I picked up the computer and opened it. It said it was locked, and I sat and stared at the screen, at the photo of me Glen had put on it. There I was, locked like the computer.
When he came home, I tried to talk to him about the future. “Why don’t we move, Glen? Have the fresh start we keep talking about? We’re never going to escape this unless we do.”
“We’re not moving, Jean,” he snapped at me. “This is our home, and I won’t be driven out of it. We’re going to weather this. Together. The press will forget about us in the end and move on to some other poor sod.”
“They won’t,” I wanted to say. Every anniversary of Bella’s disappearance, every time a child goes missing, every time there is a quiet news day, they’ll come back. And we’ll just be sitting here, waiting.
“There are so many nice places to live, Glen. We’ve talked about living by the sea one day. We could do that now. We could even move abroad.”
“Abroad? What the hell are you talking about? I don’t want to live somewhere I can’t speak the language. I’m staying put.”
So we did. We might as well have moved to a desert island in the end, as we were completely isolated in our little house. Just the sharks circling occasionally. We kept each other company, doing the crossword together in the kitchen—him reading out the clues and writing the answers in while I was still guessing, watching films together in the living room, me learning to knit, him chewing his nails. Like an old retired couple. I’m not even forty yet.
“I think the Mannings’ poodle must’ve died. It’s been weeks since any dog shit has been left on the doorstep,” Glen said conversationally. “It was very old.”
The graffiti persisted. That paint is terrible to get off, and neither of us wanted to stand there in full view, scrubbing at it, so it stayed. “Scum” and “Peedofile” in big red letters on the garden wall. “Kids,” Glen said. “From the local comprehensive, if the spelling’s anything to go by.”
There were letters from the “hate mail brigade” most weeks, but we’d started putting them straight in the bin. You could tell them a mile off. I never saw those tiny envelopes or the green pens they used for sale—the poisonous people must have had their own source of them and the rough, lined notepaper they preferred. I supposed it must be cheap.
I used to look at the handwriting to try to guess what sort of person had sent it. Some were all loops and swirls—the sort of writing on a wedding invitation—and I thought they must have been written by old people. No one else wrote like that anymore.
They were not all anonymous. Some wrote their address in spidery writing on the top—lovely names like “Rose Cottage” or “The Willows”—and then spewed out their bile underneath. I was so tempted to write back and tell them what I thought of them—to give them a dose of their own medicine. I wrote the replies in my head when I was pretending to watch the television, but I didn’t take it any further. It would’ve caused trouble.
“They’re just sick, Jeanie,” Glen said each time one plopped through the letter box. “We should feel sorry for them, really.”
Sometimes I wondered who they were, and then I thought they were probably people like me and Glen. Lonely people. People on the edge of things. Prisoners in their own homes.
I bought a big jigsaw puzzle at the local charity shop. It was a picture of a beach with cliffs and seagulls. It would give me something to do in the afternoons. It was going to be a long winter.
THIRTY-FIVE
The Reporter
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2009
It’d been a quietish week—Christmas, fast approaching, had filled the paper with festive nonsense and warming stories of adversity overcome. Kate flicked through her notebook more from habit than hope, but there was nothing to pick at. The paper was already full of Saturday reads—long features, shrieking columnists, pages of elaborate Christmas fare and postfestivity diets. Terry looked happy, anyway.
Unlike the crime man, who, passing her desk on his way to the Gents, paused to vent his anger. “My Christmas anniversary piece has been chucked out,” he said.
“Poor you. Which one?” Kate asked. He was notorious for recycling stories—“the green bin of news,” he called it cheerfully.
“Bella. It’s Dawn’s third one without her. How about a drink at lunchtime?”
“Bella. Oh my God, I forgot you,” she told the child’s picture stuck on her filing cabinet. “I’m so sorry.”
The Herald’s campaign had gone quiet once the threat of a libel action had become a reality, and both camps had drawn back behind their battle lines.
Kate heard on the grapevine that the legal director of the Herald had had a stand-up row with the editor over the initial coverage, and she persuaded her rival Tim to tell her all about it over a glass or three of wine. He’d been cautious about the details at first, but the story was too good not to tell properly. He propped up the bar in a pub opposite the High Court and told her how the house lawyer had accused Mark Perry of ignoring his advice and using “lurid comments” and allegations in the copy.
“I expect ‘Taylor’s killer eyes’ was one of them.” Kate laughed. “I thought you were on pretty shaky ground there.”
“Yes. One of Perry’s choicer phrases. Anyway, the lawyer said Mark was ramping up the potential damages every time he pulled a stunt like that.”
“And Taylor’s got money to fund a case. All that compensation from the police,” Kate said.
“The editor’s agreed to pull back from the direct accusations and harassment. Soft-pedal while the libel case is pending.”
“But he’s not going to give up the campaign, is he?” Kate asked. “He’ll definitely have to pay up if he does that. It’s tantamount to admitting he’s in the wrong.”
Tim grimaced into his Merlot. “He’s not happy. He hit his monitor with his fist, then crashed back into the newsroom to tell everyone they were ‘fucking amateurs.’ He likes to spread the pain. Calls it inclusivity.”
Kate had patted Tim’s arm sympathetically and headed for home.
As Tim had predicted, the Herald had quieted down, and the libel action appeared to have stalled in the chambers of both sides.
But she was ready to have another go. She needed to find her notebook from a year ago. There, scribbled on the cover, was an address in Peckham for one Mike Doonan.
“Slipping out to knock a door on a tip,” she told Terry. “On my mobile if you need me.”
It took an age to cross Westminster Bridge and crawl down the Old Kent Road, but the cabbie finally pulled up in the shadow of a grim relic of 1960s cutting-edge architecture. A gray concrete box, studded with filthy windows and satellite dishes.
Kate went to the door and pressed the bell. She knew what she was going to say—she’d had plenty of time in the taxi to plan—but there was no answer. The flat echoed with the bell ringing, but it was the only sound.
“He’s out,” a voice called from next door. A woman’s voice.
“Bugger. I hoped I’d catch him in. I thought he was housebound,” she replied.
A head appeared out of the door. Ancient, tight perm, and an apron. “He’s down at the bookies. Doesn’t go out much now, with his back, poor Mike. But he tries to get out once a day. Was he expecting you?”
Kate smiled at the neighbor. “Not really. It was on the off chance. I’m doing a story about a man he used to work with when he was a driver. Glen Taylor. The Bella case.”
The neighbor opened her door wider. “The Bella case? Did he work with that bloke? He never said. Do you want to come in and wait?”
Within the first five minutes, Mrs. Meaden had told Kate about Doonan’s medical condition—“degenerative osteoarthritis, getting steadily worse”—his betting habit, ex-wives, kids, and diet—“beans on toast practically every night; can’t be good for him.
“I do a bit of shopping for him every week, and the kids on the estate run errands.”
“That’s kind of you—he’s lucky to have a neighbor like you.”