Chapter Thirty-One
Kim had turned the radio on to hear the Metropolitan Police press conference in Sidmouth parish church.
She had to admit, although Edward had very little good to say about the Aspinall fellow, the station controller had organized the coverage excellently.
The young reporter, Alfie Burton, was outside the church with two or three locals who helped him fill the time by talking about the dread they had felt in the past few days, and the fear that there was some motivation for the incident they were not being told about.
Alfie and his guests spoke up to the moment at which the press conference started, at which point he said in his booming voice: ‘We will now TAKE THE NEWS CONFERENCE LIVE, and afterwards Edward Temmis, who is INSIDE, will emerge from THE CHURCH to give us his assessment.’
At the estate agency, Kim said to the half-dozen employees in the office, ‘Guys, gather around, we’ll want to hear this.’
‘This feels like the olden days,’ said one of her Gen Z estate agents, ‘listening to the wireless.’ Kim did not want to explain. They were listening because she wanted to hear Edward.
After the scientist finished, there was only hustle and bustle from inside the church.
The line clicked back to Alfie Burton, waiting for Edward Temmis.
Alfie filled the space to the best of his ability, bringing in some of the Sidmouth residents who were now pouring out of the building – ‘Great news, I think, but a very complicated presentation’ …
‘It still sounds nuclear and therefore it’s still dangerous, isn’t it?
’ … ‘I feel we need to know more’ – but when Alfie was left alone it became clear he had not taken a note of the more detailed science and just kept coming back to the conclusion: ‘No threat to anyone unless you eat it, and that means no one has to isolate.’ He added, ‘I wrote down “Crippled Actinium twenty-four”.’
‘What good news!’ said another of Kim’s younger staff as they drifted back to their places in the open-plan office. ‘Kim, I need to talk to you about the penthouse couple when you’ve a moment. They keep pushing.’
‘The penthouse pair?’
‘Yes. They know I’m fobbing them off.’
Kim managed, just, to avoid rolling her eyes at the mention.
She would be dragged back into work within seconds, when she really wanted to hear Edward’s take on the press conference.
What a puzzle this was! She knew, because she knew Edward back to front, that he would immediately be trying to work out what had happened.
She wanted to help. Just as she had wanted to help with Wendy Wrigley.
She was feeling a little guilty about Mrs Wrigley.
She liked the doctor’s wife a lot, and had plans for the two of them when things calmed down.
If Wendy was being shunned, Kim would take her out for a drink and introduce her to some of her own friends.
Maybe she and Wendy would buddy up and do stuff together.
Kim always felt she was too private and yes, she could see them becoming friends.
Wendy had been gently messaging her about Edward for the past few days, asking why he was not responding.
Today Kim had been able to reply that his phone had fallen off a cliff – a step beyond ‘dog ate my homework’.
Then Kim had made the mistake of telling her, ‘I think Edward has made some progress. We all went out to test his theory.’ The sentences seemed to electrify Wendy, who replied, ‘I must talk to him then. I know there’s a lot going on but he must have a minute for me. ’
‘I’m so sorry. Ever since the Toppings—’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Mrs Wrigley. ‘How awful it is, and such a mystery as to why Russia would do that to this little town.’
Feeling terrible, Kim had passed on Melody’s number, which Edward had shared with her earlier.
Perhaps that was why Edward had not, as planned, emerged immediately from the church to give his on-the-spot analysis to Alfie Burton: Wendy Wrigley had gone there for answers and found him.
Resigning herself to speaking to Edward later, she knew she should turn to the business of the Penthouse Pair, as she called them. She had asked her mother, ‘Can I refuse to sell a house because the two of them were weird and nasty?’
‘Yes!’ Barbara had cried. ‘You’re the boss! Of course you can!’
‘What if they start throwing money at me?’
‘No! Of course you can’t refuse that.’
She smiled. Because today was a good day.
The Penthouse Pair could wait for a reply.
Sidmouth already had its answer. There was no mass leak of radiation, and it sounded as if it had not even been a deliberate attack.
Whatever the biker was doing was not terrorism, right?
Unless he wanted to put all those dangerous ampoules into the water supply.
There was that. She wished she could get Edward’s view.
Stevie drifted into Kim’s thoughts. She would be so thrilled to be out of isolation. Was that a happy picture in her mind’s eye, of Stevie putting her wedding dress into storage for another day? The wedding was due to have been in four days’ time … Kim hoped it would stay cancelled.
Kim took her mobile out of the office because she did not want her young staff to hear. She took the stairs at a clip and emerged from the front door, where there was a bench by a quiet stretch of road that caught the sun at this time of day.
‘Stevie?’
‘Who goes there?’
‘You sound – wait.’ The volume on her smartphone was quiet, and she turned it up. ‘You sound fine.’
‘Just fine? Well, apparently I’m not in prison no more.’
There was a voice in the background. Stevie spoke to someone else.
‘It’s Kim, Mum. Okay, I’ll tell her it’s not a prison.
’ Then back to the phone: ‘It’s not a prison, Kim.
Officially not a prison. It’s my bedroom at home and I’m now allowed downstairs.
Bye, Mum.’ A door closed in the background.
‘Well, it was a prison. Fucking shite bollocks fuck, and excuse my French.’
‘But you’re out! Out of Isolation Station! You must be excited … the wedding?’ Kim dared the question.
Silence.
‘Stevie?’
‘I put Roddy in the bin.’
Kim’s heart lurched. ‘Oh Stevie,’ she gulped. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I thought you wanted me to!’
‘No, I mean, I’m just sorry you’ve had to go through all that.’
‘I broke his sunglasses.’
Kim snorted, tears in her eyes. ‘Accidents happen.’
‘Because I feel he was breaking me. I’m a little scared now.’
‘You’ll find someone else in a second!’
‘Not scared of being on my own. Scared he’ll come back at night and hurt me. He knows where my bedroom windows are, and I only have one eye left to lose.’
‘Then come and stay at mine,’ said Kim without hesitating, brushing the tears away.
‘What if he attacks the vicarage with Mum and Dad there?’
‘Why don’t you all stay at mine?’
‘All three of us? How big is your house?’
‘It’s a two-bedroom flat.’
‘What, so I have to sleep in bed with them like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?’
‘Okay – I have to be honest. The spare room only has a single bed.’
‘I don’t even want to picture that. They wouldn’t come anyway. Vicars can’t leave their vicarages or they shrivel up. Mind you, Dad already looks like a guy who left his vicarage.’
‘Would you come, though? Just to feel safe? You deserve to feel safe, Stevie.’
‘I’m probably getting too cranked up. And there’s good news – now I’m not radioactive, at least I can go ahead and get married.’
A knot of puzzlement and fear tightened in Kim’s stomach. ‘Sorry? Wait – you’re still going ahead with the wedding?’
‘Kim, I know this will surprise the knickers off you, assuming you are wearing some – yes, you probably are – but would you say we was friends, the two of us?’
Her ‘of us’ sounded like ‘oz’. Kim pictured Stevie, talking quietly into the phone at her end so her parents would not hear.
Short but mighty, with a face full of acid scars but a spirit unbroken.
The single gleaming undamaged eye, the shock of brown-blonde curls.
The foster child who stayed small but became a kind of giant.
She remembered a particular moment when there had been forty people in a pub and Stevie had walked in wearing a pink cowboy hat and bellowed, ‘NO PARTY TILL STEVIE GETS HERE, AND HERE I FUCKING WELL AM.’ Her language was appalling, and it did not surprise her that Stevie’s IT job at the council seemed to have been designed to keep her well away from the public.
But that was, Edward had told her, some kind of Tourette’s.
And the Tourette’s, she was fairly sure, had been exacerbated by her troubled life as a little girl in Glasgow.
It probably had not helped that her parents’ existence revolved around a little Anglican parish, their horizon too narrow to encompass all the wrongs done to their daughter.
‘Absolutely we’re friends, Stevie.’
‘Okay. Truth now. I’m getting married, but not to Roddy.’
Kim felt the sun on her face and a gorgeous inner warmth as the knot inside her untied itself. ‘You’re not getting married to him on Saturday, but there’s still going to be a wedding?’
‘No flies on you,’ said Stevie. ‘Since it was too late to cancel anything, even the church, I decided to marry myself. We’ll be thin on the ground, but I was hoping you’d still come.’
‘Marry yourself?’ Kim laughed. ‘Stevie, my love, I’m sorry, I’m not getting it.’
‘I mean I’ll get married to myself instead of getting married to him.
I saw on the BBC a story once, someone in Felixstowe did it.
She got to forty-two, no one wanted her, so she had her big day on her own.
Obviously we’ll have a lot of gaps, because Roddy’s family and friends won’t be there.
But I figured, why cancel everything just because he’s a wart on the arse of the world? ’
‘Ha! I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘I’m sure Edward will feel the same, if he’s not busy. He’s still invited?’
‘He’s the team leader, of course he is. He’s been all over the radio with this bloody thing.’
‘Yes. Thank God it’s over.’ Kim had a sudden jolt of memory, of conscience. It is not over for the family of Nina Lopez, and it never will be. ‘I don’t mean “over”, that’s wrong, I mean at least it’s not as bad as we feared.’
They took a breath, as if not sure where the conversation went now.
After a beat Stevie said, ‘I can’t remember if I told you, but I went part-time at the council.
I know the IT job back to front but it’s fifty per cent “I forgot my password” and the other fifty is getting AI alerts that someone’s accessed porn.
Half of all the porn accessed in the past year was on one computer, and of course it was the guy responsible for council standards.
He went on a website called DANISH WOMEN GARDENING more than a thousand times. ’
‘That’s porn now?’
‘Apparently the word “gardening” means something else in Denmark. Roddy kept saying it was his dream job, checking other people’s computers.’
‘What are you doing with your extra time then, if you’ve got fewer hours at the council?’
Stevie hummed at the other end of the phone. ‘Er … I’ll tell you sometime. I think you’ll like it.’
Kim volunteered a confidence of her own. ‘If this is our first girly chat – Edward asked me to move in. He was gutted when I said a flat no.’
‘Just tell him the truth.’
‘What is the truth?’
‘You’re asking me?’
‘I guess I am,’ said Kim.
‘Tell him you’re like the girl who got mugged in a dark alley, and now you’re scared of all alleys, even light ones.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Come on, Kim! Fucking analogies! Meaning that husband of yours left you in trauma and now you’re avoiding anything that looks like a husband, even a brightly lit one.’
‘That’s the way the brain works, I guess.’
‘I only know this because of my screwed-up childhood, and it’s taken me a hundred years to sort through that bloody mess.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘But it had the reverse effect on me, where I tried to make a hopeless thing work. That faecal tracksuit Roddy was excited because I was a virgin when I met him, I think.’
This information was so left-field that Kim stifled a gasp. The sun was on her face, but she felt something in the depths of her like a diver’s light, a beam that showed how deep her inner self went, and how much of her could suddenly turn to anger or love.
She took a deep breath. ‘You’re such a wonderful girl, Stevie.’
‘That was a long sigh. Are you okay? You sound like someone tried to run off with your earrings.’
Kim replied, ‘When someone hurts you, I think I feel it.’
‘But I’m not hurt.’
‘That’s kind of what I mean. You get hit, I get hurt.’
‘Sisters?’
‘Maybe. In a different life.’
‘That’s no good to me. It needs to be in this one.’
‘Okay. Sisters in this one.’