7
DOROTHY
Dorothy loved Middle Meadow Walk, the stream of students coming and going, cyclists passing in a blur, even the weird buskers. A guy up the road was playing a funky shuffle on a beaten-up old drum kit, and she smiled as she pictured her own kit gleaming in the second-floor studio back at the house. The festival was over and she was relieved when the city stopped being an assault course of kids trying to push flyers into your hand, but she missed that energy too. It was quickly replaced by students excited about a new adventure in the big city. The Walk was a long, wide boulevard stretching from Marchmont to the heart of the Old Town. Students lived in the former and studied in the latter, so it felt like an artery, and Dorothy imagined she was a blood cell, heading to another part of Edinburgh’s body, transporting her nutrients to where they were needed.
As she reached Söderberg she saw Thomas sitting outside. He wore a dark-green jacket, white T-shirt, jeans, black-rimmed glasses. The day was bright and clear, a slight edge in the air, the whisper of winter coming. He was reading a book, and as she reached him she saw it was by a Japanese woman.
She touched his shoulder. ‘Any good?’
He turned and removed his glasses, smiled and closed the book. ‘Very.’ He stood up and embraced her. ‘It’s good to see you.’
‘You too.’
‘How are you?’ The question was loaded.
She considered it instead of just saying she was fine. ‘I’ll be OK, I think.’
‘I’m sure you will,’ Thomas said, pulling out a chair for her.
They were at a small table outside the café. The building was large and glass-fronted, part of the modern Quartermile development nestled amongst the spires of the old hospital and university buildings. There was an open-plan Swedish bakery through the back, one of the reasons Dorothy liked it. Light, classy Nordic furniture everywhere made her long for a place of clean lines and minimalism she’d never been to.
They ordered pastries and coffee, Thomas swapping a few Swedish words with the student waiter who took their order.
‘He’s studying philosophy,’ Thomas said when the waiter was gone.
‘Good luck to him.’
Dorothy enjoyed the way their voices told a story. Her faint traces of California, his edge of Scandinavia, the two of them in middle and old age, sitting in the weak Scottish sunlight, both immigrants because of love, now alone. When you live somewhere else for a long time you don’t really have a home anymore. She loved Edinburgh, loved the Scottish self-deprecating humour, but her heart yearned for the honesty and ambition of the Pacific Coast. She wondered what Thomas missed of Gothenburg.
‘So,’ Thomas said, reaching into his jacket pocket. ‘Your mysterious bank payments.’
No nonsense, something else Thomas had in common with Jim. But she had to stop thinking like that. He unfolded a piece of paper and flattened it on the table. He put on his reading glasses and blinked.
‘They go back around ten years,’ he said.
‘Always the same amount?’
Thomas nodded.
Jesus, that was over fifty grand.
Thomas shifted his weight. ‘Does the name Rebecca Lawrence mean anything to you?’
Dorothy thought for a moment. So many people had passed through her life, so many names. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘She’s forty-five years old, lives in Craigentinny with her ten-year-old daughter Natasha.’
The same age as Jenny, that made Dorothy think. And with a daughter. ‘No, it doesn’t mean anything.’
Thomas ran a finger down the page as the waiter brought their order. He waited until the kid walked away.
‘She works as a receptionist at a doctor’s surgery. Has done for years.’
Dorothy shook her head.
‘One interesting fact,’ Thomas said, looking up. ‘She’s a widow. Kind of.’
The smell of their coffee and the sugar from the pastries made Dorothy feel momentarily dizzy. Three young women walked past talking loudly about their night out, laughing, touching each other with ease and confidence.
‘What do you mean, kind of?’ Dorothy said.
‘Her husband went missing,’ Thomas said. ‘Ten years ago. She filed an official missing-person report.’
‘And?’
Thomas shrugged and took a sip of espresso. ‘He never showed up. Three years ago she applied to the courts to get a declarator of death. That means he’s legally dead. You can do it once someone has been missing for seven years. It means she got a death certificate, would be entitled to his state pension and so on.’
Something niggled in the back of Dorothy’s mind. A middle-aged couple in tweed meandered past their table, overtaken by a scrum of teenage boys in sportswear.
‘So he went missing around the time these payments started?’ Dorothy said.
‘A couple of months before.’
‘That’s a coincidence.’
‘It is.’
Dorothy touched her temple.
Thomas sighed and splayed his hands. ‘I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for this.’
‘That’s not the police officer talking. This stinks and you know it.’
‘Jim would never…’ He had the decency not to finish the sentence.
‘What’s the missing husband’s name?’
Thomas looked at Dorothy. ‘Simon Lawrence.’
Oh shit, she knew him.
8
HANNAH
At first she thought no one was on reception, but then her mum raised her head above the front edge of the desk as if she’d been sleeping there. Jenny blinked heavily. A strand of her red hair had come away from the loose pony at the back and was stuck to her lip. She pulled at it and coughed.
‘Hey,’ she said.
Hannah had only spent a few minutes on the phone to the police last night, it was a non-starter. She thought maybe they wouldn’t do anything because it hadn’t been twenty-four hours or whatever it was supposed to be. But the jaded cop with wheezy breath told her down the line that was just a television cliché. The truth was there was no time limit on missing persons, and the police didn’t investigate unless the person was vulnerable, like an old lady with dementia wandering off, or a schoolchild. There was no law against responsible adults going missing, apparently. Hannah checked after the conversation, and annoyingly the police officer was right. He’d almost laughed when Hannah voiced her concerns, especially when he heard Melanie was a student. A twenty-year-old student hadn’t come home yet, call out the search parties. Hannah insisted on getting the cop’s name and a reference number for the call, but it was just bluster.
Then at seven this morning Yu Cheng phoned just as Hannah was about to call her. Real worry in Yu’s voice when Hannah told her she hadn’t heard from Mel. Hannah had been keeping a lid on it until then but after speaking to Mel’s mum she felt a tightness in her stomach. Checked social media again, texted a bunch of people in Mel’s phone, nothing.
It was staring her in the face when Indy said it. Mel was a missing person and this was a case. If the police won’t investigate, someone else has to, so here she was. Only trouble was, Grandpa was dead.
Jenny righted herself.
‘I need a private investigator,’ Hannah said.
Jenny came from behind the desk. ‘What’s up?’
‘Mel’s missing.’
Hannah saw lines around her mum’s eyes that she hadn’t noticed before. She also had a red mark on her forehead and looked exhausted. Jim’s death had hit them all, but Hannah sometimes forgot he was Jenny’s dad. She pictured her own dad on a funeral pyre, how she would feel about that.
‘She’s probably just at her boyfriend’s,’ Jenny said.
Hannah shook her head. She was already tired of going over the details, but she would have to again and again if she was going to do something about it.
‘Xander hasn’t seen her, no one has.’
‘Family?’
‘Yu is wor
ried sick.’
‘So contact the police.’
‘They’re not interested.’
‘What?’
‘They don’t know her. This isn’t like her at all.’ She felt something rising in her chest, breathed to keep it down. ‘I need help, Mum. I need to find her because no one else will.’
Jenny studied her.
‘OK,’ she said eventually.
Schrödinger purred as Hannah stroked him from neck to tail. He moved away to find sunshine by the window.
They were back at the kitchen table. Hannah rubbed at a sticky whisky ring on the wood. It was a beautiful day outside, light flooding in. She looked at dust drifting in the light and thought about subatomic particles, even though she knew particles weren’t really particles at all, they were waves or fields or forces, any number of different metaphors that didn’t quite fit the numbers and equations we throw at the universe.
‘I’m not a private investigator,’ Jenny said, sipping coffee. Her mug had an Indian depiction of Buddha on it. The coffee smelt strong.
‘Neither am I.’
‘So we can’t do this.’
Hannah raised her eyebrows. ‘You always used to tell me I could do anything if I put my mind to it.’
Jenny rolled her eyes. ‘Come on, that’s what parents tell kids so they don’t end up as junkie pole dancers.’
Hannah drank her green tea. ‘Thanks.’
Jenny waved a hand at the PI whiteboard on the far wall. ‘Your gran will know better, she watched Dad do it for years.’
Hannah leaned forwards. ‘You’re my mum, I’m asking you for help.’
Jenny shook her head.
Hannah felt her anger rising. Her mum was such a shrugger, what was it Gen X called themselves, ‘slackers’? Just an excuse not to engage with the world, not to expose yourself to real feelings.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she said. ‘I’m asking you to help me.’
Jenny sat up. ‘My dad just died, or did you forget?’
Hannah stared wide-eyed. She wanted to apologise but she also wanted to shake some sense into her mum.
Eventually Jenny spoke. ‘Anyway, I have no clue where to start.’
That was acquiescence of a kind. Enough for now.
‘How hard can it be? We just investigate,’ Hannah said. ‘We talk to people, trace Mel’s movements, look into things.’
‘She’s probably already safe and sound back at your place.’
‘Indy would’ve called.’
‘I just don’t think it’s a big deal.’
Hannah pulled out Mel’s phone, clunked it on the table. ‘She would never go anywhere without this. And it’s over twenty-four hours since anyone saw her.’
‘You’re acting like people aren’t allowed to do their own thing,’ Jenny said. ‘Not everyone has to be contactable every minute of the day.’
‘Please spare me the rant about the old days, four television channels, no remote controls, no Internet. You made your own fun with a hoop and a stick.’
‘Maybe she went away for some peace, to study, or take drugs, or have glorious sex with unsuitable men.’
‘She didn’t take any clothes or her phone or a toothbrush. If she was having mad sex with a biker gang she would want clean teeth.’
‘She’ll turn up.’
Hannah pushed her chair back. ‘I hope so, but in the meantime let’s look for her.’
Jenny held her hands out, ceding the floor. ‘How do we do that?’
Hannah strode to the whiteboard and stared at the names there. She took the lid off a marker pen, the smell reminding her of tutorials. She wrote ‘Melanie Cheng’ on a blank area of board then drew lines from Mel’s name and added: ‘Boyfriend Xander’, ‘Family’, ‘Classmates’, ‘Uni Staff’.
‘What would a detective do?’ she said, looking at Jenny.
Her mum shrugged.
Hannah tapped the pen against her hand. ‘Start with the boyfriend.’
‘What about the other categories?’ Jenny said.
Hannah looked at the board and shook her head. ‘I can’t think of anything.’
‘Family stuff? Cultural problems for a young, independent Chinese-Scottish woman?’
Hannah pressed her lips together. ‘That’s racist. Yu and Bolan are liberal academics, very open-minded.’
‘She has a brother, right?’
‘He’s cool.’
‘You sure?’
Hannah couldn’t imagine Vic doing anything to harm Mel.
‘What about extra-curricular stuff?’ Jenny said. ‘Societies, weird kinks?’
Hannah drew another line from Mel’s name and wrote ‘Quantum Club’.
‘Is that a Dungeons and Dragons thing?’ Jenny said.
Hannah gave her mum a look. ‘It’s a debating club, kind of philosophy. We both go.’
‘I never heard you mention it.’
‘You never asked.’
‘What do you talk about?’
‘Anything, really. The implications of modern physics on life, the universe and everything.’ Hannah knew her mum wouldn’t get the Hitchhiker’s Guide reference. ‘It’s run by one of the post-grad tutors, Bradley Barker.’
Hannah added his name to the board. She could see the shadow of previous scribbles by Grandpa underneath what she’d written, and thought about the molecules of whiteboard and marker ink intermingling, blending this case with every older one, both solved and unsolved.
‘OK,’ Jenny said. ‘So one of us should speak to Xander and the other talks to this Bradley.’
‘There’s no one downstairs,’ Dorothy said, making Hannah turn. Her gran was in the doorway holding a folded piece of paper in her fist. She looked at the whiteboard then at Hannah and Jenny. ‘What are you up to?’
Hannah looked at Jenny then back at her gran.
‘We’re on a case,’ she said.
9
DOROTHY
Archie tapped the carotid artery like a nurse and Dorothy watched as the pump did its work, pushing embalming solution into the woman’s body, which forced out the blood. The buzz of the pump and the chemical smell reminded her of Jim. But everything reminded her of Jim, maybe she should sell up and move back to Pismo Beach after fifty years, never be haunted again.
‘Hi, Archie,’ she said from the doorway.
He looked up. ‘Hello.’
She approached the body, pale and rubbery. Not like bodies on television dramas, that was something forensic shows got wrong. They were obviously actors lying there still breathing, blood oxygenating in their veins, hopes and disappointments still messing with their minds. The woman in front of her had no more disappointments, no more hope.
‘Gina O’Donnell,’ Archie said.
Dorothy reached out and her fingers hovered over the abrasive marks on Gina’s neck. Suicide at thirty-nine, hanged herself from the light fitting in her bedroom with a belt. Dorothy could see the buckle indentation still on her skin.
Archie followed her gaze. ‘Should be easy enough to cover up.’
Dorothy nodded. Archie wasn’t as skilled as Jim with the bodies, but he was good enough and he was conscientious. ‘It’s the sister organising, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Has she brought in clothes yet?’
Archie checked the pump, the peach-coloured liquid disappearing. ‘Yesterday. After…’
He meant after they burnt Jim.
Dorothy watched as he checked the needle in the artery, the tube running to the pump. Someone else might have let him go when they discovered the nature of his illness, but Dorothy supported him and it had paid off. After his mother’s death he’d developed Cotard’s Syndrome, a psychological condition where the patient has periods believing they’re actually dead. It can occur with post-traumatic stress and Archie’s bereavement was clearly a trigger. He began hanging around cemeteries and crematoriums, attending the funerals of strangers, because he felt he was amongst his own. One of the weird things about i
t is that sufferers don’t contemplate suicide, because they believe they’re already dead. In severe cases people starve themselves to death.
Archie’s was never that serious but he suffered in silence for the first year he worked here. Dorothy noticed his increasing listlessness and subtly enquired. He was still doing his tasks but only the bare minimum, never otherwise interacting. Dorothy persuaded him to seek medical help, and after months round the houses, a switched-on psychiatrist came up with the diagnosis. There were a couple of years of trying out different anti-psychotics and mood suppressants, trial and error, until they found a balance that levelled him out. But it was always there in the background, the idea of his own death never fully left his mind.
Dorothy tried to imagine it, believing your soul had left your body and you were a walking corpse. Worse than real death, trapped in a decaying body, stuck between this world and the next.
‘I want to ask you something,’ she said.
‘Of course.’
She looked at Gina on the table, those marks on the neck.
‘What do you remember about Simon Lawrence?’
Archie stopped adjusting chemicals on the tray. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘He came to mind recently, that’s all.’
Now Archie looked up. ‘Not much. He was here for the first few months after I started. Driving mostly, some carpentry.’
‘What was he like?’
‘I never really knew him, to be honest. What’s this about?’
Dorothy suddenly felt the room was too bright, the lights overhead like interrogation lamps. She felt warm despite the cool temperature.
‘Do you remember why he left?’
Archie shook his head. ‘I think Jim said he got another job somewhere in an office. I’m not sure how much he liked this work. It’s not for everyone.’
Dorothy glanced at the pump, half full of embalming fluid, gently rippling like a slushie machine. She placed the tip of her finger on Gina’s hand, cold like rubber, not human at all.
A Dark Matter Page 4