Page 43 of The Mistake

Pete sips at the water, the taste flat and metallic. ‘No,’ he says eventually. ‘Oh, wait … a woman from my office. She turned up, I guess she must have heard us talking about it in the office – I invited Dave, my foreman, you see – and assumed it was an open invitation. She left once she realised.’ Pete lets out a nervous caw of laughter. ‘We’re not teenagers, it’s not like someone plastered it all over Facebook and all the local hoodlums turned up.’

DI Travis allows herself a small smile, as if the thought of teenagers using Facebook is amusing to her. ‘You understand we have to ask?’

‘Of course.’ Pete can feel sweat prickling under his arms, and he wonders if he should have been more forthcoming about Vanessa.

‘So, Pete, I have to ask you this – I’ve asked everyone I’ve spoken to so far. When was the last time you saw Erin?’

‘I don’t know …’ Pete’s brow creases and he tries to think back, past the row with Natalie, past the confrontation with Vanessa. ‘After my speech, maybe? I made a speech at about seven-thirty? Sometime around then. That’s the last time I remember seeing Erin. Someone from Nat’s work was holding her so Nat could come up and stand next to me.’

DI Travis nods. ‘And where were you at the time Erin disappeared? We believe the time frame was between approximately8.30, when Natalie fed her and put her in her cot to sleep, and ten o’clock, when your daughter went to check on her.’

‘I was …’ Pete feels a flutter of panic. He doesn’t know for certain; after his speech everything became a bit of a blur.

‘According to other guests at the party you cut the cake with Emily at around ten o’clock. So really, we’re looking at a period of roughly ninety minutes before this. We have a photograph of you, with Natalie and your other girls with the cake, time-stamped at 9.54. Natalie put Erin to bed at around 8.30.’

‘I was outside,’ Pete says, his heart knocking out a triple beat in his chest. ‘Smoking.’

‘In the garden?’

‘At the end of the garden, on the other side of the gate. Just on the edge of the woods.’ A spurt of horror heats Pete’s veins as the two police officers exchange a glance. ‘Natalie doesn’t know I still smoke,’ he says quickly. ‘I didn’t want her to see me.’

‘Did anyone else see you out there?’

‘No.’ Pete doesn’t know why this makes him anxious, his knee still jiggling under the table.

‘But we’ll find the cigarette butts behind the gate if we look?’

Pete runs a hand through his hair, feeling as nauseous as he was after smoking those cigarettes. ‘No. Natalie uses that gate all the time to cut through the woods with the girls. I didn’t want her to know.’ He pauses for a moment, replaying the moment that he dug the cigarette butts deep down inside the compost bin. Would they still be there? Would they have disintegrated in the damp, mulchy clippings? ‘I hid them in the compost bin.’

‘Right.’ Travis writes something in her notepad, and Pete feels the prickle of sweat in his armpits. ‘We can check that.’

Pete feels a shimmer of alarm, enough to make his bladder feel full. ‘You’ll find the cigarette butts there. I stubbed them out on the fence post.’ He trails off. He still hid his tracks, even though he was caught up in his own head about Natalie, praying his marriage isn’t over, and Vanessa, wishing he’d never even spokento her in the first place. A sign of a seasoned liar, for sure. ‘I’m not lying.’ As soon as the words escape he wishes he could take them back.

DI Travis gives him another of those gentle smiles. ‘I didn’t think you were lying about that, Pete.’ She flips the pages on her notes, pausing at something she’s scrawled. ‘How are things at home? Before the party, I mean. How are things between you and Natalie?’

Pete shifts in his seat, his bladder uncomfortably full now, but still he sips at the water. ‘Fine. Everything at home has been fine.’

‘Really? It’s quite an upheaval, surely, having a new baby, even when you do have other children.’

‘Well, yes,’ Pete says, that shimmer of alarm growing stronger. There’s something about the way the police officer is looking at him that makes him feel on edge. ‘Obviously Natalie and I are both tired – you forget how much time and energy a small baby takes up.’ He flicks his gaze to the younger DS beside her, wondering if he has children, too. ‘I’ve been working really long hours, and I know Natalie has been exhausted. Things have been a bit of a struggle for her. The birth wasn’t straightforward, and I know she’s finding things tough at the moment. Erin doesn’t sleep much.’ DI Travis doesn’t respond, a thick silence filling the room as Pete fumbles for something to say to erode it.

‘But that doesn’t mean … It’s been hard, but I love them so much,’ he says in a rush, the words falling over one another. ‘All of them – my family is my world.’

‘I don’t doubt that at all,’ Travis says, but she doesn’t smile this time. ‘Pete, tell me how it felt when Natalie first told you she was pregnant. I should imagine that was the last thing on your minds.’At this stage in your life. The words hang in there unspoken.

‘I was thrilled,’ Pete says. ‘I was excited we were going to have another baby.’

‘OK.’ The word is a statement, not a question, as Travis shiftsin her seat. ‘The reason I ask, Pete, is because when I spoke to Natalie she suggested perhaps you weren’t that thrilled.’

Oh. Pete feels his stomach drop away, and places the plastic cup of water on the table before his hands can begin to shake. ‘I …’

‘She said you had to change plans you two had made, and I got the impression this wasn’t something you were happy about.’ There is an undertone to her statement, one that insinuates Pete is a liar, and he’s not.He’s not. She just doesn’t understand.

‘It’s not that I wasn’t thrilled,’ he says – although, let’s be honest, he wasn’t exactly over the moon. ‘It was more … I was shocked, that’s all. It was a complete surprise. Natalie and I had never even discussed having another baby after Zadie was born. Two was enough. That’s what I thought, anyway.’

‘But Natalie didn’t agree.’

‘No. Well, she didn’t do it on purpose.’Did she?Pete has never thought about things that way before, and he frowns as he tries to recall the conversation they’d had that night in the Italian restaurant. Natalie didn’t get pregnant on purpose; he’s sure of it. Almost sure. ‘We had plans, me and Nat. Plans we’d made years before when the girls were small, and Natalie getting pregnant threw the whole thing off-kilter.’ He still feels raw about that perfect plot of land they’d allowed to slip through their fingers. ‘We were going to build a house in Australia – that was always the plan, but then … Well, the plot got sold, and we couldn’t do anything about it because Natalie was pregnant.’

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