chapter forty
‘Hi,’ Tess answered her phone. It was Connor. Her body responded instantly to his voice, like Pavlov’s salivating dog.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘I’m buying hot cross buns,’ said Tess. She’d picked up Liam from school and taken him to the shops for a treat. Unlike yesterday, he seemed quiet and moody after school and not interested in talking about his Easter hat win. She was also buying a whole list of things for her mother, who had suddenly realised the shops would be closed the next day, for one whole day, and had gone into a panic about the state of her pantry.
‘I love hot cross buns,’ said Connor.
‘Me too.’
‘Really? We’ve got so much in common.’
Tess laughed. She noticed Liam looking up at her curiously, and she turned slightly away from him, so that he couldn’t see her flushed face.
‘Anyway,’ said Connor. ‘I wasn’t calling for any particular reason. I just wanted to say that I thought last night was really . . . nice.’ He coughed. ‘That’s an understatement actually.’
Oh God, thought Tess. She pressed the palm of her hand to her burning cheek.
‘I know things are really complicated for you right now,’ continued Connor. ‘I don’t have any, ah, expectations, I promise you. I’m not going to make your life more complicated. But I just wanted you to know that I’d love to see you again. Any time.’
‘Mum?’ Liam pulled on the edge of her cardigan. ‘Is that Dad?’
Tess shook her head.
‘Who is it?’ demanded Liam. His eyes were big and worried.
Tess pulled the phone away from her ear and put a finger to her lip. ‘It’s a client.’ Liam lost interest immediately. He was used to conversations with clients.
Tess took a few steps away from the crowd of customers waiting to be served at the bakery.
‘It’s okay,’ said Connor. ‘Like I said, I really don’t have any –’
‘Are you free tonight?’ interrupted Tess.
‘God, yes.’
‘I’ll come over once Liam is asleep.’ She put her lips close to the phone as if she was a secret agent. ‘I’ll bring hot cross buns.’
Rachel was walking towards her car when she saw her daughter’s murderer.
He was talking on his mobile phone, swinging his motorbike helmet held loosely in his fingertips. As she got closer, he suddenly tipped back his head to the sun as if he’d just received unexpectedly wonderful news. The afternoon light glinted off his sunglasses. He snapped the phone shut and slid it in his jacket pocket, smiling to himself.
Rachel thought again of the video and remembered the expression on his face when he turned on Janie. She could see it so clearly. The face of a monster: leering, malicious, cruel.
And now look at him. Connor Whitby was very alive and very happy and why wouldn’t he be, because he’d got away with it. If the police did nothing, as seemed likely, he would never pay for what he’d done.
As she got closer, Connor caught sight of Rachel and his smiled vanished instantly, as if a light had been snapped off.
Guilty, thought Rachel. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
‘This came by overnight courier for you,’ said Lucy when Tess was home unpacking the groceries. ‘Looks like it’s from your father. Fancy him managing to send something by courier.’
Intrigued, Tess sat down at the kitchen table with her mother and unwrapped the small bubble-wrapped package. Inside was a flat square box.
‘He hasn’t sent you jewellery, has he?’ asked her mother. She peered over to look.
‘It’s a compass,’ said Tess. It was a beautiful old-fashioned wooden compass. ‘It’s like something Captain Cook would have used.’
‘How peculiar,’ sniffed her mother.
As Tess lifted up the compass she saw a small handwritten yellow post-it note stuck to the bottom of the box.
Dear Tess, she read. This is probably a silly gift for a girl. I never did know the right thing to buy you. I was trying to think of something that would help when you’re feeling lost. I remember feeling lost. It was bloody awful. But I always had you. Hope you find your way, Love Dad.
Tess felt something rise within her chest.
‘I guess it’s quite pretty,’ said Lucy, taking the compass and turning it this way and that.
Tess imagined her father searching the shops for the right gift for his adult daughter; the expression of mild terror that would have crossed his leathery, lined face each time someone asked, ‘Can I help you?’ Most of the shop assistants would have thought him rude, a grumpy, gruff old man who refused to meet their eye.
‘Why did you and Dad split up?’ Tess used to ask her mother, and Lucy would say airily, a little glint in her eye, ‘Oh, darling, we were just two very different people.’ She meant: Your father was different. (When Tess asked her father the same question, he’d shrug and cough and say, ‘You’ll have to ask your mum about that one, love.’)
It occurred to Tess that her father probably suffered from social anxiety too.
Before their divorce, her mother had been driven to distraction by his lack of interest in socialising. ‘But we never go anywhere!’ she would say, full of frustration, when Tess’s father once again refused to attend some event.
‘Tess is a bit shy,’ her mother used to tell people in an audible whisper, her hand over her mouth. ‘Gets it from her father, I’m afraid.’ Tess had heard the cheerful disrespect in her mother’s voice, and had come to believe that any form of shyness was wrong, morally wrong, in fact. You should want to go to parties. You should want to be surrounded by people.
No wonder she felt so ashamed of her shyness, as if it were an embarrassing physical ailment that needed to be hidden at all costs.
She looked at her mother.
‘Why didn’t you just go on your own?’
‘What?’ Lucy looked up from the compass. ‘Go where?’
‘Nothing,’ said Tess. She held out her hand. ‘Give me back my compass. I love it.’
Cecilia parked her car in front of Rachel Crowley’s house and wondered again why she was doing this to herself. She could have dropped Rachel’s Tupperware order off at the school after Easter. The guests from Marla’s party weren’t promised delivery until after the break. It seemed she simultaneously wanted to seek Rachel out and avoid her at all costs.
Perhaps she wanted to see her because Rachel was the only person in the world with the right and the authority to speak out on Cecilia’s current dilemma. ‘Dilemma’ was too gentle a word. Too selfish a word. It implied that Cecilia’s feelings actually mattered.
She lifted the plastic bag of Tupperware from the passenger seat and opened the car door. Perhaps the real reason she was here was because she knew Rachel had every reason in the world to hate her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone hating her. I’m a child, she thought as she knocked on the door. A middle-aged, perimenopausal child.
The door opened faster than Cecilia had expected. She was still preparing her face.
‘Oh,’ said Rachel, and her face dropped. ‘Cecilia.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Cecilia. So very, very sorry. ‘Are you expecting someone?’
‘Not really,’ said Rachel. She recovered herself. ‘How are you? My Tupperware! How exciting. Thank you so much. Would you like to come in? Where are your girls?’
‘They’re at my mother’s place,’ said Cecilia. ‘She felt bad because she missed their Easter hat parade today. So she’s giving them afternoon tea. Anyway. That’s neither here nor there! I won’t come in, I’ll just –’
‘You sure? I’ve just put the kettle on.’
Cecilia felt too weak to argue. She would do whatever Rachel wanted. Her legs could barely hold her up, they were trembling so badly. If Rachel shouted ‘Confess!’ she would confess. She almost longed for that.
She walked across the threshold with her heart in her mouth, as if she was in physical danger. The house was very similar to Cecilia’s home, like so many of the homes on the North Shore.
‘Come into the kitchen,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ve got the heater on in there. It’s getting chilly in the afternoon.’
‘We had that linoleum!’ said Cecilia when she followed her into the kitchen.
‘I’m sure it was the height of fashion all those years ago,’ said Rachel as she put teabags into cups. ‘I’m not one of those renovating types, as you can see. Just can’t get myself interested in tiles and carpets, paint colours and splash-backs. Here you go. Milk? Sugar? Help yourself.’
‘This is Janie, right?’ asked Cecilia. ‘And Rob?’ She’d stopped in front of the refrigerator. It was a relief to say Janie’s name. Her presence was so gigantic in Cecilia’s head. It felt like if she didn’t say her name it would suddenly burst out of her mouth in the middle of a sentence.
The photo on Rachel’s fridge was casually held with a magnet advertising Pete the 24 Hour Plumber. It was a small, faded, off-centre colour photo of Janie and her younger brother holding cans of Coke and standing in front of a barbecue. They’d both turned around with blank, slack-mouthed expressions, as if the photographer had surprised them. It wasn’t a particularly good photo but somehow its very casualness made it seem all the more impossible that Janie was dead.
‘Yes, that’s Janie,’ said Rachel. ‘That photo was up on the fridge when she died and I’ve never taken it down. Silly, really. I’ve got much better ones of her. Have a seat. I’ve got these biscuits called macarons. Not macaroons, oh, no, if that’s what you’re thinking. Macarons. You probably know all about them. I’m not very sophisticated.’ Cecilia saw that she took pride in not being sophisticated. ‘Have one! They’re really very good.’
‘Thank you,’ said Cecilia. She sat down and took a macaron. It tasted like nothing, like dust. She sipped her tea too fast and burned her tongue.
‘Thank you for dropping off the Tupperware,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m looking forward to using it. The thing is that tomorrow is the anniversary of Janie’s death. Twenty-eight years.’
It took Cecilia a moment to comprehend what Rachel had said. She couldn’t work out the link between the Tupperware and the anniversary.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Cecilia. She noticed with almost scientific interest that her hand was visibly trembling, and she carefully placed her teacup back in its saucer.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Rachel. ‘I don’t know why I told you that. I’ve just been thinking about her a lot today. Even more than usual. I sometimes wonder how often I would have thought about her if she’d lived. I don’t think about poor Rob that often. I don’t worry about him. You’d think after losing one child that I’d be worried about something happening to my other child. But I’m not particularly worried. Isn’t that awful? I do worry about something happening to my grandson. To Jacob.’
‘I think that’s natural,’ said Cecilia, and suddenly she was overcome by her own breathtaking audacity. To be sitting here in this kitchen, delivering platitudes along with Tupperware.
‘I do love my son,’ murmured Rachel into her mug. She shot Cecilia a shame-faced look over the rim. ‘I’d hate you to think I didn’t care for him.’
‘Of course I don’t think that!’ Cecilia saw to her horror that Rachel had a triangle of blue macaron right in the centre of her bottom lip. It was horribly undignified and made Rachel seem suddenly elderly, almost like a dementia patient.
‘I just feel like he belongs to Lauren now. What’s that old saying? “A son is a son until he takes him a wife, a daughter is a daughter for all of her life.”’
‘I’ve . . . heard that. I don’t know if it’s true.’
Cecilia was in agony. She couldn’t tell Rachel about the crumb on her lip. Not when she was talking about Janie.
Rachel lifted her teacup for another sip, and Cecilia tensed. Surely it would be gone now. Rachel lowered the cup. The crumb had moved off-centre and was even more obvious. She had to say something.
‘I really don’t know why I’m rambling on like this,’ said Rachel. ‘You’re probably thinking I’ve lost the plot! I’m not myself, you see. When I came home from your Tupperware party the other night I found something.’
She licked her lips and the blue crumb vanished. Cecilia sagged with relief.
‘Found something?’ she repeated. She took a big mouthful of her tea. The faster she drank, the faster she could leave. It was very hot. The water must have been boiling when Rachel poured. Cecilia’s mother made the tea too hot as well.
‘Something that proves who killed Janie,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s evidence. New evidence. I’ve given it to the police – Oh! Oh, dear, Cecilia, are you okay? Quickly! Come and run your hand under the tap.’