Free Why Don’t You Come for Me by Diane Janes Page B

them quarrelling and was trying to slip away. At the same time she was reluctant to open the letterbox, because the feuding parties might be standing in sight of the door and realize she was there.
    She tried the flap with a fingertip but it did not move. It must be held in place with a taught spring – the sort of letterbox which would make a loud noise unless handled very cautiously. She pushed a little harder, levering the flap upwards as slowly and quietly as she could, almost letting go in fright when an angry roar erupted from Brian, in which she could make out the words, ‘Oh, no you won’t.’
    ‘Let me go, you bastard!’
    Who would have imagined that gentle Shelley could conjure up such a harridan shriek? Jo fed the letters in and heard them flop on to the encaustic tiles a spilt second before there was a crash of something heavy hitting the floor. Jo let the flap go with a snap. The occupants were making so much noise they probably wouldn’t hear it. She tried not to be in too obvious a hurry to reach the gate – much better to pretend she had not heard anything.
    Pretending – always pretending that there was nothing wrong. That’s what I’m doing now, she thought. I do it all the time, pretending that there is nothing wrong between me and Marcus; pretending that I can cope with Sean; pretending that I’m not thinking about what happened to Lauren, every minute of every day.
    She wondered where Marcus was just at that moment. Some itineraries she knew well enough to place him almost to the minute, but Border Raids and Battles was a new addition to their repertoire, so she was not familiar with it. More to the point, where was Melissa? Melissa could so easily join up with Marcus on those nights when she was not booked to be away with a tour herself. Man-eating Melissa, who had already worked her way through two husbands. Not that you could condemn a woman just for being married twice – she had been married twice herself – but Melissa, with her fake fingernails and her two divorces, why, why, why had they ever thought it was a good idea to go into business with Melissa?
    There had been room for two firms offering a similar kind of thing: plenty of customers to go round, in fact, and even if there had not been, you didn’t have to jump into bed with your competitors, figuratively or literally. It was not as if she had any definite proof, except that Marcus seemed to have changed recently. He had once been her rock: the one person in the world she could always turn to, the one person who would always be on her side. It did not feel like that any more. When they were at home together they skirted around one another, as if each were afraid of too close an encounter, lest they find in the other what they already feared to be there.
    When it began to rain Jo drew up her hood and carried on walking. It was too wet to draw, but she did not want to return to the house, where Sean’s cupboard stood fatally wounded in his bedroom. Her boots sounded out a steady rhythm against the tarmac, although she wasn’t sure where she was going any more. It was like the day after Lauren disappeared, when she and Dom had joined the search, carrying on long after the weather turned against them, refusing to stop when everyone advised them to; continuing to look because there was nothing to do except go on looking. Scouring the countryside, yet hardly knowing what they were looking for, because it was perfectly obvious that Lauren had not wandered off into the fields on her own. Someone had taken her. Someone had wheeled the pushchair down the street towards the sea, then turned aside into the public gardens and from there up on to the cliff path, where they had tossed the buggy – but not Lauren, thank heaven, not Lauren herself – over the edge of the cliff.
    Where was Lauren taken after that? In place of the valley bottom, misty with rain, Jo pictured the cliff path, following the shape of the land where it rose in