Greenwich Park, Katherine Faulkner [ereader android .txt] 📗

Scotland, abroad. She could be face-down in water, her bloated body lolling against a harbour wall. I close my eyes.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what to think.’

HELEN

When we finally go out shopping for a pram, it isn’t as enjoyable as I’d hoped. Daniel suggests one of those out-of-town discount shopping places. It is a long train ride away, and we sit for what seems like an hour as the gaps between the stations lengthen.

He hardly says anything when we are there, or on the way home, the new pram wedged next to us in the wheelchair bay. Stupid not to have driven.

‘Is it the expense?’ I ask, after Daniel has been quiet for most of the journey. ‘I know the joint account is getting a bit low, but we have all those savings, remember. Why don’t you transfer a chunk over, for the baby things? This is what they are for, isn’t it?’

He insists it isn’t that. That everything is fine. ‘I’m just feeling a bit run-down,’ he says, smiling tightly. ‘Need an early night.’

So we sit in silence. I watch the ramshackle suburban gardens backing onto the train line, a moving gallery of broken bicycles, Fisher Price slides, trampolines full of rainwater. The backs of the houses are pockmarked with broken satellite dishes. My eyelids start to feel heavy. I didn’t get much sleep last night.

Since the police came about Rachel, I can’t seem to rest. I thought that text message had meant she was all right. But she can’t have just gone to her mother’s or the police wouldn’t be asking questions, would they?

Daniel keeps telling me not to worry. He says she was obviously fine the day after the party, when she sent that message. If she changed her mind about going to her mother’s, so what? She’ll be off with the father of the baby, or with another new best friend.

Sometimes, for a few hours, he convinces me. I allow myself to decide it’s not my fault, not my problem. I mean, we’re not responsible for her, are we? We were just gullible enough to take her in for a couple of weeks.

And yet, when I close my eyes at night, it all looks different, my thoughts harder to dismiss. And for all his attempts to reassure me, I think the worry of it is eating away at Daniel, too. The police went to his office the day after they spoke to me. He didn’t say much about it. But it upset him, I can tell. I want to tell him not to feel guilty. That we weren’t to know. But every time I try to talk about it, he shuts me down, changes the subject. Stands up, takes his plate up to the study to eat alone, mutters about needing to get on with work.

Daniel has always had periods of insomnia – sometimes, if he really can’t sleep, he will get up in the night and disappear downstairs for a while. But since Rachel left, he is worse than ever. Whenever I wake in the small hours, his side of the bed is empty. Sometimes I hear him rattling around, like a restless ghost. There is the sound of the kettle boiling. The TV noise fading from laughter to music to explosions, as he thumbs from channel to channel. When I ask him why he can’t sleep, he never gives the same answer. Or any answer at all.

I asked him the other night, when he got back into bed. Is it Rachel? Are you worried about her? I worry about her too, I told him. He just said I should get some sleep.

I’ve called the detective a couple of times, just checking in, seeing if there’s any progress. No one seems to know. If I could just be sure that she is somewhere else, that it wasn’t me, that I didn’t do anything. Of course, it can’t have been. I would remember. Wouldn’t I?

I wondered if I should tell the police about the notes, my suspicions about her and Rory. But the more I thought about all that, the less certain I was. I mean, I never really found any proof, did I? And Rory is my brother. I couldn’t say anything. Not unless I was sure.

On the walk back from the station, the cold bites at my hands and cheeks. Daniel pushes the empty pram, his fingers gripping the bar tightly. It has started to sleet. The pram’s pebble-coloured sunshade is already starting to darken and stain.

When we get home I turn the key in the front door and flip the light switch, but nothing happens. A fuse must have blown.

‘I’ll have a look,’ Daniel says.

I find a torch, hold it for Daniel at the top of the cellar steps while he climbs down to get to the fuse box. When he pushes the lever up, there is a slight fizzing sound, and the bare bulb hanging in the cellar flickers on.

‘Well done,’ I tell him. I switch the torch off.

‘I’ll get some dinner on,’ Daniel says, hauling himself back up the steps.

Just as I’m about the turn the light off, I notice it. ‘Daniel,’ I say, ‘have you seen that?’

‘What?’

‘Look. In the floor.’

The crack is as fine as a pencil line. It cuts through the middle of our newly laid foundation, from the top to the bottom, like a jagged tree root. For some reason, a verse comes into my head. Something remembered from school, from the Bible, I think.

And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.

KATIE

I was bracing myself for it to be difficult. The name was common enough. But by the time I have worked through all the listings, I find there is only one Rachel Wells of the right age listed as currently living in London. I frown. That can’t be her, can it? The