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company while you wait? I can if you want.’
    I wished she sounded like she meant it. ‘It’s up to you,’ I replied, ‘but I wouldn’t mind the company.’
    ‘He’s probably, I don’t know. Gone for a drink with a mate.’
    ‘What—with Louis? Why?’
    ‘Oh come on, Jessica. You know what Mickey’s like. I mean, it’s usually you who’s saying—’ Her sentence hung heavy, open-ended in the air.
    ‘What?’ I hunted for hope in her words.
    ‘You know. He likes to do his own thing, I thought.’
    ‘Not like this, though. This is a bit odd, even for him. Isn’t it?’
    ‘I don’t want to speak out of turn.’ She was cool. She’d been cool for weeks.
    ‘Please, Leigh. There isn’t time for this now. Just say what you mean.’
    ‘Yes, well, normally I would, Jessica. Only, since the other day when I said you’d lost your bounce a bit, I seem to remember that you told me—’
    I nearly laughed. ‘You made me sound like a shampoo commercial, that was all. Anyway, look, it’s not important now, is it?’ I was as level as I could manage. ‘If the girls don’t need you, would you mind—will you come round, just for a bit?’ She said she’d try.
    Alone in the kitchen’s gathering gloom, I contemplated my sister’s words. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps I was over-dramatising things. Oh God, I hoped so. I mean, I should have been used to Mickey’s erratic behaviour by now. He hated being tied down, you know, liked to come and go as he pleased, that type of loner thing. I stared at the white wall opposite, where the huge picture of a four-month-old sleeping Louis hung, the photo Mickey had taken while I lay on the sofa in the nursery, knackered from the newness of it all, watching my feather-haired son sleep. And I looked at that photo and I remembered that I was happier then than I’d ever been. I remembered how I thought that after all the recent months of angst I was finally at peace.
    Jean popped her wispy head round the door and said she was going now, and I started to look for some money when suddenly it came to me. Of course! Why the hell hadn’t I thought of this before? I cursed myself for being so slow as I scrabbled on the table for the handset I’d just flung down, and I sliced my finger on some of Mickey’s sketches that weren’t filed, but ignored the dripping blood as frantically I dialled my own mobile phone. I pictured it flashing bright in the pushchair pocket where I’d left it, my phone with a little photo of a day-old Louis on the user screen.
    And it rang and rang and I was praying,
Mickey, answer it, please answer it
, but it just kept ringing-and then suddenly, just as I was about to give up, to sink back down, somebody answered. Someone answered my phone. Whoever it was didn’t speak, but I could hear them breathing, and somehow it didn’t sound like Mickey, though how the hell I could tell, I didn’t know. But someone was on the end of my phone, and so I said in a quick tight voice before I started screaming, I said,
    ‘Hello, who is this? Can you hear me? Mickey—’ but then, before I could say anything else, whoever it was hung up. They wouldn’t talk to me. They just switched off my phone.

CHAPTER THREE

    Leigh arrived as I was putting the phone down after talking to the police again. I watched the elephantine manoeuvres of her huge car as she tried to park and I thought of Mickey scoffing rudely at my sister, at her burly husband. What does she need that tractor for, he always said—just to do her shopping? Mall rat, Mickey called her, Bluewater rat.
    Her perfect streaks swayed precisely up the path, and as I let her in I was trying not to gibber. I told her the police were coming over soon, they finally seemed to be taking notice, and she put an arm around me and suddenly I was crying; and I found I couldn’t stop. I dissolved into tears so hot they scalded me because I was chilled to the very bone. And in the middle of all this horrible emotion, Maxine