Daughter

by Jane Shemilt

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy:

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  I try to paint, to focus down so hard that all I see are dark colours and curved shapes. If someone loved her, surely they wouldn’t destroy her. I shape the outline of the bud and my mind is so full that when the door creaks open, I spin round, surprised.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’ve done it again.’ Michael is wearing a coat and scarf, his car keys are in his hand. He guessed I would be here and came straight across the lawn. His broad shoulders curve a little as if he is offering himself as a safe place.

  I touch his face and the skin is warm under my fingers. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  He turns his lips into my hand. ‘You look tired. I should have come sooner, but I thought you had the boys here.’

  ‘They left a few days ago. Come into the house or Ted will come and look for us.’

  Ted has laid out knives on the draining board like in an operating theatre. There are neat heaps of chopped onions, little piles of spices, sliced parsnip. As we go into the kitchen he is holding the blade tip of the knife down with one hand and see-sawing the handle rapidly with the other, mincing green strands of parsley. His coat and case are nowhere in sight.

  ‘I want her to have a nourishing meal,’ he tells Michael after they have shaken hands. ‘She’s been looking after me and now I need to look after her.’ As though he has sensed our closeness and is trying to reclaim me. He stirs the contents of the pan.

  Michael goes through to the sitting room. ‘Why don’t you both come and sit down?’

  Ted pulls the pan off the heat and follows us in, sits down next to me, a little too close, and puts his arm along the back of the sofa.

  Michael takes the chair opposite and leans forward, intent and professional, looking at us. ‘When Jenny mentioned ketamine to me I ran a check. Our software enables us to access national lists of known users and dealers, and we can cross-correlate with other crimes committed as well.’

  Crimes like kidnapping or crimes like rape and murder? I glance at Ted to see if he is thinking this too, but his head is down, absorbing the impact of Michael’s words.

  ‘I’ve brought some lists. Starting with Bristol, when I typed “ketamine” in about a hundred names appeared. I need you to look at them to see if any names are familiar.’

  ‘Why would they be?’ asks Ted.

  ‘A name you might have heard Naomi mention in passing, for example, or a friend of a friend of the boys.’

  ‘I doubt she often came into contact with criminal drug users,’ Ted says drily.

  ‘Naomi stole drugs. So did Ed.’ I turn to face Ted, my voice rising. How can he still believe so implicitly in his children’s innocence? ‘Of course they came into contact with criminal drug users.’

  There is a silence. Ted pulls his arm back. As Michael looks down at his list his cheeks are red. I feel a flash of disappointment; he is embarrassed because I lost my temper. I look away from both of them, out of the window to the grass and the sky and the trees.

  Michael hands identical papers to each of us.

  ‘Anything that jumps out at you, for whatever reason, would be useful to hear,’ he says.

  Tom Abbot, Joseph Ackerman, Silas Ahmed, Jake Austin, Mike Baker … I read the names on the sheet. I’ve never seen any of them before. It’s a relief and it isn’t – it means we are no further forward. Ted shakes his head.

  ‘Sorry. Nothing rings a bell.’

  ‘I’ve got an even bigger list that takes in the South-West.’ Michael is pulling more papers from his bag.

  Ted starts reading down the new list; he reads quickly and turns the pages faster than I do. I want him to take longer, look more closely, but he’s always read more quickly than me, cleanly taking what he needs from the text as though cutting it out. I read and reread, glancing at Michael, wanting to signal my gratitude, but he is reading the list as well, frowning slightly. He must be tired. I picture him going into his office earlier today, starting up the computer, printing the lists for us, driving to Dorset for two hours. His eyes would have been focused on the road, but what thoughts would have been in his head as the countryside flashed by? It seems strange that I have no idea at all.

  Ted has read through the new list before I finish. He puts it down.

  ‘No luck,’ he says briefly. He walks into the kitchen and starts rummaging noisily through cupboards.

  I carry on reading, trying and testing each name. Nothing is familiar. Michael walks over to me and puts his hand on my shoulder. A machine whizzes from the kitchen, stops and starts again. The heat from Michael’s hand burns through to my skin. I close my eyes; after a few seconds he moves back to his briefcase and pulls out two thicker sheaves.

  ‘I’ve got a national list here.’

  ‘My God,’ says Ted, reappearing with a tray of steaming mugs. ‘You’ve cast the net wide.’

  Michael takes a mug of soup and sips. ‘Thanks. I expect it’s the same for you, when someone’s sick and you’re not sure why. You work though all the possibilities. All those blood tests and scans. Detective work.’

  Ted nods. ‘You’ve got a point. Sometimes it’s just finding that extra bit of information – a different kind of headache, the smallest shift in electrolytes or the most obscure shadow on the scan – and there’s your diagnosis.’

  The soup is warm and spicy. Ted has learnt how to cook. For a second I see Beth, my image of Beth, flushed with heat from the stove, stirring a pan of soup. Ted leaning over to look, kissing her neck. My eyes hurt with reading the small type. I fetch the glasses I now need for close painting from the shed. When I come back into the room Michael, noticing my glasses, gets up and switches on the light.

  Ted smiles at me. ‘So my wife wears glasses nowadays. Suits you.’ I sit down opposite him, on the chair next to Michael.

  Michael hands us the sheaves of paper. ‘This is the national list; where the drug users are linked with other crimes there is an asterisk by their name. This one covers Scotland, North England, the Midlands, East Anglia, Wales and back down to the South, including London.’

  ‘There must be thousands here,’ Ted says.

  I don’t have to read thousands of names, though. It is there, on the second page down, with an asterisk by it. Yoska. Yoska Jones. That strange Christian name again, and I feel winded, as though I’ve been punched in the chest.

  ‘He had a Welsh accent,’ I say slowly. ‘That was odd.’

  ‘Who did?’ Michael gets out of his chair and crouches by mine. ‘What was odd?’ His voice is urgent as he looks at me.

  ‘It was odd because Yoska isn’t a Welsh name.’

  Michael looks at the list of names I am holding, scanning down quickly.

  ‘Yoska Jones, you mean? You remember him?’

  ‘I remember a man called Yoska,’ I reply, looking down into Michael’s face, and instead of his searching grey eyes I see brown ones, in a narrow face. Powerful hands, a slim, strong body, dark hair. High cheekbones. Then another picture replaces that and just for a second I see her handwriting: XYZ. The Y hidden between the X and the Z, drawn in red and touched by a heart. He would have warned her never to write his name anywhere.

  ‘What was the matter with him?’ Michael asks.

  ‘That’s the thing, I never found out.’

  ‘Why not? Didn’t he say much? Was he difficult?’ Michael’s questions are fast, like bullets, hitting into me.

  ‘The opposite. He was charming.’

  ‘Could you remember what he actually said?’ Michael is looking at me hopefully. Ted, watching from the other side of the room, is shaking his head, and I can see he doesn’t think I’ll be able to reach that far back.

  ‘Some bits, maybe,’ I tell Michael. ‘But it was over a year ago.’

  I remember that when he first walked in and sat down he didn’t look like he needed anything, and that was strange in itself. People usually looked il
l when they came to see me: in pain, or worried, or sad. Yoska’s colour was good, and I think he was actually smiling, or at least his mouth was. Perhaps there had been a scar, a small one under his left eye, which made the rest of his face look even smoother. The brown eyes in the slim face had watched me very closely. He hadn’t looked ill at all, just curious.

  ‘Write down what he said, if you can.’ Michael reached into his bag and gave me a blank piece of paper, already neatly attached to a clipboard. He felt in his pocket for the pen he always carried. ‘It could be important. Write it down just as it happened.’

  ‘Word for word?’

  ‘You’ll be surprised what can come out of your memory when you do this. Try.’

  Then he smiled, as if it would be the easiest thing in the world to remember a seven-minute consultation which happened over a year ago. It was the second of November. I know that for certain because he came in before Jade, so the date is imprinted in my memory.

  I write the date at the top of my piece of paper, and underline it. Then I write what I think we said, and in between I try to remember how it was.

  2 November 2009

  ‘How can I help?’

  I must have said something like that; I think I kept it brief. I can remember being in a hurry because I had got behind early on. He had leant towards me and put his hand on the table. I remember that clearly because patients didn’t usually touch the table: it was my territory. Yoska’s hand had been too close to mine and I had taken my hand away. It had felt like a power game which he was winning. He’d been quick to answer.

  ‘Back pain, runs in the family.’

  Back pain isn’t usually genetic but I sensed he wanted a reaction from me, so I didn’t argue.

  ‘What do you think brought this on?’

  Sometimes patients don’t like that question, thinking the doctor should know; they don’t realize it’s useful to have their opinion. Yoska didn’t mind. His answer came as quickly as if he’d prepared it.

  ‘Carrying my kid sister around. She likes to sit on my shoulders, but she’s getting heavy.’

  I could tell he didn’t like it when I suggested he let his sister walk on her own. I had him down for the kind of man who didn’t want to be told what to do, especially by a woman.

  His straight-leg raising was limited on the left. I told him it was sciatica and gave him a script. I remember he smiled and shook my hand. I’d smiled back, relieved it had been simple after all.

  Michael scans though the dialogue I’ve written and Ted gets up and reads it over his shoulder.

  ‘Will it help?’ I look at Michael.

  ‘Definitely.’ He nods emphatically. ‘If it’s the same Yoska as on my list; though it’s a bit of a long shot, of course –’

  ‘It seems to have been a straightforward consultation,’ Ted says. ‘It’s hard to see how this could connect to Naomi.’ He walks to the sofa, sits down again and begins to stroke his right eyebrow back and forth.

  ‘I should be able to get a photograph from the database,’ Michael continues. ‘I’ll email you a copy if I do.’

  ‘Then what?’ I stare at him, feeling the little hope of the moment fade away. ‘Even if the Yoska I saw in my surgery is the same man as Yoska the ketamine dealer on your list, what will that really prove?’ The red Y in the diary seems to fade as I speak, the little hearts evaporating into nothing.

  ‘I can’t say precisely yet, but it could give us something to work with.’ Michael smiles at me then. ‘Step by little step. That’s how it usually works, remember?’

  Later that evening I remember when he’d said that to me before, about little steps and how they get you there in the end. It was eleven days after she had gone, a time when I had thought we were going nowhere at all.

  BRISTOL 2009

  ELEVEN DAYS AFTER

  As we approached the bend in the road coming from Thornbury towards Oldbury-on-Severn, we saw the bollards and the yellow and blue of the parked police car shining brightly in the gloom of a winter afternoon. Already the light was going, and the rain was falling hard.

  Michael stopped the jeep tight against the hedge, got out and walked over to where a policeman was waiting. Through the raindrops on the windscreen, I watched them move towards each other, then walk together past the bollards and enter a field by the open gate, disappearing from sight up the puddled beginnings of a track.

  I was glad Ted was on call and it was just Michael who had brought me in the police jeep. If Ted had been here we would have been alone together now, waiting for Michael to come back, the fear becoming larger as it moved between us or surfacing in angry words. Instead he was with Ed, who was still in bed with a bandaged arm, and on hand for the hospital should he be called in for emergencies. I was here because of a compulsion to be where Naomi might have been since we last saw her.

  After a few minutes Michael got back in the jeep, bringing with him the wet freshness of outside. His mouth had set in a grim line.

  ‘The van’s been left in a little copse to the side of the field, further up the slope.’ He nodded to the open gate and the field beyond that. His fingers tightened their grip on the wheel.

  ‘What is it, Michael?’ I asked him, but he was looking straight ahead. ‘What’s happened?’

  He took a hand from the steering wheel and put it over both of mine as they twisted together on my lap. ‘It’s been partly burnt out,’ he told me.

  The warmth from his hands seeped into mine. For a moment I wanted to cling to them, but Michael leant forward and started the jeep again. We edged slowly towards the open gate, where the policeman pulled the bollards back and let us through.

  My head was full of her name, like a prayer, as the jeep lurched onto the rutted farm track, steadily climbing up the sloped land of the field. I took in the ditch by the hedge, the thick twiggy hedge, and the curving brown fields. The ditch had been neatly cut and was full of brown water. I thought of rats and the small dead things that might be under the surface. On a separate little rise, set back from the field, I could see a group of trees up ahead. From here it looked like any other brown clump of winter trees in south Gloucestershire, distanced by the misty air.

  Michael halted the jeep below the rise and got out. I followed him. It had stopped raining; the air was dank and cold, smelling of mud and wet grass. It was quiet after the noise of the engine, but the silence slowly filled up with the sound of starlings in the trees and the sudden harsh calls of crows circling far above. I could hear cattle a long way off and the closer, quieter dripping of water as it came off the trees onto the ground. The grey sky was wide up here; we were higher than I had realized.

  We climbed up the steep bank, our feet sinking in a mulch of withered beech leaves, and then we stepped over the blue and white tape that was threaded through the trees. Scratchy undergrowth pulled at my legs and I didn’t see the van at first. It had been pushed under a lone conifer tree, and the charred lower branches were bare. The windows had gone and the metal of the roof was blackened. I stood next to it, imagining the flames that did this, the heat that destroyed the skin of the van, the noise and the smell.

  We walked round to the front, where the bonnet rested against a tree trunk. Fragments of blue paint were left, mostly peeling and stained black. The number plate had been wrenched off.

  ‘This part was less burnt,’ Michael explained. ‘The petrol tank would have gone up first.’

  ‘I want to see inside, Michael.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that.’ He went back to his car, pulled something from the boot, and returned with a pair of blue rubber gloves. I put them on, struggling to get the rubber over my wet fingers.

  The passenger door had gone; I leant inside and saw the wires and springs, all that was left of the seats. I put my hand into the empty socket where the radio had been. The glove compartment had been ripped out. I looked into the back seat. More wires and springs. The rain had come in so that under the front seat was a big puddle, the water black. I
couldn’t see what might be under it, though it didn’t look deep enough to hide anything. I put my hand down between the springs and brushed my fingers along the metal at the bottom of the van; I felt the skin of the van as carefully as I felt the skin of my patients. Nothing.

  ‘Why here?’ I said to Michael. ‘It’s so far away from anywhere. Not near a main road or a town or a railway station. There’s no way to escape.’

  ‘Not obvious, is it?’ Michael said. ‘Excuse me a second. I need to make a couple of calls.’

  He walked away from me through the trees, bending over his mobile, and after a few moments I lost sight of him. I thought how in the spring this place would be quite different; there would be sun and shadows moving on the ground amongst the bluebells and wild garlic, the light would be green and gold as it came down through the beech leaves and the little wood might feel like a cathedral.

  I heard the noise of the rain starting again as it fell on the leaves before I felt the drops on my head. It was darker now, and I wondered what noises there might be in the wood when the night came.

  ‘We need to go.’ Michael had come back and was standing close to me. ‘There will be more of our men coming soon. The van has to go off for examination.’

  I stood there for a moment longer. What had been achieved after all? There was nothing in this burnt car or in the woodland that brought me closer to Naomi, nothing even to tell us if this was the car she had got into. Nothing apart from a few flakes of blue paint.

  ‘Has this all been a waste of time, Michael? We are no further forward at all.’

  Michael gripped my hand for a second and let it go.

  ‘You’re wrong there, Jenny. We are moving forward all the time, but you have to be patient. It’s easier for me; I’ve been trained to do this. Remember, it’s steps like this, one after another, which will get us there in the end.’