“He raped me on July 21, 1984. In his car, Jude. Do you remember his car? That red Cavalier with the black stripe down the side and the traffic light air freshener hanging from the mirror. Do you? I’ll never forget it.”
“Of course I remember it. I was in it hundreds of times. So were you. That doesn’t mean anything.”
Emma’s expression didn’t change. Her refusal to react was scaring Jude.
“But that time was different. You weren’t there. He’d told you a lie, Jude. He said he was going home to collect something. But he collected me instead. And after it was over, Will took me back to the bus stop at the end of Howard Street and told me not to say anything. Said I had made him do it and that you would blame me. That you would never forgive me.”
Jude sat forwards in her chair with her hands pressed over her eyes, as if to blot out her daughter’s face and the words coming out of her mouth.
“Emma, you know this isn’t true,” she said from behind her hands. “You just want to hurt me because Will has come back into my life. You’re jealous because you had a crush on him. You always did. You tried to split us up before with your nasty lies about him and the woman up the street. This is just another invention. Stop this.”
But Emma went on. Unstoppable now.
“Afterwards, he said I had led him on.” And she laughed. A low, mirthless sound. “I was fourteen and a virgin. I didn’t lead him on.”
Jude raised her head wearily. “Why would he do it, Emma? He had me.”
“Perhaps he did it because he could,” Emma said, her anger finally breaking through. “Perhaps he enjoyed the risk of being caught. Some men get off on that. Or on a whim or as a power game. I wouldn’t begin to seek his reasons. He was a twisted man. A monster, Jude. Your monster.”
Jude thought she was going to throw up. “You don’t know what you are saying,” she shouted. “You’re frightening me. I want you to go.”
Emma stood and picked up her coat. “All those years you blamed me for driving him away, but I saved you from him,” she said and laughed again bitterly. “You could have married a rapist.”
After Emma slammed the door behind her, Jude tried to get up but her legs failed her.
The anger she’d felt when Emma was making her accusations had disappeared and now she was too shocked to feel anything at all.
“Why would she say such things?” she said to herself. “Lies. Awful lies.”
But she was thinking back to that summer. The summer when Emma had disappeared and a sullen stranger had replaced her.
SIXTY-EIGHT
Kate
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2012
She was cooking breakfast—a Sunday ritual—when Emma rang. She’d pushed the spatula into Steve’s hand, dripping fat on his newspaper, and said: “Sorry, got to take this, sorry.”
“Emma, are you okay?” Kate said. “How are you feeling?”
“Not great. How about you?”
“It’s not about me, Emma. I was so worried when I left you last night. I think what you told me shocked us both,” Kate said. “It is an extraordinary story.”
“I’m sorry if I scared you,” Emma said. “The thing is, I’ve kept things hidden for so long, I think I just needed to tell someone.”
Kate hesitated, torn between returning to the story and telling Emma she’d told the police about the confession. She knew it could be the end of any trust between them. She’d see what Emma had to say first.
“What are you going to do next?” Kate asked.
“I’m not sure. But I need your help,” Emma said. “Can we meet?”
? ? ?
Kate walked back into the kitchen where Steve was flipping bacon like a pro.
“How many eggs, Katie?” he asked.
“I’ve got to go out, love. I’m really sorry,” she said. Steve pulled a face and put the pan back down on the hob.
“For goodness’ sake, this is your day off. The one day we can spend as a family. Is it too much to ask for one day together? I’d hoped we could sit down today and talk to Jake properly.”
“He’s not even awake yet. We can do that tonight,” Kate said. “It’s an emergency. Honestly.”
“It’s always an emergency, isn’t it? You can never put us first,” he said.
“That’s not fair,” she said, knowing it was.
“Anyway, Freddie will be pleased. He’ll get double bacon and egg.”
Steve was very unhappy, she knew. But what else could she do? She put on her coat and shouted, “Call you later” from the door. Steve didn’t respond.
“Bye, then,” she said into the silence.
? ? ?
Emma had instructed her to meet her at North Greenwich underground station and said she’d tell her more when she got there.
Kate arrived first and sat in the car park, wondering what she was getting herself into. She was going out on a limb. A very creaky limb. She still didn’t know what to make of Emma. She’d been caught before. Just the once, but it still rankled. The fantasist who’d persuaded Kate that she and her illegitimate baby had been abandoned by a famous businessman. She and the paper had spent a couple of thousand putting the mother up in a wonderful hotel and traveled halfway across the world to gather evidence before the grubby truth had emerged.
Kate had got hold of the baby’s birth certificate and found another man’s name was on it. She should have done it earlier. A call to the man named as the father had revealed that the woman was a serial con artist, and Kate had had to confess all to Terry. Luckily, they’d caught the lie before publication.
Her comfort was that the woman had gone on to persuade another paper to actually print her story. Egg on someone else’s face, but Terry still dragged it up if she got too out of line.
It was tricky but Kate felt she was edging towards some sort of truth about the Alice Irving case. She couldn’t stop now. She would see what Emma had to say. And keep her fingers crossed.
Emma was so bundled up in a hat and scarf that Kate almost missed her.
“Kate,” Emma said when she was practically next to the car window.
“Sorry, Emma, I don’t know where my head is today,” she said and smiled.
“Can we sit in your car again?” Emma said. “I need you to come somewhere with me.”
“To Howard Street?” Kate said.
“No. To see the father of the baby.”
Kate stared at her. This was deep water she was getting into. This wasn’t just about her and Emma and the phantom baby anymore.
“Does he know about the child?” she asked.
“No. He forced me to have sex,” Emma said. “He wasn’t interested afterwards.”
“Who forced you?” Kate said quietly. “Was it Al Soames?”
“Al Soames?” Emma said and looked out of the windscreen. “No, ’course not. He was the landlord when we were renting in Howard Street. How do you know his name?”
“I went to see him to ask about the tenants in his houses around the time the baby was buried,” Kate said, unsure how much detail to divulge. “He gave me some photos of naked women by mistake. They looked drugged.”
“Naked women?” Emma said. “In black-and-white Polaroids?”
Kate risked a look at her. “Er, yes. Have you seen them?”
“I don’t know. But there was one in Will’s desk. A photo of Barbara, who lived with Jude and me for a while. I found it when I was messing around in his office at the university.”
She closed her eyes as if searching for that moment.
“Will was in the library, sorting out some photocopying, and he’d promised to buy me an ice cream when he finished, to celebrate the end of school for the summer. I was swinging round on his chair, singing ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.’
“A glass of water on the desk crashed over, and I saw the water was seeping into one of the desk drawers, so I pulled it open and used my school cardigan to soak up as much as I could. The damage wasn’t too bad and I was about to shut the drawer, but then I saw the photo. Of Barbara. And stopped. I remember wondering why Will had a picture of Barbara.”
Kate listened intently. Will and Al Soames was playing in her head. This couldn’t be just coincidence. They were in it together.