She didn’t know what to say. Why do you think of her? Because you killed her?
There was definitely something like guilt in his eyes. She was not imagining it. She’d been working as a school secretary for fifteen years. Connor had the look of a kid sent to the principal’s office. But was it guilt over murder? Or something else?
‘I hope it’s not uncomfortable for you, me working here,’ he’d said.
‘It’s perfectly fine,’ she’d said curtly, and that was the last time they’d ever spoken of it.
She had considered resigning. Working at Janie’s old primary school had always been bittersweet. Girls with skinny Bambi-like legs would streak past her in the playground and she’d catch a glimpse of Janie; on hot summer afternoons she’d watch the mothers picking up their children and remember long ago summers, taking Janie and Rob for ice cream after school; their little faces flushed. Janie had been at high school when she died so Rachel’s memories of St Angela’s weren’t tarnished by her murder. That was until Connor Whitby turned up; roaring his horrible motorbike through Rachel’s soft, sepia-coloured memories.
In the end, she’d stayed out of stubbornness. She enjoyed the work. Why should she be the one to leave? And more importantly, she felt in a strange way that she owed it to Janie to not run away, to face up to this man, every day, and whatever it was he’d done.
If he had killed Janie would he have taken a job at the same place as her mother? Would he have said, ‘I still think about her’?
Rachel opened her eyes and felt that hard ball of fury lodged permanently at the back of her throat, as if she’d not quite choked on something. It was the not knowing. The not f**king knowing.
She added cold water to the bath. It was much too hot.
‘It’s the not knowing,’ a tiny, refined-looking woman had said, at that homicide victims support group she and Ed had gone to a few times, sitting on fold-out chairs in that cold community hall somewhere in Chatswood, holding their styrofoam cups of instant coffee in shaky hands. The woman’s son had been murdered on his way home from cricket practice. Nobody had heard anything. Nobody had seen anything. ‘The not f**king knowing,’ she said.
There was a ripple of soft blinks around the circle. The woman had a sweet, cut-glass voice; it was like hearing the Queen swear.
‘Hate to tell you this, love, but knowing doesn’t help all that much,’ interrupted a stocky red-faced man whose daughter’s murderer had been sentenced to life in prison.
Rachel and Ed had both taken a mutual, violent dislike to the red-faced man, and they’d stopped going to the support group because of him.
People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, spiritual level, but it seemed to Rachel that just the opposite was true. Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn’t give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder, while others made one tiny careless mistake and paid a terrible price.
She held a face washer under the cold tap, folded it and placed it across her forehead as if she was a patient with a fever.
Seven minutes. Her mistake could be measured in minutes.
Marla was the only person who knew. Ed never knew.
Janie had been complaining that she was tired all the time. ‘Do more exercise,’ Rachel kept telling her. ‘Don’t go to bed so late. Eat more!’ She was so skinny and tall. And then she’d started complaining about some vague pain in her lower back. ‘Mum, I seriously think I’ve got glandular fever.’ Rachel had made the appointment with Dr Buckley just so she could tell Janie there was nothing wrong with her and she needed to do all the things that her mother told her.
Janie normally caught the bus and walked home from the Wycombe Road bus stop. The plan was that Rachel would pick her up from the corner down from the high school and take her straight to Dr Buckley’s surgery in Gordon. She’d reminded Janie of the plan that morning.
Except Rachel was seven minutes late, and when she got to the corner, Janie wasn’t waiting. She’d forgotten, Rachel thought, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. Or she’d got sick of waiting. The child was so impatient, acting as if Rachel was a convenient form of public transport with an obligation to run to schedule. There were no mobile phones in those days. There wasn’t anything Rachel could do, except wait in the car for another ten minutes (she didn’t actually like waiting much herself) before finally going home and ringing Dr Buckley’s receptionist to cancel the appointment.
She wasn’t worried. She was aggravated. Rachel knew there was nothing particularly wrong with Janie. It was typical that Rachel would go to the trouble of making the doctor’s appointment and then Janie wouldn’t bother. It wasn’t until much later, when Rob said, his mouth full of sandwich, ‘Where’s Janie?’ that Rachel looked up at the kitchen clock and felt that first icy thread of fear.
Nobody saw Janie waiting on the corner, or if they did they never came forward. Rachel never knew what difference those seven minutes had made.
What she did eventually learn from the police investigation was that Janie turned up at Connor Whitby’s house at something like three-thirty, and they watched a video together (Nine to Five with Dolly Parton), before Janie said she had something to do in Chatswood and Connor walked her to the railway station. Nobody else ever saw her alive. Nobody remembered seeing her on the train, or anywhere in Chatswood.