It had taken him a little while to steady himself to speak. He didn’t want Sophie to hear anything that would frighten her, no mush, no gibberish. Don’t tell about the man with blood on his arm: what’s important is that she stays, that she thinks it’s safe. That it is safe—how to make sure of that? Then Rufus had laid his head down and the moment had come. Victor had opened his mouth and one precise perfect word had emerged, intact.
“Darling,” he said, and he saw Sophie’s eyes widen, grateful.
He had told her to go and find Natalie.
* * *
In the end Dowd turned up at the pub earlier than he’d said, closer to three than four. Ducking his head to come through the door and seeing Nat was still working, he got himself a drink. Ginger beer: he was one of those nondrinkers who didn’t trust booze, or didn’t trust themselves, but then she told herself off for thinking that way. He was going to be driving her, of course he wasn’t drinking.
Steve had brought her out a sandwich in the garden when he came out with chips for Rufus, winking.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “She just called to say she’s on her way back from the cash and carry.”
There was something about Sophie that bothered Nat.
“Just a hairline fracture,” she had said nervously when Nat had stared at the sling, the cast on her wrist. “You won’t tell Da— Victor, will you? I told him it was a sprain, and they did think it was a sprain to start with, so stupid of me—”
And the little boy’s head going still, Rufus, there where he crouched under the plum tree trying to run his toy car up the trunk—still and listening as if he’d picked up on something, there was a key word in there, something he’d been told not to say, not to tell about.
Stop it, Nat told herself now, watching Dowd sip his ginger beer in the corner. Think you’re a flipping amateur psychologist, just because you got an A in Biology GCSE? But still. It was all she had, it was all she could do, standing behind that bar day in, day out, was watch people. Try and work it out. Which was why now and again she jumped into the Chickadee and shoved off, no matter how indebted it made her to Paddy, because she’d had enough of watching people. Couples picking fights, lads getting pissed and loud and leery, parents kicking back a bit too much and kids getting slapped. She wished Victor was back.
“You don’t get to see your dad much?” she’d said to Sophie tentatively, and Sophie’s face had drawn tight, pink and painful. She had pulled Rufus onto her knee and hugged him.
“I’d love to see him more,” she said with a catch in her voice, then impulsively, “I’d live with him if I could. Me and Rufus, we could get another caravan,” jogging him on her knee, “couldn’t we, Rufie?” The little boy wriggled back closer into her body, frowning down at the car in his hands, and Sophie sighed. Her blue eyes were faded, looking into Nat’s; not a scrap of makeup, hair pulled back, a few broken veins here and there, but sweet, pretty. All the same Nat wanted to take hold of her, make her stand up straight, look in a mirror.
You’re a fine one to talk, she told herself. When was the last time you looked? She put a hand up to her hair, self-conscious, short but clean at least. Pulled her T-shirt straight.
“London’s not so far away,” she said. “Is it? I mean, it’s holidays?” Rufus was tugging at his mother’s sleeve, pulling her down so he could whisper in her ear. Sophie hugged him closer, nodding, yes, to whatever he’d asked her and seeming to find it difficult all of a sudden to meet Nat’s eye.
“Well, yes, I … there’s my husband, of course,” breaking off, trying for a laugh that didn’t come off. “I can’t see him in a caravan, can you, Rufie?” The little boy just examined his toy with fiercer attention and Sophie looked up brightly, aiming at Nat but in fact looking over her shoulder. “So it’s just a day or two, until … well. As long as we can. You’re right, it’s holidays, and Richard might be glad of the peace and quiet.”
“You can stay with me, if you like.” Nat hadn’t known where the invitation had come from exactly, she just knew she had to keep them here. For Victor.
“Oh, no,” said Sophie, “I want to look after his place for him, he was worried—” She frowned. “I don’t know exactly what he was worried about. Someone. Something. He couldn’t quite—” She broke off, blinking back tears.
“How is he?” Nat said. “You saw him this afternoon?”
Now Sophie could look her in the eye, it seemed, now she was talking about her father and not her husband. But her face was pale and set. “There was—” and on her knee Rufus made a sound of protest. She loosened her grip and he wriggled free. She cleared her throat, straightened up. “They said there’d been a setback, his blood pressure had dropped very suddenly and they thought it might be something to do with his salt levels.”
“What’s the prognosis?” said Nat, wanting to take it back straightaway, trying to soften it. “What do they say—”
Sophie’s hand was at her mouth. “I don’t … I can’t … he’s so … he’s such a…”
“What a great dad he must have been,” said Nat, out of nowhere thinking fiercely, I wish he’d been my dad. If he’d been mine …
But Sophie’s face, so suddenly soft and lit with something, love, she supposed, took all the bitterness out of it. “He was great,” she said simply. “He still is. I used to feel sorry for everyone else at school, not having my father.”
“You’d better stay as long as you can then,” said Nat. “Don’t you think?”
Sophie blinked again then, getting to her feet, and Nat saw an overnight bag tucked under the table. It didn’t look big enough to last two people more than a day or two.
“If there’s anything you need,” she said, and Sophie had turned to her.
“He told me to come and find you,” Sophie said. “He thinks very highly of you. His speech is getting better, it must have been awful when he couldn’t … he’s such a…”
“Yes,” said Nat, and she found herself putting her arms around Sophie. “He is, he … yes.”
“Go and see him, anyway.” Sophie was rubbing her eyes now, pulling away, tugging her clothes back into place, putting her hand out to reel Rufus in. “He … it would help if you would. He wants to see you.”
Janine had been arriving as Sophie and Rufus’s taxi pulled off, scrambling the gravel in the ugly tank of a four-by-four she’d bought to impress Steve, and Nat had ducked back inside hastily to clear tables. Craig hadn’t turned up: Janine just shrugged when Nat asked where he was. Run off her feet trying to make sure she could get that hour off, all the time she was hoping. That Craig wasn’t there because he had remembered something useful and was telling it to DS Garfield right now.
Unless he’d just done a runner last night. Back home to his mum’s, to hide? The police would find him there. Anxiety ticked, ticked. Too many dangers.
Dowd’s pickup was as neat as his camp, the footwells so clean it might have been hoovered in her honor. The interior smelled of diesel and the woods. He had sat in the corner patient and wordless until she had finally, after muttered negotiations with Janine, stripped off the heavy apron and gone over to him and said, brusque, “Let’s go.” As an afterthought, “All right?”
If Beth had had a car, it would have been full of sweet wrappers and crumpled cans and scarves and fag butts. They did say opposites attract, but it was still a stretch to think of her with Jonathan Dowd. “Where did you think it was going?” she said on impulse, after five minutes of silence as he drove—careful, full use of mirrors, proper deceleration into the narrow bends—out of the village. “Jonathan? You and Beth.”
He snatched a sideways glance, then looked back at the road ahead. His hands were the regulation distance apart on the steering wheel and his narrow shoulders contracted, uncomfortable. “I didn’t think about that,” he said eventually. “I knew … well. She had to settle down sometime, I thought. I thought she might…” His Adam’s apple bobbed and Nat took pity.
“All right,” she said
. “I get it.”
She supposed she’d had the same thought, on and off. Something would happen, Beth would hit a bump in the road, and she’d take the safe route for once.
They didn’t speak again until they were at the police station. Dowd fretted over where or whether he was allowed to park and she just climbed out in the end, leaving him to it. “I’ll ask inside,” she said.
Inside though, a lot seemed to be going on. It was a scruffy, seventies building backing onto the canal in the town, seven or so miles inland. Nat supposed the canal was the same one as stretched all the way to the weir upriver from the pub, where the estuary split and dwindled, divided between a sluggish river and the black man-made watercourse she could see beyond the station. The weir where they’d found Ollie. As she walked through the dusty glass doors, two police officers were half running down the stairs, pushing their way past her and outside. A patrol car pulled up beyond the glass doors, then roared off again. The last thing, Nat decided, that they were going to be bothered about was where Jonathan Dowd put his pickup.
In any event, he came through the doors after her before she’d gotten a chance to talk to anyone beyond the duty sergeant. A chunky woman looking sweaty in her uniform collar buttoned to the neck, who’d listened impassively, then told her to wait. There was no sign of Craig.
“I’ve asked for her,” Nat said. “Donna Garfield, the woman I spoke to before.” Bypassing the two policemen who’d come to the cottage last night, on instinct.
She hadn’t told Jonathan about last night, not in his camp, not in his pickup on the way to the station: she wasn’t sure why. She’d shot a look at him as he drove and wondered, but put the thought out of her mind. Best not to say anything. How to explain it? And her reaction to it. And who could she trust, after all—who did she feel safe with? Victor, and look where he was. Beth, once upon a time.
Looming over her, Dowd was jumpy, shifting from foot to foot; he wouldn’t sit down. It occurred to her what weird places police stations were. But he had agreed to come, he had wanted to come. He paced a bit then headed to the glass screen where the desk officer sat. She didn’t hear what he said—he leaned forward over his elbows on the counter. When he turned back to her, he looked calmer. By the time he had sat down beside her there were footsteps on the stairs and a young woman in uniform was eyeing them. She was small and neat: she looked to Nat barely out of school, but that couldn’t be true. Twenty-five?
“Miss Cooper?” she said, warily. Nat jumped up.
“This is … Jonathan Dowd. He was—is—he’s a friend of Beth’s too.” Donna Garfield looked him up and down, and sighed.
She showed them into a side room; it was bright, at least. A big dusty window overlooked the canal: Nat caught a glimpse of it before Garfield gestured to her to sit. “I understand you spoke to some of my colleagues last night, Miss Cooper?” she said. “Called them out?” and Nat caught the look Dowd shot her.
Heat prickled at the back of her neck: she didn’t want him knowing, didn’t want any of them knowing, how afraid she had been. She wished she hadn’t brought Jonathan with her: she wished he hadn’t had to come into the room with them, but it was too late now. She made her voice calm. “Yes,” she said. “Can we just talk about Beth for the moment? Beth Maxwell. I want to register her as a missing person, officially.”
When she got to the part about being in Beth’s flat and getting the feeling someone was watching her through that big window—out of the corner of her eye she saw him shift in his chair and Donna Garfield paused, her pen hovering over the notebook a second, before she methodically went on writing. And Nat went on talking, telling her everything, about the phone, the underwear, about Ollie fancying Beth. She even told her what Craig had said he’d overheard, the lads in town teasing Ollie about his imaginary girlfriend. At that point Donna Garfield frowned hard and held up a hand to stop her while she scribbled fiercely, dropping the hand to allow her to continue. Nat hoped she hadn’t dropped him in it, somehow. It was only when Nat finished that Donna Garfield addressed Jonathan.
“And you, Mr. Dowd?”
He colored. “Well, I’m mostly just the chauffeur,” he said, but it fell flat: they both just looked at him and his shoulders dropped. “I haven’t seen her in a month. We had an … on-off thing.” Donna Garfield’s mouth twisted, but he went on, bravely, Nat thought. “She wasn’t serious about me—but that doesn’t mean I can’t worry, does it? I’m here because I think Nat is right and no one seems to be listening to her.” He avoided Nat’s eye.
“Jonathan thinks there was someone else,” said Nat. “She was seeing someone else.”
Donna Garfield looked at him a moment then nodded. “Well, that happens,” she said. “Any idea who?”
He shook his head unhappily. “Monday evenings,” he said. “She went out somewhere every Monday, that’s all I know.”
“Yoga classes? Zumba night?” The policewoman’s head was on one side, skeptical. Nat wanted to stand up and shout.
“I don’t think so,” said Jonathan.
“She wasn’t the yoga type,” said Nat angrily. “Look, don’t you … don’t you understand—” Her voice rising, uncontrollable.
Donna Garfield’s palm went up again to shut her up, not looking at her, just going on making notes. Finally she looked up. “And what about the phone,” she said, and when Nat stared: “Miss Maxwell’s mobile?”
Shit. Oh, shit. “I’m sorry,” said Nat. “Shit. I should have picked it up. I was … we were—” In too much of a bloody hurry.
“It’s all right,” said Garfield, cool. “Someone will be coming over. Now.” Expressionless. “I’ll pick it up when we’ve checked out your story.”
“Check out … as in…?”
“Verify.” Nat opened her mouth then closed it again. As in, make sure it’s true. She nodded.
“So,” said Donna Garfield, closing her notebook. “Her mother hasn’t seen her?”
“No one’s seen her,” said Nat. “And someone came to her place that night while I was there, I’m sure of it. I think it was someone who’d been using her phone to send messages. I don’t know if he—”
“Or she?”
Nat held the policewoman’s gaze as she tried to think clearly. “I don’t know,” she said eventually. “I heard … I heard a car.” The woman stared at her, flat-eyed. “Parked outside, just waiting. I think he…” Garfield’s eyebrows lifted just a little bit; she pressed on. “I think he knew I was inside. I think … I think…” And she stopped then, cold suddenly. “This morning I found a … a piece of Beth’s underwear in the cottage I’m staying in. She used to live there, but I’m sure … I’m sure it was put there by someone.” That skeptical look, it forced her on. “I think…” But it wasn’t that she thought. She knew. “I think he’s hurt her.” Or worse. Nat didn’t say that, and the more she didn’t say it the harder it grew, at her center. Killed her. “Whoever he is. And he wants me to know it.”
“You.” That flat-eyed, disbelieving look.
“Yes.” Staring back.
And now he wants me. Now he wants to hurt me. Tell them, tell them, tell her. But she couldn’t: she didn’t like the way it sounded. Pathetic, frightened. “This is about Beth,” she stated. “This isn’t about me.”
Donna Garfield leaned back in the chair and Nat couldn’t believe she’d ever thought she was young, her level gaze, the grime visible on her collar, her indifference, all said she knew too much about the world. “If you say so,” she said. “Have you got a picture? Of—ah—Beth?”
On the low chair beside her Jonathan Dowd dropped his head, and drawn by the movement she saw him look pale and shaken. Feeling sorry for him then, she patted his shoulder and caught Donna Garfield’s eyes narrowing, just for a second. She took her hand away and pulled out her own phone from her bag. Under Donna Garfield’s eye she scrolled through her pictures. Flowers, a cloudscape, the estuary, she couldn’t remember having taken half of these, what was she, an idiot? J
im. Jim smiling. Jim half asleep behind a newspaper. Jim sailing. There. She held up the little screen.
Beth’s wide mouth, lopsided smile, the stippling on her cheeks so light you’d only see it if you knew. Beth’s blue-gray eyes, narrowed, watching, laughing.
“Where was this taken?” asked the policewoman. The pictures on the walls in the background, the useless little balcony, the shiny new kitchen.
“Somewhere I used to live,” said Nat. She couldn’t take her eyes off the picture. She’d forgotten that, how Beth’s eyes could look, like metal, silvered and reflective. She’d forgotten that evening altogether. Beth had come over for a meal, with Nat and Jim playing at grown-ups, and they’d all laughed, like something off the telly, trying to impress, a dinner party. Nat had found out she was pregnant three days later. Was that why she’d forgotten? Sometimes life divided: that bump in the road. You had to choose which way to go.
With Beth, what had it been? That hospital appointment, had it made her do something reckless? Say something? What had taken her away from them?
Donna Garfield was telling her the number to send the photo to and Nat remembered Beth liking the photo, asking her to send it so she could put it on Instagram. Nat didn’t do that stuff. Once the picture was sent to Garfield’s number, she put the mobile back in her pocket, feeling Jonathan’s eyes on her. And then it seemed to be over, then they were outside, and Nat had to stop herself gulping the air, clean fresh air, it seemed, after the inside of the police station, for all they were just off the ring road and you could smell the canal.
“Jesus,” she said furiously, both hands clutching her head. Dowd had looked alarmed, hurrying around to the other side of the pickup.
He had dropped her with barely a word and roared away. Not at the pub: at the little modern building half a mile outside the village that housed the GP surgery. They’d thought maybe the village would expand, but it hadn’t, and the building sat lonely in a field. “This’ll do,” she’d said. He’d opened his mouth then closed it again, at the warning look she’d given him. You don’t ask, do you? Why someone needs to see the doctor.
The Day She Disappeared Page 14