Launch Code

THIRTEEN

Alice was glad that when she was finally let out of the interview with the detective inspector, Toby was nowhere to be seen. She needed some time by herself. She needed to think.

She hurried upstairs to their bedroom and shut the door firmly behind her. She picked up her iPad, stared at one of the half dozen draft documents she was supposed to be working on, and then tossed it on to the bed. Who was she kidding?

She looked around the room, her room. It was old: the floor was uneven, sloping upwards on one side, toward the window. She had been a student when her parents had bought the place, and scraps of her childhood had survived in that room: in the small bookshelf, her complete set of Harry Potter supported Virginia Woolf on one side and The Master and Margarita on the other. A poster from a 2010 Taylor Swift concert faced the old photograph of the loggers on the Susquehanna that had followed her from bedroom to bedroom all over the world.

She moved over to the window and gazed out at the marsh. Two figures and a dog were making their way along the dyke and had nearly reached the dunes. That must be Toby, Rickover and someone else: it looked like Uncle Lars.

She hoped Toby would be away for a while. She felt badly about snapping at him earlier when he had asked her about seeing Sam. It had been a fair question. It was going to be hard to face him, but she would have to. She needed to rely on him, to trust him to stick with her even though she had lied to him.

She had as good as lied to the police as well; she certainly hadn’t told them the whole truth.

What the hell should she do now?

She couldn’t ask her dad.

She wished her mother was still around. She would know. Her mother was the wisest person Alice had met. Alice liked to think that a lot of that wisdom had rubbed off on her, her daughter.

They had been very close. Mom had been close to all the daughters, but in different ways. Alice was the oldest, and the one that their mother had relied on most, especially in those final months. It didn’t seem so at the time, but in fact it had been fortunate that Mom had been diagnosed just as Alice was in her final months at law school. She had still managed to pass her exams, and the timing meant she could fly over to England right afterwards to spend the last months of her mother’s life with her while she studied for the New York bar. There were only three of these: the cancer had been advanced when it was diagnosed.

Alice had helped her father look after her mother and had supported him in his dark moments. She had comforted her sisters: Brooke was at graduate school in Chicago, Megan was a sophomore at college and Maya still at her private girls’ school in London. She had spent a lot of time with her mother, most of it up here in Barnholt, walking with her while she could still walk, reading to her. And talking to her.

Mom had more or less explicitly laid the burden of looking after Bill and the other girls on Alice, knowing all the time that it was a burden Alice would be happy to shoulder.

And she had told Alice other things.

One morning, towards the end, when her mother was barely strong enough to get in the car, Alice had driven her along the coast to a spot where it was possible to park on a hard concrete apron right by a creek. The place was popular with boaters of all kinds: kayaks, dinghies, sailing boats, fishing boats and skiffs bobbed on the incoming tide, ready to be taken the half mile through the marshes to the sea.

Alice had parked high up on the concrete, near the sea wall, but there were three cars parked close to the creek, one of which was an expensive electric-blue Jaguar. She and her mother spent a couple of hours just sitting in the car together, watching the boats being lifted from the muddy banks of the creek by the incoming tide, and the sea creep over the concrete towards the wheels of the parked cars. The two old bangers were quickly moved, but the Jaguar seemed to have been abandoned as the water lapped at its tyres.

Alice had a desire to do something to save the vehicle – what, she wasn’t sure – but her mother was watching transfixed, a wicked half-smile on her face. So Alice did nothing. And in their mutual helplessness against the relentless tide, she felt a kind of mutual strength. She knew her mother felt it too.

The water had just about reached the underside of the chassis, when they heard loud, deep shouts, and a large figure in dark red trousers splashed through the water to his Jag, cursing. The vehicle started, and he reversed off the concrete in a thick spray of seawater.

Donna smiled at her daughter. ‘Oh well,’ she said, with a chuckle.

‘We had better move soon,’ said Alice. The water was still a dozen or so yards away from their car, but it was getting closer.

‘Wait a moment, sweetie,’ her mother had said. ‘There are some things I ought to explain. About Dad and me. Things somebody should know, and I’m sure Dad will never tell you.’

Two weeks later, the end had come. Her mother’s ashes were now resting in St Peter’s churchyard beneath an ancient yew tree, barely a hundred yards away from Pear Tree Cottage.

Alice had been ready. It had felt good to help her father to sort through her mother’s stuff, to help him administer the estate, to comfort her sisters, to make sure that the Guth family remained strong together.

She had passed the bar exam and joined a New York law firm. As soon as she could, she had secured a transfer to their London office so she could be near her father. And there she had met Toby. Tall, dark, with warm brown eyes that seemed to understand her immediately, she had fallen for him. Hard.

Alice was good under pressure, she thrived under pressure. The challenge of being a good lawyer, a good wife, a good daughter and a good sister all at the same time stretched her, but she liked it that way. And one day, perhaps one day quite soon, she would be a good mother as well.

But this? This was stretching even her to breaking point.

Did she have a breaking point? Everyone had a breaking point. So where was hers?

She didn’t know, and she was determined not to find out.

‘OK, Mom,’ she said out loud, to the marsh. ‘I can do this.’