“Let me know if he replies!” she calls out to him.
“I will,” he calls back to her.
She turns her attention to the crumpled receipt again. Then she goesto the browser on her phone and googles “Paddy’s Ramsgate.” According to the Google results, it reopens tomorrow at midday. She will be on the phone to them then. But in the meantime, she feels an unsettling wave of relief pass through her, as though she’d been waiting for this moment for a very long time, and now that it’s here, she can finally start to breathe again.
FORTY-EIGHTTHREE YEARS EARLIER
I went to Martha’s a few days after the incident at Amanda’s flat, having laid low in a cheap hotel near Harwich for the duration. I arrived with the bare essentials in my father’s holdall and a bundle of cash from Amanda, the rest of the £5,000 that Bella had given her.
I called Martha while I waited for my train to Enderford. “Martha, I am so, so sorry to do this to you, but I am going to need a place to sleep, just for a few days. I know we’ve been talking about perhaps moving in together, and I know, obviously, that we were talking abstractly and that it wasn’t meant to be a plan of action, and I know that you have the boys and the shop to think about, and I would not in a million years ask if it wasn’t urgent. But it kind of is?”
She didn’t even ask me any questions. She just said, “Yes. Of course. Come now. Stay as long as you like.”
And nearly a year later, I am still here.
Life with Martha is everything I’d dreamed it would be. Village life suits me. Martha suits me. She is so uncomplicated and kind. The boys are sweet enough. The seasons come and go through the windows of her cottage like greeting cards: cherry blossom, sunset-hued roses, rhododendron, holly and ivy, a curtain of Virginia creeper on the wall opposite the kitchen window that turns bonfire red in early autumn. I help her out in the shop when I can. The rest of the time Igo to work. She still thinks I work for the hospitality training company I told her about last year. She thinks I travel the country staying in snazzy hotels, training up shiny-faced teams of graduates and school-leavers to face the public and provide five-star service. She thinks I’m important. She’s proud of me. I can’t pretend it doesn’t hurt a bit that she’s proud of a fictional version of me and not the real me—the me who has spent vast swathes of the last thirty years visiting women around the country, being paid to make them feel good about themselves.
It’s a line of work I’ve fallen back on often over the years. And I never ever get used to it. It’s degrading and it’s hard and it’s ridiculous. It doesn’t always involve sex; it frequently involves other things like massages or city breaks or yoga classes or shopping. I charge £200 an hour, £500 for an overnight, and I earn every bloody penny of it. You’d imagine, wouldn’t you, that a man would enjoy pleasuring women for money. But that depends entirely on the woman, and frankly, most of these women are not in my league in any way. Some of them are downright revolting. This was bad enough when I was with my previous wives but is even harder to stomach now that I am with Martha.
But one good thing about my line of work is that I get to stay in a lot of hotels in a lot of different places. I get taken out for dinner to some amazing restaurants, and I come home fully versed in the details of the types of places I tell Martha I have been working in as a trainer. I can bring home souvenirs: matchbooks, bathroom miniatures, after-dinner macarons in tiny boxes tied with ribbon. I can describe hotels, high streets, tourist attractions.
But I can’t keep doing it. I simply can’t. I’m almost fifty-two now and I want more, for me, and for Martha. Unlike Tara, who was ambitious and hardworking, Martha is ambitious, hardworking, and also incredibly creative. Her mind never stops working. She has such plans for her flower shop, such visions, and I want to be a part ofthem. I want to marry her. I want to make a life with her, but I need to take things slowly, stay under the radar, keep my head well and truly down. Because my recent history is still too complicated to take the next steps.
Emma, Tara’s daughter, reported her mother as a missing person about a month after I moved in with Martha. I’d sent Emma a few messages from her mother’s phone in the days after she died, told her a long and convoluted story about being in the Algarve, making a fresh start with Jonathan, wanting a clean break, and obviously Emma didn’t believe a word of it, her replies to these messages were full of skepticism and unsuccessful attempts to trip me up, but it took her a while to feel uncomfortable enough about it to report it to the police, by which time there was nobody to answer the door when the police came calling at Amanda’s flat and I was long gone.
It’s almost a year on and Emma is still looking for her mother. She’s forever popping up on the news, campaigning for further police investigations into her mother’s disappearance, but nothing has ever broken the case.
Amanda, of course, is still a problem, but nobody seems to be looking for her, and for now at least everything feels safe, everything feels perfect.
That is until one crisp morning in late February when the apple trees outside Martha’s cottage are bare and gnarled against a sky so blue it looks like gouache and a news report appears on the screen of my phone.
A body has been found in woodland in Essex. A woman’s body. No head. No hands. No legs. Just a torso. Roughly fifty years old. No physical identifiers. Could be anyone. But I know who it is. Of course I do.
FORTY-NINE
The day after Boxing Day, Ash heads to Cambridge. She has to do something. The past twenty-four hours have been intense and too much: the claustrophobia of having Nick here on Boxing Day when it was meant to be just the three of them, and seeing Arlo behave as if Nick was his new best friend, saying things like “He’s good for Mum, that’s the most important thing,” even as he put his Christmas gifts into carrier bags ready to take “home” to Bournemouth the following day, after which he won’t have to think about any of his family again for months.
She tells her mum she’s going sales shopping and gets the ten o’clock train into St. Pancras, goes over the road to King’s Cross, and gets the 11:21 to Cambridge, from where she gets a bus from outside the station to Cherry Hinton.
Ash can see the twinkle of Christmas tree lights through the window of the house on Kingston Gardens, and she breathes a sigh of relief. A Christmas tree means that someone is actively living here. She inhales to calm her nerves, and then rings the doorbell.
A youngish man answers. He has close-cropped hair and round-framed glasses, wears a trendy sweatshirt and jeans, and his feet are bare. “Hello?” He has an American accent.
“Oh,” says Ash, “hi! I’m looking for someone called Laura? I’m notsure of her surname. Possibly Warshaw? But she used to live here about ten years ago?”
The man turns his head and calls out behind him. “Honey. Can you come here a sec?”
A woman appears a minute later. She wears a similar pair of round-framed glasses, and a similar sweatshirt and jeans.
“Was there a woman called Laura here before we moved in?”
“Laura?” says the woman. “Yes. That rings a bell. She had two little girls. Kind of fortyish?”
Ash nods feverishly. “Yes!” she says. “Yes, that’s the one. How long ago did she move out?”
“Well, we’ve been here for ten years,” says the woman, and the man nods along in agreement.
“And do you—do you have any idea where she went? What happened to her?”