The Missing Hours by Emma Kavanagh Read Free Book Online Page A

shortage of money here, is there? Big old house, fancy car. That Range Rover of hers is brand new. I said to my Henry, there’s something funny about her. No sign of her going out to work, car doesn’t move from day to day. Where’s the money coming from, eh?’
    I nod, biting my tongue. I don’t know why it bothers me. I don’t know Selena Cole. What this neighbour is saying could be entirely true. But the truth is, it bugs me, this plucking at the missing woman, gets right under my skin.
    ‘It’s not tax fraud.’ But a little voice whispers to me that I don’t know this. I don’t know anything, only that Selena Cole is missing. Tax fraud. I test the words, like prodding a filling with your tongue. And the thing is, you don’t know anything until you actually know it. So it could be. It could be that there is something else here, something darker that I’m just not seeing yet.
    I gesture to the sofa, take the wingback chair nearest the fireplace.
    ‘So,’ I say, ‘do you know Selena well?’
    ‘Well, no. Not well. She’s … Mrs Cole and I are from different walks of life, you see. Me and my husband, we’ve been here, ooh, must be forty years now. Seen the area change, we have. Well, you do, don’t you? Used to be a time when we knew everyone in the hamlet. Our children used to all play together out in the fields out back. But now … I mean, you know how it is. People die, people move on. It’s all different now. Henry and me, we don’t know anyone any more.’
    ‘So you don’t know Selena?’ I snap the words off at their stems, thinking how Finn would laugh at me, how I chide him to be gentler, more patient, and here I am.
    Vida leans towards me, tone low, conspiratorial. ‘She always strikes me as very stuck-up. They’ve only been here a couple of years. There used to be a husband, you know. Handsome man. Dead now, of course. He was nice enough. And Mrs Cole used to be all right, if you like that sort of thing. But now, no, she never bothers.’ She drops her voice to a whisper. ‘Proper snob if you know what I mean. Would walk right by you on the street without so much as a hello.’
    I see it as if I was there. Selena Cole, magically alone, alive, here. Walking. Just walking. Maybe her sister-in-law has taken the kids for an hour, told her to go out, get some air, grieve. Selena walking, and although her footsteps are falling on these pavements, not being here at all. Instead being in Brazil when a bomb has gone off and the air is dense with sirens and screams. Or perhaps at a graveside, one where she goes to place flowers, even though she knows her husband is not really there, because what killed him was a bomb – do you even get a body back after something like that? Do you get anything? And this stupid, silly woman marching into her grief, demanding to be noticed.
    ‘No.’ Vida leans back against the sofa. ‘You mark my words, she’s done a runner.’
    I’m going to slap her. I swear to God.
    ‘Why would she have done that?’
    ‘You know how these women are. Careers, that’s all they care about. Selfish, I call it. Like being a mother isn’t the most important job in the world. It was different in my day. I stayed home, I raised my Theresa myself. I never had a day off. Never asked for one, either. You don’t if you’re a mother, do you? Not like that these days. All these women, their children coming second to whatever nonsense they’re up to all day, shipping the little ones off to day care, grandparents, whoever will have them, it seems to me. No.’ She nods triumphantly, the expression of one who has solved an enigma. ‘You mark my words, she’s walked out. Dumped those little kiddies.’
    I look out of the window, watch as the wind whips at the branches of the apple tree, and feel like I have taken a body blow. That this vicious, judgemental bat has reached inside me and taken hold of the worst of me, pulling it to the surface and then throwing it back into my