by Louise Voss
‘Mmm. But if he’s better now…?’
‘I hate the thought of him going off somewhere without me,’ I blurted. ‘We’ve barely been apart since we met.’
‘It’s a better option than him lying in a ditch somewhere,’ Ben said. ‘Poor you, though, Lynn, it’s a bit of a lose-lose situation, isn’t it…?’
I blew my nose on my paper napkin. ‘I just don’t understand why he hasn’t been in touch, if he’s just gone away.’
But I intended to find out.
35
2007
Three weeks after Ed and I starting dating, I let myself into his house with the keys I’d had cut the day before, hanging the spares back on their hooks by the coat rack without him noticing. Ed and Ben had left for a parent-teacher meeting at Ben’s school and I sneaked in through the back gate and unlocked the kitchen door.
I’d officially been to the house plenty of times by then. I knew the layout of all the rooms. I knew where he kept the Hoover, which bin the junk mail went into, where the drawer with the stamps was – and his computer password.
I slipped into the kitchen and stood still. The smell of bacon fat lingered in the air and, beneath that, a whiff of the contents of the kitchen bin. The house was definitely lacking a woman’s touch, I thought, observing a sticky patch on the floorboards near the fridge, and a solitary furry lemon in the fruit bowl.
Tiptoeing into the hall, I was about to climb the stairs up to Ed’s office when the letterbox banged loudly on its springy hinge, and a load of envelopes clattered to the black-and-white pottery-tiled floor. I almost jumped out of my skin and then froze, in case the postman could make out my shape through the stained glass panels of the front door. His red jacket loomed close and for a horrible moment I thought he was about to press his nose against the glass, but then he retreated into a blur again and I exhaled.
I crept up the stairs, keeping as close to the wall as I could, my fingertips in their numbing vinyl gloves tracing the smooth emulsioned panels. I even knew that this wall used to be papered in that bubbly Anaglypta wallpaper so popular in the seventies – I’d overheard Ed telling someone that he only got rid of it recently.
Reaching the first-floor landing, I didn’t go into the sitting room at the front of the house in case anyone saw me from outside, but turned right into the small, untidy room that Ed used as his study. I hadn’t yet had the chance for a good snoop around it.
I started by rifling through the clutter on his desk but there was nothing of interest, just a couple of mail-order catalogues, take-away menus, bills – paid and unpaid – some sheets of A4 covered in Ben’s scrawl; an English essay on An Inspector Calls that Ed had bossily annotated in the margins and a couple of scripts of Make Do and Mend.
I slid open the filing cabinet to the right of his desk. It contained captioned hanging files with titles like ‘MADS – Subs’, ‘MADS – programmes’, ‘MADS – AGM’, and, further back, ‘Payslips’, ‘House Renovations’, ‘Old Chequebooks’, ‘Benjy Reports’. At the very back of the drawer were a few unidentified files so I pulled out a bulging one to find it full of newspaper clippings and online printouts about Shelagh’s disappearance. The photo used was in most cases the same one, a snapshot of her sitting astride a stile wearing green wellies and a Barbour jacket, pointing a finger at the photographer, her head thrown back in laughter. She certainly didn’t look depressed.
I wondered if it was normal for a bereaved husband to collate the newspaper articles on his wife’s disappearance. I wasn’t sure that I would, if my partner went missing. What would be the point? I skim-read them all, although of course I knew the story intimately. The short pieces did not tell me anything I hadn’t already gone over numerous times. The same words jumped out at me in all of them: ‘out of character’, ‘please contact’, ‘badly missed by her husband and fourteen-year old son’. Nowhere did it say that police were concerned for her mental health, or that she had a history of depression, or was in any way as unstable as Ed made out.
I arranged the files back into the drawer in the same order, instinctively deciding to check underneath them before I closed it. I shoved them all hard to the front of the drawer – nothing hidden at the back – and then did the same the other way, feeling around underneath with my fingers. All that was down there was a faded Polaroid, which I pulled out and examined. It was of the interior of the house, taken from right outside the door of the room I was crouching in now, looking towards the living room. The walls were indeed still papered with the Anaglypta wallpaper, which had then been painted a very unappealing mustard colour. There were beige carpets on the floor instead of the polished floorboards and the two visible open doors were glossy white, instead of the stripped pine that they now were.
The photograph might have slipped out of the House Renovations folder – unless Ed was hiding it at the bottom of the cabinet? I couldn’t put my finger on why he would, but I put the photo in my jacket pocket anyway, and arranged the hanging files to cover the space in the drawer.
I glanced at my watch. I probably had at least another forty minutes before Ed would be back – Ben’s school was a good half-hour’s drive away – but I didn’t want to cut it too fine. I searched through and behind all the books on the wobbly black metal bookshelf beside the desk, hoping for a journal written by Shelagh, although naturally that would be far too easy … I had a brief mental daydream of finding one, filled with examples of Ed’s violence towards her and her desperation to get away before he killed her… As if! I’d be lucky. The police would have found it anyway, ages ago.
The shelves were groaning with play scripts, volumes of poetry, dramaturgy, old yellowing copies of TMJ from Ed’s former years as a GP and some thick medical tomes that I accidentally knocked sideways and they went down like oversized dominos in a cloud of dust. Nothing of interest.
I booted up Ed’s desktop computer and it came to life with the loud boom of Windows announcing its awakening, which made me wince. I entered his password and scrolled through as many files as I could whilst waiting for all Ed’s data to transfer onto the memory stick I had plugged in to the side of his console. Ed didn’t strike me as the kind to keep a diary, but you never knew. It was easy to hide a personal document in amongst everything else – but that part of it wasn’t my job. Someone with far more time on his hands would be tasked with searching through every single document with the digital equivalent of a nit comb. The data finally finished downloading and I removed the memory stick, zipped it into my jacket pocket with the Polaroid and checked around that I had left everything exactly as it was.
Time to go.
36
May 2007
I could get used to this, I thought, taking another bow. The dust motes sparkling all around me were whipped into a frenzied cloud by the audience applause, lit by the footlights. Perhaps if I chucked in the police to marry Ed, I would become an actress instead. It was amazing to look up and see the first few rows of audience, so many supportive faces beaming with enjoyment as they clapped.
It was the first time I’d had that thought – leaving the police, not becoming an actress – and it shocked me. Up until that point, I had been able to objectify my time in Molesey as nothing more than an assignment, albeit with someone I really was attracted to, knowing that at some point in the next few months it would all be over and I’d be back on patrol, or in the office, or perhaps on the Armed Response training course I’d initially wanted to do. I quashed the thought immediately, although not without regret that I would soon have to say goodbye to Ed and become Waitsey again.
I saw him up in the lighting box applauding too, smiling that smile right at me as we took our final curtain call of the run, in front of the authentic 1940s tractor that was as much a part of the play as we were.
It was a heady rush of mixed emotions, realising that for the two hours of the six performances over the past week, I hadn’t had to stop to consider the impact on me, beyond my assignment, of what I’d be losing
when it was over; the bonding cemented by the hundreds of lines we’d learned and the hours of rehearsals we’d spent together – particularly April and me. I’d never had such a close girlfriend before. As if she’d read my mind, she squeezed my hand and beamed at me as we bowed for the third time. I’d miss it so much. I totally understood why people claimed that the buzz of performing was addictive.
I couldn’t believe I’d even had the thought that I might resign to be with Ed. Being in the police was all I’d ever wanted – until I met him, at least. I’d be branded a failure, a waste of space and taxpayers’ money. It was unthinkable, shameful.
But I’d have Ed, and it was beginning to feel intolerable to go back to a life without him. Waitsey was already feeling like a distant memory, someone I used to know. Within the space of five months as Lynn Jackson, I had stepped so far out of my comfort zone that it felt like a different country. I’d been sent in to investigate Ed and I had done so to the best of my abilities – but it had been life-changing for me. I had my own place (admittedly courtesy of Surrey Police, and I’d have to either leave it or take over the lease), new friends – April and Maddie especially – and a new-found confidence from actually pulling off acting in a play.
As we stood on stage for the final time on the last night, sweaty and elated in our land-girl costumes – me and Pat in beige dungarees and khaki shirts, Robina and April in jodhpurs and bottle-green pullovers – I had the words ‘be a leaf on a tree’ chasing themselves around my brain, like a plastic bag circling in a gusty little cyclone. I’d read those words recently in a book on how to find happiness and they resonated deeply. The book had been on Ed’s bookcase, dusty and tatty. It must have been Shelagh’s – she’d read a lot of self-help, selfi-mprovement manuals; not that they’d done her any good. It meant: be part of a community of like-minded people who you feel comfortable with, and that was exactly what I was doing.
Before we’d even skipped off stage to begin the last-night party, I was back to feeling guilty that I was using my work to further my own personal development; that my current happiness was predicated upon Ed and Ben’s misery and loss. It was, at best, extremely unprofessional and, at worst, immoral of me. I thought about those male undercover agents who somehow managed to suppress similar thoughts and went on to have long-term relationships and children as their UC aliases. They got away with it. Why couldn’t I? I seemed to be finding the inevitable schizophrenic aspect of the job more problematic than some of my male predecessors had.
In the last couple of months Ed and I had got closer and closer. When I went home to my bedsit at night I relived the feel of his hand in mind, the texture of the soft skin inside his elbow and the smell of his neck; aftershave and his own irresistible scent. I lay in bed getting turned on at the memory of his kisses and the sensation of his fingers stroking the hollow in the small of my back. Perhaps it was because we still hadn’t ‘gone all the way’ that it was so unbelievably potent. I’d thought Adrian and I had that naughty frisson of forbidden attraction permeating all our liaisons, but what I felt for Ed completely swamped that.
And yet I had investigated him. I had snooped and spied, foraged and reported everything back to DS Metcalfe. There were no red flags, nothing that sounded odd about Ed and Ben’s accounts of what happened. Nothing to prove or even indicate that Ed had any involvement in Shelagh’s disappearance.
If he ever found out, it would all be over between us.
Everyone in MADS was gossiping about us, so April informed me in one of the now-regular coffee meets I had with her and Maddie. I’d initially felt uncomfortable discussing it with her, because she and Mike were such good friends of Ed’s and, I’d assumed, Shelagh’s – but she confessed to me that they had never got on with Shelagh all that well. They had both found her cold and distant. From a work perspective though, for me, April’s intel was very useful. An inherent lover of a spot of tittle-tattle, she never held back on her theory that Shelagh had taken her own life.
When I discreetly enquired whether Shelagh and Ed had a tempestuous relationship, April just laughed and shook her head. ‘I don’t think either of them could summon up the energy to argue,’ she said. ‘Shelagh was a miserable cow.’ Then she’d looked guilty and apologised, although whether that was to me or to Shelagh’s spirit, I didn’t know.
‘Go for it,’ she urged me at the last-night party, back at her and Mike’s house, her eyes glittering with some emotion I couldn’t read. ‘It’s just so lovely to see him so happy again.’
As the director, Ed had wanted to have the party at his place, but April wouldn’t hear of it. I wasn’t sure whether this was because she thought it was inappropriate given Ed’s situation, or because she wanted to show off her own house, which was predictably perfect. It was a 1920s gabled mock-Tudor affair just outside Esher, interior-designed to within an inch of its life, scented with lily of the valley and Pledge. The downstairs loo had a shelf of the fluffiest, softest towels I’d ever seen, making me think ruefully of the two threadbare, faded excuses for towels in my tiny bathroom.
In fact you could have fitted my entire studio flat into her kitchen three times over – but I didn’t feel envy at her life, just a guilty gratitude that I was part of it. I’d been on stage with her without her knowing that Lynn Jackson was also a part I was playing. I felt like a Russian doll, Waitsey inside Lynn Jackson inside Mabel the landgirl.
The party was hot and boisterous, fuelled with relief at a successful run and the unlimited champagne that Mike had laid on for everyone in MADS. After an hour or so we were all dancing in the cavernous kitchen, Ed trying to do Ceroc moves with me when everyone else was pretending they were at a rave in the nineties, which for some reason made me laugh uncontrollably. He spun me around and from one side to the other until I was dizzy, while next to us April did the ‘big fish little fish, big box little box’ move to the Rolling Stones Goin’ To a Go-Go. The two elderly front-of-house volunteers were in a huddle in a corner gossiping and Keith, the stage manager, was lumbering awkwardly from side to side completely out of time with the music.
‘He needs to consult the manual,’ Maddie whispered in my ear when I stopped for breath, which made me laugh harder – Keith had, on the second night, referred to the script as ‘the manual’, much to the hilarity of the rest of us.
‘I can’t believe it’s all over,’ I said to Ed a bit later.
‘What’s all over?’ Ed pulled me closer as the opening bars of I Heard It through the Grapevine started up, his brushed-cotton shirt soft against my cheek. Maddie and Geoff slow-danced next to us, beckoning April and Mike to join in, but they were busy topping up glasses and opening more champagne, whooping as the cork shot up to the ceiling.
‘The play, idiot! This is the most fun I’ve ever had in my whole life.’
‘It doesn’t all have to be over,’ he said, grinning at me. ‘You could always audition for the next one. We’re doing Don’t Get Your Vicars in a Twist.’
I thought about how I would soon be somewhere else – I didn’t even know where – and at once I felt sad and lost all over again, ripped up by the roots, my task completed. I had my exit strategy already planned out, a sudden phone call from my supposed ex-husband begging me to give our marriage another chance. An imminent posting to Cyprus. A few days pretending to agonise about it, then the rueful decision to try again. Then I’d be gone, no trace left except the eight-by-ten photos of me and the other cast members that had been pinned to the theatre foyer walls but which would now be languishing in a folder marked ‘Productions – 2007’.
But now I didn’t want go. I didn’t want to leave Ed, or April and Mike and the rest of MADS, or even my little bedsit.
‘I don’t think bedroom farces are really my sort of thing,’ was all I said.
As the party wore on and more champagne was consumed, I had to press my lips together in an effort to stop myself demanding sex from Ed. I wanted to grab his hand and drag him out of the party and back to my bedsit. Or
even down to the river. It was a hot night, we could have found a secluded spot of parkland where he could take me up against a tree or bent over a park bench … I felt wild with desire as I imagined him flipping up my short skirt, pulling down my pants and entering me from behind. Every time we hugged I could feel his thick erection pressing into my leg or my crotch, to the point I worried the other party guests would notice it through his baggy chinos.
I never imagined I could ever fancy someone who wore chinos, but I did, even with the fourteen-year age gap. I fancied Ed with every nerve ending, every sinew and fibre. I was sure it was because we had denied ourselves for so many months. Possibly, for Ed, also because he hadn’t had sex for a very long time – since at least a year before Shelagh vanished, according to him.
But the thought of DS Metcalfe’s censure prevented me. That, and word getting back to Adrian McLoughlin, or being on my police record till the end of time … I could not be that unprofessional, I just couldn’t.
At least that’s what I thought until the sixth glass of champagne … or was it the seventh? By then they had all vanished from my mind, Adrian, Metcalfe, my UC course trainer, all the colleagues I’d ever had. I was drunk and high on happiness, professionalism discarded along with my land-girl dungarees on the dressing room floor. It was a hot night, I was playing my part brilliantly and I was, against my better judgement, hopelessly in love.
So when Ed steered me out into the garden and said, his hand on my breast, ‘Let’s get out of here, shall we? We can walk along the river,’ I didn’t make an excuse about being tired or feeling unwell, or that it was ‘too soon’. I simply nodded, immediately flashing back to my earlier fantasy, and let him walk me right out of there without saying goodbye to anybody.