to Joanna Weatherall earlier that evening. She is believed to be in her fifties and was walking a small black dog.
‘Oh God in heaven,’ I whispered.
I sent the article to the printer, carried it back to the kitchen as carefully as if it were a pot of funeral ashes. I read it again and again, hands shaking. I slipped her into her plastic sleeve. I clipped the file shut, trapped my finger in the ring binders and drew blood. Sucking the blood so it wouldn’t go all over, I closed my eyes. Closed my mind to my own terror.
‘I did not hurt that girl,’ I whispered to no one. ‘I did not hurt her.’
She never asked for my name. I never gave it.
The witness had remembered almost nothing about my appearance, but someone must have come forward and told them about the dog. I tried to slow my breathing, which was coming quick and shallow. There was no mention of my height, my weight, the colour of my eyes, not even the colour of my hair. A raincoat wouldn’t give me away, not when half the population had a nondescript cagoule that could be black or navy or dark grey in the night. If no one can see you, you can get away with murder. But someone had remembered the colour of the dog. Black.
All morning I was a robot. At lunchtime, I was polishing wine glasses because there were only two punters in when the bar phone rang.
‘Barley Mow, Church Street, Runcorn, can I help you?’
‘Rachel?’
It was Mark. My chest filled with heat. ‘Mark? Everything all right?’
‘I’ve been ringing you all morning. Have you left your phone at home?’
‘I might have. It might be off, why?’
He sighed. I heard exasperation with a dash of weariness. ‘Have you seen the article in the Weekly News, that lass that was stabbed?’
‘No. Why?’ Phone hooked in the crook of my neck, I dug around in my bag.
He gave another sigh, longer. Disbelief this time, with an undercurrent of depression. He knew I was lying. Knew I would have read it, printed it off. I made myself wait out the pause he was trying to get me to fill. My mobile wasn’t in my bag.
‘She’s died,’ he said eventually. ‘They’re saying they want to speak to a woman with a small black dog,’
‘Are they?’ I could barely keep my voice steady. My head felt thick, creaking, like it was full of lagging.
‘Here, I’ll read it to you.’
‘You don’t need to—’
‘It says the police are keen to speak to a woman believed to be in her fifties with a small black dog.’
‘Mark, I heard you the first time. You don’t need to read it to me – I’m not deaf. It’s not… it won’t be me, will it?’
‘But…’ I could hear him searching for words. ‘But you were out, weren’t you? With the dog? Near the town hall, they found her. And our dog is small and black. I mean, you walk down that way… you might’ve seen something.’
I hadn’t said where I’d been. I never did. He didn’t care, wouldn’t have heard and certainly wouldn’t have remembered even if I had told him. ‘But I’m always out with the dog. And there’s loads of small black dogs – they’re ten a penny. I mean, I spoke to a girl briefly. But I didn’t know it was the same girl, did I? How could I have known that?’
‘So you did speak to her?’
Bugger.
‘Only in passing, like.’
‘But… don’t you think you should speak to the police?’
I tried to pick up whether or not he was thinking of the knife in my bag, about my distress at finding it there, but it was difficult over the phone. It occurred to me then that while he didn’t look at me often, when he did look at me lately it was like Katie did sometimes: eyes screwed up, the way you look at someone who’s behaving weirdly. Maybe they both thought I was mad. Maybe he actually thought I had something to do with this Jo but couldn’t come out and say it. But surely he didn’t think I was capable of—
‘Rachel? Are you still there?’
‘I’m not going to speak to the police. That’s like turning yourself in for going into a shop in the morning that gets robbed in the afternoon. It’s got nothing to do with me. What would I say? Well, Officer, she definitely didn’t have any stab wounds when I spoke to her? She’s