Fleet felt a surge of anger, and in that moment he was seventeen again, his coat on his back, his bag at the door, his mother standing in exactly the same place she was now, holding her crucifix in exactly the same way. The only difference, then, was that she’d been crying.
Fleet forced himself to take a look around the room, using the opportunity to breathe. What had he expected, after all?
There was nothing that surprised him. The same flowery sofa, the same pale yellow walls. The TV was new – not new; different – but probably only because the last one had finally broken down. Even the potpourri on the windowsill was as he remembered it, and for a second he thought he detected the familiar rosewater smell. But it was a ghost, probably. A phantom. The potpourri, by now, would only have smelled of dust.
‘I should go,’ said Fleet. ‘I’m sorry.’
His mother laughed out loud; a single, bitter bark.
‘What I mean is, I should never have come,’ he explained.
‘So why did you?’
He hesitated. She was asking him what he was doing here, at her home, but also why he’d come back at all. Why, when he’d left town, had he not just stayed away for good?
‘How did you know it was me?’ Fleet said, instead of answering. ‘Out there. In my car.’ He peered over the top of the net curtains, out into the road. ‘You couldn’t have seen me from here.’
‘I saw your car. Nobody round here drives a car like that. Like a businessman’s car or something. And I saw the smoke coming out the window. As if you were deciding.’ She shrugged. ‘As if you couldn’t.’
His mother took her own cue, and pulled a tin from the pocket of her cardigan, grey like her hair. From the tin she extracted a pre-rolled cigarette, like the ones Fleet’s father had smoked before he died. His mother, when Fleet was younger, had always smoked Rothmans. Five a day. One before breakfast, one after dinner, and the others at times of need in between. Unless his mother had changed her habits, Fleet gathered this was one of those times.
She saw him looking at the tin.
‘Economising,’ she said. ‘It’s not a choice.’
Once again Fleet felt a tightening within him, from his toes through his gut into his jaw. It’s not a choice. It was one of his mother’s mottos. A phrase she used to disavow her responsibility. Like the pictures on the mantel. It’s not a choice, she would have said. As though she’d been left with no other option.
She lit her cigarette and put the tin back in her pocket. Her free hand went once again to the symbol around her neck.
‘I want you to know,’ Fleet said, choosing his words, ‘that I didn’t come back because of anything apart from Sadie Saunders. I’m doing my job, that’s all. That’s the only reason I’m here.’
‘Your job,’ his mother answered on her out-breath. ‘You couldn’t have been …’ She rolled her smoking hand. ‘A teacher. A traffic warden if you wanted the uniform.’ She sniffed. ‘Although I suppose it was predictable enough that you’d join the police.’
Fleet ignored her. ‘Also, I wanted to say …’ Sorry? But that wasn’t quite true. In fact, it was a long way from true. ‘I wanted to let you know that I’m aware of what people are saying. I hope … I didn’t want you to have to deal with any repercussions, that’s all. Not on my behalf.’
His mother’s face puckered as she smoked. She exhaled, sucked, blew out again.
‘I thought you were leaving,’ she said.
In his car Fleet forced himself to start the engine. If he hadn’t been aware his mother would still be watching, he would have given himself time to calm down. He felt drunk on something, inebriated, to the extent his hands were shaking.
He pulled away too fast, and only realised when it was too late that he hadn’t checked the road behind him. But the movement that had caught his eye was only a car pulling out from the side road opposite, turning in the other direction. Fleet eased his foot from the accelerator, slowing the engine and attempting to slow his heart.
He drove. He wasn’t ready yet to return to the station, but he knew that if he stayed on the roads he would find himself heading out of town, from lack of anywhere else to go as much as anything – and if that happened he had his doubts he’d have the willpower to turn around. So he went to the river, and parked on the rise behind the Overlook. Below him, the search for Sadie Saunders went on.
I’m doing my job, Fleet had told his mother. That’s the only reason I’m here.
It might even have sounded half-convincing, if he hadn’t been standing in his mother’s living room when he’d said it.
So why kid himself? Why test himself? Unless the test was the point. Was that why he’d gone to see her in the first place – to see if his motives when it came to Sadie were really as distorted as people were saying? It was possible, Fleet supposed. Probable. Except now, looking down at the river, he didn’t know whether he’d passed or failed.
Abigail Marshall.
Cora Briggs.
Fareed Hussein.
Mason Payne.
And Luke Saunders, if only they could have asked him.
The truth lay buried in their stories somewhere, Fleet remained convinced. But he was missing something, clearly. How was what happened in the woods linked to Sadie’s disappearance? Was there cause there, or only effect? Or was the truth another shade of grey, a blood-flecked mixture of one and the other?
And if Sadie’s friends had really played no part in her disappearance, why did they continue to behave as though they had something to
