Chapter Ten

It was 7 a.m. the next morning by the time she climbed aboard Dreamcatcher clutching two takeaway coffees and feeling exhausted. Thank Christ she was rostered off.

Archie stuck his head out of the cabin and she held out his coffee, saying, ‘Peace offering?' He took it wordlessly, not returning her smile, before heading back down below. In the cabin she found him shaving in the tiny mirror hung over the kitchen sink. On another day she might have told him to use the one in the bathroom but this morning she was on the back foot.

‘Look, I went for a drink after work with Jax and it got messy.' Trying not to sound rehearsed. ‘I didn't fancy walking along the towpath pissed .?.?. so I kipped down on her sofa.'

Nada . Archie just splashed his razor in the sink and drew the blade up under his chin.

‘Oh, come on, Archie, don't be like that.'

Taking a towel, he dried off his face before turning to her, his grey eyes serious. ‘I was worried sick about you.'

Cassie grimaced: she could kick herself. How could she have forgotten to call him?

‘I'm really sorry I forgot to text you till this morning. Like I say, I was wasted.'

‘I'm just starting to wonder if you really want me here,' said Archie, pulling on his Barbour jacket.

‘Of course, I do,' said Cassie, but she knew she didn't sound very convincing.

‘I agreed to come live on this stupid .?.?. floating coffin' – throwing a dark look at the ceiling an inch above his head. ‘When we could be living in a nice warm flat with a washing machine and a TV. And space . The last few weeks you've been out every other night, and when you are here you're bad-tempered or monosyllabic half the time. I already feel like I'm here on sufferance – and now this?'

She bit her lip. Why didn't she just tell him the truth? That someone had tried to get into the mortuary and she'd felt she had no alternative but to stay there overnight. To protect Bronte . But it would just sound mad, and she'd have to get into what had happened at school that day to make Bronte leave and how bad she still felt about it.

She sent Archie an imploring look. ‘Look if you're worried that I'm seeing someone else, I swear—'

‘I'm worried you're not seeing me ,' he said, zipping up his Barbour. ‘I'm not really part of your life. More of a tolerated lodger.'

And before she could find the words to disagree, he was off, the boat rocking as he jumped down onto the towpath.

Her relationships always came to this . She took a kind of bitter comfort from the thought.

*

Within a heartbeat of her grandmother opening her front door those beady eyes had noticed something was amiss. But then the person who raised you from the age of four to seventeen was going to have certain insights.

Her gran didn't say anything, just kissed Cassie on each cheek, once, twice, three times in the Polish way, before ushering her inside. Cassie sniffed the air, detecting a steamy, savoury smell coming out of the kitchen.

‘ Golabki? ' she asked.

‘ Czesc .' She nodded, steering her granddaughter into the living room. ‘Just cooked. Sit down, I'll get you a plate.'

Ignoring Cassie's faint protests, she came back with two of the cabbage dumplings called golabki – literally, ‘pigeons' – because of their shape rather than their contents, ladled into a soup plate with some of their cooking broth, which shimmered with goodness.

Cassie realised that after a night passed trying to sleep on the bench in the mortuary changing room she was hungry.

Her gran watched her eat, smiling but silent. This one you had to give the space to speak, if and when she wanted.

The simple savoury goodness of the meal – together with the warm fug of the living room, the gas fire pop popping , the hum of Polish spices and the sweet scent of her gran's face powder – catapulted Cassie back to her childhood. ‘Have you put something different in these?' she asked, sensing some extra layer of umami beneath the wild mushrooms, buckwheat kasha, and obligatory fistful of garlic.

‘You can't guess?' Babcia clapped her hands together with glee. ‘It's soy sauce – just a dash.'

Babcia experimenting with culinary fusion? Cassie was surprised to find herself scandalised but she had to admit it worked.

After she'd finished, and made coffee for them both, she came and sat opposite her grandmother. ‘It must have been tough for you, Babcia, bringing me up after Mum died and Dad went to prison.'

From the age of four Cassie had been brought up believing that she'd been orphaned when a car accident killed both her parents, and it was barely a year since she'd discovered what really happened. Her mother Katherine had been murdered, with her father Callum being convicted and sentenced to life for the crime – the car crash simply a fiction invented by Babcia to protect her granddaughter from the ugly truth. After his release from prison, Callum had turned up out of the blue to claim his innocence and Cassie had got drawn into investigating the case, finally helping to find the real murderer.

Now, he'd been officially cleared and was back in her life, and living locally, although he was currently on an extended visit to his home town of Belfast and beyond to see his family. Their family . Cassie hadn't just acquired an unexpected father but a clutch of aunts, uncles, and cousins – a discovery she was still getting to grips with.

Cassie pictured Archie's expression that morning: hurt and angry at her thoughtlessness. It was only recently that she had begun to understand the shadow that growing up without either parent had cast over her life – above all how difficult she found it making and sustaining relationships.

‘How old were you when I came to live here, Babcia?' she asked. ‘In your late fifties?' She had only recently started to appreciate how tough it must have been for her grandmother, taking on a hyperactive four-year-old so late in life.

Weronika nodded, glancing at the photo of Cassie on the mantelpiece alongside the one of her daughter who she called Katerina, and everyone else called Kath. ‘When you were little you weren't too much trouble, but later, at fourteen, fifteen' – she waved an expressive hand – ‘it was a little bit more difficult.'

‘I'm sorry, Babcia,' said Cassie, awkwardly. She wasn't much good at apologies either. ‘At that age you literally don't even think about other people, what they might be going through. You spend every minute just trying to work yourself out.' She could remember it still, the agonised self-questioning: Am I pretty? Am I smart? Do people like me?

Babcia nodded. ‘It must have been even harder for you, the only girl at school without a mama and papa. Having your old granny coming to pick you up' – this with a wry but loving smile.

Cassie looked away. It was true . In her early teens she had been embarrassed by her gran, with her old lady clothes and uncool perm – while at the same time feeling hot shame for her disloyalty. The other girls' mums were so cool, with their on-trend outfits, ripped jeans and edgy haircuts. Especially Natasha's mum, obviously . Natasha was top dog, the capo di capo of the girls at the school, who, even in the dowdy-brown school uniform, still managed to signal her status. Her hair was dyed a dark glossy chestnut and cut in a severe fringe in homage to Katy Perry's retro style, nails manicured and varnished in a just-this-side of regulation natural, eyelashes dyed, blazer sleeves pushed up to show off her sunbed tan. The fourteen-year-old Cassie had studied her covertly in assembly, or while playing netball, like you might try to catch a glimpse of a celeb. She'd nursed a crush on her, of course she had , but that aside, she could still remember the intense need to be accepted by Natasha and her crew.

Now Cassie could see that her idol was an airhead and a bully. She'd put that horrible year or two behind her long ago, rarely thinking about it, but now she found herself wishing that she could go back and have the chance to play things differently. Especially around Sophia. Sorry , Bronte.

‘What was it like for you at school in Poland, Babcia?' – realising that she'd never asked her before.

‘Oh it was great fun!' – becoming animated. ‘We were always boycotting lessons. We all refused to learn Russian, of course. And we loved to bait our history teachers, asking about how Stalin had invaded Poland alongside Hitler. And then there were the demonstrations! When you're young you don't consider the risks – the boys would get beaten up by riot cops and a few of us got snatched by the secret police.'

Cassie knew that as a student activist Weronika had herself been imprisoned for helping to organise a demo against the Soviet-backed regime. But it occurred to her that the oppression might have had an upside. ‘You were all in it together, right? So I'm guessing you didn't get all the backbiting, the bitching about who was cool or uncool – you know the way girls can be together.'

Babcia narrowed her eyes. ‘I've never really thought of it that way but you're right, tygrysek . We were united against a common enemy.' After a pause she went on, ‘Was it bad for you then, at school? You never said anything.'

What would have been the point? School was a war zone in which adults were unarmed civilians.

‘Oh, it wasn't that bad,' she said, getting a vivid image of how Kylie, one of the rough girls, used to grab her lunch box, and pretend to throw up at its contents – Polish sausage and giant gherkins instead of the regulation cheese strings and Wispa bars – making her little gang titter. Sophia came off even worse, like the time Kylie picked up a dolmades, a stuffed vine leaf, out of her box and waved it about in disgust. ‘Oh my God! Look at the disgusting shit Dobby puts in her mouth!' Kylie had nicknamed Sophia ‘Dobby' after the house elf in Harry Potter because she was the shortest girl in the class. ‘It looks like an alien dick!' – positioning it between her legs to demonstrate.

If you were writing the Hollywood movie, Cassie and Sophia – the two outsiders – would make an alliance against the bullies. But in real life it was every teenage girl for herself. And she had to admit that Sophia could be annoying – always giving the teachers fancy boxes of chocs, and acting like she was superior to everyone because her dad was loaded. Cassie could picture her now, nose in the air, getting into his Mercedes outside school.

That's no excuse for what you did.

‘Leave me alone,' Cassie muttered. The shrink she'd seen briefly last year had called them intrusive thoughts.

‘Is everything all right, tygrysek ?' Babcia looked worried.

After a moment of hesitation, Cassie told her about Sophia, aka Bronte, killing herself and how they'd been in the same class for a bit at school.

‘God rest her soul,' said her gran, crossing herself. ‘I saw about that poor child dying on the news but I didn't pick up on the name.' She paused, thinking. ‘Angelopoulos you say? I have met her mother, Chrysanthi.'

‘Seriously? Was this when I was at school?'

‘ Nie, nie . Just last year. Three or four times we chatted at church coffee mornings. That poor woman!'

Camden had several Catholic churches which had served the Irish community for decades – their congregations swelled by more recent arrivals from Poland – while the borough's Greek-origin population had four Orthodox churches to choose from. It turned out that Chrysanthi's church, St Ioannis, and Babcia's, St Bartholomew's, had a programme designed to foster interfaith relations, running social events to bring the two communities closer together.

‘What was she like? Did she ever talk about her daughter?'

A troubled look crossed Babcia's face. ‘Ah the poor thing hardly talked about anything else. Those two had a very difficult relationship. She didn't approve of her daughter's singing career – blamed it for the drink and drugs, the bad men. According to her, it was all the fault of her husband.' She shrugged resignedly. ‘She married him far too young – when she was still a teenager. I gather the marriage went bad very soon afterwards.'

‘But she didn't divorce him?'

‘Oh, her religion wouldn't allow that. She is very devout.'

Which would help to explain Chrysanthi's bitterness against George: for her, marriage was a life sentence with no chance of parole.

‘Did she say what went wrong between them?'

‘I got the impression he was a Lothario' – pronouncing it with a long ‘a' in the Mediterranean way. ‘I felt so sorry for her. She was already a bitter woman, the kind who finds it difficult to move on. And now to lose her daughter. I must ask her for coffee, to condole with her.'

Cassie pictured Chrysanthi's raw grief as she cradled her daughter's body, her old-young face contorting with fury as she blamed her ex-husband for the death. One thing was certain: the chances of her ‘moving on' now were zero.