Until You're Mine (37 page)

As I drove up to the ticket barrier, all I could hear were the midwife’s words last time it had happened.

Do you want to see your baby, love?

I’d declined with a vigorous shake of my head, preferring instead to dissolve into a self-absorbed mess of pity that refused help of any kind.

I sobbed as I wound down the window and inserted my ticket. I happened to look across at the beaten-up old car in the lane next to me. Loud music and voices attracted my attention. It was the couple I’d met in the shop. They were arguing. The man glared at me and roared away as soon as their barrier lifted up.

I pulled myself together and blew my nose. When my barrier opened, I ended up behind the other car on the spiral ramp. As we emerged into the spring sunlight, I squinted and drove behind them for a couple of streets. I watched, dismayed, as they went across a set of lights on orange. My foot twitched over the accelerator as all I could think about were regrets and babies and the fact that I would never be a real mother.

THERE WAS SOMETHING
about Zoe and Heather and Cecelia that made Lorraine uneasy. She couldn’t put her finger on it exactly, but the thought wouldn’t leave her alone. However, when Adam reported that Heather Paige hadn’t flagged anywhere on the system, she forgot about it temporarily and concentrated on her wayward daughter.

‘She didn’t arrive at school,’ Lorraine said, trying to remain calm despite the surging feeling of panic. She went over again and again what the secretary had said when she’d phoned.

‘Hardly surprising, given that she’s just announced she’s leaving.’ Adam got out of the car.

‘I don’t know how you can be so casual about it,’ Lorraine said. ‘She’s not thinking straight. She’s obviously miserable. And now it would appear she’s gone missing.’ She got out of the car too, slammed the door, and marched up the steps and into the dismal grey building. She never normally noticed the grim architecture that was home to CID, but today the uninspiring concrete, the aluminium windows, the depressing monotony of the front facade, shouted out to her like a beacon of lost hope.

Adam caught up with her. He grabbed her by the arm. ‘We all know what this is really about,’ he said. His breath froze in the air between them. He released her when he saw he was hurting her.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. It seems pretty black and white to me.’ Lorraine continued up the steps but tripped on the last one. Her hands went out to the concrete and her bag fell off her shoulder, spilling the contents around Adam’s feet. She stayed there for a moment, prone on the slick surface. A pain bloomed in her right knee, causing her to wince as she stood up. Adam was already picking up her belongings and sheepishly placing them back inside her bag, staring at the items as if he’d always wondered what was in there.

‘Here,’ he said, holding out a hand. ‘I’m sorry.’

There was a pause. Lorraine wasn’t sure what he was apologising for.

‘I don’t see how we can go from Zoe Harper to our errant daughter to the mountain of mess that is our marriage, ending with a vague apology, all within two minutes.’ She hugged her coat around her. The palm of her right hand stung.

Adam flapped his hands at his side, a gesture that had always annoyed Lorraine. It made him seem like a small boy. ‘Lorraine . . .’ He sighed and guided her away from the door of the building, which seemed like the entrance to a hive with their colleagues coming and going around them. He drew in a breath and began again as if it was his last and only chance. ‘Lorraine . . . this thing between us, I don’t want it any more. Every time you speak to me, whatever you say, it hurts like a punch in the guts.’ He turned his face away for a moment.

Lorraine felt a familiar sinking feeling in her stomach. Was this it? Was this where it would all begin or end, on the steps of police HQ? She’d envisaged the showdown happening somewhere else, probably their living room, their bedroom, the kitchen, the garden – anywhere except in public, and at work, of all places. A pair of colleagues dashed past, raising their hands in greeting.

‘I don’t think—’

‘I do,’ Adam said sternly. ‘I think all the time. What happened consumes every single one of my waking hours. Correction: it consumes
all
of my hours, waking and sleeping. How can I explain to you what happened when I don’t understand it myself? It’s been nearly a year now, and I don’t know how to move forward. I did something stupid, you know that, I know that, but how I explain or rationalise it to you or myself, that’s the problem.’

Adam was turning around in semicircles. His frown was deeper than ever, his shoulders more hunched than Lorraine had seen them in a long time. Of course, she could keep him in this limbo-land of misery, suspend his agony for as long as she wished, but was that what she really wanted?

‘Let’s go inside,’ Lorraine said. ‘I’ll try calling Grace again.’ She needed to control this conversation, where and when it happened, and it couldn’t continue here in full view of their colleagues.

Adam followed her as she went inside. He was contrite, that was for certain, but, inexplicably, she preferred it when he put up a fight, when he denied his misdemeanours, when he acted as if nothing had happened. It was a familiar comfort blanket of lies, and at least it made her feel that he perhaps hadn’t done anything so awful after all.

Alone in the lift, Adam forked his arms around Lorraine in a tight V-shape. His face was close and his jaw was clenched. ‘The truth is I made a mistake. It was one night. I was drunk. She was drunk. We had sex. I have not seen her since.’

Lorraine felt sick, and it wasn’t from the lurch of the lift as it drew to a halt at their floor. It was his closeness, his breath on her face.

The doors slid open and Adam stood back as they were faced with several people in the lobby. Lorraine headed for her office, and was about to shut the door when she noticed Adam’s arm reaching round to stop it closing.

‘I refuse to discuss it here, Adam. We have two murder investigations and a daughter who is trashing her life. Why on earth would you think I want to talk about our situation now?’

Lorraine slumped down in her chair and started up her computer. She dialled Grace’s number.

‘Still no reply,’ she said, putting her phone on the desk.

‘Are you worried?’ Adam asked.

‘Of course I’m bloody worried,’ Lorraine said. ‘Our daughter hasn’t arrived at school. She’s moved out. She’s intent on marrying Matt, and she’s not answering her phone. But I know one thing.’

Adam raised his eyebrows hopefully.

‘Unlike her father, she’s not an idiot.’ She took a breath, raised her head and looked at her husband properly for what felt like the first time in a year. ‘OK then. I want to know what happened. All of it.’ Lorraine dug her nails into her palms. ‘Until you tell me, this isn’t going to go away, is it?’

Adam remained perfectly still. She had no idea what he was going to say or how she would feel when he said it. It could be the end of everything, or it could be the beginning of an understanding that she hadn’t reckoned ever getting to grips with. Either way, it was a process she knew she had to go through. She just hadn’t expected it to be now, today, in her office.
Damn him
.

‘It was last December.’ Adam’s voice was dry and rasping. ‘You were ill, but you told me to go to the Christmas party without you, knowing how much I hate those events.’

Lorraine withheld her anger. Had she really told him to go? She couldn’t remember. She’d been poorly, she knew that much. Flu had swept through her and her three-day fever had caused her mind to operate on a tenuous thread of unreality. She waited for Adam to continue.

‘I got there late. It was an inter-department gathering and the venue was heaving. A jam-packed bar isn’t my idea of fun.’ He shrugged, a passive indicator that none of this had really bothered him. Lorraine knew he could hold his own as well as anyone at a party.

‘There were a couple of people I recognised so I chatted with them for a while. I guess I’d had too much to drink even by then.’ They both knew that he wasn’t good with alcohol. He rarely drank.

‘I saw her standing on the other side of the room. I knew she was staring at me. Eventually she came up and introduced herself—’

‘Stop! I do
not
want to know her name.’

He nodded. ‘She said she’d seen me before although I didn’t recognise her. We chatted. We got drunk together. We did a stupid thing.’

‘And that would be?’

‘We went to a hotel across the road. She paid for the room, in case you were wondering.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘It happened. I dressed. I left.’

Lorraine knew what he was doing. Those short, clipped, monosyllabic sentences were typical of Adam when he was trying to portray the bare minimum while not being accused of withholding information. It was pretty much like questioning a suspect, although in this case Lorraine was certain of his guilt.

‘OK,’ she said quietly. ‘I could ask things such as “Was she good?” or “Did you get her number?” but I won’t.’ She hated it that her voice was shaking. ‘But the thing I really want to know, Adam, is
why
?’

There was a predictable silence in the office; the kind of silence that was big enough to fill the space that had grown between them since this had started nearly a year ago.

‘In all honesty, I have no idea. I wasn’t thinking. She was attractive. She was there. Had I not been drunk, things would have been different.’ Normally, Lorraine knew, Adam would be acting out his feelings by rubbing his face or ruffling his hair or even fiddling with his cuff button. But he wasn’t doing any of these things. He just stood, limply, as if every part of him had surrendered to his situation.

Lorraine shook her head, exhausted by the magnitude of it all. ‘I guess I was hoping that you’d say something more tangible, like it was because of me or the girls or because your home life sucked. But that it was purely down to your bad judgement makes me worry, Adam. It makes me worry a lot. It makes me think this could happen again.’ She lifted her hands, but then dropped them into her lap. ‘And for the record, I don’t believe that you haven’t seen her since.’

‘I—’

Adam was halted by the bleep of Lorraine’s phone. She lunged for it. ‘It’s Grace.’ She read the few words and closed her eyes. ‘She’s OK but she doesn’t want to see us.’

Adam sighed. ‘I can understand why. We’ve done nothing but pressure her since this began.’

‘Pressure? You think asking our daughter to see sense is pressuring her?’

Adam raised his eyebrows, making Lorraine stop and think.

With reluctant fingers, she tapped out a reply:
We’re here when you need us.

*

As far as Lorraine could see, the text from Grace had come as a welcome interruption for Adam. He’d told her the basics, given her enough of a picture of what had happened that night to ease some of the mystery that she’d embellished to outlandish proportions over the previous year. For the time being, though, there were other issues to deal with, not least the complex web of relationships between the characters in the Sally-Ann case.

With investigations in full swing and their team working round the clock, Lorraine and Adam had decided to go home for a couple of hours given that they both had an afternoon off. They’d travelled home separately, however, and Adam had already changed into his running gear by the time Lorraine had taken off her coat and turned up the central heating. She was making a cup of tea when the doorbell rang. Thinking it might be Grace, she went to answer it.

Matt stood shaking on the top step, jangling his car keys and glancing nervously down the street. As soon as Lorraine opened the door, he began babbling some kind of apology.

‘Matt,’ Lorraine said, putting her hand up to stop the flow. ‘You’d better come in.’

He followed Lorraine into the kitchen. Adam looked stunned to see him, but somehow Matt kept his composure, albeit shakily.

‘Is Grace OK?’ Lorraine said, suddenly concerned.

Matt nodded solemnly. ‘She’s fine. I mean, you know, OKish.’ He let out a sigh. ‘I don’t know what she’s told you about everything but—’

‘You don’t know?’ Adam barked, standing up from tying his trainer laces. ‘That’s a bit rich, seeing as you’re responsible for our daughter leaving home and school.’

Matt looked despondent. Lorraine gripped Adam’s arm in order to silence him.

‘It’s not exactly like that,’ Matt continued. ‘Grace is a bit confused.’

‘Damn right she is,’ Adam said, pulling away and taking a step towards Matt with his fists clenched. Lorraine came between them.

‘I know she’s planning on leaving anyway, but Grace didn’t go to school today,’ Lorraine said. ‘And we have no idea where she is.’

Matt raised his hands in defence. ‘She was with me,’ he confessed. ‘We were talking and stuff.’ He bowed his head. ‘Look, that’s why I’m here. There’s something important I have to tell you.’

THE HOUSE TELEPHONE
stops ringing just before I grab it. As I skid to a halt on the hall tiles, I realise my whole body is tingling. My nervousness is fuelled entirely by thought. This scares me. It’s like a volcano eruption that I have no control over, or an illness that can’t be cured. I pick up the receiver to make sure that the caller isn’t hanging on, waiting for me. Almost immediately my mobile phone begins to ring. I run around searching for it and finally find it in my bag in the kitchen.

‘Hello?’ I say before I have even pressed the answer button. There is something unusually urgent about this afternoon, something oppressive and final, as if my time here is nearly up when I really don’t want it to be; a make-or-break span of existence that I simply hadn’t expected to end so soon.

‘Hello?’ I say again. ‘Who’s there?’ All I can hear is the convulsive breathing of an unidentified caller. It’s as if all the air in the kitchen is being sucked in and out of the phone. ‘Who is this?’ I’m about to hang up when I hear a woman’s voice.

‘Please help me,’ she says, and I know in an instant it’s Pip. My heart skittles inside my chest. I know why she is calling. My hand drops limply down to my side as I take it in, as I decide what it means. When I bring the phone back to my ear, the frantic breathing continues. I can almost feel the squeeze of her hand on mine as her body tears her apart, as her womb prepares to empty.