by Unknown
In her mind she saw Frank as the opposite of violent, as spineless and impotent. But how could she be sure? She swallowed and wondered whether she had been reckless with her children’s safety, leaving them in the care of a man she did not like, much less knew in any real sense of the word.
Jim entered some information on the computer. He was bringing the interview to an end and Katharine rubbed at the tingling beginning in her hands, saw the lights in the room flare up then retreat as a migraine threatened. She didn’t want to leave. How was she going to find Bea? She must be somewhere. What if she had had an accident, fallen in the river, been attacked or murdered? Why was there no word from her, why was there no trace?
‘This, all this . . .’ She brought her hand up to her head and looked wildly about her. ‘Oh God . . .’ All this was the stuff of newsprint and television, not Bea and Katharine.
Jim straightened his tie and stood up, gesturing gently at the door. He began to speak, something about ‘The investigation is already underway. We will be visiting her husband later today, making enquiries and contacting the main agencies . . .’ Katharine stayed where she was; she wasn’t going anywhere. She needed some inside information. She was a hospital doctor, for God’s sake, she knew how the system worked. She needed to be fast-tracked, given the names of the best people to see; she wanted the truth about survival. This was twenty-first-century Britain; there could only be a limited number of possibilities. There was the bank, the doctor, passport control. We’re all on CCTV, we have mobile phones— She stopped herself, remembering that Bea’s phone had been stolen.
‘Please,’ she said.
‘I know it’s hard.’ Jim sat down again. ‘When a loved one goes missing, those left behind can often become lost themselves in a kind of—’
An animal noise rose up from inside her. She covered her face with her hand. This was appalling. She was out of control. She heard the other one switch on the kettle, the rustle of tea bags in a jar. Jim waited. His hands rested together on his laptop. His fingers were long and tanned. He wore a gold wedding ring.
‘But why?’ she whimpered. She hated that question. It was the question grieving parents asked of her, the question she always deflected with statistics and a cool professionalism. ‘But why do people go missing?’ she said, her voice small and hopeless. It was a stupid, unanswerable question. He nodded and cleared his throat, and she held her breath and tried to look him in the eye because it seemed as though he was going to say something important, something that might save her from the storm, that would bring Bea back, but fluid was running from her nose and from her mouth and eyes all over again.
‘The missing tend to fall into four categories: young people in care, men in their twenties, middle-aged men, and elderly people suffering from dementia. Sexual abuse, financial worries or mental illness are often the reason. It’s rare for women your sister’s age to take themselves off. Women tend to be firmly bedded into their lives, to family, friends and so forth, and that is why we are treating her case as high risk.’
‘You think that something’s happened to her?’
‘Most Mispers are found or return home of their own accord. It is only a very small number, a tiny number, to whom something untoward has happened.’
‘What we find,’ said the other man, ‘is that it’s never really a mystery. Somebody in the family always knows why they’ve gone. It may take a while till they realise they know. But it’s just a matter of time until they tell us.’
Katharine disliked what he was implying. Horrible little man, with his cheap shirt and brand-new trainers. She shook her head and snapped two migraine tablets from their foil. ‘Not Bea. This is completely out of character.’ No. Not Bea’s face fading on posters. Bea was solid and real. She was flesh and bone and blood, laughter and words and breath. Bea could not just vanish and melt away into nothing. Katharine fumbled about her for a tissue then reached again for one of theirs. She pressed it hard against her nose and mouth as if to block out the stench of death.
The phone rang again. Jim excused himself and answered it.
Mispers. Katharine tried out the word silently inside her mouth. It had the papery whisper of something that could not be told; it had the shifty sibilance of secrets and of shame.
Jim hung up and told Pete that Erkan had just been found. ‘Got a train to Manchester and was picked up sleeping rough round the back of the station.’ He looked at Katharine. ‘This lad’s been missing three weeks. He stole money from his uncle to pay off a gambling debt. Then he was too afraid to go home.’
‘What shall I do?’ said Katharine. ‘I can’t just sit around waiting for her to turn up.’
‘We will be working with CID and conducting house-to-house interviews. They may carry out a thorough search of the area with dogs, helicopters and divers. But it’s early days yet. The chances are your sister will turn up.’
‘I see.’ But she wasn’t sure that she did. So now they were going to be looking for a body, not a live woman.
‘Often, when people take themselves off, they go back to places they knew well.’
‘Hastings,’ Katharine said. ‘It’s where we grew up.’ She got up to go and checked her watch. She was impatient now to get out of the room, away from the whiteboard with its names of the lost. There was no time to lose. She would find Bea herself. She would go to Hastings as soon as she possibly could. Not today, there was so much to do. Tomorrow perhaps. Or Sunday. Monday at the latest.
Wife
FRANK SAT in the kitchen and poured milk into his cup of tea. He had showered, put on clean clothes, shaved and trimmed his ears. The knock at the door made him jump, even though he had been waiting for it since breakfast.
Without uniform but wearing pale blue shirts and dark trousers, the two men on the doorstep looked more like salesmen than police officers. The tall, handsome one with the tie flipped his warrant card open. The silver badge flashed and Frank saw his eight-year-old self, fringed Stetson, sheriff’s star, I’m the Milky Bar Kid and the Milky Bars are on me.
‘I’m Jim Woods from the Missing Persons Unit. Mr Frank Pamplin?’
An instant later the warrant card was flipped shut and back again in Jim Woods’s pocket. He introduced the smaller man without a tie, who looked like he could throw a punch or two.
In the kitchen they stood round the table and the tall one looked kindly at Frank while the short one cast his eyes around the room. Frank gestured vaguely at the sinkful of dirty tea cups and the curdled milk on the table and said, ‘I was just going to get some more milk.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Jim. ‘Is it all right if we sit down?’ He pulled his pocket book out. Frank nodded and sat across the kitchen table from him. Pete, the short one, stood with his back to the light. Frank wanted to see what he was doing, but it would have meant turning away from the tall one, who was looking him in the eye and straightening his tie.
‘I had a visit from the uniformed branch yesterday,’ Frank said.
‘There is some concern as to the whereabouts of your wife, Mr Pamplin.’
‘Can’t say I’m terribly confident about their powers of deduction.’ Frank chuckled, then wished he hadn’t. The informality of these men confused him. Was it sympathy or a trap?
‘Are you worried about your wife, Mr Pamplin?’
Well, that was a complicated question. They had to realise they were dealing with an intellectual here. Worried about Bea? Bea had always been able to look after herself. Worrying was Bea’s department. Writing was his. He pressed hard at the ache in his back and said, ‘Yes, of course I’m worried.’
Jim crossed his legs and began the questions, making brief notes as Frank answered. First, a description of Bea. Frank swept a glance round at Pete but couldn’t see his expression. He told them she had green eyes and was about the same height as himself. He wasn’t sure about her hair colour because it kept changing. He thought it was probably blondish. He had no idea how much she weighed, although s
he had put on a bit of weight recently. ‘I couldn’t lift her off the ground,’ he said. Jim’s pen paused.
‘We can usually get an idea from her clothes.’
‘Well, she buys enough of them,’ said Frank, risking a smile.
‘You wouldn’t believe how often we hear that,’ said Pete.
Frank relaxed a bit. He turned and smiled at Pete, at his boyish face and military haircut, but Pete was frowning at the floorboards.
Jim asked if they owned a car.
‘We do. It’s up the road. But she usually walked to work. You know, along the river.’
‘Quite a long walk. Wouldn’t it be quicker to take the bus?’
Frank shrugged. ‘Oh, she liked to walk. She needed the exercise, so she said. To keep her weight down. I told her running was what she needed for that.’
‘Can you tell us what she was wearing when she left for work yesterday morning?’
Frank swallowed. ‘She generally wore something fairly smart.’
Pete waited.
‘You know, dark. A skirt. Blouse. That kind of thing.’
‘Coat?’
‘Probably, although she did complain a lot about being too hot.’
‘Colour?’
‘Well that would depend which one she took.’
There was a pause. Pete flicked back through his notes. ‘What time exactly did she leave the house on Wednesday morning?’
Frank blushed and said, ‘Er . . .’
‘It’s quite important as you can appreciate,’ said Pete.
‘I didn’t actually hear her get up.’
Jim and Pete exchanged a look. ‘You mean you didn’t see her at all before she left for work?’
‘Not as such.’ Shame crouched in Frank’s chest. ‘I worked late the night before and slept on the couch downstairs.’
‘So the last positive sighting we have of your wife is Tuesday evening.’
Nobody spoke. It didn’t sound very good, Frank had to admit. Somebody cleared their throat.
‘Do you own a computer, Mr Pamplin?’
‘Yes.’ Frank’s voice was faint. He tried again. ‘Yes, I do.’
Jim looked at him and waited, but Frank had nothing more to say. His desultory late-night surfing would be there for all to see, he knew that, and some of it, especially after the second bottle of red, was not especially edifying.
‘Is it a shared computer or does your wife have her own?’
‘She has a laptop she brings home from work. My wife . . .’
Frank stopped. The word ‘wife’ hung in the air and he thought how Bea disliked the word. She said it sounded cold and sharp and that it was never a word the world used warmly. Jim was asking how long they had been married, while Pete was looking out at the garden. Frank said they had only been married a few years but had been together for ten. Pete looked in the vase on the low shelf by the door and found the door key. Frank heard himself saying that Bea’s sister, Katharine, persuaded them to get married because of inheritance tax and pensions. Bea made him promise not to call her his wife. I’m still Bea, married or not, she said, and Adrian had said, To be or not to be, is that the question?
‘And how was her state of mind, would you say?’
Frank said, ‘Well, you know . . .’ and stopped short of finishing the sentence, the rest of which had been ‘women’, because there was something about Jim’s calm face and gentle voice, something about the gold ring on his long-fingered hand that suggested he did indeed know women and in a way that Frank quite possibly did not.
Pete stepped out on to the patio, looked at the ground and pressed gently with his toe on a loose paving stone.
‘I think she said they’d got a new boss at work. You know, some young upstart. She went on about that.’
Outside, Pete was pulling something out of the water butt. Frank got to his feet and went to the door. ‘Ah. That is the work of a local handyman. Drifter type. Goes by the name of Urban, believe it or not. He just appeared yesterday in my garden and I have no idea how he got in. Claimed to be sorting out the squirrel problem at the request of my wife.’ Frank warmed to his theme. ‘I didn’t like the look of him. Something rather threatening about him, if you want my honest opinion.’
‘Urban?’ Jim made a note. ‘Urban what?’
‘No idea. He’s a friend of a friend.’ Frank paused. He would prefer to keep Wanda out of all this. ‘I mean, he does odd jobs about the place, you know, he’s . . .’ His voice died away as they watched Pete examine the squirrel trap, from which the dead squirrel dripped water. He put the trap on the ground and looked over at them.
‘I think you’ll be wanting to bury that,’ he called. ‘It’s not going to be smelling too sweet.’
Jim closed his pocket book and got to his feet. ‘We’d like to take a look around if that’s all right with you. Oh, there was one other thing. Do you have a toothbrush of your wife’s that we could take away?’
Frank was watching Pete, who had squatted down to stare at the garden spade standing in the flowerbed. Then he looked around at the lawn, turning his head slowly from left to right as if measuring up.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Frank.
‘Toothbrush, hairbrush, something of that sort?’
Frank blinked at him.
‘For DNA,’ said Jim.
‘Ah.’ Frank’s mouth was dry.
‘And we’ll need a recent photo.’
Recent? It was years since he had taken a photo of Bea, in fact he couldn’t remember the last time he had. He looked around him. On the mantelpiece were school photos of Adrian and Laura and an old one of himself on graduation day. Pete came in from the garden brushing dirt from his hands.
‘We’d like to conduct a preliminary search of the premises in order to secure and preserve appropriate evidence,’ said Jim. ‘Is that all right with you?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Frank, feeling that it was very much not all right. He wasn’t even sure if it was entirely legal. His wife was missing. What was the point therefore of looking in her house? ‘How do you want to do this?’ he said. ‘One of you take the upstairs, the other downstairs?’
‘We stick together mainly,’ said Pete. ‘Why don’t you show us round?’
Frank watched while they did a cursory search of his workroom. They noted the duvet and the pillow on the couch, they gazed around at his vinyls stacked on shelves, the books and CDs and piles of reference books and papers. Scotch bottles and tumblers littered the wooden floor and a few tea mugs with mould in them stood on the coffee table. The place was really a bit of a tip. Perhaps he should relent and let Wanda clean it up. He never let her touch this with the hoover or the duster – it would be a disaster for his work. He led them upstairs into the bedroom, which smelt of Bea, some kind of flowery, sweet scent that she used. The room felt crowded with three men in it, and when they pulled the curtains open and let the light in, its shortcomings were glaringly obvious. They hesitated in front of the egg cups and Jim picked up a blue striped one from the Mull of Kintyre. Frank looked down at the floor and saw that the white carpet Bea had bought long before she met him was grubby and grimed with age. He watched Pete look up at where the faded curtains had come away from their tracks.
‘She was always on at me to do the bedroom,’ he said, and Jim gave the smallest of smiles. ‘Peppermint rarely works in my experience,’ he added, indicating the walls. ‘My father swears by wallpaper. Says it gives a room substance.’
Jim opened the wardrobe and surveyed the clothes on hangers. Pete opened the chest of drawers. They looked at each other and Frank explained that his clothes were in the spare room. Pete ran his hand across the hangers and asked whether these were all the clothes Bea had. Frank looked and said that he really had no idea. It seemed like plenty to him, but he wasn’t sure whether it was a lot or a little for a woman pushing fifty.
He was relieved when they went into the spare room, which Bea had decorated for the children. Apart from his clothes in the
small wardrobe there, she had made it entirely theirs and spent quite a bit of money on it. There was an orange sofabed and new curtains, a little desk and lamp for homework, funky wallpaper that made him feel seasick, pink furry cushions, a television and music centre and an electric guitar and amp – old ones of Frank’s that he had given to Adrian. Frank explained about the children and Jim nodded, seeming to know all about it.
Back downstairs Jim said, ‘Is it all right if we take this?’ He had their wedding photograph in his hand. Frank couldn’t think where they’d found it. It must have been when he left them to it upstairs and came back down to the kitchen to wait. He stared at the photo. It was years since he had seen it. Bea was smiling, one hand up, holding on to the ridiculous hat she had insisted on wearing. It was a small black fez with spotted net that reached to just below her eyes. It was understood that the hat was her way of making a joke of it. He stood beside her, eyes almost closed so that he looked like a halfwit; Lance stood at the edge in his funeral suit next to Margaret while the children grinned from either side. It was an absolute pig’s ear of a wedding photo, but that was what happened when you left it to an amateur. Richard had taken it. ‘Smile!’
Beach
‘YOU DIDN’T tell me I was gonna be the only black person here.’
Chanel had both hands pushed deep into her coat pockets, her hood was up and she had her face turned towards the Slots of Fun amusement arcade. No one in there was smiling.
‘I wish we’d stayed at school now.’
‘Don’t be stupid, it’s Friday.’
‘I like Double Art.’
‘Shut up, will yer?’ said Laura, giving Chanel a push. ‘You’re prac’ly the only black person in Cambridge too so get over yourself.’
But Chanel wasn’t going another step.