by Unknown
Katharine began talking, as if reading a part in a play.
‘You take the children to school, darling, if you don’t mind. I want to talk to Bea’s colleague . . . Paula, Priscilla . . .’
‘Precious,’ said Laura.
‘Come on then, you two,’ said Richard. ‘I’ll have to drop you early, I need to get a move on.’
Katharine was gulping the last of her coffee and studying the calendar.
‘Laura!’ she cried suddenly. Laura cringed and flipped the top of her school bag shut, moving it closer to her chair with her foot.
‘What?’ Her mouth was smeared with chocolate and a fleeting vision of her as a toddler in her high chair passed before Katharine’s eyes.
‘You’ve got an orthodontist’s appointment at ten. Oh for heaven’s sake!’
Laura ran her tongue over her teeth and thought of Chanel’s mouth, which was filled with metal tracks and screws. Chanel was always at the orthodontist’s. She hadn’t been to Double Science for months. Laura couldn’t wait to get tracks herself.
‘We’ll reschedule it,’ said Richard.
‘No. It’s taken forever to get to this point. Umpteen visits for measurements, for impressions, for fittings, for God knows what. We can’t start all over again in London. He’s going to wire her up today.’
Adrian inserted a quarter of orange peel in front of his teeth and gave Laura a smile. Laura had been practising cutting people with her eyes and she dropped a lidded flicker at her brother now. The orange peel popped out, leaving his lips baggy and pale. Laura gave him the finger from behind the milk carton.
‘Well I’ve cancelled everything anyway. I’ll just have to take her with me. Come on, Laura, we’re going.’
‘You’ve already cancelled everything?’
Funny how parents had to say everything twice. Adrian drank the remains of his breakfast from the bowl.
‘Yes. Outpatients, training, supervision and a meeting with the Chief Executive. Everything. I know I’ve taken on too much but it’s so difficult to say no, and we’re so overstretched in Paediatrics . . .’
Richard left the room to get ready. Adrian followed him.
‘Greedy,’ said Laura quietly, swinging one foot.
Katharine glanced in the mirror. She combed her short brown hair with sharp, impatient strokes.
‘Mmm?’
‘You’re greedy,’ Laura said to her.
‘Who?’ she said, looking at Laura’s reflection in the mirror. Why oh why did the child insist on doing that to her hair? Where on earth was the logic in going to the hairdresser and asking for black highlights when she had perfectly nice fair hair?
‘You,’ said Laura.
The comb caught the corner of her eye. She blinked and pressed the tear duct with a tissue. What did this girl know? She opened her eyes again. Everything, the look assured her. Everything.
‘And in what way am I greedy?’ Voice hard and bright, Katharine turned, one hand holding the comb.
‘All those jobs you’ve got. Why not leave a few for somebody else?’
Something, some feeling she could not name, fluttered at the base of Katharine’s throat. ‘It’s not a matter of greed—’
‘How many jobs you got, then?’
Where was the love? That was what she wanted to know. Where was the love and the gratitude and the respect? Really, she had taken her eye off the ball as far as Laura was concerned. They both had. Sending her to that school had been the very worst thing they could have done. Thankfully they had seen the error of their ways before it was too late. There had been one hell of a row when they broke it to them the other night, but children were children, they adjusted very quickly.
Katharine banged her cup down harder than she intended. She sighed. No doubt Laura was struggling with all sorts of feelings about Bea. Lord knows, they all were. She tried another tack.
‘Look, don’t worry about Bea . . .’ She allowed a pause for Laura to fill. Laura stared at her and put an entire half slice of toast and Nutella into her mouth. Katharine wanted to say that perhaps Laura had had enough breakfast now but she stopped herself. It was such a tightrope, girls and food.
‘I have a feeling that she’s taken herself off for a little holiday.’
Laura drank milk and watched her mother.
Katharine took her cup to the sink. ‘I can’t remember the last time Bea and Frank went on holiday. They went to Spain, was it, for their honeymoon years ago and she and Granny flew to Mallorca for a weekend last year for Granny’s birthday, which didn’t sound like much of a holiday . . .’
There was that feeling in her throat again. ‘We’ll just pop into her office and chat to her colleagues before your appointment, and then . . .’
She turned round. Laura had left the room.
Memo
‘PRECIOUS MTANDWA is expecting you. Top floor.’
The receptionist handed Katharine a visitor’s badge and pointed to the lift, where Laura was trying to be invisible. On the way up Katharine concentrated on trying to pin the badge to her lapel but her hands were trembling. Laura took the badge and did it for her.
‘Show-off,’ she said.
‘What?’
Laura nodded at the badge. ‘Dr Katharine Cooper.’
When the doors opened, Precious was waiting for them.
‘Look at you,’ she said, taking Laura’s face in both her hands. She turned to Katharine and held out a hand. ‘I’m Precious. And you’re Katharine. Oh, yes, I see the resemblance,’ and she laughed so that Katharine put one hand up and checked her hair.
They followed her into the main office, a windowless maze of desks and partitions where men and women sat transfixed at their screens. At a small area in the corner of the room Precious stopped and patted a desk.
‘Here we are,’ she said. ‘I was just going through her emails.’
Katharine stared at Bea’s empty corner. There was nothing personal on the desk and the bare pinboard facing her chair had dark empty shapes on it where photos had recently been removed. It was unsettling to be seeing a part of Bea’s life that she knew nothing about. Her eyes were drawn to the clutter under the desk. Ledgers, boxes, files, carrier bags and a pair of shoes were pushed together in a pile. By contrast, Precious’s desk was calm and ordered.
‘Where’s all her photos of us?’ said Laura, pointing at the board.
‘Oh, we had strict instructions to remove all personal items for yesterday’s visit from on high.’ Laura made a face and Precious smiled and said, ‘That’s what I thought. Oh, I nearly forgot.’
She pulled something out of her bag and put them in Laura’s hands. Laura opened the tissue paper and found two egg cups in cobalt blue with Adrian and Laura written in white across their sides. ‘I found these on holiday and kept forgetting to bring them in. Why don’t you take them home and keep them safe for her.’
Laura cradled the cups in her hands. She looked at Precious and didn’t speak.
Katharine noticed that Bea had 278 unread emails in her inbox. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘Is this normal?’
She thought of her own inbox, sifted and checked by her secretary, of her office, clean and bright, guarded by two anterooms and three staff. She thought of her consulting room and the wards. She didn’t come across mess, she realised, not even in theatre. In theatre there were all those pairs of hands ready with the swabs, the suction and the sutures.
Precious said, ‘Well . . . Let’s just have a little look . . .’
They watched as she scrolled down the list.
‘Memo, memo, memo . . .’ said Katharine.
‘What’s a memo?’ said Laura.
‘Usually they’re nothing,’ Precious said.
‘They’re a quick way of communicating with a lot of people,’ said Katharine. ‘I find them invaluable, I must say.’
‘I think Bea’s attitude is that if you ignore them for long enough they’ll go away or at least become irrelevant.’
‘Like hom
ework,’ said Laura.
‘Probably,’ laughed Precious. ‘Trouble is . . .’ She opened an email titled ‘Urgent. Immediate Action Required’ and looked at Katharine. ‘Trouble is, they can catch you out sometimes.’
Katharine looked at Laura and wished she would go somewhere out of earshot.
Precious said, ‘Do you remember where the photocopier is, Laura?’
Laura nodded.
‘Would you mind doing twenty-five copies of this for me?’
She handed her a sheet of A4. On it was an enlarged image of Bea taken from her staff pass. ‘Beatrice Kemp’ was printed underneath and ‘Have You Seen Her?’ across the top.
Katharine peered at the fifteen-year-old photograph of Bea, the dated hairstyle and embarrassed smile. ‘That’s not Bea,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘Oh, I know. She doesn’t look her best in that one. But I thought it would do for now, until we get a recent one from you or Frank.’
‘And isn’t she Beatrice Pamplin at work?’
‘Pamplin?’ Precious shook her head. ‘She’s always been Bea Kemp here.’
Laura went to the far end of the office with the poster and Katharine sat down on Bea’s chair and blew her nose. This was all horribly, prosaically real and awful and she wished Precious would stop being so cheerful and practical about everything. As soon as Laura was out of earshot, Precious’s face became sombre. She sat down too and drew her chair over to Katharine.
‘I have to say, I am worried about Bea,’ she said.
‘So am I,’ Katharine said, more sharply than she meant to. ‘I’ve been so busy these last few weeks I’ve hardly seen her. Has she been . . . ?’ The words failed her and she shook her head helplessly.
‘I’d say she’s been up and down for a few months.’ Precious’s voice was low and kind. Katharine nodded, afraid of what she might hear. ‘But the last few days she seemed pretty good. Busy but –. She’s been making all these plans for your mother’s birthday.’
‘And Frank? How were things in that department?’
Precious wondered if Bea talked to Katharine the way she had talked to her. Wondered whether Katharine had heard Bea say that in the first years their lovemaking was earnest rather than passionate, dedicated to the making of a child, and that there was something monk-like about Frank that she couldn’t quite work out, so that pretty soon, when the child didn’t come, she went back to Patrick, in her mind for the most part, and it was Patrick’s face she saw whenever Frank made love to her, although, Bea said once, the words ‘made’ and ‘love’ were inaccurate really. Come to think of it, she added, so was the word ‘her’.
‘Things weren’t easy,’ was all Precious had time to say as she watched Laura return.
‘But did she say anything to you, anything that made you think she might . . .’ Might what? Disappear? Do a runner? Die?
‘Nothing out of the ordinary, but you never really know what’s going on, do you? Mostly I think people cope all right at work even if they are depressed. I know there were some money worries and she was certainly fed up with work. We all are. She hated the way it was going – targets, appraisals, reports to write that no one reads. And then there was the pressure on us to raise our grade from the last inspection. She had done a lot of extra work on some of the figures. But in truth the figures are impossible, they’re imaginary almost. You must know that from working in a hospital.’
Katharine found figures extremely useful. You just needed to know how to make them work for you. Katharine found figures turned easily into money for her department, her research, her bank account. She thought of her recent pay rise and blushed.
Laura put the photocopies on Bea’s desk. Katharine checked her watch.
Laura said, ‘I’m getting braces today.’
‘Are you? My two have braces now. You know why all you girls are getting braces? Your brains are getting bigger and crowding out your teeth.’ Precious held Laura’s chin and laughed. ‘It’s true! It’s intelligence evolving in front of our very eyes.’
Katharine bent to pick up her bag. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’
Laura opened her mouth enormously wide like a hippopotamus and shut it again when Katharine straightened up.
But
‘WHAT?’
‘Mispers. Missing persons. There are thousands of them out there. Gone without trace. Six hundred a day.’
‘Six hundred?’ Katharine didn’t think this could be right, but the Missing Persons officer nodded. He had told her his name – Pete, was it? Jim? She couldn’t remember. There were two of them sitting opposite each other across a pair of desks. ‘Michelle’ followed by a phone number and ‘Sudden Death’ were written in green on a whiteboard across the wall facing her. On a poster next to it was a list: Missing Persons Risk Assessment – High, Medium, Low.
‘They get up one day, leave home and disappear.’
He wasn’t making Katharine feel any better, this short, sallow-faced cop speaking in riddles like he was on a television show. She straightened her back and prepared herself to say something that would let him know the kind of woman he was talking to.
‘Listen, my sister . . .’
The skin contracted against the front of her skull and across her cheeks as if she had stepped into a cold wind. The muscles of her throat ached and the throbbing was beginning at the front across her forehead.
‘Most reappear eventually,’ said the taller man. He cleared his throat. ‘But there are a few, a very small number who—’
‘Oh God.’
He pushed the box of tissues across the table towards her, the sound of a hand stroking satin; Bea’s palm on Katharine’s wedding dress, their laughing mouths tickled by champagne bubbles while the guests gathered in the room below.
Jim cleared his throat. She looked up at him, grateful for his kindness. His eyes were brown and the skin below them looked loose and bruised.
‘There was nothing, there was no reason . . .’ She stopped and blew her nose with surprising force and noise.
‘So your sister was last seen when she left the house at around seven on Wednesday morning. That’s about thirty hours ago,’ said the smaller man. ‘Let’s just begin with some facts about her appearance.’
Katharine told them Bea’s approximate height and weight. She gave Bea’s eye colour, hair colour and age, all of it meaningless, she thought, just numbers and adjectives that gave no sense at all of who Bea was. She wasn’t even completely sure of the facts herself. Bea’s eyes were always described as blue, but in certain lights and in certain moods, it seemed to her, they were more of a slate grey. When Bea stood up straight she was taller than Katharine, but lately she seemed to have shrunk. When he asked her whether Bea had any distinguishing marks, any scars or tattoos, Katharine recoiled. She felt tricked. These questions were not to help find a living person; they were to help identify a corpse.
‘No. My sister has no distinguishing characteristics,’ she said coldly and the two men exchanged the briefest of looks. But how could she be sure about Bea’s body? she thought. She hadn’t seen her naked since she was fourteen.
‘And what name did she go by?’
‘What?’ They had Bea’s name. What were they talking about?
‘There can be some confusion over identity where married women are concerned,’ said Jim. ‘Sometimes they use more than one name. We have Beatrice Pamplin down here. Is that her married or her maiden name?’
Maiden? Katharine suppressed an image of Bea in a wimple and gown, traipsing the meadows and glens of Hastings. ‘Kemp,’ she said, ‘Bea Kemp. I have a feeling she used her married name, Pamplin, for some things but not for work. She’s been there so long, perhaps it felt odd to change it.’
She put her hand to her mouth and looked at the whiteboard. How were they going to find her if they didn’t even know her name?
‘I know this is difficult for you,’ said Jim. ‘But can you think of any reason why your sister may have decided to leave? Di
d she seem depressed, unduly worried about things? Were there problems at home perhaps?’
Katharine was shaking her head, impatient with this man, this room, the slow, tedious business of forms and protocol. She felt desperate to speak to Bea, saw now not Bea but a gap where she had been, the negative space of her sister. She couldn’t remember the last time they had had a proper, serious conversation together that wasn’t about time or objects or children.
‘She seemed tired but fine. I mean, I think things with her husband hadn’t been easy for a while.’ She stopped and wondered whether they had met Frank.
‘Things hadn’t been easy for a while?’ The short one was talking now. ‘In what way?’
She looked at them. They were asking whether Frank was violent.
‘He has a temper, I do know that, but it is mainly these dark moods. He’s capable of not talking for days . . .’ She shook her head. ‘But Frank’s not violent, I don’t think, no. His main problem is he doesn’t really have a proper job. I mean, a writer, for heaven’s sake.’ She suddenly wondered how on earth Frank and Bea managed for money.
While Jim wrote this down, she could feel the other one looking at her. His scrutiny made her blush. She had made up her mind about Frank a long time ago, dismissed him and closed her mind to him. He was a man who was disappointed with life and as a result adopted that ridiculous mantle of false pride. It would be so easy to drop Frank in it right now. Here she was, talking about violence when all they had asked was how she got on with her husband. She shrugged and tried to smile.
‘All I mean is that if I woke up one day and found I was married to Frank, I would probably run screaming into the sea.’ She gave a laugh. They looked at her. The phone on Jim’s desk rang. He ignored it and it stopped after three rings.
Now she felt like a suspect. Shame prickled at the roots of her hair. ‘Look, we’re not particularly close to them as a couple, if you know what I mean, but our children are. They’re very fond of Bea. They’re fond of both of them. Adrian adores Frank.’