Later. I’ve swept up the broken glass, keeping a sliver wrapped in kitchen paper, up where the matches are kept so the kids don’t get hold of it. Just in case. I have these little weapons hidden around the house – break in case of emergency. The knife slipped between the top row of paperbacks in our room, third from the left, next to Wolf Hall. The envelope of twenties nestled in with the cookbooks. My escape routes, such as they are. He doesn’t know, I don’t think.
In bed, we turn towards each other; I’ve brushed my teeth, he hasn’t. I can still taste the slight fug of alcohol on my tongue, feel the beat of my heart in my ears. I picture Rachel and Ian lying in bed next door; I can’t imagine they’re asleep either. Maybe they’re not even in, maybe they’re down at the police station already. Perhaps the police are searching the house. I think of them thumbing through Clare’s things, their eyes taking in every little detail. I’ve watched too much CSI.
‘How were the PTA girls?’ Jack asks, and I half smile in spite of myself. Girls. We’re forty-five.
‘Lindsay’s divorce papers came through,’ I tell him, ‘Tricia spilled her wine. Sandra says her heart hurts.’
‘That’s impossible,’ he says, and I roll my eyes in the darkness. Always the doctor. ‘Why’s she getting a divorce?’
I shift onto my back. The white curtain brushes my arm, ghostly in the darkness. We’re trying so hard to be normal that it hurts. ‘I didn’t get to find out.’
I can almost feel the twist of his smirk, although his lips are barely an outline.
‘Lucky her.’
There’s a pause.
‘Jane,’ he says then, ‘about last night…’
I wait. I suppose I’m waiting for an apology, but this time, one doesn’t come.
I wish I could barricade the downy pillows between us, protect myself in my sleep. I want to talk more about Clare but I can’t; instead I stare at the wall and think of my children, of their sweet, chubby little faces, their sweeping dark eyelashes, the soft inhale and exhale of their breath in the next room. I think of Harry, his teenage body sprawled out underneath the duvet, the smattering of newly acquired stubble on his jawline. My babies.
I don’t fall asleep until Jack does. I’m too frightened.
DS Madeline Shaw
Tuesday 5th February
Ashdon is a small town, population 3,193. The town sign sits in the centre, opposite the primary and secondary schools and beside the River Bourne. On it are three farmers, a sheep, and a strangely oversized ear of corn. The town has a doctor’s surgery, a pub and a church, a newsagent, a ceramics place and a lot of middle-class mums. It is not the kind of town where bad things happen, and the death of Clare Edwards comes as a horrible shock.
Madeline has lived in the town for just over eighteen months. When the DCI formally assigns her to work underneath him on the Clare Edwards case, she is drinking coffee at her desk, black for the calories, and playing back the recording of Nathan Warren’s phone call, made to Lorna after he came across Clare’s body. She knows about the allegation made against him a few years ago, the report of him following a girl home from school, and has already asked Ben Moore about it. DS Moore had shrugged, waved a hand in the air.
‘If you want my honest opinion, it was all nonsense,’ he said. ‘The people of Ashdon, well, the impression I get is that they don’t like anyone who’s not like them. The woman whose daughter it was never pressed charges; some people said she was making it up because she was pissed off at the school about something. They moved not long after, over to Saffron Walden.’
Madeline had nodded, noted it all down just in case.
‘I want you on this, Shaw,’ the DCI says now, ‘you know the town, you know the people. You’ve got the edge.’ He looks at her, eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t let me down, Madeline.’
She grits her teeth; not likely. She’s spent the night thinking about the look on Rachel’s face when they told them the news; the sound of the woman’s knees hitting the floor, the way her husband’s arms wrapped around her tiny waist. In her experience, the family is never quite as innocent as they look, but these two are doing a good job so far of convincing her otherwise.
‘I’m so very sorry for your loss,’ she told them both, the words sounding wooden in her mouth. She handed them the list of Clare’s personal items, the ones they have had to take in for evidence. Clare’s watch, the hair tie from around her wrist, her school things and her purse.
‘We are still looking for Clare’s phone,’ Madeline told the parents. ‘We’re working on the assumption that whoever attacked Clare took it with them.’
‘Can’t you trace it?’ Rachel asked, her breath ragged, snotty.
‘My team are working on that,’ the DCI said, ‘and we’ll be looking at the phone records too – finding out who Clare had been speaking to recently, eliminating people from our enquiries.’
Both of them looked back down at the list.
‘And her necklace?’ Rachel had asked, touching a hand to her own throat, grasping at her neck as though she’d like to snap it in two. Ian reached up, clasped her hand in his and pulled it gently back towards the table.
The police exchanged glances. ‘Necklace?’
‘For her sixteenth,’ Ian said. ‘We gave it to her as a birthday present. It was only two weeks ago, 14th of January. A gold one, a locket with her name on.’
Madeline thought back to the sight of their daughter on the ground, her blonde hair shining in the light of the torch. Feeling for a pulse at Clare’s neck. There was no necklace.
‘Is there any chance your guys could have missed it?’ Ian said, looking between them, colour rising a little in his face.
‘No,’ Madeline said, ‘that’s extremely unlikely. Everything that was recovered from the scene is on this list.’
‘But we’ll double check,’ Rob added, just as Rachel began to sob again, the sound echoing around the kitchen.
‘She’s a good girl,’ her stepdad kept saying, over and over again as the police stood to leave, the breakfast things still piled up by the kitchen sink, a stack of Clare’s clothing freshly washed on one of the chairs. ‘She’s a good girl, our Clare.’
‘We’ll be in touch,’ Madeline had said, ‘as soon as we can be, Mr and Mrs Edwards. We’ll be back first thing tomorrow.’
But she’d checked the list this morning, rang the pathologist to check there was nothing else with the body. No necklace. No phone.
The two of them spend the morning searching the Edwards’ house from top to bottom. The parents don’t look any better than they did yesterday – there’s a bottle of wine by the front door, empty, and another half full on the windowsill. Someone’s already left a bunch of bedraggled-looking flowers on the lawn outside, red roses, no note.
Rob and Madeline go upstairs, leaving Rachel and Ian sitting downstairs with Theresa, the family liaison officer who arrived just as they were leaving last night. She’s nice, is Theresa, Madeline likes her. Nice but new, good at making tea. Madeline has told her to let the police know how the Edwards are together, what they say in the privacy of their own home. Theresa looked at Madeline like she’d said something awful.
‘You don’t suspect them?’
‘Theresa,’ she’d said, ‘in a case like this, we can’t rule anyone out.’
Ian Edwards has told them