Read Precious Thing for Free Online

for their safety’. But not you. What was there to be scared of? You never said.
    I’d hoped you told me everything. I’d wanted us to share all our secrets just like we used to. But at that moment the realisation crept over me that maybe I had been deluding myself all along.
    I sat for a moment after I came off air, making a play of gathering my things together, but whatever I tried to grab – my notepad, my make-up bag – dropped out of my hands. My body was incapable of carrying out the simplest task.
    Around me the TV crews packed cameras away, retrieving cables and microphones. Photographers downloaded images of you, producers shouted into their mobiles to news desks, ‘Corrigan … no, I said CORR-I-GAN, double R. And GUNN as in a pistol but with a double N.’ Reporters sat, laptops on knees, filing their stories for the next day’s newspapers. The wheels of the news machine turning as if nothing had happened.
    My phone rang with a number it didn’t recognise. I answered.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Rachel. I’ve just seen you. About Clara. What the hell is going on?’ The voice was screeching, hysterical. ‘Has something happened to her?’ Sarah Pitts asked.
    I didn’t even think about how she got my number. I moved away from Jake and the cameraman to a quieter corner of the room.
    ‘I don’t know anything else,’ I said. ‘The police think she came to the bar.’ I whispered that into the phone, feeling guilty as if the act of whispering made me complicit.
    ‘She did come, Rachel.’ Sarah sniffed and gulped the sobs away. ‘Just after you left and then she went to find you. She said you’d called her and you were meeting up because you’d had an argument about her boyfriend.’
    I let her finish and listened to the snot and the sniffs. I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t. I just held the phone with one hand and held my other hand out in front of me. To make sure I was still real since nothing else seemed to be. And when I saw the deep brown of my nail polish and the veins on my hand and the moonstone ring on my middle finger and I was finally convinced this was happening to me, ‘I didn’t speak to her. I couldn’t find her. She wasn’t there. I went for chips and then to a hotel.’ I kept my sentences short and drew a breath with each one. I wouldn’t give in to hysteria.
    ‘But she took the call in front of us.’
    ‘Well it wasn’t me.’
    ‘Oh God, I could have been one of the last people to see her,’ Sarah said, crying again. I imagined her face, puffy and red.
    I looked up. Jake was hovering over me.
    ‘They’re throwing us out of here now, Rach.’ I nodded and motioned to him that I was winding up on the phone.
    ‘Sarah, I have to go.’
    ‘I should have made sure she was safe.’ Her voice begged for reassurance.
    ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you.’
    An hour before there had been cars and colours and grass outside the police station. Now there was only white. White under a grey sky. It was quiet too. The snow can do that, can’t it? Deaden sounds, silence everything. It felt like the world was standing still, taking a moment to catch its breath. I walked into the car park wishing my footsteps didn’t have to leave a trace. Wishing we didn’t always have to ruin everything that began so perfect and pure.
    I know what you’ll be thinking at this point in the story, Clara. Not a word to DCI Gunn or Jake? Why not tell them I knew you? The answer is nothing and everything. I couldn’t think logically. Trust me, you don’t in these circumstances. Maybe I believed that if I told someone all this would have become real. And I wasn’t ready for that, much as I came to regret it later. Instead I did what was expected of me: I scripted a version of your story for the evening news bulletin that wasn’t my own. When we were done we sent it back to London on the satellite. All that guff that people write on their CVs, about being calm under pressure,