“I’m going to be discharged today,” he said.
Immediately she looked alarmed. “Are you ready, Daddy?” she said.
“It’s in hospital that people die,” he said, trying to pretend it was a joke. “The consultant said it would be fine.” He was well aware that this was not true, that there was the risk he would be found out, but the deception only needed to last a certain length of time, to convince a certain small number of people. He changed the subject. “So Richard is coming to take Rufus home? Today.”
“That’s why I left him with Paddy,” said Sophie, low-voiced. “Richard will come here.”
“If I’m discharged, you will have to stay,” he said bravely. “You and Rufus.”
Sophie opened her mouth and closed it again, thoughtful. She knew now, at least, that he wanted to get her away from Richard: he hoped it gave her strength. He hoped he hadn’t misunderstood, that it really was what she wanted too. “Cup of tea?” she said, jumping up.
When Sophie came back, Lisa was with her, walking her back to Victor so briskly the paper cup of tea was jumping in her hand.
“I was telling Lisa,” Sophie said, looking worried, “that we’re hoping to get you home today.”
Lisa sighed. “I think we’ll decide when you go home, Victor,” she said, frowning.
Sitting as upright as he could in the chair, Victor held his nerve. Leaning forward, he opened the door to his little cupboard to show the neat pile of his things. “I’ve got everything ready,” he said. “I just need the drugs the consultant prescribed. I really only need him to sign me off.” He had to concentrate very hard to get all the words out fluently, no faltering or slurring. And smiling.
“Oh, Victor,” said Lisa, glancing to Sophie for support then back to him, a little smile returning his. “It’s not quite that straightforward. We’re not letting you go back to an empty home.” Spreading her hands. “There has to be someone there, social services will insist. A care package.” She sighed. “It’s very complicated.”
And oddly, as she spoke, as she turned again to Sophie for backup, Victor had a flash of understanding out of nowhere, a profile, a face, the man walking up from under the trees raising his face. He saw the face.
And he felt his heart gather and race, faster and faster in the frail cage of his chest.
He was watching Lisa when Sophie spoke.
“I’ll be living with him,” she said, and her voice was quite firm, her head was high. His Sophie. “My son and I. We’ll be there.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The pickup rattled down the hill, swung around the corner, past the Bird. They were busy: she saw a girl she didn’t recognize, young and harried, coming out of the door with plates along her arm.
They pulled to the side of the road to eat, but they hardly got halfway through the fish and chips, neither of them hungry. They could have sat and eaten it in the shop’s car park, but Dowd had started up the engine the minute he saw her. She wondered if he ever ate—he was so thin. Wrapping the greasy bundle back up she climbed out and put it in a nearby bin. Turning to come back she saw him gazing at her.
“Did you find anything out?” said Dowd, fastidiously cleaning his hands with wipes he extracted from the door pocket. He handed her one. “From Beth’s brother.”
She shook her head, rubbing at her greasy fingers. Held them to her nostrils: the smell. “She had a boyfriend, Sam never saw him,” she said. “Well, a special boyfriend, maybe. She called him her knight in shining armor. Is that you?”
“I doubt it,” said Dowd stiffly.
And then, because it had been sitting there since she walked out of the Bird this morning with the words ringing in her ears, before she could stop herself, or think of the effect the information would have on him, she told him. What Janine had said.
“I don’t know if you know,” Nat said and Dowd turned his face to her, pale and tense. “Who Jim is? My ex.” He shook his head, waiting. “We broke up months ago.” She swallowed, knowing the date exactly, the day, the hour, the light spring evening and the hollow feeling inside her. “April.”
Janine, standing behind the bar with both hands flat, palms down on it, watching her come through the door. No sign of Steve.
“There’s something you’ve got to know,” the landlady had said, sounding like she knew it was wrong, but she was going to say it anyway. Angry, defiant.
Nat had stopped, right there in the middle of the public bar under the low ceilings, gunfight at the OK Corral. Said nothing. And when Janine said, “Perhaps it’s for the best. We all need to move on,” Nat had just turned and walked out.
“Jim and Beth had a … well. A…” Dowd was staring at her, but it wasn’t his face she saw, or Beth’s, it was Craig’s with that ghost of Beth in it. “I don’t know what they’d have called it,” she said. “A fling, a one-night stand.”
Dowd had patches of color in his cheeks.
“But you get the gist.” She felt abruptly sorry for him.
Janine was waiting for Steve to come back. Hoping. Had getting rid of Nat been part of that? Because she was stirring things up about Beth. Because there were things Janine didn’t want her to know.
“Come on,” Janine had said. “You dumped him. Want it both ways, do you? Wasn’t he allowed to move on?”
“Move on to Beth?” Nat had been contemptuous. “That wasn’t going to happen.” She felt something dangerous stir, something she didn’t want. Anger.
“Well, to have some fun, then,” Janine said, smoothing bar towels, not looking her in the eye. “Maybe he was feeling bad, maybe she looked after him.” Smoothing her own comfortable aproned front with manicured nails, Janine who knew how to look after her man. Janine who had told the police Jim had slept with Beth to take the heat off her and Steve.
Poor Jim, was all she thought now. Poor Jim.
Dowd was looking at her, in the pickup at the side of the road, the smell of fish and grease in her nostrils, and she wanted to be sick. Poor Jim, poor Beth.
Blindly, she looked back at Dowd, she took in the rawness of his face, his staring eyes.
Janine was protecting Steve. What from? The police had asked about his relationship with Beth, Janine had admitted that. But Nat had never seen Steve touch Beth, nothing but cool air between them, never seen Steve make a false move.
Was that suspicious, of itself? Steve was nowhere now. Steve had gone off the radar.
“I’m worried about you.” The voice broke in on her thoughts, Dowd’s voice, hesitant, rusty. “You need a cup of tea,” he said randomly. Did she hear panic? Poor old Jonathan, never knew what the right thing to say was, or the right thing to do, she was beginning to get the measure of him. He turned the key in the ignition.
Don’t go with him. She heard the voice in her head, she knew the danger. But she had to know.
“I’m taking you to my place.” He looked at her, waiting for her to shake her head.
“All right,” she said.
His camp was as neat as when she’d last seen it, the tent zipped, the sample fridge padlocked. “Did you ever bring Beth here?” she asked, and she saw something in his face she hadn’t seen before, the delicate bloom of something soft.
He blinked. “Once or twice,” he said, and Nat could hardly hear him. “She liked it.” He ducked to unzip the tent and reached inside.
Nat looked, through Beth’s eyes. They were in young woodland five hundred yards from where the sloping bank dissolved into samphire and mud and water. It was very green, the canopy only thirty feet or so, and the dull light fell, slanting through the foliage in patches. There was a clump of silver birches where he’d set a folding chair and from there you could look out to the water. Brown now, under the low sky, and a bit of wind whipping up wavelets, dashes of white. There hadn’t been wind in weeks, it seemed, and for a second Nat almost felt the Chickadee under her, picking up speed, hissing across the water. Without knowing she was doing it, she turned to look upriver, past the trees,
to the low clump of boatyard and houses.
Dowd came out from behind the tent with two mugs: he held one out to her awkwardly. It had the logo of a pharmaceutical company on it.
“When would this have been?” he said quietly. “Beth and your…”
She blinked at him over the tea: it smelled unfamiliar. Some herbal stuff; gingerly she sipped. “You mean—when did Beth sleep with Jim?”
They were both in the same boat now, of course, her and Dowd. Misfits, losers, the ones that get cheated on, the ones on the outside.
She shrugged. “Janine wasn’t specific,” she said drily. “Although she did say it was after Jim and I split up. Not long after.”
It was Beth all over, a bit reckless, a bit impulsive, conveniently forgetting that to some people, sex was a dangerous business.
Getting pregnant was too. She hoped, hoped, hoped, that Beth had decided she wanted a baby after sleeping with Jim, not before.
Dowd held his tea in both hands, feet slightly apart, head low. There was something about his stance, the way he was swaying, as if he was trying to stay calm.
“Might he … might he…” Dowd couldn’t quite get the words out.
“Might he have hurt her?” She made him look at her, staying calm. She couldn’t make it ring true. Jim was so patient, Jim was so kind. “I … not the Jim I knew,” she said. “No.”
“If she laughed at him?”
Nat looked at him, uncomprehending. “She wouldn’t.” Slowly, she tried to think. “Not unless someone was cruel to her. Then she’d get in there. Get in first.”
She’d seen that. Beth kicking a chair from under a punter needling some girl. You couldn’t touch her. We’re all free, Beth’s mantra. Free. And something occurred to her.
“Did she laugh at you?” she said, but slowly Dowd shook his head.
Dowd wasn’t free: look at him. A man in a prison. So as not to look she sipped the tea: it tasted weird.
She thought of something else. “There’s a club,” she said warily. “In town.” Even as she named it she thought, Uh-oh. No way. Clubs and Jonathan Dowd didn’t go together. But it was too late and so she blundered on, retelling the story Bill had told her.
“Sorry, who is this guy?” said Dowd sharply.
“A cameraman from the film set I met. He came into the pub … he … just a guy. I hardly know him.” But Jonathan Dowd was looking at her as if he knew exactly how well she knew him. And again she had that fleeting sense that she and Beth had gotten confused: Nat wasn’t the one who slept with guys she hardly knew. Was this how men looked at Beth? It felt dangerous.
She went on, bravely. “I don’t know if he was telling the truth. He didn’t know who the man was, that she was with. The club—it was that one beyond the station.” He was still looking at her: he hadn’t touched his mug of tea. She set hers down carefully. “Pink neon sign.”
There was a long quiet moment during which she heard something far off, a soft crack and rumble from somewhere inland, beyond the stand of trees. She turned to look out to the estuary, where it widened to the sea. The water was dark at the horizon, a line of steel.
“It was me,” said Dowd, and his voice was low. “She dragged me there. I don’t know why, she said something about wanting to broaden my horizons.”
Was that nasty? thought Nat, unable to stop herself, maybe it was, maybe thoughtless was cruel, maybe … Then that thought was interrupted by a sudden realization: this could have been worse. What if it hadn’t been Dowd there? If she’d rubbed his nose in Beth’s social life, that didn’t include him, all over again. And he’d confirmed Bill’s story: that mattered to her, she realized.
“I don’t drink,” he said. “Don’t do drugs. I don’t dance. I … can’t.”
She sighed. “Beth, well, maybe she really thought you’d like it.”
“Like me watching her with other men?”
He was staring down at his big hands. “Don’t…,” she said, but she didn’t know what she was asking. Don’t get angry. Don’t lose it. There was something about Jonathan Dowd—and maybe it was what had made Beth take him to some dodgy club she knew he’d hate—that was wound up too tight and small; you had to wonder. “Don’t torture yourself,” she said, and put out her hand to his arm. He flinched.
“I’ve got to go,” she said gently.
His head tipped up, his pale eyes suddenly very large, long-lashed. “Let me give you a lift,” he said.
Nat nodded: what choice did she have, after all? She could hardly call the taxi firm, get them to bump off the road into the woods. She looked around, it seemed important to look hard before she went. The tent, perfectly pegged, each guy rope straight and symmetrical. A rack of tools, a stack of metal boxes. A spade, leaning against a foldout table.
“Were you her knight in shining armor?” she asked again. “Would you have done anything for her?”
She realized that what she wanted more than anything else was for it not to be Jim, but where did that leave her? Alone with Jonathan Dowd in the woods, because she hadn’t listened to that voice. Earth on the spade.
He was pale. “I was the one came to ask about her,” he said, standing quite still with those luminous eyes on her. “I was the one that was worried about her.” He had his car keys in his hand, and he looked down at them.
“Have you talked to the police, though?” she said and his head jerked up.
“So they’re interested now?”
Nat hesitated. She could tell him, about the digging in her garden, about the white dress hanging in the tree. Part of her wanted to see his face when she described that dress and how it looked on Beth. When she let him know how frightened she had been. And part of her was afraid.
Jim said he saw a car waiting in the lane. Wouldn’t he have said it was a pickup, if that’s what it had been, if it had been Dowd’s? And maybe she couldn’t believe anything Jim said anymore. “I need to go,” she said.
And Dowd was putting out a hand to her elbow, pulling at her. She felt alarm spark as she heard the rumble again, closer now. When she looked up, the sky was still pale but thickening.
He felt her resist him and stopped. “I could take you,” he said, “wherever.” His eyes big in his gaunt face.
She looked from him to the pickup: all she knew was, she didn’t want to be here.
“All right,” she said slowly.
Pulling open the passenger door she climbed in, unwilling, what choice, what choice did she have? To shake her head, tell him she’d walk? Feeling herself scan the small space. Looking for a strand of hair, a clump of earth. She couldn’t see anything.
As they turned onto the road briefly, far ahead she heard the high whine of a motorbike, she saw a low crouched outline hit the bend fast and disappear.
“I want to go to the boatyard,” she said, her heart in her mouth for knowing she was running out of options. Knowing she was so close to feeling the way Beth must have felt when it happened. “Please.”
He stared at her.
“I want to see Jim.”
* * *
There was a boy sitting in the corridor outside Victor’s ward, with a motorcycle helmet in his lap. He looked like a boy when Victor saw him sitting there, as he said goodbye to Sophie on the open landing.
It was the first time Victor had been beyond the doors of the ward, and it smelled different, cars and fresh air coming up from below. The outside world was tantalizingly within reach. “Please,” Victor said gently, patting her hand, but as he spoke to her he was aware of the boy in the corner of his eye, sitting there as he spoke to her. His young head was bent over the helmet and a shaggy lock of dark hair was obscuring his face. He didn’t seem aware they were there.
“You should get back to Rufus.”
Sophie was searching his face. “Rufus is fine with Patrick,” she said, anxious.
“Yes, but…” But when Richard comes for him. He didn’t want to say it, to alarm her, he wanted Sophie feeling certain, not dissolved in
to nerves and panic.
The boy stood up and suddenly he was a man. As boys do, they grow—Rufus would grow too, he would turn into a man. Did boys turn into their fathers?
Someone came through the ward’s doors behind them, and the boy slipped past them, the helmet dangling from his arm, and inside.
Sophie was on her way down the stairs: leaning on the rail he could track her progress, the small fair head, strands of gray in it, her small hand on the banister. Victor turned slowly and made for the door, where he pressed the buzzer for admission, a crackle and he was inside, because they could see who he was through the long strip of reinforced glass. He had a joke on the tip of his tongue, something about the great escape, was wondering, almost melancholy, if Lisa was even old enough to know the film or indeed anything about the war it referred to, but in any case as he approached the desk, she was busy.
The boy was in front of her and she was telling him—with just a hint of sternness—that he would have to come back. “Two till five, seven till eight, only relatives in between.” She did lift her head, though, as Victor came into view, a half smile hovering, a half smile but something else, not quite impatience, but perplexity—and the boy turned his head to see where she was looking.
I know him, thought Victor, I know him, and the understanding, that old feeling of knowing a face but not being sure where he knew it from set up a palpitation inside him that radiated to his hand trembling on the walking frame and down to his legs, the old skinny shanks he needed now more than ever to support his weight. Think, think, think.
There was a warning in the boy’s eyes. A warning from a ghost. Ollie?
Think.
Not Ollie, and as he remembered, Victor had to concentrate to stop the trembling that passed through him, so that Lisa of all people should not see it and keep him there. Not Ollie because Ollie was dead.
And then with a rush of relief he knew the boy, of course he did. The one who worked in the pub. What was his name? His name was Craig. Shy young Craig, half glimpsed through the door to the pub’s kitchen. He had changed, grown taller, thinner even since Victor last saw him. Did boys still grow, at eighteen, nineteen, twenty? This one had aged, grown gaunt and hard.
The Day She Disappeared Page 29