The Back Road (15 page)

Ellie sighed. What could she say? Perhaps she should tell Max what Mimi had said about him and Alannah - but she couldn’t. He might admit that it was true.

She stood up, and picked up the candle.

‘I’ll go and make lunch,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you a shout when it’s ready.’

Max turned his face up to hers with a smile.

‘What can I do to help?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. You sit there. You’ve done enough this morning. I’m going to put this somewhere - the downstairs loo, I think,’ she said, holding up the candle, ‘and then I’ll start on the prawns.’

She smiled at Max, and walked through into the kitchen and on towards the downstairs bathroom. She eyed the phone as she passed, and thought she might give Penny a quick call back to check if she was okay. She could never remember Penny’s number because having lived next door for so long, it had rarely been needed. Typing 1471 and hoping that Penny had called after Fiona, she listened as she heard the automated voice ‘the caller withheld their number’.

At one time, she would just have asked Max who had called, in all innocence. But now the sharp shard of suspicion pierced her fragile trust, leaving an aching void in its place. And to think that just moments ago she had begun to believe that everything was going to be all right, and perhaps her suspicions were unfounded.

On top of all these doubts and misgivings, she didn’t know what to do about Friday night. The accident. She had pushed it to the back of her mind since she’d heard when and where it happened. But she couldn’t keep ignoring it. She had to do something. She couldn’t leave it like this.

She made her way quietly upstairs, through the bedroom and into their bathroom. Leaving the door ajar so she could see if Max or one of the twins came to find her, she picked up her phone and typed in a number - one she knew by heart, but which she had never expected to use again.

It was answered almost immediately.

‘Ellie - what a nice surprise,’ came the voice she least wanted to hear in the whole world.

‘Can you speak?’ she asked.

‘Always. You know that. Did you enjoy your shopping? I hope you found your present. I saw you looking at them in the store, so I could tell you liked them.’ She could hear that he was smiling.

‘Don’t ever do that again.
Never
. What if Leo had seen you leaving it there? How would I have explained that? Please, please don’t make this any more difficult than it already is.’

‘It was just a rose, to show you I was thinking of you. Watching you. What are you wearing right now? Tell me, then I can picture you. Have you changed since you got back from shopping, or are you still wearing those black jeans and the red T-shirt?’

‘Shut up. Please, just shut up. I’m not ringing about the rose, or about you and me. I need to ask you about Friday night. You must have driven home along the back road. You
must
have. And the timing was right,
and
you were angry. You drove off at such a speed. I need to know if it was you that knocked that girl over. I
have
to know.’

For once, he was silent. Ellie waited. It was difficult to interpret the tone of his voice when he finally replied, but he had lost the teasing note that for some reason he believed she found seductive. Perhaps she might have done at one time. His voice sounded hollow, as if it were coming from a long way off.

‘Do you honestly think that I would have left a child on the side of the road to die? Is that what you think of me? God, that hurts. Of
course
it wasn’t me. I agree I could only just have missed her, but I swear to you that I could never even leave a
cat
to die on the side of the road, let alone a
child
.’

She knew he was telling the truth. Whatever else he was, and however deluded he was about her, she couldn’t imagine him cold-bloodedly dragging a dying child to the side of the road. But that wasn’t the only problem.

‘I’m sorry. I should never have asked that. But did you pass any cameras? Our neighbour, Tom, says that there will be CCTV at some of the points around the village, and possibly those cameras that recognise number plates. Do you think you would have been seen?’

She could hear him blowing out air in irritation. She knew he had been hoping for so much more when he’d seen her name on his phone.

‘I don’t know - I’ve no idea. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, if you remember. I was trying to deal with the conversation we’d just had.’ The hurt was there in his voice. ‘I know you were lying that night. I know how you feel about me. About us.’

God, what a fool she’d been. This wasn’t helping.

‘Look, I need to know what you will say if you
were
spotted. The police will want to talk to you. I cut through the lanes, and there won’t be any cameras there. But what will you
say
? If the police come to see you. What will you tell them?’

‘They’re the police. I’ll have to tell them the truth. In fact I think we both know that I should go down to the station right now and say that I was out that night. I should go and admit where I was, not wait to be questioned.’ His voice had turned serious. She knew he was right, but she couldn’t bear it.

‘
No
. Please, please don’t do that. It won’t help Abbie, and if it wasn’t you and you didn’t see anything, what’s the harm? How could I ever explain it to Max? Please, if you care as much about me as you say you do, please don’t do anything.’

There was a thoughtful note to his voice when he replied, and at that instant, Ellie knew what he was going to say.

‘If I tell the police and they question you, you’ll
have
to tell Max, won’t you. And we both know that he won’t forgive you. So if I admit I was seeing you, you’ll be free. Free for me. So tell me, Ellie - why shouldn’t I do it?’

At that moment, Ellie saw the bedroom door begin to open, and she quickly hung up and shut the bathroom door.

‘Ellie?’ It was Max’s voice. ‘Are you in there? Are you okay? You said you were making lunch, but then you disappeared.’

She took a deep breath, and tried to disguise the nervous tremor of her voice.

‘Be out in a minute, Max. Sorry - I felt a bit grubby after the drive.’

Damn this accident, she thought. Damn it to hell.

She knew that was a terrible thought and her suffering was nothing in comparison to Abbie’s family’s, but if she wasn’t careful it was going to bring her whole world crashing down around her ears.

Running some cold water into the sink, and flushing the lavatory for effect, Ellie opened the bathroom cabinet to stash her phone until she could rescue it later. She would struggle to explain why she’d taken it with her into the bathroom.

She looked in the cupboard and paused. She stared for a minute longer.

What was wrong?

Nothing appeared to be missing, but it was as if everything had been moved slightly. Max never opened this cupboard - all his stuff was on the shelf. She kept tablets, antiseptic cream and some of the necessary but less alluring female bathroom products in here.

She rushed into the bedroom, randomly pulling open drawers.

But she already knew what she was going to find.

* * *

Since the children were now happily playing in the kitchen, Leo decided to pop upstairs quickly and get her laptop so she could update her blog. Max had gone in search of Ellie, and she didn’t know whether she was supposed to leave the twins on their own or not, but she was sure they would be okay for two minutes. She disconnected the laptop from where it was charging, and headed back down.

Damn, she thought. The lid was fully closed. She must have done it by mistake as she picked it up. She always left the lid open by about a millimetre so that the screen went off, but the catch didn’t engage. It had broken a couple of weeks ago, and she had kept meaning to get it mended. Now she was going to have to root around and find a paperclip or something that she could bend to open it. That’s what came of being in a rush.

Returning to the kitchen, she fished around in the utensils’ drawer until she found an old corkscrew. The end of that should do it. She twiddled around, and finally managed to open the lid, and the laptop sprang back into life. Vowing to get the catch fixed, she decided to write up some bullet points for her next blog. Her conversations with Ellie today had her thinking about how easy it was for two people who are so close to begin to move in opposite directions, perhaps without even noticing it.

She opened her documents folder, and stopped. She hadn’t used her computer since she got up that morning, but three of her files had been accessed. The time stamps showed today’s date. Two were only blogs - her client files were all password protected thank goodness - but the other one that had been opened was the file on her father.

She looked up as Max returned to the kitchen.

‘Ellie will be down to make lunch in a moment, Leo. Can I interest you in a glass of wine? I’m going to get on with the salad so that Ellie only has to worry about the clever bits.’

‘No wine, thanks. Water’s fine.’ She paused. ‘Max, have you used my computer for any reason this morning? It’s not a problem, of course, but I just wondered.’

Max grabbed a bottle of fizzy water from the fridge.

‘Now why on earth would I want to do that when we have a super duper twenty-seven inch iMac in the office? Why are you asking? Have you got lots of exciting secrets on there?’ Max wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, and turned back to the task of helping with the lunch.

Leo decided to say nothing. Perhaps it was Ellie, although she couldn’t think when she would have had the chance.

Max was rummaging around in the fridge and pulling out bags of salad and tomatoes when Ellie came into the kitchen, looking even more harassed than before.

‘Max - did you go out at all this morning with the twins?’ she demanded in a slightly breathless voice.

‘Good grief - what’s with the twenty questions today?’ Max responded, laughing and shaking his head. ‘What’s got into you two? Yes, as a matter of fact, I took the twins to the swings. We were out for about forty-five minutes. Why?’

‘Did you lock up – properly, I mean?’

Max had clearly begun to realise that Ellie was genuinely concerned about something.

‘Yes, of course. It’s not like the old place, is it? There was nothing to nick there - but now I’m really careful. Why?’

‘Because while we were all out, somebody’s been in our house.’

21

A hand shot out and the screen went blank. That stupid bitch Leo. What did
she
know about charades?

It was easy to delete her words, but less easy to erase the feeling of rage they had provoked. Well, some relationships had to have secrets. Some things were too difficult to explain, or for other people to understand. So sometimes you had to act the part - pretend to be somebody you’re not. Didn’t she understand that?

Look what happened when the truth was told; when people showed who they really were. They got hurt. Honesty was rarely the answer. There was safety in lies.

Perhaps it would have been better if Abbie had never known the truth. She would never have guessed.

I only got to touch her once. I stroked her hair and tried to kiss her. I held her hands, and told her what I wanted. I told her we could be close – she only had to keep our secret, and I would let her go. But she screamed and cried, as if I were a monster. She rejected me like I was nothing. Nothing! After everything I’d done to be close to her. I knew how to stop her, though. I knew what would frighten her enough to make her quiet.

Then she got away
.

And then the accident.

I thought Abbie was dead, but it wasn’t my fault. She shouldn’t have rejected me. She shouldn’t have run.

It was no good thinking of what might have been. There were things to be done. The evidence that Abbie had been here, in this house, must be disposed of. The shoes and the phone - what could be done with them?

Some pretty pale blue ballet pumps were pulled from the bottom of a supermarket bag where they lay hidden below a pile of newspapers that were waiting to be recycled. Stuffed inside one was a shocking pink mobile phone. The SIM card had been disposed of in a plant pot full of earth in the back garden. Nobody would look there. But the rest needed a bit more thought.

Tomorrow was rubbish collection day. That’s where they could go. But not in our bin. Lots of people put their bins out the night before, so a late night walk on the other side of the village should solve the problem. Perhaps it would be a good idea to smash the phone to pieces first.

That was one problem solved. The other was a much greater one.

The driver looked straight at me, at where I was hiding in the woods. It’s a face I’ll never forget, bleached white by the headlights, black eyes darting frantically from side to side to check if anybody was watching. And there I was. Perhaps for now we’re keeping each other’s secret, but for how long?

Abbie can tell nobody.

But the driver knows who I am, and can’t be allowed to expose me.

There were plans to be made, and there was one person who was going to help. She wouldn’t like it, but she wasn’t going to be given any choice.