It’s answered straight away.
‘Yes, what is it?’ the gravelly northern voice isn’t Kerry’s. It’s someone older.
‘I need …’ she says and then clears her throat. ‘Is Kerry there please?’
‘This is her mother,’ says the woman. ‘She’s very upset. She can’t talk. She’s just had a tragedy.’
‘Um, yes … I know,’ Melissa swallows. ‘But can you tell her it’s … Melissa?’
There are muffled background voices and then Kerry’s voice rings out clear in her ear.
‘What the fuck do you want? Do you know what’s happened? Do you?’
Melissa closes her eyes in an attempt to absorb the hostility blasting from the earpiece.
‘Yes, the police asked me some questions. Kerry, I …’ What can she say? What can she possibly do to make anything better? ‘Look,’ she continues, ‘I just wanted to know if I could help. You know, with the cost of things …’ Her voice peters out, small and inadequate. She feels ashamed in so many different ways.
Kerry laughs aggressively. ‘Yes you can, lady! Because if you had helped him out, then he’d have been able to pay his debts and this wouldn’t have happened. Daft bugger. Always making enemies.’ She breaks off into a sob and the phone is once more handed back to her mother.
Melissa feels more alert now. Enemies? That makes sense. Maybe the blackmail attempt wasn’t just about greed, but self-preservation too? Guilt corkscrews deeper into her guts.
‘So Kerry says your neighbour is minding our Amber,’ the mother is saying. ‘One or other of you can bring her back now. She needs her mum and her nanna.’
At first she can’t make sense of the words. Hester has Amber? Why?
She manages to squeak, ‘I’ll go and get her right now. What’s your address?’
She writes it down hurriedly and then says a barked goodbye before running out of the front door.
Next door the house feels as still and silent as a mausoleum. The net curtains turn the windows into opaque sightless eyes and, when she looks through the letterbox, she can see a tidy, empty hallway.
‘Hester!’ she shouts. ‘Are you there?’
There is only silence. Melissa can’t explain why this feels so wrong. But she knows now that the woman living next door to her all these years is one of the strangest people she has ever met. She can make the darkest things sound entirely reasonable. It’s possible that she thinks she is helping by looking after Amber but it all feels skewed. Something is wrong.
She has an idea.
‘Bertie!’ she calls in a singsong voice. ‘Here boy!’
Melissa silently prays for the sound of skittering claws on tiles … but there’s nothing. She lets the letterbox fall back with a loud snap.
If the dog isn’t there, she’s gone away and taken Amber with her.
And Melissa has the strangest feeling she knows where.
HESTER
The journey will take five hours from Paddington to St Erth, then it’s a short hop to Carbis Bay. I know that travelling so far with a young child and a dog is not going to be easy by train, but I cannot face getting on that motorway again. And for Amber to sit in the van when it has transported …
Well, it just wouldn’t be right.
But we are still only at Paddington and Amber is already grizzly. I have told her that her mummy needs a rest and that we are going to take Bertie to the seaside for a few days. At first she seemed to embrace the idea. However, as the tube train rumbled through the depths of the city towards Paddington, she started to fidget and whine. She said she was hungry. Then that she needed a wee. Then came the universal signifier of an anxious child the world over: she had a ‘tummy ache’.
So when we got to Paddington, finally, after what seemed such a long period of travelling when we’ve only just begun the journey, I crouched down to her level and asked her to look at me.
Warily, she turned her beautiful blue eyes towards me and I could see that her bottom lip was starting to jut. I told her, very quietly, that Bertie needed a holiday because he had been sad and that a little holiday with Amber was what he wanted most in the whole world.
She’d frowned and chewed her bottom lip for a moment, then glanced at Bertie, who was sitting nicely and looking around at the busy station.
‘So will you come and make him happy, just as a special favour?’ I’d cajoled. ‘I can’t do it without you, you see.’
She tried to pick him up then and he’d scrabbled free and scratched her a little bit with his claws. This prompted the tears that had been steadily brimming to start falling from her eyes and I almost gave up on the whole enterprise.
Then I had a brainwave. There was a branch of Claire’s Accessories across the concourse. The day before, Amber had tried to dress Bertie up with one of her hairclips, much to the poor dog’s distress.
‘Hey!’ I said. ‘Shall we go and buy some pretty things in there for Bertie to have on his holiday? We can buy a scarf to tie around his collar. What do you think?’
Amber’s face was still grumpy but she nodded and meekly took my hand.
And so it is that we have been on this train for three hours. We are not far from Plymouth, I think. Amber has looked at all the comics I brought with me and eaten all the sweets, despite my assertion that today would be a little kinder on the teeth.
She has endlessly walked Bertie up and down the train until he got so tired he simply sat down by my feet and wouldn’t move any further.
I am a little worried about the toilet issue. When we got to Exeter St David’s, I tried to persuade Amber to hold our seats while Bertie did a widdle but she created quite a fuss. I had to risk losing our seats and bring everything with us. As it was, Bertie was too overwhelmed by the noises and smells of the station to go.
We had just managed to get back onto the train as the whistle went and the doors locked. It was a very close thing. I am telling myself that Bertie is able to go all night without going to the toilet so, hopefully, my boy won’t let me down now.
I keep looking around at other families on the train and almost wishing I had some sort of iPad thing, just for this one time. It seems to be how most other parents are keeping their offspring occupied. A frazzled-looking woman across the way, who has a boisterous boy of about six (who Amber is fascinated by, naturally) and a tiny sleeping baby, gives me a sympathetic look now.
The boy is engrossed in something on her device, his eyes glassy and round, his bottom lip hanging open and shining. I don’t approve of using screens as babysitters for children but I can finally see the attraction of those things.
The woman blows her cheeks out and grins at me. It is a moment of parental camaraderie that pierces me with such happiness that I feel my eyes prickle with tears.
I hurriedly look away, blinking hard.
Thank you, I say inside my own head.
Amber starts to kick the seat with her heels, a rhythmic, metallic thumping sound that is instantly intolerable. A young man, who appears to be surgically attached to his laptop, glances up sharply and even the woman opposite frowns and looks a bit irritated.
‘Amber, darling, do please stop that,’ I say.
She continues, even harder. The little minx is really testing me now.
‘Amber! Stop that!’ I didn’t mean for it to come out quite as loud as it did, and she starts to cry.
I have no idea what to do. I can feel the disapproval of the carriage coming at me like gusts of stormy wind and my cheeks catch fire. In a minute we will be kicked off the train and then what will we do?
‘Would your granddaughter like to play with this?’
The woman across from us is leaning over and holding some sort of plastic toy in bright primary colours.
Amber is immediately distracted from her bad behaviour and snatches the toy from the woman’s hand.
‘Amber!’ I admonish. I am becoming quite exasperated.
But the woman just laughs and says, ‘It’s no problem. My sister’s little boy has Down’s and he likes things like this. It’s the baby’s, really, but if it helps, you’re welcome to play with it for a while.’