Elle
PAST
I wasn’t stupid, I understood that I’d have to cool off for a bit.
For three weeks I stopped going to St. John’s Wood and I stopped leaving messages on Brett Parker’s cell phone asking where he’d dropped Bryony off on the day she disappeared.
But I was desperate to know if he worked for the diplomatic service.
I couldn’t help feeling elated as I walked to my boring job on the other side of the Thames.
I was sure that Brett Parker’s and Bryony’s paths had crossed, if only in the restaurant where she had worked.
If they had known each other, even on a waitress-client basis, it made sense that Bryony hadn’t seemed to hesitate before getting into his car.
When I arrived at the office, I found it impossible to concentrate on what I was meant to be doing. All I could think about was going back to the building where Brett Parker worked to see where he went during his lunch break.
I’d been to La Salsa, the restaurant where Bryony had worked, several times in the weeks following her murder.
The first time I’d gone, Jaz had been with me but when he discovered its link to Bryony, he’d refused to go back, so I would go on my own and sit at a table for one.
Once Bryony’s workplace had become public knowledge, it had attracted a lot of voyeuristic customers but I’d never included myself in that category because I never asked the personnel about their ex-member of staff.
Instead, I listened to other customers casually asking the waitress, almost as an afterthought while they were ordering their food, or paying the bill, if this was where the poor girl who’d been murdered had worked.
And when they were told, sometimes tearfully, that yes, Bryony had worked there, I would listen to the customer’s insincere commiserations before they went on to ask for more details—what she was like, how had her colleagues heard that she’d been murdered, how had it affected them, had the police told them anything else.
Their questions were so invasive I guessed that some of them were journalists hoping for a scoop and it had sickened me.
I told myself that I was there for the right reasons; I felt responsible for what had happened to Bryony so I had the right to know more about the young woman I’d failed to save.
For the next three weeks, I spent my lunch breaks casing the building where Brett Parker worked.
If I thought I could get away with getting in to work late, I’d wait outside Southwark tube station and follow Brett Parker to his office.
I pretended that I needed to be sure of his routine but I had enough self-awareness to know that “need” was a euphemism for obsession; the days when I didn’t follow him were different from the days when I did, flat and without purpose.
I soon got to know the pattern of his days.
Every morning, after arriving at Southwark tube station at around eight forty-five, he bought a takeaway coffee from the same coffee shop and drank it on the way to his office, arriving there at eight fifty.
His lunchtime routine varied; sometimes he stayed in the office, sometimes he emerged to buy a sandwich.
On Fridays, however, he had lunch with some of his colleagues, or maybe clients, at one of the restaurants on The Cut. But never La Salsa.
Then, one gray Friday in the middle of February, he came out of the building with two people I now recognized as his workmates, because he was often with them.
As I followed thirty or so yards behind them, I wished I could catch up with them and tell his colleagues that he’d given a lift to Bryony Sanders on the day she’d been murdered.
I was busy imagining the fallout when they disappeared into La Salsa.
I waited a moment, then moved closer to the window.
They had been shown to a table and were laughing and joking with the waitress as she handed them menus, and I wondered if they had laughed and joked with Bryony in the same way.
And then, at that very moment, Brett Parker turned his head and looked toward the window where I was standing.