The Perfect Girl (26 page)

I don’t want to be near Chris after what I’ve read.

I don’t want him near me, and I don’t want him near Lucas and I never want him near Grace again.

I wish he’d never, ever been near my mum, because I have a horrible feeling creeping over me that he might have killed her with his violence.

I’m struggling really hard to stay calm with that thought filling up my head. I desperately want to talk to Lucas about the script, to tell him that I understand now why he wanted me to read it so badly, and to say how I’m so sorry about what happened to him and his mum. But Lucas won’t even look at me right now. All he’s doing is sitting, and staring at his fingers and picking at the red skin around his bitten nails.

I also want to tell somebody else, I’m desperate to, so they know what Chris is really like, but I don’t know who to choose, because I don’t know if they’ll believe me. Right now, I’m not one hundred per cent sure that Lucas would want me to share the script, because I can see that Chris can be very bad, but he’s also Lucas’s dad.

While I’m trying to think about it, we’re all sitting together on the sofas: me and Lucas and Chris and Tess and the Liaison Officer who’s eating a sandwich that stinks of fish, and nobody is speaking. Richard’s feeding Grace in the kitchen. My dad’s gone back out into the garden with his phone. When I came down and gave his phone back to him I tried to tell him about what I’d read in the script but he said, ‘Not now, Zoe.’

The detectives have gone for now, but they said they’d be back later to ‘have a bit more of a chat’. Katya has just gone too; she was collected by a lady from her agency. I’m sad and also not sad about that. I don’t like her, obviously, but her going made everything feel even more real, and even more final. It made it all squeeze around me just that little bit tighter.

That panicky feeling is rising now, making me want to scream out what I know, and to flee from the room so I don’t have to sit near Chris, so I’m looping a bit of advice from Jason in my head: ‘Don’t always react to everything the instant it happens, Zoe. Think before you speak.’

The problem is that I’m afraid I might not be able to hold any of it in any longer, so I go for the person I think is safest to tell.

‘Aunt Tessa…’ I start to say, because I want to ask her to come out of the room with me, so I can tell her about it in private, because I think she’s the best person, the one I trust most. I feel like I blurt out her name when I say it, but my voice must have actually been quiet because Tessa just turns to look at me as if to say,
Did you say
something?
and, before I can explain, I’m interrupted by Chris, who says: ‘Can I use your phone, Tessa? I think it’s probably sensible if I book a hotel room for us tonight.’

‘Us?’ she asks him.

Chris frowns, as if that’s a stupid question, and then says, ‘For Lucas and Grace and I.’

‘You’re welcome to stay here,’ she says.

‘It might be easier if we got out of your hair.’

‘It’s fine, really.’

‘No, I won’t hear of it. You’ve done enough already letting the police in here, and having us all.’

‘Well, do you want to leave Grace here?’

‘She’s my daughter.’

‘But it might not be easy looking after her in a hotel room. Very cramped. We’re happy to keep her here for now, with the garden, and Richard is enjoying looking after her, I know he won’t mind.’

‘I plan to book a suite. We’ll be fine, thank you.’

It’s a pretty final statement.

‘May I use your phone?’

She waves her hand towards the kitchen. ‘Go ahead.’

She looks as gutted as I feel, and I wonder if her heart is pumping as fast as mine is and I think that if it’s not now it definitely will be when I tell her what I know about Chris.

I don’t get to talk to her about it though because Richard appears in the doorway just as Chris is about to leave the room. He’s holding Grace and she’s covered in orange purée. It’s on her face, her clothes, her hands and in her hair. It’s on a lot of Richard too.

‘Bit of a catastrophe,’ Richard says.

Chris looks at Grace. She shows him the palm of one of her hands, which has food all over it, and then she squeezes it into a fist, demonstrating how the orange goo squishes out between her fingers. She’s delighted. Grace loves mess.

Chris makes no move to take her from Richard, but I get there in two strides from the sofa.

‘I’ll take her for a bath,’ I say. I look at Chris. ‘You can’t take her like this.’

Because he mustn’t have her.

‘Take her where?’ I hear Richard asking, but I don’t hear the answer because I carry sticky Grace up the stairs and into the bathroom as fast as I can, and I lock the door so it’s just me and her, and I turn on the taps of the bath and I let her help me squeeze some bubble mixture in. When that’s done we sit on the mat on the floor together and I say, ‘Grace, you are so gross,’ and I imagine that my mum would have laughed if she could have heard me say it.

And I wonder how long I can keep us locked in here so that Chris can’t take her away.

Zoe grabs that baby out of my arms as if the house is burning down and they must flee. She pounds up the stairs and we hear the bathroom door slam shut.

‘All right if I use your phone then?’ Chris asks Tessa.

‘I said go ahead.’

‘Lucas,’ Chris says to his son before he leaves the room, making the boy’s head snap up, ‘go and get your stuff together, and Grace’s.’

‘Where are you going?’ I ask Chris, but he doesn’t hear me, or pretends he doesn’t.

‘Where are they going?’ I ask Tess in their absence.

We’re alone. The liaison woman has gone somewhere or other, doubtless roaming the house like some kind of shady private eye, as she’s been doing all day, and Lucas shambled off obediently in response to Chris, in that way he has, as if he’s embarrassed by the mere presence of himself in a room.

‘To a hotel.’

‘With the baby?’

‘She’s not our baby, Richard.’

That annoys me. I might have my weaknesses, but I’m not an imbecile, and I’ve been trying to be patient with Tess.

‘I phoned the solicitor. On redial. I left a message,’ I say.

She blinks rapidly. ‘Oh?’ she says, but I can tell that she knows what I’m going to say.

‘Funny thing though: it was a mobile phone number. It went to a personal voicemail message.’

She’s breathing heavily through her nose as she looks at me. Her face is masterfully still but I can read panic behind it, however carefully hidden. Her mind must be racing but all she manages to come up with is, ‘Are you sure it wasn’t a wrong number?’

I start to quote the message: ‘“Hi, this is Sam, please leave me a” —’

She interrupts. ‘I know his number from before, OK? From the trial?’

‘You remember his number from, what, two and a half, three years ago?’

‘Yes!’

‘So why did you say that you phoned his office?’

‘I said it wrong. It’s not the best day for me this, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

I don’t appreciate that. ‘What are you hiding, Tess? Where were you last night?’

‘Not now, please. Not this, now.’

We sit in silence, and I try to sort out in my head whether her explanation is a plausible one. It definitely could be. It definitely might not be. I think that I may be too tired to tell.

Tess moves from her chair opposite me to sit beside me. For a moment I wonder if she might be going to express some physical affection towards me, and my heart beats nervously in anticipation, for it’s been a long time since we offered each other that kind of solace, even with a simple touch, but she leans towards me instead, and whispers: ‘I’ve been thinking.’

I wait for her to carry on, but before she does she gets up and closes the door and then sits back down just as she was before.

She says, ‘If the DNA tests mean that they’re considering us as suspects, it surely has to be Chris, doesn’t it?’

‘Chris?’

‘If somebody in the house killed Maria, it surely has to be Chris, don’t you think, surely?’

I can hardly hear what she’s saying; she’s dropped her voice so low.

‘
If
it was somebody in the house,’ I say.

‘Why else are they taking swabs?’

‘I don’t know.’

The door opens and we both sit back like guilty children.

‘All booked,’ Chris says. ‘I’m going to gather up our stuff and we’ll go when Grace has finished her bath.’

The thought of the baby going is surprisingly painful, but there’ll be work to do still, I think to myself, supporting Zoe and Tess, and that’s some consolation. I’m determined to hold on to this new sense of usefulness.

Behind him the Liaison Officer says, ‘Do you want us to organise a lift for you, Mr Kennedy?’

‘No, I don’t want to arrive in a police car, thank you. I’ll phone a taxi.’

Could he have done it? I think. He’s so pleasant, so polite. He’s worked so hard for everything he has, and has been through so much.

That thought begs another question that I haven’t had time to really consider yet, with all the minute-to-minute distractions of taking Zoe to the solicitor and being at the police station and worrying about where Tess was last night, and looking after everybody once we got here. That question is: if Chris hasn’t done it, then who has? Is this the moment that we all start to look for signs of guilt in each other? Was Zoe right to flee to her solicitor this morning? Was she ahead of the game, knowing more than most about blame and accusation, and has Tess caught up with her thinking now, and should I?

Grace’s bath doesn’t take long to fill up, because she doesn’t need it very deep. While it’s running, I try to persuade her to lie down so I can take off her clothes but she won’t, so I have to improvise and undress her first while she sits, and then while she stands and bangs the soap dish against my back. She’s so chubby without her clothes on, and her thighs are almost thicker than my arms.

I put her in the water and then hang on to her tightly because there’s no grippy mat in Tessa and Richard’s bath to stop her sliding around, and she’s like a slippery otter. We have a few dodgy moments when she slides under water and I have to pull her back up, though she doesn’t even notice the danger she’s having so much fun.

I work out that I have a problem when the water goes cold, and she’s splashed every bit of me and the bathroom. It’s finally time to get her out, and I need a towel to lift her, because her skin is so smooth that her body is totally slimy from the bubbly water and I’m afraid I’ll drop her without one, but I can’t see one anywhere. The towel rail is bare. I can’t let go of her and leave her unattended in the bath even for a second while I find one, because she keeps trying to stand up, and I know she would fall and hit the taps.

So I shout for help. I shout for Tessa, but it’s Lucas who comes, and I can just about reach over to the door to unlock it for him while I’m hanging on to Grace.

I hope I don’t look at him funny, though I probably do. It’s because I need to tell him I finished the script, but I’m not sure how to bring it up, and at the same time I realise I’m changing in my head some of the things I thought about him before I knew what Chris was really like.

I tell him what my problem with the towel is and he leaves the room and comes back with a bedspread.

‘I couldn’t find a towel,’ he says, and I’m thinking that my mum would never have had no towels in the bathroom, in fact I can hear the ‘tsk’ noise that she would make if she could see us now, but here we are, and I think the bedspread will do fine.

Lucas drapes it over his arms and reaches down into the bath and gets Grace.

She thinks the bedspread is amazing because it’s so big. When Lucas gently lies her down on the floor on it she plays with it, shaking the edges around and nuzzling it on to her head as if it’s catnip and she’s a kitten. We sit on either side of her and watch her; it’s almost as if we were her parents.

I get up, and I lock the door again, because I know that I have a chance to talk to Lucas right now, and my heart begins to pound when I tell him: ‘I read the script. All of it.’

He doesn’t look up at me, but I can see that his face goes sort of still. He carries on pushing the bedspread over Grace’s face and then pulling it back in a sudden movement. It makes her give a throaty giggle. He says nothing.

‘On my dad’s phone,’ I say, in case he’s wondering, and so he doesn’t think I’m making things up.

When he looks at me it’s as if a layer of secrets has been peeled away from his face, and showing in his eyes is the deepest, saddest expression I’ve ever seen.

‘I wanted to warn you,’ he says, ‘and your mum. I wanted you to know what he’s like.’

I find that I can’t reply, because I feel like my worst fears are true, but it’s OK because he keeps talking.

‘Because if my mum or me had told somebody about him, it might have stopped him, and then she might have stayed alive for longer; she wouldn’t have done what she did.’

‘Did he kill your mum?’ I hardly dare ask it but it sounds like that’s what he’s saying.

‘No. My mum killed herself, and she was dying anyway, but if her life was better, if he hadn’t ruined her life, and hurt her, she would have stayed alive for longer, she would have fought the disease better. I know she would have.’

I feel a cold shudder run over me, from the crown of my head to the very tips of my toes. It’s a ripple of revulsion and sorrow, fear and, I think, certainty.

I say, ‘Do you think your dad killed my mum?’

Philip Guerin has crept in from the garden, his face flushed from the heat, and joined us in the sitting room. The Family Liaison Officer is in the kitchen washing up teacups.

Philip has overheard Chris booking a hotel and wants to know where they’re going to be staying, and wonders out loud whether he should do the same thing.

‘There’s plenty of room for you here now,’ says Richard, but Philip pushes on, asking Chris questions of utter pointlessness, about where the hotel is located and how far it is from here.

Chris tells him the name of the hotel and I know as soon as I hear it that Philip Guerin wouldn’t be able to afford to stay there in a million years. I can see that Chris knows that too. He seems irritated, his answers short and his mind clearly elsewhere, though Philip doesn’t seem to be picking up any of these cues. He drones on and on about a hotel that he stayed in once on a trip somewhere else, and it’s the most boring kind of small talk. I want to scream at him to shut up because I’m trying to think. I’m also trying to be normal around Chris, which suddenly isn’t easy, because all I find myself able to do is wonder what he’s capable of.

Our landline rings. It’s always an unfamiliar sound these days, though Richard tells me that cold calls are a frequent annoyance during his long days at home, and I have to bite my tongue to avoid making a sarcastic reply. He doesn’t have much else to do all day, let’s face it.

As the phone trills, my eyes meet Richard’s.

‘That’s probably the solicitor,’ he says.

Chris is alert. ‘What does he want?’

‘I’ll get it,’ I say, and I bolt from the room. I don’t know whether that will look suspicious to Richard, but I don’t care. I need to hear the calm warmth of Sam’s voice; I need somebody to offer me respite from my family. I want his advice, yes, but right now I also want his affection too.

By the time I get to the kitchen, the phone has stopped ringing, and the Family Liaison Officer is replacing the handset.

‘That was Sam Locke,’ she says. ‘He says to tell you he didn’t have time to speak because he’s going into an appointment, but he’ll call back later.’

I feel bereft, unreasonably so probably, but I can’t help myself. Annoyed too, because what appointment could possibly be so important that Sam wouldn’t at least take the time to exchange a quick couple of words with me. I pick up the phone and hit redial and pray and pray through the first few rings that he’s going to answer.

‘Sam Locke,’ he says eventually, and I hear caution in his tone. Probably he’s not sure whether it’s Richard or me phoning.

I wait a second or two to reply because the Family Liaison Officer is carrying a plate of biscuits out of the room.

‘Hello?’ Sam says.

The Family Liaison Officer moves very slowly, as if she wants to hear what I’m saying, but I wait until she’s gone and I ease the door shut behind her.

‘It’s me,’ I say to Sam.

‘Richard phoned me.’

‘I know, I’m sorry, we wanted your advice.’

‘I’m really sorry, Tess, I’ve got to see somebody in a minute, I haven’t got long.’

‘If the police are taking our DNA, do you think that means we’re under suspicion?’

There’s a pause, and then he says, ‘They’ve found evidence, in the house, so yes, I think family are under suspicion. I shouldn’t tell you that, Tess, so please don’t say that I did.’

‘Oh my God. What evidence?’

‘Blood. That’s been cleaned up. It’s the only thing that would show up this quickly, and there might well be more evidence down the line, it’s just that the other tests take time.’

‘That’s why they’re taking swabs from us,’ I say.

‘That would seem likely, yes,’ he says. ‘They’ll want to know whose blood it is.’

‘It’ll be hers,’ I say.

‘Be careful of making assumptions at this stage.’

‘Well, whose else could it be?’

‘All I’m saying is that we won’t have confirmation of that for days.’

He sounds a bit distant; his tone seems more professional and less reassuring than I would like, because I feel very afraid. I want to tell Sam that I’m feeling increasingly certain that Chris has hurt Maria but I’m afraid that if I talk in here, Chris might overhear me.

I think of Philip’s mobile phone. The one he’s been anxiously passing from hand to hand for most of the day, as if it’s a lifeline connecting him to another world, one he’d rather be in.

‘Sam,’ I say. ‘I’m going to borrow a mobile phone and call you back but it won’t be easy to do it privately so please make sure you answer.’

‘I have an appointment,’ he says. ‘I can’t miss it, but it won’t take long.’

‘I’m afraid,’ I tell him and there’s a long silence, and within it I hear him swallow and I think I can also hear the echoing of footsteps as if he’s walking down a corridor.

‘Where are you?’ I say. ‘Sam?’

Another voice in the background: ‘Mr Locke? They’re ready for you now.’

‘I have to go,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll try to answer, I promise.’

‘Chris is going to take the baby away,’ I say, but I’m too late, because Sam has hung up.

I’ll admit I feel very stung by that. I’m not used to it. Usually, it’s me who has to end a call prematurely, or behave furtively. Sam has always just been there for me, waiting patiently for me to have time to visit him, picking up the phone whenever I have the chance to make contact.

I try to calm myself down, to rationalise the fact of his appointment, whatever it is, but in truth I’m upset. If it was that important, I tell myself, surely he would have mentioned it to me?

I can’t help feeling abandoned.