Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner (primary phonics .TXT) 📕

anyone knows anything about where my daughter is,’ a gravelly male voice on the radio is saying now, ‘I would ask them to please, please …’

My phone rings. I jump, turn the radio down.

‘Hello, Mrs Thorpe? It’s the Greenwich Veterinary Practice. Are you still coming in with Monty today?’

I take a deep breath. I apologise, tell them I’m on my way. I turn Rachel’s father off, start the engine. I can’t take it in. I can’t think about this now. I can’t keep letting it go round and round in my head, blocking out everything else.

When the vet sees Monty, he smiles. ‘It’s been a while, hasn’t it, old boy?’ I can tell he means it kindly, but a stab of guilt pierces my stomach.

With everything that had been going on, neither of us had really noticed how oddly Monty had been acting. But the morning after we got back from the police station, I saw that his food bowl had been left untouched, again. I looked at him properly. Was he always so skinny? I’d placed my hands either side of his body and his ribs had felt hard as curtain rings against the soft palms of my hands.

The vet holds Monty’s abdomen in his hands, feels along his ribs, his spine. Listens to his heart, then places him on the scales. They beep, and the vet frowns.

‘Yes, he has lost a bit more weight than I’d like. Is there anything obvious that could account for his not eating? Anything going on at home?’

I hesitate, unsure whether to mention the police. I think again about the radio. A murder inquiry. My stomach twists.

The vet breaks my concentration. ‘I guess … there have been a few changes, in the house? Cats can be very sensitive to changes in their environment.’ He is looking down at my bump, over the top of his glasses.

I force myself to smile, happy to let him attribute my silence to the pregnancy.

‘Yes, how did you guess,’ I say, trying to make my voice light. ‘Actually, we’re having some fairly major building work done, too.’

‘Aha.’

‘Yes. The whole downstairs is being done, plus a basement extension.’ I stroke Monty’s back. ‘He hates it all. Especially since we laid the concrete – it’s a new foundation. He won’t go near the cellar anymore.’

The vet nods sympathetically. ‘His food bowl – is it in that area, by any chance? By the cellar?’

I look up at him, feeling like an idiot.

‘Try moving it somewhere quiet, where Monty feels a bit safer.’

As he talks to me about a new diet, animal Prozac, microchip catflaps, I notice that the vet is rubbing Monty between his ears, like Rachel used to do. He’d lie in her lap for ages, as if under some kind of spell. I think of the night we watched Sliding Doors, tucked up on the sofa together, Monty asleep on her legs. She’d had one hand on his ears, tapping away on that gold diamanté-clad phone with the other. That wolfish grin. I love cats. They don’t give a fuck, do they?

I tell myself to stop thinking about her like that, as if remembering someone who is dead. I run my fingers through my hair. It feels greasy. When was the last time I washed it?

‘Um, sorry, Mrs Thorpe. Did you want to take any of these?’

I force myself to concentrate, focus on the vet’s questions.

‘Sorry. Yes, thanks. I’ll take all that.’ I hand him my debit card.

‘Have you got long to go?’ he asks.

‘Depends on the builders, really. But a few more months, at least, I’m afraid.’

The vet looks confused.

‘Oh, sorry, you meant the baby!’ I force a laugh as I tap in my pin. ‘Due any day now. I’m nearly forty weeks.’

‘Well, best of luck.’ He frowns. ‘Oh, that card seems to have been declined. Do you have another?’

I shake my head. ‘No, that one should be fine. Could you try it again?’ But it is declined again. I tap my pockets, search my bag, but I know it’s the only one I brought with me. I don’t understand. There should be plenty in our joint account. I transferred a load from our savings the other day, in case we needed any more baby stuff, Daniel having obviously forgotten.

When I pull up back at home, I’m exhausted. I need to call the bank, try and sort things out with the vet, but all I want to do is sleep. I must call the builders about that crack as well. I must do that today. Before it gets worse. I’m just so tired. And I keep thinking about Rachel’s father on the radio. Of what he must be going through.

It’s such an effort to haul Monty out of the car and up the path that I barely notice the man with the patchy stubble, smoking outside the Plume of Feathers. It’s only after he’s in my front garden that I realise he was waiting for me. He is rubbing the hair at the back of his head, shifting his weight from one foot to another.

‘Can I help you?’

The man locks eyes with me. Something about him is familiar. Something about the mouth.

‘Are you Helen?’

I feel a prickle of anxiety on the back of my neck. Monty’s carrier is weighing down my right side; I can’t run, even if I wanted to. The man bounds up to me. Before I can say anything else, he grabs my arm, tight as a vice. I gasp. His face is close enough for me to smell alcohol on his breath, the staleness of his clothes. And then I work out who he is.

‘I want a word with you,’ he spits. ‘I want to know what happened to my daughter.’

KATIE

As soon as I see the press conference, I can tell things are about to change, that Rachel is about to become big news. It’s been a slow week, and now we have a murder inquiry: a young woman, missing after