‘Look,’ her tone is unctuous now, ‘let’s just be sensible and wait a little while longer, then? If we have to sit at the side of the road until dawn comes, so be it, but we should at least give it another hour or two.’
‘Fine,’ says Melissa, wearily. ‘Why don’t you go and get whatever you’re going to need for the journey now and take your dog back, while I get a few things together.’
Hester actually gasps.
‘I can’t leave Bertie all night!’ she says. ‘He must come with us!’
‘But won’t it …?’ Melissa starts to ask the question but her vocabulary can’t accommodate the monstrous images her mind is creating; the dog sniffing and snuffling at Jamie’s plastic-wrapped corpse, desperate to get at the juiciness inside. That’s all he is now … rotting meat. Her stomach heaves.
Luckily, Hester seems to understand what she cannot say.
‘No, no,’ she says hurriedly, ‘of course he won’t because he will have to sit up in the front with us. He’ll be fine. Won’t you, Bertie?’ She reaches down and strokes the dog’s ears. It gazes up at its owner.
Melissa looks away. It is clear that Hester has drawn a line that Melissa will not be allowed to cross. One way or another, that mutt is coming with them to Dorset.
Melissa sighs. She needs to be alone.
Upstairs she showers and changes her clothes. For some time, she sits numbly on the edge of her bed, wrapped in the towel, until her skin begins to chill and she forces herself to get dressed.
She stares into the wardrobe for a good five minutes because she can’t seem to work out what she should do next. Finally, still shivering, she goes to the chest of drawers to find underwear, then jeans, and a long-sleeved t-shirt, which she puts on with the slowness of a much older woman. Her body aches strangely and she feels mildly feverish as she pulls on her fleece hoodie and scrapes her hair back into a ponytail. Glancing at the mirror, she sees a haunted woman staring balefully back at her.
The dress she wore at the party is pooled on the pale blue armchair by the window and she has the strange sensation that if she put it on she could climb back into Before.
Yesterday she was a different person. How naive she had been to think there would be only one Before and After in her life. Yet here was another chasm between her old life and this new one.
Jamie is dead. She murdered him. The words roll around like marbles inside her skull.
A thought jolts through her mind then, making her gasp audibly.
The bag Jamie had with him last night. Where did he put it?
She hurries into the guest room and stops when she sees the evidence of his presence straight away. The bed is made and she pictures his body warming the sheets last night before he came into her room. The bed probably still smells of him.
She turns away hurriedly to the chest of drawers, where he’d lain out a Lynx deodorant, a small soap bag, a handful of change, and a mobile phone. There’s something neat about the way he has put them there. Then she realizes. It is a habit from prison: keeping your small amount of belongings neat and tidy. She wishes she didn’t know this and, at the same time, feels a belly punch of sorrow.
Melissa scoops the mobile into her pocket. They’ll have to dump it somewhere on the way to Dorset. She glances around the bedroom, searching for the holdall he’d arrived with. It isn’t lying anywhere obvious and so, grumbling under her breath, Melissa pulls out drawers and looks in the wardrobe. Then she spots that one of the big drawers under the bed, where she keeps spare bed linen, isn’t flush. It’s jutting out a little on one side. Dropping the items on the bed, she gets to her knees and pulls the large drawer towards her. It rolls smoothly on its runners until it is entirely free of the bed.
Crouching low, Melissa leans forward and feels around with her fingertips until they meet the roughness of an unfamiliar material. It’s an ugly, cheap bag that looks as though it came from some army surplus shop about thirty years ago. It’s slightly greasy to the touch and Melissa grimaces as she yanks at the zip and peels the sides back to look inside.
Pants, socks, a t-shirt or two, and another pair of jeans, which are folded neatly.
It’s as she is about to zip up the bag again that she notices a Hamleys’ carrier bag with its familiar black and red logo at the bottom. Hesitating, Melissa pulls it out and reaches inside.
It contains a teddy bear with a wide smile and a little gold bell on a red ribbon around its neck. The fur is soft and cool under her fingers and Melissa knows the bear was expensive; she once bought something similar for a friend who’d had a baby. The bear’s lifeless eyes shine up at her.
Angrily stuffing the bear back into the bag, she zips the whole thing up again. Getting to her feet, she hefts the holdall over her shoulder before going downstairs to Hester and whatever comes next.
HESTER
Melissa takes a very long time upstairs.
When an hour has passed, I think about going to find her. To check she is all right, of course, but also …
Well …
She’s in such a state that my imagination is playing all sorts of tricks on me. I’m picturing her opening a window, shinning down a drainpipe and leaving me with all this. But then I hear her moving around and am surprised by the sensation of relief I experience.
While I wait for her to come down, I walk around her kitchen, letting my fingers trail over the surfaces. I wonder what it would be like to live here? I used to spend a fair bit of time in this kitchen, holding Tilly for her while she bustled about doing whatever it was that she had to do.
An unwanted memory forces its way into my mind. I wish I could bat it away, like an insect, but it lodges itself there.
***
Tilly had been teething and fractious all night. Melissa was pale and tired and I offered to sit and look after the baby while she had a nap.
I had a knack for calming Tilly. Babies always responded well to me, which was one of the reasons I was so good at my job at the nursery.
I’d heard one of the parents there talking about a new shop that had opened up, which sold baby clothes. The bonnet I’d picked out, in the palest primrose yellow with tiny sprigs of cherries, was one of the prettiest things I’d ever seen.
I couldn’t wait to see what it looked like on Tilly’s little curly head. So when Melissa was upstairs, I got it out of the bag and slipped it onto her. Melissa had some strange ideas about how to dress her and I sometimes wished she would favour more classic baby clothes.
Tilly looked up at me with her beautiful round eyes, her thumb embedded in her rosebud mouth, sucking noisily. The bonnet framed her face perfectly and she seemed to like it. Or at least, she certainly didn’t complain.
I bent down and kissed her downy forehead and breathed in her sweet, biscuit smell. And then I looked up to find Melissa standing in the doorway.
A guilty feeling flooded through me, even though I had done nothing wrong. Melissa’s expression was stony.
‘What have you put on her head?’ she asked in a cold tone of voice.
‘It’s just a bonnet I thought would suit her!’ I said, smiling and trying to keep the tone light.
But Melissa had taken the baby from my arms and snatched it off her head.
‘I don’t like hats on babies,’ she’d said, bafflingly. She’d been strange with me for the rest of that afternoon, even though I’d offered to stay and cook dinner for all three of them. Melissa does have her funny ways.
I find myself lifting the glass she drank from almost unconsciously now. I can see an intimate smudge where her lips touched the rim. Flustered, I hurriedly place the glass in the sink.
Nerves begin to flutter inside me again.