by Natasha Bell
First we went through the most obviously safe. Patrick had been his brother Rob’s best man a couple of years ago and we’d been invited to the hour-long ceremony in the Minster, where both Patrick and Rob had once been cherubic choirboys. Just because we didn’t have God on our side didn’t make our vows less meaningful, we agreed, but there was something rather grave about remembering Rob holding out the ring with an organ playing behind him and tears running down his cheeks. The world would end before he and his wife broke their vows.
Fran and Ollie were a maybe, though neither of us could imagine a scenario that could tip Fran into enough of an emotional state to prompt a breakup. “What do you think she’s like in bed?” I said, making Marc snigger. Patrick’s words of warning when he introduced us all had been spot on: “Fran’s a bit doctory but worth the effort.”
There was my school friend, Philippa, of course. She’d married a month before us. Her husband, Charles, was a lawyer like her and seemed nice but a little dull. We’d decided that night that, if it saved our other friends, it was probably okay to write Philippa and Charles off in the name of statistics.
Marc came up behind me and placed his hand on my hip. “I think we’re almost done packing,” he said. “Rob and I are going to start loading up the van.”
I nodded and leant to kiss his cheek, smelled the aftershave I’d bought him.
Patrick and Rebecca hadn’t even come up in that conversation. They’d been together so long they were practically the same person. When I’d first met them, Rebecca had wrapped a long arm around my shoulder and insisted we sit together, leaving the boys to wonder what we were whispering about. She and Patrick had grown up three streets away from each other and dated since they were fifteen. Marc told me they’d broken up at the beginning of their second year at uni, but only for a month. Patrick had been inconsolable during that month, moping in his room and resisting all of Marc’s efforts to drag him out to chat up tipsy freshers. I’d never once seen them argue or even snip at each other over some petty thing. Rebecca’s phone rang constantly and she was always racing between classes, laughing about a child vomiting in the middle of rehearsal or having to wash nosebleeds out of leotards, but she was also the kind of person who made you feel like she had all the time in the world for you. I missed her. I’d wanted to call her, but it felt disloyal to Patrick, to Marc. I wondered when I’d next see her, what it would be like when I did. Until two weeks ago, when Patrick had turned up on our doorstep with snot on his cheek and told us Rebecca had met someone else, I’d thought them the perfect couple.
April
Six Weeks Gone
Marc agreed to return to work after Easter. He felt guilty about it, but it was a relief to start planning something familiar. Nicola was keeping him updated on the case, but there had been no new leads—or none they were willing to share with him—and my face had slipped almost completely from the pages of the newspapers. DI Jones had asked about my passport again, saying they’d run a second exit check, but it still hadn’t been used at any borders. Marc had told him honestly that it hadn’t turned up yet, finding reasons to justify omitting the fact that his and the girls’ had. He’d placed them in their correct home in the filing cabinet and run through endless scenarios, of greater and lesser likelihood, of why mine would have ended up elsewhere.
DI Jones had also asked him to make a comprehensive list of all the friends and acquaintances I might have had contact with in the twelve months leading up to my disappearance. Marc had struggled and complained to Patrick that the task was near impossible. “Could you tell me everyone Susan’s spoken to in the past year?” he asked him. Patrick shook his head. “It’s absurd. What a waste of time.” But eventually he’d emailed over a list. A couple of days later DI Jones rang to clarify some of the names. A week after that he called again to ask about one in particular.
“We’ve spoken to most of the people we’re interested in,” he said. “But we’re struggling to locate Amelia Heldt.”
“Okay,” Marc said, leaning back in his office chair. He knew he should feel grateful for their thoroughness, but he didn’t understand the point of this line of inquiry and he didn’t feel like talking to DI Jones right now.
“Is there anything you can suggest?” DI Jones said. “Anything you know about her that might help?”
“Not really. She’s Alex’s friend, not mine.”
“You said Alex wrote to her, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Marc said, scrolling through the day’s headlines on the screen in front of him.
“Which makes it quite strange there was no address in the address book, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose.”
“We’ve checked both her university and private email accounts, and there’s nothing from Amelia Heldt there.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Marc said. “They went to art school together.”
“It would really help if you could think of a way we might contact her. Even online, Ms. Heldt seems to guard her privacy.”
“I’m sorry,” Marc said, opening a new window and typing “contact Amelia Heldt” into a search engine.
“You say Alex visited her just twice?”
“Yes.” The first thing that came up was a Washington Post article titled “The Cult of Anonymity.”
“Definitely no more?” DI Jones said.
“Why are you asking this again?” Marc said, clicking on the article.
“Is there anyone else Alex is still in contact with in America?”
Amelia’s name was mentioned in the first paragraph alongside Banksy, Elena Ferrante, Daft Punk and Sia as artists choosing obscurity over the perks of celebrity. “No,” Marc said.
“Not that you know of?” DI Jones prompted.
“Not that I know of,” Marc repeated, peevish now. The reporter seemed to be praising these figures for leading the way for those sick of the narcissism of the art and entertainment industries. Rebelling against Warhol’s claim that everyone wants their fifteen minutes, he read, they’re carving out a new, more sincere and ultimately more admirable kind of fame: one that refuses fame itself.
“And you feel like you would know,” DI Jones said, “if your wife had stayed in contact with or perhaps even visited anyone else?”
“Of course.” For some, the article continued, this is too difficult a concept to understand. The large sums being offered to journalists able to “out” these artists raise questions about whether the public has a right to know whose work they are consuming.
“Even an old boyfriend,” DI Jones said. “Someone she was perhaps worried you might be jealous of?”
Marc stopped reading. “This is ridiculous.”
DI Jones was silent on the other end of the line.
“We have no secrets,” Marc said. “I’ve no reason to be jealous.”
“Okay, Dr. Southwood. Well, please let us know if you think of a way we might contact Ms. Heldt.”
Marc hung up, feeling annoyed. He read absently through the rest of the article, unconvinced. He was no fan of seeing our girls gush and gossip about pop and reality stars, but neither could he see any great social virtue in choosing to hide behind a mask or a pseudonym. Still, if Amelia’s anonymity was causing DI Jones a headache, then he was pleased. What was the point in tracking down my old friends? Why wasn’t he out there looking for me?
* * *
My husband clung to his conviction that I was alive like a child with a security blanket. As the days and weeks passed, though, often the only way to maintain hope was by not looking directly at it. He dropped the girls off in the car one morning, then drove through the drizzle to the retail park. There was a loose washer on the upstairs sink and Charlotte had spilt blackcurrant juice on her bedroom carpet, which now wouldn’t come out. Our friends had been checking in and dropping off food and supplies, but he felt he was using up their go
odwill. They were running dangerously low on essential items and he’d finally come to the realization that he needed to offer the girls more variety than pasta, takeaway or chicken nuggets for dinner.
He parked outside Sainsbury’s, placed his pound in the slot and wheeled a trolley through the sliding doors. He filled the end of the cart with fruit and veg, planning healthy meals for the girls and trying to think up non-junk-food snacks to offer them. Perhaps he’d get popcorn, though, and they could have a film night. He turned into the wine aisle, thinking maybe he should have a few bottles in the house to offer their friends’ parents should they stop by after a playdate. As he did, he saw me.
I had my back to him, studying the label on a bottle of Zinfandel. A black hat covered most of my head, but he could see a few stray curls tickling the back of my neck. I wore a thick cardigan wrapped around my body in place of a coat. He recognized my stance, weight slightly to the right, left knee bent. My arms moved with familiar fluidity as I replaced the bottle and reached for another from a higher shelf. He caught a glimpse of my cheekbone, pale and freckled. He imagined my lashes brushing against skin as my blue eyes scanned the label.
He stopped at the end of the aisle. People wove their trolleys around him, impatient to finish their shopping and get on with their days. I seemed in no hurry. I placed the bottle in my basket and moved down a few shelves to inspect the reds.
It didn’t strike him as particularly odd that he might run into me here. Perhaps it made sense that I’d come back to him as his spirits began to lift a little, just as he’d stopped moping. I wouldn’t want him sobbing on the sofa and poring pathetically over old photographs, would I? A man in mourning is hardly a catch, and every child knows you only get what you want when you stop nagging your parents for it. His heart hammered. He inhaled for the first time since seeing me and wheeled his trolley slowly forward, never taking his eyes off my back.
“Watch out,” someone growled as he forced them out of his path. Was that a Rioja I was fingering?
Behind me now, he could smell my perfume, unfamiliar but pleasing. He reached out his hand, placed it lightly on my shoulder. “Al?”
The woman jumped. Her shoulder shuddered beneath his touch and a gasp escaped her lips as she simultaneously turned to face him and let go of the bottle. He withdrew his arm as if her cardigan was aflame. The wine smashed on the floor. The woman with my hair but another person’s mouth and eyes glared at him.
“What on earth?” she said, looking down at her sodden shoes and back up to Marc’s disappointed face.
A heady aroma filled his nostrils as he slipped from his trance. For a moment he saw himself as if from above. What had he been thinking? Why would his teetotal wife be buying wine? Why would she be shopping in a supermarket after not coming home for six weeks?
“I’m terribly sorry,” he muttered pathetically. “I thought you were someone else.”
“SPILLAGE IN AISLE FOURTEEN,” the PA system echoed. Other shoppers stared.
“You’re…” the woman began, then stopped herself.
Marc nodded. “I really am sorry.” He stumbled backward, needing to create distance between him and this woman who was not me but with whom he’d shared the most intimate moment he’d had since I disappeared.
“It’s okay,” the woman said. “No harm done.”
An employee paced around the corner of the aisle with a mop and bucket and ushered them out of the way. Marc offered to pay for the bottle, but after looking him up and down and glancing at the woman for a moment, the employee said that wouldn’t be necessary, they could put it through as accidental.
“Thanks,” he mumbled and steered his trolley toward the checkouts. He felt the woman watching as he walked away and was relieved to spot a free checkout at the other end of the shop. He bagged his purchases and wheeled them to the trunk, slammed the door and sped from the car park.
* * *
A second, smaller appeal aired on Crimewatch that evening. Nicola had discussed the need to keep me in the news, how the papers tended to get bored with a missing-person story as soon as the new revelations dried up. Marc watched. My case seemed unsensational, bookended between an international manhunt for a guy who killed two women and the search for a rapist who attacked a young girl as she left school.
Nicola hadn’t been too hopeful that the new appeal would result in people coming forward with witness reports, but she rang minutes after the broadcast. There had already been an extraordinarily large response in terms of donations. Someone had just made a £50,000 payment via the link on the website. Anonymously, Nicola said. A PayPal account registered in North America. Usually, she explained, those offering large donations wanted the publicity too. “This is highly unusual in my experience,” she said.
“But good?” Marc said. As crass as it felt, money had begun to worry him. The milk bottles and flyers all had a price and running a household on one salary when we’d been used to two wasn’t easy. The university had frozen my income and informed him they couldn’t make a survivor benefits pay-out without a body. All of our accounts were confused too. Marc had had to cut off the phone line and get it reconnected because they wouldn’t let him transfer it into his name without my permission. The woman on the end of the phone had been sympathetic, even as he growled at her incompetence, but she’d explained they had no procedures in place to deal with missing people. The home insurance was the same. Marc had tried to cancel and renew the policy in his name, but the guy said, “Sorry, we need Mrs. Southwood to write to us to confirm.”
“Are you fucking stupid?” he’d said. “How can she write to you if she’s not fucking here?” The bloke on the phone had said he didn’t have to tolerate that kind of language and hung up.
The donation wouldn’t solve everything, but at least it could take the pressure off; at least it meant they had a steady fund to keep paying for posters and adverts, to keep me in people’s minds.
“The money is useful,” Nicola said carefully. “But the circumstances are strange. DI Jones wants to investigate, see if we can trace the source.”
“You think it’s a lead?” said Marc, suddenly alert. He stood up to close the living room door in case the girls walked by. “That the person who took—”
Nicola cut him off. “We don’t know if it’s anything yet, but we’re treating it as suspicious.”
Marc stared at the muted television, trying to balance the surge of adrenaline that something was finally happening with Nicola’s obvious warning that he not get his hopes up.
“While I’ve got you,” she said before they hung up, “there’s something else. Have you tried to get in touch with your mother-in-law recently?”
“No,” Marc said. Should he have done? Was it crass and uncaring of him to forget about the woman? No, he thought, she didn’t deserve his care. She didn’t deserve me as a daughter. Marc’s face was always so horrified when I talked about her drinking, about the things she’d screamed at me, about the men she’d entertained while I was playing upstairs, about discovering she’d snapped the heads off all of my dolls and my desperate attempts to hide the truth from my dad. The woman had ruined my childhood; Marc owed her nothing.
“Then I’m sorry,” Nicola said. “But I have some bad news. We telephoned earlier this week to arrange a time to conduct an interview with her and I’m afraid her carer, Miss Morse, answered and said Mrs. Carlisle passed away.”
Marc stared at the bright, flickering images on the TV. What was he supposed to feel?
“I’m so sorry, Marc.”
“It’s—it’s okay,” he finally managed. “I barely knew her. It’s just…a shock, I suppose.”
“Of course,” Nicola said. “Was Alex close to her mother?”
Marc closed his eyes and pinched the top of his nose. “Not really. They were estranged for a long time, and then with the illness…” He trailed off.
>
“But she visited frequently?” Nicola said.
Marc opened his eyes, stared at the rug we’d picked out from that little shop in Harrogate. He wondered if this was an official question or the polite small talk it sounded like. “As I’ve said, she took the train down a few times a year. The trips were stressful, not some happy family reunion. Al would be in a daze for a day or two after returning.”
“It must be unsettling not to be recognized by one’s own parent,” Nicola said, sounding genuinely sympathetic. Marc felt a stab of guilt for questioning her motives.
He remained quiet for a moment, unsure how to move the conversation along. He tried to remember which street the shop in Harrogate had been on, wondered if it’d still be there. We’d had cake in Betty’s afterward, Lizzie smearing hers over the table and Charlotte crying so hard I’d had to wheel her pram outside while Marc hunted down our waitress to settle the bill.
He realized Nicola was speaking. “Without being able to question Mrs. Carlisle, we’re going to need to go over a few more things with you, Marc. DI Jones is curious about how frequently Alex visited her mother and whether you know of any times she might have traveled elsewhere alone.”
“What do you mean?” Marc said.
“Any holidays or trips, any time she stayed overnight or left the country.”
“We’ve been over this. We do things as a family.”
“If you could just have a think, Marc, and compile a list of dates over the past few years, that would really help us cross-reference.”
“Cross-reference what?”
Nicola didn’t answer.
“What is this about?” Marc growled into the receiver.