Michael drains the can, tossing it into a nearby waste bin. ‘Fucking rozzers,’ he belches. ‘You never said the Old Bill was gonna be here.’
Following his eyeline, Joe sees a couple of police cars and recognises his mother’s Toyota. ‘Bella was murdered,’ he says. ‘Of course the police will be here.’
Apart from Dora, who marches to the front and puts her shopping trolley on the seat beside her, the rough sleepers slide into the back row. Joe and Torquil take their seats next to Delilah.
An old photograph of Bella has been found from somewhere. In it, she looks even younger than Joe remembers her. Her blonde hair waves past her shoulders and her face is full and glowing with health.
‘Any progress?’ Torquil asks.
Delilah scowls and shakes her head.
She smells a little like the homeless, Joe realises with a jolt. She is sweating inside a suit that is too tight and that needs cleaning, and a haze of stale alcohol hovers around her.
The service begins, but the words wash over Joe. He is thinking of the Bella he knew, whose pretty young face always looked anxious, and whose spindly body shook and flinched, as though in the constant expectation of violence. He thinks of how grateful she always seemed for his attention, and how guilty he felt that he had so little to give. As he sees more than one of his mother’s colleagues watching him, he wonders whether the little he gave was actually too much.
It is soon over, and the day is already warming up by the time they leave the chapel. Joe breathes in the scent of midsummer roses and wonders what burning-Bella will smell like. He wants to be well away before there is a chance of finding out.
‘Dad called,’ he says and sees his mother’s face tense. ‘Gran fell out of bed and wasn’t found for a couple of hours. I’ll try to get over there in the next couple of weeks.’
‘Long drive on your own,’ Delilah says. ‘Let me know and I’ll come with you. I can sit in the car.’
Joe opens her car door for her and bends to kiss her cheek. As he straightens up, he sees Dora and the others in a huddle near the covered walkway where the flowers are laid for mourners to admire. Kirk, the old soldier, beckons him over.
‘What’s up, guys?’ he says, when he’s close enough.
‘I didn’t see her,’ Michael replies. ‘No good asking me.’
‘OK.’ Joe looks from one face to the next.
‘I not see her,’ the woman from the Middle East with the young baby says.
‘See who?’
‘Whom,’ Dora corrects.
‘It could be nothing, Joe.’ Even Torquil looks worried. ‘It could have been one of the local kids.’
A pulse is starting to tick in Joe’s temples. ‘Guys, who did you see?’
Torquil sighs. ‘They think they saw a girl, young woman, whatever, at the end of the drive as we were all coming out.’
Joe looks down the crematorium drive that stretches nearly a quarter of a mile towards the main road. His mother’s car is about to reach the end.
‘Too far away to know for sure,’ Torquil says. ‘It could have been anyone.’
Joe looks from one face to the next. He knows what’s coming.
‘A young woman in a blue hoody,’ Torquil says. ‘On roller skates.’
43
Felicity
‘Felicity, we’ve had South Georgia on the phone.’
After a weekend in which each hour stretched interminably, when she had been afraid to leave her home and afraid to stay in it, Felicity arrives at work on Monday morning close to exhausted. She is conscious of a sinking feeling as she looks back at Penny, her boss. ‘Is there a problem?’
She’d had no idea, until now, how much she’d been relying on the South Georgia job. One of the most remote, inhospitable places on the planet. Somewhere difficult to visit in summer, impossible in winter. In South Georgia, no one will find her, and to have it pulled away will feel like standing on the deck of the Titanic watching the last lifeboat row away.
‘The opposite, actually,’ Penny says. ‘They’ve secured additional funding for the glacier project. And the BBC are definitely interested in the iceberg series.’
‘All sounds good.’
‘It is,’ Penny agrees.
There’s a but coming, thinks Felicity.
‘But they need a commitment from you more or less straightaway.’
‘They said I had a couple of weeks to think it over.’
Joe will never sign her off fit to take up a new job if he learns about Freddie. She’s been a fool to be as confiding as she has been.
‘That was before,’ Penny says. ‘And they want you to leave at the end of the month, first few days of August at the latest.’
The end of the month is just over two weeks away. She has five more sessions scheduled with Joe, including the extra Friday slots. Can she convince him, in that time, that she has made sufficient progress? On the other hand, what might she give away?
‘Opportunity of a lifetime, Felicity,’ Penny says. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that.’
Joe thinks she’ll be in Cambridge until the end of August. She doesn’t need to tell him her departure has been brought forward. And she can cancel a session, maybe two, claiming pressure of work.
‘It’s what we sign up for,’ her boss says. ‘And it’s not as though you have any family ties.’
Apart from her newly found husband.
‘Can I tell you tomorrow?’ Felicity asks.
Penny nods. ‘That should be fine.’
* * *
She wakes in darkness, with a sour taste in her mouth, a clamp-like pain in the back of her skull, and the knowledge that she is not alone in the bed. The man beside her is snoring gently. For a split second she thinks Joe, but no sooner has the thought crossed her mind than she knows it cannot be Joe. This man is tall, like Joe, but much bigger built. He seems like a massive presence in the bed. She can feel the length of his naked body pressing against hers. Her face is pressed into the back of his neck and he smells nothing like Joe.
Freddie? Can it possibly be Freddie?
The bed smells of sweat and sex and stale beer. What the actual f—?
She catches herself in time. Felicity does not swear, not even to herself. Swearing is for – others.
She cannot move without disturbing him because they are squeezed into a single bed and she is between him and the wall.
His snoring stops. He grunts, pushes back the duvet and gets up. In the dim light she can see he is as tall and broad as she had pictured him. He doesn’t look back as he crosses the room in three strides and pulls open a door. An internal light flicks on and a second later she hears the sound of him urinating.
She springs out of bed, ignoring the pain in her head and her rising nausea. There is barely enough light to see clothes scattered around the floor. She recognises none of them, but sees a pair of ripped jeans and a brightly coloured top that are in her size. There is underwear too and this does look familiar.
She dresses quickly, spotting her handbag on a desk by the window. She has seen enough by now to know that she is in a student’s bedroom in one of the more modern residence blocks. In the adjoining bathroom, the lavatory flushes. In the bedroom, she cannot find her shoes.