yourself that since you read this?”
Jayne has been trying and trying to phone Mark, but still he isn’t picking up.
“Of course, I have! But I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation.” He looks at them. “What? I’m sorry. I’m trying to catch up with what’s happened, but for what it’s worth, I’m sure Edie is not a murderer. Come on. She’s a prankster, we all know that. You girls have got yourselves in a terrible state about it and I’m sorry for that but—”
“How dare you,” Ruth says. Her voice is quiet, but furious.“We’re not girls, and you have no idea what it was like. Get out. Go and pack up the car. We’re leaving.”
She’s never spoken to him like this before. He opens his mouth to respond but can’t find the words. “I’m sorry,” he says, and leaves.
Ruth’s eyes turn to Jayne.
“The gun,” Jayne says. “Please don’t tell anyone I brought it with me. I’m so sorry. I feel so stupid.”
“I won’t,” Ruth says. She means it. “If you don’t mention that I got so drunk and so lost and pointed it at you. Quid pro quo.”
“Of course. But we need to talk about it. The drinking, I mean. Not now, but soon.”
“I want to tell you something now.” Ruth knows that if she leaves here, she’ll fall back into her old ways of keeping everything hidden. And after confessing to Jayne how Toby feels about Alfie last night, she’s ready to share more. This, right here, is a moment she can’t let slip away.
She’s been thinking about Jayne’s confession on the hillside, about the gun and Jayne’s plans for it, about Jayne’s and Mark’s struggles. It’s emboldened Ruth.
And seeing Toby, who up here in this place suddenly strikes her as so ineffectual, so disconnected from the raw business of life, so furtive behind that bookish façade, so genteelly horrible to Ruth and therefore so possibly the sort of man to be living a darker existence away from their home, only encourages her.
If I don’t say it here and now, she thinks, I’ll never have the courage again.
She looks at the doorway, the space where Toby just stood and the hallway beyond. It’s empty. From a few doors down, they can hear William Elliott’s voice on the phone.
Ruth beckons to Jayne. “I want to tell you something in return for what you told me,” she says. “I can’t keep it to myself any longer.” Jayne sits next to her and leans in. In a low, urgent voice, Ruth explains her fears about Toby. Her suspicions, his altered behaviorsince she fell pregnant, the other small proofs she’s accumulated, including the biggest of those: Lexi MacKay’s Degas letter.
Jayne listens. When Ruth has finished, the silence in the room feels to Ruth as if it’s pulsating in her ears.
“Toby was supposed to be staying with his sister last night, right?” Jayne says.
Ruth nods.
“Where does she live?”
“In Honeystreet, in Wiltshire.”
“What’s the street name?”
“There isn’t one. It’s a houseboat. You park at the pub nearby.”
Jayne lowers her voice further.
“When I was with Emily and the driver outside earlier,” Jayne says, “the driver said that Toby messaged this morning asking to be picked up from an address that wasn’t your home, and it didn’t sound like a Honeystreet address either.”
Ruth feels ice cold. “Do you remember what he said?” she asks.
“Addison Court.”
“Did you look it up?”
Jayne nods.
Ruth blinks back tears. “What’s there?” But she thinks she already knows. It’s a well-known address in the center of the city because the development was controversial. It’s near the University of Wessex, where Toby works. It’s only a block long, and that block is occupied by one building, which the street is named after.
Jayne shows her phone to Ruth.
