I look at him, feel my throat tightening again. I want to believe it is true. ‘Do you think?’
‘Of course.’ He squeezes my hand. ‘She’ll have just gone back to her boyfriend or something. Or her mum. Or a friend. Christ, I don’t know, Katie – it could be any number of random things. As far as I can tell, there’s no reason to think that anything bad has happened to her.’
I pull my hand away, twist my napkin. ‘The police wouldn’t be involved if they didn’t think something bad had happened to her.’
‘OK, but even if something has happened – I don’t know. This … this cellar thing? It might not even matter.’ He pulls his hand back, dips his naan into one of the chutneys, staining it red. ‘I just think if you change your story now, they might think it’s weird. And it might distract them from something that really is important.’ He takes a bite. ‘Don’t you think?’
I look at him. I think back to that night, when I saw him and Rachel together, how his hand brushed against her side.
‘Charlie, what were you talking to Rachel about? When I saw you that night?’
His face darkens. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, come on. You were together, by the bookcase. Just the two of you, for ages. You were standing really close to her. Why did you have so much to talk about when you’d only just met her?’
He looks away, out into the blur of rain.
‘What, Charlie?’
‘Nothing!’
‘What do you mean, nothing?’
‘I don’t know … nothing! We were just chatting. Normal stuff.’
He is staring into his lap now, then back to the rain-splattered window. I was sure he wasn’t hiding anything before. Now I don’t know. I want to believe he is telling the truth. I want to, so much. But then I think again about the way he and Rachel looked, when I saw them talking at the party, the intensity of it.
And then later, when he came out to find me in the garden. Why was he covered in dust if he’d only gone down there for a moment?
When he speaks again, Charlie’s tone is different. Harder.
‘I don’t get it, Katie,’ he says. ‘You met this girl what – once, twice? Why are you interrogating me about it?’ He leans closer. ‘What are you asking? Are you saying you think I’ve got something to do with her going missing?’
‘Of course not. Don’t be stupid!’
‘Well, what then?’
‘I just … I need to know what happened.’
‘Well, maybe we’ll never know. People go missing all the time, usually because they want to. We don’t know what was going on with her. It could be any number of things. It could be nothing at all.’ He pauses. ‘Don’t you think?’
I stare out of the window, watching the rain thrash against the glass, the bent backs of people walking through it. I watch the buses and taxis throw waves of water over the pavement, the brown rivers running into drains. I think about what happened to Emily, about how she ran for help, her bare feet cold on the cobbled street. Anything could have happened to Rachel, I think. She could be out there, in this. Hitchhiking by a roadside. In a ditch somewhere. Under a bridge. She could have been hit by a car. She could have run away, somewhere north, Scotland, abroad. She could be face-down in water, her bloated body lolling against a harbour wall. I close my eyes.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what to think.’
HELEN
When we finally go out shopping for a pram, it isn’t as enjoyable as I’d hoped. Daniel suggests one of those out-of-town discount shopping places. It is a long train ride away, and we sit for what seems like an hour as the gaps between the stations lengthen.
He hardly says anything when we are there, or on the way home, the new pram wedged next to us in the wheelchair bay. Stupid not to have driven.
‘Is it the expense?’ I ask, after Daniel has been quiet for most of the journey. ‘I know the joint account is getting a bit low, but we have all those savings, remember. Why don’t you transfer a chunk over, for the baby things? This is what they are for, isn’t it?’
He insists it isn’t that. That everything is fine. ‘I’m just feeling a bit run-down,’ he says, smiling tightly. ‘Need an early night.’
So we sit in silence. I watch the ramshackle suburban gardens backing onto the train line, a moving gallery of broken bicycles, Fisher Price slides, trampolines full of rainwater. The backs of the houses are pockmarked with broken satellite dishes. My eyelids start to feel heavy. I didn’t get much sleep last night.