Gone Without a Trace

by Mary Torjussen

  The two men looked at each other, looks of resignation on their faces. Clearly they had anticipated this.

  ‘She says she didn’t receive that either. Have you been date-stamping your work? Did you email them to her?’

  ‘Yes!’ I said. I couldn’t remember what I’d done, but I needed to get out of there. The small room was full of tension and I couldn’t stand it any longer. If I stayed in there, I knew I’d start to cry or scream or worse.

  ‘Give me ten minutes,’ I said. ‘I’ll prove it to you.’

  Alex shrugged. ‘Very well.’

  I stood up and pushed back my chair. ‘Thank you. I won’t be long.’

  I raced down the stairs and along the corridor to my room. Lucy wasn’t there, and I was dead certain that was deliberate. She must have known I’d be after her blood.

  My computer had timed out. ‘Come on! Come on!’ I said and banged the side of the monitor with my hand. The screen flickered back to life.

  I tried to log on, but the mist was back, swirling around my eyes, and it took three attempts before I could enter the right password.

  I opened my emails and searched the sent box for my messages to Lucy. There seemed to be thousands of them, and I couldn’t remember the dates now. I scrolled down, then stopped abruptly as I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

  What was that?

  I sat down heavily. An alert appeared at the bottom right of the screen. Warning! it said. Action detected!

  The right side of my screen showed my living room. What I’d seen then, just a glimpse, was my living room door closing.

  But it was shut this morning!

  I stared wildly at the screen, but nothing else happened. I clicked to replay. It took one second, maybe two, and then I saw it clearly. The door to the living room opened, just a couple of inches. If I strained my eyes until they almost bled, I could see a faint shadow on the wall. Then it shut again.

  I played it again and again. I forgot about the emails to Lucy, about the incomplete accounts. I watched the door of my living room open and shut, open and shut until I could feel my blood simmering in my veins.

  I stood up. I saw the emails then, a reminder of what I should be doing. I shook my head. They could wait.

  I fumbled in my bag to check my keys were there, and grabbed my jacket from the coat stand.

  I’d had enough of Matt coming into the house, trying to drive me crazy. I needed to get home, to see him, to talk to him. To ask him why he’d left. And why he kept coming back.

  40

  When I got home, there was no sign that anyone had been in the house at all.

  I’d parked round the corner so that I could approach without being noticed, and entered through the back door on tiptoe. I wanted to catch him in the act, to catch him off guard.

  The kitchen was exactly as I’d left it that morning. The Post-it notes were all over the units and island as usual; I hated the thought of Matt seeing them. Slowly I turned the door handle and peeped out into the hallway. It was heavy with silence, and I knew, I just knew, that nobody was in the house now. Still, I crept towards the living room, giving a quick glance upwards at the staircase just in case. I eased the door open and saw that the laptop was still in place on the sofa. I was about to walk into the room but remembered just in time that it would be recording me and sending alerts to my computer at work. I quickly shut the door again. My head started to buzz at the thought of them seeing me at home when I should be in the meeting, and I stood with my back to the door and my eyes closed for a second, rigid with stress.

  Then my eyes snapped open and I looked at the stairs. Slowly and quietly I climbed them, gripping the banister to stop myself shaking.

  There was nobody upstairs. The bedroom looked just as it had earlier that morning, with shoes all over the floor and dirty clothes lying half off the armchair. I squirmed at the thought of Matt seeing it like this, particularly as I’d nagged him for the last two years to be tidier.

  I suppose I’d always thought I’d have fair warning before he came home – a phone call apologising, maybe, or an email to my office asking me to meet him first. I hated to think he’d come into the house while I was out, judge my messiness and look at things that had nothing whatsoever to do with him. I sighed and wondered whether the sound would be picked up by the webcam. I glanced into the bathroom. Towels going back two weeks or more lay crumpled and sodden in the corner of the room. The shower screen had long lost its shine, and I don’t think there was one bottle that had been reunited with its lid. I closed the door firmly on the mess, checked the spare bedroom and bathroom for evidence of intruders, then went back downstairs.

  With a rush of relief I realised my computer at work would have timed out by now, so I went into the living room and sat on the sofa, replaying the webcam film from the moment I’d left that morning. I sat and watched as the screen filled with early-morning sun, then darkened as the sky threatened rain. I tried to fast-forward, but that was too stressful, thinking about what I might miss.

  Then I watched it through again. I didn’t want to miss a thing.

  I heard a beep and my nerves shrieked. I paused the playback and fetched my bag.

  When I saw the message was from Sam, I knew it wouldn’t be good news.

  Hannah, where are you? I’ve just got out of a meeting and George and Alex are looking for you.

  I dropped my phone on the coffee table. They were after me! I trembled at the thought of what I’d done. I wouldn’t be forgiven for leaving like that.

  I pressed the computer’s off switch hard, even though I’d already turned off the webcam, and bent over, my head in my hands. They would think I was mad. My chances of promotion were nil now, that much was inevitable. I remembered my excitement when I’d come home that day to tell Matt that I was probably going to be made a director. He’d destroyed all that by leaving.

  Suddenly I was sick of everything. Sick of Matt, sick of the job and sick of myself.

  I paced the room, trying to think what to do. Clearly, I couldn’t go back to work. I’d left the office at about 12.30, and it was now after 3 p.m. There was no way I was going to walk blithely back in there as though nothing had happened. Besides, they might not let me in. I had a brief vision of myself being stopped in reception by security; just the thought filled me with horror. In my first couple of weeks at the company, years ago, I’d seen a man being escorted from the premises. His face was grey and damp with sweat. I remember worrying he would have a heart attack. He’d been found fiddling the books, apparently, and was unceremoniously thrown out. It had terrified me the way other staff turned away from him. A woman who’d worked with him had stood there sobbing, and George had whispered that she was the whistle-blower.

  I went back to the kitchen and looked at the notes. They were everywhere now and usually I liked them spread out like that. Walking around the kitchen looking at them helped me think about things, see the links. But now I felt defeated, as though I was losing my grip on everything that had been dear to me. I had no partner, I doubted I would have a job after today, and if I didn’t have a job, how could I afford the mortgage? I’d overpaid it, so I was covered for a while, but if I was unemployed for long enough I’d have to ask my dad for money, and he’d want to know why I needed it. The band that had been tight around my head all day ratcheted up a notch at the thought of telling him I’d been fired.

  I opened the fridge and took out a bottle of wine. I needed a drink now. Just one. I went to the cabinet to get a glass and stopped dead. There had been a pair of Vera Wang glasses there; I’d bought them for my first anniversary with Matt. We’d only used them for special occasions, and they would always be lined up together at the front of the cabinet.

  One of them was missing.

  So Matt had come home and taken his glass away with him. Was that so that he could remember me, or so that I couldn’t remember him?

  41

  The wine went straight back into the fridge. I knew the
last thing I should do was drink. I needed to think. The bottle was so seductive, the way it promised release, oblivion, but I knew from experience its darker side. I sat at the island with a glass of juice instead, and thought about the things that had been happening to me. I collected up the notes where I’d written everything down. The flowers, the texts, the videos. His cologne and the warm kettle. The CD. The phone call, the note through the door, the missing glass. I shuddered.

  What did he want? Why did he leave if he wanted to stay in touch like this?

  And then I let myself think again of the other alternative. What if it’s not Matt who’s coming into the house? Who else could it be?

  At the thought that someone else had been here, my heart raced and for a moment or two it was as though I’d forgotten how to breathe. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing like the counsellor had taught me. ‘It doesn’t matter how shallow the breaths,’ she’d said, her voice calm while I struggled. ‘Just focus. Come on now, in, two, three, four, and out, two, three, four.’ It took me as long today as it did then when I was a student to get my breathing under control, and by the time I’d done it, I was sweating and dizzy.

  I put the radio on, just for something to do, for something to override the dark, helpless thoughts that whirled round and round my mind. It took me a few minutes to focus, but eventually I calmed down and shut those thoughts out of my head.

  It had to be Matt. That was the only explanation. Who else could it be? But why was he coming here when he knew I’d be at work? Had he forgotten something? Left something behind? Did he just want to remember being here with me?

  On the radio a government minister was talking about unemployment. I felt a wave of nausea at the thought of applying for jobs without a reference. I’d worked for the same company since I was twenty-one, fresh from university. I was now thirty-two and, apart from my year working in bars in Australia, I’d only had one other job – in Topshop, where I’d worked one summer when I was a student. I opened the fridge again and looked at the bottle of wine, chilled and wet with condensation, and for a moment I nearly took it out and drank the lot. Luckily I had enough sense to see the consequences of that and left it there, taking a bottle of water instead. Just as I reached out to switch the radio off, the minister mentioned that he wanted a huge increase in apprenticeships.

  Apprenticeships.

  I stopped dead in my tracks, remembering a conversation I’d had with Matt a year or so ago. I clicked the radio off and sat with my head in my hands trying to recall what he’d said. He was telling me about one of his apprentices, who was having to apply for jobs and was struggling to get one. Matt’s company had told the new intake of apprentices when they first started that if they worked hard enough and their work was of a high quality, they would have an opportunity to be taken on permanently once their apprenticeship was over. At the end of the year, however, they were told that unfortunately times had changed for the worse economically, so they couldn’t be kept on. They had all been really understanding, but then Matt had overheard a couple of the directors laughing about it in the toilets, saying they’d had no intention of keeping them, and it had just been a ploy to get them to work hard. The staff, feeling guilty that the apprentices had been lied to, had collected money to give them as a leaving present; the directors had made a show of each putting in a measly £20.

  I thought then of that young man who’d worked for Matt. His name was Andrew Brodie. Matt had written him a great reference; he’d shown it to me and said Andrew had nearly cried when he read it.

  Andrew Brodie.

  I looked at my notes. I’d spoken to Matt’s manager, I’d spoken to reception and I’d spoken to HR. I hadn’t thought of speaking to someone who’d worked for him.

  I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid.

  In the living room, I googled his name. He was there on Facebook, though his account was nailed down so I couldn’t see anything at all. He wasn’t on Twitter, but he was on LinkedIn. I wanted to find his full details, but knew that if I logged in, he might be able to see who was looking at him.

  I set up a fake account, using the name Lyndsey Harding, and searched for Andrew Brodie. There he was, working for another firm of architects in Liverpool.

  I could have kicked myself. I’d never thought of phoning other firms to ask whether Matt worked there. I think I’d just assumed by now that he’d be miles away, maybe even in a different country. My heart thudded at the thought that he might still be local, still living nearby. I thought of seeing him when I was shopping, or in a wine bar on a Saturday night, and I just didn’t know what I’d do. Luckily, I’d given myself warning now; I would be on constant high alert.

  I panicked as I realised I’d run out of Post-its. I looked around for my notebook and couldn’t find it, then remembered I’d left it on the passenger seat of my car. Sometimes it was handy having something to jot down ideas on when I was at traffic lights. For a moment I didn’t know what to do; I knew that if I didn’t write Andrew’s details down somewhere this minute, I’d forget them, so I picked up a red marker pen and made a note on one of my glossy white cabinets. It would come off easily once I’d found Matt.

  My phone beeped with a message from Lucy:

  Hannah, George says you should check your email.

  I flinched.

  After three attempts to log into my work email, I realised the password wouldn’t open the account.

  My heart sinking, I opened up my Gmail account. There was an email from HR. It was polite and succinct and absolutely clear.

  I had been suspended.

  42

  I looked from the HR email to Andrew Brodie’s LinkedIn page. I knew I wouldn’t be able to put up a good case at work unless I’d sorted out this thing with Matt. If I could just meet him again I’d be able to focus on my job and try to regain the ground I’d lost. I tried not to think about how unforgiving the company could be.

  Finding Matt had to be my priority.

  I picked up the phone and called the company where Andrew worked. In that moment before the phone was answered, I realised that Matt might actually be working with Andrew now, and my heart jolted. I could be speaking to him in a few minutes! My mouth was dry and I had to swallow hard before I was able to ask the receptionist if I could be put through to Matthew Stone. I was almost relieved when she said that nobody of that name worked there. I asked for Andrew instead, and the call went straight to voicemail. His message said he was out of the office working on a project, and that he could be reached on his mobile. I made a note of the number on the cabinet, drew a big circle around it and stood looking at it. I didn’t know how to play this now.

  I looked at the clock. It was 4 p.m. I decided to wait until after 6 p.m. to call him. I didn’t want him to be surrounded by people when I spoke to him.

  I was too agitated to do anything for the next hour. I could hear Ray outside, power-washing his garden wall; I couldn’t face him right now, so a run was out of the question. In any case, how could I go out when I had to guard the house? And my sickness had returned with a vengeance since seeing the webcam evidence of the door opening and closing; that visual proof that someone had been in my home had really shocked me. I don’t think I could have run more than a hundred yards in the state I was in.

  I picked up my tablet and closed down the email from HR. I couldn’t stand to read it again. I tried to call Lucy on her mobile; it rang once, then cut off. Had she just rejected my call?

  Then I remembered. Just as Lucy could access my emails, I could access hers. I knew her password, she knew mine. She’d told me hers when she was off sick a few months ago; I’d been able to go into her emails and sort some things out for her.

  Using Lucy’s password, I logged on to the firm’s intranet. I knew it was wrong, I knew it was illegal, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I wanted to know what she was up to.

  It’s very strange, looking at someone else’s email inbox. It looked familiar because it was
similar to my own, of course, but essentially it was completely different.

  I searched her inbox for the projects Alex had mentioned. The emails I’d sent her weren’t there. I frowned and searched the days around that date, but I still couldn’t see them. I clicked on the folder with my name on it and they weren’t there either.

  I checked the recycle bin. It was empty. I frowned. Surely a recycle bin would usually have deleted mail in it? Then I saw the ‘recover deleted items’ button. I clicked it and stared at the emails that appeared. It’s funny how I had never noticed that button before, but now it looked like it might be the one thing that would save my job.

  There, amongst a lot of other emails, were the ones I was looking for, the very ones I’d told Alex I’d sent. Lucy hadn’t even had the sense to permanently delete them.

  I opened the email to Powell’s that I’d sent her. Alex had said they had an early version. The attachment opened and I looked down at the footer. There was nothing there except the page number. I scrolled down. There were twenty complete pages, exactly as there should have been. Just as I’d told Alex, I had sent the full document to Lucy. All she’d had to do was proofread it, check it was complete and forward it on to Powell’s from my email address.

  Relief flooded through me. I’d known I was right, and this proved it.

  I remembered now that after she’d proofread it, she hadn’t emailed back to confirm it was all right. She’d just popped into my office and said, ‘Powell’s is fine, Hannah. I’ve sent it on.’ Had she done that on purpose, so there was no trail? And I wondered at what point she’d decided to send off the first version to make me look incompetent and a fool. I felt a flash of anger as I thought of her accessing my files to find the wrong copy. That had been explained to her on the very first day: as my assistant, she could send documents out in my name, but it was imperative that she only sent ones that I’d approved.

  I forwarded the relevant emails to Alex, with copies to George. I didn’t write a note; I couldn’t think of a thing to say, but I did include a screenshot of the list of deleted items, just in case Lucy realised they were still there.