It had started as fun. She knew it was wrong, but didn’t she deserve a bit of happiness after everything that had happened to her? He had made her feel wanted. She hadn’t meant to have feelings for him. They’d just happened by themselves. Now she couldn’t make them go away. She had tried, but they just kept coming back.
‘I don’t want us to stop seeing each other.’ She hated the desperation in her voice. She had heard it before, in another life that seemed so long ago now, and she thought she’d left that old Sarah behind.
Apparently not.
Connor sighed and lowered his head, focusing on the ground between his feet. ‘It can never be what you want it to be. You know that, don’t you?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Sarah said too quickly. ‘What’s wrong with this, with the way things are now? I won’t make a fuss, I promise. I won’t say anything. We can just keep things as they are. No one will know.’
She might have hated the fact, but she didn’t want to be without him. She had tried being on her own. She couldn’t do it. Eventually, he would come to realise that he didn’t want to be without her either. She just had to be patient.
Connor was shaking his head. ‘I can’t do this any more. I’m sorry. It’s too risky.’
He didn’t even meet her eye to say the words, and when he went back into the pub, Sarah waited outside, allowing the cold air to dry the start of tears that had caught at the corner of her eyes. He would change his mind, she thought. One way or another, she would make him see sense.
Connor used the toilet before heading back into the pub. No one seemed to notice he had gone; no one except Rachel Jones, whose quick eyes fixed upon him as he re-entered the bar. Connor took his seat without making eye contact.
One thing had made itself obvious that evening. Rachel knew what was going on between him and Sarah.
Chapter Seven
Chloe Lane sat in the bedroom of her flat and stared at the screen of her laptop. She rarely watched television. When she needed company, she sought it online, sneaking a peek into other people’s lives via Facebook. Most of the people she was friends with online she never saw in the real world. They were people she had known at university, first in Cardiff and then in London – ‘known’ meaning she had once lived on the same floor as them, or had sat in the same lecture hall. There were people she had met during her first few years with the police, although she wasn’t bothered if she never saw any of them again.
Chloe never added anything much to her own timeline, happy to keep her private life just that. Not that there was much to write about, she thought. But if other people wanted to tell her what they were doing, it seemed rude not to pay them some attention. These things that had become normal and everyday – boasts of workout sessions, photographs of impressive (and often less than impressive) cake attempts, daily updates on the progress of babies who did nothing but eat, sleep and shit (and what else could they be expected to do, really?) – were a welcome distraction from things like corpses on riverbanks.
They were a distraction from the ghosts that stood in the shadows of Chloe’s day-to-day life.
She rubbed the heel of her hand against her eye, pressing back the need for sleep. She was tired, it had been a long day, so why she now thought to check her emails this late she wasn’t sure, as though some sixth sense had driven her to turn on the laptop and had then led her away from Facebook and towards something that would stop everything else dead in its tracks.
She should have tidied up a bit. The rest of the flat was neat and orderly – she didn’t own enough for things to become cluttered – but her bedroom was a different matter. The wardrobe unit that framed the head of her bed was filled to bursting, with more clothes crammed into the set of drawers beneath the window. Her make-up bag spilled its contents across the top of the unit, used face wipes smeared with concealer and mascara waiting to be thrown away. These were the things that allowed her to be someone else. Every morning when she dressed and applied her make-up, Chloe felt as though she was donning a disguise.
She sat in bed, shivery in her pyjamas and reluctant to put the heating on when she would soon be asleep anyway. She glanced across at her phone. That afternoon, she had sent a text message to Scott – a man she had met a few months earlier, who, in those months, she had let down more than probably merited forgiveness – but he hadn’t replied. She couldn’t blame him. She wondered whether one day she might ever be able to get beyond all the things that stopped her from ever getting too close to somebody, but for now she very much doubted it.
Looking again at the screen of the laptop, Chloe felt a shiver pass through her. This time she knew it wasn’t just the temperature that had prompted such a physical response. The first message received weeks earlier, just before Christmas, could have been put down to error, or perhaps some sick prank from somebody who knew too much about her. But this, the second: this was no coincidence. She stared at the words on the screen.
Found him yet?
She checked the day the email had been sent. She hadn’t logged in for a few days, but it had been received that day. She checked the time it was sent: four thirty that morning. Chloe ran a fingertip across the mousepad and clicked the search bar at the top left corner of her email page. In it, she typed the words ‘the serpent’. The screen buffered as her useless Internet connection decided on whether or not it was going to work. Then there it was. The first message, sent almost a month earlier.
Reaching to her bedside table, Chloe took a pen from the top drawer and searched for an opened envelope or the back of a receipt on which to write. She found a tattered old notebook hidden among the debris of the drawer. She knew she wouldn’t forget it, but she wrote it down anyway, scrawling the email address hurriedly on the first clean page she came to.
[email protected]
She ran a hand over her face in another attempt to push away the tiredness that had previously beckoned her to her bed. She had drunk a coffee not long before, with sugar she didn’t usually take, and now she wished the blast of caffeine would actually do what it was expected to and make her feel a little more alert. Her heart pounded in her chest. She had been waiting years for something, anything, and now this, as though someone else knew who she was looking for. There was only one ‘him’ she had ever sought. It couldn’t possibly refer to anyone else.
Pushing the laptop from her, Chloe went to the wardrobe in the corner of her small bedroom and reached for the suitcase that lay on top. It was heavy, weighed down with papers and documents, and she strained as its weight eased on top of her. She wasn’t sure how she’d ever been able to get it up there in the first place. Over the years, this suitcase had travelled with her between every move. Perhaps she had grown accustomed to carrying the weight of its contents with her.
Without it, what did she have, really?