First One Missing (15 page)

‘Hello you.’

‘Hello you too.’

Instantly she felt the knots in her stomach loosening. It was something about his voice, the way it softened when he spoke to her as if she were some kind of honey it was coating itself in.

‘They think I’m telling you stuff.’

‘Well, sweetheart, it’d be a bit odd if you weren’t. We do virtually live together.’

‘About the investigation. There’s been a leak and they think it’s me.’

‘Ach. That’s tough. You’re an easy target, Lee. They’ve got to find someone to blame.’

‘Yes, but why me?’

She was aware she was whining now, but it felt good. Sometimes it really got to her, dealing with the kind of things she dealt with day in, day out. Women with bruises bigger than their faces and cigarette burns on their chests and wide scared eyes, swearing blind they’d walked into cupboards or seared their own skin. Old men mugged for their pensions, skin mottled from fear and humiliation. Leanne coped with it. That’s what she was trained for. She interviewed and processed and took statements and recorded and filed, and most of the time she wasn’t even aware of it bothering her. But then she’d get home and talk to Will and out it would come – all the horror and anger and disgust and revulsion – and just for once it would be about how
she
felt and about how it affected
her
. And she’d revel in the luxury of being allowed to have feelings and be human.

‘You’re good at your job, sweetheart. It’s not surprising some of the others get jealous and want to dig the knife in.’

Leanne exhaled the long breath she hadn’t even been aware of holding in, relaxed so that her shoulders were halfway down the chair back, and let Will’s voice roll over her like a gentle wave. From the corner of her eye she noticed a small knot of colleagues had gathered around a desk on the far side of the room. They were making quite a lot of noise, then all of a sudden a great bark of laughter went up. She frowned and straightened up trying to get a glimpse of what was so amusing. A phone rang and someone stepped away to answer it, leaving a gap in the circle through which she could just make out a familiar figure.

Pete. Well of course it would be. Centre of attention. As always.

Will was talking to her about the holiday they had booked for September. Two weeks in Majorca. She couldn’t wait. They’d spent a whole Sunday on the internet poring over photos of hotels with vast turquoise infinity pools and empty sandy coves before finally picking a place in the north-west of the island that had a path from the hotel garden leading directly to the beach. As he talked, Leanne avoided looking over to the other side of the room. Finally she glanced that way, to see Pete looking directly at her. He raised an arm in greeting.

Leanne immediately turned her head away as if she hadn’t seen.

16

The first text came when Rory was at lunch, which was a charitable name for a selection of soggy bread-based products with a smattering of wilted lettuce. At least in the old pre-Jamie Oliver days there used to be chips and pizza and stuff. Not exactly healthy, Rory knew that, but at least you knew they were unhealthy. He was biting into a panini with the exact texture of wet cardboard when his phone beeped with an incoming text.

‘You got a new girlfriend, Pervy?’

Rory gave a mock smile to Jack M. sitting to his right, and inwardly cursed his stupid surname and the nickname it had gifted. Thanks, Dad.

Thinking about his dad made him feel anxious as always. He didn’t understand how it was possible for kids to feel responsible for their parents, yet somehow he did. He got that his dad had been a dick and had left his mum to live with someone he worked with and it had all been a huge horrible crying mess. He got that. And then the thing with the other woman hadn’t worked out, but by then his mum had met Simon and so his dad had ended up with no one, living in a crappy rented flat where you couldn’t even put posters on the walls in case the Blu-Tack left marks. His dad was like a weight he carried around with him. And since Megan wasn’t there any more there was no one to share it with.

He slipped his phone out of his pocket and pretended to study it until his irritation passed, then finally he clicked on the flashing envelope icon. He hated his phone. All his friends had iPhones but his mum insisted it was too risky for him to walk around with £400-worth of kit on him.

In his inbox, he saw a ‘withheld number’ message. He got a lot of texts from withheld or unknown numbers. People asking if he needed help repaying a loan, or if he’d had an accident at work, or taken out payment-protection insurance. As soon as he clicked on the message, he realized it wasn’t one of those.

How does it feel to know you killed your sister?

His heart froze inside his chest.

‘Come on, Pervy. Who’s texting ya? You got a new girlfriend?’

‘Nah, man, just some bell-end trying to sell me something.’

Jack M. seemed satisfied with that and the conversation quickly moved on to Jessie Campbell’s party this coming weekend and whether Archie’s fake ID would work at the local Londis. But even while he was joining in with the others, the inside of Rory’s chest was tightening and tightening until he felt his words were being squeezed out through a straw. What did it mean, that text? How did he kill Megan? Why would anyone say that? IT WASN’T HIS FAULT! Everyone said that. The fucking therapist had said it so many times Rory thought he probably heard it in his sleep. He’d only looked away for a minute. And he shouldn’t even have been in charge of a seven-year-old. He was only twelve at the time. That’s what oldies did. They put you in charge of things when it suited them even though you said you didn’t want to, telling you that’s how you learned responsibility, and then when something went wrong they blamed you even though you never wanted to do it in the first place.

But it hadn’t been his fault. He’d turned away for a minute, well, maybe a couple of minutes. At most. And when he looked back she’d gone. And afterwards he’d gone crazy trying to find her.

How does it feel to know you killed your sister?

The thing was, it wasn’t the first text he’d received. They’d started a year or so ago, always from a withheld number.
Murderer
, the first one had said. He ignored it, half imagining it was meant for someone else. Then a couple of months later there’d been another one:
You killed your sister.
This time there was no doubting it was meant for him. He thought about showing it to his mum, but he knew it would cause such a fuss and he found he didn’t have the energy. She’d want to get the police involved. She might even start going through the rest of the messages on his phone and that would be a disaster beyond all measure. So he’d kept quiet. And when more messages had dribbled into his inbox every few weeks, he’d kept quiet about those too, because by then it would have been too difficult to explain. But every time he opened one, he experienced that same split-second feeling of vertigo and vomit-inducing plummeting of the stomach.

The one time he’d cracked and tried to bring them up with his mum – not being specific but just saying he’d had a nasty comment – she’d been sympathetic but distracted and had suggested he just switch his phone off.
Switch your phone off.
Like that was going to happen.

All through double maths, he kept playing with his phone in his pocket, and when Mr Whitman tossed the whiteboard rubber at Sam P. and hit Maisie instead and she said, ‘Fuck sake, sir,’ Rory didn’t even smile.

Walking home with the usual crowd, he was distracted to the point where someone asked him if he was ill. By the time he turned into his road, he’d come to a momentous decision. He was going to tell his mother about the text. Bearing in mind he’d rather eat his own arm than willingly confide in her, this was an indication of the fucked-upness of his state of mind.

But as he let himself into the house, he felt instantly that familiar heaviness in the air he remembered from the time after Megan’s death. His steps slowed as if his trainers were suddenly made of lead. His mum hadn’t been herself for days, since that stupid meeting on Saturday. He didn’t know why she put herself through it. Put them all through it. Still, at least now that the Botsfords were leaving the whole Megan’s Angels thing might simply fizzle out.

After checking that his mum wasn’t in the kitchen, Rory crept up the stairs, feeling a prickling sense of déjà vu. After Megan died there had been months and months where he’d come home from school and walked straight into a wall of unhappiness, just like this.

As soon as he reached the first-floor landing, he could tell his mum was in the bedroom she shared with Simon. The
master
bedroom. That phrase still made him snort inside. When he’d first heard it, he’d still been in his
Doctor Who
-fanatic phase and had been convinced the Doctor’s arch-rival had a room in his house. If it was empty, the door was always wide open as his mum insisted on letting the daylight from the bedroom windows flood into their windowless landing, but now it was pulled almost shut. Rory stood at the top of the stairs and took his phone out of his pocket, ready to show his mum the text. He was determined to talk to her about it this time. He was about to call out to let her know he was there when the most awful sound went up inside the room. A horrible wailing sound like foxes make in the night. He stopped still, rigid from shock and embarrassment.

‘I’m sorry,’ came his mum’s voice, only it wasn’t his mum’s voice, it was a wrung-out, twisted version of his mum’s voice. ‘I’m so sorry.’

He froze. She mustn’t know he was there. Rory remembered all too vividly that period where she’d spend whole days up in her room like this, curled around a photograph of Megan, apologizing again and again and again, for not being there to pick her up, for not finding her in time, for allowing it all to happen. It used to drive him crazy.

He returned his phone silently to his pocket, intent now on leaving without being heard. The last thing he wanted was a sob-fest with his mother. He retraced his steps down the stairs and went silently into the living room where he exhaled loudly.

Throwing himself down on to the sofa, he retrieved his phone. Even though he’d seen it so many times now, when he called up the text he tensed as if anticipating a punch. He read it through again, and then a second time.

His finger hovered over the trash-can icon.

‘Rory,’ came his mother’s misery-soaked voice from the floor above. ‘Are you home?’

He pressed delete.

17

‘I want to see her. You can’t stop me seeing her. I’m her father! I have rights.’

‘Don’t you think you lost them when you did what you did? Don’t you think you lost all your rights when you did that, you sick fuck? You agreed. You agreed to stay gone.’

Jason took a deep breath and counted to ten. He’d been doing a lot of work on himself recently. Everyone needed to take a good hard look at themselves from time to time, that’s what he thought. See what could be improved. Sometimes when he walked around the city centre and saw the state people allowed themselves to get into – rolls of fat squeezed into leggings and tight tops. Or late at night when he saw the slags on Oxford Street, staggering around drunk with their false eyelashes hanging off and their hair extensions all matted, or when he walked past a burger place and saw the rows of lardy, spotty blokes in the windows stuffing their faces with handfuls of those limp stringy chips. Didn’t they know they sprayed those things with chemical crap before frying them? Didn’t they know what they were doing to their insides? Sometimes when he saw all this, for a moment or two he thought he understood those people in America who pick up a gun and walk around shooting indiscriminately, full of despair and rage against these pathetic creatures with their cellulite and their bad teeth and their total lack of will-power. It was practically mercy-killing.

But him, he worked on himself. He knew his own weak points and he put in a lot of effort to improve them. His temper had got him into trouble all his life, so he’d been working on that. Anger-management classes. Not the courses the courts made you go on to avoid a prison sentence if you’d done a number on someone. He knew people who’d been on those and come home and punched through walls with frustration at having to go back. He’d done it properly. Proper shrink, £75 an hour. Control. That’s what he was after. That’s how come he was able to not rise to it when she called him a sick fuck.

‘Look, Donna, this isn’t about you. It’s about Keira and what’s right for her. And it’s right for her to see her dad. Kids need their fathers.’

That was the way. Calm, reasonable. Even though he could feel that ball of hot rage building in his gut, he wasn’t going to let it get to him. He was in control of the situation, just like he’d been taught.

‘You are fucking kidding me, ain’tcha? Are you really going to use the “what’s best for Keira” card on me? After everything you did?’

And then suddenly the ball was expanding and growing hotter and hotter until there was nothing he could do but let it burst out of him.

‘Look, bitch, Keira is my daughter, right? Mine. Got that? My blood runs in her. She is part of me. You cannot keep her away from me.’

And now he could hear her voice rising to match the shrillness of his own.

‘You come anywhere near her and you know what’s going to happen. I’m warning you, Jason. I’ll go to the police. I’ll tell ’em what you did, what you are.’

‘With what evidence? And don’t forget I’m your cash cow, you dozy bitch. How will you carry on living like a fucking queen if I’m locked away and your money dries up?’

Her breath was coming in sharp rasps that vibrated down the phone, and he could picture how she’d look with her blonde hair all stringy and hanging out of that hideous claw-type clip she always put it in, and her bony fake-tanned chest rising and falling like a set of dried-up leather bellows. She’d have that look in her eyes that used to drive him crazy – scared but defiant. If she’d left it at scared perhaps he wouldn’t have got so riled up, but she knew the other look pressed his buttons. That’s why she did it. She’d be biting her nails as well, he bet, chewing on the bits of skin around the cuticles until they bled. When her voice finally came, it was screwed up with spite.