The Darkest Evening

in touch?’
Jill Falstone nodded. ‘She’d been out of hospital for a month or so when I got a text suggesting we meet. Her choice. That made the difference, I suppose. We had coffee in a place in Kimmerston, out of the village, away from the gossips. After that, I went around to her house once a week. Fridays. Friday was my day for going into Kirkhill to stock up for the weekend. She didn’t want to see her dad and I never told him I was visiting. He’d have been so hurt that she was prepared to see me, but not him. Maybe she thought she’d disappointed him, I don’t know. By then she seemed to be holding things together. She’d got herself a little job, working in the pub in the village, and she’d got the house nice. It was one of the council places on the edge of the village and she was lucky to get it. Tiny, but it suited her. She even started having driving lessons – she’d never had the confidence for that before. I noticed that she was putting on a bit of weight. She was still skinny. It still looked as if her wrist would break if she picked up a cup of tea, but she was getting better. I was so pleased.’ She paused. ‘For the first time in years I was able to relax for a bit.’
‘And then you found out she was pregnant?’
‘Yes, that was later. A year or so later and by then she was well. I went one day and she was throwing up in the bathroom. That had never been part of her eating disorder. She’d never done the binge thing. She just starved herself. She was due to work that evening and I said they wouldn’t want her in if she had some sort of stomach bug. She said it wasn’t a bug.’ Jill looked over the table at them. ‘I didn’t believe her at first. When she was younger, she was given to fantasies. I wondered if she wanted to shock me, to make herself more interesting.’ Jill paused. ‘As far as I knew, she’d never even had a boyfriend. There was no one when she was at school. She’d never had the confidence, though she was a bonny little thing. And I thought I would have heard if she’d been seeing someone. A place like this, there’s gossip.’
‘She never mentioned a man?’ Helen asked.
‘No, but we didn’t talk much about her private life on those visits. That’s why she let me go every Friday. Because I didn’t intrude. She needed to be private to be healthy, she said. She held her small secrets to her like a kind of comfort blanket. She wrapped herself up in them. She knew her dad would want to pry, because he was so anxious about her, because he loved her so much.’
‘But you must have asked about the baby’s father,’ Joe said. ‘You’d have wanted to know.’
Outside, the sun was already very low in the sky, red behind a windbreak of trees, throwing long shadows, showing the smears on the kitchen windows.
‘Of course I wanted to know!’ Jill Falstone had raised her voice. ‘When she told me she was pregnant, I had this dream, a kind of vision – that Lorna had found a man who’d take care of her and make her happy, that they’d be a real family in the little house in Kirkhill, that her dad and me would go some nights to babysit. That we could stop worrying about her because she’d have a man to do that. I saw myself sitting there, with the baby on my knee.’
‘But it never worked out that way?’
Jill shook her head. ‘Lorna was always more complicated than that. I should have realized.’
‘What did she tell you?’
‘Only that she was pregnant, and that she was going to keep the baby. She made that very clear. She said she was an adult.’ Jill looked straight up at them again. ‘I wouldn’t have tried to persuade her to do otherwise. I was thrilled to have a grandbairn and I don’t care what people round here think. Besides, things have changed now. There are more kids in this village born outside wedlock than within it.’ She paused. ‘I told her I’d support her, whatever happened. And so would her dad.’
‘Would he have done?’ Again, Joe thought of the man they’d met briefly outside, closed and stern.
‘Of course.’ Jill Falstone sounded surprised. ‘I’ve told you – he loved her to bits.’
‘You must have asked about Thomas’s father?’ Helen bent down and gently tickled the child’s belly and made him chortle.
Jill took some time to answer. ‘I did. But gently. It was as if I was walking on eggshells. The last thing I wanted was for her to think I was prying. I didn’t want to make her ill again, to get her anxious and stressed. I was worried that she might just run away. She was that jumpy.’
‘She didn’t tell you about the father?’
Jill shook her head. ‘And so I stopped asking. I thought it must be a married man. Or maybe she’d had a fling one night. The bar where she worked could get a bit rowdy at weekends. She made it clear it would be just her and the baby.’
‘When did you tell your husband that Lorna was pregnant?’ Helen straightened and took her attention away from the baby.
Jill flushed. ‘It never seemed like the right time . . .’
‘So, how did he find out?’
‘In the pub one night. Usually he never goes to the Pheasant, the pub just down the road from here. And never into Kirkhill at night. But he just fancied a drink on his way back from Hexham and he called into the Pheasant. One of the blokes who farms up the valley shouted across the bar to him, for everyone there to hear. ‘What does it feel like to be nearly a granddad, then?’ She paused. ‘He’s a