‘Dad told me you were coming by,’ he announced in his reedy voice, ‘and I was just a little concerned.’
‘Oh?’
‘I fear that a few mixed messages may have entered into the equation somewhere along the line. And it would be unfortunate if they were not resolved at the earliest possible opportunity.’
The pomposity was new. So was the accent, located at some politically correct point between the North of England and the Essex marshes, complete with a spattering of sludgy consonants and wide vowels.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Dad’s asked you to help look for my sister, has he?’
‘Yes. And I’ll be glad to do whatever I can.’
Marc shook his head with a knowing little smile of derision.
‘Kind of you to offer, but I really don’t think it would be appropriate, do you? Because - correct me if I’m wrong - you don’t have any expertise in this area, do you?’
‘Well…’
‘You’re not qualified in the field of missing persons.’
‘No. Is anyone?’
Marc smiled in the manner of someone who’s prepared to be extraordinarily charitable under trying circumstances. ‘It is a highly specialised area.’
‘Well, your father seems to think I can help.’
‘Yes, yes. But with him - well, wishful thinking tends to overcome reality, doesn’t it? I did try to make him understand.
I did point out that you didn’t have the skills. You and others.
In the last two weeks he must have asked the entire neighbourhood.
The local MP. Some county councillor guy. The vicar.’
A taut sigh of forbearance, a roll of the button eyes. ‘It’ll be the local psychic next. He’s met her, you see, and that’s all it takes. Immediately convinced they’re going to be able to help.
Though what they’re meant to do is a total mystery. Pull off a miracle? Wave a magic wand? No, he can’t seem to understand that they’re never going to have the first idea.’ This in a tone that left Joe in no doubt that he himself had been consigned to the ranks of these well-meaning inadequates. ‘So,’ Marc finished on a brisk note, ‘I can only thank you for coming and apologise for any inconvenience that may have been caused.
You didn’t make the journey specially, I hope?’
Joe shook his head slowly.
‘Good.’ Marc tilted his head and pulled in his thin lips, in the manner of someone who has made his point.
Joe said, ‘I may not be an expert - as you so rightly say but I’d still like to help if I can.’
A tight smile. ‘Much appreciated, Joe. But it’s really not required.’
‘There are a few checks I can get done. I was just telling your father. It’s only basic stuff, but you never know.’
‘Oh?’ A elaborate display of bewilderment. ‘What sort of checks?’
‘From data banks, that sort of thing.’
‘You mean the standard trawl through the police computer?’
An undisguised smile of satisfaction. ‘I instigated that procedure months ago.’
Marc had caught Joe by surprise, and he knew it.
‘Alan didn’t say anything.’
‘No, well...'
‘So … do I take it you’ve some other ideas, then?’
‘I don’t follow,’ Marc said with deadly patience.
‘Ways of finding Jenna.’
Marc frowned in a rhetorical expression of perplexity.
‘Funny — I thought I’d made myself clear just now. Apparently not. The situation’ - he went slowly, as though spelling it out to a child - ‘is that we’re going to handle this ourselves, Joe. In our own way.’ In his most officious tone, he added: ‘No help required.’ This was delivered as a closing statement, with a tuck of the chin into the thick neck and a move towards the house.
‘Who’s the we. Marc?’ Joe said to his retreating back. ‘I’m a bit confused.’
He didn’t reply and after a moment Joe followed him into the house. ‘Who’s the we, Marc, if it’s not your parents?’
He was pulling off his jacket to reveal a seriously overstretched T-shirt. ‘It’s like I explained, Joe. Twice now, I think?’
He sucked in his breath with exaggerated forbearance. ‘Yes twice. It’s none of your fucking business.’ He dumped his jacket on the stairs. Under the taut T-shirt, his large body was surprisingly solid. His muscles had the sort of tone that only comes from long hours in the gym. As if to emphasise his new vigour, he stood with his head thrust slightly forward and his hands hanging loosely at his sides in the stance of the fighter ready to spring. The button eyes glinted. ‘Tell me, Joe,’ he added darkly, ‘don’t you think you’ve done quite enough damage already, without wanting to do a whole lot more?’
Ah, thought Joe, here we have it. Is this what all this unpleasantness is really about? Just a golden opportunity to put me in my place? Is this the real agenda?
Joe let the remark pass with a small shrug: of acceptance or denial, Marc could make up his own mind.
A faint sound came from the kitchen, a footfall, a swish of the door, and Helena appeared. She greeted Marc with a swift kiss on the cheek. ‘How are you, darling?’ Ignoring Marc’s lingering glower, she touched his arm. ‘Would you be a dear and bring the bins in for me?’
Marc shot her a look of sharp resentment, as though he had far more important things to do with his life, before capitulating with bad grace and marching off with a last dark squint in Joe’s direction.
Helena said, ‘Alan’s stuck on the phone, Joe. He said not to wait and he’ll call you.’
Opening the front door, she led the way outside and with a backward glance pulled the door closed behind them. There was a sharp wind now, and she had no coat, only the frayed cardigan.
‘Don’t get cold,’ Joe said.
‘I wish this stupid house business had never come up,’ she cried harshly. ‘I knew it’d be nothing but trouble.’
‘Marc’s just warned me off.’
‘I heard. Take no notice, Joe.’
‘I appear to be the big bad villain.’
‘Oh, it’s not about you, Joe. No …’ Her eyes ranged unhappily over the garden. ‘It’s about Jenna. I was always careful to treat them the same, Joe. No favouritism. Share and share alike. But however hard you try, they end up seeing things differently. Marc always felt like second best. It was the singing, of course. All that adulation for Jenna. All that praise.
Always being the centre of attention. He felt he could never match up. Forever cast as Jenna’s little brother. You must have realised that, Joe. You must have seen it for yourself. Surely.’
She threw him a glance that was almost angry. ‘So when this came up … Oh, he wants his share of the money, yes. But he’s absolutely obsessed with organising the whole search. With taking charge.’
And with being centre stage, Joe thought. ‘But what’s he planning?’ he asked Helena. ‘What’s he got in mind?’
‘We’ve no idea. He’s got some friends who’ve helping, I think. In the police? In the social services? I’m not sure. He won’t tell us. He says to leave it to him. And quite honestly, Joe, I’d rather just let him get on with it. Anything for a quiet life. If I had my way we’d simply take out a second mortgage and hand him the money. But that’s not allowed. No, we have to have this awful money all tied up with finding Jenna, so that we can all feel twice as bad if it doesn’t work out. Ridiculous.’
With a shiver, she pulled her cardigan tighter across her waist.
Joe slipped an arm round her shoulders.
‘You will find her, won’t you, Joe?’
He squeezed her shoulder. ‘I’ll do all I can - you know that.’
‘Oh, not for me, Joe!’ she announced dismissively. ‘No - I gave up on Jenna long ago. Don’t worry about me! And don’t worry about Marc either. No, if you do it for anyone, Joe, do it for Alan. Do it for him.’
‘Of course.’
Turning
to face him, she grasped his arm, and her eyes were shining with a desperate light. ‘No, no,’ she argued as though he had missed the point. ‘He’s not well, Joe. That’s why we have to find her. He’s not at all well, and this is killing him.’
Joe stared at her, a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach.
‘What do you mean, not well? What’s wrong with him, Helena?’
She dropped her hand. ‘Oh, chronic hypertension. Sky-high cholesterol. Other things he’s probably not telling me about.
Everything that comes from stress and overwork and not sleeping properly. But really it’s Jenna. That’s what’s eating him up, Joe. He never stops worrying about her, not for a single second. It got to the point where I couldn’t stand him talking about it any longer, I began walking out of the room every time he started, otherwise he’d go on for hours and hours. Just torturing himself. Going over and over the same old ground. And for what? To make himself ill. To kill himself.
It was driving me wild!’
‘Is he seeing someone about the hypertension?’
‘The cardiologist, yes. Given half a chance, he’d forget to take the drugs of course. But it won’t guard him against worry, Joe. That’s what gets people in the end.’
Joe stepped forward and embraced her. The halo of unkempt hair lay close against his cheek, and he thought he caught a hint of the scent she used to wear when he was young.
‘Take care, Joe,’ she said, pulling away.
Walking away, he turned to wave but she had already closed the door.
He was just about to drive off when he heard a shout and saw Alan trotting rapidly down the path towards him. ‘Joe!
Joe!’
Catching his breath, laughing at the ridiculous amount of time it took him to speak, Alan passed a bright-yellow envelope through the window. ‘Just - thought - I’d show you - this, Joe.’
Joe pulled out a birthday card with a happy sixtieth greeting on the front and a cheery little rhyme inside. Beneath the rhyme, a happy-face with a single X beside it had been drawn in black ink.
Still panting hard, Alan wheezed, ‘See, Joe - just one X.
Usually she covered the thing in Xs. Just covered it. She only ever drew one X when—’ He paused, he gave Joe an awkward glance. ‘Do you remember when she failed that scholarship, Joe? The one to the Royal Academy?’
‘I remember.’
‘Well, she gave me a card with a single X then. Just a small X under the happy-face, to show she was unhappy. And when she first went to college, when she was homesick, she sent me another one then. It was when she was unhappy.’ He looked up again. ‘What do you think, Joe?’
Turning to the envelope, Joe tried to make out the postmark, but it lay immediately over the stamp and, apart from the letter E and what might have been an R, was too smudged to read.
Alan was watching his face anxiously. ‘What do you think?
Is it Leicester?’
‘I can’t tell.’
‘If it’s Leicester … Well, some of my patients work there.’
‘Can you leave it with me?’
‘Of course!’
‘No promises.’
But Alan was incapable of hiding much in his face, certainly nothing as fundamental as hope. ‘Thank you, Joe! Thank you.’
He clasped Joe’s hand before stepping back and giving a wave like a salute.
Joe started off then stopped again to call back, ‘We’ll go for that walk at Christmas, shall we?’
Alan’s expression lit up.
‘The Peaks? And lunch at a country pub?’
‘You bet!’
When Joe glanced in his rear-view mirror, Alan was still smiling, his arms crossed over his chest, as if to resist the lure of the tobacco pouch.
Chapter Three
Joe heard her before he saw her: the murmur of a soft voice floating down from the landing above. Rounding the turn of the stairs, he saw through the wrought-iron banisters first the slim legs sheathed in tight black jeans, then the head of long pale hair and finally the mobile clamped to one ear.
Catching sight of him, Sarah said something into the phone and snapped it shut. ‘Traffic?’
‘Horrendous.’ He dumped the shopping on the top step and went to embrace her. ‘Why didn’t you let yourself in?’
‘How?’
‘With the key.’
‘I don’t have a key.’
‘What happened to the one I gave you this morning?’
‘I posted it under the door.’
‘You should have kept it.’
She looked appalled at this idea. ‘Oh no, I couldn’t have done that.’
As soon as he’d opened the door, and even before he’d turned on any lights, she scooped up “the discarded key from the floor and placed it ostentatiously on the radiator shelf, as if to emphasise that she made no claims to it, either now or in the future, and that it had been an indignity to suggest she would.
Joe wasn’t sure what law of relationship etiquette he’d broken but he was prepared to bow humbly to her judgement.
At some point in the last twelve hours he’d decided that despite the mixed messages over Morocco he didn’t intend to give up on her. It seemed to him that her cool enclosed nature complemented his own more variable temperament rather well, that her practicality was a welcome prop in times of uncertainty, and that in an odd way they might rub along quite well together. Armed with this thought he went to help her off with her jacket, but she was too quick for him, slipping it off in one rapid movement and throwing it onto the sofa.
‘I’m gasping for some water,’ she announced, heading for the kitchen.
He followed with the shopping. ‘How were your family?’
he asked solicitously.
‘Oh, loathing the weather, the way they do.’ Her parents lived in Kent, he’d gathered, somewhere near Faversham, and were old for parents, over seventy.
She helped him unpack the shopping. ‘And your father?’
‘Battling the world, as usual.’
‘The negligence case?’
‘Oh, always.’
With quiet efficiency, she began to organise the dinner ingredients into groups: vegetables on the chopping board, cheese and fruit to one side, chicken near the stove. ‘What’s his legal argument exactly?’
‘For the last two years it’s been the Human Rights Act. I forget which article.’
‘And what are his chances?’
He drew the cork on the vintage Burgundy he’d bought on a whim at a ridiculous price. ‘None, so far as I can gather. But to be honest I don’t really know. I keep well out of it.’
‘But it was what got you started, wasn’t it? With the law.’
He had given Sarah the bare outlines of the story two or three weeks ago because she’d asked about it, but it wasn’t a subject he ever chose to bring up. He was particularly uncomfortable when he saw a neat equation looming: filial loss added to medical negligence equals a burning sense of injustice, because it wasn’t the way it was with him, never had been.
‘The first lot of lawyers who got their teeth into my father were inept,’ he said carefully. ‘I sure as hell knew I wanted to do better than them.’
‘But you didn’t choose medical negligence-‘
‘Christ, no,’ Joe shot back, wondering at how little she had understood him. ‘When I had a missionary father? A man who lived, breathed, slept medical negligence? A man who’d give his right arm - his soul — to have his day in court? No, correction - every day in court. Who’d be looking over my shoulder every second of my working life, and probably my non-working life too, because there’s no difference to him.
Day, night, it’s a vocation, you take your vows, you follow the gospel. No, I could never have been one of the faithful.’
‘All the same, fighting for the underdog - wouldn’t that have been more your style?’
‘Why? Do I look like someone with a conscience?’
She regarded him in open appra
isal. ‘Yes. Yes, you do.’
He laughed. ‘But we can’t all take up worthy causes, can we?’
She said with strange intensity, ‘But you’ve taken on the cause of Jennifer Chetwdod.’
He made a business of opening the wine. ‘I’m trying to find her, which is rather different. And she’s not a cause.’
Sarah’s face took on an expression he’d noticed before, a lowering of the eyes and a twitching of the mouth, which seemed to signal conclusions being drawn and carefully stored away. Looking up again, she said crisply, ‘Well, I’m sorry to say that Mrs Chetwood is not going to be found very easily.’
Joe paused, corkscrew in mid-air. ‘Why?’
‘The searches have drawn a blank.’
‘They’re done already?’
‘Sure. I said it wouldn’t take long.’
‘But you’ve been away.’
‘I didn’t do it myself, Joe. Hardly. But my contact - he was in his office all day, he had the time.’
‘But what about the national insurance number? I was going to give it to you.’
‘Oh, my man managed to find it off the computer, no trouble.’
The wine forgotten, Joe went and sat down at the hinged flap that served as his breakfast table. ‘So … No sign at all?’
Sarah brought the wine and the glasses and sat down opposite. The table was so small that their knees touched. ‘A complete blank,’ she announced in the measured tone of a report. ‘Nothing under Jennifer Chetwood, and nothing under Laskey. Nothing active on the national insurance number. She hasn’t claimed benefits, not for unemployment and not for sickness, she hasn’t been admitted to hospital, not recently anyway, and she hasn’t died and she hasn’t had a baby. She last filed an income tax return four years ago. No telephone line in either of her names, no mobile phone, no gas or electricity accounts, no council tax, no entry on a UK electoral register, no outstanding debts or county court judgements against her.’
‘Abroad,’ Joe muttered, more to himself than to Sarah.
Still at full professional stride, Sarah continued her effortless display of memory. ‘No credit cards either, none that have been used anywhere in the world in the last four years at any rate. She hasn’t appeared on the news pages of any newspapers, either national or.local. She hasn’t incurred any penalty points on her driving licence. She hasn’t acquired a criminal record.
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