But the crucial part is that they’d have to be looking in the first place. Melissa worries at a fingernail and then, tasting the thick chemical resin there, pulls her hand away and lets it rest in her lap. Yesterday, a lifetime ago, she had that done. It’s insane that this can be a mere twenty-four hours later.
Her mood seems to ricochet like a power ball between two hard certainties: one minute she is certain she will be in handcuffs within a week, and then she is filled with wild belief that they really might pull this off.
Melissa glances over at Hester, who is peering intently through the windscreen. She thinks about when they first met. How can they have ended up here on this road, with Jamie’s dead body a few feet behind them?
***
Tilly was a grumpy baby and it seemed like there was one drama after another as she grew. She was forever coming down with some bug or other, needing ear grommets, or falling off a bike and smashing her front teeth.
Melissa wondered now whether she herself had been a bit depressed in those days without realizing it. She wanted to claim it was her own mother’s fault for never showing her how it all should be done. But really she knew that deep down she didn’t feel that she deserved to be a mother. Mark had pressurized her into having a baby in the first place and secretly she had hoped it wouldn’t happen. When it did, she loved Tilly in a way that frightened her and made her feel entirely inadequate to the task.
Hester used to take Melissa off for the afternoon sometimes and it was a godsend at the time. Tilly would come home covered in flour, or glitter (sometimes both) that Melissa would be hoovering up for the rest of the day, but at least she’d had a rest and some headspace for a few hours. She was grateful.
But, she remembers with a disquieting feeling now, Hester would go that little bit too far. There would be undermining comments here and there about Tilly’s clothes, or what she was eating. Or she would buy her things that Melissa didn’t want.
An uncomfortable memory floods back with sharp clarity now.
Once, when Tilly was about three, she had come home from an afternoon at Hester’s with a haircut. It was only a trim, but Melissa still remembered the hot, explosive feeling it had triggered inside her. When she had taken Hester to task about it the other woman had seemed baffled by Melissa’s reaction.
‘But it was falling in her eyes,’ she’d protested.
When Tilly started full-time nursery Melissa had managed to work herself free of the bond. They’d coexisted at a perfectly workable distance since then, apart from Hester occasionally trying to engage her in some boring issue relating to residents’ parking, or bins, or whatever.
She’d fantasized about walking away from her life, just leaving it all behind, in those difficult days of early motherhood.
It wasn’t as though she hadn’t done this before.
When Melissa began her new life and was no longer Melanie, she had been living with a man called Laurie, a thirty-nine-year-old lecturer at an FE college. She’d met him in the pub where she was a barmaid. He taught drama and seemed impossibly sophisticated to Melissa. Laurie taught her how to smooth her vowels and how to appreciate wine; he showed her that a diet of Haribo, Marlboro Lights, and Morrison’s tuna and sweetcorn sandwiches was not going to keep her healthy long-term. He cooked punishing bean stews that gave her wind for days instead. Laurie had even got her reading a bit, filling in the vast gaps in her education with an eclectic mix of left-wing pamphlets, documentaries, and books by Ian McEwan or Martin Amis.
The end with Laurie had come suddenly. One day, Melissa had woken up in the morning feeling a little sore from some rather joyless sex the night before (joyless for her, at least). She’d gone into the kitchen to find Laurie had left a pair of socks poking out of the trainers on the mat by the back door. They hung like flaccid banners, draped over the ugly, unfashionable shoes and she’d felt such a wave of contempt that it had brought bile into her throat.
There had been no prior planning involved.
She’d simply gone to where he kept a pot of emergency money in the back of a kitchen cupboard and extracted the ￡110 in there, along with his credit card.
It was as easy as that. And without a backward glance, Melissa had walked out of his life.
She had gone straight to the nearest hairdresser and had her distinctive hair dyed blonde. Then, using the credit card for the last time, she acquired new clothes and went to one of the bars where city traders hung out. And then she’d met Mark and her life had changed all over again.
But she had never experienced a feeling as intoxicating as that moment in the early morning when she’d clicked the door to Laurie’s flat in Crouch End and walked down the deserted street, bag slung over her shoulder and a lightness in her step.
She remembered a fox had slunk onto the pavement before her, all furry angles and sharp musk. She’d gazed into its golden eyes. It felt as though the world belonged to the two of them: wild, free spirits on the move.
Glancing up, she recognizes the name on the sign.
‘Hester?’ Her voice seems loud and unnatural in the small space.
‘Yes?’ says Hester.
Melissa takes a deep in-breath. ‘I think we’re nearly there. We have to take the next turning.’
They pass cottages whose thatched brows seem to glower at them in disapproval. Melissa gets the strange sensation that they will never leave these narrow roads. They will simply make endless circles, the three of them, forever. Two women and a dead man.
She chews her lips, trying to focus.
The light has come at last but the misty rain in the air gives everything a hazy look. They might as well be looking through Hester’s net curtains.
Eventually they spot a narrow country lane they must have missed the first time and Hester slows so they can peer at the sign. Fittingly called Watery Lane, it is lined with such dense tree coverage that it has an ominous, tunnel-like look. It seems like it will suck them inside and simply close over, never letting them out again.
Melissa feels a stab of hot fear as Hester turns the van down the lane.
It soon narrows to a single track. City driver that she is, she begins to fret about cars coming the other way, even at this hour. And could a country house have such an inhospitable and narrow road leading to it? It’s all hopeless. They will never find this well. And even if they do, they will never get Jamie’s body into it. She might as well find the nearest police station and get it all over with.
‘Oh Melissa, are you all right?’ Hester’s voice is shrill. Flustered, Melissa raises her hand to her face and finds it damp. She must have been crying again, or maybe it’s just the tiredness making her eyes so watery. Everything feels ever more blurred. It’s raining quite hard now and the windscreen wipers on this old pile of junk are only smearing the wetness around rather than clearing her view. Outside is an Impressionist painting of green and brown smudges.
‘Yeah,’ she sighs. ‘I’m okay, I’m just—’, then, ‘oh, stop here!’
The car slows to a crawl and the two women peer at the battered sign in the shape of an arrow at the side of the road.
Sca ow H ll and River, it says in long-rotted letters, like a gap-toothed smile.
Adrenaline thrills through Melissa once again and she is suddenly more alert than she has felt since Fleet. It looks as though they are almost there.
Melissa looks at Hester, who meets her gaze with wide eyes that somehow convey excitement more than fear.
Why is she helping her?
Mark used to joke that Hester had a crush on Melissa, which was silly and untrue, she was certain. He’d come up behind her, whispering in her ear, until she couldn’t stop herself from collapsing into giggles and batting him away.