“Behind the terrace we pulled down a couple of months ago. Big, run-down old houses—four floors some of them. Bedsits and flats. The whole terrace looked like it would fall down by itself if we hadn’t given it a shove.”
He stood up. “Anyway, back to work. Thanks for the drink, miss. Remember, no quoting me.”
She smiled and shook his hand. “Of course. Thanks for the chat, John. It’s been a big help. Do you think Peter would talk to me? I just want to check some details.”
“Doubt it,” Davies said.
“Look, could you give him my number in case he wants to contact me?” she said, offering her business card.
Davies put the card in his trouser pocket and nodded his good-bye. The rest of the workers followed him out.
Kate sat in the suddenly hushed bar and began writing up her notes. The peace and quiet didn’t last long; the pub landlord ambled over to collect the glasses and interrupted her thoughts.
“Heard you were a reporter,” he said.
She looked up at him and smiled. “Yes, I’m Kate, from the Daily Post,” she said.
“Graham,” he said, suddenly matey now the lunchtime crowd had gone. “What are you reporting on, then?”
“The baby’s body found on the building site.”
Graham straddled the leatherette stool opposite her. “Oh. I see. Shocking thing. Burying a baby in the garden,” he said. “It makes you wonder what happened to the poor little thing. I mean, did someone murder it?”
Kate put down her pen and looked at him. “Exactly what I thought,” she said. “Who could kill a baby? It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
They sat for a moment in silence.
“Did you know the people who lived in those houses?” Kate asked. “The police must be busy tracking them down.”
“They’ll have a job. They were tenants mostly and they changed every five minutes,” he said. “The usual story: the owner didn’t live here—he had loads of property round here—rented out cheap. Those rooms were revolting inside. The sort of places people leave as soon as they can. Anyway, the baby wasn’t buried recently. A copper told me when he was asking around. It could have been put there forty or fifty years ago.”
“Really? I wonder how they know that? Long before your time, then?”
The pub landlord smiled, trying not to be flattered by the outrageous compliment. “Hardly,” he said. “Do you want another one of those?” He pointed to the sticky remains of the drink in Kate’s glass.
“Thanks. Can I have a soda straight up this time? I’m driving.”
He nodded and picked up the glass.
“Anyway,” she added as she followed him back to the bar, nose to the trail, determined to keep his attention, “who was running the pub back then? In the seventies and eighties? They’d have known the people living in the street, wouldn’t they?”
“Actually, it was my better half’s mum and dad,” he said. “We took over from them. Toni might be able to help, but she’s at work.”
“Don’t worry, I can come back,” Kate said.
SEVEN
Emma
THURSDAY, MARCH 22, 2012
It’s lunchtime and I’m still in bed, where Paul left me this morning. The happy pills are working their magic and I am beginning to feel comfortably numb so I force myself up. I can smell the stink of stale sheets on me so I stand in the shower until my fingertips start to prune, then pull on a loose jumper dress to hide my body.
I’ve put the tranquilizers back in the bathroom cabinet and closed the door on them. I hate the pills—they mean I’m failing. I’d like to put them in the bin, but what if I can’t cope without them?
Maybe I’ll try to get a different sort of help this time—look beyond the chemical route. I almost laugh as I think it. It would mean talking, wouldn’t it? Telling someone my thoughts. Why I’m such a mess. What lies at the bottom of it all. It would mean brushing the loose dirt away and then excavating the thick clay packed deep around my memories.
My mum, Jude, once suggested talking therapy—back when the Bad Days had only just begun—but I refused to get in the car when she tried to take me to see a therapist. There was a terrible scene in the street, with her screaming at me to get in and me bracing myself against the car door. God, was that me? The thing was, I knew then that silence was—is—the only option.
I know I won’t do anything different now. It’s too late for that. I’ll just put it all away, take the pills until I get everything back under control, and get on with my work. Fill my life with other things to blot out the dread, like I normally do.
My normal.
Anyway, I’m going to go to the butcher’s to get some meat for Paul’s dinner—to make up for the burned offerings and frozen food. The word “meat” sticks in my head. Flesh and blood. And I want to throw up.
Stop it, I tell myself, twisting the skin of my stomach through the dress.
At the butcher’s, I can smell blood as soon as I enter the shop. Metallic and coating my throat. I can feel panic rising so I stand quietly in the queue practicing the breathing technique from yoga. In through the right nostril, out through the mouth. Or is it out through the left nostril?
“Mrs. Simmonds,” the butcher says quite loudly. “What can I do for you today?”
Startled out of my meditation, I blurt, “Er, steak, please. A sirloin steak.” I’ll have a salad, I think.
He looks unimpressed.
“Just the one? Eating alone tonight?” He laughs, all red faced under his stupid straw boater.
I give him a look. Then try to laugh it off to show the other women in the shop that I’m in on the joke. But it sounds fake.
“Yes, George Clooney’s let me down again,” I say.
I shove the parcel in my carrier bag, pay the king’s ransom demanded, and go home to try to get some work done.
? ? ?
It’s five o’clock and Paul will be home soon. The thought makes me type faster. I’ll carry on for another hour, then resume domestic duties. Can’t stop yet. Must keep going. If I stop I’ll be back with the baby. Distract, distract, distract.
I thank God for work most days. I got into editing about ten years ago. A good friend was working at a publishing house, and one weekend, when she was landed with an emergency rewrite, she asked me to help. I’d always written for myself—and at college—but this was sleeves-rolled-up writing, translating some fairly adolescent scribblings by a footballer into heart-wrenching prose. It appeared I had a talent and she got me more work.
Today, I’m in the midst of a marriage breakup, navigating the sorrow, guilt, and relief of a young actress over her parting from her “childhood” husband and her optimism (misplaced, as it turned out) for her first “industry” marriage. I never meet the subjects. That’s the ghost writer’s job. If it’s a big star, they spend hours—sometimes weeks—with them, teasing out their stories and feelings. I’m not in that league. I’m more X Factor winners, that sort of thing. From what I gather, most of it is based on cuttings about them from magazines and newspapers, and I tinker and polish until it reads like a fairy story. It’s never very satisfactory but when it’s a rush job for an unexpected news hook—death, scandal, success—it has to be done that way.
It’s hard work and sometimes, when I’m sweating every word, I curse the millions of people who buy celebrity memoirs just to look at the photos.
But it pays well enough and it’s my own money. Paul thinks the work is beneath my talents, but I can do it from home and I am anonymous.
No one knows who Emma Simmonds is, even though my words are sold all over the world, in dozens of languages. My name never appears on the cover of the book. And that’s how I want it to stay. Paul says I ought to be acknowledged, but I just laugh.