The Day She Disappeared Read online

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  A Note About the Author

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  For my father

  Evil is unspectacular and always human,

  And shares our bed and eats at our own table

  —W. H. Auden, “Herman Melville”

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank my British editors, Jade Chandler and Maddie West, who helped get this book as good as it could be, as well as the incomparable Sarah Crichton for her brilliance and unflagging support as my editor in the United States, and their respective teams in rights, sales, and marketing for their tireless efforts getting the books into the hands of readers on both sides of the Atlantic, which is after all what it is all about. I would also like to thank my thoughtful, long-suffering, clever agent, Victoria Hobbs, for ten years of keeping me on the right track, and my husband for doing everything else.

  He did it quite quickly, before she opened her mouth to start again.

  It had started in the kitchen. He’d thought they could have sex first so he had started that way, looking into her face and touching as she talked. But then she kept on talking, You didn’t think, her voice hardening, you never thought this was— slapping his hand away, then her voice rising until the sound of it set up a vibration in his head that had its own momentum, that he knew wouldn’t stop until he put an end to it, and it was simply there as the solution. There was really very little in that moment to be said against it.

  He had smiled down at her then. He had never seen what other people saw: good-looking, ugly. In the pub he listened to what the others said about women, looking at the images on the big screen high in the corner, a woman under a shower with her head back and water running down her body, they talked about the shape of her arse. He had a different range. He saw things they couldn’t see.

  Then as he walked her backward through the door and—registering her expression changing, her eyes going flat in the made-up face because she thought she knew why he wanted her in there, thought she could handle him—it occurred to him that the bedroom was a better place to do it anyway, because the window looked out over the fields and it was less likely that the neighbors would hear something. Although not impossible: he knew they heard things, it just hadn’t been of interest to him until now.

  They had gotten as far as the bed, so he let the body fall there, a shine on her legs from the window. As she went down in all the bedclothes there was a wet sound from her throat and for a flashing red second he thought maybe he hadn’t done it properly so he waited. But he considered that it must have been just air forced back out of the lungs somehow, perhaps as the body folded on itself, because she was certainly dead.

  Her bedside table was dusty, and the bin in the corner was overflowing. Dirty. Lazy. On the bed now her face was half hidden in the duvet, and he leaned over her, he knelt astride her breasts, looking down, and carefully he moved the fabric out of the way so he could see. He stepped back off the bed. Her legs were open and between them the dark. They could have gone on, another month or two at least. She’d been stupid, that was all. He began to consider that: How stupid?

  Coming around the bed to the window, he looked for a second: the meadow was uncut and shaggy as far as the tidal river. It had been hot a month now, a heat wave across Europe, it said on the news, five thousand dead, although most of them old people. The grass was turning to straw.

  He drew the curtains, then he turned to go into the kitchen. He was going to need a knife.

  Chapter One

  “No,” said Nat, turning on her side in the bed, bleary. Pleading. “No, Jim, for the five thousandth bloody time. I can’t talk to you anymore.” And losing patience: “Go away, Jim. Leave me alone.”

  She stabbed at the phone with her finger to end the conversation and dropped it with a clatter onto the side table. Feeling all sorts of things, mostly guilty. The longer you stayed, the worse it was when it ended. She’d always known that, probably. Loving someone wasn’t everything, she hadn’t known that. Jim, Jim, Jim. He needed help. She should be helping him, not hanging up on him.

  The last time she’d seen him he’d cried: she’d let him put his face on her shoulder, she’d patted, helpless. “I can’t do this,” she’d said. Coward.

  It was hot in the room: the boxes sat there still unopened, the big suitcase, crowding the small space. Although the window had been open all night, Nat—Natalie only to the older generation, to her mother, who had for four years lived a thousand miles away in a cheap bit of Spain—felt suffocated suddenly, and struggled upright. A green light filtered in past the curtains but no dawn chorus, it was too hot even for the birds. She sank back on the pillow; she buried her face. Six thirty and it was only going to get warmer.

  There was a reason Jim called at the crack of bloody dawn, although sometimes it was midnight. He never actually came out with it, but the question hovered. Is there someone else there? Opening one eye, Nat monitored the bed beside her, although she knew already. Of course there bloody isn’t. She was alone.

  On the bedside table the phone rang again. Sitting up furiously, arms folded across her chest, Nat stared at it. One of these days, Jim, please, Jim, don’t … Only it wasn’t him this time. Janine, said her screen.

  As usual, Janine was already talking before Nat even got the phone to her ear. Voice lowered. Steve must have gotten in late.

  Nat waited. You had to do that with Janine: every fifth word might be useful, if you were lucky. You had to let the rest of it go or your head would explode. Now she was addressing Nat, halfway through a sentence, hissing for her attention.

  “Sorry, Janine,” Nat said. “What?”

  “Not coming back, is what she said.” And Janine came to an expectant stop. Nat could picture her, half out of bed, rumpled cleavage, big hair askew.

  A shaft of low, white-bright sun had gotten around the curtain. On the pillow, Nat shifted to get out of the dazzle and saw herself in the low dressing-table mirror across the room. A fierce line of eyebrow, short dark hair sticking up. “It’s so hot,” she said, disbelieving. Then, feeling it with a thud. “Hold on, did you say Beth’s—”

  “Late night?” said Janine, impatient. “Have you been listening to a word I said, babe?” In her fag-fueled husky voice. “Look, I know the Tinder was my idea, you needed to move on, but—”

  “Janine, I don’t … there’s no one…” Forget it. She started again. “What did you say?”

  “Beth’s texted me. She’d met some bloke up there and she’s not coming back.”

  Up there, where she was supposed to be looking after her poorly mum.

  “Not coming back?” Nat repeated stupidly, and it was as if the air had been knocked out of her. She could hear her voice, sounding like a kid. “But she—”

  The Bird in Hand without Beth? Beth winking across at Nat behind Janine’s back, a quick squeeze around Nat’s shoulders when Janine had just told her to cheer up, it might never happen. “But there’s … she’
s supposed to be…” She stopped. Beth hadn’t told Janine, had she? She’s got a doctor’s appointment next week. Hospital.

  Just routine. Bound to be nothing. Just a checkup. It had been Nat who had said that to Beth, just to get that look off her face.

  Nat started again. “She said she—” Hold on, what had she said? Sorry babe no signal really up here see you soon.

  Janine rattled on oblivious. “She said she’s met the love of her life, not coming back after all.” Impatient. “Whatever.”

  “Love of her life?” Nat put a hand to her hair, feeling how short it was, feeling naked and exposed suddenly though she’d had it cut a month ago. She’d thought she was getting used to it, too.

  “Ergo she won’t be opening up today, and there’s a brewery delivery scheduled for nine.” Janine was working up a rage. “Dumped me right in it, bloody typical.”

  It was sinking in, but it didn’t feel any better. “I … you want me to come in and open up?” said Nat, trying to think.

  Wheedling now. “I wouldn’t ask. Only Steve’s turned up, worn out, bless him, needs his nap. You know how he is.”

  Did she? Big Steve, hardly opened his mouth to say a word, and Janine made it quite clear it wasn’t his mind she was after.

  “All right,” said Nat, not paying attention now. Thinking instead, her heart pattering, it’ll be one of her adventures, just some bloke. Janine must think that too or she’d be pulling her hair out. Because Beth might come in late more often than not with last night’s makeup on and spend the first half hour cramming toast into her mouth, but she was the reason half the punters came in.

  But Janine was back to the pub. “Look, love,” she said, confiding. “You’ve seen as many barmaids as I have, you know the type. She’s all lovey-dovey and your best friend—and she was, I know she thought a lot of you…” Nat wanted Janine to just shut up now, but of course she didn’t. “But when a certain kind of bloke comes along, well. We might as well not exist, not her mates, not her job, nothing. Here today, gone tomorrow.”

  Nat wasn’t going to say, She wasn’t like that. She said nothing.

  “You can stay in the cottage,” said Janine, hearing the silence, wheedling again. “All right? As long as you like.”

  Nat had been supposed to be finding a new place to live next week, Beth covering for her. Never mind that now. Things went around in her head.

  What about the punters who’d been asking when Beth was getting back from her mum’s? What about her boots in for reheeling in town?

  What about Beth’s hospital appointment? Next Monday, half past three. Dodgy smear test, she’d said with a scowl, stuffing the crumpled piece of paper into her pocket when Nat caught her in the kitchen staring at it, asked her what was up. Abnormalities, said Beth, not looking her in the eye, hand still in her pocket.

  And then Nat had remembered a doctor’s appointment, weeks before, because she’d heard Beth ask Janine for the time off. Poor old Dr. Ramsay, she’d thought, with patients like Beth and Nat on her books, women and their insides.

  Nat lay there another five minutes, the sheet over her face. When eventually she got up she meant to put the kettle on, but found herself at the window instead. She pushed the curtains out of the way and leaned over the sill, into the air. She could smell it, the dark smell of things stirred to the surface in the heat. The river.

  Chapter Two

  They’d started missing her even before she jumped ship for good, Beth’s fan club. A man had come into the pub—the Bird in Hand, hidden up a meandering overgrown green lane from the river—a bit more than a week after Beth had first gone, disappeared up north after an afternoon shift with only a midnight text to Janine to say where, and why.

  His name was Jonathan Dowd. A tall man Nat didn’t remember ever having seen before, who said, a bit shy, he and Beth’d been seeing each other only he hadn’t heard … she’d … she wasn’t answering his calls. Good-looking, she supposed, dark eyes, lean but broad-shouldered, he was having difficulty getting the words out. He must have known he wasn’t the only one, Nat muttered to herself, having to go back into the kitchen so as not to look into his mournful face. Ah, shit. Janine had patted him sympathetically on the shoulder for a good five seconds before asking him if he’d like to order.

  Beth. Lovely Beth with her eyeliner and her almost perfect skin; you had to work with her, up close, to see the faintest stippled trace of acne scars under the makeup. Very good at avoiding every job—chips, mixers, changing the barrel—that she didn’t like, but even better at charming the punters, which was why Janine turned a blind eye. Party girl Beth.

  Nat had texted Beth the day after she went off to see her mum, got a text back hours later telling her there wasn’t much signal, See you soon. Fourth of August, her phone told her. The next message Nat had sent, a couple of days later, just checking in—How you doing, how’s your mum, get back here Janine’s doing my head in—had been delivered because Nat’s phone told her so. But wasn’t answered. Too busy, or no signal, or nothing much to say: Nat had shrugged that one off. She and Beth didn’t really text, what with working together.

  Don’t forget your hospital appointment.

  Nat felt like her mum, fussing. Big sister: neither of them had ever had a sister. It had been Beth who’d held Nat’s hand when she needed it, and now it was Beth’s turn since Nat was helpless.

  Would Beth have made another appointment, up there wherever she’d gone? Hard to imagine her getting on to that straightaway, not with the love of her life turned up, if Janine was right. As she pressed send, staring at her phone, Nat had felt her heart pattering in anxiety. More likely that was why Beth had gone. Running away, forgetting she’d ever had that letter. Abnormalities.

  Nat had told herself, here today, gone tomorrow, over and over, till she almost believed it.

  It was a busy week, though, even for August, and maybe Beth wouldn’t have been in her element anyway, her favored method of serving a punter being to set her elbows on the bar lazily either side of her assets and deliver a slow smile while she worked out if he was worth her trouble or not.

  Nat had never had a sister, and never had a friend like Beth. Someone who knew you, without you having to tell them, even if they were so different. At school Nat would have been the one who sat in the front row with her head down, and Beth arriving late and smelling of fags. But they hadn’t gone to school together, had they? From different ends of the country, Nat having grown up on the edge of this very village, done her time at the high school in town, then college. Beth, four years younger though you wouldn’t know it sometimes, was from somewhere up north and had left school at sixteen.

  “What good is fecking school anyway,” she’d said, without bitterness, or so it seemed, cool, agreeable. “Flipping teachers after you every five minutes. What they gonna teach me?”

  And then that smile, that big lazy smile that drew people to her. “More to learn other places. Right, Nat?” And she’d give Nat a shove with her shoulder, that shoulder always peeling brown after hours staked out in the sun. She knew Nat had played it by the book: college, sleeping on sofas in London for a year trying to get jobs before ending up back here anyway. Both of them behind the bar of the Bird.

  Nat had never had a friend like Beth, who’d step in front of her if a punter started something. The bloke who’d tried to climb across the bar when she’d just cut all her hair off back when … well, back then. After she’d left Jim. The bloke drooling, “You a dyke then?” The hair had been down below her shoulder blades before, when she let it down, which mostly she didn’t. “You two? I’d like summa that.”

  Beth had reached across her with a firm brown arm and pinched him somewhere at the base of his neck, then with the other hand shoved him so he ended sprawled on the floor. By the time Steve had walked through from the back at the sound, Beth had been leaning back frowning over a torn nail while Nat unloaded the dishwasher.

  August was always busy. Was that why she’d chos
en to jump ship now?

  And what with schlepping in and out of the scruffy beer garden with trays while trying to keep her own smile in place and only Craig, the pub’s bar-back—a lanky overgrown kid gone silent lately as if his mind was on other things: girls was Janine’s diagnosis—to help, Nat told herself she didn’t have too much time to think about Beth and why she’d done a runner. Or about her own future, and finding a place to live—which suited her fine. It didn’t get any cooler, though. It got hotter.

  There was a film crew rumored—Craig had mumbled something about it as his mum worked at the hotel they’d been staying in, ten miles inland—to be working no more than three fields away, some historical spine-tingler or other, murder in corsets. Wilkie Collins? One of those. They were supposed to be over in the direction of Eastcote where the sea wall snaked around the marsh, and the possibility of someone off the set straying up to the Bird kept Janine applying the slap every morning. Nat hadn’t been down that way to look, but she had seen the glow of arc lamps above the hedges one night, so she assumed it was that way, where the river widened to meet the sea, gray and silver. She hoped they weren’t too pampered, because no hotels in a sixty-mile radius had such a thing as air-con.

  The news had spread, though, it was why the caravan site—Sunny Slopes, as old-fashioned as it sounded but people obviously liked that—was so full and plenty of the visitors found their way along the footpath or the long way around up the lane to the Bird, the only pub in walking distance from that bit of the estuary.

  Nat found herself missing the water: too full-on in the pub to get out there, away from the land, from the narrow landlocked river. The small sound of waves against wood and the caravans dotted across the slope. She missed her regulars in the Bird too: with the extra bodies they ended up squeezed into corners or staying away altogether. Old Victor from the caravan site—her total, one hundred percent favorite customer—had appeared in the door for his Tuesday night drink and she’d seen him think better of it and back out again apologetically, his bobble hat (whatever the weather it was bobble hat weather for Victor) hanging off the back of his old bald head as he disappeared.