‘Can I? Is it here, at school, or did Amy take it with her when she left?’
‘I’m not sure…’
‘If it’s here, you’ve got to find it and send it to me.’ I stop, tear a page out of my notebook, write down Esther’s name and my address. Even though Sian is in a hurry, she waits beside me without complaining. I hand her the piece of paper.
Unbelievably, she thanks me. ‘If I do find Amy’s news-book, it didn’t come from me, okay?’
‘Of course.’
Sian pulls her ponytail loose and shakes out her hair. ‘For what it’s worth, I didn’t much like Amy’s mum. Worked for a bank, she did. In London,’ she adds, as if this detail makes it worse. I wonder if Sian was born and raised in Spilling. A lot of Spilling people seem to bear a grudge against London for being the capital when clearly their home town is more deserving of the honour. ‘Like Amy, she could get angry very easily, for no good reason.’
‘What made Amy angry?’ I ask.
Sian sways beside me, keen to get moving again. Suddenly, she stops. Opens her mouth, then closes it. ‘Lucy,’ she says. ‘Funny, that’s only just occurred to me. They were good friends, don’t get me wrong, but they could rub each other up the wrong way. Amy was a bit of a dreamer-imaginative and over-sensitive-and Lucy could be a bit… well, bossy, I suppose. Sometimes they clashed.’
‘Over what?’ A pulse has started to throb behind my left eyebrow.
‘Oh, you know, Amy’d say, “I’m a princess with magic powers,” and Lucy’d say, “No, you’re not, you’re just Amy.” Then Amy’d have the screaming abdabs and Lucy would pester us to tell Amy off for pretending to be a princess when she wasn’t. Look, I’ve seriously got to make a move,’ Sian says.
I nod reluctantly. If I keep her here for a million years, I still won’t get through all the questions I want to ask. ‘One more thing, quickly: when did Amy leave St Swithun’s?’
‘Um… end of May last year, I think. She didn’t come back after the half-term break.’
End of May last year. I was at Seddon Hall with a man who called himself Mark Bretherick from the second of June to the ninth. Can it be a coincidence?
Sian opens her grey bag and pulls out a large, old-fashioned brick of a mobile phone. She presses a few buttons. ‘Write this down,’ she says. ‘07968 563881. Amy’s old nanny runs our after-school club-that’s her number. She knows more than I do about the family, much more.’
While I’m writing, Sian takes the opportunity to escape. She stretches out an arm behind her to wave at me as she hurries away.
An hour later I’m no longer lost. I feel as if I know St Swithun’s as well as any teacher or pupil-I could draw a detailed map of the place and not miss out a single crevice or passageway. What I can’t seem to do is find Jenny Naismith. Everyone I’ve asked has ‘just seen her a minute ago’. I also can’t find the headmistress, Mrs Fitzgerald. I’m so angry with myself for letting go of those photographs that I can hardly breathe.
My throat is dry and my feet are starting to ache. I decide it can’t hurt to go back to the car, where I’m sure there’s an old bottle of water lying around in one of the footwells or wedged under a seat. At least three people have assured me that Jenny Naismith won’t leave until at least four o’clock, so I can afford to have a break.
Outside, I switch on my phone and listen to four messages, two from Esther and two from Natasha Prentice-Nash. I delete them all, then key in the number Sian gave me. A chirpy female voice with a Birmingham accent says, ‘Hi, I can’t take your call at the moment, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’ I swear under my breath and toss the phone back in my bag. I can’t bear to wait and do nothing. I need everything to happen now.
Sian ’s words buzz around my worn-out brain. I try and fail to make sense of everything I now know: bossy, literal-minded Lucy Bretherick with her perfect family, her adoring parents who wanted nothing but her happiness, who held hands all the way through parents’ evenings; and Lucy’s two friends, both from families that sound not quite so perfect… Yet Lucy is the one who ends up dead. Murdered by her mother. I think about envy, how it is fed by inequality.
Amy’s old nanny runs our after-school club. That was what Sian said. Old as in she’s no longer Amy’s nanny? Why not? If the Olivers moved away, why didn’t they take her with them? I’ve got friends and colleagues who would cut their own limbs off sooner than lose a trusted nanny.
I wish I’d thought to ask Amy’s mother’s name and the name of the bank she works for. Amy’s mum, Oonagh’s mum-did Sian mention any of them by name? It drove me mad after Zoe was born, the way I quickly became ‘Zoe’s mummy’, as if I had no identity of my own. To annoy the midwife and the health visitor I used to make a point of calling Zoe ‘Sally’s daughter’. They had no idea why I was doing it and looked at me as if I was insane.
Sian said ‘worked’, not ‘works’-Amy Oliver’s mother worked for a bank in London. That’s what you say when you haven’t seen someone for a while, when you’re describing what they did or how they were when you were last in touch with them. There’s nothing unusual about it. So why do I fear that the Oliver family has vanished off the face of the earth?
I’m halfway across the car park when I catch sight of my Ford Galaxy. There’s a jagged silver line across the paintwork, stretching the length of the car. The two tyres I can see are flat, and there’s something orange lying behind one of the wheels. I swing around, breathing hard, expecting to see a red Alfa Romeo, but the only other cars in the visitors’ car park are three BMWs, two Land Rovers, a green VW Golf and a silver Audi.
I move closer. The orange lump is a ginger cat. Dead. Its eyes are open, in a head that’s no longer attached to its body. There’s a red mess where its neck should be. A rectangle of brown parcel tape has been stuck over its mouth. I bend double, retching, but nothing comes up; there’s nothing in my body apart from sharp fear. Dark spots form on the insides of my eyes.
This is when it hits me: someone wants to harm me. Oh, God, oh, God. Boiling-hot panic courses through me. Someone is trying to kill me and they can’t, they absolutely can’t because I’ve got two young children. After a few seconds I come down from the wave of high-pitched terror and feel only numb disbelief.
I need water. I fumble for my car keys, realise I forgot to lock the damn thing and drop them back in my bag. Keeping my head turned so that I don’t have to see the cat, I struggle to open the driver door. My arms and hands have no strength; it takes me three tries. Once I’ve done it, I look under the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat for my bottle of water. It’s not there. I’m about to slam the door when I notice it sitting upright on the passenger seat. I blink, half expecting it to disappear. Thankfully it doesn’t. Standing with my head tilted back, I pour what’s left of the water into my mouth, glugging it down, spilling some on my neck and shirt. Then I lock up the car and, without looking back at the cat, start to run towards the centre of town.
Brown parcel tape over its mouth. A warning to me to say nothing. What else could it mean?
I run until I get to Mario’s, Spilling’s only remaining cheap and cheerful café. Its owner, who has two-tone black and white hair like a skunk, sings opera arias at the top of her voice all day long and thinks she’s being ‘a character’. Usually this makes me want to demand a discount, but today I’m grateful for her tuneless outpourings. I force a smile in her direction as I walk in, order a can of Coke so that she’ll leave me alone, and find a table that’s not visible from the street.
First things first: phone nursery to check Zoe and Jake are all right. I am barely able to sit still as I listen to the ringing. Eventually one of the girls answers and tells me my children are fine-why wouldn’t they be? I almost ask her to check the street outside for dead cats, but I manage to restrain myself.