Page 76 of 59 Minutes

CARRIE

THREE DAYS AFTER THE ALERT

She knows that Pepper called Mary and told her about Emma.

And then told the story again to John, Emma’s stepdad, because Mary could not speak.

Carrie had not been in the room. Could not be in the room.

But now, as she zombie-trails Clementine into the living room, Pepper gestures to the phone in his hand.

‘John again,’ he whispers, covering the handset. ‘They just want to know what happened.’

‘No,’ Pepper says quickly, seeing Carrie’s face whiten with shame, ‘not that … just when we found her, and what happened next. Details are all they can cling to, Kochanie .’

‘I can’t talk to them,’ she says, and stares at Clementine, who has picked up a wooden shape puzzle, brought up from the flat below by Pepper.

Jauntily painted rabbits with pegs in their backs.

What could Carrie say to John that would help?

That Emma’s body was just one of hundreds littering their part of London, not even the only one in their communal garden.

That bodies are still being found, let alone collected. Covered by bedsheets and blankets from nearby houses, frost silvering the fabric shrouds each morning.

That the person Emma trusted the most was the one who killed her? That Carrie will never forgive herself. That if it wasn’t for their daughter, she would want to be buried alongside Emma.

While Emma lay under Pepper’s best throw, he had guarded her body at night, unwilling to leave her flesh to the foxes and the screaming birds.

The dead helicopter lay felled on its side in the centre of the garden all that time, the smoke fading to a dank trace.

Yesterday morning, before they brought a crane to collect it, two laughing kids from number 26 climbed on its metal carcass, metres from Emma’s body.

No police came to investigate, just a collection van staffed with exhausted volunteers, who slipped on a toe tag and handed Pepper a paper receipt.

As Carrie watched from the window, her palm pressed to the cold pane, the van beeped its jolly reversing warning, then rumbled away to collect the next reported corpse from the Kennings Estate.

Someone she must have run straight past and not even seen.

Pepper had locked himself into the bathroom afterwards but it was futile, she could hear his sobs rack through the flat. She had never heard him cry before.

Pepper ends the call with John and replaces the phone on its cradle. It immediately rings again. She stares at it. ‘I wish they’d stop calling,’ she says again and he wavers, leaving it for another ring, another ring, but then snatches it up.

‘Peplinksi,’ he says, warily. He looks ten, twenty years older than he did last week.

He listens to the caller, looking over at Carrie in alarm. ‘Can I relay the message?’ he asks but whoever it is says no and so, reluctantly, he holds out the phone.

‘I’m so sorry, Kochanie ,’ he says, resting his hand on her shoulder.

A soft voice is at the end of the line, calling from the big police headquarters at the Middlemoor roundabout in Exeter, where she’d failed her driving test two of the three times. They have been trying to reach her, found this number amongst her mother’s things.

‘My mother?’

The police officer, whose name she pays no attention to, then tells her gently that Janet died during the 59 minutes, shot by an intruder she had tried to help. A man named Ashley Curtiss.