He gave her a hard stare, not unfriendly. “I can’t tell you that,” he said briefly. He glanced around the low-ceilinged room one more time then stepped over to the table and looked down one more time at the place set for one. She could see him frown, then he sighed and looked up.
“I think under the circumstances we’ve done all we can here,” he said. “There’s no evidence of someone intending you harm. No evidence of a break-in. This stuff about your girlfriend, it’s just—well it’s a bit random, a bit…” He searched for the word. “Conjectural. I think you need to sleep on it, and if it all makes a bit more sense in the morning, then come in and make a statement. It is of interest that your friend knew the dead lad, Oliver Mason, of course it is. But she was a barmaid, wasn’t she? Not exactly a special relationship.” The two men exchanged glances then.
“Barmaids fair game, are we?” she said. “Or what?”
The policeman cleared his throat nervously. “I just meant—you work in a pub, you come into contact with all sorts.” When she said nothing, he made something out of looking around as he put his notebook away. “You’ll come in to the station tomorrow, then?” he said hastily. “All right? And needless to say if anything else happens, anything at all, get straight in touch.”
Nat stood there a good five minutes unclenching, staring blindly at the books the older man had looked at. Making herself see it their way. A book of poems Jim had given her one Valentine’s; he’d probably bought it at random, she couldn’t see him reading a poem.
Jim. They always suspect the boyfriend first. Grudgingly, she considered that there might be a reason for that. She should have said something, she knew that. But Jim—poor bastard. She could phone him herself if she wanted to know if it was him; she always knew when he was trying to hide something from her. When he wrote off his car and told her it was in the shop. When he said, We can keep it, if that’s what you want, keep the baby, all the time pleading silently with her to let him off the hook.
She weighed the phone in her hand, but she didn’t call him. It wasn’t a coincidence, was all she knew. Sitting in the dark on the floor of Beth’s bedroom and listening to a car’s engine idling patiently beyond the front door. Walking into her own place and finding someone had been there. Plus if she called Jim, he might think she needed him.
Beth had lived here once, for eight, ten months, hadn’t she? Nat stopped on the tiny dark landing upstairs and put her fingertips to the wall, as if it might tell her something. If these walls … there was a phrase. A fly on the wall.
She went around the whole house again before she went to bed. Everything locked and bolted, and nothing missing. Why, why, why? She stood behind the closed front door. Fuck off, she mouthed at it. Whoever you are, fuck right off. I’m not scared. I’m angry.
* * *
Outside he was watching, in the dark, out of sight of the house. He saw things other people didn’t: the way she moved signaled to him, the sight of the back of her neck. He saw where she was vulnerable, looking down at her mobile with her lip pulled in between her teeth, turning suddenly, pulling a curtain closed. Walking easily up to the house, stepping closer until he was behind the window: he wanted to be so close she could hear him breathe, standing back, watching for a sliver of her through the glass, through the crack in the drawn curtains. He stayed there until she went up to sleep. In his head he could see her, the sheet over her slipping free as she slept.
Lying in the long grass he had seen them arrive through the tangled hedge, the smell of the river in his nostrils even from up here; the dark water was slow, slower and slower in the heat. He was perfectly still, he had that ability, nothing startled him, he didn’t waver, he didn’t shudder. Not like her. He had waited until they left. He played their conversation with her in his head, he saw her clench her fists, he saw her angry, he saw her tremble.
He had seen what she’d been up to. He thought of his treasure, his store, packed into dark places, stored for when he wanted it found. He got hard thinking of that, of the shock, the gasp, taking her breath away.
Quick on her feet, but not quick enough.
In his head, he took her apart, joint by joint. He felt her slippery between his hands.
Chapter Thirteen
Tuesday
It took Victor a little while to understand, bleary as he was, that the alarm he could hear was coming from his own bed. Even when he saw them converging on him—Lisa first, panicked, then a junior nurse dropping a drip on the bed opposite to head across to him, and even Emile, alarmed, peering around his breakfast trolley—Victor couldn’t make sense of it.
“It’s your blood pressure, Victor,” Lisa was saying, taking hold of his hand, leaning back to drop the tilted bedhead, he felt himself laid back. “There’s been a sudden drop…,” and she turned, calling for someone else and didn’t finish what she had been going to say. He did feel distinctly strange, a different kind of strange.
Someone had come in the night, late in the night, or early in the morning perhaps, and filled his glass, had raised him to sip. Or had he dreamed that? She had had to lower his head, Lisa had, so it had been raised. His brain was soft as mush, he couldn’t make things stick together. There was something he had to remember, Lisa had told him.
They blurred, moving swiftly across him, calling more urgently. Let them, something whispered in his head, let them.
Victor could see slanting sunlight down the lane, and the man walking up. The sun fell on him in stripes, and he kept moving, arms hanging by his sides. He was walking up from the weir, where the water rushed and burbled and floating things snagged and caught. There was blood streaked up one of the young man’s arms. The boy lay and drifted, sinking, rising, turning, that boy. The days were a river, running into each other, things Victor had seen bumped up against things he only feared.
Something she had told him. As long as it’s nothing more serious, she had said, Lisa had said. Sophie’s sprain.
“Sophie. How is Sophie?” It came out as mush.
* * *
When Nat woke again, it was after eight.
The phone had rung at five. Reaching for it, Nat had not even thought it might be Jim, too early for her to make that connection. Instead her mind had chased in panicked circles, police, hospital, Beth, Mum, who. Him.
“Hello? Hello?” He had her phone, so he has my number. There was a crackling, a heavy breathing, a ragged whispering, sinister in the gray light. He hasn’t got her phone anymore, though.
Then there was a sharp high-pitched cry and Nat sat up, it was so unmistakably distress she could hear, that high wail—then the line was cut. Her heart pounding, running, tripping, she stared at the screen, only imagining the worst, thinking of Beth, in pain, Beth hurt, Beth calling for her help—and she stumbled out of the bed, catching her foot in the tasseled coverlet and landing, painfully, on her side. Stop. Nat turned on the light, she listened: it was quiet. Her hands trembled as she held the screen, went to recent calls, searched for the number.
She knew it. She recognized that number.
Staring again, Nat ran down the list, red numbers were missed calls, those she had made had a tiny arrow one way, those received another, there, there. There it was. A London number, no name, it wasn’t in her address book. She stared, blinking, at the arrow: she had called that number, Saturday. Saturday.
And then she knew, she had leaned back against the bed, tangled in the coverlet, feeling the pounding behind her ribs subside. Victor’s daughter. The child, his grandson, must have been playing with the phone, dialed by mistake.
After a long five minutes staring, waiting for her body to catch up and realize they were safe, she and it, Nat had climbed back in bed. And she had slept again, the moment her head hit the pillow, like a log, like a dead thing.
Now she climbed out, groggy, her mouth dry and sour from adrenaline or the glass of wine she’d had from the fridge last night, from no food. Hungry. She padded downstairs and put some bread in the toaster.
Smelling the toasted bread, Nat got back up and retrieved a plate, knife and fork, the ones, no doubt, that she’d put away last night. She should have pushed it: she should have insisted on fingerprints being taken. They’d made her feel foolish, though. Nat imagined, in the pale greenish light of early morning, that they thought she was an attention-seeker, or drunk. They hadn’t asked about Beth’s phone, still sitting above the jiggers in the bar, and she wasn’t going to offer it. It was too precious, she didn’t trust them not to lose it, or forget it, or wipe it. She’d give it to the woman, Donna Garfield. Could Nat trust a female officer not to have a laugh over Beth’s selfies, her emojis, her shopping apps? Candy Crush for quiet times behind the bar.
Finding, looking down at the place laid, that she didn’t want to sit at the table, after all, Nat walked through the room, toast in hand, trying to catch something, a scent of something. A scent of Beth. She’d lived here, after all. Come back. There was an old wooden chest: she raised the lid, but there was nothing but dust and a film of cobweb. The toast was finished, and she was in the hall, that’s better, she told herself, but she wasn’t sure, it was going to take more than a bit of toast to get rid of this uneasy feeling. She had not, after all, imagined it, last night. The same feeling as she’d had crouched in Beth’s bedroom, but this was more than a feeling. Knife, fork, plate.
There was a cupboard under the narrow staircase, a paneled door that Nat didn’t think she’d ever opened before. She opened it now. A narrow black coat hung there. Reaching to touch it Nat was startled to realize that it was made of fur, which meant it wasn’t Beth’s because she’d always said she hated fur, gave her the creeps more than anything, the thought of something killed, wearing another animal on your back. Soft where animals were concerned, she always looked sharply away if there was a thing dead in the road. Don’t we all, maybe, Nat thought, reflecting, but with Beth it was different; once Nat had actually seen her turn away, stiff and awkward, so as not to be seen upset. It was like that single batch of jam she’d made: sometimes you saw there was another Beth, gentle behind the foundation and the careful cleavage and the determination to Just. Have. A Good Time.
Did she know, even before she saw it? Part of what she knew in her gut, part of that picture that had appeared in her head of the man sorting through Beth’s things, leaving traces of himself, and her, spattered invisible on the walls.
Choosing something of hers and taking it away.
As she tried to get a purchase on it, the coat swung under Nat’s hand, turning toward the light from the hall, and Nat saw what was inside it, slung over the hook and hanging. A black bra.
Now that, now that. Nat reached out a hand to grab it, scratchy lace, a tiny pink satin rose that sat where the cups met. She saw the label grubby, and without considering what she was doing, she pulled it, held it to her face, breathed in. Now that. No.
That.
It was Beth’s bra. Even if the little rose—that Nat had seen a hundred times, visible, and intentionally so, down in the V of certain tops, sitting there to catch some punter’s eye, anyone’s eye—hadn’t done it, the grubby label had, Beth who boasted she washed her bras twice a year. “Whether they need it or not,” winking at her audience on the other side of the bra. “Blokes don’t like you too clean,” she’d confided airily to Nat afterward. Shrugging. “Don’t ask me why, chemistry or something.” She’d paused then, thoughtful. “I suppose they might want a clean girl for something.” Musing, as if she really couldn’t work it out.
It smelled of her. It was still pressed to Nat’s face and suddenly, feeling the toast churn and rise inside her, she dropped it and shut the door on it as it swung there against the dark musty fur.
And then it came to her: she had seen him in her head, sorting through those things, because something had been missing from that bin bag full of Beth’s stuff. The jeans, the miniskirt with the frayed edge, the shoes—they’d all been there, but there’d been no underwear. Not a pair of knickers, not a bra. Beth had been all about the underwear, coming back from town with another plastic bag stuffed with it, strappy bras, lacy stuff, slips, suspender belts, you name it. And standing there with her back to the cupboard door trying to keep her breakfast down, Nat knew for absolutely certain that it wasn’t that old Mo Hawkins had chucked it, no, she’d have liked to hang it out for all to see. Nor that she’d stashed it elsewhere, greedy old cow that she was, she hadn’t been a size ten in decades, nor a 32D, and she must know there’s no cash to be had for secondhand underwear, well, not unless you know your market—Nat put a hand to her mouth, horrified. Not funny. Not funny, no.
Behind her, behind the cupboard door, that fur coat swung, the bra hanging down, enfolded in it. A kind of Beth, someone had put her there, in the dark, someone had wrapped her in a dead thing and left her to be found.
By me, thought Nat.
In that moment she felt it, suffocatingly close, in the walls: Beth.
A din in her ears: Help me. Answer me. Find me.
And eyes closed, she saw him again, padding through an empty house, opening cupboards, she heard him, heard his breathing, heard the low throb of an idling car waiting just where she couldn’t see it. Beth’s soft underwear in his hands.
A man moving through an empty house in the dark—only now the rooms aren’t in Beth’s flat, with her phone gone from the cupboard, and nasty Margaret screeching next door.
The blood that only Nat could see, those walls speckled with her traces.
Now this is the house.
* * *
The ward was busy, but Victor saw it all play out in a thin gray light, fuzzed at the edges, as though a soft mist had crept in through the open window, under the doors. His attention was turned carefully inward, following his own inner workings, looking for the source of the trouble. He didn’t like it—the insides, he thought, were a mystery, like the deep sea, that was best not investigated. Low blood pressure, well, that sounded manageable, benign, even. It didn’t feel it, though, it was unsettling, inside him things were thinning, slowing, losing power; as though part of him was escaping to float upward. Victor didn’t think his daft old weakened body was whispering to him about heaven, as he did not believe in God. That, he thought, was perhaps unfortunate under the circumstances but it couldn’t be helped.
In the corridor there was a burst of laughter, and Victor felt himself turn toward it like a sunflower. Only the able-bodied laughed like that, with energy to spare.
A man had been wheeled in whose leg had had to be amputated. Another man was being prepared for dialysis. Victor had taken careful hold of these pieces of information, gripping as though they were a rope that would stop him falling.
He could hear Lisa’s voice: she had stopped to talk to someone, just out of sight, glancing back at him. Was he imagining things? He drifted, sleep lapping softly at him. He felt someone raise him up on the pillow to drink again, went back to sleep. When he woke the next time he was foggy. Lisa came in: he could barely make her out. Someone to see you, she said, like an angel.
Then her face came closer, and she called for help.
Chapter Fourteen
Nat was in Paddy’s shed, and rooting around. It was chaotic, with buckets full of junk and a row of drawers overflowing and hanging open, but—tucked away behind Paddy’s tidy little cottage—it felt about the safest place she’d been in days. She had more or less found everything she’d been looking for: a hammer, nails, eve
n two little bolts that would probably do the job.
Paddy came into the doorway, lean and brown and weary, and cleared his throat apologetically. “Give me a couple of hours, I can get over and do it for you,” he said. “Whatever it is.”
She hadn’t told him why she wanted the stuff, of course. Paddy would quietly do anything for anyone, which was why you couldn’t take advantage, and she didn’t want him worrying. It was too complicated. Once she started unpacking it all, following the thread of her thoughts, she’d look like a nutter—or feel like one. It was still hanging there, inside the cupboard. The police would have a laugh, wouldn’t they? She straightened and smiled at Paddy’s anxious frown.
“I can manage,” she said. “I think I can, anyway.”
“Jim’s … not right, you know,” said Paddy, and there was the little cough again.
Nat sighed. “Oh, yeah,” she said, head down and sorting through a box of screws.
“He’s drinking too much,” said Paddy, and she looked up. “I saw him in town the other day, and he was out of it.” Paddy drank himself, his nightly couple of pints consumed in solitary silence.
“Well,” she said, “I don’t know that that’s any of my business, anymore.”
Paddy looked at her. “If you say so,” he said mildly.
She sat back on her heels, irritable. “There’s other … Look. Jim can look after himself.”
“Beth,” he said. “That it? You think she needs you more?” She stood, clutching her handful of bits and pieces. How many nights had Paddy and Beth occupied opposite sides of the bar, exchanging not a word? No point in snapping at Paddy, he didn’t deserve it.
“What do you think, Paddy?” she said, and he thrust his hands down in his pockets.
“Beth?” he said. “I miss her.” His jeans stiff with paint. Paddy deserved a bit of looking after himself, didn’t he? “Reminds me of my sister,” he said. “I used to watch her there and think, there goes Moira.”
The Day She Disappeared Page 12