‘You didn’t do anything wrong. Not really. I’ll take them away, and you can see Frank. Get your heads straight.’
Frank’s back – didn’t he even notice?
‘Our heads?’ He makes Frank and I sound like some kind of mad gorgon. And what’s the intimation anyway? That my son and I are mutually and tangentially messed up?
‘Look, Scarlett found out about you,’ Matthew sounds weary. ‘She saw something online. She’s refusing to come in the house if you’re here.’
‘Oh God,’ I say. I feel sick.
‘And you can see that might be a problem.’ He walks away. ‘For me.’
The bottom is dropping out of everything.
And still he won’t tell me who sent that email.
Thirty-Nine
Jeanie
3 April 2015
Matthew and the twins have gone to Brussels for a long weekend. First class on the Eurostar, rooms at a five-star hotel, puppets at the Théatre Royal de Toone, whatever that might be.
I think the twins might have preferred Disneyland Paris, or just a weekend shopping and eating in London – but still.
I have fought and fought not to mind.
Marlena’s promised to come up, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Taking matters into my own hands, I’ve got another interview, this time at the Oaklands College in St Albans. I’ve spent a day out with Frank looking at local sights, like the Hellfire Caves near High Wycombe. Tentatively I mention the Grey Lady as we drive home and Scarlett’s prank – and he just laughs. ‘Typical teenager,’ he says, and I resist saying, ‘Takes one to know one.’ I don’t bother saying she denied being responsible for my first ‘sighting’.
Now I’ve decided to look for a local friend. I used to have lots of friends, once upon a time. Lots. I need at least one here too.
I ring Sylvia Jones, the woman who fancied Nordic walking, and ask her for coffee.
‘I’m pretty busy this week. I’ve taken up pottery and I’m hooked,’ she breezes. ‘Hoping to meet my own Patrick Swayze! Next week maybe?’
‘Great.’ I feel pathetically desolate. ‘Yes, please.’
I debate ringing Anne from number 52, but she’s got such a downturned mouth and deep frown lines to match, I can’t bear to.
I ring Marlena’s voicemail. ‘I’m coming to London tomorrow,’ I say. ‘Call me back please.’
I wander round the house, feeling redundant, and then I hear the mail drop onto the doormat.
I pick it up and flick through. Nothing of any interest here – just brown envelopes for Matthew and a final reminder from the gas board.
Then I look again. There’s a letter from the dentist – addressed to someone I don’t know.
Someone called Lisa Bedford.
Forty
Marlena
It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to come down and see me, Jeanie, okay? Honestly, you were always bloody welcome, you know that really – don’t you?
I was just so immersed in my own crap at the time. And you know why; I know you do. You of all people realised just how badly I’d damaged my reputation, how much I had to repay.
It was so bloody important that I helped that girl Nasreen. She’d been so sweet when I did my talk at the college – and maybe, I thought later, maybe she reminded me a bit of you, Jean – her trusting brown eyes, her warm face.
So I was still looking for Nasreen, and I felt like I was getting closer.
After I met Jeanie on that freezing February day, the imam in Luton had greeted me politely, inviting me into his tiny office. He offered me tea in front of the glowing three-bar heater, which I accepted, despite already jangling with too much black coffee.
The imam seemed like a good bloke: straight-up and concerned. My instinct for liars is pretty good – like a radar after all these years.
He said he’d helped many kids wavering near the path to being radicalised. He was, by all accounts, dead set against this ‘wickedness’, as he called it.
‘The truth is we can find no trace of this girl at all through our network in the Middle East.’ He looked sorrowful. ‘We always have our ear to the ground. But no one has seen or heard of Nasreen that we know of. I’m sorry.’
I left, not feeling much soothed. If there was no sign of her in either Turkey or Syria, why did her family and her English boyfriend seem so convinced that she’d gone that way?
I realised later – too late – I’d gotten a little obsessed. Again.
Yes, I was distracted – I admit it.
But you’ve always been so strong, Jeanie. When our fucking useless mother vanished to a commune in Morocco to ‘cleanse her soul’ just after your eleventh birthday – inspired present as usual, thanks Mum – leaving you in charge of both of us, you did such a good job, the social never even got a whiff of it.