Free Losing You by Nicci French Page B

at the sleepover to provoke this crisis? I wondered what could have made her run away instead of coming to me. I couldn’t think of a scenario that made sense but it was clear I had to start with the sleepover. I reached for the phone book, then remembered I didn’t need to: Joel’s home number was on my mobile. Another life, another story. I clicked on it and rang the number but it was engaged. A voice asked me to leave a message but I couldn’t say to a machine anything of what was needed. Rather than wait, I decided to drive over – his house was only a couple of minutes away. I left a scrawled note to Renata on the kitchen table and got into the car. I drove along the front and turned right into Flat Lane, which led inland. I pulled up outside Alix and Joel’s whitewashed thatched cottage, a tasteful anomaly in a road of terraced houses that could have been in the suburbs of any large English city.
    I rang the doorbell, then rapped hard with a heavy wrought-iron knocker. Alix opened the door with the phone at her ear, gave me a look of puzzlement and gestured me inside. I hovered on the threshold while she continued with her conversation. She turned away from me, as if to keep her privacy, but I could hear she was having a professional conversation with someone at her practice. It sounded like a routine discussion about a rota because someone was ill. This was ridiculous. I took a deep breath and tapped her shoulder. She looked round, frowning. Was I really telling her to get off the phone, as if she were a garrulous teenager? Yes, I was.
    ‘It’s urgent,’ I mouthed at her.
    ‘Sorry, Ros,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to call you back. There seems to be some sort of emergency.’
    Alix put a sarcastic emphasis on the word ‘seems’ but she hung up. ‘Karen’s not too bad,’ she said. ‘I just got back from the hospital. She was seen at once because of the bleeding. She’s had some stitches and the break in the arm was quite nasty. She’ll have to stay for the night at least. Rick’s stuck there with her, poor man. It’s a greenstick fracture. Do you know what that is? It’s like when you get a twig and snap and it doesn’t break off – ’
    ‘It’s not about that,’ I said. ‘Charlie’s missing.’
    Alix looked at me quizzically. ‘Missing?’
    I gave her a rundown of the events of the morning. I saw a familiar expression of disbelief appear on her face. ‘But it’s only been a couple of hours.’
    ‘Not a normal couple of hours. We were about to leave for the airport. I know it’s shocking and inexplicable but Charlie has taken her stuff and run off and…I don’tknow…’
    There was a moment when I almost let the tears run from my eyes. I had the temptation to let go, to howl, put my arms round Alix and ask for comfort and help. But a glance at her sceptical, detached expression made me take control again. This wasn’t the right shoulder to cry on. And this wasn’t the time to collapse. I took a deep breath. ‘I’ll need to talk to Tam,’ I said.
    She looked at me for a second. Everything that was important in our relationship with each other was unsaid, lying deep and cold under the surface politeness. We both knew this, both knew that the other knew. I had had an affair – no, a brief fling – with Joel, although at the time they weren’t living together and I wasn’t sure if that counted as betrayal or not. We’d never mentioned it, nor would we, although it was in every glance we exchanged, every word we spoke. And then, as if in a weird act of revenge, exacted without the main players even being aware of it, her daughter had bullied and tormented my daughter until Charlie had dreaded setting foot in school. Alix was certainly aware of that. I knew that Rick had called her into school and talked to her about it, but I never discovered how she had responded, whether she’d been self-righteous, defensive, appalled, disbelieving, secretly pleased. We’d never mentioned that,