Kiss Me First (33 page)

It seemed an odd thing to say – why would I?

‘No,’ I said.

‘You’re fat.’

‘I’m not that fat!’ I said. ‘I’m a size sixteen.’

There was silence. Up till then, I had thought Marion was near to expressionless, but now I could see twitches at her eyebrows, as if her face wanted to crumple but couldn’t.

I decided it was time for the speech I had prepared.

‘Marion . . .’

‘Don’t call me Marion!’ she interjected.

‘Mrs Williams, Tess asked me to help her only because she didn’t want to upset you. She went to all that trouble to
spare
you pain. I know that you and she had some disagreements, but I got to know her very well and I know that deep down she loved you . . .’

‘I spoke to you on the phone,’ she interrupted.

‘Yes,’ I said, wondering why she was repeating herself.

‘Did she ask you to write that email? The one about us starting again, being friends?’

‘No,’ I admitted.

‘The police said you never met her,’ Marion said.

‘No.’

‘Yet you claim you knew her.’

I started to say that we had talked a lot, that I had read all her emails, but Marion carried on as if she didn’t want to hear.

‘Did you really think that I would be happy to never see my daughter again?’

‘She said that you would be too concerned about Jonathan,’ I said. ‘That you couldn’t leave him and there was no chance you’d be able to fly over to Canada.’

‘In the immediate few months, perhaps,’ she said. ‘But – for ever? How did you possibly think it could work?’

‘It was only going to last for six months,’ I said.

‘And then what?’

I remembered what Adrian had said on the Heath. ‘I was going to gradually decrease contact . . . like a dimmer switch on her life.’

Marion looked at me as if I was mad.

‘Tess was hugely loved,’ she said, laying out the words as if to a simple child. ‘Not only by us. She had a large group of friends. Did you not think that at some point someone would have visited her, or offered to pay for her to come back over here? What about when her father died? Do you really think that she wouldn’t have come back for the funeral?’

‘No,’ I said. My voice was so quiet I could barely hear myself.

‘I think you underestimated how much she was adored,’ said Marion. ‘Maybe you can’t understand that. I hear you are a sad little creature. No family. No friends.’

I flinched. How did she know these things about me? I opened my mouth to ask but no words came out, and to my horror my eyes began instead to fill with tears. I looked down at the carpet. It was dark blue, and I could see a few white specks, like dandruff. I thought of what Tess had told me about Isobel, Nicholas’s wife – how she put plastic covers on the backs of her chairs when Jonathan visited to protect the material against his greasy hair.

‘And how did she meet that man?’ she said.

‘Adrian? I don’t know.’

‘Stop trying to protect him.’

‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘I had presumed they met on Red Pill.’

‘This Internet site? Tess wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. She wasn’t . . . like you.’ She paused. ‘Were they lovers?’

The idea was quite shocking, but I tried not to react.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But I thought you knew everything about my daughter,’ she said, meanly.

Another pause. Again, I looked away. On the coffee table was a neat stack of large glossy books and magazines and a small pile of leaflets and junk mail, presumably en route to the bin. They reminded me of my hallway, and finding her letter.

‘How did you find out my name and address?’ I asked.

Marion sighed, as if it was a boring question. ‘A friend of my husband’s has connections with the force, and he made some enquiries.’

‘Oh – you must mean Uncle Frank!’ I said, pleasure at making the connection temporarily overriding my discomfort at being investigated. ‘Frank, who wasn’t really Tess’s uncle, and was a chief inspector until he was forced to take early retirement because he got accused of taking that money . . .’

‘Yes,’ said Marion, icily.

Just then, there was a noise from somewhere in the house, a sort of low bellow, which I thought must have come from Jonathan.

‘Excuse me for a moment,’ said Marion, as if we had been having a polite tea party, and slipped out of the room. I heard her out in the hall, calling, ‘Helen!’ I looked at the pictures on the walls, recognizing one of Tess’s paintings, concentric green circles slashed with red stripes. There were photos of Marion when she was younger, looking glamorous in an exotic location I guessed was Chile, and some of Tess and Nicholas as children. Most of these I had already seen, but there was one of Tess that was new to me: a school portrait of her as a teenager, with black-rimmed eyes and her hair scooped high off her face. Her smile was similar to the one she had in that first photo I ever saw of her, the one at the party, where she was exchanging a knowing look with the photographer.

Marion returned, and re-seated herself in the gilt chair. She crossed her legs at the ankle.

‘Is Helen your new carer?’ I asked. ‘What happened to Kirsty?’

Marion’s eyes slitted.

‘It’s none of your business what happened to Kirsty. Nothing that happens in this house is any of your business.’ Her voice rose, and I noticed that her hands were clenched, but her nails were too long to allow them to fully close into fists. ‘How dare you! How dare you! Tess was my daughter. You may think you know her, but you don’t. You don’t know her at all. I’m her mother. I know her.’

It was on the tip of my tongue to correct her tense –
knew
her – but I held it in.

‘You know, you haven’t expressed any regret for what you’ve done,’ she continued. ‘For me. For all of us. For her life gone. Have you no heart?’

I swallowed and started to speak.

‘I believe in self-ownership over our bodies, and that it’s our right to . . .’

‘Shut up!’ screamed Marion, her face flushed. ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’

There was a moment’s silence. More than a moment, actually. I think the outburst shocked her as much as me. Marion wiped each eye with her finger, a bright red nail passing under her lashes, and when she spoke, her voice was again steady.

‘Why did she go to Spain?’

I frowned, confused. ‘When?’

‘On – that day. Last summer. The police say she took a ferry to Spain, to Bilbao. Then they can find no further trace of her. Where was she going?’

I tried to digest this new information.

‘I didn’t know she did that,’ I said, finally.

‘Oh, really?’ Her tone implied disbelief.

‘I promise,’ I said, feeling tears threaten me again. ‘We didn’t talk about it. It was the one thing we didn’t talk about.’

‘Where’s her body?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How did she do it? What happened?’

‘I don’t know!’ I said. ‘Really, I don’t.’

‘I need to know,’ she said, but quietly, as if more to herself than to me. We sat there, not speaking, for a long moment, but it was different to the previous silences – not so much awkward, just weighty.

Then, Marion said, firmly, ‘Can you leave now?’

I carefully lifted myself off the sofa. Her hands were clasped in her lap and her head turned away from me, looking at the wall.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I meant that I was sorry that she was upset, rather than sorry for what I did, and I considered making that distinction clear, but then thought better of it. I walked back down the polished hall, speeding up as I felt my chest heave, and just managed to make it outside and over to the flowerbed before throwing up, just behind Marion’s sculpture.

‘Oh dear,’ said the cab driver, as I got in the back seat. ‘Sure you’re finished?’

I nodded, and he handed me a tissue.

The idea to find out what had happened to Tess came to me on the train journey home. I sat in a window seat, as the train made its slow way through the dreary countryside, and thought about Marion’s face: those twitching eyebrows, that ‘I need to know’. And I decided then that I would use my knowledge of Tess to calculate her most likely course of action after check-out, and try and find the answer to Marion’s questions.

The revelation that Tess went to Spain had thrown me, but I think that any discovery about her movements post-check-out would have done. After all, I had presumed she had committed suicide very soon afterwards, if not on the actual day itself. But I had another reaction on hearing the news which was, I’m ashamed to say, not in the least bit rational: a pulse of annoyance at Tess sneaking off behind my back. After check-out, I was supposed to be in control. I thought her life was in my hands.

I no longer had Tess’s emails to work from, because her accounts had been suspended when everything came to light. Still, I had my memory, and Google. I also had, I realized, another clue, which could narrow down the possible search area: the email Tess had received, ten days after check-out, from her friend Jennifer, who said she had spotted her at the Alhambra in Granada. At the time I had put this down to mistaken identity and thought little more of it, but now, combined with the knowledge of her ferry crossing, it became highly significant.

The more I thought about the time discrepancy, the more it seemed plausible that there might have been an interval between check-out and the actual act.

It made sense for Tess to travel to another country to do it, somewhere where she had more scope for disposing of herself in a manner that meant she couldn’t be identified. And once in Spain, she would have been in limbo, free of her old identity: a non-person, responsible to no one. In that situation, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for her to spend some days alone thinking, coming to terms with what she was about to do.

Of course, the fact that she may have been spotted in Granada didn’t mean she had stayed around that area. The city was on the opposite side of Spain from Bilbao, where she had entered the country; if she had already travelled that far, she might well have then gone further. So, tempting as it was to concentrate only on that city and the surrounding area, I had to keep my options open.

Next, I considered what kind of place Tess would head to in Spain. The basic criteria were simple, as they were the same as I used to choose Sointula: somewhere simple and hippy-ish, the opposite to London. In this instance, though, I thought it was likely that Tess would be drawn to a place which had some personal significance for her, or which was guaranteed to have the kind of environment she desired. In conclusion, I thought it was probable that she had spent those lost, post-checkout days at a location that was familiar to her.

Tess hadn’t, as far as I knew, been to Granada before, but she had had ‘mini-breaks’ in both Barcelona and Madrid; the former with a short-lived boyfriend called Boris, with whom she had argued over lunch on the first day, calling him ‘a pussy’ when he balked at sucking the head of a prawn, and the latter with a group of women for an ‘excruciating’ hen weekend. After Googling those cities, however, I decided it was unlikely she would have headed to either. They were busy and built-up, not obvious destinations for someone who craved peace. Yet Googling
quiet
+
secluded
+
Spain
was clearly not going to get me very far.

With no firm leads, my quest quickly ran out of steam, although I continued to devote some time each day to it. Indeed, the breakthrough did not come for several months; ironically, when my mind was not on the task in hand. I was thinking about Connor.

Even after all this time, he still invaded my thoughts, despite the fact that we were no longer in contact. Since our confrontation there had been one final email from him, sent two hours after he walked away from me in Temple. It was there in Tess’s inbox when I switched on my phone after leaving the police station, in what turned out to be the small window between my confession and the suspension of her email and Facebook accounts.

It was brief and to the point.

Here’s the deal. You don’t tell Chrissie, and I won’t tell the police. OK?

I replied,
I’ve already told the police, and I’m not going to tell Chrissie.

I paused. I had so many questions. But I decided to ask just one.

Where does ‘kiss me first’ come from? What does it mean?

His reply came thirty seconds later.

I don’t know.

What do you mean?
I asked.

I don’t know,
he said.
Tess said it once, can’t remember the context. It just became a silly thing between us, a private joke.

And that was that. Our last communication. But, as I say, in the weeks since he had never been far from my thoughts. Indeed, it was as if there was a film permanently playing in my head of him going about his daily business, mostly composed of tiny, insignificant details that I had witnessed for myself or could vividly imagine. His hand guiding his mouse as he worked at his computer; his nod of greeting to the man behind the sandwich counter; the way he shrugged on his coat as he left the office. When it came to his life at home with Chrissie and the children, however, the tape went blank.

I re-lived our correspondence, mentally turning over his emails again and again to see if there were any clues that I should have heeded, remembering how I had felt when I received a certain message, or sent what I considered a particularly witty reply. This activity made me feel heavy with sadness, like a sodden towel; then, occasionally, I would experience sharp bursts of anger which had nowhere to go.

That morning I was at my laptop, the usual thoughts circling around my head whilst I ostensibly continued with my quest to uncover Tess’s whereabouts . . . For some weeks now this had been reduced to Googling various combinations of words related to travel and Spain and Granada, and trawling through the results in the hope that I would stumble across a possible lead or memory trigger. I scrolled past a site advertising easyJet flights to Granada, a site I had seen many times before. That day, however, the name of the airline combined with that moment’s thoughts of Connor to produce just that: a flicker of an association, which I concentrated on until it became a full-blown recollection