eyes have moved beyond me, looking for his next trade.
I race back to the office and head straight for the toilet and lock the door. I take out Garrick’s phone and open the web browser. Body found on North Downs – is the headline on the BBC South East webpage. Underneath is a video link. I turn the phone’s volume to low and press play. The familiar rolling landscape comes into view. The journalist is wearing a green wax jacket and corduroy trousers, as if he were interrupting walking his gun dogs to give this report. Behind him stands a beech copse and behind that, a radio mast on a distant hill. Through the trees white tents are visible and people of indeterminate gender move about in plastics suits.
A body was discovered today by a student from the Environmental Science Faculty at the University of Surrey.
The journalist’s voice takes on a false gravitas. He wants to be the next John Simpson, reporting on international conflicts, not bypass protests and increased drunkenness in the town centre.
Police have confirmed that the remains are human. There’s been no comment on the cause of death, but it has been confirmed that it is being treated as suspicious.
Police refuse to speculate on whether this could be Hayley Walsh – the teenager who went missing in Crawley three weeks ago.
The shot changes to a man in late middle age, wearing a grey suit. At the bottom of the screen the caption reads: Detective Inspector Frederick Warren.
DI: We’re making inquiries into all missing people in the area.
Reporter: Is this a recent death?
DI: We’re not jumping to any conclusions right now.
Cut back to the reporter standing in front of the copse.
And that’s all we have to tell you at the moment. We’ll be keeping you up to date as and when we have more information.
The clip ends.
I remember that hill. It’s a little different now, perhaps the beeches have grown, but the copse stands on the route we used to take to the pub. On cloudy nights the only light was the streetlamps from the town reflecting against the sky – a lonely, dark, isolated spot.
I watch two more clips from different sites. Their reports are much the same. No clue as to the identity. But on a local newspaper site, one word differs from all the other reports.
It’s believed the remains indicate a violent death.
Violent. A lonely, violent death.
Someone bangs on the door.
‘You’ve been in there ages. Are you ill?’ Miranda’s voice.
‘I’m fine.’
I leave the cubicle and scuttle back to my desk. Jonathan’s back and, fortunately, hasn’t registered my absence.
I shift in my chair and look at the clock on the wall. The hands appear to be ticking backwards. I really have to go but Jonathan expects long hours. Miraculously, at six o’clock, Miranda becomes my unlikely saviour.
‘Anyone fancy a drink? I’m going to the Huntsman.’
She pronounces it ‘Huntsthman’. Jonathan looks up.
‘I’ve been here till ten, the last two nights,’ Miranda says defensively.
I expect Jonathan to roll his eyes, but he says, ‘Could do with a drink myself.’
I never socialise with work. Instead, I stay late to create elaborate charts that will go unread, and no one presses me to join their trip to the pub. I wait for the office to empty before pulling on my coat.
The sky’s a smudgy grey, and the drizzle diffuses what little light there is into a yellow haze. To the left I can see the fuzzy profile of two smokers standing outside the Huntsman. One of them looks like Paulo, though it’s impossible to be sure through the mist, and I turn in the opposite direction, towards the Tube.
A man stares out of the Sensuous Bean’s window. He lowers his head to his coffee cup as I pass. A padded jacket is thrown over the arm of his chair. Is it the same man as earlier, the one Garrick saw, or am I being paranoid?
I reach the entrance to the Tube and I’m about to pull out my Oyster card when my phone bleeps in my pocket.
The unknown number.
IT’S HIM.
Two hours after leaving Genevieve and Downsview Villa, Julia arrived at Archway Underground station, North London. The surrounding streets, noisy and litter-strewn, stood in contrast to the bourgeois avenues of Guildford. Pearl shared the same draughty house with the same seven people as in her final year at university. Despite all having jobs now, they continued to live off junk food and alcohol, as evidenced by the polystyrene cartons and beer bottles scattered about the place. It was a long way from the immaculate rooms of Downsview Villa, where the carpets might be dated, but at least they weren’t covered in fag burns and stained with chilli sauce. Strangely, some part of Julia envied Pearl’s overspilling bin and rattling windows. It symbolised city living, youth, vibrancy and independence. In going to Guildford, she couldn’t help thinking she’d swapped one dull backwater for another, with a different middle-aged woman hovering over her instead of Audrey.
Audrey, ever present and ever critical – Julia never thought of her as ‘Mum’. ‘Mum’ was used by daughters capable of pleasing. Whose mothers didn’t tell them being dumped by their boyfriend was their own fault, who didn’t always take the side of step-siblings over flesh and blood, because wasn’t it their father, not hers, paying for everything? Why was she so difficult and contrary? Why did she have to study computer science instead of something feminine, French perhaps? Couldn’t she have nice friends instead of misfits like Pearl and Andre? No, in her mind, Audrey would never be ‘Mum’.
A housemate let Julia in, and she made her way up to the room on the top floor, where Andre was already sprawled on the bed, a bottle of Holsten Pils in his hand. Pearl was sitting in front of the mirror, getting ready for their night out. She had shaken off the remains of parochial teenage misfit in the last couple of years and now smoked roll-ups and drank German lager, instead of the Consulate menthol and Diamond White she’d preferred in sixth form. Her hair had changed from a short, jet-black crop to a choppy, dirty-blonde shoulder-length bob.
‘We used to call that cut a shag,’ Audrey said when she first saw it.
Pearl had turned to Julia and smirked.
‘Well, it does get me laid,’ she’d said.
Today, Pearl was wearing a powder blue baby doll dress and enormous black boots. She leant towards the glass to smudge her eyeliner and muss her hair. An enviable look Julia couldn’t pull off. Dishevelled, she looked more like a librarian gone to
