The Perfect Girl

TESSA

‘I know you,’ Tom Barlow says. ‘Don’t I?’

‘I’m Zoe’s aunt. Tessa Downing.’

‘You were at the court.’ He recognises me, even all these years on.

I nod.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ I say. The words are hollow with my inability to make things right for him. My only hope is that he can hear my intention.

We’re standing on the street outside Maria’s house, but I want to move him further away. It would be too easy for him to walk back into the house from here, or to go around the back and find Zoe in the garden. Now that the secret’s out, I think my greatest fear is that he could do her some harm. It’s an exercise in damage limitation at this stage.

‘Would you like to talk?’ I ask him. ‘We could sit in my car? Or walk?’

I’m trying to remember what I know about this man, to separate the descriptions I read of him in the newspapers from the other families. As far as I remember, Tom Barlow is, or was, in property. In fact, his profile wasn’t all that different from Chris’s. He was a self-made businessman, and proud of it. If Chris and Tom Barlow had met under other circumstances they might have got on well. Amelia, who died in the accident, was not the Barlow family’s only child but she was their only daughter. I remember photographs of two young boys, the image of their sister, clutching the hands of their parents in the photographs of the funeral.

‘I need a smoke,’ he says, and he sinks down on to the stone wall that borders the front of Chris and Maria’s garden, containing the dense foliage at their boundary. It’s not as good as moving away from the property, but at least if we sit we won’t be visible from the house.

He pulls a cigarette from a packet and offers me one, but I shake my head.

‘Do you mind?’ he asks me, and the question, in the midst of all this, almost makes me laugh. How is it that manners are so strong that they pervade all situations? I’ve lost count of the times that people have apologised to me for crying when I’ve just euthanised their pet.

‘Not at all,’ I say. ‘Of course not.’

Tom Barlow leans forward and hangs his head. His hands clench between his knees and his cigarette dangles from between his knuckles, the rising smoke making him turn his head a little to the side, away from me.

I notice that he has a monk-like area of thinning hair on the crown of his head that he’s tried to disguise with careful use of hair product of some sort. It tells me that he didn’t start his day thinking about Zoe, that what happened has probably been as much of a shock to him as it has been to us. You almost certainly don’t take time with hair product if you’re consumed with rage and indignation.

We sit in silence because I don’t want to inflame him again by saying the wrong thing, and after a few minutes, when the cigarette is half smoked, he reaches into the pocket of his shorts and hands me a crumpled piece of paper.

It’s a flyer, advertising Zoe’s concert.

‘Through my door,’ he says. ‘This morning. Through my front door, on to my doormat, in my house. In my own home. I only came because I couldn’t believe it actually would be her.’

I hold the flyer in my hands. I have no idea who distributed it, but my best guess is that it was one of the busybody organisers from the church.

‘If we had known,’ I say carefully, ‘we would never, ever have let this happen. Please believe me.’

‘We came here to escape from it,’ he says. ‘We sold everything, we moved the boys, we lost money, we started again. It hasn’t been easy.’

His voice cracks and I think how the same words could describe Zoe and Maria’s flight from Devon to Bristol, but of course I don’t say that.

I want to put my hand on his back to comfort him but I’m not sure that’s a good idea, so instead I say, ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

‘We buried her in Hartland,’ he says, and I think again of the newspaper pictures, where the backdrop to the black-clad processional figures was the tiered grey stone spire of Hartland Church, built toweringly tall to act as a landmark for sailors, to save lives centuries before the lighthouse at the Point ever existed. ‘So we couldn’t bring her with us when we moved, but we had a plaque laid, at the church in Westbury. We chose a plaque with the boys.’

And so I understand the awfulness of it now. Zoe has played a concert at a church where one of the victims of the accident she caused has a memorial plaque. Zoe has tried to rebuild her life on the site of her victim’s memorial.

‘Mr Barlow -’ I say. I try to choose the words I’m going to say next extremely carefully, but he cuts me off.

‘Who is that man?’ he says. ‘That’s not her dad.’

‘No. Maria’s remarried. That’s Zoe’s stepdad.’

‘Does he know? Does he know what she’s done? What she is? Does he know that and still treat me like shit on his shoe?’

He studies me as I try to word my answer, try to work out what is the least incendiary thing I can say, but I’m too slow and he sees the truth.

‘He doesn’t know, does he?’

‘I think -’ I begin, but he interrupts me.

‘I feel sorry for your family,’ he says. ‘Living with a murderer.’

He stands up and I do too. I feel things slipping out of my control again. ‘Please know that we are truly, truly sorry,’ I say.

‘People should know. She needs to pay.’

‘She has paid for what she did,’ I tell him. ‘She’s a changed person.’

‘What? Twelve months in a cushy detention centre somewhere doing her GCSEs? How does that make up for what she’s done?’

He gestures his hand at Chris and Maria’s house, at its immaculate grandeur, and disbelief at the injustice of it all runs rampant in his expression.

‘We have nothing!’ he says. ‘And she has all of this. She shows off with her piano still and she lives in a mansion like nothing ever happened.’

‘That’s not true,’ I say. ‘She’s been punished. This destroyed her life too. Be fair…’

But that was the wrong thing to say. ‘Be fair?’ he asks, and he snatches the programme from my hand and reads from it: ‘“You won’t want to miss these two precociously talented teenagers making their Bristol debut – this promises to be a very special evening.”’

There’s nothing but disgust in his tone.

‘People need to know,’ he says, ‘and I’m going to make sure they do.’

‘Is it so wrong for her to have a future?’ I ask. I’m desperate now. My ability to remain calm is slipping through my fingers.

‘Why should she have one, when we don’t?’

He screws the paper up and hurls it at my feet and then he turns away and begins to walk down the street, away from the house, shoulders slack and head bowed, towards the street light that’s making the top of the postbox at the end of the road shine a slippery red.

‘What are you doing?’ I call after him. ‘What are you going to do?’

He disappears around the corner.

I look at the house, and I wonder what’s happening in there, and I look at the corner that Tom Barlow has just disappeared around, and I decide to follow him.