Hair dried and styled, she paints her face carefully, emphasising the hollows under her cheekbones, the slant of her eyes, the red of her lips. Too red. Like Soraya’s the other week. Fleshy, lascivious. Grabbing a piece of loo roll, she scrubs it off her face, before applying lip gloss in a neutral shade. She checks herself up and down in the mirror, the dressed-down version of the little black dress: black trousers, black top, black shoes, black eyeliner. Nude lips. Nude . . .
Fuck’s sake, it’s as if Soraya’s moved into her head. She shakes herself free. It’s time to go.
‘You found us all right, then,’ Edgar says.
Lucy nods. It was easy enough to find his house, a neat semi-detached set back behind a privet hedge. Very domestic. Not quite the setting she’d imagined for him, but then he has the kind of face that would look best in a dark bar, cigarette hanging from his lips as candlelight lent shadows to play across his perfectly chiselled features.
Soraya is back again. Lucy’s IQ is dropping in real time the more she looks at him. How the hell does anyone get any work done around him? It must drive him mad. She looks away, staring out of the window as they drive out of Oxford in silence.
After a while, Edgar clears his throat. ‘Sorry, I know I’m being very quiet. My wife’s had some bad news about a woman she’s been working with. She’s relapsed, been arrested for theft and assault. Rachel is worried about her.’ He pauses. ‘Not much we can do about that right now, though.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’
He nods. ‘Anyway, this really does promise to be fascinating,’ he says, keeping his eyes on the road ahead.
He drives well, Lucy thinks, a smooth ride, the steering wheel held lightly between his hands. Perfect command of the road . . .
Fuck’s sake . . .
‘Yes, I’m looking forward to it,’ she says, pleased that her voice manages to come out sounding normal.
‘All the speakers are great, but I’d particularly recommend Alison Liebling. She’s doing a session on prison suicide. One of our finest criminologists.’
The thought of Soraya is ousted, all triviality gone from Lucy’s mind. She’s breathless, dunked into a vat of cold water, the shock of the wordsuicidereverberating around her.
Finally, she recovers herself. ‘I’ve read some of her stuff,’ Lucy says. Edgar doesn’t reply, and a silence stretches out between them. It’s oddly comforting.
The traffic has ground to a halt, an accident ahead. He coughs, clears his throat. ‘You said something a few weeks ago, when I asked what came into your mind when you thought about prison. You said your mother.’
Another sucker punch, head back under the ice.
She looks straight ahead at the brake lights of the car in front. This wasn’t how she was planning on telling it. But maybe now, maybe it is the right time.
Deep breath. Another.
‘She was in prison. When she died.’
‘How did she die?’
‘She hanged herself with a sheet. They hadn’t picked up what a bad state she was in.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and he turns to her, only quickly, but for long enough for her to see the concern in his eyes. ‘My mother died five years ago. I thought I’d be able to cope, but it’s changed everything. How old were you?’
‘It was five years ago. I was seventeen. Not that young.’
‘Young enough. Hard at any age, really. Is your dad still around?’
‘He is. Sort of. It hit him very hard.’ She can’t bring herself to mention the drinking. She’s too ashamed.
‘I’m not surprised.’
She watches the fields pass in the window, the hedgerows, the trees battling to absorb the exhaust from a thousand different vehicles. Thoughts of a car journey long ago come into her mind unbidden, her mother laughing,I spy,I spy, I spy with my little eye, something beginning with . . .
‘Do you mind telling me what happened?’
‘She should never have been in prison,’ Lucy says. ‘We always knew that. She was having a breakdown – she wasn’t herself.’
‘Was there a trigger for that?’
