Chapter 27 Anna—11 Months Ago
Cynthia can’t believe her ears.
Anna is safe and well, the voice on the phone tells her. Therefore, the police aren’t going to open a case. Everything is fine.
“She wanted us to reassure you,” the officer relays, “that she’s okay, but to let you know that she’d rather not resume contact, at least not at the moment. I’m sorry.”
There is a long pause before Cynthia speaks. She doesn’t believe a word of it.
“Was he there?” Cynthia asks.
“He?” the officer echoes.
“The boyfriend? This man I’ve never heard a word about until today? Was he living there with her, too? This is coercive control.”
The officer on the line is silent for a moment.
“Mrs. Derwent. No one else was living at the rental property with your daughter as far as I’m aware.”
By the time Cynthia hangs up, her decision is already made.
The drive to Anna’s old flat is a long one. Anna always said she chose it because it was near her office but as Cynthia makes the journey there now, she begins to wonder if Anna took the flat to be farther from her.
Cynthia knows she and her daughter weren’t close close. Certainly, they didn’t talk about personal things. She never knew how to deal with Anna’s tears when she was younger, and after a while Anna had finally stopped coming to her with them. Cynthia was her mother, after all, not her best friend.
No doubt other mothers might do it differently but Cynthia herself hadn’t been raised that way.
So there is a chance, Cynthia allows herself to acknowledge, as she turns onto Anna’s old road, Anna may have kept things from her, a boyfriend, even.
Cynthia pulls her sports car into the spot she always used to park in, opposite Anna’s flat. She looks out at the run-down building.
It needs a spruce, she thinks to herself, always has. Little weeds somehow grow from the ledge above the porch. It was okay inside, Cynthia conceded, but visiting her always got Cynthia down. So much to fix in there, and no one ever likely to do so.
Cynthia always found it odd that Anna never had any real drive.
Not like her. Cynthia married at twenty-one, and still managed a full career as a first-class air stewardess, and finally she had a baby.
She has been a good mother; she knows she has.
She “ran a tight ship,” Jim used to joke. She misses Jim, especially now.
Anna didn’t seem to want her own house, career, or nice things, apparently happy just to wallow in her office job, Cynthia thinks, and every now and then date no-hopers.
Cynthia shakes off the thoughts and pops her car door.
The landlord answers the door on the first ring, but this man is older than the one she spoke to before—perhaps she’ll get somewhere this time, she thinks.
“Hello, sorry to disturb you,” she apologizes, her smile warm. “I’m looking for my daughter, Anna Derwent, I think I must have spoken to your son before. Anna used to live here. The police told me she left a forwarding address with you?”
Cynthia has often found in life that saying things in a calm, feminine manner and looking someone dead in the eye gets more done than anything else.
—
Forty-five minutes later, Cynthia is knocking on the door of the address roughly scrawled by Anna’s old landlord on the back of a pizza flyer.
The woman who answers the door is not Anna, though she says she is. She is blond like Anna, about her height and body shape, but she is not bestowed with the natural Scandinavian good looks that Cynthia passed on to her daughter.
Cynthia does not tell the woman who she is. She can see how the police might have been fooled; these days, people rarely look like their photos.
But this woman is clearly not Anna, her clothes embellished with bursts of neon and sequins, her hair just the wrong side of clean, her voice betraying the throaty crackle of a smoker.
After much persuasion and the offer of money, Cynthia is invited into the woman’s flat.
Cynthia is given a watery tea at the woman’s kitchen table, and she puts down another fifty-pound note beside it on the table. The woman’s eyes flare.
Cynthia slides it across to her, and watches it disappear into the folds of the woman’s tracksuit bottoms.
“You aren’t Anna, are you? Do you know where she is?” Cynthia takes care not to spook the young woman, who looks up sharply. She grimaces, but Cynthia pulls another note from her wallet.
“Okay,” the girl says quickly. “A guy came round here a month or so ago. I don’t know him. He just told me to say that was my name, if anyone I didn’t know came asking. But I haven’t seen him now for weeks.”
She taps at her phone distractedly, with the speed and deftness of the young. There is a whoosh as a message is sent, and her gaze falls back on Cynthia.
“I mean, he paid enough for rent for the next two months, so I mean you can’t blame me for doing it. He just told me him and his girlfriend were trying to get away from her mum. But I’m guessing that’s you and you seem fine.” The woman shrugs. “I was expecting worse.”
“Do you know where they are?” Cynthia asks, sliding an additional note across the table’s pockmarked surface.
“Nah, he never said.”
Cynthia ignores the immediate setback and pushes on. “Would you be comfortable telling the police what you just told me? About all of this?” she asks.
The woman absentmindedly pulls a cigarette from a crumpled packet on the table and lights it. As she inhales, she twists a long strand of her blond hair around an acrylic fingernail. Time stretches. Cynthia waits. Finally, the woman looks at her again and shakes her head.
“No. Sorry. I’d love to help but he didn’t seem like someone I’d want to piss off. Plus lying to the police.”
Cynthia pulls another note from her purse. It isn’t a fifty—she has no more of them.
“Do you remember the man’s name?” she asks, sliding the money across the sticky table.
The woman lifts it, and wafts it, clearly disappointed by the denomination. “Yeah, I do. Simon. But I don’t think it’s his real name, you know?”
The woman’s phone pings, she glances at it.
—
By the time Cynthia leaves the woman’s flat, the light outside has faded.
She crosses the street quickly, this neighborhood rougher-looking in the evening light.
It is only now that Cynthia realizes how much her car stands out against the others on this road, and not in a good way. Its shiny paintwork and slick lines are gleamingly out of place.
She usually likes the feeling of standing out, having nice things, but now Cynthia recognizes that people here might see her car as a display of wealth or superiority. A car like hers seems to demand something from the onlooker, but it also reveals perhaps too much about its owner.
Cynthia does not like it here. As she reaches the car and depresses her key fob, her hand trembles. The sports car’s lights blink but when she pulls the door handle, it does not open. It is locked.
She must have left it unlocked the entire time she has been inside. Or she must have pressed the button accidentally inside.
Then she recalls briefly leaving her coat when she used the woman’s mildewed bathroom before leaving.
Why had she done that?
She hadn’t supposed the woman would be interested in her car, and she certainly couldn’t have had time to run outside and steal from it.
Cynthia pops the key fob again and opens the door.
She glances nervously into the car, her sunglasses remain in the cup holder, her tennis kit bag still in the passenger footwell, all seems well.
She checks the empty back seats before sliding in.
It is only once she has started driving, once she is well on to the M25 heading home, that she feels the air in the car shift.
There is the creak of leather behind her, movement from the footwell at her back, up on to the rear seats, and then a voice comes close to her ear.
“Hello, Cynthia. My name is Simon.”