He shrugs. ‘Most of the team are away this week, various school visits, so I’ll just work from home.’ He falls silent again and then takes another gulp of beer. He scans the room and I wonder if he feels exposed, like I do, or if it’s because he doesn’t want to look at me.
‘You don’t seem yourself today,’ I try.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Is it about Jess disappearing?’
He gives me a disappointed glare, then looks away. ‘Why would I be worried about that? She’ll have used the money to run away, just like we predicted. Like we hoped for, remember?’
I think back to our stilted conversation as we counted down the hours before the drop last night. Our hope that Jess would take the money and then vanish from our lives. Is Matt right? Should I be celebrating rather than catastrophising? Then I think about the Waitrose bag, the note Milla typed. My dad will kill you.
Why the hell can’t he even hold eye contact with me?
I take a gulp of my gin and tonic. ‘Are you worried about the police then? That detective coming round with more questions for Lucy?’
He closes his eyes, lets out a deep sigh. ‘I know what being falsely accused of a crime can do,’ he murmurs, his voice stretched by emotion. ‘I couldn’t bear it if Lucy suffers the same fate as me, and for something much more serious. She’s been through enough already.’
‘She’s got us,’ I say. ‘She knows we’ll always be there for her.’
‘And what 15-year-old girl is satisfied with that? Lucy’s best – and let’s be honest, only proper friend – left her. Whether there’s something romantic going on between Lucy and Bronwen or not, those two girls have been practically joined at the hip for a decade. Losing her must have been devastating.’ He pauses, his features soften a notch. ‘Hey, do you remember them doing that blood-sister ceremony?’
I nod. Smile at the memory of two 8-year-old girls. A solemn ritual of friendship until Milla made them both cry with stories of cross infection and vampire diseases.
‘But instead of having time to adapt to life without Bronwen,’ Matt continues, his face hardening again. ‘Lucy was suddenly being picked on, relentlessly, by two fucking nasty teenage girls for no reason at all. And then manipulated into meeting Amber on the very night the girl’s killed.’
It’s all my fears echoing back to me. But I can’t let them drag me down, otherwise everything we’ve done so far – all the lies we’ve told, the ransom demand we’ve met – will be for nothing. ‘It being a more serious crime should work in our favour,’ I point out. ‘Murder is investigated with much more depth than assault. Even if they find out that Lucy met Amber, it’s only circumstantial. They’ll need more evidence than that to charge her with murder. Real forensic evidence.’ I push away the image of Lucy’s jeans; the blood spatters that I did my best to wash away. The missing jumper. The denim jacket she supposedly lost.
Matt’s face clears slightly. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he says, exhaling. ‘And I’m sorry.’ He reaches for my hand, grazes my fingers with his. ‘I’m probably just tired.’ Then he shifts backwards, picks up his pint glass and drains the remaining beer. ‘Another drink?’ he asks, standing up.
I watch him walk to the bar, then make conversation with Steve’s wife Jade. He’s smiling, nodding, and to anyone else he might seem totally at ease. But I can see the muscles in his jaw tremoring. His fingers drumming against his side.
Is this really fear for Lucy? Or is something else making him stressed?
My dad will kill you.
I think about the badger he hit, the damage to the car, his lost hour crying by the roadside. But that’s all it was, I remind myself, a string of unfortunate events. And he’s explained why he’s acting strangely.
‘Here you go,’ he says, handing me a fresh gin and tonic. I take the goblet from him – the ice clinking as my hand shakes – and watch him sit down. He eyes the Moretti bar mat I’ve ruined, then slides it across the table and puts it in his pocket. Needing its scrappy edges out of sight.
He was tidy even when we first met, back when we were two uncool students at one of Oxford’s most elite colleges. I remember the cleaner calling him her golden boy because his room would always be spotless. But in those days, I could tease him about it, and he wouldn’t mind; he’d just raise his eyebrows and look at me sheepishly. That changed when his dad died, and the carefree side of him has never fully returned. I know if I referenced his discomfort with the bar mat now, he’d snap at me.
‘I didn’t get a chance to tell you about Milla’s journey home last night,’ I say instead.
He narrows his eyes. ‘I saw Milla this morning, she said everything went smoothly.’
‘She was cross with you; she didn’t fall for your story about hitting the badger in daylight.’
‘Too smart, that one,’ he murmurs. ‘So what happened on her journey?’
‘I don’t have the full story,’ I admit. ‘But she didn’t get back until ten to one. And she’d been crying, which is not like her at all. She said that she’d seen someone when she was walking past the derelict carriages and had to hide from them, presumably until they left.’
‘Poor kid,’ Matt mutters. ‘On top of everything else. But she didn’t tell you who it was?’
I shake my head. ‘She was exhausted last night so I didn’t push it. And then she was mad about you following her this morning, so I didn’t try. And she’d gone to the library by the time I came back downstairs after my shower. I haven’t seen her since.’
He stays quiet for a while, rubs his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘Do you think it could have been Felix?’ he asks eventually.
I look up, surprised. Milla hiding from her ex-boyfriend hadn’t crossed my mind.
‘I’ve heard that teenage romances, um, blossom in that railway dumping ground,’ he goes on. ‘If Felix had been there with some other girl, Milla wouldn’t have wanted to interrupt that. And I imagine it’s one of the few things that she might cry about?’
I sit back in my chair. Could it be something as simple as that? Milla has never explained why her relationship with Felix ended so abruptly, but teenage boys cheating on their girlfriends must be relatively standard behaviour. But if it was Felix who Milla was hiding from, then the threat was personal to her. It wouldn’t explain why Jess disappeared.
‘If Milla was hiding all that time, she must have seen Jess walk past,’ I say.
Matt’s expression sours. ‘What?’
‘Well, if Jess picked the money up about fifteen minutes after Milla dropped it, then she’d have been walking past those carriages less than ten minutes later. As I said, Milla didn’t get home until nearer one o’clock, and it’s only a ten-minute walk from there, so their paths must have crossed.’
He blinks. It’s warm in the pub and beads of sweat are forming on his forehead. Why does he look so uncomfortable?
A weight sinks onto my chest. I take a deep breath. ‘That makes sense, doesn’t it?’
‘Did Milla say she saw Jess?’ he asks.
I shuffle backwards on my chair, push my spine against its hard wooden back. ‘I told you,’ I say carefully. ‘I haven’t had a chance to talk to her properly.’
‘Properly?’ He lets out a crack of laughter, then lowers his voice. ‘Don’t you think it would have been her headline comment if she’d seen the person who’s blackmailing us?’
His question suddenly breathes life into the first thought I had when I found out Jess was missing this morning. That Milla wouldn’t admit to seeing Jess in that train carriage graveyard if she’d done something to her. Just like she could have done something to Amber during those lost hours on Friday night. I wonder if the police have searched the disused carriages. There must be at least thirty of them in various states of disrepair up there. I wonder how long it would take to look through them all. ‘I just can’t work out how she could have missed seeing Jess,’ I say.
‘It’s a big place,’ Matt counters, his voice stripped of all warmth. ‘It was dark. Milla was hiding. If she heard someone moving, she would have assumed it was Felix – or whoever she was hiding from – and kept her head down even more.’
My skin prickles. Matt’s explanation makes a lot of sense. Why didn’t I think like that? Why did I jump to Milla being violent?
Does that mean I’m being equally unfair about Matt? Being obsessively tidy and unusually quiet isn’t a crime. In fact, many wives would love their husbands to be more like him. ‘Do you really think Jess just ran away?’ I ask.
‘One hundred per cent,’ Matt says, his voice firm. ‘I can see why other people might question why she didn’t take all her stuff. But that’s because they don’t know she’s got a fresh ten grand in her pocket. Why bother packing your old clothes when you’ve got plenty of money to buy new ones?’
This makes sense too, I realise. ‘Where do you think she’s gone?’ I ask quietly. ‘She is only 15.’
Matt’s eyes shift. ‘Who knows,’ he says gently. ‘But it’s not like the system has done her any favours. With some money in her pocket, maybe she’ll thrive on her own.’
This is symbolic of the new Matt, his disillusionment with the state who employed him for fifteen years. It goes against everything I believe in, and listening to him be so dismissive of a system that might creak but is filled with people who genuinely want to make a difference, is hard to deal with. But it’s easier to let his comments go rather than get into an argument.
‘She’s got a dad,’ I tell him. ‘Up in Derbyshire. Her social worker told me she idolises him.’
‘Really?’ He looks at me, then away. ‘Do you think she might have gone there?’
