The Perfect Girl

TESSA

Chris and Philip and I are sitting more or less in silence, as the Family Liaison Officer makes many and varied attempts to engage us in small talk, or any kind of talk. She talks about cups of tea, she talks about the process of grief, she talks about the structure of police investigations, and she talks about the weather.

Chris is managing to offer her a few responses, which she leaps on to as if they were scraps thrown to a dog. I think she must have been taught to try to engage with us, to become our friend. I want to tell her that I don’t give a fig’s leaf how many times a day she has to water her geraniums in the heatwave, but instead I manage to zone her out, so that her words become a wall of white noise, against which I try to think.

Philip is in our most comfortable armchair, head back, mouth open, snoring gently. The drive, he told us, and the early start, have worn him out. I have no words to describe my anger at his selfishness.

I watch Chris out of the corner of my eye as he talks to the Family Liaison Officer. I wonder if I should say something to her about my suspicions and, if so, what. If I make them known to her, and Chris guesses who has done so, and if I’m wrong, we’ll never recover from that, and I don’t know if I’m sure enough to risk that.

In a way, I’m grateful that Chris wants to go to a hotel. It’ll give me a chance to speak to Richard about him, and to get advice from Sam. And besides, Chris isn’t behaving like a guilty man; he seems devastated.

I also can’t deny that I crave the space that he and Lucas and the baby will leave in my house, because it might give me a chance to mourn my sister, and give Zoe a chance to mourn her mother.

So when Chris stands to look out of the window, to see if his taxi has arrived, I find that I’m willing it to be there.

‘Any sign?’ the Liaison Officer asks him.

‘No,’ he says, and then, ‘Oh wait, yes, I think this is it.’

It occurs to me then, as he begins to move to answer the door, that if he is guilty of something he might flee, but that immediately seems a wild, stupid thought, and something for the police to be concerned about, not me. This is not television, I tell myself, where people can just disappear in an instant, especially not with a successful business that needs running, a reasonably high public profile, and a baby and teenager in tow.

‘Lucas!’ Chris calls up the stairs. The three of us are gathered in the hall now, though there’s no sign of Richard or the kids.

‘Lucas!’

None of them answer.

‘I’ll find him,’ I say.

Chris opens the front door and there’s a driver there, smart in a crisp open-necked shirt and chinos. It’s definitely not the usual comfortable attire of the shift taxi driver, and behind him I glimpse a sleek black vehicle. Chris has called one of his work drivers, I realise; ‘taxi’ wasn’t quite an accurate description. It reminds me once more how little I’ve understood about the life he and Maria have been leading.

I run upstairs to the bathroom to see if anybody is still there with the baby. There are signs everywhere that Grace has been bathed: water on the floor and bubbles gathered around the plughole, but the room is empty of people.

‘Zoe?’ I call. ‘Richard?’

Again, no answer.

‘Lucas?’

I see that his backpack has been slung on to one of our spare beds, all zipped up.

Then I glimpse them through a window; Lucas and Zoe are out in the garden, and it looks as if they have the baby in the buggy. They’re patiently pushing her backwards and forward in the shade of our patio.

It’s a lovely sight, as if they’ve come together to form surrogate parents for Grace, and I know Maria would be happy if she could see them. I watch as they peer at Grace together, under the sunshade, and then, carefully, they begin to walk up the garden with her, although the uneven slabs and the tufts of tough, desiccated grass that protrude between them make it slow going.

I hear talking downstairs in the hall and make my way down.

‘She just conked out,’ Richard is saying, ‘absolutely blotto in my arms after her bath, so we’ve put her down in the pushchair, and we thought you might prefer to go on ahead to the hotel and get settled in and come and collect her later. Or we could bring her to you?’

Chris doesn’t look happy. He checks his watch impatiently.

‘I don’t want to be going backwards and forwards later on so how about I send the driver to work to pick up some things for me, because I need to do that anyway, and by the time he gets back she should have had an hour or so of sleep. Do we think that would work?’ he says.

‘Of course,’ I say. That sounds like a fair plan to me and, besides, I’m flat out of the energy required to make any other kind of response.