When She Was Bad (10 page)

‘Thanks for the drink,’ Rachel said as he sat down. She’d tied her long black hair up, but silky tendrils escaped at the front and neck. He fought back an urge to blow on them, just to watch them flutter against her skin.

Instead he turned to Charlie, next to him. ‘You looking at porn?’ he said, to cover his sudden embarrassment. Charlie’s head was bent over his phone, revealing the thinning patch at the back he was so sensitive about.

‘Grindr,’ came the reply. ‘Although it might as well be porn. Look at this fox.’

He flashed Ewan an image of a paunchy, middle-aged man sitting back on a sofa with his legs splayed, wearing a pair of boxers and a big smile.

‘Euw. That’s disgusting.’

Charlie smiled.

‘Actually there is someone who’s pretty hot. What do you think?’

He called up a photograph of a man Ewan reckoned to be in his early thirties, with curling dark hair and chiselled cheekbones.

‘Not my type, mate.’

‘His name’s Stefan. He lives in the next road. And he’s at home now.’

‘What – and you’d just go round there? Even though you’ve never met the guy before and he could be an axe murderer?’

‘Which is exactly my type, as it happens.’

‘Seriously, though, wouldn’t you be worried? He could be anyone. Maybe that’s not even his photo. Maybe he’s some fat old geriatric bloke in a string vest.’

‘Nothing wrong with a string vest.’

Ewan smiled, but he didn’t feel nearly as comfortable with this conversation as he was trying to appear. Charlie was OK – although Ewan had never completely shaken off the conviction that the guy secretly fancied him – but this side of his life was just a bit, well . . . grubby. One time when Charlie got drunk at a Christmas party, he’d confided in Ewan that he was lonely. Ewan, who’d only been in the job then for a couple of months, had been mortified by the unwelcome confession. ‘I’m sure you’ll find someone,’ he’d said lamely and immediately changed the subject. Charlie had never mentioned it again. It wasn’t that Ewan had anything against Charlie, he just didn’t feel comfortable discussing other people’s private lives. He’d always been like that, always struggled with intimacy.

‘Anyway, think I’ll slip away in a bit. See what he’s like. Gives me an excuse to get out of here. Can’t handle this crazy party atmosphere.’

Ewan half expected Rachel to leave too. She must be able to tell that her presence was putting a damper on things. But she stayed in place at the table sipping her vodka and tonic through a straw and making small talk with Gill, quite as if she hadn’t just swiped her job from under her, even if it hadn’t been her fault.

Paula got up to make a speech. She looked nervous and Ewan wondered if she was having to revise what she’d been planning to say in view of Rachel being here. She was never particularly confident talking in front of a group of people. When he got to her position, no one would be able to shut him up. Even so, surely there must be something more to say about Gill after eight years than that she was ‘firm but supportive’? What was she, a sofa?

Someone from the sales table shouted something, and there was a resounding roar of laughter. The sales team was almost entirely male. Sometimes Ewan wondered if he’d be happier on that side of the divide.

As soon as the speech was over and the present – a massage voucher and a scented candle – ceremoniously handed to Gill, and the card chuckled over, Ewan noticed Charlie making a quiet exit, mobile in hand. At least he was going to get some action tonight. It had been three weeks since Ewan had picked up that girl on his friend Jack’s birthday night out. Yet for the first time the prospect of another emotion-free one-night stand seemed strangely unappealing.

‘She’s got a nerve.’

Chloe had come up behind where he was standing and was leaning heavily on his shoulder.

‘I mean, she must know no one wants her here.’

Her voice was thick and he could feel her skin burning through her thin cotton top.

She was very drunk.

‘Get us another drink.’ Her breath was hot in his ear. ‘The wine’s all gone.’

‘Sounds like you might have drunk it all. Ow.’ He rubbed his arm where she’d punched it.

‘Sorry. Let me stroke it better.’

As she ran her fingers up and down his arm, he realized two things: firstly, she was even drunker than he thought and, secondly, she was coming on to him.

‘Steady on. You trying to give me a Chinese burn?’

‘Sorry.’ But still her hand lay on his arm, damp like a warm compress.

‘Maybe we should go back to the others. We’re being a bit anti-social staying here.’

Even from where they were standing, Ewan could sense the ill-feeling among the group at the table. He knew it was illogical to feel responsible for Rachel just because she’d invited herself along with him, yet he couldn’t help it. Nor could he help being hyper-aware of her all the time – where she was, what she was doing, who she was talking to. Yet still Chloe’s hand rested on his arm and now he could feel her pressing up against his back. Almost against his will he felt a heat stirring inside him.

‘I’m too drunk to sit back down there. I know they’re all silently disapproving. It’s like being with my mother, times four. Come on, Ewan, let’s get out of here, please?’

Ewan knew it was a bad idea. He liked Chloe. They had a laugh together and he enjoyed flirting with her, but sleeping with someone you worked with was a mug’s game. But now the heat inside him was spreading and he found himself pushing back against Chloe in a way that was impossible to misinterpret.

‘We shouldn’t . . . we work together . . .’ He tried to protest, then gave in, ‘It could only be a one-off,’ he warned her. ‘Just a bit of fun.’

‘Absolutely. Just fun. No strings.’

He didn’t believe her. He’d seen the way she looked at him. But being around Rachel Masters for the last week had built up a level of frustrated energy inside him and suddenly the prospect of going home alone was too depressing to contemplate.

‘OK, but we can’t leave together. You go first and wait for me outside. I’ll leave it five minutes and then join you.’

She squeezed his arm.

They rejoined the table and Chloe made a big deal of retrieving her stuff and saying goodbye to Gill.

‘I still can’t believe you’ve gone. You were the best boss ever,’ she slurred, ignoring her new boss, sitting just a couple of feet away.

As soon as she’d left, Rachel turned to Ewan.

‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you all evening, but you’ve been monopolized,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Come and sit down next to me and keep me company for a bit. We can get to know each other a little.’

He felt a rush of liquid joy flood through him.

‘Sure. Love to. Only I can’t stay that long. I need to be getting back.’

‘Just five minutes.’

But five turned into ten, and still Rachel was talking to him, asking him about himself, laughing at his jokes, leaning in very close to catch what he said above the noise of the suddenly full pub. He felt his phone in his pocket vibrate with an incoming text. A minute or two later, it did so again. He slid it into his palm and glanced down under the table. Chloe.
Where r u?

He wished he hadn’t made the arrangement with her now, wished he could stay here with Rachel all night. But he couldn’t text her back, not with Rachel sitting right here. And he couldn’t leave the girl standing outside.

‘I’ve got to go.’ He wondered if his reluctance showed in his voice.

‘Really? That’s a shame.’

Was she flirting with him? The thought was a butterfly fluttering in his chest.

As he shrugged on his jacket and got ready to tear himself away, she put a restraining hand on his arm. He was surprised to feel her fingernails digging into his flesh.

‘Tread very carefully, Ewan.’ Though her voice was as high-pitched and girlish as ever, her eyes when they met his were suddenly hard and he felt a prickle of cold on the back of his neck.

‘You could go far in the company. Don’t blow it.’

Did she know that Chloe was waiting outside? Was that what the warning was about?

His thoughts, after he’d said his goodbyes and threaded his way through the post-work drinkers, were a heavy mix of apprehension, confusion and disappointment.

‘Where have you been? I thought you were never coming.’ Chloe peeled herself off the wall she’d been leaning against and looked up at him, pouting.

He felt a rush of irritation.

‘Come on then, if you’re coming.’

And when she took hold of his hand a few metres up the road, he imagined she was someone else.

16
Anne

From the outside, the house where Laurie grew up wasn’t a million miles away from the house in which she now lived with Jana and her family. A different suburb, but the same wide tree-lined streets, the same sense of everything being exactly as it should be. The house itself was situated on the corner plot of a block, set back from the road with only the overgrown lawn and scraps of police crime tape, still fluttering uselessly from garage handles and porch posts, to show that anything untoward had ever happened here.

‘The American dream, right?’ said the heavyset man behind the wheel as the Pontiac in which we were travelling pulled up to the kerb.

Sergeant Dean Cavanagh had been sitting in the driver’s seat when he picked us up from the medical school, and it wasn’t until he was out of the car that his true size was revealed. The man was enormous. Next to him, Ed Kowalsky seemed insubstantial, as if the policeman could snap him in two like a twig if he so decided.

‘You kinda expect a big spooky old place with turrets, doncha? Maybe a coupla bats flying around the top.’

Sergeant Cavanagh hoisted up his pants so the waistband nestled just under the hang of his belly. I stared at the gun that revealed itself as his suit jacket swung open. Nowadays I wouldn’t turn a hair. I’ve seen guns a lot closer up than that. But standing outside that house where so many unspeakable things had happened, I shivered at the sight of that moulded metal glinting in the sun and glanced quickly away towards the neighbouring house.

‘You gotta ask yourself what exactly they were doin’ in there, right?’ said Sergeant Cavanagh, misinterpreting my look. ‘I mean, you’re telling me all those years they never heard nothing? No shouting? No screaming? No little kids crying?’

‘As I understand it, the neighbours never knew there was a second child in there.’

Ed seemed to be trying to make himself look taller, raising himself high and straight out of his brown suede desert boots. I wondered if it was a response to the gun, whether he felt threatened by it. Whatever the case, the policeman wasn’t impressed.

‘Ya see what ya wanna see, hear what ya wanna hear. Sometimes it’s easier just not to know. Get my drift?’

There was still a car in the driveway, a Buick with a child’s booster seat in the back. As we walked past, I saw Ed Kowalsky hesitate and knew he was thinking about the seats in his own car, and his own children, and for the first time I wondered what toll this case might be taking on him. I’d never thought before about his wife or the three small faces smiling gappily out from the framed photo on the desk back in his university office two doors down from the one I occupy today. For the first time I allowed for the possibility that he might exist outside of his relations with me, that he might have layers concealed underneath the surfaces he showed me. Already, even at that stage, I’d begun what has turned into a lifelong habit of trying to corral and order events into a set pattern in my head, rather than reacting to them as and when they arise, and this evidence that Professor Kowalsky might have a rich, hidden life did not sit well with the narrative I’d created. My husband Johnny always used to tell me to stop writing the end of the story before it had a chance to evolve naturally. When we divorced after just three years of marriage, he considered himself vindicated.

The porch area of the house was accessed via two steps from the front path. I was wearing shoes with a small heel that gave me an uneven, hesitant walk, and as I placed my right foot tentatively on the first step, that’s when I first felt it – that sense of treading where her small foot had gone, looking at the same things she’d have seen . . . the white paint peeling on the post underneath my fingers, the small tear in the screen door up by the top left-hand corner. There was a neglected jasmine plant growing up the far side of the porch and I imagined how it would have smelled to her on summer days, the heady scent rising to meet her as she came home from kindergarten in the afternoons. How did she feel as she climbed these two steps towards her front door? I asked myself. Was she apprehensive? Did she wonder what kind of atmosphere would greet her today? Did she glance down towards the line of vented bricks at the base of the porch and feel a tug of . . . what? A sense that things were not right, that she was part of something that other people would find unacceptable. Did her heart start hammering in her narrow little chest? Did she clutch on to her school bag as if the connection to school and everything that was good and proper and normal might offer some protection against whatever was inside the house?

A child’s scooter lay abandoned on its side at the far edge of the porch. Its central stem was pink and there was a sticker halfway up with a picture of a rainbow on it. Silver streamers that had seen better days hung from the handlebars.

‘Prepare to enter the House of Horror,’ said Sergeant Cavanagh, making quote marks in the air with fingers plump as chicken breasts. The wooden porch floor creaked where he trod. Withdrawing a key from the pocket of his pants, he inserted it into the front door.

‘Never used to bother locking up crime scenes, but now everyone wants a souvenir, know what I mean? Everyone’s gotta try to be part of the action.’

He turned the key and as he did so, I had a sudden strong memory of being a child myself, just a few years older than Laurie, unlocking the door of my house with hands that were stiff with anxiety, and pausing on the threshold to try to gauge by the weight of the air in the hallway which of my mother’s various personas she would be wearing that day. As the sweating policeman nudged open the door, the dread that had been crawling slowly through my veins ever since we pulled up at the house came whooshing to the surface and I had to stop and take a deep breath in.