The Day We Disappeared

by Lucy Robinson

  Tim looked wary.

  My phone started ringing again. ‘Hello, Claudie.’

  ‘Oh, my little pepper pot,’ Claudine said sadly. ‘Lizzy just told me you are back. I am so desperately sorry, Annabel. I am going to come to Lizzy’s tonight. We can talk then. Or, if you prefer, we do not talk about it. But I will be there.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Have you heard from Stephen?’

  ‘Repeatedly.’

  Claudine made a worried sound. ‘Be careful, my little piglet. I think Stephen is very clever.’

  ‘I completely agree. I’m being very careful indeed.’

  I ended the call. ‘Claudie just said the same thing. “Stephen’s very clever.” I beg you, Timmy, don’t call the police. Not yet.’

  ‘Okay. But first sign of trouble and I’m calling them,’ he muttered.

  I felt no relief at all when we got back to my house and found the doorstep empty. If he wasn’t there now, he would be soon. He would be there soon and I would have to act on my plan, and I would hurt not only Tim but Lizzy and Claudine. And – worst of all – my dad. My lovely, sweet daddy.

  Tim held my hand while he walked around my little house, checking every cupboard. ‘I want to call the police,’ he kept saying, but I wouldn’t let him.

  After packing a bag of things we went down to my kitchen to turn off the heating.

  And then my heart stopped.

  There he was.

  In my back garden.

  ‘Annie!’ Stephen called, striding towards my French windows, and I heard Tim shouting something.

  At first, as my arms, then my legs started to shake, and I felt breathless and floaty, I didn’t realize what was happening.

  ‘Police,’ I heard Tim say into his phone, and then shout, ‘I’ve dialled nine nine nine!’ at Stephen. I was dimly aware of Stephen yelling something through my back door and Tim pushing me out of the room. Then my chest started tightening and it all came back to me. The sensation of being unable to breathe, hearing myself gasping for air. Sweat breaking thickly across me, like oil, while I scrabbled hopelessly at the threads of my existence to stop myself dying.

  And then the bit where it all stopped, when I thought, That’s it. I’ve died.

  WHATSAPP GROUP MESSAGE

  LE CLOOB

  Tim, Lizzy, Claudie, You

  Annie:

  HELLO FROM THAILAND! SURPRISE! And sorry . . ! This is the view from my hut ☺ Guys, I’m so sorry to do a runner on you, but I felt like I had no choice. I couldn’t wait around doing paperwork for a restraining order, I just had to go. Please try to understand, and please know that I love you and that I’m sorry. Lizzy, I called Dad and said I wasn’t sure about Stephen and had decided to take a nice holiday. Please DO NOT tell him what’s really happened. It’ll set him right back, and I can’t do that to him. Anyway, I’ll only be away two or three months; it’ll soon pass and by the time I’m back, Stephen’ll have forgotten about me. I’m not insane, by the way, I’m FINE. Just sorry if I’ve made you worry. I love you all. X 6.52am ✓ ✓

  Lizzy:

  Oh God, Annie! Please answer your phone. Please tell us where you are. You can send a letter if you think that’s safer. Pleeeeeeease, little sister. Or just come back where the police can protect you. Love you so much. Xxxxxxxxx 7.11am ✓ ✓

  Claudine:

  Oh dear, Annie. I am so sorry to have been part of the cause of this. I echo your sister. Please do tell us where you are, it is important that somebody knows. Stay safe, my little flip-flop. I also love you. 7.12am ✓ ✓

  Tim:

  ANNIE! Please come home. And tell us where you are in the meantime. Please, sweetheart. X 8.00am ✓ ✓

  Annie:

  Better not tell you where I am, just in case. Please don’t worry about me! I think Stephen’s unhinged but I also think he’ll give up as soon as he realizes I’ve gone. By the time I’m back it’ll just be a blip in the distant past for him. And, anyway, you know I’m happiest abroad. Especially in Asia. I am eating spicy soup and listening to the birds in the trees. I should split up with mad stalky boyfriends more often! Honestly, I’m FINE. It’s utterly gorgeous here, and I feel relaxed for the first time in ages. xxx 8.57am ✓ ✓

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Annie

  I was not in Thailand eating spicy soup and listening to the birds in the trees. Neither was I relaxed. ‘Can this just go away?’ I was saying to myself, sitting on a smooth, cold floor in a windowless building. ‘Can this just stop?’

  It did nothing of the sort.

  I had bought a flight to Bangkok with a changeover at Abu Dhabi Airport – where I was waiting now – but I had no intention of completing the remaining leg. Stephen had been accessing my email account. That much was now clear. What I didn’t know, however, was whether he’d just been snooping at my emails using my phone or if he’d actually hacked them. This was my test.

  If Stephen was hacking my emails, he would know about this flight. And if he was as twisted as I now suspected he was, he wouldn’t simply turn up at Heathrow to persuade me to come back: he’d fly out here to find me during my long layover. To stage a proper ‘rescue’. Show me just how much he cared; how desperately he wanted me back. I’d follow you to the ends of the earth, Pumpkin. I’d spend every penny I had. We belong together.

  Money was no object to Stephen Flint. And where would be the triumph, the prestige, in snaring me at Heathrow? No. This airport, with its vast eastern mosaics stretching out across the ceiling, four thousand miles away from London, would be far more exciting. A grand gesture befitting a grand man.

  ‘I am the Leader of the People!’ he used to say. ‘I am God! You don’t catch God having a day off!’ How I’d giggled.

  How I would not have giggled if I’d the faintest clue that he actually meant it.

  You crossed the line when you let Tim call the police, he’d been texting. I’m giving you forty-eight hours to call me and explain yourself. Don’t think I won’t find you. Other texts would bang on about how much he loved me, and couldn’t live without me. Then some shouted things, like, ‘DO YOU HAVE ANY FEELINGS AT ALL? ARE YOU EMOTIONALLY DEAD? FUCKING WELL CALL ME. I AM HAVING THE WORST WEEK OF MY LIFE, YOU COLD-HEARTED BITCH. REMEMBER I HAVE EVIDENCE THAT YOU’RE A STALKER. AND REMEMBER I HAVE EVIDENCE THAT YOU’RE FUCKING MAD.’

  Every time a message arrived, another part of me seemed to fall away. There was so little of me left now. What remained was just shrapnel, mismatching scraps of the innocent little hippie I’d once been.

  ‘Are you all right, madam?’ asked a lady with a smart Etihad uniform and a soft Arabic accent. She smiled at me as if I were an important first-class passenger rather than some freak in an old trilby, crouching at the edge of the balcony like a stray dog. ‘Madam? You do not look very comfortable there!’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said, as my brain started working again. ‘Jetlag! I’m fine, thank you. Just waiting for my husband. He’s coming in from London and we’re flying on to Bangkok together. I’ll spot him better from up here!’

  ‘Ah, of course, madam,’ she said. ‘Good luck finding him!’ She walked off smartly, her spotless shoes click-clacking away into the low murmur of the terminal.

  How effortless it was to lie, I thought. How easy it was, if you had the right accent, spoke the right language, to convince the world that you were doing something perfectly innocent when you were doing quite the opposite.

  I wondered at what age Stephen had stopped noticing or caring about his lies. If, in fact, that time had ever come, or if he had just been lying since he could talk.

  Did you have a nice day at school, darling?

  Yes, said five-year-old Stephen. I came top in maths homework, Mum! When in fact he had badly beaten up one of his classmates and spent the afternoon in the headmaster’s office. I got a gold star!

  There was still no sign of him. I wondered if I needed to eat something.

  I dragged myself off to a coffee shop
where a woman in a hijab was pulling coffees and chatting to a male customer about his fungal toe infection. U2 was playing in the background, that song about the city of blinding lights, and a tiny little girl who looked like she was maybe from Libya was teaching her even tinier brother the Gangnam Style dance. The world had never felt so strange.

  I ordered a pastry that I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat, and a coffee that would probably send me through the roof, and got out the notebook I’d had close to my body since finding out three days ago that Stephen had not only been cheating on me but was almost certainly in possession of a dangerous personality disorder.

  Psychopath, I’d written at the top of the first page, swirling the leg of the H round and round until it rolled off the page.

  I knew Claudine would be cursing herself for using that word in her email. She’d have used it to add emphasis to her accusations against Stephen but later regretted it, knowing that the mention of anything like that would throw me over the edge. She was quite right. As soon as my taxi had cleared Holland Tunnel and started zipping along towards Newark Airport I’d been on Google. What is a psychopath? I’d written, feeling horribly certain that the answer would describe my boyfriend.

  I’d found surprising stuff about how psychopaths often played important roles in society, rather than just running around with axes, and then some less surprising stuff about how they were remorseless and pathologically un-empathetic individuals, devoid of the moral compass on which society depends. Lacking impulse control, narcissistic, overly confident, afraid of nothing and no one.

  But then had come the real shock: Psychopaths are often extraordinarily charming, and will go out of their way to appear humble, pleasant and highly entertaining. They rarely struggle to form new relationships, although they have great difficulty maintaining them.

  In two hours I’d made ten pages of notes from the internet and I’d started to plot my escape.

  I didn’t care if I was being over the top. All I cared about – more, almost, than breathing – was getting Stephen off my tail. I couldn’t exist while a man was chasing me. Especially one with a bloody personality disorder.

  ‘… to London Heathrow,’ said a voice on the Tannoy, and for a second I froze.

  In and out, I reminded myself. Breathe in, then out, Annie. If Stephen did what I thought he would, he wouldn’t be here for another forty-five minutes.

  I returned to my notes.

  Psychopath, said my notebook. It didn’t feel like the sort of word you used for people you met in real life, whom you chatted to in your treatment room, then ended up having sex with in a vineyard. ‘Psychopath’ felt like a film word. A university-research-department word. An old word, with connections to Victorian dungeons and mad, screaming people. And yet, apparently, psychopaths were everywhere. They were quite frequently your CEO, but they could be your doctor, your hotel concierge – even your teacher. One in every two hundred people, claimed one source. One in every twenty-five! claimed another.

  Stephen Flint. My knight in shining bloody armour.

  My psychopath in shining armour. It would be quite funny, really, if it wasn’t the unfunniest thing that had ever happened.

  I attempted to eat my pastry while re-reading the observations I’d made from a psychopath ‘checklist’ invented by a Canadian psychiatrist.

  – Extreme grandiosity: check. Stephen calls himself God, I’d written in trembly blue letters. He says he is the best in the business. He calls himself Leader of the People. He calls himself God, Jesus, the King. He reminds everyone all the time – even me – of how powerful he is, and he finds it funny.

  – Superficial charm. He spent the first month making all these grand gestures to show me how lovely and charming he was. The kindness, the self-deprecation. Ha-ha, look at me, taking twatty photos in Hackney. Ha-ha, look at me, having my scruffy breakfast in the French château. I’m SO NORMAL. Ha-ha, look at me, chatting to Le Cloob, showing them all how lovely and attentive I am. How could Annie resist me? Ha-ha! And all the while I’m fucking other women!

  At this point the wobbly letters had been blurred by tears.

  – Proneness to boredom. The man cannot sit still. It’s no wonder he’s been conducting more than one relationship behind my back. No danger or excitement in monogamy. No fun in being real for five bloody minutes.

  – Pathological lying. Er, where to start?

  – Lack of empathy and remorse. Look at the way he talked about the people he’s fired! And then how he was all, like, ‘Annie, I’m JOKING,’ when I looked upset! I’m quite sure that poor Australian girl I used to massage left FlintSpark because of Stephen. She’d be right up his street. Another victim gone, dispatched, destroyed. And he just doesn’t care.

  It went on and on. The excessive libido, the underhand business tactics, even that framed picture of him cutting up a frog. The signs had been everywhere but, of course, I hadn’t been looking. My boyfriend was a psychopath. One of the successful ones who managed to go undetected. Rather than the unsuccessful ones who couldn’t keep themselves under control and popped off on killing sprees all the time. Stephen was a man whose brain was fundamentally different from that of other human beings; a man who could never be ‘cured’.

  ‘Ideal!’ I said hysterically, to my coffee. ‘Absolutely ideal!’ It was horrifying, reading all of this again, but it was a pretty good reminder that I was not being crazy at all.

  Besides, I knew enough now to understand that if I was questioning my own sanity, I was probably under the influence of a skilled manipulator. Psychopaths, I’d learned, were fabulous at making their victims think they were mad. Look how cleverly he’d turned me against Tim. It had been a devastatingly brilliant campaign: he’d known my precise weak spots and played clever little remarks about Tim right into them. ‘I really don’t think you should be unduly concerned,’ he’d say, ‘but …’ I had run off down the street screaming when my oldest and dearest friend had turned up at my house. I’d even agreed to Stephen’s suggestion that I get some medication!

  In fact, thinking about it, he’d done a pretty good job of trying to turn me against all of my friends, not just Tim. I felt sick as I remembered the tears he’d forced into his eyes when he’d told me how sick he was of Le Cloob disliking him. God, he was disgusting. And, God, he was good.

  ‘Gaslighting’, the websites had called this. To cause a person to doubt their sanity through the use of psychological manipulation. In many ways the gaslighting thing was the worst. Going back through the last four months, thinking of all the times Stephen had told me that I had a memory like a sieve. ‘Do you even remember telling me your own name?’ He’d laughed once, when I’d asked how he knew what Lizzy did for a living.

  I was pretty sure I hadn’t lost my passport in France. That Stephen had nicked it to reduce my confidence in myself. I’d turned my room upside-down searching for it. I’d turned the bloody château upside-down. ‘You’re hopeless.’ He’d smiled, handing it back to me.

  Jesus, he was clever. One little slip-up, right there at the beginning, and he’d grabbed it. All those ‘lost’ phones, mistakes and oversights I’d apparently made over the last few months. The horrible suspicion I’d felt that I was somehow unravelling, falling apart, losing it. Even that first day at FlintSpark when I thought I’d lost my client list. He’d been at it even then! Forcing me to doubt myself!

  I put my pastry down. It had begun to taste like cardboard.

  ‘I’ve been shacked up with a psychopath,’ I muttered, trying it out for size. The little girl teaching Gangnam moves to her brother on the other side of the café smiled at me, then waved shyly. I waved back. I wanted to cry. Please may you stay safe and protected your whole life, I thought. Please may you never meet a Stephen Flint, you lovely little thing.

  I had read that it often took a long time for partners of psychopaths to come to terms with the truth. Even when faced with evidence of multiple infidelities and lies, women would hold on to their original beli
efs about their men for months, sometimes years, rather than stare reality in the face. Needless to say, it had taken me about five minutes to get on board with the whole idea. I guessed that was one of the few bonuses attached to extreme paranoia and emotional scarring. You didn’t hang around fooling yourself when you were shacked up with Freddy Krueger. You just got the fuck out of there.

  I forced myself to finish my pastry. It would all be okay. I had my plan. Dad would hopefully be none the wiser and I’d be safe.

  I turned back to my notebook.

  One of the blogs I’d read had been written by a woman whose partner had combed the internet for every tiny scrap of information he could possibly find about her. Google yourself, she’d written. You might be surprised at what you find.

  The first thing that had come up under my name, aside from my massage website, was the blog I’d written for a short time a couple of years ago when I was miserable about my crappy work situation. It had been Tim’s suggestion: a journal of things I loved to keep me tapped into positivity. When I started to re-read the posts I’d realized that all of them – every bloody one – had been raided by Stephen.

  There was the blog about flat whites. Stephen had been all over that! The day I met him he had been drinking a double espresso. And the morning he called to offer me a job, I’d heard him order – once again – a double espresso. But by the time I started work at FlintSpark it was all flat whites. And Australian coffee. And specialist milk steaming. He just couldn’t believe that we shared the same geeky love of Antipodean coffee!

  And I was too stupid to notice!

  Then there was the story of Stephen having gone to Tresaith as a child for beach holidays. Eating caramel waffles from the post office. That had been my story, a blog of warm reminiscence I’d written one particularly dark evening. As if a posh bloke from West Sussex would have gone to a tiny caravan park in a secret corner of Wales for his holidays! For God’s sake!