The Day She Disappeared

by Christobel Kent

  “Yes?”

  Beth’s mother, Melissa Johnson, Maxwell as was, didn’t sound anything like Patty. Melissa was nothing like her name, she was sour and hard and gravel-voiced.

  “No,” she said straight off, then laughed harshly. “And I’d have sent her packing if she had turned up on my doorstep. Do I sound like I need looking after? Like you’d leave her in charge of a fucking cat.”

  She sounded so flatly hostile all Nat wanted to do was hang up on her. She managed to ask if there was anyone else, anyone Melissa could think of, though she knew it was hopeless. Beth’s mother didn’t care, hadn’t cared for years, if ever. “Her father?” Then Melissa Johnson laughed again and she was the one who hung up. Nat set the phone down on the counter and pushed it away.

  Stupidly, all she could think was, She’s not going to make Beth sort out another hospital appointment, is she? Even if Beth had turned up on her mother’s doorstep. Nat felt her heart speed up.

  They were looking at her, Janine and Dowd, Janine with her mouth set in a line, and Dowd pale and anxious, staring at his feet. “Well?” he said, and Nat just shook her head, still hearing Beth’s mother’s voice in her ear. For a second all she wanted was to back out of the door to somewhere no one could overhear, no one could look, and phone her own mother, phone Patty in Spain. Phone her and tell her everything.

  “She wasn’t there,” Nat said with dull fear. “Hasn’t been there at all.”

  Where is she? It hammered at her. Where is she? She thought of those abnormal cells multiplying, faster and faster. What have I been doing? Not bothering her. No signal, she’d said.

  “We should go to the police,” she said out loud. They stared. She swallowed. “I mean, isn’t she missing now? She’s missing.”

  “Missing?” Janine folded her arms across her body defiantly. “She’s a piece of work, is what she is.”

  “But you don’t know,” said Nat urgently. “There’s … she had—” Would Beth have wanted Janine knowing? No reason for shame, smear test, everyone had them—but she couldn’t quite say it. It was private.

  Dowd raised his eyes as if he hadn’t heard what Janine had said. “Something has happened to her,” he said dully. “I thought it was just me.” He stared back down at the bar top, not meeting her eye. “I thought she wasn’t picking up because she could see it was me calling. Just didn’t want to answer my calls.”

  And then, as Nat stared at him, watching the painful-looking Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed, she thought of something so obvious she almost laughed. All this texting. You just didn’t call anymore—unless you were Jonathan Dowd, obviously. Crazy: she could have done it weeks ago. It hadn’t occurred to her: she wondered if she was even thinking straight.

  “Hold on,” she said, dialing with one hand, holding the other up to Janine and Dowd to make them wait. “Hold on.” She held the phone to her ear, listening. Of course, if something … it could just … but it rang. It rang. Beth’s phone wasn’t dead. It was August 27 and she’d been gone since August 3: three weeks. Three and a half weeks, to be precise, her friend had been gone. More than gone, now: missing. She felt cold with the sound of those words in her head. My friend’s missing. If anything had happened to Beth, if she was lying in woodland somewhere waiting to be found, if she was in the river, weighted, waterlogged … Why was she thinking that? Thinking those things? Why? You always thought of the worst-case scenario, didn’t you? But her phone was ringing.

  If she was. That phone should be long dead. But it was ringing.

  It rang, and rang. And then there was Beth’s voice, as the answerphone cut in. Nat’s hand flew to her mouth as she heard it.

  “If you’re getting this message, I’m too busy having fun. But I’ll get back to you.”

  She hung up, and suddenly the phone rang. For a split second something released inside her, euphoria. It’ll be her.

  It was the hospital.

  * * *

  At the foot of the stripped bed Mo Hawkins was on her knees in her housedress with two bin bags at her side. She had two piles: one for the bin, one for … well, she called it compensation. Not that that little madam had that much she’d want, but Mo liked a bit of eBay, pennies here and there and sometimes a windfall—much as anything else she liked seeing the watchers mount up. Watching and waiting to press that button, not that Mo ever bought, only sold, stuff from charity shops, jumble sales, surprising how they didn’t know gold from gilt, the occasional find left behind by a tenant. This was a windfall, all right. Plenty out there liked this tarty stuff.

  It was only payback, three, four weeks’ rent she could have had. A nice little place, quiet, good neighbors, views. Tutting, Mo peered at a peach-colored blouse to see a rim of foundation around inside the neck; dirty, with it. Glad to see the back of her. There’d been notes, about the noises, through Mo’s door, as they’d given up having a go at Madam. She leaned down for the next item: it was stretchy, green and glittering, looked like a vest.

  Under the bed something caught her eye in the dust and she hooked it out with a coat hanger—not the first time she’d found one of those left behind. Deftly she flicked it into one of the bin bags and sat back on her haunches.

  Somewhere a phone began to ring. Not Mo’s, which was on the chair beside her. For a minute or two she thought it was coming from next door, someone out along the back gardens or in the meadows but it was the wrong direction, it was too loud. It was inside the house; then she thought it would stop, but it kept on ringing. Mo shuffled out of the bedroom into the hall, the green sparkly top forgotten in her hand, peered into the bathroom, kitchen. It was muffled, like maybe it had been dropped behind something. She opened the door to the hall cupboard just as the ringing stopped, and the little screen died into darkness.

  There. Got you. There.

  Walking slowly back to the bedroom Mo puzzled over it, in her hand, still on its charger; pausing a second, she dropped it on top of the selling pile. Then she heaved up the rest of the stuff—torn jeans, a shirt with underarm sweat marks, dusty shoes and toiletries and dog-eared paperbacks—and dropped it in the bin bag. She pushed open the doors to the garden.

  The incinerator was all set up, rolled newspaper, can of lighter fluid. Mo just had to set a match to it.

  Chapter Six

  “We’ve got your number and Mr. Wilkins’s number, and Mr. Wilkins isn’t answering. There’s been some improvement in Victor’s condition.”

  Nat let out a shaky breath. When they’d shown her in here—the relatives’ room—she’d feared the worst.

  The nurse looked harried. Lisa, it said on her name badge. “The scan showed a small area of concern, as the doctor will have told you,” Lisa went on. “And he’s most certainly not out of the woods yet.” She hesitated. “We really do need a next of kin, though.” She pressed her lips together, anxious.

  “His daughter hasn’t been in touch yet?” A knot formed in Nat’s stomach. What if … what if … she thought again about the way he talked about his daughter. Fond, tender. He talked about her as a child, more than anything else. How long was it since he had actually seen her?

  “Mr. Wilkins did assure us that he was taking care of it,” said the nurse, and she shrugged, helpless. “The manager of the caravan site? I called myself this morning, but there was no answer. We’re run off our feet, and in the meantime he has no one. He needs someone. I thought perhaps you—”

  “Of course,” said Nat, already at the door.

  Steve had been walking back into the pub as she ran out. As she stood back in the doorway he smelled of clean clothes and aftershave and she felt a momentary, irrational stab of envy for Janine, and a bloke who made an effort, and all things normal. Even the bloody rose petals on the pillow.

  “Where you off to in such a hurry?” he said and she had told him.

  “Need a lift?” he said without missing a beat.

  But before she could answer, Janine had called over from the bar, “She’s got a cab coming.
” Just a hint of shrill in it. And not to leave anything to chance Janine was around the bar and at the door with them, beaming at him.

  “You just look after old Victor, Natalie,” she said. “I can manage with Craig, now Steve’s back.” Eyes only for him, turning to address him without pause. “She’s given our Beth a call and her phone’s still on, so I don’t know what all the fuss was about, good riddance leaving us in the shit like that.”

  Steve nodded slowly. “I suppose that figures,” he said, though he hadn’t sounded convinced, not to Nat.

  Then the taxi’s hood slid into view through the doorway and Janine practically pushed her out the door.

  As she came around the curtain Nat couldn’t see the improvement they talked about: Victor was still motionless on his back, hands blue-white and thin at his sides. But when she spoke his head turned. His mouth moved but no sound came out.

  “I’m back,” she said and she saw him breathe, deliberately, effortful.

  Then he said, slurred but deliberate, an unmistakable two syllables, “Sophie.”

  “It’s not Sophie,” she said, sorrowful. “It’s Nat, it’s Natalie, Victor,” but she could see that he knew that already, he understood.

  “Caw,” he said. “Caw—” and his eyes clouded, as if with pain or frustration.

  “Do you mean you want me to call Sophie?” she said, her face so close to his she could feel his breath, light as a feather, on her cheek and smelling thin and chemical.

  He struggled, chin coming down, trying to nod. When he said yes, it sounded more like choking. “I’ll phone her right away,” she said. “I’m going to do it now,” and he sank back down, exhausted.

  They gave Nat the number at the desk, and she walked outside to make the call. There was something about hospitals: people everywhere, wandering the corridors looking frightened, whispering into their phones. Noises, alarms, heads turning to eavesdrop. As a taxi pulled up, she walked away from the entrance, past a sign telling people not to smoke, then past a gray-skinned man on a drip, tucking a lighter into his fag packet and taking a deep drag on the cigarette he’d just lit. The number the nurse had given her was a landline, a London number.

  Dialing it, Nat turned around and looked up at the windows, trying to work out which one was Victor’s as she listened to it ring.

  A man answered, irritable, and there was something so coolly hostile in his voice that for a second she held her breath, then she thought: Saturday, of course, it’ll be her husband home from work. “I’d like to speak to Sophie,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, unhesitating, “she’s busy.”

  “Is that Mr.…” She searched her brain for the name because she knew Victor had told her it, once upon a time, and as she remembered it she found she also remembered the note in Victor’s voice when the subject had come up. The husband. A mistake, I fear, Victor had said sorrowfully, with foreboding. “Richard? Is that Richard?”

  A child made a shrill sound in the background.

  “That must be Rufus,” she said, placatory, trying to establish her credentials. “Victor told me about him. I’m calling for Victor, he’s not well, he’s—”

  The room’s sounds went muffled as if his hand had gone across the mouthpiece: the child crying, another voice, a door closing.

  “Hello?” she said. “Hello?”

  Then he was back. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Thank you, I’ll pass on the message.”

  “No,” she said, “you don’t understand, he may not … he needs to see her.”

  A silence. “I assure you,” he said, and his voice was only calm and measured, but for some reason Nat felt herself go cold, stupidly fearful. “I do indeed understand,” he said, enunciating carefully, “and I will pass on the message.”

  “You need to take down the address of the hospital,” said Nat, stubborn, and then he did make a sudden sharp sound of impatience.

  “Right,” he said. “Just a moment.” But when she told him the address—all of it, the ward name and the road and the telephone number—she was speaking into silence: he didn’t ask her to repeat anything or spell it, no questions about directions, she might even have thought he had already hung up on her except that, leaving it a beat after she had finished speaking, he just said, brutal, “Yes.”

  And then he did hang up.

  * * *

  Bless her. Bless her.

  Bless you, Natalie, Victor would have liked to say, but in the event he could only hope that she already understood. Nat seemed to him eminently capable of that.

  They had managed to get him a little more upright—it seemed that was a triumph, a step forward, and he had nodded to congratulate them—he could see through the big grubby hospital window that it was almost dark. Behind rooftops the sky was the electric blue of a long summer evening, although shortening, night arriving with a rush that whispered to Victor of autumn. He felt a surge of something—he wouldn’t call it loss, not yet—but longing, perhaps, for the endless luminous evenings of June as he sat in his small folding chair and looked down the green slope across the water. The sensation was not familiar to him—he had never minded autumn, nor even winter; there always seemed a next stage to look forward to. Victor lay still, propped on clean pillows: there was no struggling with the sensation, wherever it came from. He would not call it mourning, because there was something to look forward to. There was Sophie.

  Natalie was sitting beside him looking out of the window and holding on to his hand. She had been there for more than two hours now, through the administration of supper. Tomato soup, bread and butter, lukewarm tea. He had managed to sip, he had managed to chew, he had managed to swallow, and she had helped him, showing no sign of impatience. Bless you, Nat.

  When her cropped head had appeared around the curtain—it did suit her, though he had been uncertain, shocked even when he’d first seen it, he had wished for the thick dark pile, the softness of it, but perhaps he should accept that young women needed more than softness in this day and age, more than hair to hide behind—he felt as though he had willed her back with the urgency of his need to know if she had succeeded, if she had kept her promise. If she had gotten through to Sophie.

  Scrupulously Nat had told him the truth, he could tell: better that way. He steeled himself although his courage flickered when she mentioned Richard’s name. She knows, he thought, his heart sinking at the thought that he had been right about Richard. She knows what kind of man he is.

  “Well,” she said uncertainly, “I did tell him twice that Sophie has got to come. I mean, she really has got to come. And I read him out the address, all of it.” She took his hand, not squeezing it, just holding it calmly. “I think I’ll give her another ring,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll get her next time, then we can be sure.”

  Bless you.

  He didn’t know when she left, only that when he woke at some unrecognizable hour of the night, his curtains had been drawn back so that he could see the long ward twilit with things glowing and blinking, and the chair beside the bed was empty.

  * * *

  He’d seen the old man there on the bench in the sun and remembered, maybe in the same moment the old man did, that they’d looked at each other before. This time, of course, no blood on his arm; this time he had only been down there to look at the river, to look into the backs of the houses, to examine his own trail. Crouching to look how the grass stayed crushed in the heat, to be sure he’d left no trace in the gap in the hedge he’d slipped through. No shred of fabric. No blood.

  This time he had been just a man, out walking. Not against the law, was it.

  But the old man on the bench had raised his head and looked and gone quite still. That had been when he knew, the old man had seen something, would remember something. The old man’s mistake.

  He had walked on slowly, watching as the old man got up from the bench and tottered, took two steps, then fell. Walking past unnoticed as the girls clustered around him, on, on to the caravan site. To f
ind his van and walk right in, to examine the photographs in silver frames, pull open a drawer because he could, feeling the hum inside him of power when no one challenged him, no one saw. Only the old man saw, and he was lying back up there on the road. His thin old ankles awkwardly crossed, his old man’s feet in shabby shoes.

  Of course, he had known they would come into her place. The old bitch sorting rags. It was why he had left certain things there, and taken others away. Lay a trail and see them frown over it: it always took a time for them to understand and that he found enjoyable. He could follow and watch, to see what they would do next.

  A woman on her knees in the same room he’d done it, going still with her head down, wondering. So many steps behind him that by the time she raised her head to look at where he had been standing, in plain view watching her, he would be gone.

  Chapter Seven

  Sunday

  It was Sunday.

  Victor knew this because the elderly man opposite (less elderly than me, he had to remind himself) had been brought a Sunday newspaper by his wife. The newspaper lay untouched on the bottom of the bed. Even in a hospital, there were Sunday mornings.

  Once there had been roast lamb for lunch and Joy in an apron. Victor had not thought of this for years: he had not thought it wise. But now as he lay here immobile in Sunday sunshine, he found there was no terror left in the memory, no dark crevasse of grief waiting to swallow him whole. It felt closer, more present, as if a lifetime was not, after all, so much a train line with stops as an ocean dotted with ships, some visible, others out of sight, a world you could sail around and find yourself back where you began.

  Even if he could make himself understood it would probably be wisest, thought Victor, to say nothing. The odd thing about a hospital was that it turned you into someone else, even if you were feeling yourself when you entered. Which he certainly had not been.