‘Would it be OK if I pulled my car into your drive, Jonny? Perhaps we could go inside and have a chat?’
There’s a twitchiness to him, a jerkiness to his movements, as though he’s drunk too much strong coffee to stay awake. I get that sometimes. Although he looks about a decade older, I recognise the look on his face from before, when he came crashing onto the ward. It brings a certain light to his eyes that can’t be feigned, and I know – as I did that first time I saw him – that he loves her, not necessarily in a romantic way; he just simply loves her.
He nods but says, ‘Please just tell me, she’s …’
‘She’s still alive, Jonny.’
He breathes out and closes his eyes, briefly, a quick thank you to the universe before he turns towards the cottage and asks, ‘You’ll tell me how she’s doing? I can ask about the baby?’
‘Yes, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.’
He stares beyond me for a moment, as though searching for an answer on the lane behind me.
‘Come on, then. I’ll put the kettle on.’
Jonny tells me his place is where the herdsman used to live when the farm was still a working dairy. It looks as though Dennis has had the run of the place for a while. I step over a large, well-chomped stick; splinters litter the floor. Half the table is covered in open leaves from newspapers like broken wings from huge dead insects and the other half is dominated by a small army of empty wine bottles and cans. The sink is full of cups and pans, their surfaces iridescent with grime. A small circus of flies buzz around the overflowing bin in the corner. One has crash landed; it fizzes on its back across the sideboard. Jonny knocks the washing machine door closed with his leg; it bounces open again, knocking against some washing that spews out of its maw.
‘Sorry it’s such a dump at the moment,’ he says, flicking the kettle on and peering optimistically into a cupboard for clean mugs. ‘I haven’t been here for a while. I hate being here now, for obvious reasons.’ He turns back to me. ‘Do you mind tea in a glass?’
I shake my head, still standing.
‘Bollocks, I don’t have any milk. Is camomile all right?’
‘Perfect,’ I say and he clears a jumper, dog food and a couple of maps off a chair.
‘I always got camomile for Cassie,’ he says as he motions for me to take a seat in the space he just cleared. ‘It was her favourite.’
I smile at him, grateful for this small detail, grateful to him for making her a little clearer to me. As I sit down, I imagine her here, sitting on this chair, drinking her camomile tea, looking out of the little window across to the farmhouse. This space was their friendship HQ, where she made her jams, somewhere she felt safe. I want to keep him talking about her so I ask, ‘Did she come over a lot?’
‘Yes, over the summer especially. We kept all the stuff for the jam in the spare room here. She’d use my spare key so she could come and go, even when I wasn’t around.’ He puts a glass in front of me. The inside of the glass sweats with condensation, a tea bag floating in the middle, flaccid as a jellyfish. Jonny makes a clicking sound with his tongue as he gently wakes a pissed-off-looking tabby cat I hadn’t even noticed, dropping her to the floor so he can sit in the chair opposite me. His collarbones stick out painfully under his T-shirt and I notice the skin around his fingernails is scabbed and bitten. He doesn’t have tea.
‘OK, so can you tell me how she is?’
I breathe out. I’ve come this far; I can’t lose my nerve now.
‘I will, Jonny, I promise, but first I want to hear what happened that night. I want to hear from you.’
He looks up at me, alarmed, and rakes a hand through his hair. I’ve changed the deal and feel cruel, but I know I can’t help Cassie if I don’t have the truth. I lean forward across the table towards him.
‘She’d taken off her wedding ring, Jonny. I don’t think she was looking for Maisie, I think she was leaving Jack and someone surprised her on the road. You said she was scared.’
Jonny nods and leans back in his chair, closing his eyes for a moment before rubbing them hard with both hands.
‘She cried at the party. Everyone thought I made her cry because there was something going on between us, but that’s bullshit. I think she cried because – as we now know – she was pregnant, and I don’t think she knew what to do.’
‘About the baby?’
‘No, not about the baby. I know she wanted the baby, especially after her miscarriage. She didn’t know what to do about Jack.’
‘You think she wasn’t happy with Jack?’
Jonny interlaces his fingers between his hands, and looks at his nails as he picks them. I imagine he did the same when he was interrogated at the police station hour after hour.
‘Looking back, I think something changed. I don’t know what, but she went from seeming happy to being distant. I was away a lot and had so much shit going on with my ex; I’d talk and talk to Cassie about Lorna, about how crazy she could be, but now, of course, I wish I’d asked her more, listened more.’ He pauses and looks up from his hands. ‘The only person who can tell us now what was going on between them is Jack and there’s no way he’ll say what was really happening, so …’ Jonny shrugs. ‘You know, when you think about it, Jack, moving down here … all of it was a bit of a curveball. She’d spent her whole life in London; she got together with Jack just a couple of months after her mum died. I think he offered her a ready-made life, a way out of feeling on her own. A home, a husband … a chance to make a family of her own. So different to the way she grew up. I think he made it seem like he understood her, that he knew her grief, but he didn’t, not really.’
He stops talking, and in the pause I ask, ‘So what changed?’
‘I don’t know, exactly, but I think the baby made her wake up, realise the life she had with Jack, although seemingly perfect, wasn’t really who she is.’
‘So you think she tried to leave that night. You said she was upset?’
‘I meant she was upset because she was scared, scared of the future, scared of making a decision about whether to stay or leave Jack.’
‘But she chose to leave.’
‘That’s what I think. She told me she was fine, that she wanted to go home and check on Maisie and she just left. Asked me to tell him she’d gone.’
‘But why did Cassie have to leave that night. Why not wait until the morning?’
Jonny shrugs. ‘That’s what I can’t figure out. She told me before she left the party that she would come over the next morning, that she’d need some help, but she didn’t say what with.’
‘What happened after she left the party?’