Steve Connolly hesitates on Beth’s threshold. ‘I’m surprised you called.’
Not as surprised as Beth is. She doesn’t recognise herself as she invites him in and makes him a cup of tea. It seems ridiculous to fumble their way through small talk when there’s something so huge at stake but they do it, awkwardly chatting about what makes a good cuppa. It’s reassuring that Steve seems to find it all as weird as she does.
‘Why did Danny talk to you?’ she asks, when the tea is made.
‘No, no, he didn’t,’ says Steve. Beth’s dismay must show because immediately he’s falling over himself to explain. ‘I… don’t see dead people or… I have, like, a spirit guide. She tells me things, about people who have passed over, and over the years most of it has turned out to be true. So I asked her about you guys and she said it was someone, someone close to you. A relative with an R or an S in their name. Maybe a grandparent or someone who played the piano?’
None of it means anything to her. Obviously there’s an R in Latimer, but that’s hardly a secret. And no one in either of their families is musical. Hope shrivels and dies in Beth’s chest. This is like bad cabaret at a cheap holiday camp. She shakes her head.
‘No, OK, wires crossed, that’s not a problem.’
She ought to throw him out, but those words what if, what if, keep her going. ‘Just… tell me the message.’ Is this the nervous breakdown? Asking for a message from her dead son? She feels a hysterical, joyless laugh rising up through her and swallows it just in time.
‘I should tell you that I don’t choose what I’m told,’ says Steve. ‘Danny wants you to know he’s OK. He’s being looked after now.’ It is not the expected sign: no pet name, no memory, no in-joke, no irrefutable link to her boy. But that’s the Danny she loves and misses, a little man, trying to look after his mum. She begins to shake violently at the very idea of it and when she sits on her hands to still them her knees knock instead. ‘He says don’t look for the person who killed him because it won’t help. It won’t help. It’ll only make you upset. Because you know the person who killed him really well. And he says he loves you very much.’ He looks steadily at her. ‘That’s all there is.’
Her second visitor, the second strange man of the night, leaves. And meanwhile, Mark still isn’t home. Beth writes down what Steve said. Does it count as madness if you know you’re going mad?
She doesn’t bother to take a pill before bed. Nothing short of a general anaesthetic will knock her out tonight. But she gets under the duvet anyway and lies there, staring at the clock and waiting for Mark to come home. She wonders whether to tell him what she’s been doing with her evening. It’s surreal. You left me alone for one night and I had a priest in here and a medium. Would Mark see the funny side? She knows it would have been very different if he was here. Paul wouldn’t have got past the front door and Steve would’ve got a broken nose for his trouble.
She keeps this up for a long time, mulling over her own evening so she doesn’t have to think about Mark’s. But the second she hears the crunch of his key in the door, that changes and the questions she has put off asking herself all evening pull into sharp focus. Why has he lied to me? Why did he lie to the police? What has he told them? Does Ellie know stuff I don’t? Who’s going to tell me? She lies rigid, listening to Mark kick off his boots, check on Chloe and clean his teeth. Half an hour passes before he slides into bed next to her. He smells of toothpaste and fresh sweat.
‘Are you gonna tell me where you were?’
‘Not now,’ he says.
She rolls on to her elbow. ‘Look at me,’ she says, flipping on her bedside lamp. He turns his eyes slowly towards her and for the first time in their marriage, Beth has no idea what’s going on behind them.
‘Did you kill him?’ she says. She didn’t even know she was thinking it till she said it.
‘How can you even say that? Is that what you’re thinking? Is that what you see when you look at me? For God’s sake, Beth.’ He hasn’t denied it. Steve Connolly’s words ring in her head. It’s someone you know really, really well.
Mark storms out of the bedroom, grabbing his phone from the bedside table. On the landing, she hears the click of his buttons and in swift response, a noise she never hears from Mark’s phone; not a personalised ringtone but a simple beep, the factory setting for an incoming text. The innocent little electronic noise is an alarm bell for Beth. She sits up in bed as Mark runs down the stairs. By the time she’s on the landing, the front door is clicking softly behind him. Through the kitchen window Beth watches him head out across the field towards the High Street. Her trainers are on her feet and she’s after him before she knows what she’s doing. She is light on her feet and he never looks back, even on the well-lit High Street, even when he makes a sharp right at the Traders and walks down the launch slope to the edge of the harbour.
Becca Fisher emerges from the shadows.
Beth has the sensation of an endless vertical fall, familiar only from nightmares. She presses her back against the side wall and, using the breaking waves to cover her tread, inches closer. She is shrouded in shadow but Mark and Becca are absorbed in each other and wouldn’t notice if she came running past in her wedding dress.
‘You didn’t have to tell them,’ says Mark.
‘I got you out,’ she says. Her hands are on his collar and their hips are pressed together. ‘Look, it was a mistake. Last Thursday, all of it. It’s timing. We might’ve had something —’
‘We still could,’ says Mark. Beth bends double.
‘No,’ says Becca.
‘I lost my boy.’ He wilts in her arms. ‘Maybe it’s some kind of punishment for what we did.’ Becca shakes her head and strokes his hair in a gesture of wifely comfort that sends a flare of jealousy up inside Beth. It gets worse. They kiss, and Beth forces herself to watch; she’s enjoying this, on some fucked-up level, she realises. This is a new kind of pain and the novelty of it is providing temporary relief from the Danny pain. A change is as good as a rest, isn’t that what they say?
They pull away, their fingertips the last point of touch.
‘Go home,’ says Becca. She heads back to the hotel. Even in heels over cobbles there’s a swing to her walk that marks her out as sexy, glamorous, free; all the things Beth will never be again, if she ever was in the first place.
Mark puts up his hood and sits down on the harbour, head in his hands. Beth can’t bring herself to confront him. Knowing that she cannot do this tonight, she turns for home: she wants to be back in bed before he knows she was gone.
She passes the police station as the automatic gates slide apart. Ellie Miller inches her car on to the High Street. She hits the brakes when she sees Beth.
‘What’re you doing out?’ she says. ‘Come on, let me give you a lift home.’
The inside of Ellie’s car is like a bin. Beth has to sweep sweet wrappers from the seat and empty cans clank in the passenger footwell.
‘Is he a suspect?’ asks Beth, using her feet to stop the cans rolling into each other. ‘Have you ruled him out, for definite?’
Ellie twitches in and out of her two roles: friend, policewoman, friend, policewoman. ‘It’s not that simple —’
‘Of course it’s that simple!’
A block away from Spring Close, Ellie brakes at a red light although hers is the only car in sight. ‘Me?’ she says with a sigh. ‘I don’t think he did it. Truly, I don’t. But… there were gaps in his movements, the night Danny died, that he needed to explain and we couldn’t let him go until he did.’
‘I saw him tonight, with Becca Fisher,’ says Beth. ‘He doesn’t know. Is that what he told you?’
‘You have to talk to him,’ says Ellie in diplomatic confirmation. Beth’s humiliation is complete. Her tears are hot and messy.
‘Why is this happening to me?’ she wails. ‘What did I do? I just want to be the person outside of this, watching from the other side of the road, taking pity on me. I don’t want to be in the middle of it. I can’t do it, Ell.’
Ellie undoes her seat belt and pulls her in for a hug. Beth’s tears roll off Ellie’s orange coat. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, I really am.’ They stay like that for a long time, the traffic lights going through their patient cycle on the empty road.