Without further ado and with proficiency, he peeled away her clothes as though they were paper. Deliberate movements with both of his hands, as though removing the outer layers of an exotic fruit, leaving her body exposed and naked. And then he undressed himself, hurriedly, letting garment after garment fall. Kurtiz hadn’t made love in a while, hadn’t had sex in a while. Her life with Oliver was too acrimonious for sex, for physical proximity. She had exiled him to the spare room, which she was sure Lizzie had known and was brooding about. She was possibly even angry …
Lizzie! She still hadn’t called home.
‘What time is it? Alex, stop, I need …’ She lifted herself onto her elbows, scrabbling fingers against the pristine sheets, attempting to shift and inch herself from the bed, from the arms of this man. Alex eased her back to a supine position and lowered himself to her, against her, his firm flesh against hers. She inhaled his verveine cologne and felt the solidity of him, the rock of his desire shifting, awakening the muscles within her. The call home could wait. Lizzie would be at the end of the phone tomorrow. And they’d have a fun time together on Sunday. This moment belonged to Kurtiz. Only her. She let go, spread herself wide, breaking every inch of herself open for the man she had desired and resisted for too long, the lover whom she knew already was a part of her.
When she woke, she was alone. A scribbled note on hotel paper in his handwriting read: 6 a.m. in the lobby. Don’t be late.
She glanced at the digital bedside clock. It read 5:50 in accusatory red figures. She shot out of bed and into the shower, crying out as the pain in her collarbone wrenched at her, soaping the tenderness in her groin.
The men were waiting, seated in the lobby when she appeared, hair wet, out of the lift at 6:04.
‘You’re late,’ commented Alex. ‘Let’s go.’ Was he using such a crisp tone because he had so recently left her bed and did not want his colleagues to sense that some balance within the quartet had shifted? Whatever the explanation, his manner took Kurtiz aback.
On the journey south they rode for a while in silence. He slipped a hand from the wheel and touched her knee. ‘I’ll get you coffee as soon as we can make a stop,’ he murmured. She switched on her phone. Seven a.m. in the West Bank, Eastern European summer time, meant five a.m. in London. Friday morning. Lizzie and Oliver would still be in bed. Way too early to call. She found three phone messages. All from Oliver. She hit the phone to listen to the most recent.
‘KZ, where the fuck are you? Why are you not picking up the phone? Are you receiving these messages? I have sent you two emails. Call me. I’m out of my mind with worry and I need you here.’
Had Oliver started drinking again? His voice sounded steady. Since when had he shown such concern over her absences? Except to make her culpable for being away in the first place. She calculated backwards. She had sent emails to both Oliver and Lizzie on … When had she last written? Tuesday?
She hit the button to listen to the first of the three messages.
‘Kurtiz, it’s Oliver. Wednesday morning. I haven’t seen Lizzie since yesterday. She’s not picking up on her mobile. Did she message you about where she might have stayed overnight?’
‘What? No!’
Alex glanced in her direction. Kurtiz ignored him, barely registering his interaction. She scrolled her emails to see whether there was anything from Lizzie. Nothing. She returned to the phone icon to play the second message.
‘Kurtiz, any reason why you didn’t reply to my message? It’s now Wednesday afternoon and Lizzie still hasn’t come home – home, Kurtiz, remember it? – since Tuesday. Yesterday. I am going to call the police. Pick up the damn phone.’
When Kurtiz eventually managed to get through to Oliver, Lizzie had been missing for three nights.
‘Have you telephoned the police?’
‘I called them on Wednesday about four in the afternoon. I left you messages, dammit! They asked how long she’d been gone. “It’s too soon,” was their response.’
‘And then? Have you called them since, taken a photograph into the station?’ She covered her phone with her hand and leaned towards Alex. ‘I have to leave,’ she told him. ‘Now.’
Oliver was talking again. His words were slow as though he could not recall the sequence of events. ‘They said it was most unlikely I had any cause for concern. However, if Lizzie hadn’t returned by Wednesday night, I was to make contact with them again.’
‘And did you, Oliver?’ She felt her impatience rising, panic sharpening.
Oliver had waited in all day for his daughter’s return. That same evening he had called again.
‘The matter is in the hands of the police,’ he reiterated. ‘Lizzie’s room was searched. They turned it upside down, looking for possible explanations, clues as to her whereabouts.’
‘And have they found anything, got any leads?’
‘She’s on the missing-persons list.’
Her guts seemed to fall away as her heart began to race, as terror stepped centre stage.
‘When can you be here?’
‘I’m on my way. Listen, Oliver … Oliver?’ He had cut her off.
Alex swung the car round and sped her west along the central highway to Tel Aviv airport.
The terminal was a bazaar. Queues of travellers backed up to the outer doors, shouting to one another, complaining loudly. Kurtiz and Alex squeezed and shoved a passage to the British Airways desk. Changing her ticket required a reissue. Alex took control. Eventually Kurtiz was given an economy cancellation on that evening’s overnight to Heathrow. He took her for a coffee and stayed at her side until she cleared Immigration.
She wanted to be alone, on her way, to erase the last few days. Oliver’s accusation: ‘Where the fuck have you been?’
Was she responsible for Lizzie’s departure?
‘Listen,’ said Alex, taking her hand. ‘She’ll probably have returned by the time you land. If not, take what you need to get this handled, bring her home and then I want you back with me. Do you hear me?’
Kurtiz swung her gaze away from him, concentrating on the crowded terminal, Jewish families heaving oversized cases and trunks onto the check-in scales, officious Customs officers disgorging trunks before clearing them. The worn faces, the tearful farewells, the staggering loads of baggage. The guilt she felt weighed heavier and was threatening to overwhelm her. What was she doing here?
‘I’ll be in touch when I arrive. Thanks for your help.’ She pushed her drained coffee cup to one side, rose, hauled her cameras and hand luggage on to her undamaged shoulder and walked the distance to Passport Control, aware of the sound of her every step against the marble floor. She felt Alex’s eyes boring into her back. The man who, just a few hours earlier, had been in her bed; her first infidelity to Oliver. She was probably in love with Alex, yes, she was, but she would not allow herself to think about it. She didn’t turn her head, didn’t look round. She slid her passport back from the officer, gave him a curt nod and kept going.
When she unlocked the front door ten hours later, Oliver was alone, unshaven, looking half-starved and unwashed. He had been sleeping in the chair in the sitting room, keeping watch for his daughter’s return. She probably looked equally scruffy, equally freaked.
‘What happened?’ were her first words to him, as she threw her house keys onto the table and felt the empty, mausoleum mood of the house. It was eight in the morning, Saturday. She felt as though she hadn’t slept in a week.
‘You should have been here. We needed you.’ His voice was a low whine. What had happened to the young dreamboat she had fallen in love with two decades earlier? So full of promise. Where had he gone?
She crossed to him and pecked him on the head, gently stroking his hair with the flat of her hand. He exuded stale body odours, those of a man who has stopped caring for himself, and it was clear to her that he had been drinking. He had abandoned the wagon. Now was not the moment to chastise him for it.
‘I’m going to have a shower and hunt ab
out in Lizzie’s room. Is there anything you want to tell me, anything she said, that I need to know?’
Oliver made no comment. His shoulders hung heavily over his extended gut. ‘Kurtiz?’ He said no more, incapable of summoning up the sentence.
Kurtiz waited. She was desperate to get to Lizzie’s room. ‘Have you eaten? You look … Shall I heat some coffee?’
‘We’re out of coffee and milk.’
She sighed, swallowing unspoken recriminations, and left him in his chair, hurrying up the stairs in search of her daughter.
Paris, November 2015
Kurtiz stood in the diminishing cold, stamping her booted feet against the ground, arms wrapped round her midriff, fists beating her torso in an attempt to keep warm. Her breath exhaled in clouds, as she stared about her. Victims were being wrapped in gold-foil space blankets as thermal protection, shivering, shaking, convulsing. Ambulance, fire brigade and paramedics were trolleying injured bodies, some with oxygen tanks, and heaving them one after another into red ambulances. Blood had laid its fingers on everyone, smeared its autograph. Blood marked the cross for Death to follow. While, silently, unremarked, unmoved, desiccated leaves from the mighty plane trees on the far side of the boulevard were falling to the ground, gathering in the gutters. A leaf for every victim? For every shot fired? Winter was here. The trees would soon be bare, stark, denuded. Winter. Her companion. It had taken up residence inside her heart, closed her down, on that Saturday morning more than four years earlier.
Kurtiz, London, July 2011
When Kurtiz opened the door to her teenage daughter’s bedroom she was greeted by a state of disarray and a stale, sweetish aroma. What was it? It hung in the air, unidentified. Clothes were strewn everywhere, bags emptied and tossed on the floor. It looked as though Lizzie had been frantically searching for something and in haste or frustration had chucked aside each unsuccessful attempt. Or was this the result of police intervention?
Hovering a foot or two inside, back pressed against the open door, Kurtiz’s eyes darted in every direction. The mess in the room suggested a burglary. Would the police leave a site like this or had this been her daughter’s state of mind? Kurtiz backed out without touching anything and hurried to Lizzie’s bathroom. The door was closed, not locked. She tapped on the wood.
‘Lizzie? Lizzie, are you in there?’ Of course she wasn’t. She had no idea why she was knocking. As though this foolishness might spin back the clock to the evening before her flight to Tel Aviv almost three weeks earlier.
She pushed the door open to find the room in stillness. A leaking tube of toothpaste left carelessly on the washbasin, its cap forgotten elsewhere. A loofah lying dry on the windowsill. Shower curtain half in, half out of the bath. She breathed in the scent of Chanel No 5. Lizzie had been filching her eau-de-toilette again. Dolling herself up. Might it be for the attentions of a new boyfriend? Kurtiz crossed to the mirrored cupboard above the basin. Within, she found a half-empty bottle of paracetamol, tweezers and a small blue plastic container shaped like a clam shell. Kurtiz gripped the basin and steadied herself. She knew what that contained. Hand raised unsteadily, she lifted it out of the cupboard and opened it. Its base was sprinkled with talc but it was otherwise empty.
She swung about her and savagely yelled her daughter’s name back along the corridor. A sick sense of fear engulfed her. Had Lizzie been wearing the diaphragm when she left the house? What mood had she been in? Upbeat, afraid, troubled?
The evening before Kurtiz had left for Jerusalem – she had brushed the incident aside until this moment, dismissed it – she and Lizzie had bickered. Not a blazing row but picky niggling at each other. She had laid into Lizzie for some misdemeanour, her lethargy – plates left dirty in the sink or something equally trite. Lizzie, uncharacteristically, had not stormed off in a temper, taking refuge in her bedroom with a resounding thud of the door. No, she had hovered at the door of the box room Kurtiz had transformed into her study. ‘Don’t go, Mum,’ she’d said. ‘Please, don’t.’
Kurtiz, still mildly miffed with her daughter, had replied simply, ‘Don’t be silly. I’ll be back before you know it.’
‘You don’t give a fuck about us, do you? It’s all about you and your sodding work.’
Kurtiz had lifted her head from her computer and fixed her gaze on her daughter. ‘Don’t you ever talk to me like that again.’
Lizzie had slunk away, hurt by her mother’s response.
Kurtiz had missed the sounding bell, the distress signal. Her precious girl’s cri de coeur? If she had listened, would Lizzie still be here? She had been too caught up in the logistics of her own upcoming journey, the packing that lay ahead and the quiet joy at the prospect of being in Alex’s company again.
Had the girl been suffering with a private injury, a grief or insecurity that she had held back from her parents? A teenage malaise kept hidden. Was there a boy who had become the subject of her affections, replacing her mum as number-one date? He for whom she had been fitted with the diaphragm? Gone were the days when Lizzie had confided her secrets, whispered and giggled in her mother’s ear, held her hand as they walked along the high street, talking about school and friends, counting calories, diet fads, clothes, pop stars she fancied – ‘He’s crackerjack, Mum’; ‘He’s fit’ – and the rock concerts her dad loved to take her to. Never boyfriends or personal relationships. Kurtiz had still been a virgin at sixteen. Evidently not Lizzie. Should she discuss this with Oliver?
If she had simply left home, wouldn’t Kurtiz have heard from her? Don’t worry about me, Mum. I’m doing fine. I’ve met someone. Where might she have gone?
Had she been kidnapped, lured away by a malevolent contact who intended nothing better than rape and murder?
Kurtiz spun back to her daughter’s room and stepped inside, kicking her way through the piles of clothes, books, DVDs, the personal gallimaufry. In the centre of the space she turned about in a circle, giddying herself, scanning from left to right. The walls were papered with posters. Rock legends. Jesse Hughes, Josh Homme; Them Crooked Vultures; the late Jeff Buckley, whose voice and good looks made Lizzie swoon, she claimed, with girlish giggles. Some of the display pinned to the walls had been purchased at concerts her father had taken her to, stoking his daughter’s passion for rock and blues. Was there a big concert, or a music festival taking place anywhere in the UK about now that she might have sloped off to? Isle of Wight, Glastonbury? Oliver would surely know. Was there information about Lizzie’s disappearance that Oliver was keeping to himself? Had he argued with his daughter, hurled drunken words at her, which had driven her away? Or had Lizzie been trying to convey a deeper, more desperate concern?
Don’t go, Mum.
Paris, November 2015
It was 11:57 p.m. Marguerite was standing in her sitting room, her feet snug in furry slippers, hands clenched together and pressed against her chin, too troubled to be seated, staring at the television screen hoping to hear news from within the Bataclan. Had that poor young woman reached the theatre safely? Had she been united with her family? What a distressed soul she seemed.
François Hollande was mouthing words with precision, standing erect, rigid between swept-back burgundy curtains against a grey pillared backdrop. He was addressing the camera, making a speech to les citoyens. His expression was grave, skin parched. Once or twice he paused and almost imperceptibly bit the right side of his lower lip. He was declaring a state of national emergency. The borders were to be closed. Public transport had been shut down. ‘We must perceive the atrocities that have been perpetrated this evening as acts of war against our nation.’ C’est une acte de guerre. He spoke the words emphatically. Syllables as weapons. Heavy rolling of consonants like a guillotine falling.
‘Go back to your homes and, s’il vous plaît, be prudent. Stay indoors.’
But what of the young woman? Marguerite begged the empty room. Had she got through? She glanced towards the hallway where Kurtiz’s bags lay neatly stacked on the floor. Wil
l she remember where I am? Should I try to find her?
Go back to your homes and stay indoors.
It was almost midnight. She had not been up so late in years. She must try to rest. But what if she fell asleep and the young woman came knocking, ringing her bell, and she didn’t hear her? No, more sensible to brew coffee, stay awake. Beyond her, on the television screen, fleets of Red Cross vehicles were drawing up alongside other vehicles with spinning lights, banked in crocodile lines, making a flashing tail that stretched from the Bataclan to La République. Elsewhere in the background of the grainy night-time images on screen, members of the armed forces were building a barricade with dustbins.
Thirty confirmed mortalities was the figure released by the national press office, stated the anchorman gravely. ‘The Bataclan remains a hostage situation. It is calculated that some twelve hundred people are still captured within, held at gunpoint, with shots being fired unremittingly.’
Marguerite slumped into a chair. What could she do? Her eyelids were heavy. Her heart and poor worn-out body so dog-tired. ‘They should have taken me,’ she muttered. ‘Not the young. Not some woman’s lovely daughter.’
Marguerite and Charlie, La Côte d’Azur, March 1947
Marguerite stirred. Someone was gently shaking her, stroking her knee. ‘We’ve reached the coast, Marseille.’
‘What?’
The Lost Girl Page 12