RICK’S TAXI HAS reached the tarmac road, and is indicating left to go to the station, when Thea looks up from her handbag.
‘I need to get money out. Is there an ATM at the station?’
Rick turns off the indicator, and I sigh. I left the money I drew out yesterday tucked inside a mug on the dresser, where Kate will find it after I’ve gone. Payment for the dinner tickets, which she refused to let us refund, but which my conscience wouldn’t let me ignore. I kept only twenty pounds – just enough to pay Rick, and a bit to spare.
‘You know there’s not,’ I say. ‘Since when was there a bank machine at the station? We’ll have to go via the post office. Why do you need money, anyway? I can pay for the cab.’
‘I just want some cash for the journey,’ Thea says. ‘Post office please, Rick.’
Rick indicates right, and I cross my arms, suppressing a sigh.
‘We’ve got plenty of time until the train.’ Thea closes her bag, and shoots a sideways look at me. ‘No need to be mardy.’
‘I’m not mardy,’ I say crossly, but I am, and as Rick begins to turn across the bridge towards Salten, I realise why. I don’t want to go back there. Not at all.
‘Going already?’
The voice comes from behind us, making me jump. Thea is bent over the cash machine, typing in her pin, so it falls to me to turn and answer the person behind us in the post office.
It is Mary Wren, come out quite silently from whatever back room she was in when we entered the empty shop.
‘Mary!’ I put my hand to my chest. ‘Gosh, you gave me a shock. Yes. We’re heading back to London today. We – we only came for the dinner, you know, at the school.’
‘So you said …’ she says slowly. She looks me up and down, and for a moment, I have the disquieting impression that she doesn’t believe a word of what I’ve said, that she sees through all of us – through all the lies and deception, and knows exactly what secrets we’ve been hiding. She was one of Ambrose’s closest friends and it occurs to me to wonder, for the first time, what he told her, all those years ago.
I think of what Kate said, the rumours in the village, and I wonder what part Mary played in all this. I have never been in the Salten Arms when she was not seated by the bar, her loud deep laugh ringing out across the drinkers. She knows everything that goes on in Salten. She could have quashed those rumours if she wanted to – defended Kate – told the drinkers to wash their mouths out or get out. But she didn’t. Not even to protect the daughter of a man she once called a friend.
Why not? Is it because part of her thinks Kate is guilty too?
‘Funny time to come down,’ Mary Wren says. She nods her head towards the stack of weekly papers, still blazoned with the photograph.
‘Funny?’ I say, my voice cracking a little with nerves. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Awkward time for the dinner to fall, I mean,’ she says. Her face is unreadable, impassive. ‘With the rumours and all. Must have been hard for Kate, seeing all those people, wondering …’
I swallow. I’m not sure what to say.
‘Wondering?’
‘Well, it’s natural isn’t it? To … speculate. And it never made sense to me.’
‘What didn’t make sense?’ Thea says. She turns round, shoving the wallet back in her jeans pocket. ‘What are you trying to say?’ Her face is belligerent, and I want to tell her to calm down, this is not the way to handle Mary Wren. She needs deference, a show of respect.
‘The notion that Ambrose just … disappeared,’ Mary says. She looks at Thea, at her skintight jeans, and her bare breasts just showing through the sheer vest. ‘Whatever his faults, he loved that girl. He would have walked through hellfire for her. It never made sense that he would just … go, like that, leave her to face all this alone.’
‘Well, we’ve no proof of anything else.’ Thea says. She is as tall as Mary, and she stands, her hands on her hips in an unconscious echo of Mary’s stance, almost as if they are squaring up. ‘And in the absence of any proof, I don’t think speculation is very healthy, do you?’
Mary’s lip curls, and for a minute I can’t read her expression. Is it a kind of suppressed anger? Disgust?
‘Well,’ she says at last. ‘I suppose we won’t need to speculate much longer, will we?’
‘What do you mean?’ I say. My heart is thumping in my chest. I look over my shoulder at the taxi, where Freya is playing peacefully in the borrowed car seat that Rick provided, sucking at her fingers. ‘What do you mean, not much longer?’
‘I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but Mark, he tells me a body’s been recovered by the police and, well …’ She makes a little beckoning motion with her finger and in spite of myself, I find I’m leaning in, her breath hot on my cheek as she whispers. ‘Let’s just say, if it’s proof you want, I think that body might have a name very soon.’