The Day She Disappeared Page 10

  Nat began to shake her head, not even sure what she was going to say. “Her clothes,” she began. “I went to her flat. She’s left them all behind—” There was something, though, wasn’t there? Something wrong, something missing. It was as if the run had momentarily deprived her brain of enough oxygen, she couldn’t think straight. “What are you doing here?” she said. Then, of course, the most important thing. “He came. He came, while I was there.”

  In the yellow streetlight she saw him grow pale, open his mouth, hesitate. “He? Who’s he?”

  She shook her head to clear it, aware she sounded like a crazy person. “Whoever has been sending those messages. He came back for the phone, maybe he was going to send another message, maybe—”

  “Why would…” Dowd swallowed, and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Why wouldn’t—he, if there is—why wouldn’t he take the phone with him? Why risk coming back?”

  Nat stared, trying to construct her theory. “Because … I don’t know.” Tried harder. “The police can track phones, can’t they? Say where they were when messages were sent, that could lead them to him? Wasn’t there…” She searched her memory. “When those two girls were killed, years ago, that school caretaker, they got him because their phones were traced.” She stopped, stubborn, chin in the air.

  Dowd shrugged uneasily. She felt impatience rise at his refusal to understand.

  “Or it could be just his game, don’t you see? Or wanting … wanting—” She broke off, feeling her own reluctance suddenly. “Wanting to be there, right in there with all her stuff.” Beth’s clothes, the jeans molded to her arse, the smell of her perfume and the phone, her phone. Like her firstborn, wasn’t that what Janine had said? “I don’t know. A sort of … trophy.”

  She didn’t like the word even as she said it. It meant something terrible. She shut up.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” said Dowd, looking pale, defeated. “You’re sure it was … him.” Frowning. “But did you actually see … him? A man.” Cleared his throat. “Did you see anyone at all?”

  Nat felt herself sag: if she couldn’t explain herself to this harmless streak of nothing, how was she going to be able to talk sense to the police? His hand was back on her arm, though. “No, I didn’t mean—”

  He squeezed. “I believe you. You know I do. You know I think something has happened to her.”

  She began to shake her head, somehow it wasn’t helping. Dowd was an obsessive—if she involved him the police would see that straight off, a failed relationship with Beth, a loner, a loser.

  “I just want to help.” His voice was resigned, as if he was used to people thinking the way she was thinking.

  “I know,” she said. “I—I think … thank you. Yes. I need all the help I can get, don’t I?”

  “I’m spending most of my time on the river,” Dowd said, calm. “I need to make the most of these tides. Early afternoons I get back.” Holding his ground.

  “All right,” she’d said then, awkwardly. “Maybe I’ll come and find you one afternoon.” It wasn’t till his lights had disappeared around the corner at the top of the lane that she realized he hadn’t said what he’d been doing there.

  Letting herself in, she had stopped, registering something she hadn’t really thought about before. She had left the door unlocked—half the time she did, the village being the village, and she had nothing worth nicking. That was going to have to change.

  She’d locked and bolted it behind her.

  The sun seemed too hot now. Looking at her phone on the bedside table Nat saw that it was late, almost ten. How had she slept so long? All that adrenaline, perhaps. And no wake-up call from Jim, either. That thought bothered her, even as she hauled on her clothes, flew downstairs, gulped cereal—milk on the turn, she hadn’t shopped in weeks. Can’t have it both ways: tell him to leave you alone, then miss him when he does.

  Running again, up to the pub and mercifully shaded by hedges, Nat knew it wasn’t that she missed Jim, except it made her feel uneasy. Wondering where he was. The thought of going back and starting again made her feel sick, the cereal churning. Think of something else: Dowd. She could sail there, to where he was camping.

  Early afternoon.

  She would ask Paddy.

  Chapter Ten

  Just the door between them: he’d sat out of sight and watched her go into the close. Wait, give her time, talk to the neighbors. Play detective if you like, go on, knock on doors.

  She had never minded the neighbors hearing them at it. Not against the law, is it? Not like they were doing it in the back garden. But it had gotten on his nerves, the old bitch next door banging on the wall, that had set something up inside his head, irritating him. She wouldn’t have cared if they’d seen him come and go—but he didn’t want that. So he took care not to be seen.

  Or not so as anyone would know, anyway. Other times he could be anyone, couldn’t he? Passing her in the street, walking into a bar as she walked out, standing in a corner of the pub. Opening a door for her.

  He was sure he’d gotten away in time last night; the key was to stay calm, don’t speed off, keep her guessing. She’d known he was there, waiting for her on the path, just a door between them. She’d known he was waiting for her. That was what mattered.

  * * *

  The pub had a tiny car park to the side, tucked in under overgrown hedges. Steve said he’d trim them, but he hadn’t gotten to it yet. As she approached it, Nat saw Craig standing next to his trail bike, slowly pulling off his helmet.

  There was the sound of a car coming up the lane and he shifted, stepping closer in under the straggly hedge.

  “What kind of time d’you call this, Craig?” she said. “You’re almost as late as me.” Then, peering closer. “You all right?” she asked, abrupt. His eyes looked red.

  “The police called me.” He was staring, unfocused.

  Behind the pub door she could hear glasses being put away, the murmur of Janine’s voice. “You talked to them?” she asked.

  His hand went to his mouth and she could see his nails bitten down and raw. He nodded.

  “Did they tell you anything?”

  He hadn’t shaved recently, his chin dark, his eyes deep-set. He looked like he hadn’t slept. Would they have treated him as a suspect? They start with the people you’re closest to, if you’re murdered, she’d read that somewhere. Most women are murdered by their husbands, or their fathers. But teenage boys?

  They’d been less close lately. Had they actually fallen out? She hadn’t seen that. She’d been too busy thinking about her own shit, hadn’t she?

  “He’d been in the water for a long time,” he said, and she saw his eyes dark with horror. “A week. Maybe more.”

  His head bobbed. He seemed to be having trouble getting the words out. “They want me to come in,” he blurted out. She gaped, then he said, before she could even process that, “His wrists were tied up in a rag. Ollie’s were.” And Craig was staring; he was crying. She put an arm around his shoulder, helpless. Ollie. First time he came in the pub he’d barely started shaving, that sprouty chin boys get, but already he had a way with girls, the fast nervy way. Had he made someone jealous? Craig jealous? She couldn’t get her head around it.

  “Tied up?” That was where that picture was wrong. A loose punch, maybe, she’d seen that happen outside this pub and plenty of others. But to tie someone’s wrists? “I don’t understand.”

  Craig’s head was shaking too, side to side, his black hair lank and greasy. “No,” he said. “There was blood on the rag, they said, not his blood.”

  “They told you that? Why would they tell you that?”

  “They want me to give a DNA sample. I don’t know if they think … if the blood—” He stopped, then started again. He was trying so hard to keep calm, but she could feel him trembling under her arm. “They were trying to scare me, I think.” A kind of shudder, then he was still. “It’s not my blood, I know that, so there’s no reason for me to be scared, but
…” And when he looked into her face, she thought, You don’t get over this. Shit like this. Suddenly he looked lost, like a great overgrown kid, stumbling over his words, holding everything inside. Too young for this.

  “I mean, we were mates, what if I, you know, borrowed his sweatshirt and gave it back, it’d have my DNA on it, right?”

  Nat exhaled. “I don’t know, Craig,” she said. “I doubt it, you know?” He was in the water a week, she didn’t say. “And if there’s a reasonable explanation … anyway. Just … I would just go along.” She tried to smile at him, to look reassuring, but he stepped back, stumbling.

  “I dunno,” he mumbled. On the other side of the hedge the car pulled up and she heard the voices of cheerful punters piling out of their cab. All right, mate? Nah, keep the change.

  Janine called through the open door, “That you?” Exasperated.

  “Come on,” she muttered, tugging Craig’s sleeve, turning him and pushing him ahead of her into the pub.

  Blood on a rag. Not an accident. Someone had murdered him. Something occurred to her, it sickened her, she felt stiff with horror. Had he been alive when they put him in the water?

  Ollie, full of life, full of the future.

  When she thought of him it was sitting there in the corner, following Beth with his eyes.

  First chance she got, Nat called the police.

  When she finally came on the line, DS Donna Garfield no longer sounded annoyed, exactly, more frantic. Nat, hiding behind the shed at the pub garden so as to keep out of Janine’s sight, started talking straightaway, tripping over herself. Not making enough sense.

  “Craig told me—he works here—he told me you’re sure Ollie was put in the water by someone, he was tied up in some kind of cloth.”

  “I can’t talk to you about that.” It sounded like the woman was going to hang up on her. “Look, if there’s nothing concrete—”

  Nat just blundered on. “Her phone. It’s connected, I don’t know how, but it’s connected. Ollie was really smitten with her, she disappears and now we’ve found her phone—”

  DS Garfield cleared her throat. “If I’m honest, love, you’re not making much sense. We’ve got no reason to think there’s any connection between your mate doing a runner and Oliver’s death. None. As far as I can tell, all you’ve got is he fancied her.”

  Nat felt herself tremble with frustration. “That’s not all. Not all. Something has happened to her too,” she said, enunciating it as clearly as she could. “Something bad. That’s the connection. That’s the connection.”

  A silence.

  “She’s gone. Someone sent a message saying she was going to see her mum, but her mum hasn’t seen her.” Desperate. “She’s missed a hospital appointment. She left her stuff, everything. She left her phone. It’s been wiped.”

  A sigh, reluctant. “I can give you her mum’s number,” said Nat, flailing now. “She’ll tell you, they haven’t spoken in years.”

  Why had she said that? Because now Beth’s mum would be bad-mouthing her to a policewoman. She’d just wanted the nasty old cow to know, this was serious. The police were on it.

  “All right.” Donna Garfield had sounded weary. “All right. I’ve got all that, Miss, ah … We’ll … we will certainly follow it up. We will.”

  When she hung up, though, all Nat felt was boiling rage. Donna Garfield might be going to follow it up—eventually. She had no sense that the woman took her seriously. But there was a connection. Ollie’s death, and Beth’s disappearance: there had to be.

  Her back against the shed, she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to think of what might have passed between them, but all she could come up with was Ollie gazing like a puppy, Beth giving him no encouragement. Had Ollie been in Beth’s flat? Nat couldn’t imagine it. Beth wasn’t interested in young lads, she had always kept them at arm’s length—lads, she had confided more than once, were always going off on one. Talking about you after, smashing stuff up when you dumped them. Topping themselves. Ollie hadn’t topped himself. Ollie had been murdered.

  “Oi!” Nat’s eyes snapped open and she peered around the shed. Janine was at the back door, hands on hips, frowning. Hastily, Nat got the tray she’d stashed under her arm and began clearing the tables. Janine turned and went back inside, and following her with her eyes, Nat saw Craig hovering in the doorway.

  They’d asked him for a DNA sample. Setting glasses on the tray in a trance, scraping plates, half-eaten ploughmans’, all she could think was: that’s what she should have told the police, shouted down the phone. She should have told them to get into Beth’s flat, before it was too late, before Mo Hawkins got her rubber gloves on and scrubbed the place down.

  Because that’s where it happened.

  She lifted the tray and began to walk, one foot behind the other, toward the pub’s back door, but she was somewhere else. In that flat. And she knew with a sudden suffocating certainty that he’d been there, he had been everywhere in there. Nat could see him, in her head, the man whose heavy tread she’d heard outside—she felt him. He was looking through Beth’s most private things. He was choosing what to take and what to leave—and there was nothing Beth could do about it.

  And it was as if Nat saw in infrared, or something, the walls of that little box where Beth had lived—and they were splashed with blood.

  Chapter Eleven

  The lights ran over his head like the white lines on a motorway as he was wheeled down the corridor.

  “There’s something we’re just not quite sure about,” the new consultant had said, a pretty girl with a mass of curly hair tied back and glasses, not what the word “consultant” summoned up to him but all the better for that. “Your readings are a bit off.” In his old life he would have made a joke with that term, but now he simply wondered what on earth she could actually mean by it. He felt life slipping from him. “So we’ll just try to clear it up with a scan, is that all right?” Victor managed something like a nod.

  Lisa, Lisa. She was gone, of course, she was coming back later, she had told him that. He had no real idea of the time. There was another nurse with her hand on his arm as he was wheeled down the corridor: looking down it appeared to him as the arm of someone he didn’t know, someone terribly, terribly old. What had the nurse said, though, as she bent to release the wheels on the bed and began to push?

  He didn’t know if he had imagined it, dreamed it, wished it. “Your daughter telephoned,” she said again.

  At that moment he heard someone say his name, “Mr. Powell?”

  The rolling bed slowed. “He’s on his way for a scan,” said the new nurse.

  “Victor?” Victor found he could turn his head toward the sound, and for a moment he just stared, trying to recognize the speaker. Once he had had radar, social radar, Sophie used to call it, fondly, and everyone he knew was there, a small blip, a big blip, an MFV or a warship, someone he’d met once in the queue at the post office or someone dear, someone close. Sophie. The fog shifted, a window opened. Owen. Owen Wilkins, the site manager. A surge of relief allowed him to nod, the tremble of a smile. He formed an O, for Owen, and he saw Wilkins frown, which he also knew was Wilkins’s standard response. The site manager had a different kind of radar, he intuited.

  “Just … came to see how things were going,” he said. Victor could sense the nurse’s impatience, some senses had become keener, hadn’t they? When had he had that thought before? In another life. Wilkins had a … what was the word? An aura.

  Not that Victor believed in the aura, though Sophie sometimes had confessed to it, in her old life as a parole officer, his soft Sophie leading criminals by the hand. She had developed a belief that you could sense a bad man from a good man before you looked at his notes and knew what he had done. It hadn’t helped her, had it? Not where Richard was concerned. Victor could feel his thoughts scattering, like rabbits. He chased them down. Wilkins was a severe man who offended people sometimes—but try as he might Victor could not work out if Wilkins was g
ood or bad. He was here, wasn’t he? He had come in the ambulance with Victor all that time ago, the day the old life slipped.

  The nurse began to push again, slowly, and out of the corner of his eye, Victor could tell Wilkins was walking alongside them. He closed his eyes and there was the caravan site, the long sunny slope down to the water; he could smell cut grass and the river, light glittering on the gray water. Wilkins bending to help him unfold his chair, standing back stiffly as he sat, Wilkins poised and waiting for something. Then the man’s voice sharp, turned on some teenagers as music blared, two pitches away.

  The rolling bed was moving briskly now. At his side Wilkins cleared his throat. “I’ll wait, then, shall I?” he said, more to the nurse than to Victor, and Victor opened his eyes in time to see him step back and let them move on. A lift, a change of light, the hiss of a pneumatic door. Imagine if these were the last, the last sensations. The last sights.

  The world was turning, beyond the lift, beyond the corridors, people were doing their business out in the sunlit world, and he let whiskery Mary, gossiping, come back into his mind. She had been talking about the film crew, all crowding into the post office and buying every ice cream in the freezer cabinet. A nice man taking the time to chat to her, not a film star. The girls hanging about outside the post office giggling, asking for ice creams, and the crew’s big trucks full of equipment on the pavement.

  That was the world, the world outside.

  The lift’s brushed metal doors slid open and they turned a corner and were in a large room, a warm room where lights blinked and Victor could see the mouth of a tube, a tunnel; there was a hum in the air. A woman in a white coat turned from a monitor, smiled, and stood. Curly hair, tied back, blip went the radar. Consultant. “Mr. Powell,” she said kindly.