As they came inside, Nat could see the tears coming in Sophie’s eyes that never seemed far away. “Oh,” she said, looking around the little dim space, the frames beginning to tarnish already, Sophie’s overnight case open on the narrow double bed. The air was stale and stuffy. Rufus barreled between them and jumped on the bed, bouncing. They had a look around.
“No one’s been in here,” said Nat.
Sophie bit her lip. “I should have stayed, looked after it for him,” she said.
“Stop finding fault with yourself,” said Nat. “I wanted the company last night, to be honest. And it’s all OK here, isn’t it?”
Sophie nodded slowly. Rufus went on bouncing, the little suitcase moving closer and closer to the edge, and Sophie moved to pick it up. “I would love to have him with me,” she said. “My dad, I mean,” the longing welling up. Nat crossed the small space and the caravan shifted. With an effort she pried open one of the small windows and turned back to Sophie, still standing there.
“Rufus would too. We’d love it, there’s another two years before Rufie goes to school, we could make him breakfast every morning, when Richard’s—” She stopped. “But it’s just not possible.” She folded her hands across herself, clasping each elbow tightly.
“It’s Richard, isn’t it?” said Nat, and Sophie opened her mouth to protest, closed it again. Rufus was on his back on the bed, pedaling with his legs, and she reached to take one of them in her hand.
“It’s his home,” she said flatly, and sat beside him.
Nat pounced. “Is it? Actually his?”
“Well, I … he’s taken over the mortgage.” Sophie looked tense at the direction the conversation was taking. “He says it should—”
“Let me guess. He thinks it should be in his name?” Nat interrupted as thought of her own future, homeless and insecure, knocked against her. “But it isn’t yet?” Sophie shook her head, a tight little movement. Nat went on patiently. “But he only took over the payments because you gave up your job to look after Rufus?”
Sophie was pale. “Richard loves me,” she said. “He loves us.”
No he doesn’t. Nat didn’t say it. Or if that’s love, better to leave it alone. She hesitated, shifted her approach. “If he loves you he’ll understand. That you need to be with your dad, here if you have to—that might even be better. Victor might not exactly thrive if it causes … if he and Richard don’t get on.”
The flush was back. “It’s not my dad’s fault,” said Sophie, and let go of her elbows, a hand down each side of her as if bracing herself.
“I’m sure it’s not,” said Nat, more forcefully than she intended. “Look, I’ll help you.”
To leave him: better not say that either. Not yet. Nat knew what they’d say, Richard would say, you’re letting your own stuff get in the way. Then again, having a dad like hers meant she knew a bastard when she saw one.
“It’s just for a bit,” said Nat. “Getting Victor back on his feet.”
“He said you’d help me.” Sophie was uncertain. “My father did.”
“All right, then,” said Nat, wary, because she could see Sophie’s agitation.
“It’s not what you think,” said Sophie, avoiding her eye, fiddling with her handkerchief, out again. “I love him.” She was frantic, frightened. “Of course I do, we’re married. He used to be different. If he thought, if he knew I was going to leave him…” Rufus had gone still beside her, his legs flat on the bed.
“How would he know?” Sitting carefully beside her on the little bed, Nat was curious now. Sophie seemed suddenly deeply ill at ease.
“I—I don’t know,” she said finally. “He looks after me. If I buy something on the credit card, he knows. If I make a phone call, he knows. He’s … responsible.”
“You don’t have any money of your own? No bank account?” Patty came into her head then, sitting at the table while he swayed over her, fumbling in his pockets for what cash was left after the pub. It was called the housekeeping, that fistful of crumpled notes and pennies. Sophie just shook her head, flushed deep red. She didn’t answer.
“All right,” said Nat, and she felt a guilty pulse of triumph, at getting that out of her, at the image of her own blue bank card, for all there was barely a grand in there, stashed over three years at least. “All right, then.” And tentatively she took Sophie’s hand in hers. “We need a plan, that’s all.”
Beside them Rufus began to bounce, and as she watched him Nat thought again. So lucky, at her age, that he was born so perfect.
And then it hit her, winded her. Clinic 1A, Ob/Gyn, and a list of other services, Fertility Clinic. Genetic Counseling. Beth’s brother with Down’s.
“Hold on,” she said, and Sophie turned, but Nat wasn’t talking to her, she was talking to herself. No, she thought, no, no, no, no.
* * *
You had to leave a message, of course. “She’ll call at the end of surgery, is it a medical emergency?”
Nat slowed, just as she came to the junction with the little close where Beth had rented, looked across automatically, and there was a police car parked out the front, there was Mo Hawkins standing beside it. She was talking to the DS, Donna Garfield. They turned to look at her but no one called, no one waved. She walked faster, getting out of sight. And then her phone rang. Dr. Ramsay obviously knew an emergency when she heard one.
“Natalie.” She sounded genuinely worried. “What’s the—”
“She was pregnant, wasn’t she? Beth.”
Because there was no point in pissing about. Beth pregnant, and couldn’t tell Nat, thinking it would bring it all back, thinking she’d be angry or jealous or … Nat almost wanted to howl. She was pregnant. Was. Not just her he’d hurt, not just Beth.
An intake of breath. “Just tell me,” said Nat, almost sobbing. “For Christ’s sake. Mr. Sarafidis is fertility and genetic counseling. I googled him.”
“I can tell you…,” and she heard Ramsay hesitate. “I can tell you that I don’t know.” Defeated. “Please, Natalie—”
“Was she trying to get pregnant?” said Nat, and silence was her answer. “Thank you,” she said grimly, and hung up.
A baby to keep her here, Beth settling down. She wanted a baby. She could have been already pregnant. With Dowd? Did he even know? Had that been why she wanted to see him?
Nat walked on in a daze and all she could see was Rufus, on his knees in the earth, grubby and beaming, his mother opening her arms. Happy for you: I would have been happy for you. She pulled the pub door open.
She must have been early because Steve and Janine looked like she’d taken them by surprise. They were standing behind the bar in mid-conversation when she walked through the door, bar towels hanging over the brew pumps and cleaning fluid in the air, and they stopped abruptly. Not shouting, she would have heard that, but Janine hadn’t gotten her makeup on yet, which was unusual in itself; she hadn’t come down the stairs without her face on since Nat had known her. She looked strained, ill at ease.
It was Steve told her, calm as usual, but she was beginning to wonder what would upset Steve, if an earthquake would do it. “The police have been in,” he said. She thought of the look Donna Garfield had given her across the roof of the police car.
“In here?”
He shrugged. “I suppose it was nice of ’em to come before opening time,” he said and Janine snorted.
“Did they talk to you?” Nat asked.
He jerked his head. “Janine,” he said, gathering up the damp bar towels, swiping the spray cleaner off the bar. “Seems like they are looking into Beth going missing, after all,” he said.
“I knew that,” said Nat, quiet, and Steve paused, nodded.
“Yeah, well,” he said and there was a hint of something underneath the calm, a wounded note. “Bit of warning might’ve been nice.” Janine was grim-faced in the doorway to the kitchen. “It’s looking serious,” said Steve, unmoving. Watching her.
And then Nat was on alert. “
Have they found her?” she said, and for a moment her breathing stopped, images flooded into her head. Another body in the water, in the weir, bobbing, tangled.
“No,” said Steve, and his voice was thick, choked. He had to clear his throat, then it was normal again. Normal Steve. “Coppers never very forthcoming, are they?”
Then abruptly he handed his load—cleaning fluid, wet towels, two dirty glasses—into Janine’s arms. “Anyway,” he said, “I’ve got a job coming up, this next couple of days, I’ll get out of you girls’ hair. Got to be in Ipswich for four.”
Nat thought of the big container port an hour away. With the image in her head of those big rusting metal boxes stacked on the wharves, it felt like everywhere now was just somewhere a body could be found.
White-faced Janine stepped back automatically to get out of his way. Nat stared. Steve seemed unconcerned, but at the foot of the stairs he stopped. “They’ve got my number,” he said. “The copper’s got it.” And he was gone: up the stairs then back down again in two minutes with a holdall slung over his shoulder. It must have been already packed.
His rig revved in the car park and was gone, in seconds.
“They talked to him a long time,” said Janine as the big vehicle’s thundering in the lane died away.
Nat had never seen her like this. Usually when she was upset, when she was angry, it just burst out of her, she ranted and raved. Now she just stood there, stiff. Stupidly, all Nat could think of was that it was ten minutes till opening; she wanted to tell her to go and put her face on, to shake her, say, What? What?
“I thought he said— What did they ask him?”
“They wanted to know about his relationship with Beth.”
“Steve? Steve?” Nat was flabbergasted.
“I wish you’d just left it,” said Janine, turning her back but not moving.
“But you talked to them too?” Nat was confused.
And then Janine did turn back, pale and puffy. “I had to,” she said wearily, avoiding Nat’s eye.
“What?” said Nat, urgency rising. “What have they said?”
Unwilling, Janine met her gaze. “They do seem to think—” She swallowed. “The police…”
“Beth—” But Nat ran out of breath.
Janine folded her arms across herself, white-faced. “They have decided someone has done away with her now.”
The words pattered, horrible, in Nat’s head. Done away with her. In her head she saw Beth curled to protect herself, to protect her belly. Janine was hunched, avoiding her eye again. “Or something’s happened to her, anyway. And they’ve got all sorts of ideas.”
Nat couldn’t speak. She only stared at Janine and saw a bit of color, at last, rising up her neck into her face, squaring her shoulders.
“Fucking cheek of it. I told them, get me down the station if you like. Don’t talk to me like that in my own pub.” She hugged the armful Steve had loaded her with, looking down at it as if she didn’t know how it had gotten there.
“Like what?” said Nat, her face felt stiff, her lips numb.
“Like we might have wanted rid of her,” said Janine, and then quite suddenly she was set in motion, agitated, clattering, launching herself into the kitchen. Nat followed her. “Like Steve might have tried it on with her.” Dumping it all into the stainless steel sink.
“They said that?” Trying not to show what she was feeling, wanting to take hold of her and shake her, to shriek in her face. Steve?
Janine was leaning against the sink now like she might throw up in it, or it was stopping her keeling over. Taking deep breaths. Nat came up beside her and set a hand tentatively on her shoulder, feeling it drop.
“Not in so many words,” said Janine, and she raised her head just a fraction, turned it, still not looking at Nat, but her hair fell back and Nat could see fine lines, the little wobble under her chin as she spoke, shaky.
“But I could tell it’s what they’re thinking. Desperate old woman, hanging on to her man, covering up for her man.” She swayed and Nat took hold of her arm. “He wouldn’t have touched her. Not with a bargepole.”
“What evidence do they have?” said Nat quietly, and then Janine, Janine who would rather top herself than cry, was gone, lost. She dissolved in tears, her face red and sodden.
“I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I don’t know. He won’t talk to me.”
Jesus, thought Nat, Jesus, and stiffly she put her arms around Janine. It felt wrong: Janine, who never needed or wanted comfort, or at least not from Nat, her junior, her employee, a younger woman. She didn’t know what, exactly, she expected Janine to feel like, soft, shaking, frightened, but there was something wrong about what she did feel like. She was rigid.
“What did they tell you?” she said.
Janine muttered it. “What if he leaves me?” Nat took her shoulders firmly and moved her back so that she could look in her face.
“What did you tell them?” She could hear the warning in her own voice.
Janine wouldn’t look at her.
* * *
There was a trick to the walking frame: it was to do with balance. A matter of shuffling and of disregarding the associations, not thinking what he must look like. Old, old, old, and close to helpless. Concentrate: never risk falling.
The male consultant—Victor had wished fervently for the woman to return with her thick curly hair, but perhaps, in this day and age, she had a family to be with—had peered at him over his glasses, kindly. Forty years younger than Victor.
“A small bleed to the brain,” he had said, nodding, satisfied. “That was really rather efficiently contained. Of course you aren’t out of the woods yet.”
Victor had concentrated on holding himself very upright on the bed, one hand still on the frame. “Did you see anything else? When you did the scan. Whatever they are, lesions, plaques—”
The consultant had looked faintly surprised. “Nothing out of the ordinary for a man of your age,” he said, wary.
“My age is ancient, though,” said Victor, smiling, receiving no smile back. “Anything that could cause me to forget things I’ve heard, people I’ve seen?”
“No signs of any underlying condition.” The consultant frowned slightly over his glasses. “It was slightly more serious than a TIA, which can leave no effects at all, as the name would suggest, transient. You had a small bleed in your brain that stopped of its own accord: small, but close to the centers of speech and memory. So both of those things could be affected, we hope only briefly. Your speech, for example, is almost back to normal, which is a good sign.”
Hope, thought Victor, is all I have, at my age. “When can I go home?” he asked meekly.
“We need to keep an eye on you for a bit longer,” said the consultant. “I can see you’re doing well. You’re mobile, that’s extraordinary. As soon as the various agencies have signed you off. But why don’t you take advantage? Stay a little bit longer. Treat us like a luxury hotel.” Bluff and expansive now, and eager to be off.
Victor had let him go, shaking his hand, but as soon as he was out of sight Victor was leaning, rocking to get upright again and back on the move. Shuffle, shuffle. At the nurses’ station he saw someone lean back, sharp-eyed, to monitor him.
Why not take advantage? Because it isn’t safe here. There was danger everywhere: in the corridors, in the padding of soft feet at night, in the drip hanging at his bedside. It would be safer in the caravan, with Sophie, with the little boy, Rufus, who liked to place his small warm head under Victor’s hand, already.
Victor was approaching the sunroom, the big windows that needed a clean. Someone sitting in a chair at the far end raised his pulse, he could feel it, patter, patter, but the someone was old. A patient barely moving, barely breathing, mouth a little open and asleep. A man, though not much difference at our age.
We have until Friday. Richard would come back to get them on Friday.
Was Friday tomorrow? Was he getting muddled?
Victor loo
ked out over the car park, breathing carefully to slow everything down. A woman climbed into a car, a taxi pulled up at the entrance, an ambulance moved off.
Beth. And suddenly there she was in his head, as though she had just been waiting for him to get strong enough, to get back on his feet. Victor looked at her as though far off, down the wrong end of a telescope.
Beth. When it got quiet in the pub she would come and settle herself at his table while he told her about Sophie, settled, with her baby, her nice house in London. Her husband. And after listening to him, she would talk quietly, thoughtfully, not the way she talked to the men at the bar.
“Do you think even someone like me can settle down?” she’d said, not so long ago, a coaster turning between her pretty painted nails.
“Why not?” he’d said, gently. “Why on earth would you think you couldn’t?”
“I don’t set out to hurt anyone,” she had blurted out, angrily. “You got to look out for yourself, though. You got to.” He’d murmured agreement to that, something meaningless, and she had nodded, still angry, barely listening because the young never did. Restless Beth who couldn’t sit still. She had jumped up from his table as quick as a cat and back into the kitchen.
Leaning so gently against the glass he felt himself sway. Whom had she hurt? Who wanted to hurt her?
Victor watched a man walk across the car park, chilled by the set of his shoulders, the sight of his bare forearm in a T-shirt. Would he have the same thought whenever he observed a young man? He felt the darkness.
And feeling it rise, he called for someone, not even knowing what sound he made, panicked, but it was Lisa who came. She appeared in the door, half out of a light coat—she must have been outside. “Victor, Victor, really, what have you been up to?” Anxiously she peered into his face.
“Did I ask you,” he said, genuinely confused, “to contact the police?”
Her shoulders dropped, she sighed. “I left a message,” she said. “I think they’re very busy, Victor. There’s been a … well, you know. The boy who … died.”
The Day She Disappeared Page 23