“What have you done with her?” Victor asked, trying, trying, to be brave enough, terrified. I’ve never fought, he thought, I was in the navy, I’ve never fought hand to hand, am I even a man? Shame rose in him, never fought, and now too old, too hopeless. At the question, or perhaps the tremble in Victor’s voice, the man came down, squatting in the doorway.
“Ah,” he said, and his voice was low, hoarse with something like pleasure. “Like to know, would you? She was smaller than she looked. Swaggering around like she did and then—I got her down pretty small. Packed her away nice.” Her blood on his arm.
And then fear did come, in a blind rush, fear that was cold like a drowning, and for a second he was back there, long before Anzio, back on the North Atlantic and pulling men from the water. Tags around their necks, for identification.
“Natalie knows,” he said out of nowhere, instead. Deflecting. “Natalie is on her way to the police.” Hearing himself like a stranger with a tight, hard voice.
“Do you know, I doubt that,” said Don Jason, musing, lifting his head to look again, out across the water. “You want to watch this, if you think your Natalie is in a position to help anyone. Worked better than I thought, what do I know about boats? You only need to be smart. To keep your head, see?”
“Watch this?” repeated Victor. “What should I watch?” Feeling his heart quail, despairing, not knowing if he had even a fraction of what was required. But the man still wasn’t looking down at him, that was something. Taking advantage of the momentary shifting of his attention, Victor felt along the seat behind himself. Thunder rumbled, not far off, and there was a flash. The sky was low and dark but no rain, not yet. He groped, careful.
There it was, lying along the crease. A crutch, the crutch Lisa, fussing at the last minute, had found for him when he had refused the walking frame. It was light, though, and his hand no more than skin and bone.
Lisa. Had she known? Had she let her husband in at night or had he taken advantage of his familiarity with the wards and the staff, knowing how to make himself invisible? Let him in to pad the corridors. Victor knew now, however much he might wish never to have known, that some men can force women into shapes they can’t control, they can make them do things they hate.
The taxi driver straightened a moment so that his head disappeared and as Victor heard the sound again, that high whine, he visualized the motorbike with the boy riding high on it. It grew piercing, it was on the ridge above them, but it kept going, it receded. He slid the crutch carefully forward and onto his knee and froze as the man’s face reappeared in the door.
“Out you get, Mr. Powell.”
Victor hunched in the seat, he didn’t move.
“Will I have to do it in there?”
The sound. The sound. Something revved, a way away still but not gone, after all. Victor tried as hard as he could not to let the man see how hard he was listening.
“I was seen getting into your cab,” he said, crouched over the crutch in his lap, the old tortoise, the old pacifist. “I was seen. There are cameras. They find traces—”
Jason laughed, a soft sound. “I don’t intend to tell them any different,” he said, reasonably. “I tell them, he was taken ill, on the way. I say, I tried to resuscitate him, I might have been a bit rough, if there’s bruises, but they’re not likely to look too closely, are they? At your age.” He shook his head, the ghost of a frown. “I’ll just deliver you right back to them, there’ll be all the DNA you like.” He was half crouching now, peering in.
A revving, then somewhere out down the lane the throttle opened and bore down on them. Don Jason stepped back fractionally, turned his head, and in that second Victor took his chance. He had no choice. He thrust the crutch out in front of him, aiming, hoping for the gut, but God or history or something—the greatest of these is love, Sophie—was on his side and he got the man’s balls instead, he felt the softness slip under the rubber tip and he shoved, as hard as he could.
Then he saw it unfold as if on a screen, the taxi driver bending over and reaching for the aluminum shaft, flinging it away and then staggering backward just as the high-saddled motorbike roared in past the hedge, bumping over tractor ruts, not slowing. And then it was on its side and the wheels spinning and a helmeted boy stumbling toward them.
Through the door Victor saw the driver crouching, he saw him lift his eyes to Victor, he saw the yellow glare. And then Victor saw him unbending, not toward Victor, or the motorcycle rider, but extending himself like an animal inside the car, scrabbling for something, his hands on the glove compartment. A flash of something, bright.
“No—don’t…” Victor had his hands now on the doorframe and he was pulling. He was trying to pull himself out, but it felt impossible; his old body was too slow, the car’s interior refusing to let him go. He could see the tall boy running, pulling off the helmet and his hair sticking up all in disarray.
“Don’t, he’s got a—” Victor saw the boy pull up as he saw it too, in the man’s hand.
Thunder crashed, above them. The boy, he saw, was drenched, blinded by the rain.
A knife. He’s got a knife. The words wouldn’t come, and then he heard himself. Shouting. “He’s got a knife.”
* * *
It took Jonathan Dowd three approaches before he got her, and she was losing strength by then, choking, trying to estimate how much water in the lungs meant drowning was inevitable. Then he cut the engine, the inflatable drifted, and he was in the bow and reaching for her. She was a deadweight in the water, and Nat thought he’d never manage to haul her in—she thrashed as hard as she could. She felt herself slip back in his hands and in desperation launched one last kick just as he found strength from somewhere in his arms that were all tendon and bone and there she was, gasping in the bottom of the gray inflatable. Alive.
She gestured wildly to the land, as if he might be planning to take her anywhere else, and the lightning lit the sky again, all around them this time. The counting was in a kind of delirium, she couldn’t make it work, to ten, to twelve, fifteen—and then the thunder came. It was moving away. Dowd turned for the jetty without a word.
The suitcase. Someone else could tell him. Someone else could look. Not her. Not her. Who else, though?
“We need to—” she said, gesturing back where she’d come from, exhaustion hauling on her, flailing her arm. “There’s something…”
But Dowd was on his feet, the tiller of the outboard against his knees, swaying in the unstable inflatable. Looking at something unfolding onshore. She turned to follow his gaze. The low outline of a car against the short marsh grass, on the slope down from a ridge. As they looked, she heard the noise she’d thought she heard before, of a trail bike, and it appeared, cresting the ridge. A single figure riding high off the saddle.
The car was dull silver. The motorbike bumped and tilted on the track, down toward it, stupidly slow.
“It’s him,” she said, then with urgency, “it’s him, it’s him, Jonathan. There.”
And without needing to be told, Jonathan Dowd opened the throttle.
Chapter Thirty-Three
As Nat ran, stumbling and sliding, up the muddy bank toward the silver car, they were standing there on the other side of the car in the pelting rain, Craig with his palms face out like he was surrendering, or trying to stop something happening. He swayed, too tall and rooted to the spot. Nat couldn’t see what he was looking at but she knew it must be something terrible. She shouted into the wind, “Stop.”
Abruptly, both feet slid out from under her and she fell hard, facedown. She could taste mud. Seizing clumps of the wiry grass in both hands, she hauled herself back to her feet. She didn’t look around to see where Dowd had gotten to. She had left him trying to tether the inflatable, shaking violently, with cold or something. Nat knew she was soaked, she knew it was driving cold rain, but she couldn’t feel it. Another ten yards. Five. Slithering, she made it onto the patch of orange gravel and her hand was on the car’s hood.
As she rounded the vehicle she got a glimpse of Craig’s eyes, wide and pleading under the hair plastered down his face, but she already knew, could already see.
Victor’s poor face, pressed against the car’s doorframe, his skin so thin and old, almost transparent, his eyes half closed, no, no, not gone beat like an awful drum in her head—and then Nat saw the knife. A knife in the taxi driver’s hand, a knife for butchering, big rivets in the handle and the blade so big, big as a cleaver against the soft, liver-spotted papery skin of Victor’s old throat. Don held it there, smiling, smiling Don who had looked at her in his rearview mirror. Following her with his eyes.
Then came a sound—the thud of footsteps as Jonathan finally made it up the slope—that drew Don’s eye away. Victor’s lips moved, and Nat saw Don’s knuckles tighten white on the knife handle, and in that split second, she lunged.
She had to get the blade. As Nat fell back she saw the blood but didn’t know where it came from. She only saw Victor slump to one side and Jonathan Dowd’s big bony hands on Don’s shoulders hauling him off them, off her and Victor, and then the boy moved in beside Dowd, both of them holding him down.
The blood was on her shirt, clean shirt that morning, she thought stupidly, then Victor. Forward on her knees. Victor.
* * *
He saw the cloth of the car’s interior, the paper pine tree dangling from the mirror, the great gray sky over their heads.
It played before him through the frame of the car’s door as though it were a film, a silly film, young men fighting. I’ve never fought. And this was what it was, it turned out—a messy, painful, dirty business, wrestling in the mud while the rain fell. Life so untidy, it escaped you, always. Victor lay, panting like a rabbit, waiting for it to end.
Then Natalie’s face appeared, streaked with something, mud and blood and crying, crying, crying, begging him for something he couldn’t understand, that was not in his gift. Holding up her hands to him. He saw a deep welling line across them and the blood, and tiredly he raised his old hands to hers, parchment-skinned, liver-spotted, he took her poor fingers in his.
And he didn’t know if she pulled him or he her but then there they were, rested against each other in the door of the taxi, and both their hearts still beating.
Epilogue
It was more than a year later that they contacted her. DS Donna Garfield on the phone, tense and wary and, underneath it all, sorry. Nat could tell, in the hesitation at the end of every sentence, looking for the space to say it out loud. But Nat didn’t have the time or space or energy to waste on having a go with her, and she wanted to know, anyway, why Garfield was calling.
“I’m not sure if you were planning on coming back here at all, to the village…” There it was, the hesitation.
Nat had sighed. Back there.
Back there where the Chickadee sat hauled up on Paddy’s beach, Jim earnestly working on her every evening under Paddy’s eye. Not quite ready to talk to Nat yet, Paddy said, but the time would come. Janine and Steve behind the bar of the Bird, a bit older, wiser, more knackered but still loved-up, or loved-up enough, anyway. That was what got you over it, she guessed. Steve in an alley chain-smoking after listening to a forensic scientist describe how his daughter had been dismembered.
Because against all counsel Don Jason had pleaded not guilty, so it had gone to trial. Jonathan Dowd had sat straight-backed—and absolutely motionless, it seemed to Nat who was sitting beside him—until it was over. It was soon clear that Jason had wanted his day in court so he could grandstand. The Instagram feed identifying him—Don Jason waiting for Beth in a doorway; Don Jason standing in the back of the saloon bar watching her or smiling up at her from the driver’s seat of his cab—he had dismissed, freely admitting to the relationship. “We had fun,” chuckling, then leaning forward and looking across the room at Jonathan Dowd, shrugging, then jeering as he said Beth had ended the relationship—because she wanted to settle down.
She had been pregnant. Six weeks.
In a corner of some Victorian backstreet pub in town where they’d all found themselves a week after the verdict, Dowd had said haltingly, “She told me she was on the pill.” And Nat had looked at him, not quite understanding. “The … him. Don Jason. She made him use condoms.” All the pub noise, the paneled walls and Victorian tiling seemed to fall away as she tried to process his meaning.
“She wanted your baby.”
He was pale, with longing, with grief. “Jonathan,” she had started to say, but he had stopped her.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right. I know now.” His voice steadying, far away. “I know now.” Steve had come up behind him then, his arm around Jonathan’s shoulders, and the two men had turned away.
Even Jason’s barrister looked dismayed at the defense he was obliged to mount—the knife hadn’t been his, the baby hadn’t been his, Victor was senile, it was Craig, it was Dowd—but in the end even if the physical evidence against Don Jason hadn’t been overwhelming, the witnesses for the prosecution finished him. Lisa Jason, trembling and unable to meet her husband’s eye, had stood in the witness box and testified to blood on his clothes that she had washed the day before the message was sent to Janine saying Beth had gone north. To his coming into the ward late one night, looking for Victor, her model patient. To his patient brutality, night after night, in their own home.
And Victor himself, standing straight in the witness box with both old hands on the rail, answering every question politely and calmly. Repeating Don Jason’s words from memory, unswerving until the defense barrister admitted defeat and released him.
Now Garfield’s voice came to her as if from the distant past as she sat in London, in her new life.
“Sure,” she said wearily. “I’m working weekdays but … sure, yeah.” Projectionist in a small cinema under a railway arch, her own little private space and a window opening onto images flickering on a screen. Real life being something she’d had enough of, for a while. She loved it.
“Could be a Saturday,” said Garfield. “Coroner’s office has released some of your friend’s things. We contacted her dad, but he said you had as much right as he did. We thought … if you wouldn’t mind collecting them for … well, for whoever.”
* * *
Nat had walked to the end of her projectionist’s booth and called his number. The apprenticeship had been Bill’s idea, and the guy who owned the little cinema was a mate of his. “I’m only asking them to talk to you,” he’d said. “You get to do the rest.”
He answered on the third ring: she could hear birds in the background. He was working on some historical drama in a quiet village.
“When do you get back?” she asked him. “There’s something I want you to help me with.”
* * *
The clothes had been packed up in boxes, and on top of them there’d been a photo in a cheap flowery frame. She didn’t know where it had been when she had walked through Beth’s flat, because she’d never seen it before. A selfie taken on Beth’s phone, their faces pressed close together, Beth’s wide, wide smile. She must have had it printed up, she must have trimmed it carefully to fit.
After the guilty verdict Don Jason had decided he wanted to tell the police all about it, every detail. Steve had relayed that he was talking now, Garfield had been in touch—as if it might get the policewoman off the hook. Unstoppable, Steve said grimly: every detail, the texts he’d written to Ollie, his grandiose plans to kill Victor in the hospital, under the noses of the doctors. What Beth had said, how he’d taken her body apart, where he’d kept it. It seemed they couldn’t shut him up.
In the end it didn’t matter what Don Jason said, not to those who loved her, because that detail wasn’t Beth, it was nothing to do with Beth, just like the crammed and oozing suitcase had nothing to do with her. Beth was gone elsewhere, gone wherever we go.
Nat took the picture in her hands, where the scars now on the inside of her fingers had faded silvery-pale, and held it a momen
t, pressed against her shirt, pressed so hard she could feel the corners against her breast, and then they turned, she and Bill, and went home.
* * *
The summer had ended, eventually, with a sudden flurry of black storm cloud and a wind that blew all the yellow leaves off the trees at once. It ended around about the time Victor moved—Sophie moved him, Paddy lending her his little car and helping her pile his possessions into the back while Rufus ran excitedly to and fro—into the cottage Natalie had left.
It held some of her still in it: she had left her plates for him, and a drawing she had made of Rufus tacked to a door. But it was that moment when Natalie had fallen against him in the taxi’s door, under the rain, that moment, he knew, that tied them together. Holding on to each other, knowing that whatever came next, neither of them would be alone.
The divorce was under way. At the first meeting with the solicitors Victor had seen Richard turn instantly savage, raging and threatening, but he and Sophie had sat calmly side by side until Richard had blown himself out under the eyes of both sets of lawyers. It was not easy to know if he was merely biding his time, but to Victor it seemed that he knew he was beaten. As instantly as he had raged, Richard had decided to walk away, and if it revealed how little he had ever really cared for his own child, then Victor and Sophie cared enough, and more. Now and again Natalie phoned Sophie, and Victor liked to listen to them talk as he sat in the comfortable chair Sophie had bought him, or under the apple tree in the garden. Their happy discussions of him, how long a walk he had managed, details of his suppers, apple crumble for pudding. And Sophie—sometimes sitting next to Paddy, sometimes just the three of them, triangulated—glancing across at him with that look on her face, fondness was too tiny a word, even love did not seem to encompass it, it had joy in it, it was like a door opening into a bright warm room. Then Rufus would seem to see the look and run, small redheaded arrow, along its path to his grandfather, where he would fling his arms recklessly around Victor and they would twine together under Sophie’s eye, safe as safe as safe could be.
The Day She Disappeared Page 33