by C. J. Cooke
Lochlan: When I pull into our driveway with a screech of tyres there is already a police van on the kerb opposite, and a silver Mercedes facing me has a man and a woman in the front seats who jump to attention when they see me emerge from my car. I stride towards the front door and they race after me with that surprising paparazzi speed, calling out, ‘Mr Shelley! Mr Shelley!’ And I say ‘not now’ and shut the door in their faces.
Inside I can hear Cressida screaming and Magnus barking at someone down the phone. There is a man in the front room in my favourite armchair and a woman wearing a crisp white shirt and trouser suit. She rises to her feet when she sees me, and I hold up a hand to tell her to wait a second while I search out my screeching daughter in the kitchen.
Cressida is in Gerda’s arms, fighting off a bottle. I pluck the bottle from Gerda’s hand – it is ice-cold – and toss it in the microwave.
‘It has to be warm, otherwise she won’t take it,’ I say. How much I’ve learned in the last twenty-four hours.
‘Well, it would have been nice to know that before you left,’ Gerda snaps.
I take Cressida, struck by a sudden affection for her, so small and fragile in my arms, her cries turning to whimpers when I hold her. She roots at my chest, as though expecting to find a nipple there. Not finding it, she’s back to shrieking within seconds.
The microwave bleeps. I take out the bottle, give it a vigorous shake and place the teat into Cressie’s mouth. She sucks greedily, making piglet noises and bunching her fists tightly against the bottle. The milk foams against the sides of her mouth and her eyelids flicker, as though she’s spent all her energy railing against cold milk and is now about to fall into a cloud-cushioned coma of satiation. She drains the bottle in about five minutes, but as soon as she’s done she starts to cry again.
Frustrated, I pass her back to Gerda, who kisses the crown of her head and manages to console her. I head back to the living room to speak with the police.
The male detective leans forward and offers his hand. He is tall, serious-looking and broad-shouldered, early to mid forties, pale-haired, dressed in a grey suit with a navy tie. He reminds me of Archie Sims, one of the posh kids from Year Ten who used to throw wet paper towels at me in the playground. He doesn’t smile but gives me an iron handshake.
‘Detective Sergeant Roy Canavan. I’m the OIC. Officer in charge. This is my colleague, DS Welsh.’
The female detective is young: mid-twenties, soft face, light brown hair wrapped up in a bun. She extends her hand and nods out the window. ‘Seems we’ve already got some attention from the press.’
‘Yeah.’
I’m not quite sure where to sit, and it occurs to me that my own home has become rearranged by the situation, this thing that shouldn’t be happening, by these people who I shouldn’t be encountering. It’s like I’m visiting a place that reminds me of my house, and I’m waiting for someone to tell me where to put myself and how to act. I almost offer Detective-Sergeant-Canavan-the-OIC a stiff drink, and only as the words are about to tumble from my mouth do I realise this is probably not wise. He and DS Welsh sit on the sofa and each pulls out a notepad, ready for business. I take a seat in the armchair adjacent to them.
‘Mrs Bachmann – your grandmother-in-law? – said that some of the neighbours came forward this morning,’ DS Canavan says. ‘Mrs Shahjalal’s the one who raised the alarm, is that right?’
I nod. ‘She called me at work yesterday afternoon. She’d thought to check in on Eloïse after a delivery couldn’t be made. Good job, too, otherwise Max and Cressida would have been alone all night and I wouldn’t have known.’
It’s the first time I’ve said this aloud. What would have happened if Mrs Shahjalal hadn’t spotted Max? Cressida’s so young that she could have become dangerously dehydrated in a matter of hours. Max is too young to know how to contact anyone. He might have tried to feed himself and Cressida. I can’t bear to think of it. The tragedies that might have unfolded are too great.
‘She mentioned that UPS tried to make a delivery here,’ he continues. ‘We’re trying to locate the driver involved in case he heard or witnessed anything. One of your other neighbours from this side of the street – Mr McWhirter – said he saw a car pull up outside your house yesterday around eleven o’clock in the morning.’
I straighten. ‘Did he get the registration details?’
‘No. He said it was a white saloon, not sure of the make or model. He’s certain it mounted the pavement and remained parked for ten or twenty minutes. We’ll make enquiries with local taxi companies. Another neighbour, Mrs Malvern from number twenty-nine, said she thought she heard a shout sometime in the morning but couldn’t be sure.’
‘My colleague noted that you had a faulty lock on the back door of this property, is that right?’
I nod, crushed. I should have fixed it. ‘Yes.’
‘There’s been a couple of incidents over the last month in this area, so we’ll make enquiries about that.’
‘Incidents?’
‘Burglaries. You said no valuables were taken, correct?’
‘As far as I can tell.’
He searches my face, so I add: ‘I work away Monday through Thursday. So I suppose I’m not completely up to speed with everything in the house.’
‘We’ll do a sweep of the door for prints.’
DS Welsh tells me they want to ask me a few more questions, although a ‘few’ in this case means so many I lose count. Medical numbers, insurance company details, schools we went to, everyone and anyone we have contact with. They want to know more about my job, about Eloïse’s job, and I tell them that eight years ago she set up Children of War, a charity that offers emotional and educational support for refugee children. The detectives are deeply interested in this and take copious notes. When she set it up, what kind of work it involves. Their questions make me realise how much I don’t know about the charity.
‘Any colleagues holding a grudge against her?’ DS Canavan asks. ‘Anyone who owes the charity money?’
‘I’m afraid I have no idea.’
He lifts his eyebrows. ‘She didn’t talk about her job? The people she worked with?’
‘I guess that Eloïse was so good at her job that everything looked to be very smooth.’ Even to my own ears I don’t sound very convincing. Right before I go dig out my Bad Husband sackcloth, I remember that she really did make most things look effortless. That’s why I didn’t tend to ask. If anything was good or bad, I expected that she’d tell me. And of course, she’s currently at home full-time with the kids.
He taps the pen against the page. ‘Even so, it’s important that we get a complete picture of the events leading up to her disappearance. Any media interviews she might have given, anything work-related at all, could prove extremely useful.’
‘What about her mental state?’ Welsh asks from the other armchair.
‘Eloïse’s mental state?’ I say. ‘What about it?’
‘Well, she gave birth recently. Sometimes women can experience mood swings and depression.’
I shake my head. ‘She was fine.’
‘Has she ever had any signs of depression or emotional instability in the past?’
A memory rises up. ‘Well, she saw a counsellor for a while after Max was born, but other than that she was fine.’
‘What counsellor?’ Canavan says, and I can see he’s writing down everything I’ve said and underlining it.
I rub my face, trying to think. ‘I honestly don’t remember the name. I mean, it was over four years ago. A health visitor kept going on about El’s moods after our son was born. Despite El saying she was fine, a bit tired, she had to go talk to someone. But she was discharged very swiftly. It was nothing.’
‘We’ll look into that,’ Welsh says, throwing a look at Canavan.
‘I really don’t think this has anything to do with her going missing,’ I say, fearful that they’ll waste time looking into something completely irrelevant. There’s no way t
his has anything to do with El having a bad day.
‘We need to rule this one out,’ Canavan says firmly. ‘We see a lot of cases where a loved one goes missing because they don’t want to admit that they’re struggling and don’t know where to turn to for help.’
‘I’m pretty sure my wife doesn’t fall into that category.’
He ignores me. ‘Anything else you can think of? Anything missing, any personal belongings gone? Even a single credit card can make a huge difference to the investigation.’
I shake my head, but then an image jumps into my mind: the Swiss passport. I tell Welsh and Canavan that it’s gone, but that I haven’t seen it in a long time anyway. ‘She never used it,’ I say. ‘More a token of her heritage than anything. Besides, if she’d used it to travel overseas I’d see it on the credit card statements. But I thought I’d mention it.’
Both Welsh and Canavan react to this a lot stronger than I’d have anticipated. ‘She could have used cash to travel. You don’t keep any at home?’
I tell him we do, but it’s all still there.
Magnus and I begin to draw up a list of everyone El’s ever had any association with, while Canavan writes up his notes. He interrupts Magnus and I to ask more questions: addresses and telephone numbers, a list of Eloïse’s support network. I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t recall the names of many of her friends and have no idea where they live. I promise to get the information off Facebook, but he tells me there’s no need: they’ll do their own investigation of my wife’s social media activity and check out her emails. For this, they require every device she has access to: her laptop, tablet, and mobile phone. They’ll check our bank accounts, Eloïse’s charity, and they’ll be speaking to our GP.
‘So, what happens now?’ I ask as the interview comes to an end. I feel wrung out.
‘There are a number of steps in cases of missing persons,’ Canavan answers. ‘Eloïse is what we call high risk, given that she may not be fully recovered physically from the birth of your daughter. First, we’ll need to do a search of the property.’
I stare at him. ‘A search of the property?’ Is he insinuating that I’ve murdered my wife and buried her under the gladioli?
DS Welsh must spot whatever crosses my face because she jumps in to explain. ‘We’re aware that two small children are without a mother right now, and that Eloïse recently gave birth. Both things combined make this case a high priority. We really want to make sure we can locate her as fast as we can. Searching the property is standard procedure.’
Welsh is convincingly sympathetic, and her role in this partnership becomes clear. She has a soft manner, the kind I usually associate with early years’ teachers and childminders.
Once I’ve ascertained that I’m not about to be dragged from my children in handcuffs, I step away from the doorway, granting them entry to the stairs. Swiftly and efficiently they move throughout the house, peeling back the layers of our lives.
The search takes most of the afternoon. After some debate over whether or not I should send Max to nursery, Gerda and Magnus drop him off on the basis that his routine ought not to be too disturbed. Then they pack a baby bag and take Cressida to the park while I pace back and forth from the playroom to the kitchen, listening to the noises of strangers upstairs trawling through our cupboards and drawers, emerging every now and then with a box of toys or paperwork.
In the kitchen, I go through our family paperwork in the oak dresser to find anything that might indicate a reason for all of this, something concrete and reasonable. Receipts, birth certificates, Max’s paintings from nursery. Still no sign of the Swiss passport, and so I phone our bank to make sure that there aren’t any payments pending, no airline tickets booked. Then I turn yet again to El’s laptop and phone, before the police have a chance to take them away. It takes me a while to work out her email password, but finally I crack it: MaxJan11. I spend ages searching carefully for train or flight tickets, but there’s nothing. I sign into her Facebook account. Her most recent status update hardly suggests anything out of the ordinary:
Big smiles from Cressida all morning! Love this girl
She had sent text messages to her friends Rachael, Mimi and Niamh about meeting up for coffee and the park and an eBay offer for a toddler bed. She’d made recent calls to the dry cleaner’s, Gerda, and me. Her phone contains hundreds of photographs, a vast percentage taken by Max, it seems – these images are mostly of Max’s nose, hand, and the carpet, with a few blurry shots of Cressida in various states of discomfort. There are several blurry ones of Eloïse, too, and on seeing these images I can’t help but fall into a chair and wrestle with the urge to turn into a big mushy puddle of emotion. It’s more out of frustration, or perhaps a concoction of extreme emotions, that I find myself with tears running down my face.
Max must have taken these. El seemed unaware that they were being taken. In one she is asleep in Max’s bed, his Thomas the Tank Engine bed covers visible. In another she is sitting cross-legged on the floor by his Peppa Pig set. In another she is captured from behind as she stands at the back door, her head turned to the right. I flick to the next image, then go back.
She is holding something in her hand.
I zoom in to it. The image is blurry, and at first I dismiss the small white object as a pen, but on closer inspection I can determine that the ghostly white spiral above her hand is smoke winding upward like a thin white ribbon. A cigarette.
The date stamp is 7 February 2015. This year. A month ago. I study it for a long time, wondering if it is Eloïse in the picture or someone else, maybe one of her friends. El has never smoked. She was staunchly opposed to the whole concept of smoking, would choke and wave her hands if anyone lit up close by. It was actually embarrassing how vocal she’d get about it. I quit soon after we got together because she threatened to dump me if I didn’t.
If for some reason she suddenly decided to take it up, surely she would have told me, of all people? And why when Cressida was barely eight weeks old? Eloïse decided to become more or less vegan to ensure that Cressida got the best nutrition while being breastfed – so, smoking? I’m amazed. It doesn’t seem to fit the picture, and yet here she is. Smoking. I almost want to laugh, it’s that bizarre. I have no way of even beginning to interpret what this discovery means.
I flick through all the images, studying them for any signs of anything equally mis-fitting. One of the videos shows El laughing and clapping as Cressida kicked her legs on the play mat. This is consistent with the woman I know and love, and so I give a big sigh of relief, as though I’ve found her again. Another clip shows her in the living room sleeping as Max tells the camera to be very quiet and not wake Mummy up.
I make a mental note to think carefully about how to ask Max about Mummy smoking.
As I’m figuring out how to work the dishwasher, DS Canavan comes into the kitchen holding out a baby monitor. ‘We’re going to have our technical team look over these, if that’s OK?’
I nod. ‘Yes, of course.’ I tell him I’ve already checked them in the hope that they might tell us where she’s gone. He perks up at this, and I feel gut-kicked all over again when I tell him they were turned off.
‘Have you the one set of monitors, or are there any more around the house?’
This, I can answer.
‘We have four. A camera in each of the kids’ bedrooms, one in the playroom and one overlooking the landing upstairs. They’re wireless.’
‘And did you link up the babycam to any online account?’
‘My wife had them synched to her phone. I’ve already checked. She had the monitors switched off.’
Canavan nods.
‘We’ll get our tech team to check it out.’
20 March 2015
Komméno Island, Greece
My dreams are strange and vivid. I dream I am holding a ball of red wool and walking from the back door of the farmhouse towards the outside. Only, the island with its vast blue sprawl of ocean is not to be foun
d beyond the threshold – instead, I step through the door to a dark cave.
I am terrified of the dark, of the cave entrance marked with fang-like stalactites and jagged walls, but somehow I know I have to go in. I have no choice. I find a cigarette lighter in my back pocket and flick it to illuminate my path. At my feet I can see shallow puddles of muddy water. The cave is narrow, though the ceiling is high – about fifteen feet. The cave does not stretch very far ahead but seems to twist and bend around many corners, widening at some parts to ten or twelve feet and then narrowing again to three or four. I keep the ball of wool in one hand and the flickering lighter in the other, my mouth dry with anticipation.
At one point I notice the wool has started to unravel on the ground behind me. I stoop to pick it up, and as the light struggles to remain it occurs to me that it isn’t a bad idea to let the wool unravel – when I need to return to the entrance, I will be able to find my way, even if the light dies out altogether.
So I press on, deeper into the cave, the small flame from my lighter gradually washing my surroundings in a yellow haze. The stalactites grow longer, wider, dripping with moisture, an occasional rustling sound signalling the presence of bats. My skin crawls, but I close my eyes and whisper to myself. It’s OK. You can do this. Don’t be afraid. Keep going and you’ll find your way back.
After a long while I seem to reach some kind of central point, a circular space with several pathways leading off it. I find a large round rock and sit down with my ball of wool, which is now no bigger than a plum. I have very little wool left, and my lighter is running out of gas. I’ll need the wool to find my way back, but I know I have to keep going until I find the end. There is something there, waiting for me. I have to find it.
As I stand up to choose a path, a loud noise shakes the walls of the cave. A deep, muscular growl, belonging to something larger than a dog or wolf. A rhino, perhaps, or an ox.
I drop my lighter and the cave plunges into soupy darkness. I scramble around on the ground trying to find it, splashing my knees, hands and face in pools of stagnant water. The growling has started up again, a rumbling sound about a hundred yards away. Finally, my fingers hit against a small plastic object, and I scoop up the lighter. But no matter how much I thumb the switch, the light won’t return.