‘We can’t just leave her in there!’

‘Who is it?’ moaned Johnny. ‘It’s not Andy, is it? Please tell me it’s not her. Not her!’

Pete nodded slowly without turning. Andy, he thought. Andrea. I love you. Then he began to cry.

24

Pete

‘What’s wrong with us?’

They had returned to Meredith’s cottage after the police had taken their statements. Meredith parked her Morris Traveller in the car park, and both of them gazed momentarily at the space that had held Ralph’s car before the police had towed it away.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked flatly as they trudged down the steps to the cottage gate.

Pete rubbed a hand across his face, as if he was trying to wipe away the memory of Andrea’s body in the water.

‘Did a gypsy put a curse on us as babies, or something? I mean, what the fuck is going on? It doesn’t make sense. It’s as if everybody we get close to is being bumped off.’

As Meredith jiggled the key in the lock, he turned away to look over her cottage garden, a riot of hollyhocks and tea roses that blurred into a floral cloud. He blinked hard and took a deep breath.

‘“Everybody we get close to” is a bit of a stretch,’ Meredith said, her voice sounding as strained as he felt. ‘And you’ve got me. I know it’s not the same as a wife or anything, but at least we have each other … I don’t think I would ever trust anybody else.’

Poor Meredith, he thought. Her trauma had been stitched so well into the fabric of their lives that he just didn’t see it any longer, like the invisible mending that their mother used to do on his school trousers; like the hole in Meredith’s hand that he no longer noticed, because after a while it had become too painful to see. His head was a mess.

‘Andrea and I kissed last night when you were in the loo,’ he said, heading straight for the living room and flopping down on the sofa, as he always did. He put his face in his hands. ‘It was so bloody lovely. And I told you she invited me over, right…? I was so excited. I thought at last something was going to happen; that it was time, that I’d been right to wait and not rush it. And now she’s fucking dead. How can she be dead?’ His voice cracked. ‘And her baby. Can’t stop thinking about that little baby too, it’s just so…’