‘There must be an explanation,’ she says, echoing my thoughts. ‘Have you asked him?’
‘He’s at Charlie’s until Sunday and I don’t want to talk to him about it over the phone.’ I get up to fetch the article from where I’d slipped it into the book I’m currently reading and hand it to her. She takes it from me, bends down to retrieve a pair of reading glasses from her bag and slips them on. I watch her puzzled expression. When she’s finished reading she looks up at me.
‘This was the hospital where you did your training?’
‘Yep. I was in my last week of the placement. The whole thing with Natalie and the drugs fraud put me off wanting to continue in midwifery.’ I don’t say that it was a rash decision I might not have made if I had my time all over again. But I was young, impulsive and idealistic. I was also insecure and unconfident in my abilities. ‘I was there when Simone found the baby. Or, at least, just moments after.’
She rereads the article and pushes her glasses onto her hair. ‘Do you think all those articles pinned to the Morgans’ wall are connected to each other? I mean, there’s the one about Simone and the electricians. And then this one withSimone being the one to find the baby. Can you remember any of the others?’
‘No. Annoyingly, I didn’t get a chance to read them, and they were all overlapping so it was hard to make sense of them anyway.’ I reach over to the coffee-table for my phone and scroll back to the photos I took on the night I let myself into their house.
BABY FOUND ON HOS …
… ORGANS FOR RESEARCH AT …
DRUGS LORD FOUND DEAD IN …
BRIGHT SPARKS WIN NATIONAL AWARD
‘Here, look …’
I pass my phone to Jo. She lays the newspaper cutting on her lap and takes my mobile while simultaneously pushing her glasses from her head back onto her nose.
‘It’s hard to make them out exactly,’ I say.
She looks up at me through her trendy oversized readers. ‘The drugs-lord headline. That could be about Hugh Warrington? Or the gang Simone was running from?’
‘Maybe. Oliver told me Hugh had died. I googled it when I got home and it’s true. He was found dead in his house last summer from an overdose. He was sixty-four, divorced and, according to the reports I’d read online over the years, had been struck off the medical register so his career was over too. It was around the time Charlie and I were having all our problems so I must have missed it in the news.’
‘And what about this organs one?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’
She hands me back my phone. ‘Like I’ve said a million times, please be careful.’ She hesitates.
‘What?’
‘On their wall? You didn’t see anything about you?’
‘What? No. Of course not. What makes you say that?’
‘It’s just … they have a few articles about St Calvert’s and you worked there too.’
‘For six weeks, twenty-five years ago.’
‘That’s true. But, please, stay away from them … Henry in particular. He sounds like a nasty piece of work.’
I stand in the shower, relishing the cold water that gushes over my head and down my back. I’d felt so hot after Jo left that I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Afterwards, I step out of the bathroom and the silence presses in on me: the house has that empty, hollow feeling. Phoenix is waiting patiently for me, stretched out on my bed, and the room is like a furnace, despite the two sash windows that overlook the street being open as far as they will go. I perch on the edge of the bed in just a towel, and the night air wafts in, brushing against my damp skin and leaving a faint metallic scent. For the first time today my body temperature is ambient, which I know won’t last once the effect of the shower wears off.
It’s gone midnight and I sit in the semi-darkness; the only light comes from the crescent moon and the streetlamps. I hear a car pull up and curiosity gets the best of me. I kneel at the window in time to see Henry pulling upin his Jaguar. He’s alone. I crouch lower, hoping he can’t see me, and watch as he gets out. He runs a hand lovingly over the bonnet, as though tracing a woman’s curves, before making his way down his front path. Immediately a hallway light comes on. I wonder if Marielle is at home. I haven’t seen her walking the ‘baby’ since I found out it was fake more than a week ago.
I close the curtains, leaving a gap so that air can still get through and throw on the vest and shorts that I sleep in, then lie on the bed on top of the sheet, Phoenix next to me. The silence, along with the coolness from the shower and the slight breeze, causes me to drift off.
I wake with a start. At first I don’t know what’s disturbed me and then I see that Phoenix is no longer on the bed. I get up, my heart quickening as I grab my mobile. I head to the top of the stairs. I can hear Phoenix growling and my heart gallops.
I forgot about the fucking dog.
With trembling hands I bring up the app that Paul installed for me just hours earlier and sink onto the top step. The garden looks ghostly through the lens of the security camera and my heart thuds painfully as I scan the screen. It’s like looking through night-goggles and the effect is eerie. I see a cat dart across the grass but nothing for a while and then … My breath catches. The back gate is wide open and a figure is strolling brazenly across the lawn. There is something about the way he walks that I instantly recognize. I watch, in shock, as he peers through the glass of the patio doors, recoiling when Phoenix starts to bark. He retreats, pressing his back against the hedge. Ican’t see his face, but I don’t need to. I know exactly who it is.
