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What has changed his feelings towards me so drastically? Has he finally decided that a decade is long enough to be patient? Is it work ambition? Some top secret new knowledge about you that he doesn’t trust himself not to share? His pure fury that I won’t take his advice and give up the idea of visiting Thorne?
A split second before I see him, a trickle of sweat runs down my back and my skin prickles and I think I am going to panic. Something in me, some sense somewhere, knows before I really know. A change in the air carried by his voice or scent. A glimpse in my peripheral vision. Simply his material presence in the building. My heart freezes. My stomach goes hollow.
Liar. I want to scream the word at him. But I don’t. I swallow it back and feel as if it will choke me.
Ted is sitting at a small corner table with a woman whose face I cannot see, though the back of her head – her dark silky hair – is visible. That hair is so like my own my stomach seems to lurch up to my throat and there is a flame at the top of my head that rushes down my spine to my toes.
Is it you? I grab the arm of the stranger standing next to me to steady myself before he looks down and asks if I am okay, which shakes away my crazy split-second thought that you are actually here. I mumble that I am fine, I stumbled, I am so sorry.
The two of them haven’t changed position since the photograph was taken. Ted is facing the room with his back to the wall of draughty glass, so he can keep watch. But he isn’t watching. He doesn’t notice me, and not because of all the bodies between us. He doesn’t notice me because he is looking at her with such deep interest.
I think of Sadie a year ago, when she and I ran into her latest ex-boyfriend. He was holding hands in a restaurant with his new girlfriend. Sadie marched right up to them. Her performance was received in stunned silence. There is no doubt it was memorable. I certainly have not forgotten it, and I doubt her audience ever will.
Hi. I’m the ex-girlfriend. Has he moved his mother in yet to give you lessons on how to clean and cook for him? You know, until I met Donald I thought it was a myth that all men wanted anal. If you haven’t yet, you’re about to learn from him that it’s no myth. Do you enjoy it when that nasty brat of his wipes his snot all over you and screams until he gets his way? I hope the two of you get all the happiness you deserve.
I am not Sadie. I do not want to be anything like her. I do not want to go anywhere near Ted and this woman. I can taste bile, coming up from my stomach and into my throat. Did Sadie take the photo and send the anonymous email, following it up with her silent phone call to gloat? Who else could have done it?
I consider Ted’s ex-wife. I have never properly met her. I haven’t searched for her on the internet. I feared that even a glimpse of her face would be like staring down Medusa and I would be turned to stone. More than anything, I feared that once I started to look at her I wouldn’t be able to stop.
Maybe his ex-wife suspects me of luring Ted away from her, of sleeping with him while they were still together. Maybe she blames me for their failed marriage. She is a photographer. It is perfectly possible to imagine her sending me a carefully selected image.
I am faint and jumbled to the core as I continue to watch the woman sitting across from Ted. Her shoulders are slim and her back is straight. The fabric of whatever dress or blouse she is wearing is navy blue with black stripes, a kind of zebra print. I cannot help but be certain that her face is as lovely and interesting as her waterfall hair, and this is why Ted is staring at her so closely. This is why I am doubly and triply safe from him noticing me as I peek through the gaps between these coffee addicts’ arms, over their damp handbags. Their closed umbrellas drip onto my boots and rub against my jumper so that the wet seeps through and into my skin – I hadn’t bothered to grab my coat when I rushed from my illegally parked car.
Ted isn’t on duty. He is wearing a Christmas jumper of all things. I bought it for him five years ago. Fair Isle, with small reindeer parading across its variously toned charcoal stripes. Why would Ted wear something I gave him if he were on a date? This thought makes my stomach unclench a tiny bit.
In that way I have of letting my mind open up to find out what it knows before I am conscious of it, I think of Ruby, from my personal safety class. She didn’t come to class on Monday and hasn’t returned the concerned message I left her the next day. In a rush of certainty, I know who the woman is, and my jealousy is complicated by worry. The worry grows bigger when she turns her head to look off to the side and I see that there are tears on her cheek. Has Ted made her cry? Or is he supporting her while she cries about something else? Six months ago, she was raped by a fake meter-reading man who tricked his way into her house. Ted reaches out and touches her hand, lightly and quickly, but doesn’t keep it on top of hers. He frowns.
What is he doing with her? Could he have known her before last month’s self-defence class? Could he be meeting her as part of the investigation into her assault? No – he wouldn’t do that in a café.
Whatever the reason, what should disturb me most? That Ted is here with a woman when he swore to me he wasn’t seeing anyone? That Ruby is vulnerable and he may hurt her? Or that somebody cared enough to clock their meeting and photograph them?
Whoever that somebody is, they know who I am, and who Ted is. They know what Ted and I are to each other. And they knew how to find me through the charity’s website. Whether they are for me or against me remains to be seen, though if it is Sadie or Ted’s ex-wife it is all too clear which group she is a member of.
Whoever sent it, whatever their reason, I am actually glad they did it. They gave me a gift even if they didn’t mean to. I would rather know than not know. Always. My stance on everything. Because the information – the fact that Ted is in this café with Ruby – is louder than everything else. It is so loud it is drowning out the context. Even if my brain is asking the right questions about the circumstances which got that photograph to me, my emotions are engaged only by what it shows.
Bonfire Night
It is after seven by the time I have finished my daily run, followed by my usual sit-ups and presses and pull-ups and stretches. I have barely stepped out of the shower before I hear Luke’s keys in the locks, then the front door of my little Victorian house crashing open and his shout, ‘Stay out of the way, Auntie Ella. Back in a minute.’
I shrug off the oversized towelling bathrobe that Ted left with me shortly before you disappeared. It is navy blue. It is so big I used to wrap me and Luke in it together when he was a baby and I wandered through the house late at night, trying to lull him out of crying and into sleep. There are holes and loose threads from uncountable washes, but this old thing of Ted’s is an object of comfort to me still.
I shimmy into a jumper and jeans, tie my wet hair into a ponytail, and fly down the stairs to the sight of Luke and our father, lurching sideways into the hall. They are each clutching one side of the doll’s house, which is shaped like a medium-sized chest of drawers. Ted is rear and centre, taking most of the weight. Above Ted’s head, in the clear black night that followed the afternoon storm, there is an explosion of silver stars. They fall from the sky as if to announce him.
Luke cranes his neck to watch. ‘Awesome,’ he says.
‘Luke asked me to help.’ Ted says this like an apology. He looks at Luke, not me, when he speaks, and a wave of sickness moves through my body.
Somebody on my street has lit a bonfire. The air is thick with smoke. Ash floats into the house. My eyes are burning. I blink and rub them. I think of the disappointed embarrassment that coloured my parting from Ted on Monday night, after trick-or-treating and dinner, which I see now he only went through for Luke.
‘Ted came out to Granny and Grandpa’s tonight,’ Luke says. ‘He helped us get the doll’s house down from the attic and into Grandpa’s van. He followed us here.’
‘That was kind.’ I am moving backwards, up the stairs again, out of their way.
‘Luke and I could have managed,’ our father says. I wink at Luke without our father seeing.
Once the doll’s house is in Luke’s room, there is a great deal of whooping and high-fiving between our father and your son and my furtive ex-boyfriend.
‘So what have you and your aunt got planned for tomorrow?’ It is infinitely easier for Ted to talk to Luke than to me.
‘How about the zoo?’ I say.
‘Yessssss,’ Luke says. He puts out a hand for some more high-fiving with Ted.
‘Luke and I will run to the van to get the box.’ Our father is trying to channel our mother’s matchmaking impulses but not managing her social smoothness. Ted and I stand awkwardly in Luke’s room after they are gone, looking at our own feet.
My heart is squeezing as if I were a teenaged girl about to ask a boy to a dance. But what I have to say is not at all romantic, and it hardly matters anyway because it doesn’t seem possible to piss Ted off any more than I already have. Besides, it’s not like I will lose him – I have been there and done that several times over – and it looks as if I am about to repeat the experience. Once that happens my chance of learning what I need to will vanish forever.
‘Tell me about her laptop,’ I say. ‘Tell me what they found on it.’
He actually sighs. ‘You will never stop.’
‘No. But I am willing to say please if it helps.’
‘I wouldn’t want you to do something so unnatural.’ He shakes his head slowly. ‘You won’t believe me.’
‘Try me.’
‘They found nothing. The laptop’s empty.’
‘Then why are they holding on to it? Why does it still matter to them?’
‘I said you wouldn’t believe me. It’s lose-lose with you, no matter what I do.’
‘I am not the one making it lose-lose for us.’ My fingers are fidgety and nervous, brushing hair from my eyes that isn’t there because it is already pulled into a ponytail.
‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘You know exactly what.’
‘Is there something you want to get off your chest, Ella?’
‘No.’ For now, I want the power of having knowledge without his knowing that I do. ‘So why did you make such a big deal of refusing to tell me about the laptop if there’s nothing to tell? Was it some kind of power game for you?’
‘Low blow. That was beneath you. When I say there was nothing, I mean that whatever is there is hidden. Tech have kept the laptop in the hope that some future tool might uncover something.’
‘You’re saying she used the laptop, but everything she ever did on it is invisible?’
‘So far as I can understand, yes. One of the things they think she did was to use an onion router to mask all of her online activity.’
My amazement actually drives the photograph and the café and Ruby from my head. ‘But that’s impossible. She wouldn’t know what an onion router is.’ My head snaps up. ‘What is an onion router?’
‘You’re talking deep web. That internet world where nothing leaves a trace anywhere. None of the search engines you’d recognise.’
‘But she was seriously useless at technology.’
‘Evidently not.’
‘But she can’t have done that. If MI5 gave her a spying device she wouldn’t know how to turn it on.’
‘Well she did. And it wasn’t the kind of technology ordinary people have access to.’
‘Then someone else set it up and taught her. We need to know who. And why.’
I spend my days warning women of the importance of guarding their privacy to keep safe. But your skill at doing this – your talent for secrets – might have been the very thing that put you in jeopardy. Did you continue your conversation with Jason Thorne that way, after the phone calls the tabloids said you made to him?
Ted is frowning. ‘You’re going dangerously quiet.’
‘Just thinking. Thank you for telling me. I mean it.’
‘Don’t drop me or Mike in it.’
‘I won’t. I never would. You know that.’
‘I know you wouldn’t want to, but you might not be able to help yourself.’
‘I’ll be careful for you. I’d always be careful for you.’ And of you, I silently add.
He doesn’t look convinced. ‘That’s the end of it. Don’t ask me for more.’
This is not a promise I can make, so I change the subject in the crudest way possible, mostly for Luke’s sake, but partly for my own. ‘Will you stay for pizza?’
‘I’d like to but I have to be somewhere.’ He glances at his watch and I imagine Ruby waiting for him in a French restaurant, or in her little house, where she has cooked him dinner and lit candles. ‘Half an hour ago, actually.’ Ted is wearing black jeans and a black shirt and something that smells of woods. Even yesterday, I might have secretly hoped these things were for me, but today I know they are not.
‘Next time,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ Ted says.
‘My dad … Thank you …’
‘I know, Ella. You don’t need to say.’
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