When they come back down the stairs, DI Hughes speaks first.
‘We need you to come to the station. Now, please. We’ll need a recorded statement. From both of you.’
I look at him, then to Daniel, then back again.
‘But we already spoke to your colleagues,’ I say. ‘The, um, the ones from Greenwich –’
‘The detectives from Greenwich CID, yes,’ DCI Betsky interrupts. She looks impatient now, clicking the lid onto her pen, pushing it into the breast pocket of her long jacket. She is speaking to us differently, this detective. Why does she not smile? Why doesn’t it feel like she is on our side?
‘I’m sure you can appreciate it’s been a couple of weeks now, Mrs Thorpe. We are very keen to exclude the possibility that Miss Wells could have come to any harm.’
Daniel picks up our car keys.
‘Don’t worry,’ DCI Betsky tells him, ‘you can come with us.’
‘I’ll drive,’ Daniel says. ‘I’m sure this won’t take long, and my wife is tired. We will need to get home.’ He sounds furious. The detective gives him a look, but doesn’t disagree.
When we get to the station, we are led into separate rooms, opposite sides of a narrow corridor with laminate floors peeling at the edges. It goes on for what feels like hours. None of the questions seem to have satisfactory answers, or at least not ones I am able to provide. There are a lot of silences.
Most weirdly of all, they don’t appear to have known that Rachel was pregnant.
‘You’re absolutely sure about that, Mrs Thorpe?’
‘Look, I didn’t see her without her clothes on, if that’s what you mean.’ I’m almost laughing, but the detectives are deadly serious. ‘I mean, if she wasn’t pregnant, then she was going to antenatal classes and wandering around Greenwich with a fake baby bump. Are you seriously suggesting that’s what’s happened?’
When they finally let me go, my head is spinning.
‘Thank you, Mrs Thorpe.’ DCI Betsky presses a card into my hand as I pull on my coat. ‘You haven’t got any long trips planned, I presume?’
I stare at her. ‘I’m about to have a baby,’ I say.
She looks at me for a moment longer. It is late. I ache for my own bed, for pillows, sheets, oblivion.
‘We’ll be in touch,’ she says. Then she walks away.
Unsure what to do, I ask at reception. They say Daniel was let out ages ago. He is waiting for me in the car.
‘Helen,’ I see him say, although I can’t hear through the glass. He opens the passenger door, holds his arm out to ease me in. His eyes are wide. ‘For God’s sake. What on earth were they doing, keeping you so late?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, my voice wavering. He takes my hand.
‘What did they ask you?’
I try to answer him, but it already feels like a blur. I have the sense of having failed, having botched an important test. I think about the look on DCI Betsky’s face and the way she played with her blue ballpoint pen, twisting it between her fingers as she leaned forward.
‘Mrs Thorpe, forgive me for asking again. But we’re still not entirely clear. What exactly happened between yourself and Rachel Wells on the night she disappeared?’
KATIE
Jane waves me through to the kitchen. Her slippers stick slightly to the laminate floor as she walks. There are dirty pans and dishes in the sink, and the whole flat smells faintly of unwiped surfaces and cheap tomato sauce. The view from the window is blank and featureless, London’s landmarks too distant to make out, the city a scribbled line on the horizon.
‘The police came already,’ she says, opening the fridge. ‘I told them. I’ve got no idea where she is. She left here a few weeks ago and she hasn’t come back.’
Jane starts reheating sloppy leftover pasta from a cling-filmed bowl in the fridge. A grubby extractor fan whirrs in the wall above her head; little cobwebs of clotted grime quiver in its wake, like streamers.
‘Do you know much about the father of her baby?’
The microwave beeps and Jane yanks the door open, tips her steaming pasta onto a chipped plate.
‘I’ve been through this with the police. If Rachel was pregnant, that is news to me,’ she says, slumping into a chair diagonally opposite me.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I saw her a few weeks ago. Just before she moved into your friend’s. And OK, it was cold, she was wearing a big coat, but she didn’t look pregnant to me. She was no different. Strange as ever.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says to me, through a mouthful of pasta. ‘I know she was your friend. But she was driving us mad, to be honest. We had quite a few problems with her, and basically, she needed to move out.’