by Nicci French
‘I… er… Are you all right?’ he said, looking really shaken.
As if I hadn’t put him through enough already today. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m not thinking properly. I walked out without looking. It’s completely my fault. I’m so sorry.’
There was a sound of a car horn behind Rick. A queue was building up. A man got out of one of the cars. His hair was cropped so closely that you could see the skin underneath. He was wearing combat trousers and a green flak jacket.
‘All right! All right!’ I yelled.
‘Fucking bitch!’ he shouted. ‘Get the fuck out of the way.’
I was briefly tempted to continue the row. Perhaps even start a fight. It would have been something to do with the fire burning inside me. But instead I looked at my son beside me and at Rick, and I swallowed my anger. It took an effort but I did it. ‘Sorry,’ I said to the man. ‘We’ll get out of the way.’
I asked Rick if he could pull in to the kerb. I said I needed to talk. He restarted his stalled car and parked outside the café.
‘How’s Karen?’ I asked.
He rubbed his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he was just exhausted or holding back tears. ‘She’s fast asleep,’ he said. ‘They gave her some strong medication. She needs to rest. She was drunk at your house. I’m sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘Is she in the hospital?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They didn’t want her to be moved. It’ll be a couple of days at least.’
‘Is anyone with her?’
‘Eamonn said he’d pop in. For what it’s worth. Children, eh?’
‘What are you doing now?’ I asked.
‘Nothing much,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a couple of fairly unimportant things to get on with. I might as well pass the time. There’s not much else I can do. But what am I thinking, going on like this? Have you heard anything about Charlie?’
‘She’s still missing,’ I said.
‘What? Haven’t you heard anything?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Are you sure she hasn’t gone off with a friend? I’m afraid she’s that age.’
‘That’s what I thought at first. But we found her bike and her bag. She’d been delivering papers.’
‘Oh, my God,’ Rick said. He stared at me, shocked. ‘That’s awful. Have you called the police?’
‘Yes, of course. They’ve started interviewing people. I’m not sure they’ve got the proper sense of urgency.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve been taken up with Karen. But if there’s anything at all I can do, Nina, you know you only have to ask.
A thought struck me. I glanced down at Jackson, who was gnawing his cheese roll and looking bored. He knew Rick well and was comfortable with him. ‘There is something,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go and talk to someone who knows Charlie. It’s desperately urgent. Could you take Jackson for a few minutes while I do it? I’ve tried other people but…’
‘Oh…’ said Rick. He glanced at his watch – nearly a quarter to four. I could see he was already regretting his impulsive offer. At any other time, on any other day, I would have let him off but I was merciless.
‘Please, Rick. It would be the most enormous help.’
‘I, erm…’
‘Give me your mobile number and I’ll ring you as soon as I’ve seen… er, this person. It’ll be twenty minutes, half an hour tops. You know I wouldn’t ask unless it was important.’
Rick gave a sigh. My car. My party. And now my son.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Come on, Jackson. Out of the cold with you.’
Jackson hopped into the back seat quite cheerfully. He was probably glad to be away from me. I tapped the number of Rick’s mobile into my phone and they drove away. I could see Jackson talking and making gestures and Rick looking stoical, his face blank. I got into the car but before I started it, I sat for a few moments, not thinking but settling my thoughts, trying to cool down. If there was going to be any point at all to this, I had to think clearly. Otherwise I was wasting everybody’s time. A few deep breaths. Then I turned the key in the ignition. The engine hiccuped loudly and stalled. I tried again. This time the hiccup was brief.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Please don’t.’
I turned the key again and there was a faint click. Then nothing.
I leaped out and ran to the corner to see if by any wonderful chance Rick and Jackson were still in sight. I was in time to see the car turning away.
I ran back and tried again. The car was not going to start. I picked up my mobile. Rory was still at the police station; Renata was weeping in my bed; Christian was stuck on the M25, probably for the rest of his life; Bonnie was out Christmas shopping; Rick was in his car with my son. My heart sank. Maybe I should try Joel: he’d come, unless it was Alix who answered.
Then I had another thought.
‘Hi.’
‘Jay, it’s Nina. Listen, I’m in town, just near the newsagent’s, and was about to drive over to you but my car won’t start. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you coming here? Do you drive?’
‘A motorbike,’ he said.
‘Can you come, then?’
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Give me a minute or so.’
‘Thanks.’
Another wait. I sat in the wretched car and drummed my fingers on the steering-wheel. I turned the key in the lock a couple more times and heard the dead click. Then, coming down the road towards me, I saw Tom, the vicar. He was carrying a large shopping-bag and had a paper rolled up under his arm. He seemed to be talking to himself. Or maybe he was talking to God. He stopped by the car and I opened the door.
‘Hello, Nina. I thought you’d be in Florida by now.’
‘Change of plan,’ I said wearily. I couldn’t tell the story to another person.
‘Is something up with your car?’
‘Yes. When I most need it, it won’t start.’
‘Shall I have a look?’ He put his paper and shopping-bag on the passenger seat, leaned across me, without asking my permission, and pulled the lever that opened the bonnet. He tugged off his woollen gloves and bent over the engine, a look of pleasure on his face. Men and cars, I thought.
Then I heard a motorbike, which pulled up beside my car. Tom stood upright as a figure climbed off. A black helmet covered his head and face, and he lifted it off. I opened the door.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Do you want to sit in the car?’ I said. ‘I’ve got something important to ask you. Things are looking serious. Bad.’
‘Bad,’ he repeated. ‘Bad with Charlie?’
‘Yes.’
He looked at me and then at Tom, whose head was back under the bonnet.
‘Can we talk somewhere else? I feel kind of exposed. It’s like a goldfish bowl in this place. Especially with him there.’
‘Everywhere’s pretty public round here,’ I said.
He stared at me, then gave a sudden grin. ‘Why don’t you hop on the back?’ he said. ‘I’ll take us somewhere private.’
‘On your bike?’
‘Why not? Unless you’re scared.’
It sounded like a challenge. I looked at his thin, pale face; the green-grey eyes. This boy – or young man – was Charlie’s secret life. He might know something, or everything, of what had happened. He might be an ordinary teenager or he might be violent and disturbed. I shrugged.
‘Nothing scares me now, except what’s happened to my daughter,’ I said, and climbed out of the car, slamming the door behind me. ‘But not too far. I don’t have time.’ I turned to the vicar, who was trying but failing to hide his curiosity. ‘Tom,’ I said, ‘I don’t have time to explain but I’ve got to go now. It’s been very kind of you to try to help.’
‘But I’ve hardly begun.’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I tell you what, if you leave me the car key, I’ll tinker a bit more, shall
I? It might be something simple.’
‘If you want,’ I said. ‘But you don’t need to, you know.’
‘I like mending things.’
I pulled the key off the key-ring and passed it to him, then turned back to Jay. ‘Let’s go, then.’
‘There’s a spare helmet in there,’ he said, pointing behind the seat. I took it out and put it on, adjusting the chin-strap and pulling down the visor. I swung my leg up and over and straddled the seat behind him.
‘Put your feet on those bars,’ he said. I did so. ‘And put your arms round my waist.’ I did. ‘Go with the bike,’ he instructed me. ‘Don’t try to counterbalance it. Relax.’ He turned his head. ‘Not how I’d imagined my first meeting with you,’ he said, and pulled down his visor.
One minute we were by the pavement, the next we were roaring along The Street, so fast that the road melted to a grey river beneath me and the houses blurred. As we accelerated round the corner and headed east, we seemed almost to be lying flat against the surface, like our own shadow. I could have reached out my right hand and flayed the skin off my knuckles. The muscles in my cheeks dissolved and my stomach turned to liquid. For a few seconds, I wasn’t thinking of Charlie, only of dying. Then the bike straightened again; the world righted itself. Past the boatyards and the caravan site, past the beach where dinghies were turned turtle on the sand, past the beach huts. Houses petering out, the road narrowing.
I held on to Jay, leaned as the bike leaned. Charlie had done this, I thought. She had sat up here and put her arms round this young man’s waist, laid her cheek against the black leather of his jacket as the world ripped by. Then she had come home to me and said nothing about it.
‘This’ll do,’ he said, and we stopped on a track that led from the coastal road down to the shoreline. Behind us lay the town, with its shops, cafés, roads, cars and people. In front was a lonely wilderness of scrubland, marshes and borrow dikes, leading to the open sea. Small waves slapped and hissed against the diminishing stretch of mud. This was a side of Sandling Island that I loved and that scared me. It felt as though Jay and I were the only people in this whole flat grey world, where you couldn’t tell where water ended and sky began. The wind scoured my face as I pulled off the helmet. I swung myself down and found that my legs were trembling.
‘You didn’t do badly,’ he said, pulling off his own helmet.
‘Charlie is missing,’ I said. ‘It’s getting worse and worse. Worse with every minute that passes. The police are asking questions but I can’t sit at home. I’m going to ask you questions that no mother should ever ask her daughter’s boyfriend.’ He gazed at me impassively. It was difficult to be anything but impassive in that wind. I could feel my own face stiffening. ‘It doesn’t matter what you say. I’m not going to judge you. I don’t care any more. I don’t care what you two got up to together. I don’t care that you kept it from me. I want to find Charlie. That’s all. Then everything will be forgotten.’
He stared out to sea and I stared at his face, looking for something, some kind of sign. A small tremor passed over it, like wind across water.
‘I want to help find her,’ he said. ‘Of course I do. I’m sure she’ll turn up. There’ll be a reason. People don’t just disappear.’
Do you know? I thought. Was it you? ‘First off, you have to tell me if there’s anything you know that could help me.
Do you know where she is?’
‘No.’ His eyes were steady.
‘You swear it.’
‘If you like. I swear.’
‘All right, are you Charlie’s boyfriend?’
‘You could call it that.’
‘How long has it been going on?’
‘About four, five months. Since the summer.’
Such a long time, I thought. So many days of keeping it from me, of deceiving me, of pretending she was somewhere else. I thought of all the little things that Charlie confided – and she’d held this back.
‘Why didn’t she tell me?’
‘I don’t know. It was between us. We liked it secret. Things change when they’re public. It felt…’ He stopped.
‘Yes?’
‘We just liked it like that. Adults think they can tell you what to do, they think they can remember what it’s like to be young. We didn’t want that.’
‘Was it serious?’
‘Serious?’
‘Yes. Were you a couple?’ I put my hand on my stomach with a gasp for I had realized I was talking about it in the past tense. ‘Do you love her? Does she love you?’
‘Love?’
‘Oh, fuck this, Jay! Don’t you understand she might be in terrible danger?’
‘We don’t say “love”.’
‘What do you say?’
His face flamed. ‘Stuff,’ he said. ‘You know.’
‘Drugs?’ I asked.
‘Not really.’
‘Don’t piss around.’
‘Dope. Nothing much else. Ecstasy once but she didn’t like it.’
‘Did she tell you anything secret, anything that might be a clue?’
He ground the toe of his biker’s boot into the ground.
‘This is weird.’
‘What did she tell you?’
‘She talked about her father a bit.’
‘Go on.’
‘She didn’t like it, the way he doted on her so much. She said it wasn’t fair on Jackson and it gave her the creeps a bit. She didn’t like to discuss it with you because… well, you know, you’re her mother, it would be too weird.’
‘But nothing specific?’ I said.
‘Like…?’
‘Like he was sexually abusing her,’ I said, loud and clear.
‘For instance.’
He winced. ‘No.’ He paused, then said, ‘But she did tell me that she thought all older men were perverts.’
‘Why? Why did she think that?’
‘I don’t know. At the time, it just seemed like one of her wild statements. You know what she’s like. She often said things like that.’
‘Were you having sex?’
He mumbled something.
‘I know you were, Jay, but I need you to tell me.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Charlie was scared she was pregnant.’
It was as if I’d slapped him. ‘What?’
‘She’d missed her period.’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Didn’t you use a condom?’
‘We didn’t… we weren’t…’
‘I think this might be to do with her being pregnant, or worrying that she might be pregnant. So I need to know.’
‘We haven’t.’
‘Haven’t what?’
‘Haven’t had sex,’ he mumbled.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘That’s up to you.’ He raised his chin defiantly and glared at me. There were splodges of pink on his pale cheeks. ‘It’s true.’
‘You’re telling me you’ve never had sex?’
‘Not as such.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You know.’
‘Tell me.’
I wanted to slap him across the face, punch him in his leather-protected stomach.
The wind whipped his hair across his face and his eyes gleamed green. He clenched his fists and, for a moment, I thought he would hit me. ‘It means that whatever else we’ve done together – you know what that means – I haven’t had full sex with your daughter. OK?’
‘That can’t be true.’
He shrugged and turned to the sea. ‘Whatever,’ he said.
‘Do you promise?’
‘Promise? Promise, swear, cross my heart hope to die. If I was lying, I’d still promise I was telling the truth, wouldn’t I? She wanted to go on the pill first.’
I thought of Alix, Charlie’s doctor. ‘So is she on the pill?’
‘She didn’t say.’
Maybe those crosses in the diary meant something different, I though
t. Perhaps I was on the wrong track. ‘But if you’re telling me the truth, why did she think she was pregnant?’
‘You’d have to ask her that. Sorry, sorry, I know. I didn’t mean that. Look, I don’t know. Maybe…’
‘Maybe what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What aren’t you telling me?’
‘Fucking hell.’
‘Tell me. Tell me what you’re thinking.’
‘She had a one-night stand a few weeks ago.’
‘Who with?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who do you think?’
‘I mean it. I don’t know. You think if you go on asking the same bloody question over and over again, I’ll eventually give you the answer. She didn’t say. She just said she’d done something she regretted and hated herself for it and would I forgive her.’
‘And you did?’
‘It was like her revenge.’
‘You mean you’d done the same?’
‘That’s really not your business, is it?’
‘When did she do this?’
‘A few weeks ago.’
‘When?’ I persisted.
He thought for a moment. ‘Towards the end of last month. I don’t know the exact date. She didn’t tell me. I was away in France on my exchange. She told me when I got back.’
I was making calculations in my head. The last cross in her diary had been on 9 November, so Charlie’s one-night stand had been about two weeks after that. Which would make her almost a couple of weeks late with her period now.
‘I see,’ I said.
‘Any other questions?’
‘What else don’t I know?’ I asked despairingly. ‘If I didn’t know about you, there might be all sorts of other things I didn’t know as well. I thought I knew her inside out and suddenly she’s turned into this mystery. Like a stranger to me. I don’t know who she is.’
‘She says she’s close to you,’ said Jay. ‘She says you let her be who she is. Not like her dad. She was going to tell you about us when you were in Florida. That’s what she said, anyway.’
‘I just want to find her,’ I said. ‘If you’ve done anything to her, I swear –’
‘No.’
‘Where did you two meet?’
‘All sorts of places. On the mainland. Sometimes at my place when no one was there, and in Dad’s barns. Or the hulks, though we haven’t been there for a week or so. Too cold in this weather.’