Free Try Not to Breathe by Holly Seddon Page B

lay on the soil, unable to move, unable to talk her way out of this, sweat cooling in the dip of her back. The dusky scent of the trees filled her broken nose with a thick perfume.
    She considered trying to scream. She had tried and abandoned pleading with her eyes as the noise neared her again. There was no hope to be had; if he had wanted to help, he would have. No matter how many footsteps, she was alone.
    Her eyes fell upward as the great murky bruise of blues and grays tumbled overhead. Deep gray clouds slid across the sky as two white-gloved hands gleamed in the sunlight. Slowly they crept onto her neck. She closed her eyes, waiting for the relief.

A lex held Bob’s gaze as long as she could bear, trying hard to think of this as
just another interview
. After checking the iPhone was recording properly she looked into her lap at her notes.
    “Thanks for agreeing to answer some questions, Bob.”
    Bob leaned in toward her, distrustful of the technology. “It’s okay. You know my reasons for talking and I hope you’ll respect them.”
    Alex nodded.
    “Bob, I’d like to go back to the beginning, and ask you a few questions about your first years as a family with Jo and Amy. Are you okay with that?”
    “Yes…but you’ll have to bear with me if I get a bit upset.”
    “Of course I will.” Alex swallowed. “Could you tell me when you first met Jo?”
    Bob smiled. “It was in the spring of eighty-four, and I was an apprentice plumber at the time. Tony, the old boy I worked for, used to drink in a pub called ‘The Castle’ and I’d go in there with him lunchtimes and sometimes after work. Jo worked behind the bar and we used to banter with each other. She was a bit older than me and I knew she had a little girl but…” Bob ran a thick hand over his face.
    “It’s okay, there’s really no rush. So Jo was a little older than you?”
    Bob cleared his throat, leaned in again. “Yeah, Jo was twenty-two when I met her. We had about eighteen months between us, which doesn’t sound like anything now I’m an old codger but at the time we used to joke about it.”
    Alex smiled. “So where was Amy when Jo was working?”
    Bob paused, looking upward briefly. “Jo was good friends with her neighbor at the time, a girl called Carole. Carole had a little boy who was a few months younger than Amy, so they’d take it in turns minding the kids so the other one could work. Things were different then, you left your kids with people. You trusted them. Jo couldn’t have afforded to pay anyone to look after Amy.”
    Alex looked down at her notes. “Did Amy’s birth father have any contact with her?”
    “No. No, he didn’t. He’d never met her. He was a brute, a really nasty piece of work. Vicious and violent. When Jo found out she was expecting Amy, she upped and left him, moved to Edenbridge and started again, just her and the baby. She’d told him she was pregnant, and he’d said he didn’t want nothing to do with it, with her. And that was for the best…” Bob stared at the cars whipping past the window. “Anyway, I don’t want to talk about that scumbag. It makes my blood run cold just thinking about him.”
    “Okay, that’s okay. So when did you move in with Jo and Amy?”
    Bob tilted his head and leaned forward. “Looking back, it was quite quick but it never seemed it at the time. We’d been going out for about three or four months before I met Amy…”
    “It’s okay, take your time, it’s okay.” Alex found the sight of men crying difficult and hoped to God Bob held it together or she’d end up in tears too.
    “Jo didn’t want her to meet anyone that wasn’t for real, you know. She didn’t want to disrupt Amy’s life or get her attached to anyone. She was such a good mum.” Bob spluttered the words a little. Alex had to stop herself reaching across to hold his hand.
    Bob cleared his throat again. “What was I saying? Yeah, when I met Amy for the first time I thought she was brilliant.