I unclip my seat belt. ‘Could you stop doing that, please?’
She snaps back round to face me, her lips tight and her eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t tell me what to do, Jo.’
The transformation is shocking, all trace of her cheerful, friendly demeanour gone. She lied to me. She doesn’t have a son called John who lives on our street. She’s never strolled down to Perrett’s Park with her granddaughter. And I never told her my name.
‘I want you to get out of my car,’ I say as steadily as I can.
The smallest of smiles creeps onto her lips as she straightens her jacket and settles herself into the back seat. She reaches out her left arm and drapes it over Elise’s car seat.
‘Pretty girl, your daughter,’ she says under her breath but loud enough so I can hear it. ‘Isn’t she, Jo?’
The malevolence in her eyes makes me catch my breath.
‘Get out,’ I say again. A man has appeared at the end of the street. If I open the door and shout he’ll hear me. Paula sees me looking.
‘Now, now. No need to be rude. I’ve lost something. That’s all. And I think your husband might know where it is.’
I stiffen. ‘Max? What’s this got to do with Max?’
Paula glances over her shoulder again – the man has reached the car behind mine – and pulls on the door catch. ‘He’ll know what it’s about. Just tell him to get in touch. Oh, and, there’s something else.’
She digs into her pocket with her free hand.
‘You should keep an eye on your daughter’s things,’ she says as she places a small, soft, multicoloured glove on Elise’s car seat.
‘And your daughter,’ she adds as she gets out.
Max Blackmore sighs as his mobile phone judders to life, vibrating on the smooth wooden desk that separates him from his editor. He snatches it up and looks at the screen. Jo, again. It’s the third time his wife has called him since he left for work at 8 a.m. and he’s already had to reassure her that yes, he does think it’s OK for Elise to go to nursery with a bit of a cough and yes, he will stop by at the chemist to get more Calpol before he gets home. He’s been ignoring his home mobile for the last half an hour and now she’s ringing his work mobile instead.
His editor Fiona Spelling leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. She’s doing ‘the face’, the one that signifies that her genial mood is on the cusp of switching to irritable. ‘Do you need to get that?’
He tucks the phone into the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘It can keep.’
‘Are you sure? Because you know she’ll ring me if she can’t get through to you.’
Max grimaces. He should never have given Jo Fiona’s direct line. It was meant to calm her – so she could check he was OK if he couldn’t answer his mobile – but she rings the number so often she now has it on speed dial. Literally speed dial, programmed into her chunky, ancient Nokia. One for him, two for her mother, three for nursery, four for her boss and five for Fiona. He’s begged her to delete Fiona’s number but she won’t have it.
‘It’s her agoraphobia,’ he says. ‘It makes her overly anxious.’
‘But she works at the university as a student support officer, doesn’t she? How bad can it be if she can hold down a job?’
Max smiles ruefully. He thought the same as Fiona once: that you’re basically housebound if you suffer from agoraphobia, but it’s not as ‘simple’ as that – something Jo has explained to him countless times. She isn’t afraid of going outside, she’s afraid of situations where she can’t escape or get help.
‘It’s bad,’ he says. ‘Really bad. Jo works part-time but she won’t take Elise to the park or the zoo. She won’t even go food shopping any more, not since she had a panic attack in the corner shop because she thought someone was looking at her strangely.’
‘Wow.’ His boss arches an eyebrow.
Fiona doesn’t know the half of it. He and Jo haven’t had sex for over a year. They had a dry spell before, when she was so afraid of getting pregnant she wouldn’t let him anywhere near her, but then they’d conceived Elise and he’d assumed that everything would go back to normal. It didn’t. It got worse.
‘Anyway, Max,’ Fiona says, gesturing towards her screen. ‘Congratulations. I’ve read your story and it’s good. Very good. How does it feel?’
‘How does what feel?’
‘To get a conviction off the back of your investigation? Five years, he got, didn’t he?’
Max smiles for the first time since he sat down. He would have loved to see the look on Ian White’s face when the police turned up to arrest him. Evil bastard. He’d set up a national chain of money-lending shops that charged single mums, pensioners and people on benefits ridiculous amounts of interest and then turned up at their home and threatened them with violence when they couldn’t pay it back. Coercion, drug-taking and violence were rife. Max had witnessed one of Ian’s goons shoving an old man up against the wall of his own home when he said he wouldn’t be able to eat for a week if he paid up. He couldn’t react. He couldn’t stop him. All he could do was pray that the tiny camera in his glasses was getting enough footage to convict the bastards.
‘And you weren’t worried about your cover slipping? No one at Cash Creditors suspected you?’ Fiona asks.
‘There were a couple of sticky moments but I talked my way out of them.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me in the least.’ His boss smiles tightly. ‘So, are we going to have to start calling you Donal MacIntyre now then?’
‘Nah.’ He waves a dismissive hand. ‘He’s old hat. Max Blackmore will do fine, although if you want to call me “sir” that would be fine too.’
He stiffens as Fiona’s smile slips and she raises an eyebrow. Shit. He always takes a joke one step too far.
The second the buzzer sounds and the door is un-locked I fly through the nursery, dodging coat stands, a papier-mâché homage to The Hungry Caterpillar, and several members of staff.
‘Elise?’ A bead of sweat trickles down my lower back as I fumble with the catch of the gate at the ‘twos room’. Half a dozen pairs of tiny eyes look up at me in interest and alarm as I step into the room. None of them belong to my daughter.
‘Everything OK, Jo?’ Sharon, a woman with a tight ponytail and an even tighter smile, looks up from her position in front of the children, a picture book in her hands. Another of the nursery staff, a sweet eighteen-year-old called Bethan, looks up
