The Day She Disappeared Page 9

  “Nothing,” said Margaret, and she was savage with disappointment. “I never saw none of them. I jus’ heard ’em.” And the door snapped shut.

  For a second Nat stared at the closed door with loathing, behind it the woman shuffling after her husband into the curtained front room, a row brewing. I could just go, she thought. Sod it, what am I doing here? But she didn’t turn for home. She crossed the road.

  The upper story of number six was dark; she’d already ascertained from Mo Hawkins that the house had been converted to two flats, but she hadn’t had a tenant above Beth for a year. She thought of a man, in the shadows, of all those men out there, online, in clubs, at bus stops. A man letting himself in and out, after dark, at two in the morning when no one can see.

  Why would he do that? The messages. Covering something up? Wanting us to know, stringing us along.

  Or maybe she’s OK. Alive. The spark sprang, as she hoped, fervently, unable to stop herself, hoping against hope. Please. Please.

  In the deep quiet she fished the key out of her pocket and let herself in. There was a smell, immediately, in the narrow carpeted hallway: faint, fusty. Was that just the smell of a fridge gone stale, unemptied bins somewhere in the heat? It wasn’t the smell of Beth, perfume and foundation. Beth’s smell was musky, sweet. Nat swallowed painfully: you couldn’t bring a smell back, but she’d know it if it hit her. She groped for a light switch. There was a crack and flash above her head and for a second she had to hold very still, fighting panic. A blown bulb, that’s all. She made herself walk on, feeling with her hand along the wall for the next switch. There.

  The hall ended in a kind of lobby. She’d been here once or twice, lunching on fish and chips in the kitchen, sunbathing on the patch of grass beyond the window, but Beth never took pride in it like it was a home, never showed her around. Half cleared, the place contained nothing that spoke to Nat about the real Beth, the woman she’d worked alongside for nearly two years. It was dismal. Bad carpet, worse wallpaper, an open door into a tight kitchen; another closed. The third door, on her right, opening onto the front room, was ajar. She pushed at it gingerly and saw two bin bags. She stepped back again.

  In the lobby she saw now there was the shape of a walled-in staircase that must lead to the upstairs flat through a separate entrance, and a cupboard set in under it. She looked at the bin bags, back to the cupboard door. It was open a crack. This must be where, thought Nat. Didn’t Mo Hawkins say a cupboard? She pulled it open with a fingertip, and there was a socket inside the cupboard. Otherwise it was empty, furred with dust save a smudge, mobile phone–sized, on the floor.

  Deep in the night, everyone asleep, coming inside on soft feet to send a message on Beth’s phone. She envisioned a man. Because every time she closed her eyes and thought of Beth, there was a man’s arm around her, a man staring at her, watching her backside move, looking down her front.

  A sleaze off Tinder, some heavy breather, a lecherous punter following her home, had her locked in his cellar or … or worse.

  Would the neighbors have seen him coming in here, so late? A man, young, old, married, single—did he drive, did he walk whistling into the close? The possibilities multiplied, teetering, dangerous. Nat backed out into the lobby.

  The black plastic bin bags sat there in the door to the dark front room: she could see straight off how Mo Hawkins had divided the stuff. Rubbish in one, the other one full of clothes for flogging on eBay. Would the police go through the rubbish? Should she touch nothing? In one rash movement Nat upended the bag full of clothes and it all came tumbling out: crop tops, the favorite sequined mini, the wedges, the sandals, jeans, jeans, more jeans. The pair she never washed, she was wearing them in to the perfect color, Beth said, the perfect jeans, molded to my arse, and slapping her own backside, friendly.

  Mo Hawkins wouldn’t have given it a thought, why a girl like Beth would leave it all behind. It wasn’t like she could splash out on a new wardrobe, on what she earned—or maybe Mo thought Beth would be looked after, a sugar daddy, taken around the shops. Not likely. Beth wasn’t that girl. Beth wanted her freedom. Party girl Beth wasn’t going to be locked up in a carpeted pink pad or a chrome and glass high-rise.

  Hold on, hold on, thought Nat. Those were the jeans she’d been wearing when … and she tugged them from the pile and held them up. She could see Beth’s shape in them and for a moment the sight stopped her. Then, tentative, she put a hand in the back pocket, not expecting it to be there still, but it was. She fished it out. A crumpled page on hospital letterhead. She scanned it, but it told her nothing she didn’t already know, did it? An appointment has been made for you with Mr. Sarafidis, clinic 1A.

  You liked it here, Beth. I know you did. We were friends.

  That morning in May, she’d heard Beth sigh as Nat turned quickly in front of the toilet mirror, not wanting to see herself, turned to hide her face in Beth’s hair. “We’ve all been there, love,” Beth had said. “They tell you, get it done quick and it’s a missed period, nothing more. Don’t feel like that, though, does it?” Giving her a little shake, her arm around Nat’s shoulders. “Come on,” she said in her rough kind voice, coom on, “we’ll be all right.”

  We.

  Nat set the page aside on the carpet and stared down at the heap, moved her hand through it, sifting. Something. Something was missing. She sat back on her haunches, staring, then stood. She went into the kitchen, but it was still buzzing at her, knocking from side to side inside her head like a trapped fly.

  She felt apprehension creep in from the corners, the shadows. Staring into the narrow room, she walked up to the glazed garden door at the far end and looked out through the glass. The light was almost gone, but you could see the long grass of a meadow, silver in the dusk, the shape of a clump of willows. The river must be down there.

  The kitchen was unused, not even dirty, bar a film of dust on top of the toaster and a scattering of crumbs. Beth was not a cook, you couldn’t trust her even to warm up a pie for a punter. She lived off chips and gummi bears like a kid, that was why she was still breaking out in spots at closer to thirty than twenty and she knew it, but she didn’t care enough: Beth was never one to stare at herself and find fault. Nat didn’t expect to find herself thinking of Beth in a kitchen of all places, but suddenly she was everywhere, a whispering presence.

  It was here you’d expect the smell, if things were going off, but it only smelled a bit fusty. Nat decided not to look in the fridge; she walked quickly back past it and out. Bathroom.

  An old-fashioned bath with limescale following the drip of a tap. Bottles of cleaning products stacked in a bucket, a cloth hung over its lip. The toilet was clean, but that was probably Mo Hawkins, never happier than chucking bleach around, and you could smell it. The door on a mirrored cabinet above the sink hung open, the shelves half cleared. Painkillers. Tubes of makeup, foundation. Nat stood closer. Roaccutane. She frowned. Acne medication. She remembered Beth saying how hard it had been to get that out of the doctor because of the side effects. The foundation was expensive stuff, by their standard, anyway, hers and Beth’s, on barmaids’ wages. “Should be tax deductible,” Nat had said to her one time and Beth had only snorted uncomprehending because, of course, it was all cash in hand. “Joke,” Nat had said.

  She wouldn’t have left it behind, anyway, no more than she would her jeans. Not the makeup, not the medication. Nat added it up in her head, ready to take it to the police.

  What was the alternative? That it might be Beth herself sneaking back under cover of darkness, sending the messages, hiding out for reasons of her own. Nat strained to think what those reasons might be and came up with nothing. And then the smell drifted back, it was here beneath the bleach and the disinfectant, whatever it was, something sweet, something sickly. Nat swallowed: the light, suddenly, seemed bright. Bedroom.

  The bed was stripped, the drawers all pulled out of the chest, empty, and a poster was peeling off from the wall by a corner. She pulled the wardrob
e door open, setting wire hangers clattering. There were no curtains at the wide plate-glass window. Feeling exposed, Nat turned, slow, forcing herself to look harder, in the glare of the overhead light. A wastepaper basket, emptied. A varnished dressing table, old-style, low, with a beveled rectangle of mirror, one earring settled in a crack in the veneer, gilt tasseled, and she remembered it swinging against Beth’s cheek. She picked it up.

  Under the bed? She lowered herself to look, and in that moment she caught something out of the corner of her eye, and without thinking she straightened, went for the light switch by the door, and dropped flat, in the dark.

  What was it? She had heard something, had she? Seen something? Had it been her own reflection in the wide dark expanse of glass, or was there … was there? She listened.

  The faintest sound of music, far off, a burst of distant laughter that stopped. And in the quiet something else: an engine running, steady, close by. A car with its engine idling. Nat waited for the engine to be switched off, for a door to open and slam, for voices, someone walking up next door’s path or across the road. But it was still running.

  Someone was waiting in a car, outside the house.

  Just a car. Just someone waiting, picking a teenager up, taking five minutes before going inside. But in her head another story fell softly into place like a child’s game, like marbles running, the logic of it, click, click, click. Was he coming back for the phone?

  The engine turned and stopped. Silence. She waited, waited. Out there someone sat in his car. A minute passed, another. Five minutes. Crouched, stiff, Nat began to unbend.

  Then, so soft, so careful she hardly caught it, the sound of a car door opening. Closing. The faintest rasp of a footstep on tarmac.

  Nat was bent over in the dark, following the sound. Closer—closer—the crunch of footsteps on the gravel footpath. Coming up the path toward the front door, there was something about the footsteps—slow, deliberate—that brought the hairs up on the back of her neck. As if he knew she was there.

  A key. A key. Did he have a key? Her body was cramped and stiff, and at the center of it her belly felt hard, like a stone: she couldn’t move.

  Get up, she ordered herself, run at him, whoever he is, shout and scream so everyone can hear, don’t just sit here waiting— then suddenly someone was shouting, somewhere along the back gardens, next door. Something smashed. A woman’s voice, muffled then louder as if a back door had been flung open.

  Not a young voice. Ranting, nasty. It was Margaret from next door, shouting at her husband. Nat could hear him murmuring.

  Standing with her hand against the wall in the dark, Nat heard words, identified a row. I’ve told you fifty fucking times not to— The swearwords so shocking in the old woman’s voice that they shook Nat out of whatever state she’d been in.

  And then as suddenly as the row had broken out, it stopped: the door closed, she heard it slam, for a second muffling the voices, then silencing them.

  As the sound died away, she heard the feet on the gravel, going back the way they’d come, quick now, though, a car door slammed.

  A breath, held one beat—then Nat moved. She charged, blundering through the flat’s narrow hallway and out into the road, because she would batter on the car’s doors, she would press her face against the window, she would haul him out.

  The car was gone, the red ghost of taillights through shrubs at the entrance of the close the only sign it had ever been there. And Nat, alone on the pavement in the warm dark with the sound of footsteps in her head.

  Chapter Nine

  Monday

  “It’s disgusting.”

  The six-bed room where Victor lay was directly behind the nurses’ station. The double doors that might have separated them had been open all night and were still open now, so he could hear their conversation. They didn’t really lower their voices: it made Victor feel odd, as though he had already passed beyond civilized society, he wasn’t fully alive anymore. Or was it something else making him feel odd? Best not to think, best not to wonder.

  They were talking about Sophie. They hadn’t used her name, but they were talking about her, or people in what they assumed was her position.

  “They just dump them. Nothing we can do.” Someone clicked their tongue, someone exhaled disapprovingly. He hoped it wasn’t her, Lisa. “You’d think. I mean, what’s a ninety-two-year-old doing living in a caravan?”

  I like it there, he wanted to say. It liked me. Among friends. Until he wasn’t, anymore. Until that man walked out of the shadows. I couldn’t live with her. She’d love to have me, but she can’t.

  Victor had known Sophie’s telephone number by heart since she had first bought that tiny house in London, twenty years ago. Richard had moved in with her, not she with him: he had taken over the mortgage, although she had assured him the house was still in her name. But now it seemed that his tired brain had dispensed with that information, he could assemble four, five of the digits, but they wouldn’t stay in the right order. The screen he could use to make a telephone call or pay to watch television on was attached to a mechanical arm about ten inches from his head on the pillow, dark. No use to him anyway, until he could remember, until he could locate money and numbers and make his body work.

  He couldn’t tell now if he’d spent the night asleep or awake. He remembered someone filling his water jug. He remembered sitting up to take a drink. Or had that been a dream? He didn’t seem to be able to sit up now. Yesterday he had thought he was improving. This morning there was a sheen on everything, a silvered edge, it all looked as though it might shift and slide, like mercury.

  It was just after seven, the clock told him that. Abandoning the telephone number, he decided to put something else in the right order. The breakfast trolley would be around at seven thirty, pushed by a man called Emile who had been born in the Philippines. Emile was allowed to open his sandwiches for him but not allowed to help him sit up. The nurses’ shifts changed at eight.

  And as if the thought brought her to him, Lisa walked in from the corridor past the nurses’ station right up to his bed and smiled. “I’m finishing up,” she said, a hand on his arm. What was that look? Searching him. He felt muddled, fuzzy. There was something he needed to say.

  Beside the bed on the cabinet was the jug of water. He looked at it and back to Lisa. Police, he wanted to say, but the word wouldn’t appear. His lips felt dry and cracked: his tongue moved cautiously to wet them, an effort, but it felt as though that jellied muscle was the strongest in his body. Victor could see himself as if from above, so old, so helpless. So close. So close to something that appeared to him as a dark doorway, that led down into the earth.

  Police. His lips trembled as he tried to press them. Plosive. The P sound is a plosive. Nothing came out. Her hand on his arm lifted, hesitated, patted.

  “Back this evening,” she said.

  His eyelids fluttered.

  He was woken by the sound of a chair being scraped across the lino. Whiskery Mary was dragging the chair up to the bed, knitting spilling from her bag and a packet of the cheap biscuits from the shop parked on the bed on his abdomen.

  “Oh, Victor,” she said consolingly, asking questions and answering them herself as she always did. “Oh, Victor, this isn’t looking good, not good at all, is it?”

  His eyes followed her as she settled back in the chair with satisfaction, but as she began to talk he closed them again. Weary. He had never felt so weary.

  * * *

  Nat was running, running, down a lane between high hedges at night when the river opened in front of her, wide and dark. She smelled the weed, saw dead things floating. She sat up with a start, with the sun hot on her face.

  Last night she had run. Without even taking a breath, it seemed, her sandals flapping on the tarmac loud in her ears. A car had passed her, but it had been going the other way, it didn’t come from behind her. A dark car with mud on the wheels. She had not looked into the windscreen as it went by.


  If that row hadn’t broken out, if she’d just waited, he might have come in. If she’d had the balls to go out when she first heard the engine running, she’d have seen his face. She needed to go to the police, but she could imagine the questions they would ask her. Incredulous. You what? A suspicious engine running? Footsteps? And what did you think you were doing there? How can you be sure it wasn’t your friend, trying to avoid her landlady, some ex—

  Because I’m sure she’s missing, she heard herself insist. It came to her that this was a game to the man whose footsteps she’d heard on the path. The man who had sat at the curb in his car. He could be patient. That was what this was to him, coming back to the close late at night, returning to the scene of … whatever. To send a message he knew no one would believe, in the end, a tease. A game.

  Next move.

  Had he seen her go in there? Had he seen the lights go on? Had he seen them go off again? Might he have thought whoever was here had gone out of the front door? Might he have assumed it was Mo Hawkins, and Mo Hawkins was of no interest to him?

  Had she walked past him on her way in? That thought stopped her in her tracks. She scanned her memory, but came up with nothing. The close was quiet, dark, innocent, the safest dullest place in the world—until Margaret started shrieking.

  If she had run out sooner? Shouting the odds at some bloke in his car. Old Margaret shuffling out in her slippers with her husband cowering behind her in the doorway. Or was it none of their business, heads down and turn up the sound on the telly?

  It had taken her to get within a hundred yards of the cottage, before Nat had slowed, those red taillights in her head, the sound of those footsteps in her ears, and as the adrenaline ebbed she felt the other thing return. Fear. Shit, shit, shit. She looked up, and there was a pickup parked outside her cottage, and a man standing beside it.

  It was Jonathan Dowd, Beth’s ex, and he stared. Coming close to him, she was aware of her own breathing, sweat down her back in the heat. “Are you all right?” he said, taking a step toward her, concerned. He put out a hand, touching her on the arm. Then he stepped back abruptly, awkwardly respectful. “Something’s happened,” he said. “You’ve found something. It’s her, isn’t it? Something’s happened to her.” Breathless.