Page 101 of Meet me at the Seaside Cottages

‘What do you mean.’

‘You know about this stuff,’ she gasps.

‘What do you mean? I don’t know anything about finance. I’m an architect.’

‘Not about the finances! That’s pretty obvious. No. You know about housing.’ Essie glances at her watch. ‘I have to catch the midday plane,’ she says, in a warning voice. ‘You have to tell me about the housing office. Also,’ she says, in a slightly meeker tone, ‘I need to borrow the money for the plane ticket.’

Roused from her iPad, Verity jumps up excitedly, waving, and Essie waves back. Verity beckons her over to show her that she has taught Argyll to raise a paw for a piece of cheese without having to yank her. And Essie, for all her impatience, the headstrong mess she’s made of everything . . . she goes over to her. While Lowell is pulling up internet pages that might help, and printing them out, she goes and sits and watches patiently while Verity shows her.

That’s her mother, Lowell thinks. That’s Janey all over. He sighs internally.

‘Have you asked your mother?’

‘No,’ says Essie. ‘She’ll lock me in the kitchen. Please, Lowell. Please just answer my questions and then I’ll go.’

‘Do you promise not to incriminate me to the police?’

Essie doesn’t want to think that this might be a police matter, even though it so obviously is. She just has to do something.

‘ABSOLUTELY,’ she hollers back, while still holding Verity’s gaze.

*

Lowell drops her at the airport and she just makes the flight.

She hasn’t been able to think straight from the second she was sitting in her mother’s car, surrounded by love and sympathy, realising she had everything. But this is her mess and she has to do something. On the flight, her fists clench. And then her fury turns outwards, towards Connor, Tris, the whole frigging arrogant lot of them, the smug, rugby-loving bastards, listening to any old BS. And she’d fallen for it.

Her stewardess friend, Gertie, hasn’t heard the news yet, and thinks her tension is due to Essie being a nervous flyer; she comes and says comforting things to her, which Essie barely hears, but feels guilty at more kindness she doesn’t deserve.

The little plane judders and hops and comes in to land on the huge international runway in Edinburgh, just behind the vast Airbus coming from Doha; the tiny tin bus they’re in bounces down in its slipstream just behind it.

Essie jumps down the steps and tears through the airport hordes towards the tram stop, hopping in just before it glides off, then paces, anxiously. She can’t think about everything, can’t think about the mess she’s left behind her. She has to keep moving.

She jumps out on Princes Street, the castle towering above her, unchanging through history, which normally she findscomforting but today she doesn’t give it a second glance. She tears through the crowds enjoying the bright light and cool winds blowing down from the north, charging down Frederick Street into the grey grids of the New Town, the cacophony of traffic, sirens, people, buskers, socialist workers completely overwhelming; it’s amazing how quickly she’d forgotten the noise and the chaos of the city, got used to the quieter, easier pace of life. This seems crazy, to try to fit so many people into such a small place. Buggies skirt huge grey cobblestones; bicycles take daring swoops around the statues, trying to quickly make it from one truncated bike lane to another without being run down by irate taxi drivers. It’s absolute havoc. Out of breath, desperately enervated, she pounds past the people reconstructing their favourite scenes fromGood Omens,One Day,Trainspotting, appears in hundreds of people’s photographs of the beautiful city, a fleeting glimpse of a striped T-shirt, blurred, in the background, later removed from some as spoiling the image, kept in some as a view of a living city in motion.

But Essie is heedless, and runs, on and on, towards her goal. He has to be in. Where else would he be? And will the others be there? She will deal with that as and when. She certainly isn’t calling ahead. Isn’t warning anyone what she’s doing.

She is making for the flat. The flat is part of an entire circle, or circus as it’s called, on Moray Place: a perfect set of tall houses around a beautiful round park – private, of course, to the lucky people who live there. No traffic is allowed to drive around the circus, which means children can play happily in the streets or jump in and out of the gates, into the rose garden and past the flowerbeds towards the swings. It’s heavenly. Looking upwards through the elm trees towards the tall glass windows of the ancient buildings, far away from the noise of the city, it is easy to believe you are in the past, back when these houseswere built, and the ladies would stroll to their garden, lifting their long skirts up from the mud and mess of the cobbles; and the noises would be carriages, not the zoom of electric cars and the far-off ding of the trams.

Essie realises as she approaches the flat that she has been terrified there might be police there, or journalists, but there aren’t; it is the same as ever. It is going to destroy lives, but it isn’t even the worst thing happening that day, which is a sobering thought.

She doesn’t ring the big old metal doorbell. She hasn’t heard from Connor. Which means he knows and Tris knows and they all know that what has happened is unspeakable. Which means he won’t want to see her. People hate, she knows, people who make them feel they are behaving badly. Or make them feel guilty for not being better. She thinks briefly of her mother, then banishes the thought.

One of the downstairs neighbours, an elderly woman who is made up immaculately every day, her hair set, with a tiny dog she takes for slow, meandering walks while it barks furiously at every dog, child, lamppost and blade of grass it encounters, is on her way out and, recognising Essie, gratefully lets her take the weight of the big black entry door. That beautiful big, heavy door, that leads to the black and white tiled entrance; the curling black wrought-iron balustrade that loops the stone steps gracefully up to the three flats; the usual jumble of expensive estate agents’ magazines on the marble-topped table next to the huge gold-framed mirror that hangs by the door. Essie does not stop, as she normally does, to check her make-up, but instead hurls herself up the steps, two at a time, to Connor’s flat on the third floor.

And now Essie is back at the flat; the place she so coveted and so adored; had always dreamed of.

The circus is still quiet and beautiful; there are still gardeners making the private garden perfect, and the hollyhocks are starting to show. But those glorious shining doors with their brightly polished knockers, the elegant secret back gardens that go down the banks to the Water of Leith . . . this one has something ugly behind all its beauty.

Essie hammers on the front door. She doesn’t know what she will do if Tris answers. Surely he’ll be busy, or in hiding or something. The reports said he’d been taken in for questioning, she doesn’t even know what that means. Presumably he has access to some very expensive lawyers.

She hammers again. No response.

Then it occurs to her that, if Connor is in there, he might think it is the police. She kneels down to the letterbox.

‘Connor? Connor. Let me in. Please. It’s me. Sweetie, I just want to make sure you’re alright.’

There is a feeling in the air; there is a way you can tell that there was someone inside. The air is disturbed, just a tiny amount.

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