Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner (read book txt) 📗

GREENWICH PARK

The rain scatters everyone, washes all the people from the streets. They do awkward crouching runs with makeshift umbrellas – magazines, newspapers folded in half. They cower in doorways, under the awnings of shops. They pull out their phones and call for rescue.

In this part of town, no one looks at anyone. I pass a pizza place, a jobcentre. In the launderette, the machines spin round and round like rolling eyes. It is a place and yet it is nowhere. Pavement puddles hold up a grey mirror to the metal sky.

The phone box is under a huge billboard, a peeling election poster for the side that lost. He pulls down his hat as he reaches it. There is no CCTV here, they have checked. There is only concrete, the roar of traffic, the skid of crisp packets across the pavements.

The phone box stinks of piss, but the phone still works. He takes a coin from his jacket pocket with a gloved hand. As he dials the number, the pornographic eyes of girls stare blankly back at his.

HELEN

Katie and I are sitting on her sofa, pizza boxes piled in front of us, an old romcom on pause. Rain is beating at the windows, a dull drum roll over the sound of the wind in the trees in Dartmouth Park.

I couldn’t be at home any more. Daniel and I are under siege, reporters knocking all the time, asking about Rachel. It’s the same for her flatmates too, apparently, and at Charlie’s club. I texted Daniel, told him I was going to Katie’s to get away from it all. He was worried, didn’t want me going so far from Greenwich with the baby due any moment. But I assured him I’d be OK. Even if I do go into labour, it’ll be hours before I need to go to hospital, I told him. As you would know if you’d come to the antenatal classes, I felt like adding.

It is cosy in Katie’s flat. Of course it’s silly to envy Katie her place – after all, it’s barely the size of our living room – but I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to have a little space that is just mine, not Daniel’s. Katie’s cat, Socks, is curled up on the sofa between us. As we pull slices of pizza away from the box, coiling the stray strands of mozzarella with our fingers, I ask her if she’d seen Charlie since I took him to the police station.

Katie shakes her head. ‘He called me that night – late, it must have been when he got back from the station with you. He asked me what I was doing, taking that photograph, showing it to you, instead of talking to him first. He was angry, we rowed.’ She looks down, fiddles with the blanket over her knees. ‘I haven’t spoken to him since.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault.’ She pauses. ‘Helen, what exactly did he say about how he knew Rachel? Did he just know her from the club? Or did something happen between the two of them?’

I glance at her uncertainly. She rolls her eyes. ‘Come on, I can take it,’ she says firmly.

I feel blood rush into my cheeks as I recall the conversation. ‘He was maddening, actually. He kept saying they were friends, and that he only kept the fact that they knew each other a secret because she asked him to. He claims he doesn’t know about her pregnancy – or lack of it. Or why she wanted to keep it a secret that they knew each other. And that he didn’t ask.’

‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘I know. But you know what he’s like. He doesn’t talk to me. He’s probably told the police more than he’s told me.’

Katie finishes her slice, presses her fingers into her eye sockets.

‘I don’t know what to think,’ she says quietly.

The rain is picking up. It occurs to me how much safer I feel here in Katie’s flat than I do at home. Earlier, when I arrived, I pressed a set of spare keys to our house into her hand. ‘When the baby comes,’ I said, ‘would you mind – if I have to stay in hospital with the baby – coming and feeding Monty, keeping the plants alive?’ She looked at me. I knew what she was thinking. It was a long way to come to feed the cat. But for some reason, I felt strongly that I wanted her to have them. I wanted to entrust the house to her. In case something happened. I didn’t think too much about what. She nodded, slipped the keys into her bag. Of course, she said.

‘You know,’ I say, ‘before she left – before all this Charlie stuff – I was starting to think something was going on between Rachel and Rory.’

‘Rory? Jesus. Why?’

I tell her about the two notes I found, the first one in Rory and Serena’s bathroom, then the other one in Rachel’s suitcase.

Katie looks at me, one eyebrow raised. ‘You just found them, Helen?’

‘All right,’ I mutter.

‘What did they say, these notes?’

‘Nothing really. I couldn’t understand them. One said “wear to show me”. I never read the other one – just saw the initial.’ I pause. ‘But you’ve got to admit it’s weird. Finding them in his house and then in her suitcase.’

‘I guess so.’ Katie nods slowly, but I can see she is unconvinced.

‘It’s not just that that made me think it,’ I add. ‘Do you remember how Lisa thought she remembered Rachel?’

Katie furrows her brow. ‘Oh yeah. I thought that was odd.’

‘And the way Rory reacted, when he saw Rachel in his kitchen. Remember, when he dropped all that glass?’

‘You don’t know that was because of Rachel.’

I sigh. She is right.

‘You think I’m an idiot.’

‘No, Helen. I don’t think that. You need to stop putting yourself down. But I mean – I just think it doesn’t prove