Seven o’clock, and the surgery was dark, or mostly. A light around the back and a couple of cars in the car park, including the one Nat wanted. Dr. Ramsay drove a battered Opel, twenty years old, orange. Nat stood in the fading light, aware of the emptiness beyond the building as she waited. The receptionist emerged, giving her a funny look as she got on her bike and cycled away. Maybe she knows, thought Nat with resignation, all about my fucked-up life. Sod it.
There was the sound of the key in a lock from the back of the surgery and Dr. Ramsay came around the side of the building and stopped. Sighed, pocketing her keys. Her name was Jane, Nat knew that. Nat had sat there in her consulting room, not able to look her in the eye, heard her sigh. Heard her say, reluctant, I can refer you for a termination.
“Natalie,” she said, weary. Pushing sixty: she must be looking forward to retirement. She wore a wedding ring.
“It’s not about me,” Nat said, stepping forward quickly. The sun was close to the horizon across the empty fields, the light uncertain. “It’s about my friend Beth, she’s a patient too. Beth Maxwell.”
“Yes,” said Jane Ramsay, wary.
“She missed her hospital appointment.”
Ramsay hesitated. “Yes … I assumed she—” Stopped. “Why are you here?”
“I’m worried about her.” Nat stood her ground, blocking Ramsay’s path to her car.
“Worried? There’s no need to—”
“It was a smear follow-up,” said Nat. “I know that, she told me. Abnormalities, if she doesn’t—” There was something odd about the way Ramsay was looking at her. “What?” said Nat. “What?”
“It wasn’t … you don’t need to—” Ramsay broke off, started again. “I can’t talk to you about another patient,” she said carefully. “You do know that?” But she didn’t make a move for her car. “Are you all right, Natalie?” Concern in her voice.
“She’s my friend and I’m worried about her,” Nat said. Keeping her tone steady, patient. “She’s supposed to have gone off to her mum’s, but she hasn’t. She’s left her phone behind. I think—” She stopped. “Would you know, for example, if she had registered with another doctor? Can you tell me that much?”
She felt Jane Ramsay studying her in the fading light. “I would know, yes,” she said finally. “And she hasn’t gone to another practice.” There was a silence, and Nat felt it filling up with fear. Beth’s gone nowhere.
“Can’t you … can’t you tell me anything…” She felt her voice break, she saw herself through the doctor’s eyes. “Can you tell the police, at least?”
“Natalie…” Nat backed away, stumbling in the low sun, only wanting to get away from the pitying look in the doctor’s eyes. Bumping into the thin hedge surrounding the car park, around it, into the empty road, the doctor standing there watching her go.
It was almost dark in the road and she had to hurry to get back to the pub in time. Something weird, she thought, about the way the doctor had responded. Like she didn’t believe Nat? Like Nat had gotten it all wrong.
What had the doctor’s name been? Something Greek. Clinic 1A. She should have kept the piece of paper.
A car came up behind her, slowly. Too slowly. Barely moving, so Nat turned to see his lights on full beam and dazzling her and then speeding up so she had to jump the ditch to let him pass. Nat could feel her heart thumping as she stood, pressed into the hedge on the lonely road. She ran after that, awkward and sweating in the humid twilight and her sandals rubbing and flapping, slowing only when the edge of the village appeared.
Behind the bar Janine and Steve were all loved up, so much so that as Nat slipped in, breathless, they hardly noticed her. So much so that she wondered what they’d been up to all afternoon. So much so that she felt faintly nauseated, her heart still pounding. She couldn’t turn around behind the bar without coming across them stroking or nuzzling each other.
She got to work straightaway, but the fear didn’t go away, the queasy cocktail of fear and panic and anger that sent her up and down the bar, jittery and careless with filling drinks, in and out of the garden too fast until Janine did notice, frowning, and she had to make an effort to pretend.
The police needed to know, she’s gone nowhere. Not registered with another doctor, didn’t that mean something? And those Monday evenings. Beth all dressed up, locking her door behind her, never knowing someone was watching her, Jonathan out in the garden. Beth in high heels. When that thought came to her, Nat happened to be reaching up to the jiggers for someone’s last drink, close to closing time, and already she was thinking ahead, fearful, to the dark lane and putting her key in the lock of the cottage. She stared, frozen.
And there it was, the taxi firm’s card, stuck alongside the postcards people sent, thinking there was nothing a barmaid liked more than to be reminded that other people got holidays. Nat studied the card. She’ll have got a taxi, she thought. To wherever she went every Monday night. Staring back up at the ranked bottles she saw Beth’s mobile and in a swift movement grabbed that too, and pocketing it she heard Janine behind her. “What the … what—” and thought she’d been caught red-handed. But then the door banged and Nat turned around and stared: Craig’s mum was in the doorway, white as a sheet. A widow and a homebody, plump and kind with only a trace of Craig in her dark eyes, the only time she came near the pub was when his bike wasn’t working and he needed a lift home. She came toward the bar. As she got closer, Nat saw she was trembling.
“He’s not here, is he?” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
Setting the customer his double Scotch down and leaving his money where it lay, in his palm, Nat lifted the counter, came around to comfort her.
But Steve was there ahead of her. “What is it, love?” Big and easy, his arm around her shoulders. “You after the lad? Craig?”
“He went to the police,” she said, her chin wobbling, hardly able to say it. “He went like they asked him and they kept him in. They wouldn’t … wouldn’t let me…” She was staring, the tears streaming now. The pub had fallen silent. “My Craig couldn’t … he wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
“But they let him go?” Her head raised, trying to nod. “This morning, they said. But he never came home.”
There was a silence then, everyone waiting for someone, listening, and then Nat heard it, a sound that had been there off and on all evening, just on the edge of the pub’s noise. The sound of a helicopter, circling in the dark.
Chapter Sixteen
The helicopter had been there since Sophie got back to the caravan site, moving up and down the river, shining its light down onto the water and across the sloping fields, the black clumped trees. Rufus had asked what it was looking for and she had told him she didn’t know, shutting the flimsy little door behind them. And she didn’t know, in fact. It was only some aberrant thought pattern that made her connect the helicopter with her father, lying in the hospital, trying to tell them something. Aberrant: a favorite word of Richard’s.
There she was, on the little veneer flip-up table edged in aluminum, laughing in a silver frame, aged four and a half. Sophie could remember the dress, remember the photographer with hair greased flat on his head. She could remember her father doing silly voices to make her smile for the camera. And there were his books, along the bookshelf above the bunk where Rufus lay, curled like a dormouse with the ragged piece of blanket pressed to his upper lip, fast asleep. The navy blue clothbound Oxford poetry collections, a dictionary with a torn binding, an ancient set of sailing tours, dark red with gilding on their spines. There was his old candlewick bedcover. It felt like home, the only real home there ever is—it felt like her childhood. There was only one thing missing. He was missing. Her father was lying in the hospital.
He was alive. Sophie sat very still, concentrating on that fact and what needed to be done. Carefully she set the shiny new mobile phone down on the table, given to her by Richard before she left, the account in his name. “So I know where you are,” he said. H
is smile. “So I can always get hold of you.” She looked at it with apprehension.
What absolutely needed to be done, before it was too late. She was going to bring her father back here and she was not going to leave him. No matter what. No matter who.
“Another number for you to learn, Daddy,” she’d said, showing him the phone. “That way, it’s … easier.” She should have gotten her own phone. She should have gotten two. One for each of them, her and Victor. The thought of her failure made her clutch at her blouse, wanting to sob.
How could she? The joint bank account and Richard’s frowning face if he saw anything on it he didn’t like or hadn’t approved.
As if someone was listening to her thoughts there was a loud rattle, shockingly loud, and she jumped to her feet. On the bunk Rufus stirred in his sleep, his face contracting.
Him. It’s him. She stood, between Rufus and the door. Had she locked it? Rufus was still again.
“Mrs.… Mrs. Powell?” Not him. Stupidly, all she could think was, Not Mrs. Powell, that was my mother. It’s Cameron now. “Yes?” she said, not opening the door.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Powell?”
“Oh,” she said, recognizing the voice. She fiddled with the door: she had locked it. Good, she thought, and opening it she saw the manager of the campsite. She couldn’t remember his name—then she could.
“Mr. Wilkins,” she said. She could hear girls’ voices, raucous.
“I was just checking you’re all right,” he said stiffly. “Your father … well. He seems to think you need keeping an eye on.” He was not exactly friendly. He was frowning, and for a second—aberrant again—she thought she saw Richard in him.
“I’m fine,” she said, making herself smile, fighting the urge—not polite at all—to shut the door. To shut it on him and lock it and set her back against it. “Thank you, though. It is kind of you.”
The girls teetered past in a huddle, five or six of them all with their mobiles held up in front of their faces. “They said ten minutes,” Sophie heard. “He’ll take us all for twenty quid.” One of them looked across at her in the lighted doorway and said something. Owen Wilkins held his ground, even when a burst of laughter came from the group and they began to run, shrieking now, high heels sinking in the grass.
“Well,” he said, turning stiffly to watch them climbing into a taxi that was pulling up at the top of the site. “If there’s anything I can do.”
Sophie made herself wait until he’d turned his back, but then she was quick, and quiet. She turned the key and slid the bolts shut, top and bottom.
* * *
It was partly to distract herself from the fact that she was walking home alone that Nat called the taxi firm. They had music on in the background: she knew where the cab office was. Not far from the hospital, where all the customers were, she supposed. Cheesy music, twenty years old. Thirty.
Out of breath as she was hurrying in the dark, half the words she had to repeat. “Every Monday. Picking up from Meadow Close.”
The man sounded tired and fed up and—eventually—suspicious. “Look,” he said, “I can’t go giving out information about customers, can I? Be reasonable. And I’ve got two paying punters on hold right now, chucking out time, isn’t it? So if you don’t want an actual cab…” Another solution occurred to Nat, and abruptly she backed down, apologizing, thanking him.
The cottage was dark when she got home. Nat found herself walking more softly as she approached it, then standing inside the hedge for a good five minutes before going in. Just waiting. Listening: nothing. Not even a rustle, not even a cat slinking out of the bushes.
The cottage felt as she’d left it, just stale from sitting in the heat with all the windows tight shut. No lights on. She made herself get Paddy’s bits and pieces out of her bag, fixing another bolt to the door, another on the bigger ground-floor window. Carefully she closed the curtains, upstairs and down. Then she flopped into an armchair, dead tired suddenly, and pulled her bag onto her knee. She needed to run a bath, but she didn’t have the energy. She was sick of being on her own, doing all this shit on her own. Something made her think of that picture of Beth, the three of them eating shanghai noodles and pretending it was a dinner party just because they’d folded paper napkins into nice shapes. Three—and now there was one.
Don’t call Jim. Don’t send Jim a text just because you’re knackered and you’re lonely and you’re frightened. She got out her mobile.
There was a message on it from an unknown number.
Sorry, I know this is a bit underhand.
She stared at the number, at the words, and made herself go on reading.
Subterfuge but I asked your boss for your number. Boss? He must mean Janine. Her heart still bumping in alarm she tried to think back, the looks Janine gave her today. The message was from Bill Sullivan, the cameraman. She sat up straighter in the armchair and frowned down at the screen.
It’s Bill. I won’t contact you again unless you get in touch, but I heard you were having some trouble. Might need a friend? With a car, even.
Slowly she stood up, the phone in her hand, and went over to the kettle. She set the mobile on the counter as she filled the kettle and set it on to boil, took a mug down, got the milk out of the fridge. Sniffed it, poured.
Then she looked back at the words again and forced herself to go down a gear. Take it easy.
There was a line, wasn’t there? A line you drew around yourself, this close, no closer. A line between eager and stalker, between friend and intruder. I won’t contact you again unless you get in touch. OK, OK. The danger receded, the buzz in her ears receded.
Beth hadn’t believed in that line, not really. Or rather—she liked it to be breached. She liked that sensation, of someone stepping inside her space, she liked the danger of it. Nat thought of Beth’s mother, hard-voiced, full of dislike, cold. She thought of Beth putting herself out there, like bait, to get inside the circle, to feel the heat of another human being. Why not? It was what life was all about. Nat knew why not. Because it was dangerous.
It came back to her then, one morning leaning against the sink in the pub toilet while Beth put on her make-up. “There’s something about it,” she had said, dreamy at the mirror after a one-night stand with some guy. How long ago? Nat couldn’t think. “About finding out the things you only know if you’re close up.” Raising her own forearm to her nostrils and breathing in. “What someone smells like. What they’re scared of when they take their clothes off.”
Now Nat raised the mug to her lips, sipped cautiously. Hot.
“Scared of?” she’d said warily to Beth, though she knew exactly what she had been talking about. It was why she’d gone back to Jim after London, why Tinder made her furious and jumpy. Scared to take your clothes off in front of someone new.
“Everyone is,” said Beth, matter-of-fact, narrowing her eyes to apply eyeliner. “It’s why you have to watch yourself.”
“What are you scared of, Beth?” Nat had said, and Beth had turned that look on her, silver-eyed, and said nothing.
Now, gingerly, Nat put the phone down on the arm of the chair. All she had to do was delete the message and Bill Sullivan was out of the picture, but she didn’t do that. She thought of his nice square face, his smile. His eyes moving around Janine to settle on her.
Still, though. Janine shouldn’t have given him the number. She pulled up Janine’s contact details. Any chance of coming in late again tomorrow?
If she went on like this, Janine might just give her the push, now Steve was around more. Fuck it, though. Maybe it was time. And was it underhand of Bill Sullivan, really? No. Not really.
Overhead the helicopter was restless, moving away, coming back, looking for something. It should have made her feel safe, but it didn’t. She thought of Craig, out there in the dark somewhere. She thought of Victor in the hospital, of Sophie in the caravan, of Paddy alone with his piles of newspapers and tarnished photo frames. She thought of Beth, getting dresse
d up and taking a taxi and never coming back. But it was thinking of Bill Sullivan that she fell asleep, to the sound of the rotor blades, thrumming in the dark.
Chapter Seventeen
Wednesday
The taxi driver was chatty, smiling, breaking off only to pick up his radio. “Don, you got time for Mrs. J, needs picking up from the GP in Church Lane in five?”
Nat opened her mouth, wanting to ask something only not sure what, but Don was leaning forward to pick up the handset, clicking through to answer. “Sorry, on a run to the hospital, Linda,” he said, smiling back at Nat between the seats. “No can do.” Nat couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a taxi. Jim always used to drive her. She was relying on this guy not having been the grumpy bloke on duty last night, taking calls, but that seemed to her a pretty safe bet. A careful driver, hands on the wheel, talking to himself more than to her because he didn’t bother to seek her out in the rearview mirror.
Casually Nat steered him around to other fares, regular bookings, mentioned the pub. Eventually mentioned Beth. “My friend recommended you.” Cautiously.
“Sure, Miss Monday nights, I do that run sometimes. Haven’t seen her in a while, come to think of it. She on holiday?”
Nat made a noncommittal sound, then quickly, running out of caution, “Where was it you used to take her?” Hearing herself use the past tense.
Slowly Don made the turn. Nat watched him in the rearview mirror, but he didn’t seem suspicious, not flicking a look back at her. “Up Brandon,” he said promptly.
“Brandon,” she repeated, nonplussed. She knew the name, but it meant nothing to her. She’d never been there.
“Eight-, ten-mile fare?” he said. “Halfway to Harlow. She’d always get me to drop her at the church, I used to joke with her, was she seeing the vicar, she’d always look so done up, high heels.” Chuckling. “The vicar, imagine that. Brandon vicar’s about seventy, but they’re randy bastards, aren’t they?”
The Day She Disappeared Page 15