She nods, finding a fresh tissue in her pocket and wiping her nose and eyes. ‘Whoever did this was trying to cover their tracks, the police think. The post-mortem said she was probably already . . . she had already passed away by then.’
I reach out and cover her hand with mine, her skin papery and cold under my palm.
‘I don’t know what to say, Angela. I’m just so, so sorry for your loss. I only spent a little time with your daughter but she was a lovely young woman. She wanted to protect Mia.’
‘The detective inspector came to tell us last night that they’d found a body in the woods near Seer Green. I had to go in today to do the identification.’ She indicates her husband, still sitting wordlessly in the shadows across the room. ‘We both went, but Gerald couldn’t do the formal bit. I did it.’
I try to make sense of her words, trying to stitch together fragments of a larger canvas. An image returns to me, of Leon Markovitz on the train, looming over me, only moments after Kathryn had got off. She separated herself from Mia because she knew danger was close by. Perhaps she didn’t know who, exactly, but she drew that danger away from the baby all the same. Sacrificed herself. Did Markovitz turn back and go after her again after losing me in the station?
‘I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.’
She pulls the tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan again, wiping her eyes. ‘Do you have children of your own, Ellen?’
‘Always wanted them, but it never quite happened for me and my ex.’
‘I was a late starter, an older mother, nearly forty when I had mine. Always wanted girls. I was lucky, blessed with my two.’ She shakes her head slowly, not seeming to see me. ‘All the things you worry about when they’re little, when they’re growing up, all the hazards and dangers you learn to be aware of, cot death and meningitis rash and choking on food, steep stairs and open windows. Then it’s cars on the street and open water and talking to strangers and a million other things. By the time they’re adults you fool yourself that the worst dangers are over, that you’ve got past it, you’ve succeeded in navigating all those hazards and you can let them get on with it. But really it’s harder than when they were little, because you can’t protect them anymore. You can’t hold them close and shield them like you used to, and the danger’s still out there. It’s just changed.’
A sound cuts the air between us. A little moan, a tiny grunt of a baby turning, shifting in her sleep, and for a second I think I’ve imagined it.Mia. But then Angela stands and walks to a bookcase by the door, turns up the volume on a white plastic baby monitor and listens for a second. The sound fades away and Angela sits back down in her armchair, bringing the monitor with her.
‘Mia?’ I say, a glow in my chest.
She nods, looking at her watch. ‘She’s due a feed soon. She’s a hungry little monkey.’
I wait for a beat to pass before speaking again.
‘Angela, I met someone who said Mia was still in danger,’ I say slowly. ‘But I think he was trying to trick me, to get me to convince you to leave here. To leave this house, take Mia away with you.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Dominic Church. He said . . . Mia would still be at risk as long as she stayed here.’
‘He’s got a bloody nerve after how he treated Zoe.’ Angela’s fists clench in her lap. ‘Still trying to control her life, control Mia’s life, even now. Trying to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. Kicking him out of her life was the best decision she ever made.’
‘How’s Zoe coping, Angela? She’s heard about Kathryn?’
Angela turns her head to look away, the skin tight along her jaw. A ringing reaches us from somewhere else in the house. A landline phone, its noise echoing down the hallway, intrusively loud against the quiet. It trills six times but she makes no move to go and pick it up.
Abruptly the trilling stops and silence is restored, falling like a blanket over the house.
Angela speaks without looking at me. ‘Yes, I’ve told her,’ she says. ‘Come with me.’
It’s a statement rather than a request. She pockets the baby monitor and stands up to lead me out of the lounge, down a long hallway lined with wooden picture frames perfectly spaced, one after the other. Images of Kathryn and Zoe as children together; a proud little girl hugging her baby sister, then kneeling on a sandy beach, at a school sports day, in fancy dress, cheek to cheek in paper Christmas hats, as teenagers with reluctant smiles for the camera, then Zoe in a black graduation gown arm-in-arm with Kathryn wearing her mortar board at a jaunty angle. Angela leads me past a book-lined study and another reception room, wooden floorboards creaking beneath our feet, past a downstairs bathroom and into another corridor.
‘This is the annexe,’ Angela says over her shoulder. ‘It’s just down here.’
At the end of the corridor is a single closed door, plain white, a viewing window set into it. She opens the door and I follow her into a large white room, sash windows looking out on the lawn on two sides. The sharp smell of antiseptic in the air. The room is dominated by a high single bed, metal-framed and complicated as if it’s come from a hospital ward, machines and monitors beeping and clicking beside it. Two monitors, one on top of the other, numbered displays in green and red.
In the bed, there is a young woman. Dark hair fanned out on the pillow behind her, her skin so pale it is almost translucent. There is a tube running into the back of her hand and a sensor clipped to the end of her thumb trailing a wire out of sight. A slow and steadybeep beepfrom a screen next to the bed.
Her eyes are closed.
‘This is my eldest, Zoe.’ Angela goes to the bed and touches the back of a hand gently against her daughter’s cheek. ‘We had this annexe converted when we brought her home from hospital so she could be with us, after it happened. She’s much happier here at home. I won’t leave her, and I won’t leave Mia either. So we won’t run away, no matter how Dominic Church might try to frighten us away. We stay here. All of us, together.’
A woman in a starched blue nurse’s uniform appears from a side room. She’s fortyish and has a kind face, her dark hair pinned carefully back. Angela gives her a nod.
‘Why don’t you get yourself home now, Michelle? See you on Monday morning.’
‘Thanks, Mrs Clifton.’ The nurse peels off latex gloves and drops them in a yellow bin in the corner markedMedical waste – for incineration. She gives Angela a soft smile. ‘If you need me to come in tomorrow though, just let me know. It’s no bother.’
