“Jo?”
No reply.
Hana raises her voice. “Jo? You there?” Peering around the door, she finds the room empty, piles of clothes—jumpsuits, shorts—laid across the bed as if Jo had already begun packing.
She’s about to withdraw when she stops, noticing Jo’s phone plugged in beside the bed, white charger snaking across the wooden frame.
A thought slips into her head: She could look, couldn’t she?
It’s something she’d never even consider doing usually, but these past few days, she feels different somehow. It’s as if this trip has stripped a layer from her, revealed someone new.
Slipping inside, Hana walks in and stops beside the bed.
Seth.
He’s everywhere: clothes still hanging in the wardrobe, Veja sneakers under the bed, wallet on the bedside table. Despite the bravado, her heart is thudding in her ears.
Self-reprimands: This is their space. It’s wrong, especially after what’s happened.
But Hana steels herself. No more guilt. It’s what’s been holding her back all these years—a fear of being anything but good and nice, caring what people think of her.
Glancing quickly toward the door, she picks up the phone, unplugging it. No way of doing face recognition, but she doesn’t need to—Hana’s seen Jo tap in the code before: the first four digits of their old home landline number with her birth month at the end.
Once it’s unlocked, Hana scrolls the screen until she finds WhatsApp—Jo’s messaging platform of choice. If there’s something to be found, it will be here.
Jo’s messages to Seth are at the top, but as she scrolls through the chain, there’s nothing but the banal type of messages you’d expect from the day-to-day.
Seth: Where are you?
Jo: Going for a run.
Seth: We’re heading to breakfast.
Jo: Don’t be long . . .
No reference to the night Bea arrived.
Hana goes back to the main list of messages. Her eyes leap down the names but fix on only one: Bea. She skips over the exchange. She sees right away that it’s not the same kind of messages as the ones between Seth and Jo.
Punchy, aggressive language, the online continuation of an argument:
Bea: You have to tell Hana.
Jo: It’s none of your business.
Bea: If you won’t tell her, I will. It will devastate her, but it will be worse if she finds out from someone else.
Wildly scrolling and scrolling, Hana finds more of the same. It’s obvious now that Jo had lied to her earlier. Whatever she and Bea were discussing here is at the heart of the letter she’d found on the jetty. It’s clear that the scribbled-out note is nothing to do with Jo not supporting Hana after Liam’s death.
Jo’s hiding something else.
A terrible emptiness blooms inside her. This is what lies do, she thinks numbly—hollow you out. The bond between people—that mass of something certain and solid—is destroyed, and all you have left is the shell.
Hana puts the phone back on the side table with a clatter, watches it skitter off the surface and crash to the floor.
She lunges forward to pick it up, and as she does so, her eyes hook on something protruding from the gap between Jo’s mattress and the frame.
Dumbfounded, she presses her hand to her mouth.
57
Can’t get through to Johnson,” Elin says. “It’s going straight to voice mail.”
“He’ll call back,” Steed murmurs. “In the meantime, I got a list of everyone still here. The woman on reception has your kind of ruthless efficiency.” He smiles, but it quickly lapses when she fails to return it. “That face, I don’t like it. What’s happened?”
Elin stops a few feet from the reception desk. “Before I called Johnson, I spoke to the force incident manager. Looks like we’re on our own. MCIT is fully committed with a recent murder in Barnstaple and we’ve got several major incidents in Exeter.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Several?”
“Yeah . . . a multiple fatal RTC and a fire in a shopping and residential development. People trapped. Sounds like all uniformed and community support officers are committed. Regional officers too. They’re going to be delayed.”
Steed runs a hand through his hair. He looks flustered, unusual for him. “So what are we meant to do now?”
“Lock down the retreat. Get everyone together. I need to find Farrah. I’ve called her, but she’s going to voice mail too.” She glances down at her phone. “I’ll try again.” But her momentum falters as she absorbs the message on the screen.