“Moira,” said Nat, in surprise. She’d never heard Paddy mention a sister before.
“Tough as old boots,” he said. “Loud. Wild. Party girl, if you like. But underneath it—she had something. She would give you anything. Kind—somewhere no one ever saw it, you had to know it was there.” Nat’s mouth was open. He was frowning down at his hands, black under his nails. His eyebrows were fierce and bushy.
“Where is she now?” Nat said and he looked up, startled. “Moira?” she said.
He shook his head. “Dead,” he said, and the word drew something tight inside her. “She’s dead. Tough as old boots, only it turned out she wasn’t. Never complained, she was a big woman but nothing left of her by the time she died.” A silence. “Cancer. Years back now.”
Nat pondered. “Beth—” and she realized she was about to use the past tense, shifted. “Sounds like Beth,” she said. “I didn’t know.” Didn’t know about Moira. Didn’t know he’d spent those evenings working Beth out, either.
Paddy smiled, gentle. “You better get going,” he said. “You want to catch the tide.”
It was hot and windless, and Nat had to row a bit just to get off the mud. She had heard Jim’s radio on inside the boat shed as she crossed the shingle to shove the Chickadee into the rising tide and she didn’t want him to come out and see her there drifting, sail flapping. She knew what Beth would say—had said—about having a reason to come down to the water this often, where Jim just happened to work, but sod it. The Chickadee felt like her lifeline sometimes. Get away from it all.
By the time she’d gotten out into the fairway, though, she’d worked up a sweat, but she’d persuaded Janine to let her come in late, and she didn’t want to push it. She couldn’t just drift. She thought of London for the first time in a long while. The smell of the Underground, walking over the big gray-brown river, the lighters passing underneath. A bright office she’d temped in. How much she’d like to get back there.
Not much chance of that. She hauled up the sail, then settling back onto the stern thwart she thought about Janine instead. What did she think, exactly, about Beth? She just wanted rid, was how it felt. Beth had ended up more trouble than she was worth. Nat supposed Janine knew more than most about flaky barmaids—but she had the feeling there was more to it than that, however hard Janine tried not to show it. A nervousness. The sail flapped, filling briefly, then slackened again. She adjusted the sheet, shifted a little off the wind, and it filled again. She could see the clumped trees where she supposed Dowd’s camp to be. A little dinghy hauled up on the mud.
What was it she’d said exactly, hissed to Steve upstairs yesterday, the day before? Nat couldn’t remember, but they’d been having a row, and it had been about Beth.
The light was hazy, heat glittering off the flat gray estuary. Someone had emerged from the trees on the far bank: she couldn’t make out more than a white T-shirt, the smudge of a face, but it had to be him. He stood there quite motionless, waiting; it wasn’t till she was almost at the rickety jetty that he raised a hand, and then he was there taking the painter from the Chickadee’s bow, his hand under her elbow before she even had a chance to notice the slime on the old wood, let alone slip on it.
Dowd’s camp was very neat and orderly, a top-of-the-range tent tucked in under the trees, a fire pit kept neat with a small stack of wood beside it. He showed her around, nervous. It wasn’t till she’d seen his generator (for the fridge, to keep samples cold); his stove; his equipment (some weird little knives and scrapers, flat glass dishes and test tubes, a contraption like a small hoover); and even his latrine—that he fished out his mobile. Nat realized that she could have asked him before, couldn’t she? To see it.
“She had an appointment at the hospital,” she said. “Monday before last. She missed it.”
He stopped, pale. “She was ill?”
“She didn’t tell you?” Feeling guilty, of course she wouldn’t have told him.
He flushed, biting his lip. Shook his head.
“It was just a … routine thing,” said Nat. “That’s what she said to me.” Wanting to put him out of his misery. Something occurred to her, though. Someone she could ask, about that hospital appointment. It would be confidential, but …
Dowd made a quick nervous movement, tugging at his collar, and she refocused.
“I know I was just…” He hesitated and she saw the flush rising higher at his neck. “An occasional shag.” Blurting that out, not able to hide the bitterness that was sadness too. She resisted the urge to put a hand on his arm: she wasn’t sure what his reaction would be. He might cry, or he might hit her. He was frowning down at the mobile now, scrolling through messages until he found what he was looking for and thrust it at her, holding it out till she took it from him, then stepping back away from her so hurriedly he almost stumbled. Thrusting his hands in his armpits, shoulders hunched.
How about next week?
Dated August 2, the day before she sent the message to Janine that Nat had never seen but said, Mum’s not well, off up north for a bit. “Something like that, anyway,” Janine had said, twitchy. “How was I to know? Not to delete it. Silly cow.”
“I know it doesn’t look much,” he said, defensive, looking up at her from under sandy eyebrows. His wrists, bent where his hands disappeared under his armpits, were bony and thin. Poor guy, she thought, poor guy. “But that was her being keen. We’d only … I’d only seen her the week before, and if she wasn’t in the mood, she could not bother to answer at all and I’d wonder if she’d got the message or should I turn up.” He faltered, then pulled his hands out from under his arms and let them hang by his sides, waiting for judgment.
A little string of emojis, pink hearts, stars, a martini glass. That was Beth, all right, she was addicted to them.
Nat stopped. She took out her phone, because she’d kept that message, of course she had.
Sorry babe no signal here really see you soon. No emojis.
She’d bet the texts Janine had deleted didn’t have any either.
Blokes wouldn’t know where to find an emoji, would they? Let alone which ones to use. Babe was as far as he’d got in trying to make it sound like Beth. She called everyone babe. He’d only have had to sit in the corner of the pub to know that. She handed Dowd’s phone back to him and stashed hers.
“So,” she said. “Yes—I mean, I’ve never tried to fix a date with Beth, thank Christ—” Pausing then, because that was something too, wasn’t it? The number of times Beth had hinted she swung both ways and Nat never had worked out whether it was true, or just for the benefit of the lads. “But—yes. That’s her being keen.”
He stared down at it a moment. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked abruptly.
“Sure,” she said, taken aback. He busied himself with his little stove and she could see where he had everything stashed, safety matches in a tiny plastic container for camera film, a stack of aluminum camping pots all scoured, snap-lock tubs of coffee and sugar. He handed her the cup and she sipped: instant, hot, tasteless.
“What if … well,” Dowd said, the flush gone. “I mean I wonder now if she’d had someone else and ditched him and that was why she was available.”
“Maybe,” Nat said slowly, “or maybe she was planning to ditch him. A … say a day or two later.”
“There was someone,” he said slowly.
“What?” said Nat, setting down the cup carefully. “You knew?”
The flush started up again at his neck and she saw him go still, fighting it. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Every Monday,” he said. “She could never see me Mondays. She didn’t mind me wondering either, she liked looking mysterious about it.”
“She didn’t work Mondays,” said Nat, trying to remember. The second of August had been what day of the week? When she’d sent the message to Dowd. Nine p.m., on a Monday. And she had jumped ship—what day? “We last saw her the next day, the third,” she said, working hard to think. “She sent the first message to J
anine in the middle of that night, saying she was going to her mum’s. I texted her the next day and got a message back saying she didn’t have signal. Thursday.” That Friday and Saturday short-staffed and Janine grim-faced and furious.
Nat tried to make that work, but it didn’t. “No Mondays between Monday and Friday,” she said. “But maybe she’d have made a special date, to ditch someone. Maybe something happened the day before, that particular Monday, August first, she made up her mind, sent you the message the next day, maybe went round to see him again—” She stopped then, because of the misery on Dowd’s face. And this wasn’t a game. “Where did she go on those Mondays?” she said. “You know, don’t you?” He was staring down at his hands, where the skin was flaking over his knuckles.
“Did you follow her?” Nat was gentle. Poor sad Jonathan Dowd. Unhappily he shook his head. “I don’t know where she went,” he said. “But I know it was someone she had to dress up for. Lipstick, high heels.”
“How do you know that?” she asked, faltering. Dowd was still looking at his hands, and when he spoke, it was a mumble so low she could hardly hear it. “I watched her,” he said. “Through the window. I went round there and watched her.”
Something gripped inside Nat. “You didn’t follow her, though,” she said, trying hard to keep her voice gentle, level, calm.
He shook his head slowly, then looked up into her face. “I went before she came out of the house,” he said. “She was ready, and I saw her pick up her mobile phone and start to dial, and I left.” The Adam’s apple moved again as he swallowed. “I didn’t want her to see me.”
“Was she phoning someone to come and get her?” Nat was trying not to think of him out in the patch of garden behind Beth’s flat, hiding, watching.
He shook his head stiffly, his hands jammed back under his armpits. “Like I said.” He was watchful now. “I left. I didn’t want her to see me.”
She nodded. “I’m going to go to the police this afternoon, Jonathan,” she said, and he leaned stiffly to pick up her cup, then his own, then went and rooted behind his fridge, extracting a plastic washing-up bowl. “Shall I tell them what you told me?” Giving him the option. “Shall I give them your number?”
Dowd stood there with the plastic bowl in his hands. “I have to get things washed up straightaway,” he said. “I get inspected, you know. And you can’t be … living like this, you have to be organized.” She nodded, but said nothing. “You can give them my number,” he said, holding the basin against himself. “You can tell them what I think.” He swallowed. “You can tell them I think someone’s hurt her.”
And they stared at each other then, because it was the first time it had been said, out loud, by someone else. Then at last Nat turned away, feeling her throat tight. “I’d better…,” she said. “The tide.” She realized that she was more afraid now. She understood that the fear had crept outward, not just her imagination. Whoever those footsteps on the gravel outside Beth’s flat had belonged to—he was real.
She could have passed him in the street, she could have talked to him in a shop. He could be someone she knew.
They walked down to the water. Nat didn’t dare speak. The tide had come up a bit, but Dowd didn’t try to help her on the slippery surface of the jetty this time, keeping his distance, though she had the feeling he would move fast if he needed to. And when they got to the Chickadee, bobbing in the wavelets, he did hold out his hand. She stepped in, feeling the bones in his hand, the strung tendons.
He coiled the rope for her, holding it while she settled herself, kneeling to set it on the thwart neatly, taking hold of the Chickadee’s bow ready to shove her off, but not quite ready. She held herself steady, waiting. “I can give you a lift in the pickup,” he said then. “I could get to you around four. Take you to the police station?” Swallowing.
She looked at him, not knowing, not knowing. He wanted to help. He wanted to be trusted. She saw his hand holding the bow. “Thanks, Jonathan,” she said, hesitating. “That … sure. That would be great.”
He rocked back on his heels and pushed her off, standing in the same movement, and he was walking away from her. As she watched him, stiff-legged, crossing the marsh, she could only think, But you spied on her. You watched her.
She came about, the boat swung, and when she settled back on her course, there was no sign of Jonathan Dowd.
Jim’s shed was locked up when Nat brought Chickadee up on the gravelly mud behind it. The radio was silent and there was no sign of Paddy. He should be working—lunch maybe, she told herself. She stowed the sail and sluiced the mud from her feet; it was close to one and she had to hurry, her heart thumping. Things were rocky enough with Janine as it was, and when she turned into the lane and saw a straggle of cars already parked outside the pub, she began to run.
The saloon bar was empty, though, and to her relief only Steve was behind the bar, polishing glasses. “You’re all right,” he said. “She’s gone to the cash and carry, and whatever she tries to tell you, we’ve not been run off our feet.” He set the glass down. “There is someone in the garden, though,” he said. She stopped in the doorway, feeling the sweat bead on her forehead after the run. Hearing something in his voice.
“Someone who wants to see you,” he said, and leaning down, he released a cloud of steam from the little dishwasher. As Nat slipped past him he was unloading it. She pushed open the door out from the kitchen into the little garden, she took in the warm smell of earth and the big rustling canopy of leaves, but all she could think was, It won’t be her, let it be her—Beth, Beth, Beth. Dowd’s words still in her head. I think someone’s hurt her. He was very sure, wasn’t he?
Let it be her.
Nat didn’t see the woman at first, because she was kneeling behind one of the wooden tables. She saw a small ginger head tipped and looking down at something at his feet solemnly, a little boy of about three with hair that reached to his collar. He turned to look at her and she saw a trace of something, someone, she knew. Then a woman straightened and stood. A plump, anxious woman, about Nat’s mother’s age, a bit more than fifty, and all Nat thought was, Victor must have been a redhead, once upon a time when he had had hair—because apart from that all she could see in the woman’s face was him.
“Are you Natalie?” the red-haired woman said tentatively, and all her inflections, old-school soft posh, were his too.
Nat registered that she had her arm in a sling. She nodded. “You’re Sophie,” she said.
Chapter Fifteen
Was there a word for it? thought Victor. If there was a word for it and he could think of that word then everything would be all right, that awful tipping to the world would be arrested. Already, since they had begun the new drug, cautiously he thought he could detect things settling, returning to focus.
Triangulation? Setting up a stable system, bringing three points into relation with each other so you could work out where you were. He couldn’t remember who had taught him the word, of course, but that had not been part of the bargain he had made with his memory. Victor, Nat, and Sophie.
“You gave us a bit of a shock,” Lisa had said comfortably.
She was used to it, he supposed. He wondered how many of the patients on her ward didn’t get back up and take their clothes out of the little cupboard and go back out into the sunshine. Enough for it to be as much a part of her job as Special Delivery is part of the postman’s.
Mr. Hesketh. Who had, like all Victor’s teachers, worn a mortarboard and gown every day in the classroom. Had taught him about triangulation.
Lisa had been smiling and he had wondered why, weak as he was. He had just emerged, blinking and nervous, from an awful dream state that might have lasted moments or hours, he couldn’t tell, in which lights had gone off and on and alarms had sounded and a trolley with a huge and terrifying machine had drawn up alongside him, humming with menace. They had hooked something new up to the drip beside him, then they had hauled and rubbed at him.
No
w he was sitting up on his pillows, feeling like a newborn, blinking in the sunshine. Outside in the corridor he heard a scuffle, a little high cry of protest.
“There’s someone here to see you,” Lisa had said, and Victor remembered then that that had been what she had come in to say before, before all the fuss. Cautiously he waited for the word to have the same effect, but nothing happened. Well, something did happen, a little warm pulse of hope that, try as he might, Victor could not subdue, and then there she was, in the doorway.
“Daddy,” she said, a hand coming up to her mouth and tears glistening in the corners of her eyes, his little round-legged tenderhearted Sophie. And then Rufus barreled past her and flung himself forward onto the bed, giving it and Victor a jolt, Sophie gasping and laughing and seizing him all at once.
After they’d sat and she’d hugged him silently and Rufus had been given a stethoscope to play with by Lisa—no, she had told Sophie, I haven’t got any children, looking wistful and Victor thanking God, or someone, that whatever else Richard had brought into Sophie’s life, they had Rufus—he told her. Had Lisa gone, by then? He remembered her explaining to Sophie that they thought his dramatic dip in blood pressure had been down to a reaction to one of the drugs they had been administering, and that they felt they had managed to identify and correct it, and the consultant would be along later and would “talk her through it.”
On reflection, Victor thought Lisa had gone, because he remembered waiting for her to go. Wanting it to be just them, safe and tight, and no danger of any chilling hospital phrases on anyone’s lips. Sophie had eventually gone out to talk to the consultant, and he had heard them in the corridor while he sat with Rufus stretched out beside him on the bed asleep, the little warm head under his hand. He hadn’t heard the words: the tone, though, had been reasonable, a murmur which he supposed was as much as he could expect.
The Day She Disappeared Page 13