The Loop

by Anabel Donald

  I told her and she made out the cheque. ‘What about expenses?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll invoice you later. Who am I looking for?’

  ‘An Englishman at the University of Chicago.’ She fished around in her bag and passed me a brown envelope. ‘There’s all you’ll need in there: my address and telephone number in London, and his name and last known address, with some personal details and a photograph.’

  I took the envelope. ‘Why are you carrying this about with you?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about hiring a detective for a while. But I couldn’t . . . I didn’t really want to find out.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because until I know what happened, I can make it up. I can avoid it. I can dream. Never mind . . . What else do you need to know?’

  ‘Is he a professor at the University?’

  ‘Oh no. A graduate student.’

  ‘And you just want me to find him?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Does it matter if he knows I’m looking for him?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘And if I find him, what do I do?’

  ‘Send him all my love. But you won’t find him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he’s dead. Or dreadfully injured, or in a coma.’

  She spoke with such utter certainty that I was taken aback. Most missing person cases were simple, though, and the facts of this one seemed no different. An Englishman in Chicago should leave a trail a mile wide – I supposed, knowing nothing of Chicago. ‘How long has he been missing?’

  She stubbed out her cigarette, lit another one. ‘I don’t know.’ She saw my raised eyebrows. ‘I don’t know exactly. I know where he was last September. September twenty-first.’

  ‘And where was that?’

  ‘On a British Airways flight, with me. From Heathrow to O’Hare. I last saw him by the luggage carousel. My bags came through first, he was still waiting for his, so I took mine and went. I didn’t’ – she blinked, and though there were no tears there was the echo of them – ‘I hate long goodbyes, don’t you?’

  I did. And I didn’t want to chat; I wanted her out and myself in a bath. I usually like to get the feel of a client and of the situation I’ll be mixing in to, but I was beginning to feel sandbag-tired. Still, I was taking her money.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Especially with lovers.’ I nodded at the high-riding bulge under her sweater. ‘And you were lovers, obviously.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. We are. We still will be, after death. We’d talked about marriage. I told you, he’s the love of my life. And I am of his.’

  She was only pushing thirty. How would she know? How can you name, until your deathbed, the love of your life? But she evidently meant it literally, and she was crying now, frankly. I passed her a handful of missing-man-size paper tissues.

  ‘I’m sorry. Jams. Why are you so sure something’s happened to him?’

  ‘Because otherwise he’d have written. Or rung. I didn’t expect to hear from him until I got back to London a week later – I was on a shoot in the backwoods up by the Lakes, and I hadn’t a telephone number to give him, and he didn’t have a telephone in his room – but then I waited, but the letter didn’t come, and the post takes a while from America but I thought he’d write straight away and so it could even have been waiting for me when I got back but it wasn’t, but he might have been coming back to England so I waited another week and then I called the place he was staying at in Chicago, and left a message, but he didn’t return it, so I left another, and then I wrote, and then I wrote again, and then I wrote again ...’

  I gave her another wodge of tissues. ‘And he didn’t write back,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you stay over in Chicago and look for him yourself?’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it myself, whatever it is. I want someone else to hear it for me, and then tell me, and soften it somehow. Because it means so much. Don’t you see?’ She was still crying, gently, the kind of tears that come from a long, deep hurt. The man had probably dumped her: it would turn out to be as simple as that. But it wasn’t so simple for her, or it was simple but it was almost unendurable. Either way, now I had stirred it up, I couldn’t just leave it and push her out on to the Chicago streets with her wound freshly opened.

  I took a deep breath. ‘Tell me all about it,’ I said. ‘How you met, how long you’ve known him, how much you saw each other, how often he wrote, what your plans were, what he was like – the whole bit. Give me the picture.’

  It took her a moment to understand what I said. Then understanding clicked in her eyes, and she nodded eagerly. ‘Yes, please. The more you know the better chance you have of finding him, isn’t that true?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said.

  She took a deep breath.‘I’ll tell you everything,’ she said.‘Anything you want to know, just ask.’ She blew her nose with inelegant, childlike thoroughness, wadded the tissues, looked for a wastepaper basket and then, not finding it, shoved the tissues into her bag.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s start at the beginning. When did you meet him?’

  ‘Twenty-first September last year,’ she said.

  I wrote it down. Then I looked at it. ‘But that’s when you last saw him,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So when you lost touch with him – when he went missing, you think – you’d actually known him for how long?’

  ‘Ten hours,’ she said.

  Chapter Three

  You don’t find the love of your life on a flight from Heathrow to O’Hare. You might meet him but his importance wouldn’t emerge till later. Would it?

  Plus she claimed to be a model and I wasn’t convinced.

  I looked at my watch. Seven-fifteen, local time. One-fifteen tomorrow morning, London time. Hong Kong was eight hours ahead, so nine-fifteen Monday morning Polly-time. She’d be at her office, crunching numbers and calculating her bonus.

  Jams gazed at me.

  ‘I could murder a cup of coffee,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll ring room service,’ she said helpfully.

  I don’t use room service. Even on expenses. It takes for ever, the mark-up’s outrageous and I never know how much to tip. Even if I ever did, I certainly wouldn’t now. ‘There must be a coffee-shop downstairs. Be a love and get us some take-out while I shower, then we can talk. Two coffees, white, no sugar, and a doughnut for me.’

  ‘OK,’ she said obligingly. ‘Any special kind of doughnut?’

  ‘The round kind.’

  ‘OK.’

  As soon as the door closed behind her I was by the phone wrestling with the international dialling instructions. Click click click click click silence buzz ring ring.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Polly.’

  Silence, then recognition. ‘It’s you, Alex. Hi! I was expecting Tokyo!’

  ‘Tokyo can wait. I’m at my hotel in Chicago and I’ve just met your batty friend Jams Treliving.’

  ‘She’s not batty. She’s sweet, and she’ll be a wonderful mother, it’s so sad . . . when she told me she wanted a detective to find her man I knew it was fate sending her to you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me she was on her way?’

  ‘Because I thought you might put her off and I didn’t want you to, and I knew if you saw her you’d agree to help her because you’re a big softy.’

  I didn’t even bother to dispute this reading of my character, which struck me as risibly inaccurate, but pressed on for facts. ‘Is she a model?’

  ‘Of course, didn’t she tell you?’

  ‘But she’s got a face like a pie.’

  Polly laughed. ‘Nobody uses her face, Alex. She’s a leg model. That’s why she’s called Jams, you know, from the French, jambes. And a backside model. She was my bum in the health-food telly campaign back in the eighties, remember? When I ran laughing through the rain forest on to the beach, with the branches clawing at my face?’

&nb
sp; ‘I remember.’

  ‘The rear-view close-ups as I ran across the beach – that was Jams. My bum’s too bony and flat. Hers is narrow and bippy.’

  ‘Bippy?’

  ‘You know, high and curved, so if you outlined her back with your hand, the buttocks stick out, bip. Very unusual in a white woman. And her front is good, too. Dead sexy without being obscene. She does knickers and stockings. She’s the Sheer Heaven tights model – on all the posters and telly ads.’

  ‘So she’s successful?’

  ‘Very. One of the three top in the world, I’d say.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘I’ve told you, she’s nice.’

  ‘Polly, you think everyone’s nice.’

  ‘No, really, she is – she’s down to earth, sensible, kind, very sensitive. One less protective skin than the rest of us and knits lovely sweaters. Everyone likes her.’

  ‘What’s her sex-life like?’

  ‘Hasn’t she told you, she’s in love?’

  ‘I know, since last September. I mean before that. Usually. Can she be sure who’s the child’s father?’

  ‘Absolutely. She had a disastrous love affair which broke up about three years ago, and she hasn’t slept with anyone since. She was waiting for the right man, she told me. That’s what’s so sad. She finds him and then he vanishes. Make sure you find him for her. And give her my love.’

  ‘Sure. Listen, Polly, should I expect any more of your lame dogs to turn up tonight? Because I was hoping to sleep.’

  ‘Of course not, and Jams isn’t a lame dog, and stop pretending you don’t like clients, because you do. See you very soon.’

  ‘See you soon.’

  When I replaced the receiver I pulled a change of clothes from my suitcase and retreated into the bathroom.

  Then I lay in the bath and thought about love.

  I’d thought about it a great deal, recently.

  Barty’s about fifteen years older than me, he’s been married before, he’s got no children. And I was beginning to suspect he wanted to marry me and father some.

  Marriage. Children. Serious stuff that I had to think through.

  My childhood dreams hadn’t included marriage. They’d been fantasies about independence – financial and emotional. Although I had, briefly, dreamed of being married to Lew Archer, Ross Macdonald’s private eye. He’s battered and middle-aged and world weary, and when I was about thirteen I thought I could bring the light of hope back into his bleak, knowing eyes. Then as I grew older and got to know more about boys I’d thought I’d stick to trying to get the light of hope back into my own, trying to get myself established, trying to get away from the Social Services, trying to be just me.

  Now, I didn’t know. I didn’t know if the desire for independence was truly adult or just adolescent. I didn’t know if my life would be hopelessly crippled, even if I didn’t see it, by being Alex Tanner, woman detective and television researcher. People get crippled by the narrowness of their dreams, and my dreams had narrowed to a small tunnel.

  OK, I was independent. OK, I earned enough money; plenty of research work came my way. OK, the mortgage on my flat was beginning to come down and I was going to go into my thirties reasonably well provided for. But emotionally, I was beginning to feel the pinch.

  I’d thought an affair with Barty would suit me, and up to a point it did. I liked his company, mostly, and I enjoyed him in bed. Leaving out early one-night stands, I’d never slept with anybody who I didn’t quite enjoy in bed, which suggested to me that what I enjoyed was bed. But I’d started feeling something I hadn’t before: my body was tugging at me for babies.

  I’ve never liked babies, much. I’ve never particularly liked puppies either, or kittens, and I never had fluffy toys, and when I was a small kid and crying into my pillow because my mother had gone off her head again I didn’t hug a stuffed toy. I cried myself out and then I read a book, because books were the escape into other worlds, better than the one I was in. When I grew up, I’d be in those other worlds.

  But now the other worlds seemed to me tawdry. And narrow. After you’ve swaggered about the streets saying to yourself ‘myself alone’ for a while, that isn’t enough. I half-wanted to be a full member of the human race, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it, or even what it meant.

  How did you become a full member of the human race? You took part, that was how. You gave parts of yourself away and other people or other groups gave parts of themselves back, and you were knitted together, and you went ahead like that, carrying other people and them carrying you.

  But marriage. And children. Words that cast a long shadow, if you weren’t sure, if you weren’t in love. And I didn’t think I was in love with Barty, but I didn’t know. If I was, why did I grind my teeth with rage when he left his used teabags on my clean worksurfaces? Why did I think his back was too bony? Why did I still flirt with tasty men at wrap parties?

  I didn’t even know if there was such a thing as love. Not the thunder-and-lightning love, where your eyes met, and you knew, and it lasted for ever. Perhaps that only happened in Hollywood and Harlequin novels.

  But Jams thought it had happened to her, and she was back with the coffee, I could hear her moving about in the bedroom.

  I had to listen anyway. And who knows? I might learn.

  Monday, 28 March

  Chapter Four

  I woke up before dawn, just after five.

  In America.

  Jams had left to catch her return flight before ten, and I’d crashed out and slept for seven hours: long enough to recover from the flight. Almost long enough to look forward to meeting Barty for breakfast.

  To keep sulking this morning would be rude. I try not to be rude. It betrays too much.

  And besides, it’s rude.

  I showered, using the free hotel-gel. I’d save the British Airways stuff for later. I unpacked and hung up my clothes, more than I would have brought if I’d been alone. I put on my newest jeans, my most expensive sweatshirt (black, no logo), and moussed my hair. It’s still short. Not quite cropped, but short. And I dye it red. My natural hair is mouse but I don’t feel mouse, I feel red.

  There was no coffee-making equipment in the room. I couldn’t do anything without coffee, so I fetched myself some, roaming the deserted hotel in search of a machine. The coffee-shop didn’t open until six, I noticed: it was shuttered and dark. But there was a blessed machine on the ground floor near the reception desk with its sleepy young female receptionist. I got myself three plastic cups of coffee and wrestled them up again in the lift, pressing the buttons with my elbow.

  I drank the first cup looking out of the window into the early-morning darkness. There were some cars, some people, enough light to see that across the road there was a park. I sorted through the maps I’d got and picked out the tourist map. I always start with those: from small to large. The tourist map first, to get familiar with what the locals thought a visitor would like to know about their city. When I’d got that fixed in my mind, I’d move on to the bigger map, and then the bigger, so when I hired a car and drove around I knew roughly where I was.

  The thing that struck me about Chicago – my first American city – was the blessed simplicity of it. Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Strasbourg, Edinburgh, Birmingham, all cities I’d got to know, were higgledy-piggledy organic growths, but the American city-from-scratch grid system made everything easy.

  I knew it from the books, of course, but here it grew before my eyes as I glanced from the scaffolding on the map in my hands to the gradually lightening streets outside.

  The central part of the city, the part covered by my tourist map, was a north/south strip on the west coast of Lake Michigan. The hotel was on South Michigan Avenue, facing east. The park was Grant Park. Across the park was the lake. To the north, along Michigan Avenue and across the Chicago River, was the smart shopping area. Polly’d know all about that. Lucky she wasn’t with us.

  More important to
me was the car rental office, which I located three blocks north of the hotel. Walking distance, good. I was due there at nine. I didn’t actually need a car, the police press relations people had said they’d drive me anywhere I wanted to go, but if I didn’t rent a car Barty would and then he’d be giving me rides, which wasn’t the point of the trip at all. Besides, there’s nothing like driving in a place to get to know it, and I could bill it to Jams – Alan probably wouldn’t have worn it. He’s a cheapskate and he’s known me too long. At noon the police were picking me up. Before that, I could get started on Jams’s missing man.

  I emptied her information envelope and found his last address. International House, East 59th St. Fifty-ninth St wasn’t on the tourist map – too far south – so I moved to a larger map. Not far at all, maybe six miles. Straight down Lake Shore Drive. It looked easy. I’d soon find out if it was, directly I picked up my car.

  It was still only six o’clock and Barty wasn’t due for breakfast till seven-thirty, so I settled down to my notes of the previous night’s interview with Jams.

  Her lover was called Jacob Stone and he was very tall, six-foot three, important I supposed for Jams who would have been that height herself in heels. He was twenty-six (bit young for her?) and a second-year graduate student in the English Department, working for his Ph.D. in eighteenth-century English Literature. He’d been an undergraduate at Christ Church Oxford, taken his degree when he was just twenty, then gone into a merchant bank until he’d saved enough money to pay for graduate school. He’d hated the bank, according to Jams. Everyone was obsessed with money. That seemed fair enough to me, and a peculiar objection for him to make. If he wanted to be among unmaterialistic people with a social conscience, he could have worked for the Liberal Democrats.

  I read on and thought. If he was researching English Literature, particularly long-ago stuff, why was he in America? Maybe the University of Chicago had bought all our eighteenth-century materials. I didn’t know enough about it to judge, and at any rate, at this stage, it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to understand him. I just had to find him.