The Day She Disappeared Page 11

  I want to see Sophie.

  He had to lie very still in the white tunnel. He refused to think that this was what it would be like to be dead. He thought about Sophie.

  * * *

  There were strangers at Victor’s table, in the corner of the pub. If Nat stood at the pumps, she could always get a clear line of sight to Victor, and she always knew he knew she was looking, that little ghost of a smile, his old head, polished brown by the sun, lifting to acknowledge her.

  It was as if her whole body was humming now with certainty. She’d tried calling the police station again, but she’d been told no one could talk to her. She had left a message: Beth’s address. She’d left a message for Mo Hawkins too: don’t touch anything. No one answered.

  If Victor was here, he would listen, his clever old eyes understanding. He would believe her. The fact that Victor wasn’t here felt like it meant something too. He should be here.

  Two hefty blokes in cycling shorts were at his table instead, drinking lager and eating chip sandwiches, talking with their mouths full. Nat watched them, just a couple of overgrown lads was what she told herself, but the truth was, one of them might have known Beth, mightn’t they? Heard about her, followed her out here, muttered conversations in the garden, arranging to meet one evening when he was supposed to be working late. They both had wedding rings on, she’d seen that when they stood at the bar ordering, but that meant nothing. Behind her Janine made an exasperated sound, and Nat moved.

  “I miss Victor,” she said, the words not enough for the feeling she had of dread, and Janine sighed.

  “How’s he doing?” she said reluctantly: Janine was funny around illness.

  “Holding his own, that’s what they said.” Nat had a knot in her stomach at the thought of that. “But something’s worrying him. I don’t know if it’s his daughter, or what. I don’t know how he came to have his funny turn, even, if it was a stroke or what. Something.” It came to her, and tentatively she said, “What if something frightened him?”

  Janine gave her a skeptical look. “He’s bloody ninety-odd,” she said. “I mean, it wouldn’t take much, would it?”

  “It would take something, though,” said Nat, urgent. “Didn’t smoke, hardly a drink, Victor was healthier than I am.” Janine shrugged and the gesture infuriated Nat.

  “I’m going to go to the police,” she said, and she saw alarm come into Janine’s face. “What happened last night, at Beth’s place. The phone plugged in there, all her stuff left behind, and then … what I heard. I was scared. I was scared, and you know me, Janine, I’m not the nervous type.” Wasn’t she? Well, if she was, she wasn’t going to confess it to Janine. The door opened and someone came in. “They weren’t listening on the phone. I’ve got to go there.” She didn’t mention Craig and the DNA test.

  Janine fidgeted. “I don’t like it,” she said. “It’s not good for the pub if … something’s happened. Something else. I don’t want people thinking—”

  “Thinking what?” said Nat bitterly. “Do you think business is going to fall off?”

  “You think that’s all I care about?” said Janine, tight-lipped, stepping stiffly away from her up to the bar, and Nat relented.

  “No,” she said. “But there’s nothing you can do about it one way or the other, is there? I’m going to talk to them. As for business, the place is rammed since Ollie died. There’s a queue for the pool table, have you seen it?” Bitterly.

  And when she turned there he was, Bill the cameraman, two broad hands flat on the bar, smiling at them. It must have been him just come in.

  “What can I do you for?” said Janine, almost elbowing her out. His smile followed Nat, lopsided.

  And then Craig was coming in from the back, a tray loaded and wobbling in his hand. His face was drawn and anxious.

  She took the tray and steered him back outside. “Are you going to see the police?” He looked frightened, staring back at her as if she had hypnotized him. She gave him a little shake. “If you do—”

  A child ran, squealing, between them, followed by its mother, and they stepped back under the old plum tree that leaned against the garden’s fence. The plums were almost ripe and something came back to Nat then: she remembered Beth picking them—this time last year?—and taking them to make jam. She’d been living in the cottage then, and she’d brought Janine a jar of the jam a few days later, ruby red. They’d gawped, Nat and Janine, tasting it, because it was delicious. “Thought I’d have a go,” Beth had said, shrugging. She’d never done it again.

  “If you do, you have to think of anything—anything—you can tell them.” He was still just staring and she tried to pull him closer. “Like…” She wasn’t going to mention Beth. “Like, girls. A girlfriend.” The focus in his eyes changed. “There is something, isn’t there?” Slowly he pulled his arm away, rubbing at it where she’d held him.

  “I saw him with some lads in town, I dunno, a couple of weeks ago?” He spoke slowly. “They were winding him up.”

  “Think,” she said. “When? Was it … was Beth still here, for example?” He was shaking his head. “What lads?”

  “Just lads, they’d got hold of his phone, lads we were at school with. Saying he had an imaginary girlfriend, she was one of those Russian scambots, you know, wants money, they get your mobile number from somewhere and try to get pin numbers or whatever. So I thought it was some online stuff.” He swallowed and then looked at her. “I thought, serve him right.” Blinked. “I shouldn’t have thought that, should I?”

  “Serve him right why?”

  He just shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Did you fall out over Beth?” He didn’t answer, just turned away. Another shrug. “Look, Craig,” she tried to explain. “It might have seemed … well, it was Beth’s way. I think she probably was trying to save you the misery. Both of you. But you need to tell the police—about these lads, the scammer, the girlfriend.”

  Craig nodded, his back to her, refusing to look. “You don’t think they’ll—the police—they won’t—” Mumbling.

  “It’s all right, Craig,” she said, to his tall stooped back, and for the first time she thought with a shock how young he was, the things that happened to lads in custody. They took the laces out of their trainers. “No one’s going to lock you up, they just want to ask you a few questions.” Surely that was true? But Craig didn’t answer, just stood aside for her to go ahead of him into the bar.

  And when Nat shouted out the back for him half an hour later, Janine raised a weary eyebrow. “He’s gone,” she said. “Said he had something urgent to do.”

  It wasn’t just summer, and the weather, it was everything: it was Ollie, it was Beth, and this lot like flies to a carcass. Rubberneckers. Nat kept her head down and just worked, slapping on a smile, trying not to think, while Janine, sweaty and defeated, waiting for Steve to reappear (voluble for once, he’d even told them where he was going, a Harwich pickup, toys from China to be dropped in Birmingham), had been up and down the stairs four or five times to reapply her makeup before he eventually walked in the door at eight, fresh and cool and easygoing as he always was.

  Unlike Janine, Nat hadn’t looked in a mirror since she’d left the house, but Steve’s expression said it all. “You get going, girl,” he said, carefully hanging his jacket behind the bar. Nat could see Janine opening her mouth to object a second before softening, and she took her chance.

  Outside, the evening was soft and blue and sweet-smelling: warm grass and hedgerow. Nat shouldered her bag and was turning up the lane when someone stepped out behind her.

  Bill, the cameraman, leaning in the shadow of the pub’s side wall and smoking. Nat had forgotten about him. Halfway through the afternoon she’d remembered and wondered what kind of look she must have given him at the bar, that he made himself scarce so efficiently, but wherever he’d disappeared to, he had come back. She stopped.

  “Walk you home?” he said, pushing himself off the wall and standing there, ha
nds in his pockets, keeping his distance. How old was he? Forty, maybe, square and solid and unthreatening. She sighed, too weary in that instant to wonder what he was up to.

  “Didn’t it work out, then?” he said.

  “What?” she said, and felt the weariness shift, clear.

  “I was trying to remember where I’d seen you before,” he said. “And then I did. You were on a date, a couple of weeks ago, a pub in town.”

  A date: that stupid Tinder experiment. It seemed like another life.

  He smiled a little, head on one side, and something fired, something sounded, a little ping, ping of alarm. Nat held herself still, asking herself, quiet, how she felt about this level of interest. But he seemed only relaxed, well-intentioned, holding his position. “Look, I don’t want to muscle in,” he said quietly, and then he did step into the light, she saw his face, earnest. “I mean, if you’re with someone, but maybe we could go for a drink sometime. If you’re not.”

  She stood, examining him, making herself take her time. “No,” she said finally. Tired. “Not just now.” Sighed. “There’s too much going on—” she began to explain, but then she stopped herself, no. Then began again. “Thanks but no thanks,” she said, and there was a tiny pause before he nodded. And smiled: that smile again.

  “I understand,” he said. “Sorry.” Blowing out smoke, stepping back to the outside table to stub out his cigarette on an ashtray, carefully. “We won’t be here for more than another month anyway.” He seemed resigned.

  Turning to go, she paused. “How long is it, then?” she asked. “How long have you been around?”

  The look he gave her was steady, as if he didn’t need to ask why she wanted to know. “Two months?” he said. “Maybe a bit more.”

  Nat didn’t turn to look back until she was at the bend in the lane, but when she did he hadn’t moved. He did then, though—he walked out into the light and climbed into a car. She heard the engine fire, but he must have driven the other way, inland, because he didn’t pass her in the lane.

  Had she wanted him to? She liked him, was the truth, that calm, still quality appealed to her. She fancied him, to take it that step further and actually be honest. But that didn’t mean she thought it was a good idea, any of it. It pinged to and fro in her head as she walked so that she was right at the cottage and in the porch before it registered, the outside world, some change, something wrong, something.

  The door was locked as she had left it. The green of the overgrown garden was deep blue dusk, and quiet, the birds sleeping.

  But inside, a light was on. And in the tiny kitchen a place had been laid at the table.

  Someone had been there.

  She stepped back quickly into the doorway, her back to the wall.

  Hold on, hold on. What was this? What did this mean? Hold on. Was he still there?

  Nat made herself wait one heartbeat, then another. Silence.

  “Hello?” Her voice sounded scared. She cleared her throat. “Who’s there?”

  Nothing: no answer, no sound, no movement. With trembling fingers she pulled out her mobile and dialed the number Donna Garfield had given her.

  Chapter Twelve

  The ward was dark again, though it was barely past nine. Already Victor had learned that in here the days passed quickly, the nights seemed to last forever. They had closed the double doors to the nurses’ station tonight, which meant perhaps that he was more likely to sleep—but he wouldn’t hear anything, either. They were his conduit to the outside world, the nurses grumbling about the vending machine and the lack of spaces in the car park. Those frightening coded terms, dosage and pain thresholds and DNR orders. Do not resuscitate.

  Sidestepping the steady beat of anxiety those thoughts set up, Victor retraced his day. What have I seen today? I have seen new things. The lift doors, the white tunnel. He had not imagined that it would be so noisy in the scanner. You lay as still as you could manage, and above you, around you, it ground and creaked and rumbled like some great clumsy piece of Victorian engineering. It could only mean you harm: he had brushed that thought away too, to focus on the work of Brunel instead, on his sounding arches and soaring girders. And then at last it had been over and they had eased him out, blinking, pale, into the bright lights.

  The door swung open, soft, and she came in, a silhouette familiar now, the wisps of hair, the comfortable rounded shoulders. She came up to the bed, hesitating. He tested his voice, his tongue. “Lisa?” he said. “Is that you?”

  She came closer, half perching. “Just checking on you, Victor,” she whispered. “Takes it out of you, that machine, doesn’t it?”

  It had exhausted him, he had not expected that. She had something to say, though, he focused on that. “They told you, your daughter phoned, I heard?”

  Ting, ting, ting, went the fear, daughter, daughter, daughter. “Is she all right?” he said immediately, astonished that the entire sentence emerged more or less whole, if a little blurred at the edges.

  Lisa cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, and at the sound of her equivocation he struggled on the bed. She set a hand on his arm and he felt despair that he didn’t even have the strength to resist that gentle pressure. He sank back down, his breathing shallow.

  “She’s fine, but…” She hesitated again, her voice was soft. “It wasn’t actually Sophie who called, in fact it was her husband, Richard. She’s hurt herself, nothing serious, a sprain to her wrist, he said, I think. She needs to have it dealt with, and as long as there’s nothing more serious—” Feeling him struggle again, she patted, warning. “I mean, as long as there’s no fracture, then she will be up to see you, just as soon as she can.”

  At the sound of her attempt to reassure him, with that undertone of resignation—these relatives, excuses, excuses—his anxiety set firm, into certainty. “He’s hurt her,” he said, and there was a pause, a tiny intake of breath, from Lisa. She leaned in.

  “I’m sorry, Victor?” she said, and he froze at her warning tone, he groped for the right thing to do.

  “I—I don’t know,” he said. “I’m worried about her, Lisa.” His speech was ebbing now, he was mumbling.

  She sighed. “I’m sure she’s being looked after, Victor,” she said. Then, “I tell you what, I’ll call her myself in the morning, I’ll talk to—is it Richard?—if need be.” She sounded tense, wary. “But a sprain really isn’t something to worry about.”

  “There’s a child,” he said, fumbling for the right words, to make her understand: he felt her resist, but he didn’t know why. “Rufus. Grandson.” She patted his hand again, something distracted in it now. She would be wondering if he was losing his marbles, was that it? He subsided, not hopeless, not quite yet, feigning calm. Closing his eyes.

  “That’s it, Victor,” said Lisa. “That’s it. You get some sleep.”

  * * *

  The downstairs bathroom window was open a crack: dubiously the policeman prodded at it with a pen. The window wasn’t much bigger than a laptop screen. Nat couldn’t make herself believe an adult could have squeezed through it.

  “Well,” said the PC, shrugging. He seemed a nice enough bloke, tired, stubbly, fortyish. “Depends, you’d be surprised. Burglars—well, generally the skinny lads, if I’m honest—you know what they say about mice, can get through a crack the size of a ballpoint pen? A bit like that.” He frowned. “But nothing was taken, you’re saying?”

  Nat shook her head.

  They’d turned up in a squad car about twenty minutes after she called, no sirens but the light flashing toward her as she stood in the quiet lane, the stubbly bloke climbing out followed by the driver, who looked on the verge of retirement and said nothing. They stood there in fluorescent jackets, taking what felt like an hour to understand what she was saying to them.

  Ducking their heads to get under the low lintel, they came inside. They looked around respectfully, and she saw it through their eyes for a moment: Janine’s ancient sofa, the dust on the shade that hung low over t
he table, her books stacked sideways on a shelf, temporary. She saw the older bloke tilt his head sideways to read the spines.

  “Right,” the younger one said eventually. “So the light was on and the table was laid, for one. No damage, no theft, no signs of forced entry.” A sideways glance at his colleague. “I dunno if forensics…,” and he was back looking at Nat, tailing off.

  They expected Nat to look sheepish, to say she overreacted, she could tell. “I didn’t lay the table,” she said. “I never lay the table.” There it was. Knife, fork, spoon, glass, one of the blue flower-patterned plates she’d brought from Jim’s.

  What had he thought she was going to eat? There was no food in her fridge. Was that the point? Sad loser with empty fridge and no one to eat with?

  “Boyfriend?” interjected the older bloke. It was the only word he uttered. His colleague raised an eyebrow, expectant.

  “I haven’t got a boyfriend,” she said, steely. “I live here on my own.” She opened her mouth then closed it, changed tack, thinking, Jim, thinking, Is that fair? Send a patrol car round to Jim’s? “Look,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “I think there’s someone following me—I think it’s to do with my friend going missing. I spoke to someone, a woman, a DS.” She searched her memory for the name. “Donna,” she said finally. “I told her this morning.”

  They listened as she went over it again and the lead officer took notes, laboriously. Finding herself telling them more than she would have liked about Beth: about the plum jam, even. A radio crackled urgently, and as his colleague disappeared off outside to talk, the older bloke stifled a yawn, apologetic. Nat forced herself to let him off, thinking of Ollie, of them on duty round the clock, but her hand tightened around the phone in her pocket. Hand it to some dozy bloke who thought this was all just a prank? “She knew Ollie,” she said, finally, when the other policeman came back in, tucking the radio inside his collar. “Oliver Mason. The kid that was … that they found in the river.” Taking the plunge then. “Have they … there was blood, he was tied up, I heard. Do they know whose?” The younger man snapped his notebook shut then and frowned. Nat held her ground. “I mean, do they know if it’s a man’s or a woman’s?”