Whoever it was seemed to be having trouble getting the door open, but the driver didn’t get out to help him. Then it was open and the passenger half fell out on the forecourt, righted himself, turned around and around. A paramedic leaning against a waiting ambulance pushed himself off and took a warning step toward the man—but then Lisa had taken Victor by the arm, drawing him back from the window.
“Best get going,” she said. “Don’t want to keep anyone waiting,” and Victor heard the panic in her voice.
The minicab was still there, though, when the doors slid apart to let Victor out, and he took a breath of outside air. There was rain, rustling in the air, he felt wet on his cheek. The car sat there, waiting, and for a second the prospect of the freedom he had waited for so patiently, had planned for so carefully, only made him afraid. He turned back to look for Lisa, but she had disappeared back behind the wide glass sliding doors. Go on, he told himself.
The driver didn’t get out for him, either. Victor only saw the dark shape of a head and shoulders as the man leaned back over the front seat to reach for the door handle and the door swung out.
As he climbed in a motorcycle turned into the hospital car park. Victor heard it before he saw it, the insect buzz of one of those trail bikes, with the high seat, meant for teenaged boys to roar up and down dusty hills on. Crouched in the back seat Victor looked up out of the rear window, aware of how small he had become, how shrunken—the rider turned to watch the cab go. Only at the last minute did he meet Victor’s eye, then they were obscured by a medical van delivering something. Then there was an ambulance moving to meet it, then there was an altercation that Victor heard as they moved past it. Raised voices, the bike’s rider a man—a boy—reaching to pull off the heavy helmet with its menacing visor.
Looking for Victor, a message in his eyes, the same boy, the same message. His head shaking. No. No. No.
“All right?” said the driver, picking up speed, not turning his head. “We know where we’re going, don’t we?”
Chapter Thirty-One
There was something wrong. The wind was fierce and steady, blowing hard. Nat was fighting the tiller to hold her course—and now she didn’t even know if she’d been heading in the right direction to start with.
Jim. She should have gone, even if she had no idea what he’d taken, or when. Could she trust a taxi driver to explain? Of course she couldn’t. Couldn’t trust anyone.
And behind her on the beach, what bothered her was the suitcase, sitting there, Sophie and her husband. Had he chucked her out? Did he have a plan? Her head ached under the low sky, with trying to make it make sense.
And there wasn’t any escape, either. The Chickadee was sluggish, low in the water, she wasn’t handling properly. The wind and tide were dragging her, and the tiller just wasn’t responding and Nat didn’t understand why. Her head felt as sluggish as the boat, overloaded. More of the boat below the water, so the wind had to work harder. And the wind was offshore, the tide beginning to run.
Nat looked back at the land, searching it, the trees dark from a summer of sun, the bleached fields. He was there somewhere: the man who had taken Beth, who had hung her white dress in a tree. Who had dug her empty grave under Nat’s kitchen window. Nat hadn’t gotten him, she was only running away from him. And with that thought she had the weirdest, most horrible sickening feeling that he had come after her, he was in the listing boat, he was under the boards, in the tiller that resisted her. She sat up straighter on the stern thwart, trying to get a better view, and as she saw the clump of trees that concealed Dowd’s camp and a pale spot appeared, standing there—in the same moment an answer unfolded itself. Stupid: so obvious.
Had he done it while she was behind the shed, talking to Paddy, kneeling to talk to Rufus?
You’d have to know me, that was the thought that chilled her, that curdled her. You’d have to know what I would do when things get shitty, that I would climb in the Chickadee, just fuck the lot of you, I’m going.
“Shit,” she said savagely, to no one.
And he did, didn’t he? She’d let him get to know her.
You’d have to have watched me.
She wasn’t going to make Sunny Slopes.
Across under the trees she saw the pale spot emerge, become Dowd, and he was walking out toward the sea wall and the jetty. The wind was blowing steadily offshore now and the sky was lowered, bruised cloud down to the horizon. Then to the right, inland, a flash flooded the sky, lighting up inside the cloud and down to the land. Sheet lightning. On reflex Nat began to count.
One thousand, two thousand. You needed to count to know how far off the storm was: every second two hundred yards, something like that. She got to ten before the thunder came, a long rolling crack, deafeningly loud, unfurling across the trees that were tossing now in the wind, black and silver.
And the suitcase. The suitcase.
Dowd had gotten to the jetty, his arm raised above his eyes. He was watching. Nat half stood on instinct, showing herself, even if it was the wrong thing to do, even if he wanted to see it was her, even if she would be making herself a target for the storm. Standing told her something, though, the way the Chickadee slid under her—clumsy, heavy—would have told her if the sickening tepid slosh of bilge water over her feet hadn’t, even if she hadn’t already guessed. This wasn’t a matter of boards opening a bit in the heat.
The suitcase.
It had been stained at the bottom. Nat felt a thump in her chest as she understood. It wasn’t mud, or tide. It wasn’t Sophie’s suitcase. It wasn’t stained with mud, mud wasn’t that color.
And then with a lurch and a gasp Nat was on her knees, soaking, groping for the baler, trying to find the source of the leak. Did she even check that the plug was in? No, of course she didn’t, too much of a hurry to run away, from Jim, from the taxi driver with judgment in his eyes and his hand out for her cash. She felt under the slimy water: yes. The plug was out but that wasn’t all. She was leaking somewhere else. Not just in one place, either, and there had been no leak the last time she sailed, tight as a drum. The size of her mistake ballooned in Nat’s head.
Something popped up from under a thwart, jaunty orange plastic, with a handle. The baler.
Right. Right.
Nat grabbed it, sat back on her heels in the bottom of the boat, hauled the mainsheet up over the hand that held the tiller, set the bow toward the shore, and with the other hand she began to bail, frantically.
When she looked up, Dowd hadn’t moved on the jetty except his arm was down now. He had his hands in his pockets.
She waved the orange baler, frantic. Nothing.
The suitcase must have been under the tarpaulin in the back of the pickup. All that time. Beth.
In her pocket her phone rang and in the same moment she felt the lightning as much as saw it, a fork this time, a mile high. Falling back on her arse in the water with the mainsheet tangled around her hand and the tiller swinging free, the baler between her knees, she began to count again, stupidly, pointlessly. The phone was in her hand.
It was Jim. The crash of the thunder—five seconds this time, getting closer—meant she didn’t hear what he said straightaway, but she had already seen his name on the screen. She realized as she spoke into it that she had thought it would be Jonathan Dowd, phoning to goad her, to tell her what, why. To tell her what was in that suitcase he’d kept under a tarpaulin in his pickup.
“Jim,” she said in despair, and sitting there below the gunwale of the boat she’d always trusted and feeling its fragility, feeling the surge of the water pressing against it, trying to pull her down, all she could think of was, if this was it, she’d better talk to Jim. She let the mainsheet run. Sod it. Listen.
“You called me,” he said. His voice was slurred with need and she could feel herself losing it, losing patience with him, desperation climbing as she struggled to be kind. “Jim,” she said again, pleading. “Have you got to the hospital? Did he get you there?”
/> Don’t give up. Don’t give up.
He sounded weak, his voice strained, wandering. He was saying something about the taxi driver. “Help me,” she said. “Get the lifeboats out, someone’s scuppered the dinghy. It’s too far to swim.” Her hands were cold, the phone slippery and Jim didn’t seem to hear her, he didn’t seem to be listening because he was talking about a car.
“Please, Jim,” she said, and then his voice was suddenly clear, certain.
“The car I saw, outside your house that night,” he said.
Noise behind him, an alarm beeping, hospital noise. “Get the lifeboat out,” she said, but her voice was too weak.
“There’s something I remembered,” Jim said and she could hear how hard he was trying. “Only not until I climbed out of the taxi at the hospital. That was it, you see, I saw it and I remembered.”
“Saw what?” The water was lapping up her back, under her shirt. Nat didn’t dare raise her head to see how little freeboard there was left, but the water told her anyway: a wave sloshed in over the gunwale at her cheek. Too low at the stern. Nat tipped herself onto her knees and began to crawl forward. “Saw what, Jim?”
She let the mainsheet fly: all she could hope was that the tide wasn’t in full flood yet, that she wasn’t already at sea.
“Silver car, just like the one brought me here. With that thing screwed on below the number plate at the back. Licensed taxi.”
* * *
“Do you mind?” said the man, leaning down to turn the music up.
Bach, thought Victor, and looked in the rearview mirror for the taxi driver’s face—but his head was down as he reached for the CD controls and all Victor could see was a shock of dull brown hair, a full head of hair, carefully maintained. Dyed, even?
That told you something. Victor felt his thoughts roll on as they had all his life, meandering, remembering, deciding. A man who takes too much care of his hair is vain, narcissistic they call it these days. That is all we are. Thought and memory, that is all we are. Victor knew the end would come. Was it now?
Between the seats in front of him he saw the man’s rolled shirtsleeve, his forearm. Victor saw it coming. He saw it even before he raised his eyes to the rearview mirror again and met the man’s eye.
Thought and memory—and love. There’s a quote, biblical. And the greatest of these is love.
“It was you,” said Victor on an outward breath. He felt as though he’d come full circle. Even as the worst emerged he knew he shouldn’t have said it, shouldn’t say anything at all, but it was too late for that.
The man smiled, looking at him in the rearview mirror. His name tag sat beside it above the windscreen, where Victor’s long sight, the old man’s gift, could read it, if it meant anything, by now. If it wasn’t too late. Don Jason, licensed taxi driver. Remember that, anyway.
He had to keep staring, into the man’s eyes. Don Jason. Lisa Jason’s husband, who worked nights, the husband, he had finally understood, of whom she was afraid. And then Victor looked away, through the window, seeking the real world, the outside world—it was important to know where he was. Where the man was taking him. He didn’t recognize the empty road, the trees, the dark cloud. There was a crack and rumble somewhere close.
“What was that, Mr. Powell?” said the taxi driver pleasantly, but in that voice, the voice that sounded in Victor’s ears down most of a century, the voice of the teacher who wants you to know how clever he is, how much cleverer than you, the voice of the lieutenant on the beach at Anzio, with his heavy gun in his hand. Don Jason. Remember that.
“We’re old friends, Mr. Powell, aren’t we? Old enemies.”
The sound of the music rose, flooding the space, unbearable. Had it taken this, wondered Victor, to know he hated Bach?
“There’s something I’d like you to see,” said Don Jason.
And then the driver looked away, and the taxi swung off the road, the ground turning rough beneath it, jolting Victor against the window.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The mobile fell with a clatter into the bilges as Nat stood, cursing, and waved with her whole body into the misted distance, feeling more water slosh in with every movement. Nat couldn’t see Dowd, now, she could hardly see the land. The weather had come down, an ominous silent rain driving sideways. Huge drops. She was drenched.
“He picked up someone else.”
The water was level with the gunwales, with her knees, and creeping over every minute. Nat heard something, the high buzz of a two-stroke engine that came and went, maybe a motorbike far off.
“The taxi. The old guy, your friend. Coming down as I was coming in. Took him.” Jim’s voice had been tiny at the end of the line, tiny and distant.
That had done it: Nat felt as though her head would burst with the magnitude of her fuckup, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, following the wrong guy. Thinking too much about where she stood in all this. This isn’t about you, and who you slept with last night. It’s about Beth, it’s about Ollie—but most of all it’s about stopping him hurting anyone else. And she hadn’t stopped him.
“Victor?” she said. “You mean Victor?” The water up her back, salt in her mouth, on her eyelashes. “Call the police, Jim. Tell them it’s him. Ask for Donna Garfield and tell her it’s the taxi driver.”
“I don’t even—”
“His name is Don,” she said. And that had been it, her last communication with the world and the phone slipping out of her hands in the same moment that she understood that if her survival depended on Jim, strung out on a busy casualty ward and no doubt losing battery or credit on his phone into the bargain, she was fucked. They all were.
The bow was under. The gray water erased it, and as the gunwale disappeared the Chickadee listed abruptly sideways and forward, nose down. She no longer knew which way the shore lay, and it was too late to think. She was on her knees in the water then, the boat was gone from under her and she was thrashing, kicking off her shoes, reaching for an oar that floated free, she was swimming.
The high-pitched buzz filled her ears, as though the motorbike had driven out across the tide, unless it was panic, it was terror. Nat twisted in the water, and as she felt herself dragged down, the jeans, the shirt ballooning around her, she saw it. The triangular bow wave, a hundred yards away, closer, of a gray inflatable almost invisible on the flat gray water, bouncing and cresting the water toward her and then, above it for a second, a head, hair plastered down but his eyes fixed on her, Jonathan Dowd, his hand on an outboard’s tiller.
Fighting the tangled weight that hauled on her under the water, Nat strained to lift a hand, a wave slapped her full in the face, and she was under.
* * *
Victor kept his eyes on the man as he left the driver’s seat and stood up, stretched.
The car was parked on a track that led down to the water. The wind was blowing in through the door the man had opened and Victor felt it cold, cold. There was a patch of wood beyond them, between them and Sunny Slopes.
Sophie, he thought, Sophie was there but he couldn’t see her. He couldn’t reach her.
“Of course I couldn’t take the risk,” said the taxi driver, leaning in to smile at him. Don Jason. “In the end. How many times have I had you in the back? No more than three or four. And you might not have got a good look at me, coming back up the lane, not enough to know me, not enough to make the connection. But Lisa coming home, telling me about her new model patient, how well you were doing.” His mouth turning down, contemptuous. “And then she’d say, ‘At his age, of course, you can’t take mental health for granted.’ Asking to see the police?” Victor’s breath caught at the betrayal: he’d thought Lisa had been on his side.
The driver straightened and disappeared again, looking for something out on the water.
Painfully Victor tried to edge along the seat while he was not being observed: every muscle and joint felt stiff, old. Slow.
“There she is, there she is,” he heard the man say
, his voice low and throaty.
Crouched in the rear seat, Victor was aware that he must look like a helpless sort of creature, mesmerized, but it had been a long time since he had worried about his appearance to others, an old tortoise in his shell. He knew all about powerlessness, and as the man set his broad, strong hand on the car’s roof over his head and looked down at him, utterly confident in his physical superiority, Victor felt a tiny spark of something, not hope exactly but knowledge. Don Jason could tell him nothing about survival: he was ninety-two years old.
The lieutenant on the beach at Anzio had died thirty hours after he’d loosed off that shot in hatred, his own head blown off as he stood up in the dunes for no reason anyone had been able to discern except arrogance.
“He saw me going inside the house, you see,” said Don Jason conversationally, leaning back in again, head tilted, to examine Victor. “Silly kid, hanging around her place.”
“Oliver?” Victor’s voice cracked.
Don Jason smiled.
What had possessed her? thought Victor, looking back, seeing the square face, the hair, strong chin, the prominent Adam’s apple. What could this man have said to that girl with her hair tangled around her pretty face, her brown legs, the soft arms she swung as she walked, that had led her to put those arms around him, take him into her little room and let him have her? Sadly Victor acknowledged that he knew very little about women really, having had experience only of his own wife, his innocent Joy. Just that they were often more generous than one expected. Kinder. And that men like this, like Richard, like the lieutenant at Anzio, could always get women—for a while, for their limited purposes. Even lovely girls, even clever girls. And especially kind girls.
“Lads like that, they don’t have the control, you see.” There was a hint of nostalgia somewhere in Don Jason’s voice. “Testosterone, is it? He had to come after me, he had to say everything he had in his daft little head, ‘Where have you taken her, what have you done with her?’” A silly mimicking of a childish voice that sounded to Victor nothing like Ollie. Poor fierce little Oliver.
The Day She Disappeared Page 32