Lauren had gone silent. Unusual for her.
When he walked in, she said, ‘Don’t be mad.’
He raised his eyebrows, holding on to the wall as he eased his trainers off. He said nothing; something his wife was joyfully incapable of.
‘I asked their price, like you told me to,’ she said, like it was all his idea. ‘And we could do it.’
‘How much?’
‘We could do it if we remortgaged.’
‘Remortgage? For a dog?’ Aidan said.
‘We could keep him. The funds are used to train loads more … that’s why it’s so expensive. To ease the moral burden!’ Bill appeared, then, padding into the hallway. Lauren’s hand drifted down to the top of his head and rested there, completely unconsciously. But it wasn’t the hand that did it. It was the look on her face. A brief close of her eyes, a smile just beginning as her fingers fanned out across his yellow fur. Love.
Lauren fell in love easily, and she fell hard.
Aidan sent the mortgage form off the next day.
They gave Bill a middle name: Gates. It made them laugh. ‘He’s the richest dog in the world,’ Lauren said, the day the money came through.
‘Sleep well?’ Lauren says now, though he guesses she knows the answer.
‘You should see this,’ Aidan says, the anxiety erupting from him without warning. He opens his laptop and tries to pass it to her across the kitchen counter, but it’s so messy. She went shopping the other day and overloaded the fruit bowl. It towers between them. She reaches for the computer and stares at the screen as she holds it, standing up.
‘What, what?’ she says. She reaches over to boil the kettle, balancing the laptop on the palm of her hand. The kettle’s blue light comes on, illuminating her face. She looks tired.
‘There’s a crowd funder, for Luke,’ he says.
‘Some of the comments,’ she says, looking up at him with concern.
‘I know,’ he says. The crowd funder has been populating with them all morning. Things they’d like to do to his stepdaughter, ways in which they will make her pay for lying. He takes the laptop from her and scrolls through them, reporting each one for violent content.
Lying shit needs to pay.
Think sum1 should find this Girl A and tell her what’s what.
She deserves to be hung – isn’t it a crime to lie in court x
She deserves worse than hanging, mate.
Make her suffer. Make her realize what it’s like to feel pain. Twist her arms behind her back, bag over her head lol. Show her who’s boss.
Fuck her I say till she cries out.
Two days after the trial, the door closes behind Zara. Aidan watches her go. Lauren is making sweetcorn fritters, swearing at how the batter is clumping together.
‘Where’s she gone?’ Aidan says.
Lauren shrugs, licking her index finger. ‘She’s gone to speak to the homeless people. I let her go.’
‘What?’
Lauren looks up at him in exasperation. ‘She was anonymous. Nobody will recognize her. And she wants to speak to the … to Jamie’s friends. To apologize, I think. For letting them down. Look. What time are you going to stop stressing about my child and go to see yours?’
‘That crowd funder is vicious.’
‘I can’t keep her inside for ever, like a prisoner,’ Lauren says. ‘She wanted to go out, so she’s gone. She’s almost an adult. Harry said it was fine.’
Aidan stares at Bill, sitting in his bed in the corner of the kitchen, watching the fritters sizzle in the pan.
‘I did think about it, alright?’ Lauren says to him suddenly. One of the fritters is slowly burning. ‘But she has to go to school tomorrow. Ten o’clock on a Sunday morning is a pretty good time to try her being out, don’t you think?’
Aidan checks the crowd funder again, as he has many times today. In the comments, somebody has pasted a single link.
Aidan clicks it, and it opens the Facebook app on his phone. It navigates him automatically to a Facebook group.
The group is called Find Girl A. He sits back for just a second, like the beat between a firework being lit and it going off. Fuck.
‘There’s a Find Girl A Facebook group,’ Aidan says quietly, unthinkingly.
‘Find Girl A?’
He points to the screen.
Lauren’s eyes track across it. She’s a quick reader. ‘Oh, shit,’ she whispers. She looks at him, then points to the screen. ‘Zara Starling,’ she says.
At first, Aidan thinks she is being superstitious, or reverential. That, by uttering her daughter’s name, nothing bad will happen to her. But her lips are white, and he looks at his phone again, searching for an explanation for her terror. There it is, posted by a man with a blank profile photo calling himself Dr NoGood.
News just in on the grapevine, he has written. Girl A is also known as … Zara Starling. Zara’s Facebook profile photo is attached, smiling, happy Zara, taken on holiday this summer, totally unaware.
Aidan’s eyes meet Lauren’s across the kitchen. His stomach drops. They know who she is.
Lauren’s hand is already reaching for her phone, trying to call Zara.
They have found her.
7
Zara
Highbury, London
Zara is on her way back from seeing one of Jamie’s friends, and she feels worse, now, not better. She wishes it was possible to remove information from her brain, and store it somewhere else for a while.
Nevertheless, at least she isn’t anxious. She is walking in the sunshine in Highbury, thinking how she used to hate to go out. She joked she was a hermit, an introvert, but, specifically, she didn’t like the Tube, lifts, wide-open spaces, and exam halls.
From these, she constantly planned escape routes and excuses. If, during an exam, she felt weird, or like she needed to leave, she’d say she was having a nosebleed; no, she’d say she’d got her period unexpectedly. Anything was less embarrassing than anxiety.
She worked through a book about it, with Aidan, CBT for Dummies. And then she saw the therapist who said the nice things to her and wasn’t weird or whacky – not at all as Zara had expected her to be. She told her that she can do kind stuff for herself. That life doesn’t have to be one series of imagined disasters after another. At the first session, Zara said flatly, ‘That isn’t true,’ but then, session by session, she realized that maybe it was. Maybe things didn’t need to be risk-assessed, maybe escape routes didn’t need to be planned. Maybe a shopping trip could simply be enjoyed.
She is better now, she’s been better for a year maybe. The summer before she saw the murder, she kept finding herself thinking: I’m not worried about this any more. I’m out, I’m having fun. I’m myself again. Weird, awkward me.
Nevertheless, now, Zara isn’t anxious, but she can’t stop her mind spinning over the lie she told the police. The judge addressing her in the courtroom. Her shame behind those curtains.
Luke and Mal stood over Jamie, and then Jamie reared up, unpredictable, like a monster. Shouting, lashing out. Mal passed Luke the roof tile, and Luke cut Jamie with it, as cold and clinical as a surgeon. And yet, somehow, the law treats Luke and Mal as if they did nothing wrong.