After what seemed like for ever, and without taking his eyes off me, he gave a nod. But only a very small one.
‘Cooper, no!’ I scream. ‘Stupid dog, come back.’ I run up to him and reach over into the rose bed, hooking my fingers into his collar. ‘Don’t do it there.’ I drag him off the soil. ‘Go under the tree or something.’ I look around to make sure that no one saw him trampling down the spring flowers that have been carefully planted around the just-emerging rose bushes. A voice from behind catches me off guard.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘Dogs will be dogs.’
‘Oh,’ I say, turning round. ‘Hi.’
Susan is standing there in running gear. Her cheeks are pink and her forehead sweaty. She gives a quick glance at her sports watch and presses a couple of buttons, and then pulls out her earphones. I hear the tss-tss of upbeat music until she silences it on the iPod attached to her arm.
‘He’s got a very characterful face,’ she says, watching as Cooper heads over for some bushes.
‘Lopsided, you mean. He’s a good old boy, but a bit dozy too. He’s eight now, and . . .’ I trail off, remembering the day Dad brought him home unexpectedly, a little black ball of fluff wrapped up in a sweater. He whined all through the first night, alone in the kitchen, but not after that because I had him on my bed. Dad said he was the last in the litter; going cheap because he ‘didn’t seem quite right’ was how the breeder had put it.
‘It’s good that you allow dogs here,’ I say, filling an awkward gap.
Susan is studying me – I feel it as I watch Cooper – and it’s almost as if she has something to say but it won’t come out or because she can’t find the right words. I’m reminded of my session with Gary.
‘Your hotel is beautiful,’ I remark, looking back at the building, because the silence is a bit weird otherwise. A swirling black cloud looms over the rooftops, promising rain later. ‘It’s . . . it’s very well kept.’
I realise I sound like my mum, though I don’t feel nearly as confident. That said, these days it’s as though she’s a different person, retreating into her own dismal, empty world as soon as she comes home from work. Drinking too much, jumping if the phone rings, not seeing any friends. I’m not there to witness it much of the time, but when I am, it doesn’t seem healthy. Almost as unhealthy as my state of mind.
Still Susan doesn’t speak. I hear a little sigh, but it could be because she’s out of breath from her run. She’s tracking Cooper as he bounds across the lawn.
Finally she turns to look at me. Our faces are close. ‘Thank you,’ she says, really softly. ‘I have good staff.’
I give a little smile and pull a plastic bag from my pocket.
‘Frankly, I don’t know what I’d do without them,’ she continues. ‘What with Phil away so much.’
She’s still staring at me, more intently now. ‘I guess your mum would be able to relate to that, wouldn’t she?’
I smile quickly then make some kind of unintelligible noise, heading over to clean up Cooper’s mess. When I turn round, Susan is walking back across the lawn to the hotel.
‘I wish you hadn’t mentioned anything to her,’ I say to Mum, who’s nursing a bucket of coffee at our breakfast table. She looks a bit rough, and I think the early-morning swim was more to convince herself that she feels fine rather than because she wanted to.
‘Mention what to who?’
I’m about to tell her of my encounter out on the lawn, but Susan walks into the dining room.
‘Tell you later,’ I say quietly, watching as she walks past our table, chirping a quick good morning at Mum. My phone lights up on the table beside my bowl of cereal. I turn it over, the crack cutting right through the message. I don’t want to read it. They come most days.
‘You must get that screen replaced,’ Mum says. I feel the table vibrate under my elbows as another message comes in.
‘Yeah,’ I reply, thinking how easy it would have been to swap it for the expensive phone I found under the bench. But instead, I went to the lost property office the next day, only to find the desk unmanned. The next time I went back it was closed. I’d wasted enough time on the stupid thing already, so as I was cooking that evening I charged it up to see if it gave me any clues about the owner. Karen had a cable that fitted.
‘Call the last number dialled,’ Ant suggested as he tossed about his stir-fry. He’s stick thin and runs marathons. He’s studying law.
It was a good idea and thankfully the phone didn’t have a password. It somehow didn’t feel right nosing through someone’s personal life, so after I’d left my flat – late for a Drama Society event – I redialled the last number called. It rang a few times and just as I was about to give up to try another number, someone answered.
‘Oh, hi,’ I said, walking into the meeting room. I pinned the phone to my ear with my shoulder, glancing at my watch. I was really late for my audition. I’d never acted before, and I was doing it for Mum really. She’d said I should get involved with things, make the most of uni life. So that’s what I was doing, even though I felt really nervous and would, at that moment, have done anything to get out of it.
Everyone stared as I went in, shushing me as I stumbled through the door. The auditions were already in progress. Not a good first impression. I felt myself redden.
Dozens of eyes were on me – all except one boy, I should say. He was pushing out of the rows of seats and was walking briskly towards the door, also looking rather red-faced and embarrassed. Like me, he had a phone pinned to his ear and was taking a call.
‘Who’s that?’ he whispered loudly, pushing past me as I blocked the entrance. ‘Dad?’
I heard exactly the same through the phone’s speaker, delayed by a fraction of a second.
‘Hello?’ I said.
He stopped. We looked at each other.
Then we burst out laughing.
Gina
‘Did your husband suffer from any kind of mental illness?’ PC Kath Lane asked. It was just under forty-eight hours since Rick had gone missing. It seemed like forty-eight years.
I looked at her, unable to comprehend what she’d just asked.
I should have been at work, but I’d called the office in a daze, pretending to be sick. It was Steph who’d answered as Tina wasn’t in yet. I don’t think she’d believed I was ill – her slow, curious voice had seemed to sense it was more than that – but I hadn’t been able to face telling her what had happened, not when it hadn’t even sunk in with me at that point.
I still half expected to wake up from a bad dream, reckoning that Rick would be back by dinner time. No one need know that he’d had a temporary blowout. By that time the following week, it would all be forgotten.
I shook my head in response to the officer. ‘No. No, he doesn’t have any mental issues.’
I considered each and every question carefully, making sure I answered correctly, saying the right thing. I didn’t want to mislead her, yet I didn’t want to reveal anything that would make us seem like a dysfunctional family. We’d already lost a child. Rightly or wrongly, the stigma was there.
I should have been a better mother . . . If only I’d picked him up from school . . . Why didn’t I listen to him more . . . ?
To lose another family member was unthinkable.
I’d reported Rick missing on the Saturday afternoon, two days earlier. He’d only been gone a few hours when I made the call, but it was totally out of character. I felt like a fraud when I phoned the police, wondering if the officer who took my call thought that we’d just had a row and that he’d be back by evening.
He wasn’t.
On the Sunday morning, I’d had a follow-up call after the previous day’s report and a basic risk assessment. I was asked a few personal details about Rick and his lifestyle. They’d clearly decided he wasn’t a particularly urgent case, yet not one that could be ignored entirely. Hannah, who’d already seemed upset about something, was in pieces. I wasn’t much better.
/> So by Monday morning, the sight of two uniformed officers on my doorstep simultaneously made everything seem better and worse – it was a relief they were finally there, that they would find Rick, but it was also terrifying because it was obviously serious enough for them to come.
Whatever it was.
PC Kath Lane had introduced herself and her colleague PC Dan Boyd, and I’d invited them inside the house. It didn’t occur to me in those early, blurry days that were filled with raw hope and the belief that everything would turn out fine, but looking back, what I learned is that you can’t solve a problem until you know what the problem actually is. Four months on and we still don’t have a clue.
PC Lane’s hair was short and red, her skin pale and lightly freckled. Her dark uniform made her appear frail, even though I could see she wasn’t. She had an athletic body, looked as if she’d give chase or put up a well-trained fight if needed. By comparison, PC Boyd was swarthy, even at his youthful age, and his mass of dark hair made me wonder if he was part Italian or Greek. They’d sat down on my sofa, side by side, and I’d made them a cup of tea.
‘There’s a process we go through,’ PC Lane had explained, although I don’t recall what she said in much detail. Words washed around me in those early days, and I was too numb to take them in. But just having the police there was enough to virtually drown me in endorphins. They would find my husband soon, I felt sure of it. They were the police, after all.
Until then, it had been two days of Hannah and me fretting alone, phoning Rick’s friends as well as a few distant relatives, while trying not to tell them the full situation or worry them.
He didn’t have a large family and saw his parents rarely. That was a sore point with me to say the least, and unless the worst was confirmed, I had no intention of contacting them. I made sure the police were clear on this.
Occasionally Rick would make the trip up north to visit them, very often over Christmas. I swear they invited him at that time of year just to cause trouble between us, though I made sure it didn’t. Rick and I were far too good for that, and managed to keep resentment out of our marriage. As their only son, his visits were borne out of duty.
‘They’re old, Gina,’ he would tell me. ‘They’ve not got long, so I should go.’ I could see the regret on his face, how torn he was. I didn’t want to add to it by telling him no.
‘They’ve been old for ever,’ I’d reply, laughing, recalling the handful of times I’d met them right at the start of our relationship. As far as they were concerned, he’d married way beneath himself, and Rick couldn’t convince them otherwise. They’d determined me unworthy of their son, making their disdain for me and, years later, my children obvious.
My own parents were quite the opposite, however, and when Rick was at ‘Castle Forrester’, as I call it, I often visited Mum and Dad. When I broke the news to them about Rick disappearing, Mum immediately insisted on coming to stay. They live on the south coast so it’s a bit of a trek. I put her off for a day or so, but didn’t fail to notice the worry in her voice as she hung up, making me promise to call her the moment there was news.
It had felt like a hundred years of agony as we waited for the police to do something. We filled the hours by driving around places he might have gone, jamming the brakes on at the sight of any man who looked vaguely like Rick, calling his name out of the window and not caring if we looked like idiots. Hannah was sobbing as we drove home, and in the end I got angry with her. It wasn’t helping. She was acting as if he was already dead.
‘We evaluate the risk level of the missing person before deciding what action to take,’ PC Lane explained as I sat stiffly on my sofa.
‘Risk of what?’ I heard myself asking. Surely there was no risk. Rick was sensible. He wasn’t a drunk. He wasn’t depressed. He wasn’t stupid, and he knew how to look after himself.
PC Lane hesitated. She spoke softly. ‘Risk to the person’s overall safety based upon whether we believe their disappearance is voluntary or . . . or not. The Missing Persons Bureau has collected data over the years from many cases and has produced a . . . well, a formula for calculating the most likely outcome.’
PC Boyd cleared his throat. I wondered if it was secret code for Shut up.
‘The good news is that most people come back within a day or two,’ PC Lane went on.
‘And the bad news?’ I asked. It had already been a day or two.
She picked up her mug and took a long sip. ‘The bad news,’ she said, her voice a little uneven now, ‘is that sometimes they don’t.’
Half an hour later and PC Lane had drained her mug, although she was showing no signs of leaving. ‘It’s my personal feeling that the risk of Rick having come to harm is low,’ she said cautiously. PC Boyd had left the room to talk on his radio.
‘It’s just not like him, though,’ I said for the hundredth time. My eyes were misty with tears. ‘He’s never done this before. And he didn’t take his wallet or his phone or his keys or . . . or anything.’
‘That’s the bit we’ll be taking into account.’ A pause, then that smile again, one she’d clearly practised over the years. It was a non-committal yet pleasant smile that hinted I should leave it in their hands now. But I couldn’t.
‘What do you mean – taking into account?’
‘We’ll be factoring it into our investigation, but it does puzzle me, I admit. It’s not entirely unusual, though. When we go through his things, do a bit of a search, check accounts and stuff, we may find that he’s arranged for funds to be available elsewhere, if you know what I mean.’ She shrugged by way of apology for the implication.
But I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t know at all. Or rather I refused to acknowledge it.
I knew Rick hadn’t touched our joint account because I’d already checked the balance. The last transaction he’d made on the debit card was buying petrol for his car on the Thursday before. He’d paid for some groceries on the way home, and there were one or two cash withdrawals for twenty pounds here and there over the previous week or two, but nothing that would be of much use if he’d planned on running away and abandoning his family.
‘Rick and I don’t have a huge amount of spare cash,’ I explained. ‘I’m an estate agent and mainly on commission, while for the last few years Rick has been working as a freelance film-maker and photographer. He mostly works here at home, but has some stints away on location, meeting with clients. Sometimes he goes to Europe, though rarely. It sounds glamorous, but it’s hard to make a living in that field. He was finally building up a regular client base, especially in the tourism industry. He did a lovely video for a caravan site in Cornwall recently.’
It occurred to me he might have gone there – to live life in a trailer with windswept cliffs and beaches, blue skies and sandy feet. He hadn’t been able to stop talking about the place when he’d come back from the job. Perhaps he’d met someone, but I soon kicked the thought from my mind. I’d have noticed changes if he’d fallen for another woman.
I managed a smile, almost able to hear the music Rick had used to accompany the footage as I continued describing his work to PC Lane – the way he’d sat hunched over his computer late into the night perfecting the timing of the soundtrack, making the swell of the haunting music he’d commissioned from an up-and-coming young musician in London fit perfectly with the crashing waves, the soaring gulls, the happy holidaymakers enjoying drinks overlooking the sunset. There was a chance it was going to be aired on regional television.
‘So would you say money was tight?’ PC Lane asked. ‘Sorry,’ she added. ‘There will be some questions that are a bit uncomfortable.’
I shook my head, aggravating a brewing headache. ‘No, no, that’s fine.’ I took a breath. ‘Money has never been in abundance,’ I confessed. ‘But we got . . . get by. Four times a year I receive a small bonus, which we put towards a holiday or maybe Christmas presents, or towards a new car. We’re sensible, and always have just enough. Though with Hannah at univers
ity, things have got a little tighter.’ I said the last bit quietly, not wanting Hannah to hear, even though she was upstairs in her room. PC Lane said she wanted a word with her before they left.
‘So you don’t think that . . . that Rick could have been putting some aside?’ she said.
‘God, no,’ I replied quickly without even thinking.
But then I did think. And I also did some very rough mental arithmetic. If Rick had managed to ‘lose’, say, twenty pounds a week – perhaps by gathering stray coins, or buying sale items but pretending they were full price, or perhaps by just pilfering a tenner here and there – over the two decades we’d been together, he could have saved up nearly twenty grand, plus all the accumulated interest. Plenty to leave and start a new life if he’d had enough.
But the thing was, I knew he hadn’t had enough. I knew my husband. And I knew that he loved us. The whole idea was preposterous.
‘We’ve struggled once or twice – you know, with repairs to the house, a deposit on my car, that kind of thing. If Rick had money tucked away for a rainy day, he’d have told me. I absolutely guarantee it.’ There was no doubt in my mind that Rick hadn’t been secretly saving. It would have taken more than a rainy day for him to betray us like that. It would have taken a biblical flood.
‘Thanks for being honest,’ PC Lane said. ‘Would it be OK if we looked in your husband’s study? You mentioned he used the spare room?’
‘Of course,’ I said, standing just as PC Boyd came back. He smiled awkwardly, letting me past. They followed me upstairs. Hannah’s door was closed, I noticed.
There was a chill in Rick’s workspace, as if it were protesting at his absence. Everywhere Rick went, he spread warmth and life, embracing whatever he was doing with such energy and verve.
‘Come here,’ he’d growl if I brought him up lunch or a hot drink on my day off. He’d carefully put down whatever it was I was carrying, then literally sweep me off my feet in a tango-style embrace that would have me gasping and giggling. Very often it had led to us spending the next hour or so on the sofa in the study, or perhaps retreating shamelessly to bed for the afternoon. I felt myself blushing at the thought as PC Lane and PC Boyd cast their eyes around the room, almost as if they could see us.
In Too Deep Page 9