Fullepub 
Chapter Twenty-Six
TWENTY-SIX
Irene, dozing in her chair next to the window, a copy of Pat Barker’s Blow Your House Down open in her lap, was woken by the rain, a sudden downpour so heavy the raindrops drummed like hail against the flagstones in the lane outside, the sound of it so loud that Irene almost missed the sound of someone weeping.
She thought she’d imagined it at first, and then, rising to her feet, she thought with a sinking heart that it might be Carla—despairing, tragic Carla—back to haunt the house next door once more. But then she heard a knocking at her door, so soft, so tentative it might have been the work of a child. She heard a small voice call out, “Irene? Are you there?”
Laura, on her doorstep, soaked to the skin and in a dreadful state, her jacket torn and a livid bruise the size of a tennis ball marring the left side of her face. She was trembling, weeping like a little girl.
“Laura, good God! Come inside.” Irene reached for her, but Laura drew back.
“Don’t,” she sobbed. “You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t be kind to me.”
“What on earth are you talking about? Laura, for goodness’ sake.” She grabbed a handful of the girl’s sodden coat. “Come in, come out of the rain.”
In the darkened hallway, the door shut behind her, Laura shook herself like a dog. “You should turn me away,” she said miserably. “You should tell me to fuck off, not that you’d ever say that, because you’re too nice and polite.”
“Well, quite,” Irene said crossly. “Stop being silly. Take off that wet coat, put it on the radiator there. Hasn’t it got cold? I’ll turn the heating on. Now, come on, don’t dawdle, don’t drip. Come into the living room. I’m going to turn the heating on and then I’m going to get us a cup of tea. You can tell me all about it, you can start from the beginning.”
When she returned with the tea, Laura was sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room, her legs crossed and her head in her hands. Irene handed her a mug. “Come on, then. Let’s hear it. What’s going on?”
As Irene settled back into her armchair, Laura began. She said that she’d taken money from Irene’s purse, which Irene knew, of course, because although she was forgetful, she wasn’t a fool. Laura told her that she’d taken something from next door too, that she’d seen the door open and snatched a bag from the hallway, and Irene had not known about that. “Do you still have what you took?” she asked sternly, and the girl nodded. “Then you’ll give it back. Money is one thing, Laura, and I understand you’re in a tight spot. But you can’t take things that mean something to someone. Can you imagine how you’d feel,” she scolded, “if someone took William’s watch from me? Can you imagine what you’d think of that person?” Laura cringed in shame. Her expression forlorn, she tipped the contents of her backpack onto Irene’s living room floor, picked up the two little jewelry boxes, and handed them to Irene.
“That’s not the worst of it,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. In her chest, Irene’s heart quailed. She dreaded what Laura was about to tell her, for what could be worse? What could be worse than stealing from a grieving woman?
“What have you done, Laura?” Her breath catching, she could barely utter the words. “You’ve not . . . you haven’t hurt someone, have you?”
Laura looked up, eyes bright. “I don’t think so. Unless you count the guy with the fork, but I don’t think that’s what you mean, is it?” Irene shook her head, confused. “Daniel,” Laura said, and Irene’s hand flew to her mouth.
“Oh no, Laura.” Irene felt her heart might stop.
“I didn’t kill him!” Laura cried. She was on her knees, at Irene’s feet. “I didn’t, I swear. But I was there. . . . Just before, I was there with him. And I didn’t tell you, because you said he was trouble, you—”
“I didn’t say he was trouble, Laura. I said he was troubled. I think I warned you to be careful with him, because he was a troubled boy, didn’t I? He had a difficult family life, I told you that, I—”
“And I didn’t listen. And I went with him, and I spent the night. . . .” Laura tailed off. Outside, the rain had abated somewhat but the sky was darkening as if in preparation for a second assault.
“You stayed the night?” Irene repeated, and Laura looked down at the carpet. “Oh, for God’s sake!” she snapped. “There’s no need to be so coy. I’m an old woman, not a child.” Laura nodded, but she didn’t raise her eyes. “So, you spent the night with him. And then you left without any breakfast, I’m guessing. But he was fine when you left him?” Laura nodded again. “And you’ve no idea what happened to him?” Laura shook her head this time. “Laura! Did you honestly think, in the light of all that, that it was really a good idea to go stealing from his family? For God’s sake. Imagine how it would look, if someone found out, if—”
“Someone has found out,” Laura said, her voice small. “You have.”
Irene rolled her eyes; she felt quite cross. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, I’m not about to call the police, am I? And none of that explains all this,” Irene said, waving her hand in Laura’s direction. “None of it explains the state you’re in now.”
“Oh, well.” Laura sat back down, crossing her legs. “There’s this woman, you see, who lives in one of the boats on the canal, and I know her a bit because she comes in the launderette sometimes. Her name’s Miriam, and she’s a bit weird, she looks weird, you know, like she’s always wearing a few too many clothes, do you know what I mean? In any case, she’s the one who found Daniel, found his body I mean, she was the one who called the police, and then the other day, she showed up outside the launderette, and I was in a bit of a state, nothing terrible, just . . . you know.” Irene didn’t know; she had no idea what Laura was talking about. “Anyway, so I went round to her place, to her boat, you see, because I owed her an apology—it’s a long story, you don’t really have to know about all this, but the point is, the point is, when I got to the boat, I found out that she had the key to my flat.”
“She had your key?”
“Exactly! Remember I said I lost it, well she had it.”
“And she gave it back to you?” Irene wasn’t really understanding the point of this story.
“No, no, she didn’t give it to me. She hid it from me. I found it in her boat, I was looking through her things, you see—”
“You were looking for something to steal!” Irene said.
“Yes, all right, I was, but that’s not the point, is it? The point is she had my key. And so when I found it, we had a bit of a . . . well . . .”
“An altercation?”
“Exactly.”
“And she hit you? This woman hit you? Gave you that bruise?”
Laura shook her head. “There was a bit of pushing and shoving. I was basically trying to get out of there, and I tripped. I fell.”
“Do you think we ought to be calling the police, Laura? I mean, if this woman has your key, then . . .”
“Oh, no—I have the key now.” She delved into her jeans pocket and pulled it out, along with one gold earring, which she peered at, before stuffing it back into her pocket. “I have the key, and I have this as well.” From the pile where she’d emptied out her backpack, she took a sheaf of papers, a bound manuscript, which she held out to Irene. “She gave me this—before we had our . . . whatchacallit, altercation, she gave me this. Her memoir,” Laura said, air-quoting with her fingers. “Suggested I read it. Which I’m never going to do. You might like it, though. It has a crime in it! She claims she was kidnapped by a madman when she was young. Or something like that, anyway.”
“Good grief,” Irene said, accepting the manuscript with both hands. “How extraordinary.” There was a sudden flash of light accompanied by a particularly vicious crack of thunder, which had them both ducking their heads.
“Fucking hell,” Laura said.
“Indeed,” Irene replied. “Do you know,” she said, “I think you ought to go upstairs and get out of those wet things, hang them in the airing closet, and run yourself a nice hot bath. I think you should stay here with me this afternoon, don’t you?”
Laura smiled, squeezing tears from her eyes. “I’d like that.”
Above the sound of the second downpour, Irene could hear Laura singing, her voice truer and sweeter than Irene would have imagined. She took her time; it was almost an hour before she came back downstairs, wrapped in a pink terry cloth robe that had been folded up in the airing cupboard, unused for the best part of a decade. Something about the sight of this tiny young woman in her old robe was extraordinarily touching to Irene. She felt a wave of emotion come over her, a feeling she imagined might almost be maternal.
She said none of this to Laura, who she suspected might be embarrassed by such a declaration. Instead, she said: “Do you know, it’s very odd, this book”—she brandished the manuscript Laura had brought with her—“this memoir. I was reading through it and—”
“You can’t have read it already,” Laura said, flinging herself lengthways onto the sofa and rearranging the cushions beneath her head.
“Well, I was just skimming through it—it’s actually not badly written, a little overwrought, perhaps—but the odd thing is that some parts of it feel terribly familiar, though of course the idea of someone escaping from a serial killer isn’t exactly original, only . . .” She tailed off, frowning, peering up at her bookshelves over the rim of her glasses. “There’s something that’s bothering me and I just can’t put my finger on what it is, I . . .”
Laura closed her eyes and snuggled down on the sofa, pulling Irene’s robe down over her knees. “Oh,” she murmured, “this is, like, heaven. I am just so knackered, you know what I mean? I just want to lie here forever.”
“Well, you’re welcome to stay. You could even spend the night,” Irene suggested, “if you like. I could make up the spare bed.”
Laura didn’t answer, but with a smile upon her lips said, “I always feel safe here, you know? I feel like no one can get at me here.”
“No one’s going to get you, Laura,” Irene said. “Why ever would you think that?”
“Oh, they will,” Laura said, pulling the robe up so that it covered her chin. “They will. They always do.”
While Laura slept, Irene read. A number of the scenes in the manuscript were terribly familiar—two girls hitchhiking on a hot summer’s day, a chance encounter, a sudden descent into violence occurring at a remote farmhouse, tender young limbs slashed on broken windows—it was all standard horror film stuff, she supposed, but there was something that snagged on the memory, and that was the singing. A refrain played on the radio, sung by one of the characters (could you call her a character, if this was a memoir?), was familiar to her; it reminded her of something, rang a bell from somewhere.
On the sofa, Laura stirred. She turned over so that she was facing away from Irene and began, very gently, to snore. Irene felt again the pull of affection, a twinge in her stomach that she thought of as maternal, but then what did she know? She couldn’t say what it was, only that she felt the same urge to protect the girl as she’d felt toward poor Angela.
She cast her eye once more over Angie’s books, the ones she’d not yet finished sorting through. She really ought to get on with that because those books had been lying around for weeks. Perhaps she might ask Laura to take that first pile up to the Oxfam shop on Upper Street.
And then she saw it. On the top of the charity shop pile: The One Who Got Away by Caroline MacFarlane. Theo Myerson’s crime novel! It was staring her in the face. She got out of her chair and picked up the book, a hardback copy, hefty and well bound. She turned it over, reading the words on the back cover, in bold blood red:
On their way home from school, a girl and her friend were abducted.
The girl made it home. The friend did not.
This girl is a victim.
This girl is grieving.
This girl is damaged.
This girl is vengeful.
This girl is guilty?
This girl is the One Who Got Away.
Irene rolled her eyes—she’d thought it was drivel when she’d first read it on publication; her view had not changed. Returning to her chair, she opened the book, flicking through it to find the passage she felt sure she remembered, something about a song, a snatch of a lyric. It was there somewhere, though not at all easy to find in this novel, whose story jumped about, the point of view occasionally switching from victim to perpetrator, the timeline jumping about all over the place. Very confusing and, if you asked Irene, irritating. She remembered hearing Myerson, once he’d been unmasked as the author, defending it on a radio program, saying something about playing with perceptions of guilt and responsibility, challenging the reader’s expectations, all that sort of guff. Nonsense. Experimentation for its own sake, who did that serve? What was wrong with the traditional crime novel, after all, with good prevailing, evil vanquished? So what if things rarely turned out like that in real life?
Irene was interrupted in her reading by an odd buzzing sound. She looked up and saw a light flashing on Laura’s phone. It quietened and then, after a moment, started up again. On the sofa, Laura stirred. “Oh, that’s me,” she groaned, rolling over toward Irene and promptly falling off the edge of the couch. “Fuck’s sake,” she mumbled as she crawled across the carpet to pick up the phone, “I was completely out.” She squinted at the screen. “Yeah?” she answered. “Who? Oh, yeah, sorry. What’s that? Oh, no I’m not there at the moment, I’m with a friend. I can . . . but I . . . but . . . What, now?” She closed her eyes for a second. “Do I have to?”
She ended the call with a heartfelt sigh. She looked sleepily up at Irene. “Told you,” she said, trying to smile despite the telltale crack in her voice. “I told you they always get me, didn’t I?” Wearily, she dragged herself to her feet. “I have to get going,” she said. “That was the police.”
Laura left in a hurry, dismissing Irene’s concerns. “It’s nothing to worry about, mate,” she said as she ran upstairs to get her clothes. “Nothing to worry about,” she said again when she came back down.
“This is about Daniel?” Irene said, and Laura pulled a face.
“Yeah, of course it is! Of course it’s about Daniel—I haven’t slept with anyone else who’s carked it lately, have I? I’m a witness, that’s all; I was the last person to see him, you know, alive. It’s nothing to worry about.” Irene saw her to the front door. Helping her into her still-damp coat, she asked if Laura had a solicitor. Laura laughed, started off down the lane, limping a little more than usual, and then she turned back, a grin on her face, all traces of tears banished. “Does the pope shit in the woods?”
Irene was thinking, as she popped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, how much William would have liked Laura. She would have made him laugh. He’d not been overly keen on Angela—he was never unkind to her or anything like that, he was just wary. She’s on the edge of something, that one, he’d said. And when she goes over, you don’t want to be anywhere nearby, she’ll catch hold of you and whoop! Off you’ll both go. William never really got to know Angela; he never got to see how kind she was.
Toast buttered, Irene sat at the kitchen table with the memoir open in front of her and Theo’s novel next to it, for comparison. Something about singing, she was saying to herself as she flicked through the pages. Something about—oh.
Right at the back of Theo’s book, tucked into the flap of the jacket, she discovered an envelope, addressed to Theo Myerson. Odd, since this was Angela’s copy of the book. Inside the envelope, she found a sheet of A4, apparently torn roughly from a pad, on which there was a pencil drawing of a woman sleeping, the bedclothes flung back to expose her naked torso. At the bottom of the page, in a spidery hand, was written, hello old man, been doing some sketching, thought you’d like to see. The note was unsigned, but the drawing looked very much like one of Daniel’s. And the woman in the picture was unmistakably Carla Myerson.
