Then You Were Gone (25 page)

When the front door opened, there was a sudden burst of noise and activity. Maria abandoned the now-boiling kettle and ran to the hall, from where Simone could hear screams and gasps and Maria frantically asking the girl, who they must all assume now was Jessica, how she was, what was she thinking, what the hell she was doing back here, was she OK? Was she OK? Was she OK? Was the baby OK? What the hell was she thinking?

Then she heard the young girl say, ‘It’s OK, Mum, it’s OK. I’ve seen Connor. I went to the prison. He’s going to plead guilty, I’m not going to even have to go to court, that’s what he reckons. It’s OK.’ And then she, Jazzy and Ayanna looked at each other awkwardly as they listened to the sound of the two women sobbing loudly for the next minute or so.

When Simone looked up, she saw that Mack had come into the room and was standing in the doorway. He was staring at her; possibly he had been for some time. His skin was fair anyway, but now he was so pale as to be almost translucent. His black hair had grown and was dishevelled, at least by his usual pernickety standards, but the blue eyes shone as sharply as ever. Simone had felt sure that, on seeing him again whatever the circumstances she would cry, and she did feel the tears immediately spring into her eyes, but otherwise she felt herself unable to react. She wanted to run to him and hug him, she wanted to slap him and shake him, she wanted to scream at him and ask why, she wanted to pull his head into her shoulder and tell him that none of it mattered, she just wanted him back. His eyes were filled with tears too, and for a long time neither of them spoke. She had utterly forgotten the presence of Jazzy and Ayanna on either side of her.

Eventually Mack cleared his throat and spoke. ‘Hi, Simone.’ His voice was lower and more gravelly, almost a croak.

‘Hi,’ she said, her own voice barely louder than a whisper.

‘And Jazz,’ Mack nodded towards Jazzy. ‘And Anna. I mean, Jesus, what the hell are you guys all doing here? Together?’ The incredulity in his tone echoed what Simone herself felt whenever she thought of the three of them together.

‘They came looking for you.’ It was Maria, coming back into the room from the hallway. Her pretty face was blotched and red from crying and her voice was shaky. ‘They tracked you here somehow. Said they found Jess’s birth certificate in your flat?’ Her voice was still shaking, and it sounded to Simone almost as though Maria was angry.

Jess appeared behind Maria. She was even more striking than her mother, her hair darker, her bright eyes blue rather than Maria’s greenish-grey. ‘My birth certificate?’ She turned to look at Mack. ‘In your flat? What the hell?’

Simone saw him glance quickly at Maria but the other woman’s face was set in a grim, flat-mouthed mask. Maria jutted her chin slightly at Mack, clearly trying to convey the message that she was not going to help dig him out of this particular hole. Simone was beginning to pick up on an atmosphere between Maria and Mack, something not quite hostility but certainly more than exasperation. ‘Your mum gave it to me,’ Mack said after a few moments’ hesitation. ‘I needed it to show to the guy when I got your false papers.’ This struck even Simone, who knew absolutely nothing about these things, as palpably ridiculous. Why on earth would some people smuggler care if the person he was providing with a fake birth certificate had originally had a real one?

Jessica did not look mollified and cast a glance at her mother, who nodded slightly, still not looking at Mack.

‘Erm, excuse me,’ Ayanna piped up, once the silence had had a chance to become uncomfortable. ‘It’s great to see you, Mack, but we,’ she gestured at Simone and Jazzy, still sitting at the table with their empty mugs, awaiting the hot drinks that never materialised, ‘are all still none the wiser about where you’ve been and why. I mean, it might have escaped your notice, mate, but we’ve been worried sick here.’

Mack was looking down at the floor. He opened his mouth to speak, still without making eye contact with anyone in the room, but Maria spoke before him.

‘Joe’s an old friend of mine. We were at school together, weren’t we, Joe?’ There was no warmth in her tone.

Mack nodded, his eyes still on the floor.

Maria looked round at the three of them, and held Simone’s gaze for a moment. A brief glimpse of something like understanding passed between the two women. ‘I’m guessing that by now you lot have at least worked out why Jess had to run away? She was there when Connor Marston murdered that poor kid Aaron?’

Simone nodded.

‘Connor’s a total headcase but his family are just pure nasty. His brother mainly, Liam. At first Jess was too scared to go to the police, she knew Connor had seen her and she knew he’d put two and two together. Knowing the family like we did, we thought it was for the best to just let it lie. There were five other people in that cab office that night; we thought one of them might step up, thought maybe they wouldn’t know Connor, wouldn’t be so scared, but we waited and waited and the police kept coming back, staying for hours, sitting at that table where you are now, asking her and asking her, was she sure, could she say for definite that she didn’t know him, did she think she’d be able to pick him out of a line-up, over and over and over.’

Jessica, next to Maria, was nodding in confirmation as her mother spoke.

Maria put an arm round Jessica’s shoulder. ‘Then she came down one morning and she just said, “Mum, I have to tell them. He killed a boy, I watched Aaron die, what about his family? It isn’t right, I have to tell the police”.’ Maria closed her eyes and took a slow breath. Simone recognised it as a technique they taught you in yoga classes. ‘I said to her, are you sure? But,’ she looked at her daughter and smiled, uncountable love and pride in the look she gave her, ‘Jess just kept saying that it was the right thing to do, that she had to do it. Didn’t you?’

Jess shrugged, flushing slightly. ‘I had to,’ she said, so quietly that Simone had to lean forward to hear. ‘I remember Aaron’s mum from when we were all kids. She’s a nice woman. I had to,’ she repeated.

‘We knew there would be trouble,’ Maria went on, ‘but as soon as they’d taken Jess’s statement they charged Connor and he went on remand. We thought maybe it would be OK. But then the next day, Marcus got attacked on his way home from work and we knew that things were getting seriously dangerous. The police said there was no proof the two things were connected, but we knew, didn’t we?’

Jess nodded.

‘Um, sorry,’ Ayanna said, taking the conversational lead once again. ‘But who’s Marcus?’

‘Oh, sorry,’ Maria said, ‘he’s Jess’s boyfriend. He’s, you know,’ she gestured at the great curve of Jessica’s body, ‘he’s the baby’s dad.’

Simone felt as though a bird-scaring grenade had gone off inside her head. She had not realised, until the moment Maria spoke those words, what a heavy weight of dread she had been carrying inside her since she saw the online pictures showing that Jessica Novak was pregnant. Mack had disappeared with her, this young, beautiful girl, and taken her to a forest at the outside edge of the country. The girl was carrying a child, and it had begun to feel disarmingly possible to Simone that the father of that child could be her Mack. But it wasn’t. It was that poor, beaten young man from the papers, that smiling, bearded ‘team member’ who was, according to the updates on his Facebook page, still recovering in a rehabilitation centre.

Simone did not realise that she had made a noise, some startled grunt of relief and realisation, until she felt Jazzy squeeze her hand and heard Maria say, ‘Are you OK?’

Mack looked at her for the first time in minutes, and Simone knew that he knew what she had been thinking. But his face, gaunt and grey, and his blue, hollowed-out eyes told her something else as well; they told her not to relax, not to feel joy and relief. They told her that the thing she had so feared learning was perhaps not so bad as the thing that she might yet be about to learn.

‘I’m fine,’ she said in reply to Maria. ‘Sorry. Carry on.’ Despite the warmth of the cosy room, she shivered.

‘So anyway,’ Maria continued, ‘we knew then that Jess had to get right out of London, right away from here, at least until Connor’s case came to trial, but maybe even for longer. Because anyone who knows Liam Marston knows that he can bear a grudge for – well, basically forever. So we did consider the possibility that she – her and Marcus – might have to leave London forever too. And I needed to find someone who could get her away from here and keep her safe, at least until the trial, but who couldn’t easily be traced back to us.’

‘What about the police?’ Ayanna asked. Her brown eyes were wide, her face agog. This was probably better than TV for someone with little emotional investment in it, Simone supposed. ‘Couldn’t they have kept her safe?’

Maria shrugged. ‘Don’t get me wrong, the police have been good – brilliant, really. They said they could drive by the house a couple of times a night, put the staff at Jess’s college on alert, stuff like that, but it wasn’t enough for us to ever really feel safe. I needed to get her as far away from here as possible.’

‘So you asked Mack?’ Ayanna pressed on. ‘Why him?’ She glanced at Mack with a lopsided smirk, ‘No offence, mate.’

Even Mack, with his bleak floor-bound gaze could not help but crack a grin at that. They all laughed and some of the tension in the room ebbed away. When Simone saw Mack smile like that, even as faded as the smile was compared with the full-wattage grin of old, she felt the lurch in her stomach that she had felt on first meeting him and was reminded of what had brought her on this quest in the first place.

Maria rolled her eyes, as if to say,
I know, right?
‘Like I said, he’s an old friend but we haven’t seen each other in years. Jess doesn’t know him at all. I knew he had enough money and enough freedom to be able to take her away and look after her. And I knew that he was a good man and that he would do the right thing.’

Simone glanced from Maria to Mack and back again. Maria’s words sounded reasonable and measured, but there was a harshness to her tone and in the look she gave Mack as she delivered the words. As for him, he shifted edgily from foot to foot and nodded along like an errant husband trying to absolve himself by acknowledging his guilt. Just what the hell was the deal with these two, Simone wondered. She had never heard Mack mention Maria before, nor any of his old school friends, and yet he was important enough to her to be her first choice for safeguarding her teenage, pregnant, fugitive daughter. And what did this atmosphere between the two of them mean, this sizzling, not-quite-animosity that seemed to be playing out in the subtext beneath Maria’s words. Why would you send your poor, pursued child away with someone for whom you clearly harboured powerful feelings of – well, perhaps not dislike but certainly something the wrong side of ambivalence?

‘But,’ Maria went on with a forced brightness, as though determined to change the subject, ‘we’ve just had the best news we could have hoped for, haven’t we?’ she squeezed Jessica’s arm again. ‘Connor’s changing his plea to guilty, which will hopefully mean Jess won’t even have to go to court any more.’

‘Yeah,’ Jessica agreed. ‘I can’t say for definite that his psycho brother will leave us alone, but Connor promised me he would try and call him off.’

‘I’m sorry, Jess,’ Mack butted in with what Simone clearly recognised as false confidence and cheer, ‘I haven’t introduced these guys have I?’ He did not wait for her to reply. ‘Jazzy and Ayanna are my, um, colleagues, I suppose. And friends,’ he added quickly. Jazzy’s face did not change but Ayanna broke into a huge grin, her eyes trained coyly on the table. ‘And this is Simone.’ He gestured towards her but did not move in her direction. ‘She’s my…’ there was a moment’s hesitation and Simone’s heart fell. Was it really so difficult for him to say the word ‘girlfriend’ after all this? After he knew now how hard she must have looked for him, the miles she must have travelled, the sleep she had foregone in order to find out if he was safe? Mack blew out through his lips, as though trying to steady himself. He looked Simone in the eye and she saw the sincerity behind what he was about to say. ‘Sorry, Simone. I was going to say you’re my girlfriend – which I know you are, but…’ a hint of colour rushed into his pale cheeks. ‘It doesn’t sound like a big enough word, does it?’ Simone did not speak or move, but she knew that her eyes would give her away, so she cast them down at the table. She sensed Jazzy shifting uncomfortably next to her. ‘I guess,’ Mack said in a rush, as though keen to get it over with, ‘I’d say Simone’s my girlfriend, but also my best friend. And my favourite person.’ He grinned and in that moment looked almost boyish.

Simone heard Ayanna say, ‘Awww.’ If even Ayanna was moved, then Simone knew that she herself ought to appreciate the sentiment.

‘Thank you,’ Simone whispered, although the overriding emotion she felt was embarrassment, coupled with a strong urge to get away from here, from this house and everyone in it, Mack included. She knew she was being bullshitted, but she could not work out how. She was exhausted, she was sick to death of Jazzy and Ayanna’s company, and she just wanted to be somewhere that made sense. She wanted to go home.

‘Well,’ Simone spoke more loudly now, ‘I’m so sorry to have barged in on you like this,’ she said to Maria, ‘and I wish we could have met under more pleasant circumstances. I need to get to know more of Mack – I mean Joe’s – old friends.’ She felt as though she were reading the words from an autocue. ‘And Jessica, I’m so glad that you’re OK and that you won’t have to be involved in some terrible court case, but I’m so sorry that you had to go through all this in the first place. It must have been terrible. And I hope your boyfriend gets better soon. And good luck with the baby.’ Jess gave a shy smile and a little wave of acknowledgement, but Maria was just gazing at Simone with an expression that could only be described as sadness.

‘Are you going?’ Mack asked, desperation in his tone. ‘Wait, let me come with you.’

‘No, I’ll be fine,’ Simone put in before he could labour the point. ‘You guys have a lot to sort out and I’m exhausted.’ He at least had the decency to look sheepish at this, she noticed.