Page 41 of The Tapes

THIRTY-TWO

Vivian Mallory looks hardly anything like the profile photo on her author website.

In that, she has flowing gingery locks, and a curt, tight, non-expression as she stares at a point a fraction off-camera.

In real life, she’s greyer, and older. The wrinkles are deeper and a general tiredness hangs over her, as if she hasn’t had a proper night’s sleep since she first started using a keyboard.

Perhaps all authors are greyer, older, wrinklier, and more tired in real life?

She’s happy to see me, though.

‘Eve, my word! Gosh! It’s been such a long time, hasn’t it?’

I wish I remembered her but Vivian is a mystery to me.

She was Mum’s friend, and I know the name, though there’s no recognition on my end beyond the author website through which I trawled last night.

I sent an email through her page and woke to find a reply inviting me to her house.

I’m not sure why, but I assumed creative types lived in massive houses but Vivian’s is an unassuming end of terrace that’s part of a housing association block.

A pizza menu is hanging half from her letterbox but she ignores it as she waves me inside.

We go through the whole ‘Tea? Coffee?’ thing, before we end up in her living room. A pair of battered sofas are more for comfort than appearance, which I think is the best way. I’m almost swallowed as we sit across from one another.

‘It was such a delight to see your name in my email,’ Vivian says. ‘I saw “Falconer” and instantly thought of your mum. I thought it was a coincidence, then I realised it was you.’

I’m a little blank, because there’s such familiarity from her that I can’t return.

‘You said you wanted to ask something about your mum…?’ she prompts.

‘It’s a bit hard to explain,’ I say. I think my mum might have recorded a tape in which she says who the Earring Killer is, and sent it to someone, but I don’t know who.

I can’t say that to this woman who lost her own child to the same killer. What if I’m wrong? What if this is another dead end?

‘I think I just wanted to ask you about her. I know you and Mum were friends from book club…?’

Vivian doesn’t seem to mind. ‘We were friends long before that. We knew each other at school but then drifted apart, until we ended up arguing over who had the correct opinion about books. We fought over more or less everything!’

There is no malice or ill-feeling. It’s more like a long-married couple bickering over who snores the loudest.

‘People at book club thought we hated each other,’ she adds. ‘But it was all a bit of fun. You only argue hardest with the people you love the most.’

There’s a gentle hint of something as she glances sideways to a photo pinned to the wall above the bricked-up fireplace. It’s a picture of a teenage girl with dyed-black hair and a pair of rings through her nose.

‘Mum talked about you a lot,’ I say – which is true, but only because I’ve been listening through the tapes.

Vivian breaks into a smile, touching a hand to her chest. ‘Did she? Ha! I suppose I talked about her a lot. She kept me sane, I think. I was having quite a few problems at home and I’d be going through a book trying to relax.

Except I’d spend the whole time wondering how Angela would be able to read the same paragraph and have such an opposite opinion.

I’d sometimes think she was doing it on purpose, just to wind me up. ’

I laugh. ‘Mum said the exact same thing about you. She thought you were coming up with opinions just to wind her up.’

Vivian is delighted by this. She claps her hands together and howls an infectious laugh. A few seconds later, I realise the laugh has become a sob. Vivian reaches for the box of tissues on the table and snatches a pair. She blows her nose and dabs her eyes.

‘Gosh, it’s been a long time,’ she says, before slipping another look towards the photo of the teenage girl with the nose rings.

‘You must know about Pamela. Your mother and I drifted apart again after I lost her. I stopped going to book club, because… I don’t know.

I suppose it didn’t feel as if it mattered any more.

People called, or came round, but I couldn’t face them. ’

She blows her nose once more, takes a big breath, then forces a smile. ‘Sorry. I’m not usually like this but I saw your name, and thought of your mum and how things used to be.’

I’m stuck for anything to say, not only because of Vivian and her daughter but because I think I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me that my mother meant something to them.

‘I think it was about a year after Pamela that I heard your mum had disappeared,’ Vivian says after a while.

‘I still hadn’t gone back to book club, but a couple of people asked if I’d seen her, or heard from her.

I was wrapped in my own life, my own grief.

And it was a strange time – there were the floods. ’

I nod along, because she’s right. I’ve not read Vivian’s book but I did find an article that had the timeline of the Earring Killer’s victims. Vivian’s daughter was killed close to a year before Mum disappeared. Then coverage of Sedingham’s floods overwhelmed any search for Mum.

Even without the floods, it had been easy for the police to assume she’d disappeared on purpose.

‘Has there been any word…?’ Vivian lets the question hang.

‘There’s been no sign of her in thirteen years,’ I reply.

‘Oh…’

I don’t tell Vivian about the fingerprints on the gun. That’s a sign of Mum, of course – the surest sign I’ve had. But I don’t know what that really means.

Vivian and I sit in a melancholic reflective quiet for a moment, before I decide to ask the question I came to ask. ‘Did Mum ever give you anything after you stopped going to book club?’ I ask.

It’s a question from nothing and Vivian’s forehead crinkles. ‘Like what?’

‘A cassette. She used to record her thoughts a lot.’

I see the recognition as Vivian’s eyes widen and she starts to nod.

‘Gosh, that’s right. She did record herself, didn’t she?

I remember now. She gave me a tape one time that was her reviewing a book we’d disagreed on.

She told me I could listen to it if I ever wanted to know what a serious person thought of things.

It was so self-righteous that I laughed my head off. I definitely listened to it.’

It really does sound like Mum.

She stops and rubs her temple. ‘Thing is, we didn’t see each other after what happened with Pamela. That was my fault, not hers. I shut everyone out. We went from seeing each other once or twice a week to never at all. There wasn’t a chance for her to give me anything.’

It feels so deflating, because I’d convinced myself Vivian would have answers. She isn’t only a link to Mum, she’s connected to the Earring Killer through her daughter. Much more directly and devastatingly than me.

If there is a second cassette, I can’t think of anyone else Mum would have given it to. But then maybe it’s one more thing I’m wrong about. My mother wasn’t saying she made a second version of the cassette, she was saying she recorded over the first because she messed up.

‘I suppose…’ Vivian tails off as she stares up to a point somewhere on the ceiling.

‘I didn’t even know your mum was missing until one of our old book club friends told me.

I remember I’d had a really bad week. It was still only a year or so after Pamela – and then we had all that rain.

I lived down on the river then and mine was one of the houses that was evacuated. ’

Vivian is out of her chair, at the window, fiddling with the blind in an attempt to peer into the distance. I think she’s the sort who needs to see something to be able to talk about it.

‘I lived over there,’ she adds, pointing towards a gap in the trees that I know leads towards the river.

‘I’m sorry we didn’t tell you directly at the time.

I wasn’t really paying attention,’ I reply.

We look to one another with a shared understanding.

We were both going through different, terrible things.

Vivian’s daughter had been murdered, and it sounds like she almost lost her home to a flood.

I was desperate to find out what had happened to my mother.

Or maybe it was simply that I was drinking too much.

Vivian taps a spot on the wall roughly halfway up the window frame.

‘The floodwater was up to here,’ she says.

‘It happened so quickly. In the morning, they were saying they were hoping to hold back the water with sandbags, then, by noon they were saying we had to get out. There was no time to pack; I grabbed a few things and left.’

She’s still at the window, and again taps the patch of wall where she says the water reached. I have a feeling she does this often – but then I likely would if I’d been evacuated because of a life-threatening flood.

‘Lots of stuff got ruined at the old house…’ Vivian says, almost absent-mindedly. It’s as if she’s talking to herself, before she focuses back on me. ‘Your mum never directly handed me a tape but there’s a chance that she posted me something and I never got it. Or never opened it.’

A chance.

Vivian keeps talking, explaining. ‘The house was almost destroyed. It was more than a week after the flood until we were allowed back. Even then, I was living in a hotel for a while, trying to deal with the insurance company. It was chaos. Eventually the house was rewired and renovated and I managed to sell and move here – but there were boxes of things I never unpacked. The old house was still getting mail that I never opened because I didn’t see the point.

It’s hard to worry about a water bill when your house is wrecked and you’ve been in a hotel for six weeks. ’

Vivian had lost her daughter, then almost her house. Easy to see that she would stop caring about things like mail.

‘Have you still got all the mail you received back then?’