There was a roar from inside the bar and a crowd of third years spilt out. They were an eye-catching group; Alice had seen some of them before and they looked particularly good in the soft afternoon light. The best-looking of them, lean and angular, led the way to the centre of the quad, holding a yard of ale in his hands like an ostensorium. The group gathered, quasi-solemnly, around one in particular. His face was tanned dark, his hair brown and wavy, combed back off his face, which had a sleepy, aquiline quality. The good-looking one, holding the yard, presented it to his friend, almost formally.
‘Cheers, chaps!’ he grinned.
And they started to shout: ‘Drink, drink, drink!’
‘Who’s that guy?’ Alice asked.
‘The hot one?’ asked Christie. ‘That’s Dan Vaughan.’
‘No, the shorter one with the yard of ale.’
‘George Bell.’ Christie hesitated. ‘He’s got a bit of a rep,’ she said eventually. ‘Don’t sleep with him. Take it from me.’
‘What – have you?’
Christie shook her head. ‘No, I quite fancy his friend – Teddy Shelton?’
Alice glanced at a large boy, with darting eyes, on the edge of the group. ‘Him?’
‘Yes, there’s something about him.’ Christie smiled slyly. ‘And his family owns a castle in Scotland, but, you know, it’s not really about that …’
‘Christie!’ Alice flicked a bit of grass at her friend. ‘You’re awful.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Christie said primly and she went back to her book.
It hadn’t been long after that that George and Alice got together. She had made him wait three weeks. Probably the longest George had had to wait for anything. It had been worth it in the end. They had spent a whole weekend holed up in his room, drinking champagne and listening to Pink Floyd.
She sighs now at the memory and returns to her client. ‘The toilet thing is neither here nor there,’ she says apologetically. ‘But if you’re sure you’d like to proceed with the divorce, we can go ahead.’
‘I have never been so sure of anything,’ says Elizabeth, her eyes shining. ‘I wouldn’t exchange how I feel now for all the security in the world.’
George hadn’t always been respectful in bed in those early days. Once, when a gang of them had gathered in his room for the after-party, he tried it on while the others were still there lolling around smoking weed. ‘No,’ Alice murmured when he started tugging down her pants as they were huddled under the covers snogging. And then, more loudly, in a voice that sounded like a schoolteacher: ‘I said no.’
She had gathered her things and marched back to her room, hearing Dan laugh as she left, saying: ‘Well, she’s not like the others.’
Who were the others? Alice used to feel haunted by George’s others. They only had a couple of terms together in St Anthony’s before he graduated and moved down to London, and there had been a lot of toing and froing in the years before she joined him in the city, a lot of breaking up and getting back together. Shagging around on George’s part, tears on Alice’s. She’d slept with a couple of other people too, but no one got her in bed like George did. She never found it as exciting with anyone else.
‘Marriage is an exchange, isn’t it?’ her client says now. ‘Not like prostitution,’ she laughs. ‘I don’t mean that. But, in terms of, “You give me this, I give you that.” I traded excitement for safety. Now, I don’t want to feel safe any more. I want to feel something else.’
Alice nods. It had been the other way round for her: George had made her feel alive, vital. Alice had had a lifetime of feeling safe before meeting George. Her upbringing had been secure, risk-averse. With him, she had known things would always be interesting. She knew from the beginning that he would make something of his life, that they wouldn’t live quietly. She wasn’t stupid – she always knew there were skeletons, too. More than once, some girl or other had tried to take her aside to warn her off George. But she’d got used to batting away such admonitions.
‘It’s fear that keeps people together so long, you see.’ The woman taps the desk with a manicured fingernail. ‘And I’m not afraid any more.’
Alice wonders if she agrees with this, after her client has gone. She returns to her desk after showing her out to discover an Amazon parcel waiting for her and a note from the office manager. ‘We just cleared out the post cupboard and found this hidden at the back.’ For a moment, she can’t remember what she had bought, but, as she rips the package open, she gets a thrill from seeing Richard Wiseman’s face in black and white looking up from the back cover. It’s his book – she’d forgotten she’d ordered it when she was ill.
Her hands are shaking as she flicks through the pages to find what she is looking for, but she needn’t have worried, the bright red hair makes it easy to find. There she is, at the heart of the book, looking straight at the camera or what must have been the man behind it. It’s a direct gaze, slightly challenging. It must have been taken on a cliff walk in St Anthony’s – it’s a spot Alice recognises, a bench overlooking the sea. Ruth’s hair is gleaming in the sunlight. Her face is pale. It’s hard to know, from her expression, what was about to pass between the photographer and her: it could be a kiss or, just as easily, an argument.
Sometimes Alice has to get up in the middle of the night to check things – an email she’s sent, a document she’s working on – having convinced herself, after hours of tossing and turning, that she’s got a detail wrong. More often than not, however, she hasn’t. It’s the mind playing tricks. That’s the feeling she has as she looks at the picture: that she had been wrong to doubt herself, that her instinct was right. But it’s better even than that, much better. This is the woman she saw. She is absolutely convinced of it. ‘I was right,’ she says aloud.
‘What?’ says her colleague on the next desk, only sounding half interested.
‘I was right about something,’ says Alice. She doesn’t care if she sounds mad, she just doesn’t care. ‘Something important.’
Naomi
In the office, Tim is sorting through the post. We still get plenty, but not as much as when I first started working for the charity just after uni. These days we keep in touch with relatives of the missing more through email and social media. I began on a volunteer basis during my holidays. It made me feel useful, sifting through the letters, following leads that came in. But, deep down, I knew the reason why I was here: it was because if anything came in about her body, I would be the first to hear.
It’s unlikely, of course. I still have to tell myself that. Unlikely but not impossible. The coroner told us that a body lost near an estuary might never be recovered. And the fact that the dress she was swimming in was so torn when it washed up was a very bad sign.
The early days were terrible. It started with Richard arriving at our cottage, knocking on the door, waking me from a strange alcohol-infused sleep.
‘Naomi,’ he said, looking tired, sheepish. None of us slept much the night of the ball. ‘Is Ruth in?’
It was pouring with rain, so I let him in quickly. ‘I thought she was with you.’
‘No,’ he said. And I could immediately tell that something had gone badly wrong between them.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure she’s not here. I put my head round the door when I came in this morning and then went straight to bed.’
Did the panic begin then? I don’t think so. Life still felt normal as we checked her room, where the bed was made, her jeans still hanging over a chair as if waiting for her to come back.
He hung around in the kitchen for a bit. I could see he was agitated, that they’d had another fight, but he wouldn’t tell me anything and I had my own concerns that day. We were friendly then, but I didn’t know him as well as I do now.
He left after a while to finish packing, telling me to send Ruth his way when she came home, and I thought about going to bed again for a bit, so I wasn’t frightened. Not in the way I was when the poli
ceman arrived an hour or so after Richard – just a local guy, holding her red shoes in one hand, her handbag in the other.
‘Is Ruth Walker in?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said for the second time that day. ‘Where did you find those?’
‘A member of the public found them on the beach,’ he said.
I looked at the red shoes he was carrying and I felt a kind of fear I had only experienced once before, when our father died. A fear that felt like a trapdoor giving way beneath my feet.
‘When did you last see her?’ he asked.
When you lose someone like this – when they go without warning – you examine all the signs over and over. You look at what she carried, what she wore, who she spoke to, what she said. You look for significance in every little clue. We tell ourselves we will know the truth when we see it; that because we love someone so much we will know in our gut whether they are dead or alive, but the truth is, we don’t know. We don’t know at all.
For me, there is solace in work: the routine of it, the satisfaction of a job done – black ink on yellow paper, Post-it notes. Ruth would laugh at me, but it helps – that feeling of satisfaction at piecing together other people’s lives still gives me some sense of purpose. And I know what the relatives are going through. A few of us here do. Everything has changed in the years since I’ve worked for the charity. Social media has done wonders for looking for people. One of the first things people tend to do when a relative or friend goes missing now is set up a Facebook page or create a tweet that asks everyone to retweet it. As one of the youngest here, I got roped into that side of things, even though social media sometimes unsettles me: for every genuinely helpful person out there, there’s a lunatic at their computer, trying to mislead you. And social media has made it easier for word of false sightings to spread. Something that has become a particular bugbear of mine.
Ruth’s case is very different from most. Often, we have even less to go on – the people we’re looking for have left one day for school or work or, as the cliché goes, popped out for cigarettes never to return. With Ruth, sudden as it was, everything pointed to her drowning. When I started volunteering here, my mother asked: ‘Are you sure you want to do that sort of work?’ She knew what I was doing: watching, waiting, hoping.
There was no social media fifteen years ago – no online campaigns with catchy slogans and hashtags. Everyone’s more media-savvy these days – if it had happened now we might have come up with a symbol for the search: red shoes, perhaps. A few years back, after the Canoe Man turned up alive, Richard, spurred on by fresh hope, suggested dedicating a Facebook page to Ruth – somewhere people could post sightings – and I considered it for a bit, but decided in the end that I couldn’t do it to my mum. People can always find you, if they need to, if they have something important to say.
I switch on the computer and go to the kitchen to make myself a peppermint tea. The course I went on advised starting the day with some positive news on our Facebook page and there is more than you would think: 99 per cent of all missing cases are solved within a year. I log on and look first at responses we have received overnight. I answer a few questions and post something cheery about one of our fundraisers.
‘You’ve got a parcel here,’ says Tim and he tosses a package in my direction. It is large, but soft, and weighs almost nothing at all. For a moment, I am frightened by the softness and think perhaps I have been sent some form of hate mail: a dead rat, roadkill, by an unbalanced someone who doesn’t want to be found. It has been taped down particularly thoroughly, so I get up to borrow a pair of scissors.
On the way I bump into Sue, who is back from holiday and makes a big fuss about how much my bump has grown in the three weeks since she’s been away. It seems incredible that I’m sixteen weeks in. I’m lucky – apart from some queasiness early on, I’ve felt pretty well. I have friends who have been terribly sick, who could sniff out everything from chewing gum in a back pocket to what sort of hand soap their husbands have used that day with a dreadful clarity. Some have turned against the most innocuous flavours – peppermint, camomile.
I don’t say this to Sue now but, despite myself, ever since my encounter in the supermarket at the beginning of the year, I have started thinking of the baby as a boy. I imagine a redheaded toddler playing on the beach in Wales. I think of how I will never let him out of my sight, never let him swim alone.
It’s later that I remember the package, which I’ve left absent-mindedly on the scanner. It has been secured very tightly, with layers of brown tape. I cut off the end and I smell something unbearably sweet and familiar. Coconut oil.
Things continue in the office as if nothing has happened. Tim and Sue are talking about the weekend. Sue laughs. The phone goes; Tim picks it up. Outside, the pub next door is receiving its Monday delivery; the beer barrels crash against the concrete.
And there is Nunny.
Ruth’s childhood toy looks up at me with his goggly glass eyes: orange marbles with large dark irises now worn at the surface, clouded over as if by cataracts. His once-pink coat has faded to grey with large patches worn away completely.
She was never without him as a child: in every photograph – by the sea, on a pony, posing on a tractor – there he is next to her. She carried him everywhere in an obsessive sort of way, carefully stowed away in a green bag, with a selection of other items: a yellow spoon, a box of Sun-Maid raisins … Our mum had to confiscate the green bag to wash it and Ruth screamed and screamed. After that none of it smelled the same, she said. She gave up on the green bag, but she kept Nunny.
Our grandmother had to knit clothes for him to stop him from falling apart. Ruth left him once on a train, but he found his way back to her. That was the way it was: as if they couldn’t be separated.
It doesn’t feel real. I take a pinch of skin on the back of my right hand with my left fingers, let the nails grip it until it feels tender with pain. If I were asleep, that would have woken me.
Who, who would send me Nunny in the post?
I pick up the phone. I misdial the first time because my brain is fog.
‘Hello, darling. You at work?’ My mother always asks that. Her voice is bright and sharp. She speaks loudly over the murmur of the radio.
‘Did you send me Nunny in the post?’ Framed as an accusatory question, it sounds ridiculous.
‘What?’ I hear her turn the radio off, give me her attention.
‘Did you send me Nunny in the post?’
She is quiet.
‘Ruth’s Nunny,’ I say to be more specific.
‘Nunny? Ruth’s Nunny?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the post?’
‘Yes.’
‘Whyever would I do that?’
‘Somebody has. Somebody sent him.’
‘Somebody sent him?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the post?’ she asks again, as if arranging the facts in her head.
‘Yes.’
‘Where to?’
‘To work.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘I don’t know. To hurt me?’
But I can’t think of anyone who would want to hurt me, who would wish me harm in that way. The thing is: I’m not sure the same could be said of Ruth. Not that she had enemies exactly. Enmities, perhaps. Particularly in the weeks before she went when she seemed jittery all the time, restless and angry. I think of Ruth’s friend Kat shrieking at her, that awful scene with Richard when the porters had to get involved, of a sombrero toppling at a party as Ruth punched the person wearing it.
We are quiet for a moment.
‘When did you last see him?’ I ask. For some reason, Nunny had always been a ‘him’.
‘I can’t remember.’ My mother flusters more easily these days; her memory isn’t what it was. ‘I can’t remember,’ she says again. ‘Maybe he got lost in the move.’
Our mother still owns the land where the hotel stands and rents the hotel to a couple from Ca
rdiff, but she has moved to a cottage inland. After Ruth’s death she found managing the hotel too much – that and looking out at all that water.
‘The last time I remember seeing him he was on her bed in her old room at home,’ she says eventually. She is quiet for a moment, perhaps thinking, like me, that that memory could have come from any time. ‘Did she take him to St Anthony’s with her? Might Richard have had him?’
‘I can’t recall seeing him in St Anthony’s. And no, I don’t think so.’ I shake my head. ‘It doesn’t sound like the sort of thing Richard would do.’
‘I can’t think who else might remember anything.’ She sighs. ‘What about that Kat girl?’ Our mother had never liked Kat.
‘I can drop her a line, but I don’t think they were very friendly by the end.’
Kat had come to Ruth’s memorial, though – tottering around on those ridiculous heels, her make-up sliding down her face.
‘Oh yes, of course.’ My mother’s voice sounds small. I wonder if I should have said anything, should have called Carla instead. Then she asks: ‘What about the postcode?’
‘The postcode?’
‘On the parcel,’ she says breathlessly. ‘The postmark, I mean. Where was he sent from?’
I pick up the parcel. My name and address have been scrawled in capital letters. I look for the postmark. My thoughts are so scrambled that it takes a moment for the penny to drop.
‘Well?’ my mother asks impatiently.
‘St Anthony’s,’ I say.
It still feels like something from a dream. I hold Nunny up to my face and breathe him in. She’s still there, very faint, under the scent of coconut.
Kat
December 1999
There is more than one Ruth, Kat realises, in the way there is more than one of all of us. Ruth the shy Welsh virgin. Ruth the drama queen. Ruth the nymphomaniac. Ruth her now very drunk friend, flush-cheeked, glass of wine in hand, talking about her favourite subject: George.
‘This is how addiction works,’ she tells Kat solemnly. ‘I used to see it all the time in the hotel bar. There would be these guys who would turn up as soon as we opened for lunch. They’d have their own stools, they would nod their order to the barman, without having to say it aloud, and they would just sit there until their money ran out. Or the bar closed. Or they just couldn’t keep themselves upright any more.
The Girl Before You Page 8