Sunday
Helena
She can hear them laughing like day-trippers, smoking around the war memorial down below her flat window, though the curtains are drawn. The curtains have been drawn against them since they gathered yesterday.
First there were only a few, but they flew down like birds on crusts, vying with one another around the narrow blue door to the side of Barclays – her front door which has until now seemed invisible. ‘Helena Reed!’ they called, as if she might open a window and invite them up. When she pulled aside a net to look, they locked onto her, nudging one another, shouting to her and setting their zoom lenses for a grainy shot, so she had quickly retreated. She sat all day yesterday, and all last night, listening to the answer machine click and rewind with each new appeal from strangers luring her with false intimacy – ‘Look, this must be a difficult time, we can help’ – while she chewed on the skin at the edge of her thumbnail. Wondering who’d released her name.
But then, she’s been waiting for this to happen, knowing it would happen, since Crimewatch. After slamming into those two detectives outside Dr Young’s, she’s been a prisoner of her thoughts. Three days, four long nights. Would the police check who she had been visiting in Newnham? Would they find out she was seeing a shrink and assume all manner of mental instability from that? Would they talk to Dr Young and would he mention her terrorised thoughts, and what on earth would the police infer? Would they inform Dr Young that she was Edith’s lover, to which he would say, baffled, ‘Well, she never told me that,’ and to all of them she would appear madder and more inscrutable, a dissembler of the facts about Edith’s disappearance?
Thursday afternoon they sent someone round – ‘to sit with her’, the officer said. A babysitter. Helena had moved round this person in her flat, trying to look natural, but inside she was gnawed at by the sensation of being observed in her own home – they were watching her – so she said, ‘You go, I’m fine, I don’t need looking after. In fact, I’m going to stay with friends.’ Helena smiled, her hand on her open front door. The officer/babysitter said, ‘If you’re sure?’ but Helena could see she was glad. She’d received some furtive call about childcare arrangements and she couldn’t get away fast enough.
Friday morning, Saturday morning, she ran out early to check the papers, dreading but assuming she would be named, and surprised to find no mention of her apart from in the usual timeline descriptions. So yesterday afternoon, when the crows first gathered at the bottom of her stairs, it was as if the inevitable had taken place.
She stared and stared at the only card she had from the police. DS Manon Bradshaw. The other one – the kindly chap she’d crashed into who’d promised to protect her – his card must’ve fallen out of her pocket in her rush to get home that day. DS Bradshaw appeared not to be available. Dr Young’s practice number clicked through to a machine. She couldn’t think what message to leave so she hung up.
This morning, around 10 a.m., there’d been a noticeable quietening outside and she braved a glance through a crack in the curtain. They seemed to have dispersed, perhaps to a greasy spoon for a Sunday fry-up, leaving one or two hapless representatives to keep watch at her front door. She chanced it, out of the need for bread and milk, running down the back staircase – concrete and municipal, the air hung with the smell of stale cigarettes – which brought her via a door with metal push-bar, out by the bins to the rear of Barclays. The cold and rain drove welcome pins into her hands and cheeks as she ran, clasping her hood, to the nearest newsagent, but she was brought up short by the grey box-grid outside and eight images of herself and Edith, flapping in the wind.
Best friend was missing Edith’s lover
‘Lover’ was with Edith on night she vanished
Girls were lovers
It was like looking at images of a very familiar stranger. She noticed how young she looked, though she feels anything but young. She wasn’t nearly as fat as she assumed; rather slender, in fact. She tried to see herself as the readers of those rags might see her: unstable, predatory, sexually loose. There was a gap – the outside and the inside, and sometimes it was very wide indeed. Wide enough for you to fall through.