I CANNOT LOSE Freya. I cannot lose Freya.
These are the words that circle inside my head like a mantra as the train speeds north, back to London.
I cannot lose Freya.
It beats time with the rattle of the wheels on the track.
I cannot lose Freya.
Thea sits opposite me, sunglasses on, head lolling against the window, eyes closed. As we round a particularly sharp curve her head leans away from the glass and then thunks back with an aud-ible sound as the train straightens. She opens her eyes, rubbing the spot on her head.
‘Ow. Was I asleep?’
‘You were,’ I say shortly, not trying very hard to disguise the annoyance in my voice. I’m not sure why I’m irritated, except that I am so very tired myself, and somehow I can’t sleep. We didn’t go to bed last night until two or three, and then this morning I was up at six thirty with Freya. I haven’t had an unbroken night’s sleep in months, and I can’t sleep now, because Freya is slumbering in a sling on my chest, and I can’t relax in case I slump forward and crush her. But it’s not just that – everything feels edgy and heightened, and seeing Thea’s face relaxed feels like an insult to my own tense anxiety. How can she snooze so peacefully when everything is balanced on a knife edge?
‘Sorry,’ she says, pushing her fingers under the sunglasses to rub her eyes. ‘I didn’t sleep last night. Like, at all. I couldn’t stop thinking about …’ She glances over her shoulder at the sparse carriage. ‘Well, you know.’
I feel instantly bad. Somehow, I always misjudge Thea. She’s so much harder to read than either Fatima or Kate, she plays her cards close to her chest, but beneath her fuck-you exterior she’s just as frightened as the rest of us. More, maybe. Why can’t I remember that?
‘Oh,’ I say penitently. ‘Sorry. I haven’t been sleeping properly either. I keep thinking –’
But I can’t say it. I can’t voice my fears aloud. What if I get prosecuted? What if I lose my job? What if they take Freya?
I don’t dare say the words. Just saying them would make the possibility real, and that’s too terrifying to even think of.
‘Even if they find out –’ Thea breaks off, looks over her shoulder again and leans forward, closer to me, her voice barely audible. ‘Even if they find out that it’s him, we’re still OK, right? He could have fallen into a ditch after he OD’d.’
‘But so deep?’ I whisper back. ‘How could he have got so deep?’
‘Those ditches change all the time. You know that. Especially down by the Reach – that whole section has been eroded right back – the dunes are always shifting and changing. We didn’t –’ She glances again and changes what she was going to say. ‘I’m pretty sure it, the place I mean, was a good ten or twenty yards back from the shore, right?’
I think back, trying to remember. Yes … I remember the track was further back then, there were trees and bushes between us and the shore. She’s right.
‘But that tent, it was right on the shoreline. Everything’s moved. They won’t be able to find too much out from the exact placement, I’m sure of it.’
I don’t answer. I feel sick to my stomach.
Because although there’s something comforting about her certainty, although I want to believe her, I’m not so sure she’s right. It’s a long time since I’ve done criminal work, and I know more from watching Cold Case than I can remember from the cases we studied at uni, but I’m pretty sure they have forensic specialists who can tell exactly how an object might have moved and shifted through the sands over the years.
‘Let’s not talk about it here,’ I mutter, and Thea nods, and forces a smile. ‘Tell me about work,’ I say at last. She shrugs.
‘What’s to tell? It’s good, I guess.’
‘You’re back in London?’
She nods.
‘I had a pretty fun stint last year on one of the big cruise ships. And Monte Carlo was excellent. But I wanted …’ She stops, looks out of the window. ‘I don’t know, Isa. I’ve been wandering around for so long, Salten was probably the longest I ever stayed at a school. I felt it was probably time to put down some roots.’
I shake my head, think of my own plodding progression through school, uni, Bar exams, the Civil Service, and life in London with Owen. We are the exact opposite, she and I. I am limpet-like in my tenacity. I found my job, and I stuck to it. I found Owen, and I stuck to him too. Salten House, for me, was this dizzyingly brief interlude. And yet both of us are equally defined by what happened there. We’re just coping with it in very different ways. Thea, restlessly running from the shadow of the past. Me, clinging on to the things that anchor me to safety.
I look at her thinness, at the shadows beneath her cheekbones, and then down at myself, Freya clamped to my body like a human shield, and for the first time I wonder – am I really dealing with this any better than her, or have I simply worked harder to forget?
I am still wondering, when there is a croaking cry at my breast, and a wriggling inside the sling, and I realise that Freya is waking up.
‘Shhh …’ Her cries are getting louder and more cranky as I pull her out of the swathes of material, her fat little cheeks flushed and annoyed as she gears up for a full-on tantrum. ‘Shhh …’
I pull open my top and put her to my breast, and for a minute there is silence, beautiful silence. Then, without warning, we go into a tunnel, and the train plunges into blackness. Freya tips her head back in wonder, her eyes dark and wide at the sudden change, exposing a wet flash of nipple to the carriage before I can grab for a muslin.
‘Sorry,’ I say to Thea, as we pass, blinking, back into the sunshine and I push Freya’s head back into place. ‘I think at this point half of north London has seen my tits, but you’ve had more than your fair share this week.’
‘It doesn’t bother me,’ Thea says with a shrug. ‘God knows, I’ve seen it all before.’
I can’t help but laugh as I lean back, Freya warm and heavy in my arms, and as the train enters another tunnel and emerges again into the searing sunshine, I think back, back to that first time we met, to Thea, rolling her stockings up her long, slim legs, the flash of thighs and me blushing. It seems like a lifetime ago. And yet, as Thea stretches out her legs across the gap between the seats, gives me a lazy wink and closes her eyes, it could be yesterday.