The Woman on the Pier Read online

  ‘They’re nothing of the kind – you know that. You need to let it go, Caroline,’ he says, looking at me sadly. I can see the tears starting to fill the corners of his eyes. They stay there for a few moments, then he catches them roughly with the back of his hand as they start to fall, as his expression grows cross, as if I should have warned him that he’d started to cry. Like he’d been caught unawares.

  I shake my head. ‘No. The police aren’t doing enough. Nobody’s doing enough. I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one who cares.’

  Alec’s rubbing his face now with both hands, then, after one more heavy sigh, he gets up, letting the bed spring back to its normal shape with a twang. ‘I think they’ve got more than enough on their plate. And I hope you know that’s not true. That you aren’t the only one who cares.’ He stares at me for a few seconds, then looks down at the floor. ‘Why don’t you come down and have some dinner?’

  I shake my head and turn back to the TV to start the film up again. He stares at the remote in my hand as if it’s an abomination. ‘You’d rather watch television than…’

  ‘Right now, yes.’

  He shakes his head, as if I’m some unfathomable creature that a sane person couldn’t even begin to understand. I hope he’s about leave, but he lingers near the door, his eyes now on the TV screen.

  After nearly a full minute, I decide I can’t bear it any longer. ‘I’m going to get some more smoothie.’ I get up and pad out the room, my bare feet silent on the carpet, ruined by the heavy stomp of his hard shoes as he follows me. He used to care so much about taking his shoes off at the door when we had the new carpet laid. It’s amazing what rules can be abandoned when you suffer like we have suffered. It’s like there’s no laws any more. I even saw him leave a teabag on the side of the kitchen counter the other day, brown stain left there – forever, potentially – tainted water making its dripping marks down the cupboard doors and onto the floor. My mind immediately began imagining what Alec would have said if I had done such a thing in the days before everything changed.

  We do end up having tea together. Nothing fancy or adventurous. Just cheese on toast. When dinner was a family affair, with the three of us sitting down to a cooked meal at least three or four times a week, depending on our work and Jessica’s social engagements, Alec used to ‘entertain’ us with endless trivia, as if he were the fount of all knowledge. He’d tell us snippets about psychology and history and even creative writing tips, aimed at me – the woman who has written for two major TV soaps, created four reasonably successful series of her own, one of which won multiple awards, penned six stand-alone TV films and miniseries, and contributed to many other established dramas. But Alec knows better about everything, it seems. Once, during a shop at the local Sainsbury’s, he started advising me of the best way to structure a narrative. I laughed straight at him. I couldn’t have hidden my contempt even if I’d wanted to. ‘Why are you being like that?’ he said, looking shocked.

  ‘Because you’re lecturing a BAFTA-winning screenwriter on how to write a good story.’

  ‘What? Oh come on, nobody does that – refer to themselves as “a BAFTA winner” or “Oscar winner”. It’s…’

  ‘It’s what?’ I asked back, allowing a woman with a pushchair and full basket under her arm to get some Ready Brek off the shelves.

  ‘Arrogant,’ he said, then did his disturbed, puzzled face, as if he’d just discovered something deeply troubling about the woman he’d married. ‘Honestly, Caroline. You really need to think about how you come across to others sometimes. Not everyone’s as… well, as forgiving as I am.’ He wandered off at that point, leaving me standing with my trolley and not knowing if he’d left the store or just gone to another aisle to sulk.

  Many months on, with our lives turned upside down, he no longer does this. No longer offers me regurgitated I-bet-you-never-knew-this facts he’s remembered from the previous night’s episode of QI. He now just spends the mealtimes we do happen to share together either sitting in silence or trying to get me to talk about Jessica. Help him unburden himself by telling him what a great father he was.

  Night-times are even more difficult. Before it happened – before my daughter was murdered and my world changed so irrevocably – I’d presumed couples who underwent trauma never had sex again and that somehow their libido and sense of intimacy would be swallowed up by the hole now left in their lives. I was wrong. Our sex life carries on. But I think it’s because it was never that ‘normal’ to start with. It was never about closeness and comfort. It was about him getting what he wanted. The release he wants. A release he still wants now. The only difference is, he now goes to the bathroom to cry once we’re done.

  After the cheese on toast, Alec goes out for a walk while I lounge on the sofa, feeling my hands brush against the soft, expensive materials. Out of the corner of my eye, I see my iPhone’s screen light up in my pocket with an incoming text. It’s from my friend Kirsten. She’s one of the few friends I still speak to now. The others think they speak to me, or rather think I speak to them. But I don’t. Not really. I just tell them that everything is terrible but ‘we’re working things through and taking each day as it comes, one step at a time’. They love that kind of thing. They lap it up. Good, they think. She’s still sad (she has to be, otherwise she wouldn’t be human), but she’s not loopy-sad. She’s doing it in a respectable, normal way. But of course, what they don’t know is that there isn’t any normal way to cope with what we’re going through. No textbook guide, even though there have been many self-help volumes written on dealing with the struggles of grief.

  But Kirsten, on the other hand, always stares at me blankly and I’m never entirely sure if she’s heard me until she finally speaks and gives me disconcerting advice. ‘Start doing laundry,’ she says, ‘and I mean really do it. Focus on folding each item before you put it into the washing machine, then again once you’ve dried them.’ I told her it was a bit pointless folding things when you’re putting them into a washing machine and I didn’t think it would be the best way of ensuring they were cleaned, but she shook her head: ‘It’s the process; the perfect symmetry of doing it before and then after – honestly, it’s soothing.’ I said it sounded like she actually wanted me to go nuts, but she just smiled her strange, sweet smile and stirred her tea. And, oddly enough, it turned out she was right. It was therapeutic. More therapeutic, to some extent, than my sessions with Laini.

  ‘Did this help you?’ I asked her, when I went to see her a few weeks later. We were wandering around an open garden; one of the few times I’d agreed to go somewhere that wasn’t my house or hers. ‘Did this help when everything that happened with your husband became so unbearable?’ I thought she was going to cry then, the memories of her sudden divorce and his very public arrest. He’d killed a dad and his two children due to dangerous driving. Ploughed into them on a zebra crossing at a huge speed. He was on his way home, drunk, after visiting a woman he’d been having an affair with. He fled the scene, arrived home in tears, and had to be dragged away from his own driveway by the police. Probably reflecting back on all this, Kirsten nodded. ‘Yes, of course. Although what happened with me and my family was nowhere near as bad as what happened to those two little girls and their dad. Nowhere near as bad as what their mum must have gone through. And nowhere near as bad as yours,’ she said. I nodded. She was right. It couldn’t even compare.

  I stare at the phone, trying to focus on the text.

  Are you going to Denise’s fiftieth? We can talk about it if you want?

  I read Kirsten’s message a couple of times, its meaning sinking in. I knew Denise’s fiftieth was approaching. She’d dropped a card by, probably comfortable in the knowledge there’s no way I would attend. I hadn’t really thought seriously about going, but had put it in the little pouch in the calendar in the kitchen. I’d meant to talk to Kirsten about it but it had gone out of my mind as soon as the card had dropped out of sight, hidden among phone bills and council tax form
s. Once upon a time there would have been things in that calendar about Jessica’s school. Trips to London to galleries, museums, university fairs. Not anymore. It had been another of those weird milestones, going past the months where there was nothing written in or added into the calendar about her at all. No dental appointments or school things. It was as if she had faded from our lives; steadily sponged out as the days went by.

  I text back to Kirsten:

  I haven’t decided.

  And click send. Then type out an extra message as an afterthought:

  Alec wouldn’t agree to going. No hope in hell.

  I wouldn’t want him to, either, I think as I lie back into the cushions. Not because he would be embarrassing, though there’s a chance he would be, but because I’d sense him watching my reactions, judging me, waiting for me to fall.

  Regardless, since Kirsten’s text the prospect of the party plays on my mind. I lie on my bed, turning it around in my head, allowing my mind to fantasise about what it would be like, trying to be nice to people, attempting to smile and make it look natural. It would be an effort. An extraordinary effort. But something within me wants to do it just to see the looks on their faces. It sounds cruel, but I’ve always rather liked doing that. Disconcerting people. Challenging their sense of the norm and throwing their presumptions back in their smug faces. It’s what makes me a good writer, I think. A writer has to be brave enough to ‘go there’, I’ve always thought. Tackle the problems you don’t want to talk about. Make people feel uncomfortable. Because that’s where they find out the most about themselves. And usually – not always, but usually – they don’t like what they find out.

  Chapter Four

  The Mother

  February. The day of the attack.

  ‘Have you seen the News?’

  I in was the foyer of the BBC’s Broadcasting House on Regent Street. I wouldn’t normally be there on a Saturday, but the drama producer I needed to meet was about to go to America for three weeks to oversee a show being produced with HBO and I was keen to go through a few things before his trip. We were going up in the lift to the floors full of brightly coloured chairs and photos of famous TV stars on the walls, when I noticed something odd. There weren’t many people in the offices, but the ones who were there were grouped around the large TVs on the walls to the sides, watching the BBC News that was being broadcast in the very building we were standing in.

  ‘What’s going on?’ the producer, Mike, said to a young woman waiting for the lift.

  ‘There’s been another terrorist attack.’

  I saw Mike’s eyes widen. ‘Where? In London?’

  The girl nodded, ‘Yes, in Stratford. I think at the train station.’ She looked worried. Maybe she knew someone in Stratford. Maybe she was supposed to be getting home that way. She got into the lift and pushed one of the buttons, and the doors closed.

  ‘God, another one,’ Mike said, leading the way towards an empty meeting room. He swiped it with his pass and we went inside. A large photograph of Nadiya Hussain was on the wall. ‘Take a seat. I’ll grab you a drink. Tea or coffee?’

  ‘Tea, please,’ I said, settling down and taking out my iPad. Mike left the room, and as he walked off I saw him glance at the TV screen on the wall. I couldn’t see it properly, and part of me wished we’d stopped to watch on our way through. Unlocking my iPad, I navigated immediately to the main BBC News homepage. And there it was. The main headline read:

  STRATFORD ATTACKS:

  MULTIPLE VIOLENT INCIDENTS IN EAST LONDON

  The photograph was of the outside of Stratford station showing police vans and ambulances, their lights glowing in the late-afternoon winter gloom. The page had one of those useful bullet-point timelines summarising the confirmed information, but I didn’t have time to click onto it before Mike came in carrying the tea. He noticed the page on the screen.

  ‘Do you need to call anyone?’ he asked as he set the tea down.

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘My husband’s at home and my daughter’s in Somerset visiting a friend. I might have some trouble getting home, though.’

  The thought had only just occurred to me. Should I be leaving London? Will there be a rush on the trains?

  ‘Oh goodness. Do you go through Stratford? Will you be able to find an alternative route? I suppose it depends on whether they close the train line. I imagine they probably will.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, trying not to look too worried. ‘Although I don’t go through Stratford. London Bridge, so hopefully that’s still open and running. Well, let’s go through everything as planned and I’ll see how things are when it’s time to leave.’

  I switched my iPad over to the notes on the TV series we’d planned to talk about. Mike opened a laptop in front of him and we got to work.

  ‘Do you want me to call you a car?’ Mike offered as we went down in the lift just over an hour later.

  ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ I said, gripping my phone in my pocket. I was getting a bit worried now, eager to work out how I’d be travelling.

  ‘I now feel a bit bad you’ve come all the way up here on a Saturday.’

  I smiled and shook my head, ‘It’s nothing. I had planned to do some shopping on Oxford Street, but I think it’s best if I just work out my way home.’

  He nodded and we got out of the lift.

  On my way out of the BBC I walked in a bit of a daze down towards Oxford Circus. I took out my phone, but at my first glance I ended up careering into someone who tutted loudly and rushed past me. ‘Watch it!’ someone else said.

  I needed to stop and think. I was walking past a Caffè Nero and quickly nipped inside. I didn’t bother going up to the counter to order, just headed over to an empty table and sat down. There were already two messages from Alec and a missed call.

  Something’s happened at Stratford. You OK getting home?

  Said the first one. Then the second, sent half hour later:

  Message me to say you’re all OK getting home.

  I tapped out a message straight away:

  Yes, all fine, just looking into journey details. Will call if I have problems.

  I then navigated to the BBC News site, clicked on the main item and began to read:

  At least 17 people have been killed in a series of major incidents in Stratford, East London. The Metropolitan Police have confirmed they are treating this as a terrorist attack. Below is a timeline, based on information from the police, on how the events unfolded.

  At 4.35pm six men carrying knives and firearms alighted from an incoming train and attacked members of the public and two police officers on platforms 9 and 10 at Stratford station as they waited for trains to London Liverpool Street, Southend Victoria, and Norwich.

  At approximately 4.40pm the attackers then entered the main concourse of Stratford station and continued to shoot civilians as they tried to flee to safety. The BBC understands two further police offers were shot.

  At 4.44pm the attackers then walked the short distance to the exit of Stratford station and opened fire on police and crowds of people near the entrance to Westfield Stratford City shopping centre and the lower ground-floor food department of Marks & Spencer.

  At around the same time, reports of multiple knife attacks came in from two restaurants on the dining level of Westfield. It has been confirmed nine people were stabbed by two masked attackers in Pizza Express and TGI Fridays and at the entrance to the Vue multiplex cinema. Police consider the incident to be connected to the attack on Stratford train station.

  At 4.50pm, during the mass evacuation of the shopping centre, a suicide bomber, believed to be one of the Stratford station attackers, detonated a bomb in the main entrance hall of Westfield Stratford, causing further fatalities.

  The Prime Minister has been informed and is journeying to 10 Downing Street, cutting short a visit to Brussels, and will chair an emergency COBRA meeting in the morning.

  I found the details, laid out in a cold, simple list, both shocki
ng and strangely numbing. Shocking because such callous, horrific violence against innocent members of the public naturally repulsed me, but numbing because – and I felt guilty as I thought it – it had got to the point where this kind of thing wasn’t only a part of life, it was to be expected.

  Everyone knew the tempo had changed over the past year when there were a series of attacks in quick succession throughout the summer and autumn. After the lull in atrocities since the multiple attacks of a few years back, it felt as if people had just forgotten there was much of a threat. Other things started to become main news, and the attacks grew less frequent. Whilst there were still terrible attacks a short distance away in Europe, and our national terror threat level went up and down, people’s minds weren’t really on extremists and people who may wish us harm. And then, just as things were starting to edge back to normal and people were celebrating the end of a very dark era, a man walked into a crowded Sainsbury’s in Battersea with a load of Semtex strapped to his chest. I don’t think many people had thought of supermarkets as being a target. Not until they saw the carnage on their TV screens. Thirteen people dead. Then a week later another bomb, left on a luggage rack, detonated on a train just as it was pulling into Walthamstow Central. Nine people dead. Just over two months later, a man left a rucksack in a packed bar on the King’s Road in Chelsea on a Friday night. Twenty people dead. And, finally, just before Christmas, a bomb which failed to fully detonate went off in the Eurostar terminal in Ebbsfleet. Multiple people with major injuries, and one person dead; a teenage girl, close to Jessica’s age.