‘I know,’ he said quietly.
‘I just want to go to St Anne’s,’ Tanzie cried. Her glasses had fallen off – Jess hadn’t had time to take her to the optician to fix them – and she covered her eyes with her hands. ‘Please let me go. Please, Mum. I’ll be really good. Just let me go there.’
‘Sssh.’ A lump rose in Jess’s throat. Tanzie never begged for anything. She just wasn’t made that way. ‘Tanze …’ On the pavement, Nicky turned away, as if he couldn’t watch it.
Mr Nicholls said something into his phone that she couldn’t make out. Tanzie had begun to sob. She was a dead weight. It was as if she was refusing to leave the car.
‘Come on, sweetheart,’ Jess said, tugging at her.
She had braced herself against the door. ‘Please, Mum. Please. Please. I’ll be really good.’
‘Tanzie, you cannot stay in the car.’
‘Please …’
‘Out. C’mon, baby.’
‘I’ll drive you,’ Mr Nicholls said.
Jess’s head bumped against the door frame. ‘What?’
‘I’ll drive you to Scotland.’ He had put down his phone and was staring at his steering-wheel. ‘Turns out I’ve got to go to Northumberland. Scotland’s not that much further. I’ll drop you there.’
Everyone fell silent. At the end of the street there was a burst of laughter and a car door slammed. Jess straightened her ponytail, which had gone askew. ‘Look, it’s really nice of you to offer but we can’t accept a lift from you.’
‘Yeah,’ said Nicky, leaning forward. ‘Yeah, we can, Jess.’ He glanced at Tanzie. ‘Really. We can.’
‘But we don’t even know you. I can’t ask you to –’
Mr Nicholls didn’t look at her. ‘It’s just a lift. It’s really not a big deal.’
Tanzie sniffed and rubbed at her nose. ‘Please? Mum?’
Jess looked at her, and at Nicky’s bruised face, then back at Mr Nicholls. She had never wanted to sprint from a car so badly. ‘I can’t offer you anything,’ she said, and her voice emerged with a weird break in the middle. ‘Anything at all.’
He raised one eyebrow, swivelled his head towards the dog. ‘Not even vacuum my back seats afterwards?’
The breath that left her chest probably sounded slightly more relieved than was diplomatic. ‘Well … okay, that I can do.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Then I suggest we all get a few hours’ sleep and I’ll pick you up first thing tomorrow.’
11.
Ed
It took Edward Nicholls about fifteen minutes after he had left Danehall estate to question what the bloody hell he had just done. He had agreed to transport his stroppy cleaner, her two weird kids and an enormous reeking dog all the way to Scotland. What the hell had he been thinking? He could hear Gemma’s voice, the scepticism with which she had repeated his statement: ‘You’re taking a little girl you don’t know and her family to the other end of the country and it’s an “emergency”. Right.’ He could hear the inverted commas. A pause. ‘Pretty, is she?’
‘What?’
‘The mother. Big tits? Long eyelashes? Damsel in distress?’
‘That’s not it. Er …’ He couldn’t say anything with them all in the car.
‘I’ll take both those as a yes, then.’ She sighed deeply. ‘For Christ’s sake, Ed.’
Tomorrow morning he would pop by first thing, apologize and explain that something had come up. She’d understand. She probably felt weird about sharing a car with a near-stranger too. She hadn’t exactly jumped at the offer.
He would donate something towards the kid’s train fare. It wasn’t his fault the woman – Jess? – had decided to drive an untaxed, uninsured car, after all. If you looked at it on paper – the cops, the weird kids, the night-time joyriding – she was trouble. And Ed Nicholls did not need any more trouble in his life.
With these thoughts in his head, he washed, brushed his teeth and fell into the first decent sleep he’d had in weeks.
He pulled up outside the gate shortly after nine. He had meant to be there earlier but couldn’t remember where the house was, and given that the estate was a sprawling mass of identikit streets, he had driven up and down blindly for almost thirty minutes until he recognized Seacole Avenue. It was only the pub that got him there in the end.
It was a damp, still morning, the air heavy with moisture. The street was empty, apart from a ginger cat, which stalked its way along the pavement, its tail a question mark. Danehall seemed a little less unfriendly in daylight, but he still found himself double-checking he’d locked the car once he’d stepped out of it.
He gazed up at the windows, hoping he’d got the right place. Pink and white bunting hung in one of the upstairs rooms, and two hanging baskets swung listlessly from the front porch. A car sat under a tarpaulin in the next driveway. But the real giveaway was lumbering slowly around the front garden, pausing only to lift its leg against a child’s bicycle. Jesus. That dog. The size of it. Ed pictured it lolling over his back seat the previous evening. A faint echo of its scent had remained when he climbed back in this morning.
He opened the latch of the gate warily, in case it went for him, but it simply turned its enormous head with mild disinterest, walked to the shade of a weedy tree and flopped down on its side, lifting a desultory front leg as if in the vague hope it might get its stomach scratched.
‘I’ll pass, thanks,’ Ed said.
He walked up the path and paused at the door. He had his little speech all prepared.
Hi, I’m really sorry but something very important has come up with work and I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to take the next couple of days off. However, I’d be happy to contribute something to your daughter’s Olympiad fund. I think it’s great that she’s working so hard at her studies. So here’s her train fare.
If it sounded a little less convincing in his head this morning than it had done last night, well, it couldn’t be helped. He was about to knock when he saw the note, half attached to the door with a pin, flapping in the breeze:
FISHER YOU LITTLE WASTE OF SKIN I HAVE TOLD THE POLICE THAT IF ANYONE BREAKS IN IT WILL BE YOU AND THEY ARE WATCHING
As he straightened up the door opened. The little girl stood there. ‘We’re all packed,’ she said, squinting, her head tilted to one side. ‘Mum said you wouldn’t come but I knew you would so I said I wouldn’t let her unpack the suitcases until ten. And you made it with fifty-three minutes to spare. Which is actually about thirty-three minutes better than I estimated.’