“Charlotte was born in America. She has family there. We saw Laura couldn’t stay in England and have any sort of life. After she recovered—physically, anyway—Laura emigrated. We arranged it very carefully.”
“But we see now that we didn’t protect her. We only made her more vulnerable.” Mrs. Betterton’s voice came from low in her belly, a throb of pain shaking it. “We were so careful about how and when we contacted her. We were so cautious about what we kept in the house. One year after she moved—she was in California, living under my family name—she disappeared.”
Clarissa recalled his UCLA sweatshirt and her powerful instinct when she saw it that it meant something to him, that it was some kind of trophy.
“All contact stopped that summer,” Mrs. Betterton said. “None of her neighbors knew her or noticed her sudden absence, she’d kept such a low profile. They hardly blinked an eye at work, either—it was all clerical temping, so they were used to people not turning up.”
She felt how unbearably lonely Laura must have been, living like that, and how much she must have missed her parents. She knew that she herself could never be that brave.
“She was just one of the countless missing,” Mr. Betterton said. “The police there couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing, in the land of the milk-carton children. They ought to put adults on those cartons, too. The British police wouldn’t get involved. We’ve sent private detectives. We’ve tried everything.”
It was the way they said “we.” Again and again it was “we.” And their way of so smoothly passing the baton of their terrible story back and forth, despite the very different impulses Clarissa’s appearance had initially produced in them. That was what made her see how very in sync the Bettertons were, regardless of what they had suffered, what they were continuing to suffer. It could have torn them apart, but by some miracle, she thought, it had done the opposite.
“We hope, always we hope, that she did it to free herself,” Mrs. Betterton said. “Maybe she’s safe and happy somewhere. Maybe the phone will ring one day and there will be her voice. Maybe it isn’t as we fear and it wasn’t him.”
“But we know it was,” Mr. Betterton said. “Even though we tell ourselves that as long as there’s no body, there’s hope. We’ve let ourselves pray that she’s got some kind of amnesia but that she’s otherwise all right and she’ll remember who she is someday and get in touch.”
Mrs. Betterton nodded. “But we know Laura. She’d never put us through this. She’d always get through to us if she could.”
Now Clarissa understood why her phone calls and sudden arrival had filled them with such a strange mixture of hostility and suspicion and hope: worrying that she was somehow approaching them at his behest, yet desperate not to cut off someone who might have news, however unlikely the odds of that were.
“You need to get proper help, Clarissa,” Mr. Betterton said.
Mrs. Betterton put her hand on top of Clarissa’s. “You need evidence, better evidence than we had, ironclad evidence and lots of it, and you need to fight hard. If you don’t want to vanish out of your life, you’re going to need to get the police involved. You can give them our name and number if you’d like. They didn’t listen to us then, but maybe they will now. You’re going to need to do a better job at getting them to help you than Laura managed. He’ll never stop.”
By the time Mrs. Betterton finished speaking, Clarissa’s hand was red and aching, marked by the pressure of her wedding ring, but Clarissa hadn’t wanted to pull away.
WEEK FIVE
The Guardians
Monday
SHE’D DRAGGED HENRY to too many films about serial killers, and they were all coming back to her. She was filled with horrifying—and, she hoped, preposterous—ideas about what might have happened to Laura. Was she buried in a shallow grave on the edges of some farm in California? Undiscovered beneath leaves in woodland? Dumped in a culvert somewhere, or a disused quarry, unnoticed? On the ledge of a mountain, far off any footpath? Stored in a freezer in some derelict building? Crammed into a coffin with a stranger’s corpse and buried or cremated so she would never be traced? Was it luck or cunning or both that had kept her hidden?
As terrible and vivid as her thoughts were, Clarissa could not bear to picture what might have happened to Laura during her last hours or days. Envisaging her dead body was nowhere near as dreadful as imagining what might have been done to her while she was still conscious and aware. She could picture Laura’s face: all of those photographs of her at different ages, overlaid. And her parents in their never-ending fear and grief. Laura was so real to her now.
She had investigated statistics about the missing. It happened more often than people realized. Hundreds of thousands of people were missing in Britain. The numbers would be even more frightening in America.
She tried to shake away her sensational conjurings and concentrate on what Annie was saying.
“You look like crap” was what Annie was saying.
They were walking up the stairs to Court 12. “Thank you,” she said sweetly. “You don’t.”
“Seriously. Eat, woman. And sleep. And get out more. You’re so white you look like the undead. You won’t be able to keep up that pretty vampire look for much longer.”
Clarissa glanced down at herself. Annie was right. Her arms were like bleached sticks beneath the filmy fabric she’d used to make the sleeves of her top. More and more, she was depriving herself of weak winter sun. It was probably just as well that her mother hadn’t seen her for a while. She’d know just from looking that something was wrong.
“My, my, you’re chatty today,” Clarissa said.
“Hair’s still bright,” Annie conceded as they lined up in the annex. “Bottle?”
“No, Annie!” Clarissa said truthfully.
Annie touched the clasp of enameled flowers Clarissa had used to pull it back. “Nice,” she said, as if by way of apology.
A MINUTE LATER they sat down in the jury box. The witness was an expert in facial mapping. Exactly the sort of person who could determine if it was Laura on the magazine cover.
As the woman droned on without inflection, Annie sighed dramatically and squeezed her eyes shut and tipped her head back in agony. As ever, Clarissa was amazed that only she heard Annie, that none of the barristers ever turned, and none of the other jurors. She sometimes wondered if she only made up Annie’s responses. Annie was like her own secret voice. Her head was pounding; Annie’s must be, too.
At last, Mr. Morden asked, “What was your final conclusion?”
There is the most powerful level of support available for the contention that the woman on the magazine cover and Laura Betterton are one and the same person, Clarissa imagined the facial-mapping woman saying.
“There is a moderate level of support for the contention that the suspect in the CCTV images and Mr. Godfrey are one and the same person,” the facial-mapping woman actually said.
Monday, March 2, 12:40 p.m.
Bearing in mind Annie’s horror of my pallor, I take a walk during lunch in icy air. The sun is lemon yellow but low in the cloudless blue sky.
More and more I am exploiting the fact that you aren’t the only one capable of tracking other people. I don’t want a repeat of what happened in the mini market. I know from the university timetable that you’re giving a lecture. Henry once told me you bitterly resent teaching and think it’s beneath you, dragging you away from your paradigm-breaking research.
On my way back I cross the street. At first I don’t notice you in the crowds milling about on the green in front of the cathedral. But despite the timetable, there you are. I nearly trip over my own feet as you approach and then begin to walk beside me.
“You need some new stockings, Clarissa,” you say.
What fantastic social skills you have, I think. Only you could start a conversation with that sentence as your opening gambit, I think.
But this attempt to make myself feel brave through unvoiced sarcasm is
a pitiful failure. My heart is thumping more than ever as I aim myself back to court and pretend not to know you. I am searching for Robert, grateful each time I scan that he doesn’t materialize.
Fine pale-brown hairs sprout from your knuckles. I imagine your hands circling Laura’s throat, circling my own. I swallow hard. My neck hurts, remembering your fingers around it in the park three weeks earlier. I think I am choking and struggle to swallow again, though I know the sensation can’t be physical; I know that it can only be in my head now.
“I like you in stockings,” you say. “But you know that.”
I keep walking. I won’t let what I’ve learned of you make me less effective and more terrified. It must do the reverse. The Bettertons drummed this into me.
Just before I turn the corner you speak again. “I need to take some new photographs, Clarissa. It’s going to be a private sitting.” And you walk straight on, leaving me to turn left by myself.
But there will be no private sitting; your saying those words will not make it happen. However much you think you know about me, you have no idea about the new friends I made on Saturday. You’re not the only one who can uncover secrets. I am learning yours, too.
ROBERT WAS PACING angrily back and forth in the jurors’ waiting area, his phone to his ear.
A few minutes later, she stood at the back of the line with him, waiting for the usher to come and count them and return them to Court 12. Robert took his phone out, double-checked he’d turned it off, glowered a bit more as he shoved it back into his pocket. He was in his usual stance, feet apart and firmly planted, but not relaxed.
“Something wrong?” she asked. It was obviously a stupid question.
He tried to smile, but it evaporated as if it had been pressed onto water. “Some kids, probably. Poured paint remover over the car last night. Slashed the front tires.”
She sat down quickly, practically falling onto the upholstered bench that was running behind the line of jurors.
“You’re pale.” His hand floated to her forehead, then pulled away as he realized he’d touched her in front of the others. “You’re clammy.”
“I’m fine, really. I just felt like sitting.”
“You don’t look fine. You haven’t looked well all day.”
“It’s just— It’s horrible. So mean.” She looked over at the jury officer’s desk, where the usher was still talking.
“It’s fixable. Just inconvenient. I was angry. I don’t stay angry.”
“I’m sorry, though.”
“Not your fault.”
But there was no doubting that it was.
Monday, March 2, 6:15 p.m.
As soon as I step onto the path and trigger the outside light, I see it. You’ve propped it against the door. This envelope is fatter than the last one. I am numb and cold and dead. I tiptoe up the stairs as quietly as I can, not wanting to turn on the tap of Miss Norton’s kind concern.
You’ve wrapped them in a single sheet of white paper. I’m actually thankful. They are not what I fear. You didn’t take these in my bedroom. They’re all from last week, a batch for each day, carefully ordered.
Standing with Robert on the bridge, my hair blowing beneath my knitted hat, mittens tucked into my coat pockets against the cold. Robert is stealing a look at me. We are almost touching but not quite.
Sitting with Robert in the café before catching the train, leaning toward each other over the table as we share his cake and I look up at him as if he is a birthday present.
Talking about my failed IVF attempts and his wife’s death. In one shot, Robert looks across the road, where you must be. He frowns directly into your lens. In another, he is holding my arm.
In the park. Snap snap snap. The series of photos is like a film broken into stills: eight inches between me and Robert as I confess my worst thing; four inches as Robert wraps me in his scarf; the side of his body against mine while he speaks about fires as if he is reciting a poem.
Walking toward the train station after the medical testimony. Robert is carefully holding an umbrella over my head—I’d kept asking him to make sure he was covered, too, but in the photograph I can see that he is getting wet with sleet and I am dry. In the taxi queue before we parted that night, standing so close to each other but again not quite touching.
You haven’t written a word, but I know what you are saying. I can watch you all the time, and I hate what I am seeing.
Do you not know that even stolen photographs are not always ugly? You didn’t mean to, but you’ve inadvertently given me something beautiful, in these glimpses of me and Robert together.
Laura had been alone, in California. I am not alone, despite your best efforts. You are stupid to overlook that. It gives me pleasure, calling you stupid, and makes me feel better, stronger somehow, though I know it is a childish, pointless indulgence.
Mr. Belford’s words are flying around my head. Reported injury. Subjective account. They are not words the legal system will be able to use about me. You are about to find this out, though I have known it for weeks.
I open the cupboard and stuff my collection of evidence into a huge plastic bag in readiness for tomorrow. I feel a spasm of doubt when I deliberately leave your pornographic photographs at the bottom of my wardrobe.
I take out the notebook and sit cross-legged on my living-room floor, flipping through it. I’m clutching an eraser, letting it hover over the penciled notes about what you did to me in my bedroom. I lose track of how long I sit like this.
Rubbing it out won’t make it untrue. The words are already inside my computer anyway because I’ve scanned every single page, dutifully obeying the leaflets’ advice to make copies of everything I can. It’s supposed to be a kind of insurance against loss as well as electronic proof that I haven’t tampered with anything at a later date. I let the eraser drop from my fingers. There is a dull thud, and it rolls beneath the sofa. Mr. and Mrs. Betterton spoke so strictly to me, warning me not to hide anything from the police; they’d guessed those photographs existed, despite my inability to talk about them.
Briskly, I get up and go into my bedroom and snatch them from my wardrobe.
I think again about how the leaflets say that it takes an average of 110 stalking-related incidents before a woman actually goes to the police.
Do those three repulsive photographs amount to one incident, because you took them all that same night, or three, because you attacked me on three separate occasions with them? Is a batch of three texts calculated as one or as three? Are forty answering machine hang-ups over a lunchtime one incident or forty? Will each of your photos of me and Robert be tallied individually or as one because they arrived simultaneously, in a single envelope? Are the Valentine’s chocolates with the accompanying card worth one or two? Perhaps they are worth three, if they factor in your personal delivery service.
I cannot begin to imagine how the police do their sums. I only know that there have been way too many incidents for me. I only know that I have reached saturation point and cannot bear even one more incident from you. I only know that numbers do not feel like they have anything to do with any of this. Your effect cannot be measured by figures of any kind, however fine-tuned their methods of calibration may be.
I know exactly what my next step will be, and I’ll take it early tomorrow morning. It never crosses your mind how hard I will fight you, how meticulously I’ve been preparing. There’s more than enough evidence against you now, whatever counting methods the police may employ.
Tuesday
Tuesday, March 3, 6:30 a.m.
This is where I belong, where I should be, the place that’s been waiting for me. I am climbing the steps of the rectangular stone building that Lottie spent so much time in. Behind me are half a dozen calmly parked cars and vans, ready for action, painted in their comforting Battenberg grids of yellow and blue blocks. Above me is a bright blue sign with the word Police on it. I take a deep breath, grab the handle of the metal-framed door, and step over the t
hreshold.
The station is virtually deserted so early in the morning. Within a minute I understand the significance of this, staring in disbelief at the protective glass reception window with its notice that they are open for inquiries from 8:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. All at once I am deflated, on the verge of tears. I will have a fit of hysteria right here, and they’ll think I’m a madwoman in the grip of antisocial behavior and slap some kind of order on me and throw me in a cell. How can I not have thought to check something as basic as the opening hours?
I turn, searching for the door I used to enter, but I’m disorientated and lost and dizzy, like a child who has spent the last minute spinning in circles, which I suppose I have. They’ll charge me with being drunk and disorderly, too. I stumble along, trying again to find my way out, and a policeman wanders by, peering curiously at me. He must be ten years younger than I am. He says, looking concerned, “Can I help you?” and I think he means it, and that his question is not simply the polite rhetoric that millions of people reel off on autopilot zillions of times a day.
I stutter unintelligibly and hold up my huge bag of evidence as if that will explain everything. I know I need to tell him about you, at least a very quick version, so he will listen to me, so he won’t make me leave. But each time I try to speak I can’t get beyond the first word of my sentence. I don’t know where to begin the list of the things you’ve done. “He . . . He . . . He . . .” I sound like a broken record or a bad mockery of laughter. I try again, opening and closing my mouth, and though nothing comes out the policeman asks if I need to make a complaint. I choke out the words “I do,” and he says something about getting me into an interview room, and I somehow say, “But aren’t you closed? Aren’t I too early?”
The Book of You: A Novel Page 20