“We can start again,” he said and she could hear all the effort it took to make his voice sound reasonable, not pleading. The low red sun hit the mirror from behind them as they turned toward the estuary, the sky streaked shocking pink and purple from edge to edge. The days were shortening: it was September tomorrow. September was when the world changed, the holidaymakers went, there would be rain. She’d been in Janine’s cottage in a downpour, she knew the dripping dark, the sudden damp chill in everything—shoes, jumpers, tea towels.
“We can try again.” There was the slightest movement of Jim’s head as he resisted looking at her. “We can start again—we can start a family. I love you, no one’s … nothing terrible has happened. Nothing that can’t be undone.” He swallowed, but kept his voice level. “I can’t live without you.”
She held herself still then, unable to open her mouth because it was too complicated. No one’s died, he’d been going to say, but had stopped himself.
I love you, Jim. I want to keep you safe. But we should never have, we should never … I should never …
You don’t stay with someone just because you feel sorry for them.
You don’t get rid of a baby just because you panic.
Only sometimes you do.
And then he turned and looked at her, his eyes bloodshot, his brown face too thin.
“I—I’m sorry,” Nat said. “I’m sorry, Jim.”
For a second she felt a vibration, as if he understood, and in the next second she thought what he understood might flip him back into anger, or misery, but then he sighed, his shoulders dropping. “I heard you’re worried about Beth,” he said in a monotone, head down.
“She’s nowhere. She left her phone, she left her stuff…” She hesitated. “Even the police look like they might be taking it seriously now.” She went over it all and she could tell he was really listening. Maybe it was a relief to be talking about something else.
She told him about the blood on the cloth tying Ollie’s hands being a woman’s, and then Jim turned to stare. “They know that stuff?” he said. “They can tell? They really think she’s…” She could hear the panic in his voice and she felt sorry for him. She sat back in her seat and he looked ahead at the road again, both quiet. The hedges were black on either side of them now.
“You need to be careful,” Jim said as he leaned forward at the last junction, into the village, checking both ways. “I mean it.” And hearing something new in the way he said it, Nat sat up. His voice went lower. “I mean, I understand, the way things were when we … we split up, but it isn’t safe, that kind of life, Beth’s kind of life, guys you don’t know…”
And Nat had frozen then, understanding that he meant her, he meant Tinder, that it had gotten Beth into trouble and it would get Nat into trouble too. They’d only have themselves to blame and he was pretending to sympathize but she knew him too well, she could hear bitterness—and she felt anger boil up inside her. Two Tinder dates? What the fuck do you know about it? She turned to look at him, ready to say it, but she didn’t. She had turned her head back, slowly, and said nothing. She could tell he was anxious, mortified, by her silence when he said, “Nat?” fearful, coming to a halt outside the Bird, but she didn’t trust herself to say anything. She got out and slammed the door and left him there.
“All right, darling?” The punter had a red face, a beard, one of the fishermen and pleased as punch with being able to hold four empty glasses in his two hands, setting them down on the bar in front of her. Nat knew the next thing out of his mouth would be Cheer up, love, it might never happen, and she wouldn’t be answerable when it was.
“Same again?” she said, stretching a smile across her face. Not his fault, was it? Then again, it could be. Could be any of them.
His face fell, just slightly. A wedding ring embedded in a fat finger. Bluffing back up to cheerful. “Well, if you insist.”
As she held the glass steady against the pump and looked down at the amber liquid so as not to look into the man’s daft red face, something was bothering her. Something Jim had said? Something Jim had done? Something wrong, something right, what had she seen? Or heard, or remembered. It tick-tick-ticked down in her head: What, what, what? Something to do with Jim. When he’d been listening to her so carefully, when she’d been thinking about the cottage, their old place, Jim’s flat with the big windows and rain, and a table laid. A table laid for dinner.
Could be any of them. Nat set the pint down on the bar cloth and started on another.
And then it struck her, she felt it cold at her back: these were the men Beth saw. Regulars or transients, fishermen, locals, holidaymakers, they came in here and saw her. Up here at the bar with their banter or sitting quiet in a corner, watching Beth in secret. Wanting her.
Could be any of them. It could be a punter, it could be someone working at the residential home she visited once a week, it could be Bill or Steve or Craig or Jim. Could be someone Nat had never met.
She felt her hand suddenly cold and looked down to see the glass overflowing. He could be in here right now. She set the glass on a tray, dazed.
If the blood they found on Ollie isn’t Beth’s. She clung to that for just a second, a tiny window of hope she tried to build on: she’s just walked away, left it all behind. Christ knew, Nat had been tempted herself, since … since. Say it. Since the termination. Start again. And what?
The fisherman handed her his money, giving her a funny look, and took the tray. She turned to the till.
But why would Beth go? Nat tried to remember those last days. A Wednesday night, she’d disappeared, off to see her mum. Thirty-six hours earlier, she’d gone to see her brother, as usual. And said nothing, to him or the staff?
Who would she have talked to? To Victor, to Paddy, to her brother? Victor and Paddy knew nothing, nor did Dowd. And then there was the hospital appointment. Dr. Ramsay had told Nat not to worry—but there’d been something weird, something shifty about her answers. Hospitals didn’t dish out appointments for nothing, did they?
The car that had come up behind her in the lane on her way back from the surgery, dazzling her. Something wrong about that. Too slow, lights on full beam then speeding past, trying to scare her.
Looking across the hot, crowded room she felt suddenly as though they were all avoiding looking at her. She’d drawn attention to herself, thrashing around, shouting that something had happened to Beth. Some of them were embarrassed by it, some of them thought she’d lost it, avoiding her eye. But of all of them, one of them knew she was right. The one who had walked up the path to Beth’s place, knowing she was behind the door. Who had placed Beth’s bra where she would know Beth hadn’t left it, hanging inside a dead animal’s skin.
Who was watching her.
Watching her run herself ragged here, there, and everywhere, hospital care center, cadging lifts off Steve and Dowd, paying for cabs, begging to be heard. Grilling poor old Victor. Seeing it from the outside, like that—the way the police saw it, maybe, the way all this lot saw it—Nat felt anger and frustration rise. She knew what he was up to, whoever he was. Like Sophie’s husband, Richard, waiting for her to break down so he could laugh, seeing her get nowhere, and he was waiting. Just waiting.
She felt a sudden rush of fear. Waiting for what?
“Jesus bloody Christ, Nat.” It was Janine, planted in front of her, a box of chips in her arms, disbelieving. “You could turn the milk with that face. Sort it out, will you?” Then she was looking past Nat to the door, and sighed. “And here’s another one of your charity cases. When you going to learn?”
It was Sophie, standing in the doorway, looking around, blinking, and Rufus pressed against her. As Nat’s heart began to sink at the complication they represented, Paddy was already on his feet in the corner and Sophie was turning toward him, not to Nat at all. They edged across to him and Nat saw Sophie register Janine, watching.
“I asked her,” Nat began. “I know it’s late. He’s a good kid, though. Victo
r—” Janine shook her head impatiently. Not child-friendly, after eight in the evening, wasn’t Janine.
“If he’s quiet,” she said, tight-lipped, and she was around the bar and asking them for their drinks order.
When Nat looked over again they were settled in for all the world like a little family, Paddy’s dusty gray head bent as he explained something to Rufus using coasters. Then, like a token in a slot, like the three apples in a row, with what almost felt like a click, Nat knew. What it was she’d been trying to remember.
The place laid for one, at her table. Jim.
A dinner party, that dinner party, their only one, getting ready in the bright glass-walled room. Laying the table, only she’d had to go around after Jim and do it all over again. You didn’t see it at first, what was wrong, you had to look a few times, and that night in the cottage with her heart battering like a runaway engine at the sight of the table laid for one, she had not been looking. And had the policeman asking her about her ex just got her hackles up, stopping her from seeing clearly, or had she wanted to protect him? Had she known even then?
It was quite simple, really: the knife and fork reversed, set the wrong way around, under the low-hanging light in the cottage.
Which was how Jim did it—being left-handed.
Jim. Jim. Jim. And that face rose in front of her, thin and dark, staring at her, pleading with her—and it was a stranger’s face. A Jim she hadn’t known after all. Starting backward from the bar so quickly she almost trod on Janine standing behind her, she muttered some excuse or other, aware of Janine’s stiff, angry face following her out into the kitchen, then on into the dark garden, where she pulled out her phone.
The phone only rang once, as though he’d been waiting for her.
* * *
The lights had been dimmed on the ward and they lay there, none of them asleep, most of them sedated one way or another, or just obedient. You could tell that they were awake, from the shifting of legs, the sighs, but no one would speak.
Victor was obedient too, or at least he wished to be, it seemed the best way of getting out and home again, although as he lay awake in the dark without a book or a radio or any means of feeling as though he still occupied the world, the thought hovered, just on the edge of his field of vision, that the opposite might indeed be true. Obedience to the dimming of the lights and the removal of the world and all its entertainments might be just settling in to wait for the end, making no trouble, preparing for the moment at which one disappears.
Of course, you didn’t get to his age without wondering, peering over the edge to see, what those last hours, minutes, seconds, might look like. But Sophie needed him to hang on; Rufus did. The warmth of Rufus’s small body perched unselfconscious on the bed beside him, wriggling down to find a comfortable spot, had told him, perhaps he was still needed.
He stirred, uneasy, thinking of Natalie, and Sophie. Would she understand, would she see it wasn’t Sophie’s fault? She had been in love with Richard, poor trusting girl, and when she understood what he was it was too late and Victor had not trained her to assert herself, or to point out others’ cruelty. He had to trust that Nat would see.
They had carried out some maneuver between them, hadn’t they? Because Richard had come in to kneel and mutter angrily in Rufus’s ear, but then he had gone, back to London in his big fast car. Sophie had been red-eyed and breathless, it had cost her something that perhaps she would not tell him, but Richard had gone.
A walking frame had been left beside the bed—for the morning, they had said. Richard had gone but something like him still hovered, in here, something sat in the dark, murmuring out of sight in the shadowy corridor. He put out a hand to feel the cool metal of the frame. The water had tasted strange, the jug that someone had refilled in the night, and then he had felt that sinking, that ebbing of his capacities that they had put down to his medication.
A nurse, or someone else? Had Owen Wilkins come in, unnoticed, was there someone else, who could walk through the wards and no one would stop him—or her? Someone who didn’t understand what Victor knew, that when the body failed, the other instinct strengthened, that sensed danger like a soft shadow creeping outward from a corner.
On the bed Victor eased himself upright, feeling his body respond, a little bit slow, but true, surely, all nerves and muscles present and correct. Trying not to make any sound. His legs over the side and the soles of his feet on the odd warmth of the linoleum. He felt for slippers, gave up quickly. Not necessary. Weight on his arms, trembling, and he was upright. Three days in bed, four, and he was down to half strength, perhaps more—but caravan living had trained Victor: the morning walk for the newspaper, afternoon down to the water, evening to the pub twice a week and almost never accepting a lift, there or back. A good mile’s walk. He had the strength in him, he only needed to coax it out. Up: he was up.
There was a solitary male nurse on the night desk, but he didn’t turn his head to look after Victor, and when Victor paused to catch his breath and fully expected to be sent back, he saw that the man had earphones in. Not allowed, of course. He didn’t know the man, had not seen him before. He would have guessed him to be Filipino or Malaysian.
Down the corridor, rocking step by rocking step. He could hear Sophie, bewildered, Daddy, what did you think you were doing? and he wasn’t sure he could have come up with an explanation except the climbing, rising feeling that if he stayed in that bed he would die. If he made no effort, they would come for him. It would come: the man with bowed head and blood on his arm walking up from the darkness would come and hold a glass to his lips, and unprotesting, he would sink back on the pillows and die. He reached the door of the big bathroom, and with a trembling hand he pushed.
It was heavy and Victor had to inch ahead painfully. Halfway through he heard the swish of another door, down the corridor, around a corner, he heard voices—but then Victor was inside and the weighted door swung silently to behind him.
His heart pattered as he stood just inside the door. Some yellow outside light was cast through a high window and he could just make out the big open shower stalls. Nowhere to hide in here but there was one door between him and them. He heard the voices, murmuring.
If he fell, if he fainted. Down on the cool-warm linoleum, his cheek against the floor, snap snap snap would go his limbs like old dry sticks. They would push inside and take him back to the bed, and there he would stay.
Balancing himself between the walking frame and the wall, Victor held steady and upright, breathing quietly.
Polite inquiry, two men talking, although he didn’t know what they said. One making conversation, working his way around to something, the other responding in an accented voice that identified him as the nurse. The one probing—Victor knew him. Something in the timbre of the voice, the low laugh. Knew him, but didn’t know where from.
He could come out and identify him, the man he’d seen walking up from the river, or he could hide until he had gone. The man who had come for him.
Would he ask the nurse, You know you’ve lost one? Bed number twenty-three, AWOL? And set off all sorts of alarms, there would be running feet. But all was quiet: the hunt not worth his while, then, or not part of the plan. Or all in Victor’s failing mind.
Victor stayed where he was in the dark until the voices fell silent again, and for some time afterward.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“It was you. What did you think you were doing?”
She didn’t care who in the pub’s scruffy garden was listening. A couple holding hands under the weeping willow at the end, and a disheveled mother walking a baby up and down and too knackered to pay any attention.
On the phone Jim sounded frightened, he babbled. He denied it. Didn’t know what she was talking about. “I love you,” he said, in desperation. Anything but admit it.
Nat hung up on him.
Walking back into the pub not quite in control of what she was feeling—stupid, stupid Jim, stupid and frighteni
ng too, just a bit frightening for him to have done that and then deny it. And why? To what end? Looking after her. She knew how Jim’s mind worked. See. Here. You need to eat properly, you need order in your life, you need me. It was him needed all those things.
Here’s a place laid for you.
The table laid just like when they lived together—only just for one, to show her how lonely she was. How lonely they both were, without each other. But as she pushed the phone back in her pocket, the thought of the flat they’d shared, the wharf development with the balconies facing a dull stretch of the canal, Nat felt like she was suffocating. She came through the back door behind the bar and there was Jonathan Dowd, waiting to be served. Elbows in, hunched, and Janine pushing him over a bitter lemon. Not another one, was all she could think, as bad as Jim, with that awful look on his face.
Janine eyed them, pursing her lips, then something broke out in the corner, a bit of argy-bargy with one of the fishermen trying to grab another’s phone off him and she was around the bar to sort it out and leaving Nat and Jonathan Dowd to it.
What look did he have on his face? Cool, determined. Like he was the only one keeping his head. That would have sent Beth off on one, for sure: if there was anything she couldn’t stand it was being patronized. For her five GCSEs and her ragged fingernails and her dodgy dye job and her infuriating tendency not to feel sorry for herself, ever.
“Look,” he said, leaning in over his bitter lemon, “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to think … badly of her.”
“Tell me what?” Nat kept calm, but it was boiling up. She drummed her fingernails on the bar top.
“It wasn’t exclusive. She was … she—”
“She slept with who she wanted.” Her fingers were still. “I don’t think badly of her, Jonathan.” She wondered if he could hear how angry she was. Maybe he could, for all that: he bent farther over the bar, his voice going lower.
The Day She Disappeared Page 20