at rock bottom now? ‘Cass, will you take Benj to the snack bar?’
‘Can I get cake?’ said Benji. Cassie scowled. She felt her brother was getting too fat.
‘Of course, baby.’ I fumbled a tenner into Cassie’s hand, pleading with my eyes. Please. Don’t judge me. Cut me some slack.
DC Devine watched them go, then looked at me.
‘What is it?’ My voice was trapped in my throat, fluttering like the birds that sometimes got into our chimney.
‘We should sit down.’ He guided me to a rack of chairs at the end of the corridor, upholstered in pale green pleather. I wondered how much bad news had been delivered between these walls. I did as he asked, adopting the same straight-backed ready-for-a-job-interview stance I’d taken while speaking to Karen last night.
‘What is it?’
‘Jake Rampling’s bail hearing is tomorrow.’
‘Will they keep him in?’
He screwed up his face. ‘It depends. If they think he poses a danger, they might.’
‘And if they let him out, and he comes here? If he tries to hurt Mike again?’ It was unthinkable, Jake in jail, but if the alternative was him coming here and stabbing my children’s father, it had to be done. ‘So you came to tell me – what, he might get out?’
‘There’s something else you should know. Something that might affect the case.’
I waited. I had learned, already, to wait for the blows, bracing myself.
‘Ms Rampling is claiming . . . she’s stated that Jake is your husband’s son. That Mike is his father.’
Karen
The police had helped her find a small flat to stay in while Jake was in custody. A living room with a strip of kitchen and cupboard of a bathroom, a small bedroom. Nicer than many flats she’d lived in when she first had Jake. She wondered where he was now, what kind of cell he was sleeping in. Even though it hurt her like an ache below her heart, to imagine him in there, she also knew she couldn’t bear to have him here. Pitying. Picturing her like that, helpless and hurt and bleeding. She hated it.
Karen lay down carefully on the borrowed bed, the sheets that bit more shabby and worn than you’d get in a hotel. Wondering about the other people who’d passed through here, the victims and witnesses, the scared and the fleeing. The act of lying down, of being horizontal, itself brought flashbacks, and she left the light on so it burned behind her eyes, and, realising it was inevitable, allowed the memories of the night before to return to her.
In her head it was like a film, except one she was in, one she was reliving, but which she could do nothing to change or stop. It was that night – the night that had changed her. She was so drunk. Forty-three years old, a son almost off to college, and she was swaying like a student during freshers’ week, fuzzy round the edges, words sticking in her mouth. The grass was cool under her bare feet – she’d felt sexy earlier, bohemian, in her short dress with her smooth legs. At least she had that, even if she’d messed up her degree and career and never made anything of herself. At least she still looked young, alongside Jodi, like an inflated white pudding, and Ali so prim in her sack-like dress and her sunglasses like an Alice band on her hair. Ali had always been like this – lower-middle-class respectability to the core, a make-up-thin layer of college rebellion on top. Shots in night clubs. Blushing, her blouse undone, on bop night. And he loved her, he went back to her every time, but still he couldn’t leave Karen alone.
Mike. Like her shadow, like an old illness she thought she’d recovered from that crept back into her bones, so that every time Karen thought she’d moved on there he was. Carl the electrician, a decent simple man; Jim the university lecturer with the ex-wife and two blonde daughters. OK, neither perfect, but both a chance for her to have a life, a husband of her own at these get-togethers instead of waiting for scraps from Ali’s table. Like a messed-up harem, but Ali didn’t even know she was in one. Rearranging the plates while under their feet roared a vast fault line. How could Karen do this, sleep with her best friend’s husband? It was like being two people at once. She loved Ali, she’d go after anyone who hurt her. But she’d also slept