What are the odds that Tom Barlow would be living only a few miles from Chris and Maria’s new house? Long. Just as the odds are that Zoe would be playing a concert at the very church where Amelia is remembered.
But if you work in the business that I do, you know that long odds don’t always make any difference at all. Somebody always makes up that small percentage of people to whom unlikely or desperate things happen, and there’s actually nothing to say it can’t be you.
Tom Barlow doesn’t jog for long. He gets in a car around the corner from Chris and Maria’s house and when I realise that I still have my bag over my shoulder, and my keys are inside it – Maria’s hostess skills have failed her tonight, my bag wasn’t taken from me on arrival – I turn back swiftly and get my car, even though I fear that I’m going to lose him. But I don’t. When I trundle around the corner, his car is only just pulling out, as though he’s had to sit in there for a few minutes and pull himself together before leaving, or perhaps make a phone call.
We leave the wide, leafy, sedate lanes of Chris and Maria’s neighbourhood and drive further out into surburbia, retracing some of the route back from the concert. On a long street in Westbury, which seems to go on for ever, Tom Barlow pulls into the driveway of a modest semi-detached house that looks as though it was built in the sixties, and I’m able to park in a space opposite. I keep my head back so that he can’t see my face, but I have a view of his house.
It has a large picture window to the front and through it I can see the sitting room. There are two sofas and a TV, plus some gaming equipment. The walls are painted a plain magnolia. There’s not much else, apart from a poster-sized family photograph on the wall, where the kids are small, and Amelia is sandwiched between her little brothers, who appear to be twins. The sparse furnishings make the room look more functional than loved.
Tom Barlow stays sitting in his car for a good few minutes before he gets out. In fact, he stays there for so long that a woman, who I recognise as his wife, opens the door and looks out enquiringly.
He gets out of the car and holds her in a long, tight hug.
‘I thought that was you. Are you all right?’ I hear her say. ‘What’s wrong?’
I can’t hear his reply, but he shakes his head as if to say ‘nothing’s wrong’ and then she pushes him away from her so that she’s holding him by the shoulders, and she smiles at him. ‘I love you too,’ she says. From the doorway, one of their boys watches, bare-chested, wearing just pyjama bottoms. Tom Barlow puts his arm around his son on the way into the house and, as the door shuts, the child starts an explanation about how it was too hot to sleep.
On my way there, I thought I would ring on the doorbell and try to speak to the family, to convince them that Zoe should be allowed a chance to rebuild, that she and Maria are entitled to their privacy, and entitled to move on. But I can’t do that now because I’m pretty certain that nobody else in his house knows what Tom Barlow has been doing that evening. Not yet, anyway, and I don’t want to be the one to tell them.