by Simon Lelic
‘So,’ Leo says.
Megan lifts her head. Her husband is staring at his coffee.
‘So.’
‘You heard, then. The news.’
‘I did.’ She has an urge to reach across. ‘Leo, I’m…’ Don’t say it. You’re not, so don’t say it. ‘What happened? Do you know?’
Her husband has a gesture. It is not for strangers because it would be construed as rude. But for friends, family, Leo has a gesture – a flick of a finger, a turn of the head, a tightening across the lips – that says, I don’t want to talk about it. He will, Megan is convinced, use it now.
Instead he sighs. He picks up his teaspoon. He does not seem to know what to do with it so he puts it down again. ‘The short version?’ he says. ‘Or the long?’
Megan’s Bloody Mary arrives. It is a bouquet of celery in a blood-red vase. She would laugh, ordinarily. ‘I don’t have anywhere I need to be,’ she says instead. It is not true but she says it anyway.
Leo regards her, as though uncertain whether she means what she says. But he seems, in the end, to be convinced. He sighs again.
He is grieving, Megan realises. After all these years and after everything that has happened, he is suffering. For this child, this boy – this man, in the end: Leo is aching from the loss.
Megan shivers. She cannot help it and she cannot hide it. Her husband, though, does not notice. He is searching for his voice in his coffee cup.
‘It was the guards,’ he says. ‘Two of them. Allegedly, of course. They haven’t admitted anything and from what I hear each one’s covering for the other, blaming some mysterious inmate. But the guards. Can you believe it?’ Leo smiles and shakes his head.
Megan looks at her hands.
‘He was up for parole,’ Leo said. ‘Or he would have been. Maybe that was why. Huh. I didn’t think of that. Maybe just the thought of them letting him out…’ Leo shakes his head again. ‘Such rage,’ he says, as much to himself. ‘So much rage.’
‘Don’t tell me you can’t understand it, Leo. Not now. Not after everything that… that we…’ Megan’s anger, from nowhere, overwhelms itself.
‘What? No. Meg, please. I didn’t mean…’
She turns her cheek. She presses her lips. Leo, she can tell, is searching for the words that might appease her but she could save him the effort because there are none, not in that moment. Her husband, however, seems to have reached the same conclusion because the silence stretches.
When Megan turns back he avoids her eye.
‘It was the guards,’ Megan says. Her voice is taut but composed. ‘You were saying: it was the prison guards.’
Now Leo looks: a child peeking from beneath the covers. He nods, tentatively. ‘That’s right.’ He clears his throat. ‘That’s what people seem to think.’ He sits straight.
‘What did they…’ Megan, too, adjusts herself in her seat. ‘The guards. How did they…’
Leo does not answer right away. He is staring again. He wants to ask, she can tell: do you really want to know? Probably she does not but she can hardly confess to that now.
‘They stabbed him,’ Leo says and that, Megan thinks, is that – at least now they can move on. Leo, though, is not finished. ‘They stabbed him,’ he says again, ‘and punctured his lung. They locked him in the shower block and they watched through the glass as he drowned in his own blood. Allegedly,’ Leo adds. His smile, on anyone else, would seem dangerous.
Megan shuts her eyes. She makes a motion with her hand, as though Leo had not already stopped talking.
When she recovers herself, he is watching her. There is something in his look that was not there before.
‘He’s dead, Megan. Daniel Blake. He’s dead.’
She shakes her head. What is that supposed to—
‘That’s why you’re here. Right? That’s why you wanted to see me. He’s dead, I promise you. They’ve had their blood.’
And so, his expression seems to say, has she.
‘Leo. Really. Is that what you… Surely you can’t think that I…’
He waits.
‘… that I wanted – ’ she lowers her voice ‘ – this.’ She is shaking her head and Leo seems suddenly uncertain.
Until: ‘The divorce,’ he says and his shoulders wilt. ‘Right? Closure, finally. That’s what this is about?’
Still Megan shakes her head. ‘No. Leo, no.’ She almost laughs. How has she behaved? How has she treated him that he holds her intentions in such base regard?
Leo is searching the tablecloth for direction. He looks at Megan and his eyes draw narrow. Well? he does not say. What, then?
‘The house.’
Coward.
‘The house? What about the house?’
Nothing. Forget the house. This has nothing to do with the house.
‘I’m planning… I’m planning to sell it.’
Leo takes a moment to react. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘That’s up to you.’
‘I saw an agent. You wouldn’t believe how much he said it was worth. I mean, we’d split what was left, obviously. After we pay off the mortgage.’
‘Sure. That’s fine. It’s up to you.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Why would I mind? It’s your house, Meg. That’s what we agreed.’
‘I live there. That doesn’t make it mine.’
‘No, that’s true but…’
‘It’s a lot of money, Leo. Aren’t you interested in knowing how much?’
So much for the sweetener. So much for softening the blow. But how, really, did she expect him to react, given how much each of their attitudes towards money has changed? After Ellie, it hardly seemed important to either of them. It is the reason – one of them – why their parting was so effortless. There was nothing, no complications even, to bind them together.
‘I earn enough, Meg. I trust you. Sell it for what you can and take what you need.’
Megan nods. She fiddles with the straw in her drink.
‘Meg.’
She looks up.
‘This isn’t about the house,’ Leo says. ‘Is it?’
And the surprise, this time, must surely show on her face. But again, why should it? She knows him; he knows her. After the greater part of twenty years together, there is no escaping that.
Except, if today proves nothing else, it is that Leo does not know Megan as well as he might think. He does not know, for instance, how furious she is, how it feels sometimes like she is choking on hate. He does not know how atrophied her heart has become, how ruthless that allows her to be, how pitiless. He does not know, after twenty years of being together and a decade now of being apart, what his wife is capable of.
‘No,’ Megan says. ‘It’s not.’
And he does not, above all, know what she has done.
20
He was conscious, through it all, of the contradiction. On the one hand he willed an acceleration because everything, it was clear to Leo, was taking far too long. People walked, they did not run. They asked, then asked again, then went away and came back with the same questions. Just to clarify, they would explain, even though Leo – in the first instance; certainly by the third – had been perfectly clear. He knew he had been clear because he knew too the effort it was costing him: to reason when he wanted to rage; to be considered, considerate, when the only consideration he had was finding his missing daughter. Some of those he spoke to suggested he sit. They offered him tea or coffee or water or anything at all and they actually suggested he sit. No one sits! he wanted to scream. No one drinks! No one eats, sleeps, shits until we find my fucking daughter!
As though he were entitled to rage. As though he were entitled to direct his anger anywhere but at himself. More haste. More speed. It seemed, on the one hand, the only prophylactic to insanity.
But on the other. On the other, every minute was a minute lost, every second a second wasted. Each tick, each tock, was a slice stolen from his daughter’s life, another moment of Ellie suffering. It w
as time, moreover, they needed to be using. Leo knew enough about these things to know that. He knew, or could guess, what every passing hour was costing them; how for each day they lost, so their chances on the next would diminish. And so he checked the time incessantly, to monitor it, scrutinise it, see that it did not snatch. It was like a gluttonous child, he decided, reaching with flabby fingers as soon as Leo turned his back. And it stole, when it stole, by the fistful.
Speed things up. Slow things down. He would have had it both ways if he could have, though of course he ended up with neither. There was just his grief – a wound that was tearing at the edges – and the suffocating clasp of his guilt.
Leo saw his wife suffering too and in a way it was the hardest thing to bear.
Their marriage, within hours, became a coalition. As Leo watched his wife watching him recount to the police the litany of his stupidity, he became aware of this shift in status, this downgrading. Megan was only at his side, from that point on, because they had a common goal, a common enemy. Finding Ellie was all that mattered. Everything else would wait.
The waiting. They should not give up hope, they were told – there was every chance Eleanor was alive. Writing notes is one thing but taking a life… That was something else.
But the waiting, they would find, was the hardest part. The lack of news, the lag in knowing, it’s always the thing that hurts most. Which was codswallop, actually. Utter crap. Leo would have taken not knowing over what he did know. He would have taken waiting over the fear, swelling in his gut, that the waiting would turn out to be in vain.
On the first day, anyway, there was no time for it. They were at the school, then inside it, then at the police station Leo already knew so well. There were questions and more questions and statements and tears, followed by a trip in a marked unit to Linden Park. A forensic team, when they got there, was already packing up, having taken what they could from the perimeter of the house. Something, Leo overheard them saying; probably nothing. There was another police officer inside, discreetly established beside the telephone table and offering, as her training seemed to mandate, to stick on the kettle. Her colleagues already had possession of the notes – Leo had told them at the station where they could find them – but the officer who had driven them needed a photograph, if they didn’t mind: something recent. He tried insisting he only needed one but Megan sent him off carrying a shoebox.
The waiting, Leo supposed, might have started then. Megan, though, made calls – to friends, relatives, boyfriends, suspected boyfriends, hospitals even though the police were taking care of the hospitals. Leo, at first, listened through the kitchen door. There was no spare phone line – Megan was using a pay-as-you-go the police had given them and the landline, it went without saying, was to be kept free – and there was no one, phone lines aside, Leo could think to call. What could anyone, anyway, have told them? They already knew who did not have Ellie. They knew where their daughter was not. So Leo listened, until Megan’s family began to arrive, at which point he unsnagged a scarf from the coat rack and cast himself into the night.
He meant to drive. He had the car keys, somehow, in his palm but no recollection when he reached the garage of what had happened to the car itself. It was at the school, presumably. Double-parked in the middle of the street. It would not have been, of course, but it made sense, sort of, to go back and look. It was close to the place Ellie had last been sighted and so as close to his daughter physically as Leo could imagine how to be.
The cold forced him on. Three hours later, with the car keys still in his hand, it forced him back. He craved news as much as his extremities demanded warmth. But he knew, as he reached the edge of the estate, not even to within sight of their house, that there would be none. He could feel it in his gloveless fingers and see it in the bruise of the dawning sky. There would be nothing to do when he reached home except pick up a coat this time and head out again.
He was joined by Megan’s brother. Until the press briefing, it was how Leo spent the second day: in the front seat of Peter’s Volvo, discovering how sprawling a city this small town of theirs really was. How many walls there were, how many doorways. How many alleyways and cellars and outbuildings and bushes and vans and car boots and bins.
She could be anywhere. There, here, there, and all they were doing was driving past.
‘Stop,’ Leo said, and Peter stopped. It was the first word either one of them had said since Peter had started the engine.
‘There.’
Peter looked and he did not argue. They got out of the car and they searched, then returned an hour later with mud on their shoes and rips in their jackets and fifty square yards better off.
At the press conference, Leo did the talking. They did not discuss that he would but Megan was in no state to do anything except sit by Leo’s side. Before it began Leo felt strangely detached. He listened to the audience tuning up and knew the performance was about to start but was somehow convinced it never would. It was only when they led him on set and the lights and the shutter clicks hailed him did the enormity of his task cause him to falter. Here, now: this was it. His best and perhaps only chance to make up for what he had done to his daughter. To save her, his family too. To plead for help and for mercy and for forgiveness, all while holding back the tears.
So: are you ready, Mr Curtice? Over to you.
He did great. That is what they told him. Even though he did not finish. Even though he made it barely halfway through the statement and stuck, like vinyl, on a single word. Please, he said.
Please.
It was Ellie’s blood. It was Ellie’s hair. Not that there had been any doubt. Not that the absence of doubt made the news, when it came, any easier to bear.
This is what he would do.
He would take a knife, like this knife in his hand, just a kitchen knife but sharp enough, easily, to slice through flesh, and what he would do is, he would stab him here. Like that. Just above the belt buckle. And he would grasp the hilt, hold it tight, and it would resist, he imagined, because of the muscle, but he would drag the knife up, like this. To the ribcage, maybe; until he hit bone. Then, what he would do is, he would twist. He would adjust his grip on the handle and he would take his time about it and he would make sure he could see his eyes, that he could see his, and he would twist, like this, and keep twisting and keep twisting, until—
‘Mr Curtice? Is everything okay?’
Leo spun.
He nodded.
He released his grip on the knife and laid it on the kitchen counter.
There was a sighting. Dozens, actually, but this one, on day three, seemed something more. Annie, the female officer who had her finger, always, on the kettle switch, told them as soon as she got off the phone. They should not get their hopes up, she said. A sighting was nothing more than that. But the witness seemed reliable and the description accurate and it had been verified, independently, by more than one source. Even Annie, as she spoke, could not suppress a smile. See, she told Leo and she placed a hand on his forearm. Didn’t she say he had done great?
She made tea. They waited for Annie’s colleague to arrive and as they burned their mouths on the bitter brew, Annie told them what she knew. The original call had come from an old lady. Old-ish, she amended when she saw Leo’s face, and she didn’t even wear glasses. She had seen a girl matching Ellie’s description at the town end of Bonhay Road. She saw her twice, in fact, which is why the woman noticed her. The first time the girl was with someone, the second time she seemed to be alone. A man, Annie added, before they could ask: the girl was with a man. The witness could not describe him other than that he was tall, broad and definitely older than the girl. The girl, though. Her height, her hair, her shoes, her coat – everything seemed to match. And this was yesterday. Late evening. Which meant…
They did not need to be told. It meant, if it was true, that their daughter, twelve hours ago, had been alive.
And, ‘She was with someone,’ Leo said. ‘But t
hen she wasn’t.’
Which might have meant something too.
They searched door to door, alley to alley, garden by garden.
Over a hundred officers, they were told, which made it the biggest concentrated police operation the county had seen in… Well. Annie glanced at Leo. In a little while, anyway. There were volunteers, too. The type of people who had started writing the Curtices letters. The search had been going on already, of course, but not in such a tightly defined area. Before the sighting the police had been scattered: in the streets around Ellie’s school but also in the wasteland along the Exe and among the garages in the corners of the trading estates. Dumping grounds, in other words. Places where something, girl-sized, might easily be disposed of. Now, though, they had a lead. A chance, was the unspoken implication, that they might actually find something.
It went on all day. Into the night, too, with a helicopter borrowed from the Met tracking its spotlights along the line search. Leo and Megan asked what they could do to help but the answer, inevitably, was drink more tea. They obliged, grudgingly, but only because they were invited to do so in the trailer that became the central command post. From their seats in a dimly lit corner they heard everything they needed to and several things, unredacted, they almost certainly were not supposed to. That the girl had been found, for instance. That her name was Caitlyn. That she had been out the night before arguing with a boyfriend her mother did not know she had. That she were the spitting image, Sarge, but that it weren’t her. That the only thing left, the sarge supposed, was to drag the river.
It did not get any worse. Surely. Feet yielding to the mud, skin scored by the wind and rain, convinced every diver was about to emerge with your daughter’s body. Not that the mud mattered. Not that the weather mattered. And he was forgetting how much worse, in an instant, things might be.
They spoke about currents. They said it might look calm but down below, at this time of year, and shook their heads. Someone glanced over at Leo, not having realised he was standing so close. Leo, shivering, turned his gaze towards the sea.