Page 86 of Breaking the Dark

They have moved to Lincoln for Arthur, for his degree course. His lectures start today. He is spruced and tidy and glowing with nerves. Finally, at the ripe old age of thirty, Arthur has begun his higher education. The course is called Physics with Quantum Mechanics. The University of Lincoln almost bit his hand off to offer him a place when they saw the breadth of what he’d been working on for the past two years. Polly got Arthur a grant to help with living expenses by applying to an entrepreneurial education program she found online, so not only can Arthur study, but he has his own money to live on too.

Polly goes to the front door to see him off. She straightens the collar of his shirt and smooths down his hair. He has grown into his looks, her boyfriend. She no longer looks at him sometimes and thinks, Who are you? She no longer sees the beaky lanky boy in the cheap trousers running a shoe shop in Portsmouth when she looks at him. She no longer only sees him as a way to Ophelia and her magic creams. She simply sees Arthur, her partner. And when she glimpses them together, side by side, she can see a correlation between them now; they make sense. They have grown together, almost like scar tissue, healing the bits of each other that were open wounds. It is fair to say that Arthur is the love of Polly’s life, and she knows without a doubt that there will be no other. Apart from their natural compatibility, they have too many secrets. They are bound together by their mistakes.

Or are they in fact mistakes?

Maybe they are actually just stepping stones towards the future that Polly knows awaits them. And maybe there will have to be more mistakes to enable them to get there. And they’re getting close, so close.

Her Perfect Peach persona now has nearly half a million followers on Instagram, and eighty thousand subscribers on YouTube. Arthur is going to university. They even have passports. They are normal.

Well, almost normal…

Because there is only so normal you can be when there are pints of blood in your in-laws’ kitchen and dead bodies buried in woodland everywhere they have lived, and there’s only so normal you can be when you were complicit in some of those deaths, when you waited outside your father-in-law’s front door with a carrier bag for vials of blood and serum taken from his victims so that you could make expensive face cream to sell on the internet. There’s only so normal you can be when your boyfriend was made to bring kids home from school for his father to torture and steal blood from, and there’s only so normal you can be when your boyfriend’s mother is immortal and his father drank his wife’s blood every day in an attempt to keep himself alive because it’s full of the innate magic that has kept her alive for a full 221 years.

They should make a film about them, Polly often thinks, a dark comedy: Welcome to the Warshaws.

But here, for now, in this tiny apartment with its views, her boyfriend handsome and shy in the doorway, money in the bank, dogs napping nearby, a career, followers, influence, a plan—she feels normal as dammit. She really does.

Polly closes the door behind him, feeling vicarious nerves on his behalf. Then she picks up her phone and makes a new post telling her followers that her boyfriend’s gone back to school and she’s feeling proud. Her followers lap it up, tell “Peach” to have a good day, they wish him luck as if he is their very best friend. They all care so much about her. In fact, they love her. And she, in her own way, loves them too. She wants the very best for all of them. She wants every one of them to fly.

The dopamine pings through her system with every comment that appears under her post. Her heart fills with it. And then a comment appears that says:

PLS PLS PLS DO A MEET AND GREET PLS!! I WANT TO MEET YOU IT WOULD MAKE MY LIFE COMPLETE PLEEEEEESSEEEEE!!

Someone replies to it a moment later, saying:

YES! I’LL COME ANYWHERE!

And Polly feels a hot glow all the way through her. She pictures women on trains and coaches, in cars and on planes. She pictures them standing in clusters, dressed up to the nines, phones aloft, listening to her speak, queuing for selfies, leaving afterwards on a buzzy high for cocktails in town.

But then she has to delete the images from her mind’s eye because that can never happen, her face will always have to be a secret because of Clara. She will have to be anonymous for the rest of her life.

It kills her, but she has no choice.

THIRTY-THREE

AT LUNCHTIME JESSICA heads out to Soho to drop the pot of face cream with Julius and his boyfriend. They invite her to stay, but she’s eager to keep working her case.

“What’s the background on this?” asks Frank, Julius’s boyfriend, staring down at the mint-green container in his hand. “What am I looking for?”

Jessica shrugs apologetically. “I truly don’t know. I just think that there is somehow a connection between what’s in this pot, the deaths of some homeless men in Harlem in the 1980s, and an anonymous beauty influencer running an Instagram account in the UK. I know that sounds nuts, but then this whole case is nuts.”

Frank raises an eyebrow, skeptically. “Okey dokey,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“How long do you think it might take?”

“Totally depends on how busy the techs are. And also, what they find. But I can try and get you some results by the end of the day? Tomorrow morning maybe?”

“Great, thank you so much. Can I give you some money? Or…”

“Bottle of wine would be fab,” he says with a quick smile. “Or better still, champagne?”

It’s just after one p.m. as she heads toward the subway, and she thinks of Malcolm leaving school soon. She checks her phone and sees that he has still not opened her message, which strikes her as odd, as he must surely have looked at his phone at points between classes. But she bats the discomforting thought away—she’s sure there’s a reason for Malcolm’s radio silence. Maybe he had his phone confiscated? Maybe he ran out of charge?—and heads uptown.

The twins’ school is in a wide beaux-arts building on East Eighty-Ninth Street, with creamy stone steps leading serenely from a busy sidewalk to handsome bronze-framed doors. It’s just after lunchtime. A few students drift around the front entrance, but there is still the contained kinetic energy of a school in process. She waits for a group of students to leave and slips through the open door behind them into a clean, manicured, and inviting interior, nothing like the public schools she has visited before.

“Hi,” she says, hitting the young man sitting behind the reception desk with her best smile. “Jessica Jones. I’m a private investigator working on a child abduction case, and I have some questions for your principal, Mr.”—her eye finds the name plaque on the door behind the desk—“Henri. It’s about two of your students. Would you ask him if he could find the time to talk to me?”

The young man looks up at her with wide eyes, clearly keen to find out more about abducted children and private investigators. “Erm, sure, let me just see, I mean, do you have some form of ID?”

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