“We had an outing planned to Portobello Market tomorrow to look for some things for Kit,” Gemma told Winnie, and found herself expressing feelings she hadn’t been able to articulate to herself. “I really thought we should all be together, as a family, to reassure Kit that we’ll continue to be a family… But Duncan can’t make it…”
“Work?”
Gemma nodded. “A case came up. Here in Southwark, as a matter of fact.”
“I wouldn’t worry about your outing,” said Winnie. “Kit knows how committed you are, and the last thing he needs now is to feel any sort of divisiveness between you and Duncan.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Gemma admitted. “It’s just nerves. I suppose I hate the idea of being put on show as a model family. What if we don’t measure up?”
“You measure up as far as Kit’s concerned, and I’m sure that’s what counts.” Winnie buttered a slice of bread for herself. “What about your friend Hazel? I’m sure she’d testify on your behalf.”
“She would, but she’s in Scotland.”
“Trying to make a go of her distillery?”
Gemma nodded, fighting back the sudden, mortifying prickle of tears. After the tragic events of the previous spring, she’d encouraged Hazel to do what she thought right, even if it meant staying in Scotland, but she hadn’t realized what it would mean to lose the supportive presence of her closest friend.
She took a sip from her half pint of cider, concentrating on the feel of the bubbles against her tongue, hoping that her voice wouldn’t betray her. “She and Tim are talking, at least, and they’ve agreed for the time being not to sell the Islington house.”
“Any hope of a reconciliation?”
Gemma sighed. “I don’t know. It would be hard, after what’s happened, for either of them.” Their food arrived, and Gemma was glad of an excuse to change the subject.
“Now, why don’t you tell me why you rang?” she said, picking up her cutlery, but a cloud of steam rose from the perfectly arranged food on her plate. “I’m dying of curiosity.”
“Well, I hope I haven’t been hasty,” confessed Winnie. “But this is outside my experience, and I wasn’t sure if it was a matter for the police, so you seemed the obvious person to consult. And my parishioner wasn’t too keen on the idea of going to the police…”
“I was the unofficial solution?” Gemma asked, a little amused, imagining a teenager caught stealing, or an accumulation of traffic citations. She hoped she hadn’t been called out for a kitten stranded on a fire escape, but in any case it looked as if she was going to get a good lunch for her time.
As Winnie began to tell her about Frances Liu’s missing roommate, her amusement quickly faded.
“I’ve been round to Guy’s Hospital, where Elaine works,” Winnie continued, “and got them to tell me that not only did she not show up for work this morning, she didn’t call in. Her coworkers say she’s very punctual and dependable; she’s seldom missed work at all, and never without notice.”
“Does she have family you could ring? Boyfriend? Ex-husband?”
“Not that Fanny knows of, and that strikes me as a bit funny as well. I mean, how many people do you know without connections of some sort?”
“Had she been behaving oddly?”
“Not that Fanny noticed… or not that Fanny admits noticing, anyway.”
Deciding her food had cooled enough to taste, Gemma took a bite of meltingly tender white fish and sautéed greens. “Blimey,” she said, closing her eyes in bliss. “This is wonderful.” Swallowing, she forced her attention back to the matter at hand. “What about the local hospitals? Did you check to see if she’d been admitted?”
“I checked Guy’s and St. Thomas’s,” answered Winnie. “No one by that name, nor any Jane Does. And that left me at a dead end. I thought that perhaps if you were to talk to Fanny, you could convince her to file a missing-persons report.”
“Do you know why she’s so reluctant?”
The pub had filled to capacity since they’d come in, and Winnie leaned a little closer in order to be heard above the rising babble of voices. “She said Elaine’s very protective of her privacy, and would be angry if Fanny had called attention to her unnecessarily.” Winnie frowned and toyed with a forkful of her chicken pie. “But I also think that Fanny has a horror of making a fuss, of being seen as the hysterical invalid.”
“That’s understandable, I suppose,” Gemma said thoughtfully. “But although the most likely explanation is that her friend has done a runner, the situation is odd enough that I think she’s justified in sounding an alarm. Does she live nearby, then?” she added, thinking reluctantly of the work that would be piling up on her desk at Notting Hill. She wouldn’t be getting away early enough that evening to toast Sergeant Talley’s birthday.
“Not five minutes from here, just across from my church.” Winnie smiled. “It’ll give me a chance to show you where I slave away my days.”
Kath Warren shut herself in the toilet adjoining her office and leaned against the basin, holding on to the cold porcelain edge as if it were the only anchor in an unstable universe. She took deep breaths, counting in, counting out, and after a moment she turned on the cold tap and held her wrists beneath the stream. When the faintness began to pass, she shut the water off and reached for the towel, only to find it had disappeared from the hook – nicked by one of the shelter residents, she supposed, as per bloody usual. Tearing off a bit of toilet tissue from the roll, she dried her hands and gazed at herself in the fly-specked mirror over the basin.
She saw carefully streaked hair, expensively feathered over her ears and at the nape of her neck. Regular features, nose a bit turned up, skin taut and evenly tanned from weekly sessions in the tanning salon. A good face, she told herself, an attractive face, but in the cold light filtering through the toilet window, there was no denying it was the face of a forty-five-year-old woman.
How could she possibly have convinced herself it didn’t matter? She’d risked her job, her marriage, her children, her comfortable semidetached house in Peckham, all for a few quick encounters on the stained and threadbare sofa in her office.
Encounters. That was a euphemism even shabbier than passed on or developmentally challenged. She could at least be honest with herself. It had been sex - sweaty, pulseracing, heart-pounding, skin-tingling sex – and she had wanted it with a ferocity she hadn’t known she possessed.
And she had believed that it mattered as much to him as it did to her. She had been an utter fool, a stupid, pathetically middle-aged fool, and now she would have to deal with the consequences.
The phone call had come that morning as Michael Yarwood was downing a last cup of coffee in his Birmingham hotel room before beginning the first day of a three-day Labour conference. While the official agenda held topics such as “Communicating with Your Constituents” and “The Question of Tax,” the real purpose of the meeting was to meet and greet, to make or cement alliances that would further one’s political ambitions. If he had been naive enough in his early days as an MP to think that his own convictions mattered, he had long since learned the error of his ways. But if he’d learned to play the game, he’d also learned to enjoy it for its own sake, and he’d been looking forward to the weekend as a way to take his mind off more personal troubles.
Then the police had rung his London office, and the dominoes had begun to topple. His secretary had rung him, her voice squeaky with distress; he had taken the first available train, then a taxi from the station, stopping only to drop off his overnight bag at his flat. Now, he stood staring in disbelief at the remains of his building, struggling for breath as if he’d just been kicked in the chest by a draft horse. He hadn’t imagined it would be so bad, hadn’t really visualized the gaping windows, the piles of rubble on the pavement.