Maggie clutched Isla to her and ran from the room.
Straight into Nick, who was standing in his joggers and T-shirt on the landing. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘You really do need help, don’t you, Mags? Shame you’re not going to get it. And just for the record, I’m not jealous of that.’ He wrinkled his nose at Isla. ‘Christ, it stinks to high heaven.’
After Maggie had changed Isla, she put her into the pram and took her out to the lawn. And there they were, Duncan and Nick, running through the field in front of the house towards Billy McLetchie Hill. Nick was laughing, running backwards a few steps, calling back at Duncan, who flopped his arms like he was going Aye, okay, son, I give up.
Duncan was never going to accept that Nick was evil.
She looked down at Isla’s wee sleeping face, shaded from the sun by the pram hood.
The only way to keep Isla and herself safe was to leave Duncan. Get a divorce. It would break her heart. But if it was the only way . . .
But naw.
That wouldn’t work. Duncan would get joint custody of Isla. There was no reason why not. And that would be even worse. Isla would have to spend days at a time here alone with Duncan and Nick, with no Maggie to protect her. Maggie could imagine Duncan putting Isla down in her cot; calling to Nick to mind her while he went out . . .
She wheeled the pram to the garage.
At Maggie’s, she told Pam she needed to have ‘a private word’ with Liam about his employment and shut the kitchen door behind them. Liam looked from Isla, strapped to Maggie’s chest in her baby carrier, to Maggie and back. He must be worried about what this ‘word’ was, but he was also obviously freaked out by Isla. He probably hadn’t had much to do with babies.
Ordinarily she’d have messed with him, asked if he wanted to hold her.
But she came straight out with it. ‘This isn’t about your employment. You’re fine. You’re great.’
He relaxed. ‘Right?’
‘I need your help.’
And now he was grinning all over his face, like he knew fine well she would come round to his way of thinking eventually.
‘Not to put a hit on Nick.’
The grin vanished.
‘But if you really have the contacts you say you have,’ said Maggie, ‘I need fake IDs for Isla and me. And I need them fast.’
13
Lulu - June 2019
Lulu had laid the table in the dining room and lit candles in the candelabra, but she wasn’t fooling anyone that this was fine dining. Neither she nor Nick was a great cook, and Lulu felt embarrassed to be making Michael and Yvonne eat this muck. The potatoes were mush, the beef was so tough you could hardly swallow it, and the cabbage was like rubber too.
But Michael, bless him, had a second helping.
‘I’m sorry, I’m not much of a chef,’ Lulu apologised, handing him the potatoes. ‘You really want more of these?’
‘All ends up the same way, doesn’t it?’ said Michael cheerily.
Yvonne, in contrast, had only eaten a couple of mouthfuls.
‘This recovered memory thing,’ Michael said, ladling sloppy spuds onto his plate. ‘Is the idea to work out what might have happened?’
Yvonne shot him a repressive look.
‘Uh, no,’ said Lulu, glancing at Nick, who was refilling his own wine glass without offering more to their guests in a very uncharacteristic show of bad manners. ‘It’s about helping Nick process what he went through.’
Nick took a slug of wine. ‘It would be good, though, wouldn’t it, if I did happen to remember something important? Something we could take to the cops. But no joy so far.’ He took another slug. ‘Whatever happened must have happened between my leaving the house in the morning and returning in the evening. It’s convenient that the place is so isolated. No one to see what was going on. Apart from you two, maybe. If you were out and about on the farm, in the fields, you might have seen something.’
Michael shook his head. ‘I was in the shed most of that day, taking a tractor apart. It was November. Not much call to be out and about on the fields. The ploughing was finished. We were digging drains near the track, but not that day, and there’s no view of Sunnyside from there anyway.’
‘And I was away,’ said Yvonne.
‘Oh. Yes,’ said Nick. ‘So you were. At a conference in . . . was it York?’
‘Harrogate.’
‘What was it, The International Smelly Cheese Symposium?’
Yvonne pursed her lips. ‘It was The Technologies for Small Businesses Conference.’
Nick looked off, his eyes narrowing, and Lulu was sure he had gone back there again, back to the day of the disappearance. She was sure this was the last thing he wanted to talk about, but he seemed to brace himself as he looked back at Yvonne. ‘But you left early.’
‘Of course. Michael called me the night they went missing, and I drove back.’
Nick nodded slowly. ‘I appreciated you doing that.’
‘I was worried about my brother, my sister-in-law and my niece,’ snapped Yvonne. ‘Not everything is about you.’
Lulu’s heart sank. She’d hoped that aunt and nephew might move towards a reconciliation tonight, but Nick was having to get drunk to get through it and Yvonne was making zero effort to build bridges.
When they’d finished the main course, Yvonne helped Lulu and Nick clear it. As Nick took another bottle of wine back through to the dining room, Lulu scraped food into the bin and handed the plates to Yvonne, who was stacking the dishwasher as efficiently as, Lulu suspected, she did most things.
‘All this therapy nonsense isn’t going to get you anywhere, you know,’ Yvonne said as soon as Nick had left the kitchen. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree entirely.’
Lulu handed her another plate wordlessly.
‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with here.’ Yvonne slammed the dishwasher closed. ‘You need to look at reasons for Nick’s behaviour other than that he’s a poor traumatised soul. You need to wake up, Lulu.’