I had to climb a steep flight of stairs into a corridor that smelled sharply of old cigarettes and reefer coming up through the floor from the club below. There was a different kind of odour too, behind that, of something left to burn in a pan. I opened the door and found myself in a pleasant room with large windows looking out on to the canal. If anything, it was too big for me. I was used to close walls and the same view every day. I ignored the TV and went over to the window, watched the canal boats churning up the muddy water, and pretty girls in sensible clothes chatting earnestly as they headed into the Red Light District.
I went out and dawdled around the shops, staring in at piles of sepia-coloured junk and once-polished bronze and brass that now seemed to suck in the light rather than reflect it. The amount of traffic was staggering. I watched it play out behind me in the windows, the endless milling of people on foot or on bicycles or in cars or in trams. There seemed to be a hierarchy system going on. It appeared that cyclists had right of way over everyone. In reality it was one great mash-up waiting to happen.
I was stalling. My angle of attack was increasing beyond the point where lift began to decrease. I started laughing, then, and that helped. It didn't bother me that the act of laughing hurt my back and my head, or that people in the street gave me a wider berth. It was a positive reaction, no matter where it had come from. It was a surprise to be caught out by an old definition from the pilot's handbook. I still thought in terms of flight, it seemed.
Flight. There was an attractive prospect. I was distracting myself needlessly. Things were very, very simple. It all boiled down to her either taking me back into her life, or saying no. Everything else was just noise. I gathered myself and took a few deep breaths. Then I began my hobble over to Oudeschans.
I liked Tamara's apartment. She had intended to sell it when we sold the flat in Camden, but I insisted she keep it. We could come away for weekends, when we reached a point where we could employ a manager to look after the B&B and grew so sick of the hard summer work that we needed breathing space away. But we seldom managed to get over here. Either there was too much to be getting on with, or the logistics of such a trip were prohibitive.
'I'll keep it, for when you dump me,' she said once, treating me to one of her challenging, come-on looks. 'Then you'll have to come and get me, because I'll have stolen all your underpants and hidden them under my bed.'
I wanted children. The idea hit me from nowhere, although thinking of Tamara must have sown the seed. Seeing the child play so unselfconsciously in the ball pool on board the ferry had flicked a switch in me, I now realised. Tamara would understand.
My reticence had been well-founded, back when we had to think about budgets and five-year plans. I wasn't the right person to be a dad. There was no point in it. I didn't want to have a child only to farm it out to minders and nurseries at an age when they ought to be bonding with the people who created them.
My injuries had been extensive, but nobody had said the chances of me becoming a father had disappeared upon impact. I could have taken it as a sign, if I was a superstitious man.
I was so preoccupied with thoughts of boys and girls that I didn't realise where I was. Too soon, it seemed, I was on Tamara's street. I stood there, taking in the scene. I wanted it to remain with me, a stillpoint between my remarkable past life and the important, defining years to come. It all hinged upon this.
I closed my eyes. I heard cars and trams, I heard bicycle bells. Music from an open window. Jazz. I could smell the canal and the coffee shops. I could see Tamara answering the door in her long grey cardigan and skinny jeans. She'd be holding a large cup of steaming Earl Grey tea with lemon. Maybe her hair would be damp from the shower. She'd be listening to Radiohead or Roxy Music. She'd drop the cup. She'd run to me.
I made my way to the door and climbed the steps, shaky now, blood sugar low kind of shaky. I wished I'd eaten something. I couldn't remember the last meal I'd sat down to, or snack I'd bought. Thoughts of Tamara were sustaining me alone. I rang the bell and waited. No answer. She was out, buying lunch maybe. Going for a walk. Meeting a friend, or a lover.
I kicked the door, then punched the buzzer to the flat next door. A lazy voice answered. I knew it, but I couldn't remember his name.
'I know you,' I said, and regretted the words as soon as they were out. They sounded aggressive, illogical, the random snarl of a madman. Thankfully he didn't hang up on me.
It was a surprise when he said: 'I know you too, come on up.'
I struggled on the stairs. I'd been here on a number of occasions in the past, when I was wooing Tamara, when I had a spare weekend and I wasn't required at the airport. I would bound up here in seconds. Now it took me the best part of five minutes, with frequent stops. I thought about Schiphol airport as I did so, to try to sidetrack me from my pain. I thought of its six runways and tried to remember how long they all were. By the time I was standing in front of her door, my shirt was stuck to my back with what felt like an acre of sweat.
I tapped lightly on the door, just in case the buzzer was broken, but I was already coming to terms with doubt that I would see her today - a suspicion confirmed when I pushed open the letterbox and saw the small hill of mail, bills and advertising fliers reaching into the flat. Beyond that, familiarity snagged at me. I could see one of her jackets hanging on a coat hook. I could see the lower half of a framed photograph, a picture of the two of us standing at the rear exit of a Boeing 737: she was wearing my hat and saluting.
The door across from Tamara's flat shot open and I turned to see a familiar face. Jeroen? I thought. Is that his name?
I tried it and he nodded. He wore a cement-coloured shirt; one collar was flicked up. There were three pens in his top pocket. His hair was gelled back, a wet look, almost black: the skin of his scalp looked tender in contrast. His ears twinkled with diamond studs. He seemed athletic, comfortable in his skin. I noticed that about people these days. I envied him for it.
'Who are you?' he asked.
'I'm Paul Roan,' I said.
'I think - I thought - I recognised the voice, but you're not Paul Roan,' he said. 'I know Paul Roan. Not well. I've only met him a couple of times. But I know him. Who are you?''
I realised how different I must look. Everything about me, almost. Height, weight, clothing, not to mention the scar tissue: none of it was how I used to be. I pulled out my passport, almost laughing now at the complications that were arising. It was like being involved in a Hitchcockian movie about mistaken identity. At any moment James Mason and Martin Landau might materialise at my shoulder and ask me to step outside. I handed it over.
'I am Paul,' I said. 'We had you over once, for a drink. You had a Spanish beer. You forced a wedge of lime into the neck so hard that the neck broke and foam went everywhere.'
It was coming back to me now. This guy, this Jeroen, he worked at a recruitment agency in Leiden, as I remembered. I told him that too.
'Okay,' he said. 'So what happened to you?'
I ignored that. 'Tamara,' I said, nodding at her door. 'Do you know where she is?'
He frowned, shook his head. 'I've been away for a while. Holiday. Travelling to see relatives. Work. I've only been back for about a month. Why? What's up?'
He gestured for me to follow him inside. I gritted my teeth; I didn't want to move away from Tamara's door. It didn't seem right somehow. It was the closest I'd come to being near her since she left me. Turning my back was not what I wanted to do.
Reluctantly I went after him and pushed the door to, making sure I stopped it before the latch clicked shut. His flat was spartan almost to the point where it seemed he was either just moving in or ready to move out. But I remembered that he had no wife, no children. The more I remembered, the more came back: he read books but only on his Kindle. He couldn't abide dust - something to do with an allergy, I recalled - so surfaces were at a minimum. There was a sofa and a flat-screen TV in his living room. Precious little else.
'What's up?'
he asked again.
I fixed my gaze on the canal and told him everything. I told him about skulls and the Craw and Amy and the lack of children in the village, and in such a mundane way, as if I was reeling off a shopping list, that he didn't say anything. But now I sensed he was frozen, and when I glanced at him he was looking at me with an expression that said: I wish I hadn't asked.
'Don't you have a key? A spare?'
'Sure,' he said, apparently grateful for something to do. 'But I'll have to find it first.'
I stood by the window while he checked through a series of coin envelopes neatly filed away in a recessed cabinet. He emerged with a keyring dangling from his fingers, wearing an expression of distaste, almost. 'Drop it back when you've finished, if you want,' he said.
'Thanks.'
'I hope you find Tamara,' he said. 'For my sake, as well as yours. She's a friend. She talked to me when I was lonely. She's a good woman, Tamara. It concerns me that you say she's missing.'
I gave him a telephone number, so he could contact me should Tamara return after I had gone, and left him in his living room. There was a sense of relief as I shut the door behind me. I slid the key into Tamara's lock. I felt a presence; Jeroen perhaps, on the other side of his door, listening to what I was doing. Or, too late, as I pushed open the door against the mass of mail at its foot, the presence was in Tamara's flat and I had made a fatal mistake in coming here. But no, the flat was empty.
I struggled to pick up all the mail - irked that Jeroen hadn't popped in to keep on top of it - and hefted it through to the living room. I suppose I wanted to see some evidence of recent activity, some clue that she would return soon, but the amount of unshifted mail seemed to have put paid to any hope of that.
Green sofas. White walls. The pendant lamp in the centre of the room that I always bashed my head against but she effortlessly swerved around as if she was in possession of radar. Thick rug with a simple petal print. White units. A TV and a mini stereo. The table by the window overlooking the canal where we breakfasted. I went over to it and drew up a chair. This was my chair. She sat opposite. On sunny days the light would catch in her hair and...
I sorted through the envelopes. Nothing of great interest. All of it formal, boring. I checked the drawers in the unit beneath the television: just video tapes, DVDs, a notebook of films she wanted to watch.
In her bedroom I checked the cupboards. Lots of clothes, neatly folded. A notebook by the bed. I found some documents of mine, with my signature on them. I pocketed them, hoping that any further passport hassle might melt away if I waved them around.
Tamara's smell was all over the place. Why had she not come here, if she was leaving me? Where else was there? I sat on the bed and clenched my jaw at the obvious answer to that. I wondered about her ex-lovers. She'd told me about them, talked to me about them. I'd seen photographs. None of them seemed to have captured a particularly special place in her heart. While we were together, she displayed no desire to drop in on any of them to say hi. No lunches. No phone calls. No birthday cards. Which counted for nothing, of course. Trust means never checking. She might have been having illicit meetings; she'd have had plenty of opportunity. I was often away.
But it wouldn't sit right with me.
It was March now. Eight months since my accident. Two months since I'd awoken from my coma. There was post on the table franked with dates from the previous summer. I couldn't accept that she had not been back to this flat in the meantime. She'd have needed clothes. Even if she had found a new man, she would have had to come home first. Set up a mail redirection service. Let the flat, maybe. You didn't just move from one man's bed to another. Not her.
Which meant what?
I couldn't stop thinking about what Ruth had said about the rapist. He'd taken off after he assaulted her, but she couldn't shake the fear that he was still around. I wondered if there was more to him that being a sex criminal. I wondered if the little boy, Kieran Love, had died at his hand. I wondered about me. The hit-and-run. How much damage could one man do? I thought too about DI Keble. There had been a massive police presence at the bed and breakfast, summoned swiftly. I knew nothing about police procedure, other than what I had gleaned from newspaper articles, and fictional takes, but it seemed a lot for such a small village, such a crime. This was no fresh corpse. This was a skeleton. This was old news, surely, like the skulls dredged from the Second World War hunting grounds of the North Sea.
I thought of Tamara in some shallow grave in the marshes outside the village, frozen solid beneath a thin blanket of soil. Bruises on the skin that would never fade.
I wrote her a note asking her to call me urgently. I left it propped up on the table and was going to the door when my bag snagged on one of the kitchen cupboard handles and pulled it open. I went to shut it and stopped. Inside the cupboard, next to the Weetabix and muesli, was a small box, the size of a toothpaste tube. The word Clearblue was written on the side. A pregnancy test. Its seal had been broken. I stared at it for a long time before hobbling down to the street. I hailed a cab.
'Waar?' the driver asked me.
'Schiphol.'
43
Her fingers were raw, but The Man had not noticed. Not yet. She didn't understand how he could have missed what she was doing. Perhaps he had seen it after all, and knew that it would come to nothing. She might very well detach herself from the wall, but the door was always locked. She would not get out. So why bother locking her up at all? She reasoned there were two possibilities. He didn't want her going near the door because the building was in a heavily populated area, which meant someone might hear if she screamed. She preferred this avenue of thought. It made sense. They played music to cover the noise, and the bare earth walls would absorb much of the sound she produced. But if she could get up close to that door, no doubt the acoustics beyond would help her voice to carry.
The alternative was that they had to keep her chained to the bed because they didn't want her to see what was behind the curtain.
It was chewing into her mind, that curtain, with its skirt of blue-black mold, like some offbeat grunge addition to bathroom chic, like a curtain she had once seen for sale in an ironic shop that was patterned with bloody red handprints and arterial sprays.
To take her mind off it, she returned to the eye bolt. It was thick, collared, impacted into the wall much farther than it had been intended, its head - the size of a doughnut - battered into the surface. Picking at it had cracked and splintered her nails. Her fingers were bloody and swollen, and returning to the task after a night's sleep was almost incapacitatingly painful, but after forcing herself, after getting back into the habit of picking and prising and teasing, the task grew easier. Not that the bolt was shifting at all. What she'd discovered was that the wall was less secure than the bolt. If she worked at the plaster, she could get to the brick behind it, which was old, crumbly, compromised by decades of dampness and, possibly, flood water.
It was painstakingly slow work, but she relished it. It honed the mind. It shrank everything down to one action, drew her attention away from too many things that could begin to undermine the bolt that kept her fastened to reality, to sanity. When a piece of music was played on the radio that she recognised - she knew Fauré's Pavane, and Lieutenant Kije, and Brahms' Violin Concerto - it helped to dull the pain and blur time; hours would go by and she'd have to suddenly stop working because she would hear the key in the lock, and the footfalls creaking on the wooden steps, pushing before it the smell of her dinner.
She'd shift the pillows so that her work was concealed, all the while aware of the brick dust and the blood on the cotton, certain that The Man was aware too, but he never said a thing, or made to repair the damage she had caused. He stood and watched through his ghastly orange mask, an ecstasy of bug-eyed pouting and ragged breathing, sweat turning the fabric of his coat patchy with dark. She would scoop up the soup or the stew or the risotto, and push away the plate with its blood-printed spoon, wishing she could
conceal the cutlery from him and spare her poor hands. But, without fail, he watched her finish each day and he always took everything away that he brought to her.
It was on the morning of the 43rd day in captivity - she did not know what she would do if her watch alarm should stop working - that a third possibility reached out to her from her mind, with its filthy, thin claws. What if The Man was doing nothing to stop her because the time was fast coming when what he was planning would come to fruition? Maybe he knew she would be dead before she managed to work the bolt free.
She intensified her efforts. She dislocated her thumb, but she enjoyed a breakthrough. A chunk of brick the size of an apple fell clear of the bolt and she was able to drag it clear. For a dumb moment, while she stared at it - thick and rusty, its threads impacted with pulverised brick - she didn't know how to proceed: options spread out before her like too many choices on a menu. While she thought, her hands moved to put the bolt back in the wall. She had to throw it away to stop herself. She swung her legs off the bed and felt the ground beneath them for the first time in what felt like years. She was weak, and unsure. She stared at the curtain and moved towards it, but it was as if there were some kind of forcefield around it: two feet shy and she could go no further. Now she knew what she wanted. She wanted never to see what lay behind that thin, horrible barrier. She wanted more than anything to be through the door and out into the world again, where the air was not tinged with the smell of old dinners, or ancient, damp earth, or rat spoors. She wanted to find Paul and love him back to health, to tell him everything. To apologise. To at least give him a way out that was paved with the truth, rather than the sham she had lived in the weeks up to his accident.
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