sat there all the while she was talking, silent – eyes lowered to the carpet. I ignored Rachel: willed him to look at me so that I might see in his eyes what he made of this preposterous suggestion, but he continued to sit there, eyes downcast – not daring to meet mine. “What’s wrong,” I asked him, “can’t you even look at me?” “You should think about it,” he said, looking past me – “what she said is right – he’d have a good life.” He – he said. He was convinced you’d be a boy.
‘I stood up then, told them both that they could keep their money – I had no intention of giving up my child. If Vince wasn’t willing to leave Rachel, then he was giving up any right he had to you. Not that I had to state that – Rachel wasn’t about to let him have anything to do with a child that wasn’t hers too.’
Angela stopped talking – she seemed exhausted by having to go over it all. Joanna tried to absorb all that her mother had told her.
‘And you didn’t see them again?’ she asked.
Her mother shrugged. ‘I saw her on the bus once. I had you in the pushchair. She kept staring at you. I pretended I didn’t know her – got off the bus two stops early and walked the rest of the way home.’
‘Did you not feel … sorry for her?’
‘I suppose I did sometimes. He should have left her – it wasn’t fair – she’d have met someone else – we’d have been happy. But people don’t always do the right thing.’
Angela stood up from her stool, rinsed her mug and left it on the draining board. She spoke with her back to the room. ‘I know I can’t tell you what to do, Joanna, but I’d rather you didn’t see Rachel Arnold again. And it’s not for what she might tell you – you needn’t think that, I just don’t want her latching onto you now that Vince is gone.’
Joanna said nothing. Enough lies had been told, and she wasn’t prepared to commit to not seeing Rachel again. There were things she wanted to know about her father.
Awkwardly, her mother kissed her goodnight. It was the first time since Rachel Arnold had come into their lives. She looked tired, Joanna thought. When she reached the door, she turned.
‘I almost forgot, Pauline asked me to go shopping with her tomorrow afternoon – she wants to get a dress. She’s going to a wedding or something. So I won’t be here when you get in.’
‘Okay, Mum, I’ll see you tomorrow night then.’
Joanna sat for a while in the kitchen, looking out into the dark, listening to her mother moving about upstairs. She thought of the solicitor she’d met at the funeral and went out to the hall to check her coat pocket to see if she still had his card. She took it out and looked at it. She had a sudden urge to see the place where the man, Oliver, had found her father’s body. She decided that she would call him the following day when her mother was not around.
‘So where exactly were you when you saw him?’
Oliver pointed down the bank towards the lock. ‘Just there,’ he said. ‘I’d crossed over and come down the other side.’
He watched as the girl, Joanna, moved towards the water’s edge. She knelt close to the damp earth, lifted the camera and began to photograph the scene. She zoomed in on the reeds where he told her he’d spotted what he’d thought was a coat. She asked him to describe as clearly as he could what he had seen – the position of her father’s body and how the rescue team had removed him from the water. She moved back then and took some shots of the lock with the reeds in the foreground. He heard the sound of the shutter opening and closing repeatedly until she rose and walked stealthily onto the lock to point her camera at the murky canal beneath. It was coming on for four in the afternoon and the light had begun to fade.
Oliver took the opportunity to observe the girl as she stood there, eye to the lens, her attention focused entirely on the camera. She was quite striking, but in a different way altogether from the Hernandez sisters. Her auburn hair hung loose over her shoulders, and her skin was so pale that it appeared almost translucent. He wondered how old she was and guessed that she was perhaps mid-twenties. She had told him as they’d walked along the canal road about how she was the fruit of Vince Arnold’s early infidelity. He would have been, what, late twenties when he’d had the fling with Joanna’s mother? According to the papers, he was fifty-four when he died.
Oliver had not told Joanna about Patrick’s visit. He’d arranged to meet him that evening in Brogans’ pub, and he’d decided to tell him that he couldn’t take on the legal work he’d offered him. Given Patrick’s record and the circumstances in which Vince Arnold’s insurance policy had been taken out, he wanted no involvement. The last thing he needed was to become embroiled in a potentially dubious insurance claim. Patrick could find some other patsy to look after that one. His gut told him to stay clear.
The girl had finished taking pictures. She put the cover back on the lens and retraced her steps down the bank.
‘Do you reckon it was an accident?’ she asked.
Oliver looked at her, at her pale skin and eyes the colour of storms. ‘The family seems to think so,’ he said. There was no point in telling her about the autopsy result, raising questions in the girl’s mind. She was still trying to get to grips with having discovered the identity of her father.
‘Rachel said that you studied with Patrick?’
‘Yes, it was a long time ago now.’
‘Is he a solicitor, too?’
‘No. He hasn’t practised in a long time. He … well, to tell you the truth he was struck off. I asked him about it when we were speaking. He was quite frank, said he’d done something he shouldn’t have and got himself debarred.’
Joanna nodded. ‘Did he tell you anything else? Did he say anything about my father?’
Oliver hesitated, and then decided that it might be better to tell the girl the truth. She would hear it anyway, he assumed, from Rachel or Patrick if they were to keep in touch. ‘He mentioned that your father may have run up some debts. He was a sports journalist, I believe, and it’s not unusual for people involved to fall into the trap. Betting is a tempting game. I’ve seen men lose everything over it.’
‘Do you think maybe he … that he might have taken his own life? People often do, don’t they, when they have problems like that?’
Oliver shook his head. ‘It did occur to me when Patrick told me, but I asked him and he said no. They think that Vince was simply unlucky, another victim of the freeze.’
They had started walking, left the lock and reeds behind. Oliver pointed towards the camera. He wanted to change the subject and to get to know something about the girl.
‘You like taking pictures?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘This probably looks a bit strange, macabre even. But yes, I take the camera most places, never miss an opportunity. I’m doing a degree at the moment in the IADT.’
‘That’s the art college?’
‘Art, yes. What – you don’t
