The Woman on the Pier Read online

  On the stairs to her rather gorgeous office block I bump into a young man. He has a pale, haunted face, as if he’s being eaten up by some dark secret. There’s a dentist in this building, an osteopath, an acupuncturist and then Laini. I bet he’s going to see Laini. He looks like he needs to confess something. Don’t we all, I think to myself as I cross the road to my car.

  The Range Rover is filled with thick, warm air when I get into the driver’s seat. It’s only May and already the weather is baking hot. I check my phone and see I’ve got a voicemail from Alec asking me to pick up some milk if it’s not too much bother. The choice of words makes me tut. Too much bother. I know what it is – it’s a deliberate attempt to rile me. He does that – has always done it, if truth be told – but especially now. It’s as if he wants me to flip out, wants to watch me crumple, watch me overreact so he can be the bigger person. Just because I forgot to get his Earl Grey teabags last week I am now being treated to a succession of tiny digs.

  I drive defiantly past the Tesco Express on the way back to the house. Fuck his organic, semi-skimmed milk, I think to myself as the car sails by, the wind rushing through the windows. After ten minutes, I slow down as I steer along the road until I reach the turning onto Oak Tree Close. The neighbourhood’s tidy line of trees, the large houses, most of them new-ish and unremarkable, a small handful either tastefully mock-Tudor or weird and modern. I used to love it here. Used to enjoy the sense of calm – clean, neat suburban calm. Now I just want to stand outside each and every home, one by one, and scream until I have no strength or working vocal chords left in me.

  In the house, Alec is there by the kitchen counter, staring into the distance. The staring drives me up the wall. I clatter about loudly as I get in, pulling out the blender and going to the fridge to get strawberries, raspberries, and then, from the fruit bowl, a banana. I throw them all in the blender – I don’t even bother to take the green bits off the strawberries – and enjoy the satisfying grind of the propeller blades as they turn the jar’s contents into a dripping red mush.

  ‘Did you get the milk?’ Alec asks as the blender growls on and I pretend I can’t hear him. He’s white noise to me. He looks at me, then, just to make sure, comes right round, so he’s almost facing me. ‘Caroline? The milk?’

  He bellows this over the top of the blender’s roar. When I think about it now, I really am astonished I ever found his voice attractive. I would have once described it as deep but lyrical, earthy but sophisticated, his Scottish accent lending it a boyish charm. Now, it grates like broken glass in my ears.

  ‘Just go away,’ I mutter at him under my breath.

  ‘You what?’ he says. The blender ends and I make sure I’m especially attentive to the way the liquid enters my large glass tumbler in folds, as if it were made of silk. He watches me as if he’s part disgusted, part baffled.

  ‘I’m going for a nap,’ I say, walking past him.

  ‘You what?’ he says again. He lays a hand on my arm, trying to stop me leaving, but I shrug him off.

  ‘Nap time,’ I say, heading for the stairs.

  ‘With a big glass of sugar?’ He follows me, hands on his hips now. He thinks he looks impressive, like a dominant, manly man. He doesn’t. It just makes me sigh sadly.

  ‘Why didn’t you get the milk?’ He shouts this up the stairs as I disappear.

  ‘Good night!’ I call back, as if responding to goodnight wishes from him, even though it’s only 4pm.

  In the bedroom I fire up the TV and navigate to the Netflix app. I stick on some awful-as-hell comedy – a dire pastiche of old cowboy movies – and sweeten my tongue with the berry pulp. Then I reach for my phone.

  He answers on the fourth ring. ‘Caroline,’ he says, and there’s something in his voice that’s impossible to ignore. A tinge of impatience.

  ‘Rob, I’m sorry… I just had a row with Alec. I just need to talk for a bit.’

  I hear him sigh. I’ve been trying to ignore this side to our calls for a while now, but it’s impossible to disregard. I’m becoming a burden on him. He’s getting bored with my grief. He’s starting to withdraw his support, slowly but surely, like a liferaft steadily losing air. ‘What was the row about?’ he asks eventually.

  ‘What it’s always about. Us. This shit life we’re now leading. How we’re broken. Smashed up and fucking broken.’ I pulled myself up a little on the bed, feeling myself get into my stride, ready to open my soul in a way I’ve never done to Laini. ‘Do you know what my mother once said to me, back when I phoned her to tell her I was getting married? I hadn’t seen her in years and I told her I was engaged, and do you know what she said?’

  A few beats of silence, then Rob says, ‘What did she say?’

  I take a deep breath, feeling tears start to sting the backs of my eyes. ‘She said, “It won’t last.” And do you know what I hate the most? The fact she was right. Couples are supposed to support each other through the very worst. So how can it last if we can’t even do this?’

  There’s some more silence. Then at last Rob says, ‘I’ve got to go, Caroline. I’m out shopping and I need to go and pay and…’

  It’s exactly the wrong thing to say – something so crass and insensitive, so different to how he used to be. ‘Oh, well, I’m sorry to interrupt your fucking grocery shopping,’ I snap at him. I hear him say my name, once more with that tired-sounding tone, before I cut the call. Then I fling the phone across the bed. It falls to the floor with a thud. I don’t bother to pick it up.

  As the film starts to play with a burst of orange and red colour filling the TV screen, I glance around my perfectly organised bedroom. The crisp white duvet cover, the pale-blue curtains, the neatly ordered bookshelves. All of it is just so heartbreakingly mundane. This is my life now. I just have to live it.

  Chapter Two

  The Mother

  January. One week to go.

  ‘You’ll probably just say no, but I said I’d ask. Can I go and visit Hannah in Somerset next weekend?’

  I looked up from the script I was perusing on my iPad. It was something I wrote two years ago. The project was originally with the BBC but they decided they had too many crime dramas in the pipeline. Now it looked like another broadcaster might give the green light, but the production company had asked me to rewrite it so it was set in Birmingham rather than Central London. Cheaper on the budget, apparently.

  ‘Hello? Mum?’

  I realised I’d been sitting there with a rather glazed expression on my face, my mind still picturing Midlands architecture. ‘Sorry, darling? What did you say?’

  Jessica sighed; one of her more frequent demonstrations of impatience towards me. ‘I said, I know you’ll probably say no, but I promised I’d ask if I can go to Somerset to see Hannah next weekend.’

  This threw me a bit. ‘Hannah? But I thought she lived in Sevenoaks?’

  She rolled her eyes. Her second most used demonstration of impatience.

  ‘She does. With her mum. But her dad has moved to Somerset to open some seafood café or something and has married this awful new woman and Hannah’s asked if I can go and stay with her there for a few days. To distract her from the wicked step-mother.’ There was a silence while I digested this before she prompted: ‘Well, can I?’

  I laid the iPad down on the empty side of the sofa next to me and focused properly on her. ‘Somerset? For how long?’

  ‘I’ll go on Saturday morning and come back late Sunday night.’

  I felt my brow tense. I wouldn’t have considered myself overly protective, but the West Country was a long way and the thought of Jessica doing that journey late in the evening, with school the next day, didn’t have me jumping for joy.

  ‘Can’t you wait until the holidays? How about February half-term? And you’ve got all those modular exams to be preparing for too. I really don’t think you should lose a whole weekend of revision when you could—’

  She cut me off. ‘I can do all that on the train. If you think about
it, I’ll be kept prisoner for hours there and back, so I’ll definitely be able to concentrate.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said, because I wasn’t convinced the revision would last any more than ten minutes before it was replaced by Instagram and a Cassandra Clare novel. ‘Well, I’ll talk to your father.’

  Jessica made a huffing sound and rolled her eyes again, then wandered away and upstairs, clearly deciding to save her energy for convincing her father. He’d let her go. Almost straight away, I predicted, but not to please her. To make him look like the calm, cool, relaxed parent. The one that said, ‘You know what, let’s have extra ice cream today!’ whilst pestering me to watch what Jessica eats and how diabetes and obesity are real things to be concerned about. I told him his concerns weren’t necessary – Jessica was very healthy, ate a perfectly normal diet, and didn’t show the slightest chance of developing an excessive addiction to sugar. But if she ever did, I was pretty sure the blame would be laid at my door.

  Sure enough, when Alec arrived home from work at 7.45pm, Jessica immediately started the campaign before he’d even properly got through the door. ‘Hold on, hold on,’ he said jovially, trying to get his bag strap off around his neck and hanging up his brown blazer. ‘When is this trip planned?’

  ‘Next weekend,’ Jessica said enthusiastically. ‘Mum said we need to hear what you say before she says I can go. Something about revision – but I know I can do it. I’ll work on the train there and back, and…’

  ‘Let me go and talk to Mum while you go and carry on with said revision now, OK?’

  I couldn’t see her, but I was sure she would have offered him one of her I-love-you-Dad grins, before running back up the stairs.

  It took a few seconds before he came into the kitchen, but as soon as he’d walked in, I could tell he was annoyed.

  ‘Good day?’ I asked, not looking up from the lasagne I was lifting out of the oven.

  ‘No,’ he said bluntly. ‘The soft drinks company has asked us to go back to the drawing board with our campaign. They’re worried about the amount of soft-drinks-are-bad-for-you stuff circulating and now want a campaign that tells people to ignore the advice and just drink it anyway. Not exactly an easy tagline, but we’ve just got to find a way to say it.’

  I nodded, offered him a weak smile, then waited a few moments to see if he asked how I was or how my day had been. But he didn’t. It wasn’t on his radar.

  He sat down at the kitchen table and let out a long, exasperated breath. I could tell what was coming. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t get Jessica all hyped up about going on a minibreak with her friend so close to her module exams.’

  I gripped the large spoon in my hand, trying not to get angry.

  ‘I know you had an easy-come-easy-go approach to your teenage years, running away from your home, shacking up with a bunch of hippies once you’d got to London, but I think Jessica needs rules and stability. Giving her hope about things like this only makes her get her priorities mixed up. It confuses the message we want to send her.’

  The message we want to send her. He even talked about parenting like it was a marketing campaign for a new sportswear brand.

  ‘I didn’t say she could go. And it isn’t a “minibreak”. It’s a two-day trip to the West Country to see her friend. The one she was close to before she changed schools.’

  I could hear him breathing as I set the lasagne in the centre of the table. I was bracing myself for more jibes, more criticism, but before he could speak, Jessica rushed into the room.

  ‘Ah great, I’m starving.’

  She sat down at the table, iPhone in hand. One glance told me she was editing the caption on an Instagram photo.

  Alec took the seat opposite her. ‘Less of this at the table,’ he said, waving a finger at the phone, but his tone was kind and jovial. Jessica finished her tapping after a few seconds and put the phone down. ‘So, I hear you’re keen to go on a little trip to visit your friend… Karen, was it?’

  ‘Hannah,’ Jessica said, grinning. ‘Karen’s the one with the three mums who now lives in London. Somewhere shocking, like Southwark or something.’

  ‘Is Southwark shocking?’ I asked, placing the lasagne in the centre of the table. ‘I always thought it was quite a nice area of London. You’ve got so much near you, like Borough Market and London Bridge and along near the Southbank you’ve got—’

  ‘Some kind of table mat would be nice,’ Alec cut in, ‘just so as not to ruin the surface.’

  My eyes automatically shifted to Jessica, to see if she’d noticed the edge to her father’s tone. Apparently not. She’d turned her attention back to her phone. Silently I reached for one of the spare table mats on the side and, using the oven gloves, slipped it under the Le Crueset oven dish. I noticed how it was starting to look a little old, with a mark on the side I haven’t been able to get rid of. Alec would have noticed it too. I’d have to do something about it soon, before he mentioned it.

  ‘Anyway, back to your little trip,’ he said to Jessica, tapping the table in front of her. ‘Your mother thinks you should be staying here to revise, but I’ve made your case – that you’ll do extra revision in the evenings leading up to the weekend, with no movie nights or lengthy swim sessions – and have managed to persuade her that you should be able to go.’

  I saw Jessica’s joy light up her beautiful, soft, pale skin. ‘Really? I can go!’ She turned to look at me, and I force a smile. I knew he’d do this. I just knew it. I was now the pantomime villain, once again. The joy-killer. The one trying to hold her back. And lovely Daddy was the parent of the year. The one who gave her everything she wants.

  ‘Yes, you can go,’ I said, gripping the stack of plates in my hand so tightly I could hear them grinding into each other. I then distributed them round and took a seat. ‘You’d better tell Hannah so she can let her dad know.’

  Jessica was already typing away on her phone. ‘Already done. Cannot wait!’

  Alec smiled at her. I started to ladle out the lasagne in silence.

  Chapter Three

  The Mother

  May. Three months after the attack.

  ‘What’s the point?’ I ask.

  Alec stands before me, in front of the TV, blocking my view of what is now my second Netflix film – a raucous comedy drama about a group of girls who go to Ibiza. He seems shocked at my words.

  ‘What do you mean, what’s the point? Surely that’s obvious. It helps. Talking helps.’

  ‘What will it solve?’ I ask. I know I’m sounding cruel, but I can’t help it. I know he’s looking for comfort. But I just can’t stand the sight of him. Everything about him reminds me of how I’ve wasted most of my adult life trying to please him. Trying not to piss him off. Trying not to let so many things bother him: that I bring in more money than he does; that I have a social life with friends I actually like; that it was impossible for me to have another child after Jessica. These subjects were his ‘trigger’ issues. Ones for which, if he were exposed to them too much and too often, he would punish me. Not physically. Alec has never laid a finger on me. He probably likes to think of himself as more sophisticated than that. But now Jessica has gone – now our lives are without her laughter, her sadness, her joy and teenage tantrums – he’s lost one of his main weapons against me. And he’s very much feeling the loss, wrapped up within normal parental grief and guilt.

  I look him up and down as he stands over my bed. Slim frame, smart, sensible shirt, black trousers. All of it just smacks of dull, dull, dull. I once overheard one of the secretaries at his work Christmas party describe him as ‘privileged, middle-class Britain at its very worst’. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

  ‘Charlotte phoned,’ he says, sitting down on the side of the bed.

  I pull myself up, my back pressing uncomfortably into the headboard. ‘Detective Inspector Close. Calling her Charlotte is… weird.’

  ‘She told me to call her Charlotte,’ he says, defensively.

  ‘Of course she did
,’ I mutter.

  ‘What?’

  I shake my head. I haven’t got the energy for an explosive row. ‘Nothing. What did she say?’

  Alec sighs. ‘He says you’ve been bothering her about that man Jessica was seen talking to. The one in the shop at Stratford station.’

  I fix Alec with a hard stare. ‘Bothering. She really said that, did she? Detective Inspector Close said I had been bothering her?’

  Alec rolls his eyes. ‘No, not quite, but it was implied. She says there really isn’t any need to look into it further. She mistook him for a member of staff at the shop. She asked him if they had a book she was looking for. He just told her he didn’t work there, she said sorry and went off to browse the shelves alone. And he went and caught his train to Braintree. Nothing strange or suspicious about him at all.’

  I look at my hands. I wish DI Close had spoken to me personally and not explained everything to Alec. I couldn’t shake off a suspicion about the man she’d mentioned. She said it was innocuous at the time – said it didn’t bear any relevance to what happened later. But I still hoped it would offer something… some kind of explanation…

  ‘I think you should stop. Stop looking for things, just… wait for news. If there is any news. And try to be OK with the fact that there may never be.’

  ‘Be OK with it?! How can you even…? I don’t understand why you’re not doing the same thing. Why you’re not interrogating people yourself, not camped outside the police station, ringing up all of Jessica’s friends.’

  ‘Because you’ve already done all that,’ he said quietly. ‘And all you do is get people’s backs up, make them feel awkward, afraid – or, like Jessica’s friends and their parents, block your number and threaten to report you for stalking them.’

  I’m angry at how often he likes to remind me of this. ‘Well, if you wanted proof of how many seemingly ordinary people are actually insensitive, selfish, cruel…’