The Disappeared

by Ali Harper

  The door wasn’t locked. As soon as I pushed against it, it opened, and the dampness of the air hit me.

  I took a step inside.

  Cold steam, the heat long gone, the hot air turned back to water, condensation dripping down the tiles. Tendrils of damp. Wet cold.

  And there she was.

  In the bath.

  Naked.

  Eyes open. Or at least one eye open. I could only see her left eye; her right was submerged under the waterline. Her left shoulder was caught against the side of the bath, her skin pruned and bloated. Her hair floated around her like seaweed.

  Our first client.

  Mrs Wilkins.

  Martha.

  Whatever her name was no longer mattered. She didn’t need it anymore.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I opened my mouth to scream, but before my vocal chords had time to get their shit together, my brain clamped them down. I stood burned to the spot. My mind flashed to Brownie, skinning up in the front room. Then Jo. Jesus, Jo. Fear flushed through me. I crouched low on the floor, put my hand on the damp lino to steady myself. I tasted vomit at the back of my throat and forced myself to swallow it down. How long since we’d watched Martha climb the stairs of the Students’ Union? How did she get from there, from moving, alive, to here, a bloated, lifeless mannequin? There was so much I didn’t know, couldn’t understand. What happened? What had she done? I hated myself for not recognizing how deep her pain had been. If I’d been less angry with her, could I have stopped this?

  How?

  When I felt steadier, I edged closer and forced myself to dip my hand in the bath. My fingers disturbed the water, made a small ripple in its surface. The shoulder nearest to me moved on the wave and it was all I could do to keep my feet planted on the floor. The water was cold as stone. Martha’s dark hair splayed around the shoulder, covering the side of her face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. Hot tears.

  I straightened my legs and stood up. It took a moment for my knees to lock. Suicide. But I dismissed it almost as soon as the thought became a word, fully formed. You don’t pay a firm of private investigators double rates to find a missing person and then top yourself before finding out whether they’ve succeeded.

  When?

  I forced myself to imagine her alive, her hair clipped to the side of her head. I pictured us in the university, the tremble in her fingers as she’d stirred her coffee. She’d told us not to ring. Told us she was going out.

  Had she been and come back, or did she die before she’d had the chance to go? Where had she gone when she’d left us? I’d assumed she’d been going home, but I don’t know why.

  She wasn’t the suicidal type. I felt on stronger ground. I know the type, or, let’s say, I know the signs. She still had hope. She had something to live for. She loved someone.

  I glanced around the room. A bottle of shampoo lay on the floor by the bath, and another under the sink. I had the sense that something was missing but couldn’t put my finger on it. What wasn’t here? No drugs, no drugs paraphernalia, no electrical appliances. No cut wrists. My mind flitted around trying to make sense of the scene in front of me. A voice in my head said no woman intends to die naked.

  Clothes. I glanced around the room. No clothes. The chair in the bedroom, the shirt hanging over the back of it. The shirt was the shirt she’d been wearing earlier.

  Why?

  I wanted to roll back time. I thought of Jo and I couldn’t stop the tears. My body wanted to empty itself, but I tried to contain it. To hold it. Martha had said someone was watching her. She’d had the feeling of being watched. I forced myself to look at her again, to make my brain accept the series of unacceptable facts before it. Martha was dead. Someone had killed her. You don’t just die in the bath. Someone must have killed her. I flinched at the sight of her left eye, how it bulged from its socket. Somebody had been here, in the flat, and they’d killed her. They’d killed her because of Jack, because of the missing money, because she knew something I was on the edge of discovering.

  I wiped my nose on the back of my sleeve and tried to get a grip. A dressing gown hung on the back of the bathroom door. I touched it and felt its clammy dampness, the collar properly wet. She’d got out of the bath and put on the dressing gown. Her wet hair had soaked the collar. She’d taken it off and got back in the bath. Or someone had put her in the bath.

  No sign of a struggle.

  I forced myself to turn her head, to look into her wide-open eyes, see if I could decode the message there. Her last thought. Her unseeing pupils, her irises darker blue than I remembered, bore past me, to an indefinable point somewhere in the next life.

  I breathed through my options. I swear I thought about ringing the police, but as soon as I got past the ‘I’ve found a dead woman in a bath’ line, I ran into trouble. How did I get into the flat? How did I know said dead woman? When did you last see her alive? What’s her name? None of these were questions I could, or wanted to, answer.

  And besides, I was a woman on a tight timescale. Was the person who killed Martha the same person who now had Jo? I could hardly tell the police that I was waiting for drug dealers to phone. Dealers who were going to give me the ransom details for my best mate so I could hand over twenty-four grand and a tin of smack we’d got stashed at our office. There’s no way the police would let that happen, and I couldn’t let them endanger Jo.

  All these thoughts passed through my mind in the time it takes to look around a small bathroom. I noticed without noticing two bottles of mouthwash on the windowsill, a woman’s Bic razor, pink-edged, cotton wool buds. I stored the images in my brain, all the time thinking what to do about Brownie. I hadn’t heard him move, could smell the sweet aroma of resin and tobacco mixed. Martha turned in the water in front of me, her head pulling her downwards, but her shoulder preventing the twist. How would Brownie take this? Should I even tell him? Could I get him out of the flat without him noticing?

  I was saved from answering any of these questions by a voice behind me.

  ‘What …?’

  I turned to see Brownie standing in the hallway. He held out a spliff towards me. My jacket was about four inches too short for him in the arms and didn’t reach down far enough to cover his grey underpants. The small amount of colour he’d had drained completely from his skin, so he looked like a ghost, a greasy ghost.

  ‘Jesus.’ He put a hand to his hair and tugged at it as if he were trying to wake himself up. The spliff fell to the floor. ‘What …?’

  ‘Brownie.’ I straightened and tried to position myself between him and the body in the bath behind me, but I wasn’t big enough.

  ‘Martha?’ he said in a voice that almost broke my heart.

  ‘She’s dead,’ I said, never shy of stating the obvious.

  His knees went first, and he crashed to the ground like he’d been felled. He dropped, all six foot of him, right in front of me, landing on my Docs with such force I thought he’d broken my toes. I prised my feet from under him. He didn’t flinch, didn’t move at all, his arms and bare legs splayed at odd angles. My first thought was he’d had some kind of massive heart attack and I was now stuck in a flat with two dead bodies, but when I put my hand on his back I felt the rise and fall of his breath, shallow and fast.

  I took the crushed spliff from under his arm and stuffed it down the plughole in the bathroom sink. I left the tap running, jumped over him and ran down the hall to the bedroom. I opened the drawers and rummaged until I found a pair of dark blue tracksuit bottoms. I ran back to the bathroom and dropped them on top of Brownie.

  We had to get out of there. I had to find Jo. Every time I thought of her another burst of acid hit my veins. I put the cold tap on in the bath. Martha’s body bobbed with the movement of the water, making her seem alive. I shuddered and headed for the kitchen, looking for a clock. The one on the cooker showed nearly midnight, which meant it was almost time for my ransom phone call. I grabbed the resin and the Rizla papers t
hat Brownie had left on the table and shoved them in my pocket. We had to get out. I had to find Jo. I couldn’t do anything else until I’d found Jo. I ran back to the bathroom, turned off the sink tap, making sure there was nothing left of the spliff. I squatted down next to Brownie, grabbed his right arm and dragged him up to sitting.

  ‘Brownie? Listen to me.’

  His pupils did their best to focus, but I wasn’t certain he was seeing me. I waved my hand in front of his face. His gaze didn’t change. I didn’t have time to spare. I snatched my hand back and smacked him as hard as I could across the face. His throat bulged. He made a noise, something between a burp and a cough. I grabbed his hair and yanked his head as hard as I could in the direction of the toilet, just as thin, yellow liquid erupted from his mouth.

  Some of it made it into the white porcelain. Some of it didn’t. I wiped my hand on the jacket he was wearing before I remembered it was mine. He retched another two or three times, each time the splash of his piss-like vomit hit the back of the toilet. When I was sure he had finished I flushed the chain.

  The water in the bath was nearing the top.

  ‘Put these on,’ I said to Brownie. He’d collapsed into a heap on the floor. I hit him with the tracksuit bottoms on his calf muscle. ‘Brownie. Focus. I have to go. I’ve got to find Jo.’

  ‘Can’t leave,’ he said, trying to sit up, his voice high-pitched.

  ‘I haven’t got time to answer questions.’

  ‘Questions.’

  ‘The police.’ I thought about my fingerprints, probably splattered all around the flat by now. I calmed myself with the thought I’d never been arrested.

  ‘Police.’ He repeated everything I said, like he was learning language for the first time.

  ‘The police are going to want answers.’ I spoke as slowly as my pulse rate would allow. I didn’t know about Brownie. Maybe his prints were on file somewhere. He struck me as a likely candidate for police attention. But then his prints had a reason for being here. He’d been here before.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Martha is dead. The police will want to know why. How. When. Those kinds of questions.’

  Finally, something seemed to register. He frowned, rubbed his eyes, shook his head like a dog might after a river swim. I got to my feet. It was time to get the hell out.

  Brownie struggled to get to his. I threw him the tracksuit bottoms for a second time. He caught them in one hand and then stared at them like he didn’t know how they’d got there.

  ‘Put them on,’ I said.

  ‘Martha.’

  ‘There’s nothing we can do.’ I knelt beside the bathtub and turned the tap so that the gush of water reduced to a trickle. I took the facecloth from the side and did my best to squash it up against the overflow, using Martha’s left foot to hold it in place. I swallowed again. Forced myself to look at her face. Her pale, almost translucent body hunched over, the water milky white. ‘I’ll find out what happened,’ I said to her. ‘I swear they won’t get away with it.’

  After a moment or two, I stood up, turned my back on her and stepped out of the room, pulling Brownie with me. I closed the door.

  ‘She’s dead, Brownie. No matter what we do, she’s still going to be dead. I can’t change that.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Brownie tried to get his legs into the tracksuit bottoms. After two failed attempts I wrapped his arm around my shoulders and held him up while he got them on. We left the flat, almost falling down the stairs in our hurry to get away from there, out of the building, dreading bumping in to anyone. Through the main door, back to the car park, the night air cold, my senses heightened.

  ‘Do you think she … did she …?’

  ‘No,’ I said as I unlocked the van.

  ‘Top herself?’

  ‘No,’ I said again, trying to keep any trace of doubt from my voice. ‘She couldn’t have. Not as easy as you think.’ Believe me, I’ve tried – got right up to this peaceful, white-light state – a moment that makes you believe in an afterlife. I shook the memory clear. ‘You need a current,’ I said to Brownie. ‘Otherwise the survival instinct pops you up. Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with rocks. You need something to drag you down.’

  He screwed up his eyes, wiped the snot from his nose. ‘OD?’

  ‘You checked the flat. Never heard of anyone ODing on pot.’

  ‘Then—?’

  ‘I don’t know, Brownie, but we aren’t going to figure it out standing here. Get in.’

  ‘You think it was Duck and Bernie?’

  ‘How come there’s no fag ends in the ashtray?’

  ‘She flushes everything.’ He ducked his tall, gangly frame into the van. ‘Paranoid about getting busted.’

  I climbed into the driving seat, started the engine and crunched the gears. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  Brownie didn’t answer. I glanced at him. He was bent over, holding his head in his hands, his shoulders juddering so much the van rocked.

  ‘Seatbelt,’ I said.

  ‘Fucked it all up.’

  I strapped myself in. ‘You didn’t kill her.’

  ‘She lied,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, seatbelt. I really don’t want to get pulled over now.’

  ‘Why? Why do women just mash your mind?’ He nutted the dashboard of my van so hard it dented.

  The noise made me jump and a flash of anger zapped my veins. ‘All right, steady on. Let’s get out of here, think what to do.’

  I released the handbrake, let the clutch up and we lurched towards the car park entrance. I hesitated, not sure whether to turn left or right. Shock had wiped the contents of my brain and in the vacuum a plan formed. Maybe my subconscious had been mulling it over while the rest of me had come to terms with the horror of Martha’s flat, I don’t know. But suddenly I had a fully formed plan in my head.

  We had to get out of Leeds.

  I had to get Jo.

  And we needed a safe house.

  But first, we had to swoop by the office. I needed envelopes.

  It was only a five-minute drive from Martha’s flat to our office. I parked the van a couple of streets away, down the hill. ‘You stay here,’ I said to Brownie. ‘I’ll only be ten minutes.’

  He threw open the van door and vaulted onto the pavement faster than Usain Bolt.

  ‘No chance.’

  He kept close to me as we walked round the block and didn’t say anything as I undid the padlocks and we squeezed through the makeshift door. His eyebrows knotted at the ‘Be scarred’ spray paint on the wall, but I didn’t give him time to ask questions.

  ‘OK, make us a brew. I have to sort a few things.’ I steered him through to the back and pointed him in the direction of the kitchenette. ‘Hot, sweet tea.’

  I had no intention of drinking it, but he needed a focus. While he was occupied I snuck into the back room and opened the broom cupboard door. I took down the poster to reveal the safe, entered the combination and tugged the door open. A scattering of thick brown envelopes fell at my feet. I picked them up, scooped the notes out and shoved the cash in an old money belt that was hanging among the bags on the wall. I clipped the belt around my middle and stuffed the empty envelopes into a knapsack.

  The Old Holborn tin lay at the back of the safe. I shoved it into the bag. I relocked the safe, even though it was empty, put the poster back and closed the broom cupboard door.

  Brownie was in the main office. ‘Here,’ he said, holding out a mug with steam coming off the top of it.

  ‘We’ll have to take them with us,’ I said, glancing around the office. I pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk and scooped out a handful of compliment slips. ‘They’re going to be ringing any minute.’

  I checked Jo’s phone again, made sure the ringer was on.

  He stood my mug on the desk and sat down on the floor, his legs crossed in front of him, bare chest visible although he was still wearing my jacket. He was scrawny thin, even by my standards.
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  ‘I don’t know anyone,’ he said.

  I stuffed handfuls of compliment slips into the envelopes in my knapsack. ‘Come again?’ I said.

  He cradled his mug of tea, his gaze fixed on the carpet tiles in front of him. ‘I don’t know anyone to ring, anyone to tell.’

  I found a roll of Sellotape in the top drawer and sealed each envelope with a strip before returning them to the knapsack.

  ‘Who am I going to tell?’ asked Brownie again.

  ‘Not your problem,’ I said. ‘The police will notify next of kin.’

  ‘We’ve been … you know … for months, and I can’t think of one single person to tell.’

  ‘What about mates?’ I pulled the strings on the knapsack and slung it over my shoulder.

  ‘Didn’t have any.’

  ‘She must have had one.’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’ Brownie gulped some tea. ‘Something’s not right.’

  I considered this. I’m hardly the world’s most sociable person, but I have Jo. And there’s other people I could call acquaintances, if not mates. To have no mates at all takes some doing.

  ‘She said she’d just moved down. From Newcastle.’

  I knew nothing about our first ever client. Everything I thought I’d known was a lie. ‘What was she doing in Leeds?’

  ‘PhD.’

  ‘So, she’d have mates on her course, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Wasn’t a course. It was research.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Politics. Social movements, she said. Never really got it.’

  ‘Come on, we’re on a timescale.’

  He didn’t budge. ‘I didn’t get it, because I didn’t ask.’

  I put the knapsack down on the desk and sat on the floor next to him. I lit a fag and passed it to Brownie. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘My fault I don’t know who to tell.’

  ‘Hindsight is awful,’ I said. Which is true. The present lacks the clarity hindsight offers. Hindsight is just a shortcut to guilt. ‘If we knew what was going to happen we’d all do stuff differently. Point is, you didn’t know.’