Then You Were Gone

by Claire Moss

  For Christ’s sake, Simone could not help but think. Men! What was wrong with asking your best friend a straight question and getting a straight answer? But then she chastised herself. Everybody has secrets. Everybody has things in the past that they may not be proud of. Mack was as entitled to that as she or anyone else. ‘Look,’ she said to Dan, ‘we don’t know whether it is to do with Keith or the business. Do you know Jazzy?’

  Dan nodded noncommittally, ‘I’ve heard Mack talk about him. Never met him though.’ His tone was dismissive and Simone felt the urge to smile again. Was there some rivalry for Mack’s affections between the two best friends?

  ‘Well, Jazzy’s looking into it while I’m here.’ She remembered her role, the cool-headed PI, calm and capable and working for the greater good. ‘I decided I’d do some digging into this side of things – you know, Mack’s personal life.’ Dan raised a quizzical eyebrow and Simone burst out laughing, breaking the tension. ‘You know what I mean. But,’ she shrugged, ‘it seems like you know even less than I do.’ She felt something plummet inside her as she said the words aloud. She had been teetering on a precipice and, without realising it, she had placed a lot of faith in finding something here that could bring her back from the edge. Now she saw that that was not going to happen.

  ‘Sorry,’ Dan said, his tone sombre again. He must have been able to see the loneliness and defeat in her eyes. ‘I wish I could help you. And Mack too. It sounds like he’s in a bad way. I know if I were ever on my uppers I could go to Mack and he’d do anything he could for me. I want to do the same, but…’ he sighed and pressed his knuckles into both eyes. Simone did not know if she had ever seen anyone more in need of a good night’s sleep. Dan released his hands and blew out a long, loud sigh. ‘Sorry,’ he said again.

  Simone drained the last of her coffee. ‘Listen, I won’t keep you much longer, I know it’s late.’ She put on the voice of the ballsy, bitches-get-stuff-done PI. Melissa had taken the baby from Dan and was breast feeding him in an armchair with her eyes closed. Simone was not sure if the poor woman was awake or asleep or whether she had truly been one or the other since Simone got there. ‘But there is one more thing I wanted to ask you about.’ She reached into her bag and took out Jessica Novak’s birth certificate. Handing it to him, she asked, ‘Do you know what this could be? It was in Mack’s flat with his own birth certificate and some other personal papers.’ She did not add any more details, the main reason being that she did not have any. The certificate spoke for itself, in that it said absolutely nothing.

  Dan took it from her and studied it, his face similarly bewildered to the one that had greeted her when she first arrived. After a minute he looked up and shook his head. ‘I have no idea,’ he said, handing it back. ‘No idea at all.’

  This barely surprised Simone, but she did still feel a jolt of disappointment. She had waited until now to ask Dan because she had known disappointment was the overwhelmingly likely outcome and she had wanted to defer it for as long as possible. Now the inevitable had happened and she realised she had no idea what to do next.

  ‘Jessica?’ Dan said suddenly, jolting Simone from her depressed reverie. ‘It’s someone called Jessica?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Dan squinted. ‘Oh. That’s odd.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Well, not really, it’s just… I mean, it’s probably just coincidence but – Mack’s always had this funny thing about the name Jessica. It struck me as being a bit weird, to be honest with you.’

  ‘What do you mean a “thing”?’

  ‘Well, when Mel was pregnant with Thomas – that’s our eldest – Mack was asking us about names, like you do, and we both said we liked Jessica for a girl, and he went really funny. Started going on, “Oh, Jessica? What, really? Oh, no, that’s an awful name, you can’t call a baby Jessica, ooohh noooo!”’ Dan did an exaggerated squeaky cockney accent, which did not sound like Mack at all. ‘I mean, I’d been fairly sure that he’d only asked about names out of politeness in the first place. Most of my single male friends couldn’t have given a shit really, they just felt they ought to at least acknowledge the fact we were having a baby, so they’d ask about names and that kind of thing – the easy stuff. And I thought that was just what Mack was doing, until he had this weird freak out about the name Jessica.’

  ‘OK.’ He was right, Simone thought. This was all a bit weird. And completely irrelevant. She was tired, she realised. Dan’s boyish helplessness which had seemed so charming half an hour ago was now starting to irritate her. It was the same way she often felt about Jazzy.

  ‘And then obviously Tom was a boy…’ Dan went on. ‘But then, again, when Mel was pregnant with Archie, he started on about it – and it was him that brought it up. He said “Oh, you’re not still thinking about Jessica for a girl, are you?” And we said, “Yes, we are actually,” and we had to go over the whole thing again, him going on and on about how much he hated the name and what a mistake it would be. And even when Archie was born and I rang him to tell him, one of the first things he said was, “Well, at least you won’t be calling him Jessica.”’ Dan shook his head. ‘Very weird.’

  ‘Yes,’ Simone agreed. ‘Yes, that is a bit weird.’ Was this relevant? She tried to ask herself through the fog of fatigue that was starting to settle. Was it something that mattered, or was it just a very tired man who was desperate to help, spouting gibberish so he felt as though he was contributing something?

  Dan blinked and widened his eyes, as though woken from his own thoughts into a world where a strange, stressed woman was occupying his living room and his best friend had disappeared into the night. ‘Sorry, that’s all on a bit of a tangent, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s OK. It’s not like I have any clues as it is.’

  ‘You think this–’ he indicated the birth certificate, ‘might have something to do with him going off like this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Simone said truthfully. ‘I mean, it’s an odd thing to have lying around your flat isn’t it, someone else’s birth certificate? Especially… well, especially a young woman with an eastern European name.’

  ‘Yes.’ Dan’s face was serious, betraying little, but Simone knew he must realise what she was getting at.

  ‘Do you think Keith or… anyone else that Mack knows might be involved in that sort of thing? Do you think…’ she swallowed. ‘Do you think Mack might even have been involved in it?’

  ‘Do you mean…?’ Dan’s tone was hesitant. Simone could tell he was reluctant to voice his thoughts in case that had not been what she meant at all.

  ‘Yes, I do. I mean that. I mean women. Prostitutes. Trafficking. Whatever you want to call it.’ It was the first time she had spoken these dark thoughts aloud.

  ‘No.’ Dan shook his head, his voice firm as it must be when the teenagers at school got a bit out of hand. ‘Absolutely not. Not Mack, at least. I can’t vouch for Keith – or anyone else. I’m pretty sure Keith’s capable of anything. But not Mack. Mack’s… he’s not perfect, he’s no angel, but he’s a good guy. He would never do anything like that. I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Right. OK.’ Despite the heat from the fire, Simone could feel herself starting to shiver again. ‘Thank you. I mean, I know he wouldn’t, I just… I feel as though I’m losing my grip on him, on who he really is. I’m starting to wonder a lot of things.’

  ‘I know.’ Dan closed his eyes slowly then, with visible effort, opened them again. ‘Me too. But you shouldn’t wonder that. Honestly.’

  ‘OK then,’ she smiled feebly. ‘I won’t.’ She put the birth certificate back in her bag and rose to leave. ‘I’ll get out of your way now, let you all get some sleep while you can.’

  Melissa lazily opened one eye. ‘Sorry, I’m being so rude here.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Simone said in a hushed voice. ‘Thank you for the coffee. Bye.’

  Melissa raised a hand slowly in response. Her eyes were closed again.

  Dan followed Simone
out into the hallway. ‘Listen, will you be OK? I mean, do you have somewhere to go tonight? Because you can stay here you know, we’ve plenty of room. Any friend of Mack’s is a friend of ours, and I don’t like to think about what he might do to me if he thought I’d kicked you out onto the mean streets of Clitheroe in the middle of the night.’

  He really meant it, Simone realised. Despite the tiny baby and the lactating wife and the fact that they had only met Simone once before, and most of that time she had spent screwing in the hotel toilets with Mack. Despite all that she really was welcome in this house. She could sleep in the cold spare room and be woken in the dark hours by shouting children and eat toast with them and their curious stares and colourful plastic crockery. The temptation was almost overwhelming. This place, this house, this village, this family all felt so safe. Dan and Melissa were her kind of people; in another life this could be a social call. If she stayed here it would be like a weekend visit to friends she had not seen in a long time, a break in time from the hell Mack was sucking her into.

  But before she came here she had gone to the pub in the village and booked a room, and she knew that going back there was the right thing to do. Plus, she reminded herself, families were something she was only equipped to face when she was feeling rather less fragile.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Really. But I’m fine. I need to keep looking for this guy, don’t I?’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  She hesitated, just long enough that Dan probably noticed. ‘I don’t know.’

  Dan moved to open the door, then hesitated. ‘You know, talking about Kielder just then, I wondered… do you think Mack might have gone up there?’

  Simone pursed her lips as she considered this. ‘Maybe.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe. Do you think that’s where he would go? If he wanted to hide?’

  ‘Yes.’ Dan nodded. ‘Yes, I think he probably would. Because if not there, then – where? If he’s not there then he could be anywhere.’

  ‘I know,’ Simone said. ‘That’s what worries me. So, OK, maybe I’ll try there. I may as well look there as anywhere. If he’s not there then… Well, then I suppose I’ll go back to London. Think again.’

  Dan smiled. ‘Good. Worth a try. And let me know, won’t you. You’ve got our number. As soon as you find anything, please let us know. We’ll be waiting to hear.’

  ‘OK. I will.’

  He opened the door letting in a sliver of chill, damp air. ‘You know, I’m sure you won’t mind me saying this. I’ve seen Mack with a LOT of women over the years. And there hasn’t been one of them until you where I’ve thought, yes, this is it, this is what he needs. This is right. But as soon as I saw him with you, I did think that. And I just hope…’ He reached out a hand awkwardly, apparently unsure what kind of gesture was appropriate in this situation. In the end he settled for a pat on the arm. ‘I just hope that this… whatever this is, that it doesn’t cock things up for you both. Because I hope we’ll see each other again.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Simone said, her throat tight. ‘Me too.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Talking about the night the boy died had helped Jessica more than she had thought it would, and more importantly it had made her genuinely trust the strange man who called himself Joe. He could not have been that good an actor that he could have hidden any existing knowledge of the murder so well. Jessica shuddered whenever she even thought the word ‘murder’ in relation to the boy’s death and she had still never spoken it aloud. She had never imagined murder to be a word she used in conjunction with an event in her own life, that the decision to take a taxi home one evening because her poor, fat, pregnant feet were killing her would bring her into the orbit of such a black, ugly word. The man though used the words ‘murder’ and ‘murderer’ all the time, as though he were trying to hammer home to her the enormity of what she had, albeit unwittingly, become involved in.

  ‘Will he listen to you, do you think? The murderer?’ he asked her out of the blue the morning after she had first told him about the stabbing.

  ‘Listen to me? About what?’ She had told Joe that she had been at school with not just the victim but Connor Marston, the boy who had stabbed him, too. She had not told him the extent of her friendship with Connor, that they had known each other since they were a pair of four-year-olds crying for their mothers in Reception Class and been in the same classes every year until he had stopped turning up to school halfway through Year Eleven. They had had many overlapping friendships, including Jessica being in the same gymnastics team as Connor’s cousin Savannah, and had often ended up running in the same circles, but there had always been something about Connor that had prevented Jessica from ever becoming what she would have called real friends with him. There had always been something a little askew about him, a slight absence behind his eyes that would shift suddenly into a loud or violent outburst; throwing a chair at a classroom door, pushing a fellow student up against a wall and spitting into his eye. These tendencies only intensified as Connor grew older, and from what little Jessica knew about his home life, she was able to infer that it was an utter mess. He lived with his dad who drank heavily and would sometimes disappear for extended periods, and by the age of fourteen Connor was essentially left to do whatever he liked.

  When he and Jessica had been in primary school they had both been part of ‘pet club’ where they took shared responsibility for the school’s tortoise, goldfish, rabbits and stick insects, and still when Jessica looked at Connor she saw the round-faced little boy who would spend every break and lunchtime tirelessly making sure that his beloved creatures were fed and watered.

  Joe shrugged. ‘He knows that you saw him. He knows that you’re incredibly brave…’

  ‘Yeah, or stupid,’ Jessica interrupted.

  The man gave her a tender smile that made her blush and look away. ‘You’re brave,’ he repeated. ‘And Connor knows that. He knows that you’re going to do the right thing.’ Joe appeared to notice her shift uncomfortably next to him, to pick up on some guilty change in her demeanour. ‘You are, aren’t you?’

  She nodded, her eyes focused downwards on the curve of her ever-growing belly. ‘Yeah,’ she said softly. ‘I have to, don’t I?’ She had come this far, she reasoned. She had already given up so much, almost lost so much. If she was going to chicken out then she should have done it weeks ago, when there was still something to salvage. She had committed to this course of action so completely that to see it through to its natural conclusion actually seemed like the easier option now. She just wished she did not feel so tired.

  ‘Well, do you think he could be persuaded to make it easier for himself? And you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean plead guilty. Front up. Be a man, rather than terrorising little girls.’ There was real venom in Joe’s tone. ‘You could write to him.’

  ‘What, in prison?’

  ‘You’re allowed to write to people in prison. You can’t email him, I checked. But could you get in touch with his family maybe? You could send an email to them and ask them to pass it on to him?’

  Jessica wondered if this meant she was going to be allowed to use her phone. Maybe Mum had given it to Joe and said he could let her use it once he was sure she was not going to do anything stupid. Or maybe he was going to let her use his iPad; she knew he had one, she had found it when she went through his bag while he was in the shower one morning, but it had not been charged up then and she had never seen him go near it since they had been here.

  ‘I’m friends with his cousin,’ she said, although actually she hardly saw Savannah now they went to different colleges. ‘I could get in touch with her, see if she could get a message to him. What if it made things worse though?’

  Joe laughed, although there was little humour behind it. ‘Come on, Jess.’ It was the first time he had called her Jess. ‘How much worse can things really get?’

  ‘A lot worse. He could fucking kill me, or get his nut-job brother to do
it, like he nearly did to Marcus.’

  ‘Look, you’re already hiding out in the middle of nowhere with some oddball mate of your mum’s you’ve never met before. You’re already alone and pregnant and terrified. Do you think that Connor’s scared too?’

  Jessica swallowed. Connor had always seemed scared, even after he turned hard and wild; even when he had the knife in his hand he had seemed scared. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think he would want to hurt you?’

  Jessica thought for a minute. ‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘He might not want to, but that doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t.’

  Joe nodded. ‘OK. But he knows that if he pleads guilty he can make things a bit better for himself doesn’t he? He knows you, he associates you with home and a happier time. He hasn’t scared you off yet, so you make sure he knows he isn’t going to. He can make it better for himself now by pleading guilty, or he can wait for you to tell the court the truth. Because that’s what you’re going to do, if he doesn’t.’

  ‘And what if he doesn’t listen? What if he makes me go down to court and testify against him and I spend the rest of my life having to hide from him and his loony family?’ Her voice was quavering. ‘What then?’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jazzy went into work, purely because he could not bear to stay at home on his own any longer and he did not know where else he could go. He had not slept so he left the house early and the sun was only barely beginning to show in the sky as he arrived at the office. As he climbed the stairs, he noticed that a light was on inside. He felt an automatic thump of terror, his body responding as it might be expected to, but his mind could not summon any real emotion. His resources had been drained dry. He unlocked the door and went inside. Ayanna was sitting at Mack’s desk. She jumped to her feet when Jazzy came in, then seemed to sag a little as she sat back down. ‘Oh, thank fuck. It’s you.’