I stay in the scalding shower until my skin is raw.
PART OF ME is expecting to see panic-stricken faces, endless pacing and frantic phone calls as I take the glass elevator down to the lobby, but already I can see the group lounging on the sofas like nothing’s wrong. Clara is typing on her ultraexpensive laptop, and Jin Ra is cackling at Duncan, who’s wearing sunglasses inside. Even looking down from the third floor, I can see none of them look remotely worried. Tim is nowhere to be seen.
“All right, kid,” Duncan grunts in my direction as I walk over. “How’s the head?”
“Sore. How’d you know?”
“The amount you drank last night? Doesn’t take a genius.” He waves a hip flask at me. Was I really that drunk last night? I can hear from the sloshing of the liquid that the flask is already half-empty. “Hair o’ the dog? Sort yeh right out.” His light brown hair sticks up in tufts.
My stomach clenches at the thought. I shake my head. “No, thanks.” He raises an eyebrow above his aviators and shrugs, taking a swig. “Has anyone heard anything from Erin?”
Clara looks up from her laptop, and her acrylic nails stop tip-tapping across the keyboard. “Nope. Not a word. Shocking. How can you just disappear without telling anyone where you’re going?” She glares pointedly at me. I dig my thumb into my palm. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair on us, and it’s not fair on Tim.” Another patronizing shake of the head and she’s back to typing up her gossip column.
“Where is Tim anyway?” I glance around. We’re the only ones in the glass atrium of the lobby, apart from the middle-aged barman, who’s taking great pride in polishing his industrial-sized coffee machine, and the young receptionist, who’s coiling the phone cord around her index finger as she chats to a customer in rapid-fire Serbian. It looks scorching outside. The sun’s rays are wobbly and the pavements are sizzling as yesterday’s rain evaporates into wisps of steam.
“Dunno.” Clara doesn’t even look up from her screen as she takes a slurp of orange juice. “He’s been tearing his hair out trying to get hold of her. He’s even called around the local hospitals to see if she’s turned up there. You know, I wouldn’t blame him for calling the police. This isn’t funny.”
“I know,” I say through gritted teeth. “But the police won’t listen. I already tried. I think . . . I think something is very wrong. This isn’t like her—”
“Oh, please. She’s probably just gone off with those Serbian guys from yesterday. Which is the one she was doing puppy dog eyes at all day? Andrijo?” She rolls her eyes. “She was all over him.”
“She has a boyfriend,” I point out, but Clara’s not even listening. Part of me wishes I had the guts to tell her that not everyone in real life carries on like the celebs she writes her lies about. But I stay quiet. As usual.
Andrijo. That was his name.
There was something strange about him and his friend. They were too . . . friendly? Attentive? I’m never great when meeting new people, and at the time, the uneasy feeling felt no more uneasy than usual. But in hindsight . . . I shake the thought away.
The group’s ambivalence makes me feel even more antsy. Why am I the only one filled with dread? I’ve just started pacing up and down the length of the bar, obsessively checking Erin’s social media to see if she’s posted anything, when my phone starts vibrating in my hand.
Linda Lowe.
I take a deep breath, but I still tremble as I hit Answer. I can’t help it.
“Hi, L—”
“Erin’s ignoring my emails,” Lowe almost barks down the phone. I wince as her voice rattles through my fragile head. “Really, Carina, the only reason I allowed you both to go was if you’d be on email the whole time. It’s deadline day! Does that mean nothing to you? We’re trying to sign off a mag—”
“Erin’s missing.” It’s the first time I’ve ever interrupted her, and I feel guilty almost instantly.
Maybe missing was a bit strong, but it catches her off guard. “What do you mean, missing?”
“Missing, as in, none of us can find her. She hasn’t been seen for—” I glance at my wristwatch “—fourteen hours.”
“Well. Okay.” I hear a door slam shut down her end, and the background noise becomes much quieter. She’s gone into the boardroom. “Have you tried calling her?”
No, we’ve just sat here patiently like we’re waiting for fucking Godot. “Yes. Fifty-two times.”
“And nobody’s seen her.”
“No.”
“Have you called the police?” she says, her voice lower now.
“Yes. We have to wait until it’s been twenty-four hours.”
There’s a silence that neither of us know how to fill. I expect Lowe to yell some more, about how Erin’s features aren’t signed off and her image selection is shoddy as always and her grasp on the English language is tenuous at best. But she doesn’t. She just says, quietly, “Keep me posted.” Then she hangs up. I frown at my phone.
A hand touches my elbow and I jump. Jin Ra. He’s wearing a slim-fit checked shirt, red braces and a bow tie. “Are you okay, Carina? Would you like something to drink?” His well-spoken accent is soft and slow. I nod.
We each take a bar stool and he orders us two cappuccinos and two still waters. He’s one of those people who doesn’t just talk for the sake of talking—he and I are the quiet ones of the group. And unlike Erin and me, he’s actually at JUMP for the music. We sit in silence for a few moments.
Glancing at his vintage wristwatch, he swallows deeply, his jutting Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “She’ll turn up, you know.”
I nod for lack of anything better to do. “I know.” No, I don’t. “What if she’s . . . what if she’s passed out somewhere?” I try and remember how drunk she was last time I saw her. “What if she’s in trouble?”
Jin Ra slaps a sachet of sugar against his palm. He presses his lips together as he stirs it slowly into the frothy coffee. “But where? There are so many people going around that she’d be found in a heartbeat. And they checked the fortress before they closed it. She’s not there.”
I know what he’s saying is true, but that doesn’t help. Because I can’t help but feel that being drunk and passed out is better than the alternative.
An alternative I can’t even bear to articulate.
I ALWAYS THOUGHT that if someone I knew disappeared, I’d be sitting in the police station within a nanosecond, tracing their last movements and talking to everyone and anyone who could have seen her.
But it’s not like that when it actually happens. It’s too easy to explain away, too easy to rationalize. Even for the police.
Like house fires and lottery wins, this is the kind of thing that happens to other people. Not to normal twenty-somethings on a fun-filled trip. Disappearances belong safely in the world of CNN and blockbuster movies.
We’re journalists. We’re used to writing about this stuff, not living it.
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS.
By the time we finally have the attention of the police, all I can think about is how much tragedy can happen in twenty-four hours. A giant earthquake in the ocean can trigger eighteen tsunamis and kill nearly a quarter of a million people. Terrorists can hijack planes, hurricanes can tear cities apart, deadly viruses can spread through countries like wildfire.
Twenty-four hours. It’s a fucking arbitrary time limit, in the grand scheme of things. It implies a situation isn’t really an emergency if it’s only been going on for twenty-three hours.
It’s absurd.
What has happened to Erin in the last twenty-four hours?
As the clock changes from 10:59 to 11:00 and we officially reach the twenty-four-hour threshold, I wonder how much that minute really changed anything.
The concept of time is warping and distorting in my mind, lik
e when you repeat a word so many times and it loses all meaning. I do this a lot. I think about things so intensely and for so long until they’re not really things anymore and then rational thought processes are impossible and I feel like I’m losing my mind.
The police come to the hotel. This surprises me, because I envisage glaring spotlights, cold metal tables and hot sweat as they question us about every movement we’ve made over the last twenty-four hours. But they don’t appear suspicious of us. Hell, they’ve only just decided—if only because of the predictable ticking of the clock—that the situation is even suspicious at all.
“At around eleven last night,” I hear myself say, “Erin told me she was going to the toilet. She told me she’d be back in a couple of minutes. She never did. Come back, that is.”
It seems like an impossibly long time ago, an insane amount of time for a person to be missing, but the police seem unfazed.
“All right,” says a young male officer. Detective Ilić, I think he introduced himself as. Thick dark stubble covers his recently shaven head. “Is it possible Ms. Baxter went to go and meet someone?” His English is flawless.
“No. She would have told me,” I reply. “She’s very responsible.”
“So you’d say this was out of character for her?”
“Definitely.”
Ilić and I are sitting on the bar stools in the lobby. We’ve already established that she had no known medical conditions and no history of erratic behavior, and another telephone sweep of the local hospitals comes up empty. Another male detective talks to Tim and the hotel receptionist, while Duncan, Clara and Jin Ra sit in the same sofas they’ve been in all day. Even they’re starting to look anxious now. A third detective—a middle-aged woman with bright red hair and a mole on her chin—is outside, contacting Erin’s family.
“So the two of you are close,” Ilić says, but it’s not a question. “Had she been acting strangely at all?”
I rack my brains but come up short. “I don’t think so. She had the usual work worries, but nothing out of the ordinary.”
“You work together?”
“Yes. We intern for the same magazine back in England.”
“You’re from England?” I see him eye my dark skin and thick black hair with streaks of violet.
Don’t bite. “Yes.”
“Where are you from originally?”
I grit my teeth. “England.”
A cocked eyebrow. “And you say you work with Erin.”
“Yes. At Northern Heart. We came on the trip together.”
“I see. And you say she seemed worried.”
I shrug. “Kind of. But just the usual stuff, you know? Like whether our editor would be mad at her for not emailing back right away. It’s deadline day. Always stressful.”
He nods, scratching his chin with his thumb. The bristly sound makes me shudder. “Can you run me through your movements yesterday? Were you and Ms. Baxter together the entire time—until she left to go to the bathroom?”
“Most of the time. We slept in late yesterday morning, because we’d been up late at JUMP. Around midday, our press trip group went on a boat trip down the Danube, where we were caught in a storm.” I’m not sure how much detail I’m supposed to be giving, and I keep thinking of facts I should be including, but I don’t know if they’re relevant or not and it’s perfectly possible my brain might explode before I even reach the point at which she disappeared. “We took refuge with Tim’s friend, Borko, who has a residence on the riverfront.”
Ilić nods and jots a few things down on a lined notepad. The wrinkled paper is covered in brown rings where he’s used it as a coaster for his coffee mug. “Go on.”
“We stayed there for a few hours until the storm died down. There was another guy there, in his late-twenties, I’d guess. Andrijo. Erin seemed to be getting on really well with him—they chatted and laughed together the whole time. It looked like they exchanged phone numbers before we left.”
“And this was the first time Ms. Baxter had met this Andrijo?”
“Yes.”
“Did they make plans to meet again?” he asks.
“I think so. He was talking about coming to JUMP, and wanted to meet up with her if he managed to make it.” Even as I’m saying it, I know it looks suspicious.
“I see.” He jots down something else. “And what did you think of him? This Andrijo?”
Gorgeous. Intense. Eyes as black as coal. “He seemed nice. They were both very welcoming. I did find Andrijo a little . . . intense, maybe?”
“Intense? In what way?”
I can’t put my finger on it. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t really have any examples—it was more a vibe I got from him.”
Ilić cocks his head. “Do you remember finding him strange at the time, or is it just now, looking back?”
My migraine is still pounding and I feel like I’m hearing him from the other side of a very long tunnel, but I try to think. “Just in hindsight, I guess.” Really? Just in retrospect? I don’t know if I’m being honest with myself.
“All right. Then what happened?”
“Our bus driver picked us up from the hut and we drove back to Novi Sad. We still had a few hours to go before JUMP kicked off again, so I took a nap.”
“Do you know what Erin did in that time?”
I shake my head. “We all separated. It was the first free time we’d had since we got here.”
“And you didn’t ask her what she’d been doing?”
“No.” I feel stupid, but how was I to know how important it would be?
I explain how we’d gone to the festival in good spirits, how we’d tried the silent disco, watched some bands, drank some cider and played a game of giant Jenga in the Jack Daniel’s garden. Ilić is insistent on knowing how drunk Erin was, but I’m honest and tell him that I was pretty tipsy myself and couldn’t really judge her level of inebriation with any amount of accuracy. But I’d guess she was tipsy, too.
With as much detail as I can, I give him rough times of our movements, right up until Erin told me she’d be back soon and to wait by the speakers for her.
“Did anything else seem . . . out of the ordinary?”
Everything. The day itself was so exceptional, so different to our normal lives, but I try desperately hard to think of something, anything, out of the ordinary about her behavior. I can’t. I try to think of anything that struck me as odd, besides sheep skulls dangling from trees, donkeys wearing bandanas and the half-naked man singing the Serbian national anthem, but I can’t.
Except Andrijo.
He was out of the ordinary.
THE POLICE LEAVE around midnight. After Ilić asks Tim a few questions about Andrijo, the hotel staff let him into Erin’s room, where he doesn’t find anything unusual. I fight back nausea as they take her toothbrush—they can use it as a DNA sample in subsequent forensic examinations.
Yesterday morning she used that toothbrush as if it was the most normal thing in the world and now they’re using it for DNA.
I feel my brain fixating on the toothbrush, but I pull myself away.
Erin’s mother is hysterical, but manages to find the composure to give them Erin’s bank and credit card details so they can trace any transactions from the last week, plus her cell phone details so they can access her records. I send them a few photos of Erin from the last few days, including a selfie we took next to the JUMP stage—it shows the hot-pink shirt she was wearing last night. I almost break down at the sight of her smile, which already packs such an emotional punch it feels like it belongs to a murder victim.
She’ll turn up, I tell myself for the thousandth time, but like any repeated phrase, it’s lost all meaning. All I’m left with is lingering dread and an overwhelming sense of emptiness.
The police take all of our contact
details and say they’ll be in touch if they have any more questions. We agree to get in touch with the British Embassy in Belgrade, and with the Foreign Office back in the UK.
And then they’re gone.
Chapter Four
July 14, Serbia
I DON’T SLEEP. The stifling silence in my hotel room, broken up only by the whir of the air-con, leaves too much space for my anxiety to take hold. I can’t breathe. I throw off the covers. I still can’t breathe. I crank a window open far as it’ll go. I still can’t breathe.
Grabbing my rucksack, I shove a shaking hand into its depths and pull out the coloring book I’m supposed to use when I feel a panic attack starting. Pen pen pen, there’s a pen here somewhere, but I can’t find it.
The hotel pen. Blue. It’s blue. BLUE IS CALMING.
My scribbles are outside the lines, outside the page, outside this room.
No no no no no.
Erin.
How can doodling help when my best friend is gone?
I hurl the book across the room. It hits the wall and flutters to the ground.
Fuck fuck fuck.
I’m gasping and gasping, but my lungs won’t fill. I know what’s happening. I can’t stop it.
Erin Erin Erin Erin Erin her is name on loop inside my head, faster and faster like a fairground ride I can’t get off.
I grab my silver bangle from the bedside table and clutch it to my heart. Erin.
I let her go. I let her go to the toilet alone. I could’ve stopped it.
What have I done what have I done what have I done?
Stupid stupid stupid I’m so stupid.
Over and over and over and over again in my head I replay the scenario. I force it to end differently. Maybe if I think it vividly enough, perfectly enough, it’ll change how this ends.
No.
Water. I run to the bathroom and crank the tap on so harshly it sprays everywhere but I don’t care. I scoop up handfuls and drink, drench my face, cover my clothes. I’m too hot it’s too hot I can’t breathe.
Perfect Prey Page 3