‘All I’m saying is that everything’s open to interpretation. Including this card.’ He puts my phone face down on the coffee table, the photos obscured. ‘Whoever sent it wants to mess with your head. They’re sick. They want a reaction. Don’t give it to them.’
‘The man at the police station put it in an evidence bag. He said they’d check for fingerprints.’ They’re taking it seriously, I want to add.
‘Did you see a detective?’
‘No, just the man who works on the front desk. He was a detective for most of his service, and when he retired he came back as a civilian.’
‘That’s dedication.’
‘It is, isn’t it? Imagine loving your job so much you don’t want to leave it. Even after you’ve retired.’
‘Or you’re so institutionalised you can’t imagine doing anything else?’ Mark yawns, his hand too late to catch it. From the front, his teeth are a perfect pearly white, but from this angle I can see the amalgam fillings in his upper molars.
‘Oh. I hadn’t looked at it that way.’ I think of Murray Mackenzie with his careful concern and insightful comments, and whatever the reason, I’m glad he’s still working for the police. ‘Anyway, he was lovely.’
‘Good. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is put it out of your mind.’ He scoots to the corner of the sofa, his legs stretched out, and raises one arm in invitation. I slide into our well-worn position, snuggled under his left arm with his chin resting lightly on the top of my head. He smells of cold air and something I can’t quite pinpoint …
‘Have you been smoking?’ I’m curious, that’s all, but even I can hear the judgement that lies beneath the surface of my words.
‘A couple of drags, after we finished. Sorry, do I stink?’
‘No, I … I just didn’t know you smoked.’ Imagine not knowing your partner smokes … But I’ve never seen him with a cigarette. Never even heard him mention it.
‘I quit years ago. Hypnotherapy. It’s what made me go into counselling, actually. Have I not told you this story? Anyway, every few months I light one, have a few drags then stub it out. It reminds me I’m the one in control.’ He grins. ‘There’s logic to it, I promise. And don’t worry – I would never do it around Ella.’
I settle back into him. I tell myself it’s exciting that we’re still discovering things about each other – what we have in common; what sets us apart – but right now mystery isn’t what I need in my life. I wish Mark and I knew each other inside out. That we’d been childhood sweethearts. I wish he’d known me before Mum and Dad died. I was a different person then. Curious. Amused. Amusing. Mark doesn’t know that Anna. He knows bereaved Anna; pregnant Anna; Anna the mother. Sometimes, when Laura or Billy is around, I’ll lose myself in a time before Mum and Dad died, and I’ll feel like the old me again. It doesn’t happen often enough.
I change the subject. ‘How was your course?’
‘Lots of role-play.’ I hear him grimace. He hates that sort of thing.
‘You’re later than I thought you’d be.’
‘I dropped by the flat. I don’t like leaving it empty.’
When Mark and I met he was living in Putney. He saw clients in a room of his seventh-floor apartment, and spent one day each week at a practice in Brighton – the same practice that distributed flyers around Eastbourne at the very moment I most needed it.
I told Laura about the pregnancy test before I broke the news to Mark.
‘What am I going to do?’
‘Have a baby, I guess.’ Laura grinned. ‘Isn’t that how it usually works?’
We were sitting in a café in Brighton, opposite the nail bar where Laura used to work. She’d found a new job taking customer calls for an online shopping company, but I saw her looking at the girls laughing in the nail bar and wondered if she was missing the banter.
‘I can’t have a baby.’ It didn’t feel real. I didn’t feel pregnant. If it wasn’t for the half-dozen tests I’d done, and the absence of a period, I’d have sworn it was all a bad dream.
‘There are other options.’ Laura spoke softly, even though there was no one else within earshot.
I shook my head. Two lives lost were already too many.
‘Well, then.’ She held up her coffee mug in a mock toast. ‘Congratulations, Mummy.’
I told Mark over dinner that night. I waited till the tables around us were full, protected by the company of strangers.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, when I’d dropped my bombshell. There was a flicker of confusion on his face.
‘Sorry? This is amazing! I mean … isn’t it?’ He scrutinised me. ‘You don’t think so?’ He tried to be serious, but a slow grin was spreading across his face, and he looked around the restaurant as though expecting a round of applause from our oblivious dining companions.
‘I … I wasn’t sure.’ But I put my hand on my still-flat stomach and thought that after the awfulness of the previous year, here was something good. Something miraculous.
‘Okay, so it’s maybe a little faster than we might have wanted—’
‘Just a bit.’ I could count the weeks we had been together on my fingers.
‘—but it is what we wanted.’ He looked for agreement and I nodded vehemently. It was. We’d even talked about it, surprising ourselves with our candour. Mark was thirty-nine when we met, bruised from a long-term relationship he’d thought was permanent, and resigned to the possibility that he might never have the family he wanted. I was only twenty-five, but painfully aware of how short life was. My parents’ deaths had brought us together; this baby would provide the glue to keep us there.
Gradually Mark wound down his London-based business and scaled up his Brighton one, moving in with me and renting out the Putney flat. It seemed the perfect solution. The rent covered his mortgage, plus a little extra, and the tenants seemed happy to fix anything that went wrong. Or so we’d thought, until a call from environmental health informed us the upstairs neighbour had complained about a smell. By the time we got there the tenants had left with their deposit and a month’s rent owing, leaving the place trashed too badly to rent out straight away. Mark was gradually putting things back together.
‘How’s it looking?’
‘Grim. I’ve lined up someone to decorate but they’re on another job till mid-January, so it’ll be February before there’s a chance of a deposit from new tenants.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does.’
We fall silent, neither looking for an argument. We don’t need the rental income. Not now. We’re not short of a bob or two, as Granddad Johnson would have said.
I’d hand back every penny if it meant one more day with my parents, but the bottom line is: their deaths left me solvent. Thanks to Granddad Johnson, the house has never been mortgaged, and a combination of Dad’s savings and my parents’ life assurance policies means that sitting in my bank account right now is a fraction over one million pounds.
‘I’ll sell the flat.’
‘Why? This is bad luck, that’s all. Switch agencies – find one that checks out references better.’
‘Maybe we should sell both places.’
For a second I don’t register what he’s suggesting. Sell Oak View?
‘It’s a big house, and the garden’s a lot to maintain, when neither of us knows what we’re doing.’
‘We’ll get a gardener.’
‘The Sycamore went on the market for eight fifty, and it’s only four bedrooms.’
He’s serious. ‘I don’t want to move, Mark.’
‘We could buy somewhere together. Something that belongs to us both.’
‘Oak View does belong to us both.’
Mark doesn’t answer, but I know he doesn’t agree. He moved in properly at the end of June, when I was four months pregnant and Mark hadn’t spent a night at his flat in weeks.
‘Make yourself at home,’ I said cheerily, but the very fact that I’d said it reinforced my ownership. It was days before he stopped asking if he could make a cup of tea; weeks before he stopped sitting bolt upright on the sofa, like a visitor.
I wish he loved the house the way I do. With the exception of my three years at uni, I have only ever lived here. All of my life is within these four walls.
‘Just think about it.’