And then, of course, the questions tumbled back down.
Had Beth woken up this way, how many times, a hundred? Two? Rationalizing, rearranging her fears. He could have said, We can wait. Tomorrow, I’ll be prepared. Can I see you tomorrow? Nat could feel her heart patter, she could feel chemicals running through her. You haven’t hurt anyone, you haven’t lost anything, no one owes anyone—It’s what we’re made for, ain’t it? It’s only sex.
He’d known what he was doing, with the condom too; he was practiced, everything about him had been practiced, and she had only to enjoy it: his mouth, his hands, the diagonals of muscle running down either side of his abdomen. “Let me,” he’d said, a finger to his lips, his face over hers, and she had let him. Stop thinking. Stop thinking.
But then suddenly there was movement beside her, and with a yawn and a stretch and a quick smooth movement that lifted his T-shirt and showed her that line of muscle again, Bill sat up, tugged at the pillows behind him, and looked down at her, smiling, perfectly at his ease. Nat resisted struggling upright beside him; she just turned on her back, arms over her head. Don’t think: look. Work it out. Talk.
A big metallic case sat on a table, more like a toolbox than a suitcase, and she could see black plastic and metal inside it, the curve of a big lens. His jacket—multipocketed, outdoor, waxed but worn in—hung over the back of a chair. He was used to being alone.
“What’s it like?” she said. “Your life.”
He laughed abruptly. “That’s deep,” he said, and an eyebrow went up.
“No, I mean day to day,” she said, calm. “The work, living like you do. No home to go to. You must get to like places. Don’t you ever want to stay? How long are you on location for?”
“I’ve got a home,” he said, and she wasn’t sure if he was pretending to take offense. “I’ve got a flat in Kilburn.” Laughed. “At least, that’s where I left it.” He set his head back against the headboard.
“This place has been … not like the rest.” There was something in his tone, thoughtful. And he turned his head to look at her, not smiling. “There’s you.”
“What else?” said Nat, tougher than she felt.
“Well,” Bill said, swinging out of bed and crossing to the window, tugging the blinds open and looking out, “I’ve done a couple of detective series, five years one of them, five years on and off in the same village, filming, faking it—the atmosphere, you know, looking for the right light— and all the time all you can think is how safe those places feel, you have to work really hard to get the … the fear in there.”
She did sit up now, watching him. He leaned down and pulled on some boxers, intent, thinking.
“And actors, dressed up as cops.” He raised his head and laughed. “If you could see them. The way they stand, even, the way they talk, it’s nothing like the real thing. The real thing … well, they’re different. They’re … you know, cheery and all that, but underneath…” He shrugged, three steps and he was back in the bed with her, he was leaning up on an elbow, looking into her face. “Underneath they’re cold bastards.” His finger came up and touched her cheek, and then he took it away again.
“So,” he said, musing, “five years’ filming and the first time we see real police is here, and we’re filming some ancient historical. A real murder. A body.” The smile was back, but distant. “You were down at the weir,” he said. “Last night. Where his body was found.”
“You’ve been following the case,” she said, feeling a tremor of something. Bill shrugged, still at his ease but an edge to it, a readiness.
“So have you, though,” he said.
“She was my friend,” said Nat, without meaning to shift it to Beth, but once she’d said it, she saw his eyes change and darken. “You knew her,” she said, quick and soft. “You knew Beth.” Not another one. Not him.
“Oh no,” he said, half laughing. Half warning her. “Not in the biblical sense, I didn’t.” She shifted, turning against the headboard to get a good look at him.
“In what sense, then?” Nat was stubborn, she could feel the danger.
“No,” said Bill, quite calm, watching her.
Stupid, thought Nat. I’ve been very stupid. This hadn’t been about him fancying her, that wasn’t what this was about. And she didn’t even know where he’d taken her. Had it been his car parked outside her cottage? The anonymous rental hatchback. “You knew her.”
Bill sighed. “I think I saw her once,” he said, still calm, but with a hint of edge now. “It’s how I heard about the pub. We were out in the town, some club. She was dancing. Everyone was looking at her. Nice-looking girl.”
But? Nat waited for him to say, to even hint at it. She was a slapper.
“Good dancer,” he said. “You could tell, though.”
Tell what? She said nothing, but felt her hands clench into fists.
But he didn’t say what she expected, not exactly. “The reckless sort.” Bill looked tired suddenly, then he looked sad. He put out his hands, examining his palms, and she looked too. They were rough: they showed he wasn’t young. “It’s a risk,” he said finally. “It can pay off—curiosity. No boundaries, no fear, no regret.” He sighed. “It’s exciting, sure. I’ve had girlfriends like that. I’m too old for that kind of fun. The bloke she was with looked like he was too.”
“What bloke?”
“What bloke? Just a bloke,” Bill said, then, frowning, “Perhaps I’ve seen him around somewhere. Not sure.”
“Jonathan Dowd?” She tried to describe him, but Dowd could be anyone. The invisible man. “Or a skinny guy, dark?” She was talking about Jim: Bill just shrugged.
“So.” She shifted on the bed and reached for her shirt. It was lying on the floor. He watched her put it on: as she lifted her arms, it went over her head and she was uncomfortably aware of her breasts exposed—she felt him tug at it gently to help her. She pulled the sheet up to her waist. “You knew where she worked? You asked?”
“The barmen were talking about her,” he said. He was patient, but it just told her, his patience could run out. “Her gay best friends. I didn’t ask … well, I asked about the pub. But only because I wanted somewhere I could get away from the crew.”
“What was the club?”
He told her; she knew it, and Nat dimly remembered Beth talking about two gorgeous gay guys who worked the bar. Nice for Beth, she remembered thinking that, to not be hit on for a change.
“And you came to the pub looking for her?” She could hear her voice, jealous, petulant: she told herself she didn’t care.
“They said it was a nice pub,” said Bill mildly. “And actually they did say it had the best-looking bar staff in the county. Which turned out to be true.” She looked at him. He wasn’t smiling.
“She came to your film set, once at least,” she said.
He frowned. “When? I never saw her there.”
“Oh no? A girl like Beth?”
“Lots of girls on film sets,” he said wearily, “and I would have been working. Looking through a viewfinder.”
Nat stared, not sure if she believed him, then she remembered. Shit.
“I’ve got to be back,” she said urgently, out of bed and scrabbling on the floor for her jeans. “Where … Shit, shit, shit.” She couldn’t find her knickers: she felt herself get hot, all up her back, armpits, at the thought, this isn’t me, looking for my underwear in a strange man’s rented flat. “It’s the police,” she said, head under the bed. There. She hauled them out, dusty, shook out her jeans. Dirt from her sandals on the floor. He was beside her then, holding her by the elbow as she teetered on one leg trying to get her clothes on, all of them at once.
“I’ve got to be back for the police.” She felt the strength of his grip on her, then he let go and was swiping his own clothes from the chair, picking up his keys.
“I’ll get you there.”
He drove fast, without talking, the only sound the air rushing past the open windows. At one point he gla
nced to check on her, then back to the road, and for a quick second as her eyes traveled over his hands on the wheel, a whole other life flickered in front of her. Her beside him in a car, the two of them going somewhere together, some other time, some other place. A lift to work, off on holiday. Heading home together.
You hardly know him. She looked away, out of the window.
It was early but it was hot: a different kind of hot. When they came out at the top of the slope that would take them down to the village before they turned, Nat saw the weather front coming in from the west, a line where the blue was blurred gray, a thick ridge of cloud spanning the horizon.
Bill saw it too. “Looks like the weather might break,” he said.
You hardly know him.
“Is that going to stop filming?” she said, feeling herself allow uneasiness to creep between them.
He shrugged. “Depends,” he said, turning into the lane. He came to a halt outside the cottage and applied the handbrake. There was no police car. It wasn’t even eight thirty. He turned to her. “If it pisses down, yes. Up to that point it’s a sliding scale. It’s to do with continuity.”
“You might get the afternoon off, then?” she said, then wished she hadn’t. Did he think she was … She let out a breath. Shit. Shit, shit, and shit again.
“You never know,” he said, amused, and in an agony of embarrassment she shoved the door open with her shoulder and practically fell out on the tarmac.
“Thanks for the lift,” she said, leaning down through the window, almost too late. “Just … well, thanks. Sorry.” He nodded, already engaging gear.
As Nat watched him go, the thoughts fell down one after the other, clunk, clunk, clunk. That’s that, then. He’s fed up. He doesn’t like you. And: What were you apologizing for, exactly?
In a kind of daze she walked in through the low front door and straight through to the kitchen sink, ran herself a glass of water, listening to the tap, trying to blot out the other sound. Looking out of the back window with a glass of water in her hand. The tap turned off and there it was, buzzing in her ears again, like electricity, and focusing, she saw it. The white in the trees again, not a carrier bag caught in the branches, not leaves in the wind. Too long for that, too much of it, as long as a human form.
She didn’t know how long she stood there, frozen. Then she set down the glass and opened the back door and walked out.
It was hanging in the trees: Beth’s favorite dress, her favorite ever, white, like a Victorian nightie with lace. She used to haul the front down to show her boobs, the one item of hers Nat would have liked for herself, in her dreams. The grass was soaking under her feet, but the cotton of the dress was barely damp, as though it had been hung there as dawn broke.
She reached for it, wanting to wrap her arms around it, her whole body bathed in sweat—It was hot, wasn’t it? It was so hot, even though there was no sun, the sky was gray, gray as a tin lid—and stopped herself. Just in time, because it was evidence, Remember that, evidence, and then she heard the sound.
* * *
He knew she would find it, and then the police would arrive. But there would be an interval. He gauged the interval. He put a forefinger to his pulse and felt it: slow and steady. If he remained motionless, he would be invisible, it was a trick he’d pulled off a good few times.
The police would look at the empty grave he’d dug and shake their heads. They’d look sideways at each other and when they got back in their patrol car one of them would tap the side of his head and say, “Loco.” Another hysterical female.
She knew, though, the girl knew what it meant. He wanted her to put her hands down into the empty earth, fearful, wondering if her fingers would, searching, encounter cold dead skin, a hand, lips, teeth.
He swallowed, savoring the moment. She had found nothing, but she knew, the grave told her, it was waiting to be found.
The problem with the old man had been that when the man had seen him he had been moving, not motionless. And that leaning down into the water to wash her blood off him he had missed it, that great streak under his forearm, the streak he had been looking at when—sitting on the bench, eyes closed in the sunshine—the old man had chosen that moment to open his eyes and turn his head. That was a question. Why had he known, why then? Under his finger the pulse quickened, a tiny itch of annoyance mocked him and carefully he took his finger away. He didn’t make mistakes, think of it as a practice run. Surprisingly easy, a pillow held over the face in the dark, two minutes, make it three and a weak heart gives out. The wrong heart, as it turned out. But now you’re on borrowed time, old man.
No one had seen him meet Oliver Mason, nor return from the weir, his hands in his pockets, still warm from what he’d done. He’d chosen the place well, though somewhere inside him he would have enjoyed stopping to talk to a dog walker. Hands in pockets.
He willed her to look, to raise her head and look. Look for me. I am closer. I am closer.
She was reaching for the dress.
He had not had to look for it, it had been on the floor of her bedroom under his feet as he hauled her into the bathroom. Her in that dress. So many men watching her in it. Slipping into the back of the pub just to let her know he was there, he could see. She had liked that, in the beginning.
The white dress hanging in the tree all night, it didn’t matter how long it hung there, because eventually this moment would come. She had her face against it now. Spunk on that dress. The cool fabric against his skin, the smell of her and all the while knowing where she was now, what he had changed her into. He had come in a white light, three seconds. Washed it after.
For a second, as she stood in all the green garden with her arms out like that, reaching for the dress but not touching it, by some trick of the light he saw her again, alive, and a rage jumped inside him. Alive? And with this thought he considered that there may have been thoughts that body had had, that he didn’t read. The rage ticked, he slowed it, like his pulse. No: he saw things other men don’t see, even if they could never know that. He had been inside her head. He had cut her open.
Behind him a branch cracked and his head moved before he could prevent it. An animal, ugly. Muntjac. He saw her change, her body changed, her head was still. She stared straight at him for one second, two, then at the animal. It jumped away; half pig, half deer, it bounded off behind him into the light, and her gaze shifted. She didn’t see.
And then she was turning because she heard it before he did: the sound of a car door slamming. The sound of voices. And he was gone, the same way as the muntjac, skirting the tangled hedge. Gone.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
As she walked away from the Bird in Hand—at close to eleven, when she should be starting her shift, a busy Friday lunchtime and a handful of punters already clinking glasses out front under the uncertain sky—Nat thought, on balance, that she had been fired.
Beth had pushed her luck far and often, and although Janine had made threats, she’d never fired her. A month or so ago Craig had turned up so hungover he couldn’t turn his head and had served a portion of whitebait smelling so far gone the punter had simply draped her paper napkin over it—but Janine had just told him to come back when he’d had a bit of a lie-down and a fry-up.
And now, although the words hadn’t been spoken, and although Nat hadn’t been late or pissed or talked back, she had the definite feeling there was no going back.
The police had been at the cottage twenty minutes after she made the call: they had already been on the way, said Donna Garfield as she stepped out of the car, when they got the message. The younger man climbed out after her.
Garfield looked pale when she saw it—that hadn’t been Nat’s imagination. Nat concentrated hard on looking calm, holding her arms tight across her body to stop the shaking. “I stayed with a friend last night,” she said quickly. “I didn’t want to be on my own in the cottage.”
Garfield frowned, uncomfortable. Guilty? So you fucking should be, thought Nat. But s
he said nothing. Telling them they were useless bastards would get her nowhere.
“It was there when he dropped me off,” she said stiffly, and then she realized something, not him. She was Bill’s alibi, he couldn’t have anything to do with this. He’d been with her. “I called you straightaway.” Feeling something ease, just fractionally, just for a second.
Garfield had cleared her throat then. “And the … disturbed ground.” The man she’d brought with her—the younger policeman who’d been around the first time—was standing at a respectful distance from the oblong of turned earth. He was grimacing as he looked at it. Despite her frantic excavations you could still see its shape. Or was that just her? Losing it.
“What do you think it’s supposed to look like?” Nat tried not to sound as angry as she felt. Or as scared.
“Yes,” said Donna Garfield and Nat saw her swallow. “It’s nasty.” So police officers could be freaked too. Garfield’s eyes kept being drawn back to the white shape shifting in the tree.
“We’ll get it taken down,” she said, lips compressed, and put her arm out to Nat’s elbow. “Let’s have a cup of tea, all right? While we wait for the team.”
In the cramped kitchen, jerky with suppressed anger Nat told Garfield she’d make the tea. Her place, her kettle, her mugs.
“You wanted to ask me questions,” she said, setting the mugs down. Pushing one across to the man. And DS Garfield sighed.
“We’ve identified the blood we found on Oliver’s body as hers. It matches DNA from her hairbrush. On rags used to tie his hands and feet. Looks like strips torn from a dress.”
Despite herself Nat found she had a hand to her mouth, her eyes filling. She strained to keep it all back, inside, but she couldn’t. “She’s dead,” she said. “I was right, I was right.” Hollow. She didn’t want to have been right.
Garfield leaned forward across the table, chin resting on her knuckles. “You were the one that knew, all along,” she said softly.
And then the questions. It was as if the earth hadn’t been dug, the dress not hanging there.
The Day She Disappeared Page 27