Every Good Girl (35 page)

‘Emily says she knows who the man who attacked her was. She's babysitting for him. She called me and I told her I'd find you, go back there and we'll talk to the police. She can't leave the child or Lucy, she says. That's why she rang me.'

‘But she's babysitting for neighbours, for . . . for Paul across the road. But she can't mean . . . he's . . .' Nina felt confused, waiting for some kind of information to take hold. ‘I don't like him that much, but surely . . .' her voice trailed away. Surely what? Surely not a nice nuclear-family man with a gorgeous wife, all the desirable trappings that made up middle-class life. There was nothing ‘surely' about it. After all, she'd even briefly suspected her own brother, ignoring the ‘surely it's not him' that was instinctive, protective.

‘How does she know?' Henry asked as they walked towards Joe's car. Nina, held between them, felt like an injured footballer being led off the pitch by concerned team-mates.

‘Something to do with the smell of Sophie's hat,' Joe said. ‘At least that's what she said on the phone. I didn't much understand, but I believed her.'

‘If she says it's him, then it's him,' Nina said, climbing into the Audi. She was feeling nauseous again and
put it down to the bitter lemon – and also to the shock of another proven instinct, this time one she'd ignored: her kitchen knives were still in the tea-towel drawer after Paul's visit, and yet she'd let her children babysit for him.

‘Exactly,' Joe said, switching on the engine.

Emily felt strangely calm as soon as she'd put the phone down. Dad would fix it, just like when she was little. She didn't tell Lucy. Lucy might panic, get theatrical and upset Sam. And then Sam would cry and be frightened and everything would be chaos and no control. They were upstairs, tired, thumbs in their mouths, lying on Paul and Megan's high brass bed watching a film of dreadful violence.

Emily sat on the sofa and waited. The balaclava was in her bag, safely stashed in a self-seal freezer bag. The police would be pleased about that. The coat he'd been wearing that day was hanging in the hallway, just as if it was any old real coat. She couldn't touch that.

Breathing quietly and concentrating on not looking at the clock, Emily calculated how long it would take for Paul and Megan and Sophie to get from Gatwick if the plane and the customs and baggage had no delays. She imagined them, as her nervousness started to cut through the calm, bursting in through the door and shouting ‘We're home! Record time!' They'd be all smiles and family life because Paul wouldn't be an evil violent creep all the time. When the doorbell actually rang, and she knew that her parents had got there first, she almost flung herself into the hallway. But the shapes through the window were not theirs.

‘Hi. Thought you might want some company!' Chloe and Nick were standing on the doorstep looking eager.
Emily laughed, a disjointed shriek, mildly hysterical at the shock of it being
them
.

‘I mean, sorry, if you want us to go away, that's cool, but—'

‘No! No come in. The more the better!' It sounded sarcastic, even to Emily's ears, but she didn't bother to apologize. She didn't mean it to sound like that but they'd have to understand. They would if they were real friends.

‘We brought you some drink. Ready mixed, Archer's and lemonade.' Chloe was holding out a Perrier bottle full of clear, fizzy liquid. ‘You'd never know, would you?' she said, making herself comfortable on the sofa, ‘just what that innocent little bottle contained.'

‘You're so right,' Emily murmured vaguely. Nick was standing with his hands in his pockets, eyeing her tits. She pulled her T-shirt away from her body, making it baggy and giving herself more air next to her skin. Nick looked down at the floor, going pink.

‘My parents are on their way,' Emily told them very quickly. ‘And then the police will come because the man I'm babysitting for is the man who grabbed me that day on the Common.' She said it calmly enough, but she kept looking at the window, willing Joe's Audi to pull up outside, now, right now. ‘So if you're carrying anything you shouldn't be, like the odd spliff . . .' she glanced at Nick and shrugged, her hands stuffed in her pockets, as if none of what she'd said mattered really, it was just one of those things to be dealt with.

‘Shit! Are you sure? I mean are you
really
sure?' Chloe said, her eyes wide and amazed.

‘Well of course I'm sure. Stay if you want, then you'll see. I already called the police station and spoke to that nice woman officer that they gave me that time. You get one allocated, sex crime victims. She said to call
again after he's come back and she'd do some checking while we wait. I think I'm supposed to just get paid for the babysitting, be like nothing's different and go home. Except that I called Dad.'

‘You're very, well, businesslike about it,' Chloe commented. She didn't, Emily thought, looking particularly approving.

‘What do you want me to do, scream and yell? Bit late for that. Nothing's going to happen to me now.' She picked up a wedding photo of Megan and Paul, all smiles and confetti. ‘It's going to happen to
him
.'

‘You'd better be really, really sure. Surer than you've ever been about anything,' Nick said in a slow, considered way. His voice sounded discordantly male, as if, right now, it had no real business being heard. The doorbell rang before she could even think of a reply.

‘Em! Are you all right? Are they back yet?' Nina hugged Emily and peered beyond her.

‘What's happening, why are you here, Mum? And Dad?' Lucy appeared on the stairs. Nina looked at her over Emily's shoulder. She shouldn't be there, she thought, and neither should Sam, but she wanted Joe with them all.

‘I'll take them to my place, shall I?' Henry suggested.

‘Oh Henry, thanks. That would be great.'

Lucy stepped backwards up the stairs, sensing she was to miss a drama. ‘Why? Why can't we be here? Megan will be really cross if Sam's not home.'

‘Tough,' Joe said. ‘Lucy my love, we'll explain later. Just go with Henry for now.'

‘Fish and chips?' Henry said, opening the door and ushering Lucy and a quite amiable Sam out onto the path.

‘It might be an idea if you left, too,' Joe said to Chloe and Nick. The two of them looked at each other and
then at Emily. She could tell they wanted to stay, but that they also knew they'd wish they hadn't.

‘Tell us about it at school,' Chloe said, hugging Emily. ‘Or call me in the morning.' Nick said nothing. Emily watched him from the window, walking down the path and waiting till the gate was almost shut before he put his arm round Chloe. Australia, Emily thought with longing. New people.

There was nothing like the urgent nee-nawing of police sirens for linking a community. Doors edged open as the cars stopped, lights flashing, outside number 26 and eager nosy onlookers gathered in small speculating groups on the pavement at the shortest distance they could consider discreet. Even posh Penelope, still shoving her arms into a jacket, indulged her curiosity quite shamelessly and bustled along the Crescent to see what was going on. ‘Look at that,' Joe commented to Nina. ‘She's not even got the dog with her so she can be pretending to be just passing on her way to the Common.' Far more accustomed to being the victims of burglary than perpetrators of anything more criminal than a dodgy tax return, the residents clung together in outrage and shock as the truth emerged. ‘But he's so . . . Paul's just . . .' Penelope waffled to one of the policemen. ‘So what, love? So like everyone else? Like you and me? They all are.'

Megan blamed Nina. ‘Why couldn't you just leave things alone?' she hissed at her over the luggage still cluttering the hallway. ‘He only did it because of
this
. He'd have been all right when I'd finished being pregnant, he was before.' She clutched the baby-bulge that had clearly grown in the Caribbean sun.

Nina was close to feeling sorry for her: she imagined the twins cuddled safely together under the stretched skin, innocently growing their limbs, their hair and
their beautiful baby faces. Megan's own face was frantic with anger and terror and she looked from Sam to Sophie and back to Nina with furious desperation.

‘What about them? You didn't think, did you? Their lives will be ruined, don't you realize?'

‘What about his victims' lives?' Nina asked her quietly. ‘If you knew he was doing this, why didn't you ask
him
to think about
them
?'

‘You can never tell, with men,' Monica stated ominously when she heard about Paul's arrest from Nina. ‘I suppose, all things considered, it's just as well that you've let Joe move back in again.' Her tone was somewhat grudging, Nina thought with amusement and rather implied that he shouldn't even have been considered for another chance if Genghis had been more use as a guard dog.

‘What will he do with that flat of his?' Monica continued. ‘Keep it on?'

‘To instal a mistress in for afternoon fun?' Nina teased. ‘No, he'd only rented it. He's brought all his studio equipment back, and that battered old sofa. Everything else he bought has gone into storage for now, till we decide just what to do with it.'

‘Graham could do with a new bed,' Monica told her with a very intense look. ‘I'm going to have to buy a hat, to go with that blue suit we got in Harrods. He and Jennifer are about to name the day.'

Many months later, Nina thought again about Megan and wondered how she was coping. She thought of her living alone with Sam and Sophie and her fast-growing twins, and wondering how on earth she was going to tell them, when they asked, that their father wasn't around for the birth because he was locked away on remand. Some people joked about prison, called it
being a guest of Her Majesty. For what Paul had been doing there wouldn't be any element of being a guest about it.

The first time Paul had been caught, years before, during Megan's pregnancy with Sam, there'd been a fine and a mention in the local paper and a swift, embarrassed change of area for living in. It didn't seem likely that Megan would play the understanding wife this time, not now there would be a prison term to live down and the realization that her husband had actually committed real sex crimes, not some joky little misdemeanour that had simply got a bit out of hand. Now number 26 was up for sale again, but then so was number 23.

Nina and Joe were taking their last Sunday walk on the Common. Neither of them would miss it. They would still see Henry. He and posh Penelope, who had got together in the post-arrest excitement and discovered a shared taste for gossip, the Post-Impressionists and good Burgundy, had promised to be frequent visitors and to keep them supplied with decent wines and delicacies that London people always assume simply aren't to be found beyond the M25. Down in Dorset there would be the long empty beach to walk on and Genghis, at last, would be able to run free. Emily, on her postcard from Ayers Rock, had simply said she didn't mind where they moved to as long as absolutely nothing of hers got thrown away in the packing except her copy of
Man-Date
.

Lucy was holding Genghis's lead, skipping ahead. Another Sunday afternoon, another arm-wrenching run for the dog with Lucy imagining she had control. Her chilled breath billowed under the trees as she ran and panted, shrieking and laughing at the dog and telling him, hopelessly, to slow down.

‘Look how free she thinks she is. No sense of danger. That must be bliss,' Nina was saying to Joe. ‘Emily might never have that again. No woman does, not really. Wherever we go, there's always that back of the mind feeling about someone like Paul, stalking and creeping and watching.'

‘Men get that too, you know,' he told her. ‘We don't all go through life feeling like Superman. If we're not scared for ourselves, there's always someone we care about.'

Nina looked down into the pram Joe was pushing. Their new baby, milk-full and secure, was sleeping. ‘The sleep of the innocent,' Monica had said when she'd first seen him at the hospital. Nina, in a postnatal mental blur, hadn't been listening properly and had misheard it as the
slaughter
of the innocents. Her eyes had filled with new-mother easy tears and she'd crushed her new son to her in automatic protection. Later, she thought carefully about that, analysing her reaction. She'd have felt the same about the girls. She had done at the time, when they were that tiny, she was certain. It really wasn't that this one was a boy. The girls had been just as treasured and adored and had turned out fine. You didn't get them for long, that was the trouble. She would bring this boy up the same way as the girls, she was sure of it. Really, she was absolutely sure.

Graham was out on the Common again early in the evening, long after the wintry sun had disappeared. It was chill and bleak, the stiff, freezing branches of the trees motionless as if the slightest stir would snap them and give them pain like broken bones. Soon it would be time to go back. The women would worry. They would be making supper, busy together in their kitchen harmony. Monica still, after all these months, would be telling Jennifer just how much chilli was right for him and double-checking that the parsnips had been put in the oven at the right time to roast with the potatoes. They didn't mind him sloping off out, as long as he told them more or less where he was going and when he'd be back.

‘Men do that,' Jennifer had conceded, as soon as they were back from the San Francisco honeymoon (Edwards air base in time for the open day and then Miramar – sitting at the end of the runway watching the F-18s, pretending to be Tom Cruise). ‘I know they like to go to the pub.' Sometimes he drank a can of lager he'd brought out with him just so she could imagine that was where he'd been. Occasionally he even lit a cigarette and let it burn down, wafting smoke over his clothes so he'd smell of lounge bar. If it made them happy.