by Louise Voss
Constable Laurie’s thoughts seemed to be heading in the same direction: ‘What did your husband take with him yesterday? I mean, are any of his things missing?’
I shook my head so violently that I felt the ends of my ponytail whip against my cheeks. ‘Nothing. Apart from his phone and charger, and his laptop. He definitely didn’t take any kind of suitcase, just a canvas bag, because I gave him a lift to the station. He hasn’t voluntarily gone missing.’
I paused, then decided I should tell them: ‘And I can’t find his passport.’
There was another pause. I saw a split-second exchange of glances between them.
‘But then, I haven’t seen it for years,’ I hurried to say. ‘We haven’t been abroad since 2011. So that doesn’t mean he took it with him. He easily could have moved it somewhere stupid – when he was ill … you know…’
Laurie took a slurp of his tea. The man’s big, sausagey fingers were as red as his face. He cleared his throat with surprising delicacy. ‘And, er, can you describe what his state of mind was when you left him?’
‘He was happy,’ I said, annoyed that I couldn’t keep the tremor out of my voice. ‘Really happy. Back to his old self, excited about how much his memory has improved. So grateful to be feeling well again. He said he feels like he’s had a reprieve. The only awful thing is how much he still misses Mike. They … were good friends…’
I was going to say ‘used to be best friends’, but for some reason I didn’t.
‘Why would he take his laptop with him, if he was just meeting a friend for lunch?’
‘He always used to take it when he went into town. He prefers going online on it, says his phone screen’s too small to be able to see stuff properly. And he likes watching movies on the train. I didn’t think anything of it, except taking it as another sign of his recovery – he hadn’t been interested in doing that for a while.’
Laurie had filled up several pages of his small notebook. There was silence while he scratched away, broken by a startled yelp from Martine when Timmy suddenly leaped up onto the windowsill and mewed outside the window, outraged at his expulsion.
‘Sorry,’ Martine and I said simultaneously.
‘So you think he might have his passport with him?’ Laurie asked.
I stood up so quickly that the blood drained from my head. ‘No! That’s not what I said. I said I couldn’t find it. He could’ve put it somewhere daft. And anyway, he definitely wouldn’t have gone abroad – he’s terrified of flying.’
Martine put a reassuring hand on my arm and I had to resist the impulse to shake it off.
‘I know, I know,’ she soothed. ‘It’s so difficult. But we have to ask these questions, you understand?’
I sat back down again. ‘Yes. I know. I’m sorry.’
‘So he’s likely still in the country.’ Laurie looked as uncomfortable as I felt.
‘I’m sure he is. But you can check that, can’t you.’
Laurie jotted something down. ‘We can, yes. One last question and we’ll leave you in peace: Has Edward’s behaviour or personality changed at all, since his miracle cure?’
These two were hopeless cops. It would have driven me mad to be in a team with them. ‘It’s Ed, not Edward. Well, yes, obviously it has – last year he had dementia and now he doesn’t!’
‘Sorry. That’s not what I meant. Is Ed’s personality different now to how it was before he was diagnosed with dementia?’
I thought about it, picturing Ed how he was then. Funny, sarcastic, irascible, affectionate. ‘No,’ I said, deciding there was no point in mentioning his phase of violence and occasional threatening messages. ‘I’d say on balance it’s about the same.’
After Laurie and Martine had finally gone, with their list of what Ed was wearing – overcoat, new jeans, brogues, green cashmere jumper – and photographs of him that they borrowed from off the top of the mantelpiece and which I instantly missed terribly, the house felt yawningly empty and still.
I drifted from room to room, unable to settle at anything. I called April’s mobile and left a voicemail, but didn’t say why I was asking her to ring me back – I didn’t want to upset her when she was so far away.
For something to do, I painted my fingernails a metallic silver colour. Then I started to empty the dishwasher without waiting for them to dry properly, and three nails smudged immediately.
‘Fuck,’ I said, out loud, hurling the empty plastic cutlery-holder across the kitchen, where it crashed into Timmy’s bowl and sent cat crunchies skittering over the floor. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
I’d never felt this alone, even when Ed was ill. What was wrong with me? Waitsey wouldn’t have been this pathetic. How had I changed so much, become so dependent?
In that moment I saw my life for what I feared I’d become; at best a doormat, at worst, a pawn in something bigger than I had allowed myself to think about in years.
31
I rang Maddie in Jersey.
‘Mads,’ I said when she picked up, hearing the faint sound of waves crashing on the beach in the background. ‘Ed’s gone missing.’
I heard a little gasp.
‘He didn’t come home last night,’ I rushed on before she could reply. ‘Something really weird is going on. The police have been round, and I’m going to wait a while to see if he turns up, but I … I just have this feeling that he won’t.’
It gave me a shock, saying it out loud for the first time.
‘Oh,’ said Maddie, speaking at last. ‘What do you mean, you don’t think he’ll turn up? So sorry, darling. How stressful, after Mike. Are you all right, Lynn? You don’t sound like yourself … you sound different.’
‘I feel different. I’m going out of my mind. If he doesn’t come back today I’m going to bloody well go and look for him.’
‘Has he been wandering then?’
‘No, it’s not that. I know this sounds weird, but … but something’s telling me it’s nothing to do with his illness.’
Maddie, of course, didn’t know that he’d been cured; that the trial had worked. We’d only had the news for a day.
‘Really? He’s a vulnerable person – so if the police are involved, I’m sure they will mount a huge investigation. Has anyone tweeted an appeal yet? They’ll find him, don’t worry.’
She thought I was just in shock, I could tell from her purposefully calm tone.
The cat jumped into my lap and I stroked him automatically as he settled down, kneading my legs with his sharp claws and shedding ginger fur on my black jeans. The needling pain kept me focussed.
I shouldn’t have told the police about Ed’s miracle recovery. I felt like I’d sealed his death warrant. They wouldn’t look for him nearly so hard if they thought he’d merely absconded for his own reasons – they’d already told me his case was ‘low to medium risk’. Why hadn’t I kept my mouth shut?
‘Oh Maddie. It’s complicated – I’m not supposed to tell anyone because it’s confidential to the trial, but I told the police and now I wish I hadn’t…’
‘Told them what?’ She sounded alarmed. ‘What’s confidential to the trial…?’
I took a deep breath. ‘Well. It’s brilliant – at least, it was. Now I’m worried that there’s more to it.’
‘Spit it out, Lynn, you’re not making sense.’
So I told her about the visit to the Chelsea Clinic, the scans, Bill Brown’s tears of joy, our champagne celebration. Maddie listened in stunned silence – not speaking for so long, I had to ask her if she was still there.
‘Yes … my God, Lynn, this is … incredible! I really didn’t hold out much hope that the trial would work!’
‘No, me neither. It’s incredible, and I can’t tell you how relieved we are – were – but now, one day later, he’s vanished. What am I meant to make of that, after all the other weird stuff that’s gone on? Mike’s murder, Ed’s behaviour – you know, sometimes he said and did stuff that I didn’t think was anything to do with his Pick’s.’
‘Hard to tell though, surely?’
She wasn’t necessarily doubting me, I knew that. It was a genuine question and one that I’d asked myself enough times. I took a breath. I couldn’t keep my fears to myself.
‘His passport’s missing.’
She gasped again.
‘But then, I hadn’t seen it for years. It might just be somewhere else in the house.’ I was offering Maddie the same kind of justification as I had given to the police. It sounded just as brittle the second time.
‘You don’t think he’s run away?’
‘I don’t know!’ I wailed, my voice abruptly loud. ‘I don’t fucking know anything, except that something’s off about this whole thing.’ I hesitated. ‘And now April’s gone to Australia.’
‘Has she? What, on holiday? She didn’t tell me! I spoke to Naveeta last night and she didn’t mention it either – you know she would’ve done if she knew.’
It was true: Naveeta loved to gossip.
‘I got this long email from her – April, I mean – saying she was already halfway there, it was a spur of the moment thing, she said. She’s going on a yoga retreat, for a couple of months at least.’
‘You’re not…’ Maddie stopped. I could almost hear her measuring her words. ‘You’re not suggesting that Ed’s done a runner with her, are you?’
I was silent. The night of Mike’s death came back to me; the two of them tête-à-tête in the kitchen. April claiming Ed had come on to her. It was as if the memory had been waiting behind a closed door in my mind.
‘I’ve never had any reason to think she had her eye on him. She’s our friend. She wouldn’t! If anyone did, I’d have thought it would be Naveeta, you know how flirty she is around him. But what if April’s grief made her act out of character?’
Maddie sighed. ‘Oh Lynn. No. She’s a flirt too – but you’re right; she wouldn’t. Did she even know he’d been “cured”?’
I noted the way she said “cured”, and imagined her wiggling speech-marks with the two forefingers of each hand. It made me angry. Ed had been cured!
‘No. Well, not unless Ed told her himself.’
‘Well then. They’d hardly have planned a joint escape to Australia within twenty-four hours of getting the news that he was better!’
She was right. I didn’t know why I’d even thought it. ‘I’m losing the plot, Mads. I’ve been feeling so paranoid and … well, scared. Spooked, I suppose. For months now, if I’m honest. For ages I really felt like something bad was going to happen. Then Mike was killed, and now Ed’s disappeared. What if they’re linked? If the same person who murdered Mike has come after Ed?’
Maddie’s voice was sober. ‘I know how worried you’ve been, but I thought it was all to do with Ed’s illness. Do the police think there might be a link?’
I shrugged, as if she could see me. ‘They haven’t a clue. They still have no idea who killed Mike, and no leads, so they don’t have anything to go on.’
‘This is awful,’ Maddie said. ‘I wish I was there to help. Please come and stay if – if…’
‘– if I need to,’ I finished flatly, neither of us capable of articulating the unthinkable. ‘Thanks Mads. I will. Listen, I’m going to go now. The police are looking at all our accounts, and I need to as well. I don’t want any more nasty surprises.’
‘OK darling. Promise you’ll let me know if there’s anything at all I can do. Hopefully he’ll come strolling home any minute now. Maybe he just went on some sort of massive post-illness bender – to celebrate, you know. I would if I were him.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. Then again, more quietly, with diminishing confidence: ‘Maybe.’
32
After a weekend of doing almost nothing but fretting, waiting, and arguing with myself – wandering the house and garden, and searching every nook and cranny for the missing passport, on the Monday morning I finally received a piece of news.
Martine – Constable Knocker – rang to say that they had spoken to the Chelsea Clinic.
There was no Dr Bill Brown renting premises there, nor had there ever been.
I couldn’t make my voice work for a moment.
There were several William Browns on the GMC’s register, she told me, hurriedly. The police would be contacting them all to check. She paused before continuing. None of the ones listed had a dementia specialism, though, so it was highly unlikely that any would turn out to be Ed’s Bill.
I still couldn’t speak. My mind was working too fast. Could Bill really have been a fake? If so, who was he? None of this made sense. And if he was a fake, then that meant the entire medical trial must have been a sham. Either Ed himself had been used as some kind of pawn – or, worse, he’d known about it all along, perhaps even set it up himself.
In which case, the whole purpose of it had been to fool me. There had been no real diagnosis, no scans, no Pick’s. Just lies. Months, years, of lies.
I thought about Ed’s vagueness, the forgotten passwords, the lost emails, the appointments he only told me about afterward. The scans he wouldn’t have, then did have. The missing passport, the miraculous results I had to keep a secret. The night he grabbed my throat and threatened me. The many nights he hit me. Real symptoms of a real illness – or faked symptoms of a faked one?
What the fuck was going on? He wouldn’t do that to me. He couldn’t.
I grimly agreed to send her over all the scant correspondence I did have about the trial – which was hardly any, given Ed’s myriad excuses, from refusal to let me go with him to his appointments, to his claims of forgotten passwords. Martine said they would also obtain Ed’s medical records from Mr Deshmukh, and from his GP.
Then she told me they had checked flight manifests, and Ed hadn’t left the country – not by plane, at least. But perhaps he was just holed up in a hotel somewhere, I thought. Or had sneaked out by car or coach, which would be easier to do undetected. I suggested this, which merely made Martine comment that there wasn’t a lot they could do if he’d simply decided to do a bunk. ‘If no crime has been committed,’ she concluded.
‘No crime? What about impersonating a medical consultant? Hiring consulting rooms under false pretences?’
‘That’s a different matter, and of course is a criminal offence. I’m referring to your husband, Mrs Naismith.’
‘But, don’t you see? If Bill Brown is a fake, then Ed hasn’t really been cured. And if Ed hasn’t been cured, that means he’s either still ill – or he never was ill in the first place!’
‘Yes … it’s a bit of a mystery really, isn’t it? But he must have been ill. I remember when I met him after the incident at Hampton University. He was not a well man.’
‘Exactly!’ I cried. ‘So could you please raise the risk level at least to medium? I wish I’d never told you he’d been cured!’
Martine promised that she was doing what she could, and that if Ed was intercepted leaving the country, his name would be flagged up on the system and the police informed.
‘Would they detain him?’
‘If it was felt he was a risk to himself or others, then yes, most likely.’
Martine ended the call by saying she’d check back in tomorrow, and I told her I was going to stay with friends but that I’d have my mobile with me at all times.
I put the phone down, frustration overwhelming me. It was as if I was going round in circles, my mind so dizzy I was staggering to keep upright.
I hadn’t intended to talk to Adrian at all since I broke up with him – but I needed to now. I needed to hear his calm, reassuring voice. I left him a message before I changed my mind, trying to keep the hysteria out of my own voice. ‘It’s me. I hope you don’t think I’m using you, and don’t call back if you don’t want to – but Ed’s gone missing. There’s no way he could’ve found out about us, is there? He just vanished, three days ago. There’s something fishy going on. Oh, Ade, I’m worried that this whole thing’s been a set-up from the start, that he was never even ill … I t
hink I’ve—’
I almost forgot myself and said, ‘fucked up’; I almost told Adrian that maybe I’d been too hasty in concluding that Ed was innocent of any involvement in Shelagh’s disappearance.
I was losing the plot.
I ended the call then sat at the kitchen table, my laptop open in front of me. With a well opening up in my stomach, I logged into our savings account online.
Last time I’d looked, it had contained nigh on ninety thousand pounds, intended as our emergency funds, strictly ring-fenced for any future unforeseen circumstances. When Ed had sold his big house in Molesey, the year after we got together, he’d been able to buy the much smaller lock-keeper’s cottage outright, with about seventy grand profit left over. My name was not on the deeds of the cottage, because I hadn’t contributed anything towards it, and we’d not been married then, anyway. It had all made sense back then. As had putting my own savings into the same account. Over the years I’d carefully put aside monthly contributions from my old job in the financial advisor’s office and then from Hampton Uni. It was nothing like as much as Ed had saved, of course, but a tidy sum nevertheless. Over the past few months I’d come to accept that we’d most likely have to use all this cash to pay for Ed’s residential care one day. But now … now I had a very bad feeling about what I was about to discover. As soon as the screen displayed BALANCE, my fears were confirmed. The savings account now contained just three pounds and forty-two pence.
He’d transferred the rest out yesterday and left me with nothing.
‘You BASTARD’, I screamed, picking up my laptop and only just preventing myself dashing it onto the tiled kitchen floor.
Maybe someone, murderer of Mike, perhaps, had held a gun to Ed’s head and forced him to withdraw the entire amount – but it seemed unlikely. My rage coagulated into a cold, hard lozenge of bitterness that stuck in my chest and made my breathing shallow.