“Ryan!” she hears Bella shouting from across the room. “I daresay you think you’re very funny, but the girls can hear you, you know, and you won’t think it’s so funny when they’re trotting that question out at nursery.”
“Sorry,” Ryan says, and she can hear the suppressed laughter, the old piss-taking, provoking Ryan in his voice. “Ignore me. Carry on. What was it you wanted to ask?”
“It’s about—” She swallows. She feels suddenly sick. Ryan’s friendly banter has somehow made this even harder. How can she explain what this means? “It’s about that night. When April—when April died.”
Ryan says nothing, but she senses rather than hears his nod down the phone.
“Someone said… someone told me…”
She hears April’s voice in her head, clear as if she were standing next to Hannah, fixing her with that icy blue gaze.
Spit. It. Out.
“Someone told me that Will was in college that night,” she says in a rush. “That he wasn’t in Somerset. Did you hear him come in?”
“What?” Ryan sounds stunned; whatever he was expecting, it plainly wasn’t this. “But… but what difference does it make? April was alive when Neville went up the stairs, and dead when she came down them. There’s no one else could have done it. You were the one who testified to that.”
“Ryan—” She’s trying to keep her voice calm, but there’s an edge of desperation that she knows Ryan must be able to hear. “Look, I don’t have time to go into it right now, but all I want to know is, did you see Will come home that night? Did you hear anyone in his room? His alibi for April’s death hinges on him not being in Oxford that night. Can you back that up, or can’t you?”
“I—” Ryan’s voice sounds uncertain. “I… I don’t know. I’d need to think. I didn’t see him come in… I guess the first time I saw him was… coming out of the shower? Around lunchtime?”
“Lunchtime on Sunday?” She tries to think. How long would it take to get from rural Somerset to Oxford, on a Sunday? Lunchtime is pushing it… but just about possible she guesses. “And before that? Did you hear anyone? In his room?”
“The police banged on his door,” Ryan says. He sounds bewildered now. “I had to tell them he was away for the weekend.”
“But they didn’t go in, right? They didn’t actually check his room was empty?”
“No, they didn’t go in.”
“And did you hear anything? Anything after you’d gone to bed?”
“I don’t know!” Ryan says. He sounds utterly bewildered, his usual joking manner quite gone. “Hannah, what’s this all about?”
She closes her eyes. A wave of such faintness and nausea is sweeping over her that she has to hold on to the windowsill.
“I’ll call you back,” she says. “I—I’m sorry, Ryan. I have to go.”
She hangs up. She turns around.
Will is standing in the doorway.
AFTER
“Will.”
The voice that says his name sounds strange in her own ears, not her own, strangled, harsh.
“How—how long have you been there?”
“Long enough.” His face is expressionless. He’s holding his running jacket in one hand and a packet of bacon in the other. Automatically she glances at the clock. It’s 7:59.
“You—you’re not supposed to be back yet,” she manages.
“Ajesh saw me waiting outside. He opened up early.”
Oh God. She feels sick. How much did he hear?
“What the fuck is going on?” he says, and his voice is flat and yet somehow colder than she could ever have imagined Will sounding. Will. Will, her husband, the man she loves with every fiber of her being.
Even the fibers that phoned Ryan to check up on his alibi? whispers her subconscious, but she pushes its accusations away. A sob is rising inside her. This cannot be happening.
“Do you think I killed April?” he says now, dangerously calm. She shakes her head. Tears are starting in her eyes.
“No. No!”
“That’s not what it sounded like.” He puts the bacon on the counter, very, very gently, and takes a step towards her. She starts to shake.
“No, Will, no. I never thought that.”
“If that’s true, why the fuck didn’t you just ask me?” he shouts, and now there is a vein throbbing in his forehead. Hannah wants to throw up.
“Will, please…” It comes out like a long whimper of fear and she sees something flash in his eyes, but she cannot read it. Is it anger? Contempt? Hate?
“Ask me,” he says, coming closer. She has always loved his height, his lean muscled bulk, the way his body makes her feel safe and cocooned. Now she sees it from the other side. She sees the way he could pick her up with one hand by the throat and pin her against the wall. “Ask me!” he shouts, his spit hitting her face, and she flinches in spite of herself. “Ask me if I killed April!”
Hannah’s heart is thumping. Her vision is beginning to crack and fragment, like static spreading across a television screen. She knows she is breathing too fast, and yet she can’t stop. Think of the baby.
And then something stills inside her. It’s as if she has been in a hurricane, and suddenly the eye of the storm is passing over, and that strange illusory calm settles for a moment upon her.
Her vision clears. Her heart slows.
“Did you kill April?” she says, every syllable clear and deliberate.
“What do you think?” he says. And then—he laughs.
In that moment, all the blood seems to drain from her body, leaving her numb and chill as stone. She stands there, staring at him, unable to believe what she has just heard. She was so sure—so certain that he would say no.
She is still staring, horrified, mesmerized, when her phone rings, making her jump convulsively.
“Who’s that, the police?” Will says. His voice is ice-cold, goading, cruel.
November’s voice flickers through Hannah’s memory again—Please, don’t do anything about this until you’ve spoken to the police.
Oh God, she has been so stupid.
“Hannah?” Will says. He takes a step towards her. She takes a step back. The phone is still ringing. It’s on the counter, within hand’s reach. “Aren’t you going to answer it?”
Hannah’s heart is beating so fast and hard she can feel it in her wrists, in her neck. The baby writhes inside her.
Will is between her and the door.
She has been so, so stupid…
She takes another step back towards the window, not breaking eye contact with Will, and with her free hand she gropes blindly for the phone, never losing Will’s gaze as she grabs it. He takes a step forwards. She takes another step back. He takes another step forwards.
She is backing into a corner, and she knows it, but if she can just get him to take one more step forwards…
She takes one more step back.
He takes one more step forwards.
And Hannah runs.
Will swears, but that last step has put the kitchen table between him and the door, while giving Hannah a clear line.
She runs, barefoot, out of the kitchen, down the hallway and down the stairs, hearing a thumping clatter as Will tries to follow and trips over one of their kitchen chairs. Out in the street the cobbles are bitterly cold under her feet and wet from the night’s rain, and she slips, but then rights herself and runs towards the open end of the mews. Behind her she can hear Will’s feet pounding down the stairs.
Her heart feels like it’s going to burst. She holds her stomach with one hand, as if she can protect her unborn child. She forces herself to run just a little faster down the last few meters of Stockbridge Mews… and then she is out, onto the main road, skidding around the corner, the asphalt of the council-owned pavement biting into the soles of her feet. She looks wildly up and down the road. A car passes. Then another. They are going too fast for her to stop, and they don’t spare a glance for the wild-eyed pregnant woman running barefoot down the street. Can she flag someone down? Run into a cafe? The nearest one is closed and she draws a shuddering breath and runs on, towards the park.
“Hannah!” she hears from behind her, Will’s roar of a kind of fury she has never heard from him before. He has rounded the corner onto the main road and is gaining on her. “Hannah, what are you doing?”
She makes her legs work harder—runs across a junction without looking, and then another and then—