Then You Were Gone

by Claire Moss

  ‘Read that.’

  Both newspapers were folded back to display an inside page. The national broadsheet was an old one from a couple of months previously, folded open to a page containing one long single article, entitled Teenager dead in minicab office stabbing. It was accompanied by a school photograph of a teenage boy, Aaron Hodder, smirking rather than smiling, his school tie loosened and his hair gelled up into an enormous quiff.

  The tabloid was a South London local freesheet, folded open to a page containing a few small articles and classified announcements. The biggest article on the page, and the only one accompanied by a photo, related to two bank workers who were cycling to John O’Groats and back to raise money for a colleague’s new electronic wheelchair. Simone shook her head in irritation and looked to him in a ‘What the hell?’ manner.

  ‘No,’ Jazzy said softly, and pointed to one of the smaller articles at the bottom of the page. Whoever had left the newspaper had circled the article in red. Father-to-be hospitalised after street attack, the headline read. The following couple of lines outlined the upsetting but essentially unremarkable story of a twenty-year-old man named Marcus Lovatt (a father-to-be, as the journalist kept reiterating) who had been mugged on his way home from the pub one evening and ended up in hospital with a broken rib and what were rather sinisterly described as ‘facial injuries’.

  Simone squinted at him in irritation and bafflement. ‘I know,’ Jazzy whispered. ‘Me neither. This though,’ he pointed to the broadsheet, ‘I do remember reading about. It was south of the river somewhere; New Cross I think. A fight or something in a minicab office one night and one of the kids involved got stabbed to death. I remember it because he was only a kid; seventeen or so. And so was the guy who did it.’

  ‘They caught the guy who did it?’ Simone’s irritation had apparently turned to bleak confusion, and Jazzy, remembering his own frustrating episodes of roaring empty-mindedness, could sympathise. She sat back in the chair and closed her eyes, as though the sheer amount of thinking she was being required to do was causing her physical pain.

  Jazzy gave a non-committal gesture, as if to say the truth was not quite so simple. He crept over to where Ayanna lay, still gently snoring, and picked his laptop up from the side table.

  ‘We looked them up last night,’ he said, firing the machine up, ‘after we read all that stuff.’

  Simone sat up and opened her eyes with visible effort. ‘OK,’ she said, although whether to him or to herself Jazzy could not tell.

  ‘There were obviously loads of witnesses to this,’ he indicated the broadsheet article. ‘You know, a minicab office at half eleven on a Friday night; there were apparently three or four other people in the waiting room, plus the woman working the phones. She was the one who called the ambulance. But then, when you look through the news articles over the week or so after it happened, it’s pretty obvious that nobody who was there – and remember this was in a tiny little minicab office under one of those horrible fluorescent lights they all have – none of these people were apparently able to identify the kid who did it.’

  ‘What, they’d been scared off?’

  Jazzy shrugged. ‘That’s what it looks like. There are several statements from the police saying stuff like, we urge you to do the right thing and banging on about how their anonymity will be protected.’

  Simone pulled a face. ‘Not a great deal of help though, is it? Like you said, there were only about four other people in the place. Whoever did it would know who it was who shopped him to the police. You can’t blame them for keeping quiet.’

  ‘Well,’ Jazzy said, ‘that’s as may be, but obviously one of them fronted up in the end because,’ he flipped open the laptop and turned the screen so it was facing Simone, ‘it says here, about a fortnight after it happened, they arrested an eighteen-year-old local lad called Connor Marston, and a couple of days later he was charged with murder. He’s on remand now, waiting for the trial.’

  He watched Simone absorb the details as she studied the photograph of the young kid who was now looking at spending the rest of his youth, and possibly his early middle age, on the high security wing of various prisons. He looked ludicrously young in the photo, no sign of stubble on his pale cheeks or upper lip, his eyes hooded in a creepy smirk. ‘Looks a right charmer, doesn’t he?’

  Simone laughed humourlessly and closed her eyes again. ‘But…’ she said, then puffed out a heavy sigh and did not continue.

  Jazzy knew what she wanted to say. ‘But why did someone come into my house at night and leave this here?’

  Simone nodded without opening her eyes, then ran a hand down her face.

  ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue,’ he said truthfully. ‘We were up all night, me and Ayanna, googling everything we could think of to do with this case, the kid who got killed, the kid who killed him, the minicab firm, that part of London, everything.’

  ‘And you came up with nothing?’ Simone had her eyes open now, her tone flat and defeated.

  ‘Nothing to speak of. Nothing that made anything any clearer.’

  ‘You know that’s where Mack’s mum lives?’ Simone said, nodding towards the local freesheet. ‘I went to her flat, it’s in New Cross. That’s the area Mack grew up in.’

  Jazzy nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I do know. And this must be it,’ he jabbed the article about the murdered boy, ‘this must be something to do with Mack, something to do with why he’s gone. Does he go to his mum’s much?’

  Simone screwed up her face as though revealing an unpleasant truth. ‘I don’t think so. I mean, I’d only ever met her once until I went round there the other day, and it was obvious when me and Mack went out with her that that was the first time he’d been to see her since he’d started seeing me. And I don’t remember him ever saying he was going to see her. Although,’ she said in a resigned tone, ‘that certainly doesn’t mean he hadn’t been to see her. I mean, I think it’s pretty clear that he’s been doing something we don’t know about. I just wish we knew what.’

  Jazzy felt relieved to hear her say ‘we’ like that. She had been acting a bit off with him, as though her anger at Mack for buggering off on her was being transferred (very unfairly as he saw it) onto Jazzy. He was glad to hear some evidence that she still felt they were on the same side. ‘So you don’t think there’s any chance Mack could have been in that minicab office that night?’

  Simone grabbed the broadsheet. ‘When was it?’ She studied the date in the article, then fished her phone out of her bag.

  ‘Do you use the calendar on your phone?’ he asked, unable to keep the surprise out of his tone.

  ‘Yes I use the fucking calendar on my phone, Jazzy, I’m not a fucking imbecile you know.’ She scrolled through her phone, not making eye contact with him and not smiling to indicate she had been only joking, then she shook her head. ‘Nope. I’ve got it in here, we went to see a band at a pub in Islington that night. They finished late then we both stayed over at mine, I remember.’ Jazzy did not ask what it was about their sleepover that had been memorable.

  Jazzy pushed his fists into his eye sockets and ground them in, as though he could force some spark of inspiration into his brain that way. He blinked and looked around him. Ayanna stirred in her sleep and turned her head. Her hair was plastered to the side of her face. He saw Simone glance at her, then shift uncomfortably. Surely Simone couldn’t think that of him, that he would go behind Petra’s back, that he’d have sex with a teenager while his wife and baby were away? ‘And he never said anything to you about having been to New Cross, knowing anyone there, anything?’

  ‘No, Jazzy,’ that narky tone again, ‘I would have remembered, and if it had happened to slip my mind then I think that this,’ she gave a sweeping gesture to indicate the scale of the madness in which they were now embroiled, ‘would probably have jogged my memory, don’t you think?’

  Jazzy could think of nothing to say that would not result in an argument, so he said nothing.

&
nbsp; ‘And who’s this guy?’ Simone went on, picking up the freesheet article about the young mugging victim. ‘What the fuck’s he got to do with all of this?’ Her tone was now verging on the hysterical.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Jazzy said. ‘We googled him too, of course, but there was nothing on him apart from the fact that he recently got mugged and put in hospital. We found him on Facebook and stuff, but that’s it.’

  ‘Can I see?’ Simone asked quickly, in the manner of a drowning person clutching at a deflated life raft.

  ‘Um, OK.’ Jazzy brought up the young man’s Facebook profile that he and Ayanna had studied to little effect in the early hours. His name was Marcus Lovatt; not all of his profile was visible, but there were a large number of photos, mostly of him and a strikingly pretty young woman, black-haired and blue-eyed and, in the more recent photos, visibly pregnant. His place of work was listed as Yellowhammer Logistics, his job title was the seemingly meaningless Team Member. He had longish hair and a shortish beard, a kind, round face and a sweet smile. He did not look like someone who deserved to be mugged, he did not look like someone who would have been in any trouble in his life and, crucially, he did not look like someone who Jazzy or Simone or Mack would have ever had anything to do with.

  Simone clicked on his profile picture, one of the ones with him and the stunning woman who was presumably his girlfriend. As the cursor hovered over the young woman’s face, two words popped up: Jessica Novak. Simone gave a small gasp, moved the mouse, then moved it back again. The same name popped up. She took an involuntary step back from the laptop and looked at Jazzy. ‘Jazz,’ she said urgently, and he hated himself for feeling pleased to hear in her voice that she needed him again. ‘Jazz, are you seeing what I’m seeing?’

  He nodded and reached again to his back pocket for Keith’s letter. ‘Yes. And there’s something else you need to see.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘She’s real,’ Simone breathed, not really aware whether she was speaking aloud or not. It had not occurred to her, she now realised, that Jessica Novak could be a real girl, a real smiling girl with blue eyes and beautiful teeth and a baby growing inside her. In Simone’s mind she had become a spectre, a doppelganger, a non-person that could be magicked into being if the situation required. She was the new identity of someone who had fled their old life and their old country; she was a scared half-grown woman in the back of a blacked-out Mercedes semi-conscious from the tranquilisers she was being fed. The name Jessica Novak, the weight of her birth certificate which was still in Simone’s bag, had been something that haunted her ever since she first saw the name etched in fountain pen on a red-bordered rectangle of cream paper, the name a cipher for the worst case scenario. ‘She’s a real girl,’ she said to Jazzy, her tone almost joyful.

  He nodded. ‘She is real. And obviously she’s right here on Facebook. I don’t know why we didn’t think to look for her online before. I mean, what kind of seventeen-year-old girl isn’t on Facebook?’

  ‘A trafficked prostitute?’ Simone attempted a light-hearted tone, but her words came out as black as she felt them to be. Because really she knew, and probably Jazzy knew too, the reason they had not yet tried to look for this young girl whose birth certificate had been in Mack’s flat was because they had never thought that there was a girl out there, born in London, whose name was Jessica Novak and who was busy living her own normal, happy life. But then it was the thought of this normal, happy life that gave Simone pause. ‘Are you sure this is her though? The girl in the birth certificate was only seventeen. She,’ she indicated the mother-to-be on the screen, ‘looks a bit older than that, wouldn’t you say? And, you know, having a baby? At that age?’

  Jazzy shrugged. ‘Plenty of people do it at that age. And younger.’

  ‘I know,’ Simone sighed, and she did know. ‘But she doesn’t look like a kid.’ She nodded towards Ayanna, arms curled up under her like a baby, stick-thin legs trailing behind her to the floor, her shapeless clothes swamping her. ‘That’s what I think a seventeen-year-old looks like. This girl’s all tits and eyebrows and scarily blue eyes.’ Christ, those eyes, Simone thought. Those glacial, crystal eyes. They were something.

  ‘That’s what they’re like these days,’ Jazzy said. ‘The number of pictures that get taken of them every single day, they need to be close-up ready, don’t they?’

  ‘Oh yeah, sorry Jazz, I forgot what an expert you are on young girls now.’

  ‘What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?’ he hissed, quietly so as not to wake Ayanna.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said sweetly, ‘I was just being sarcastic. Sorry.’ Then she sighed and reached out a hand to him. ‘No, sorry, Jazz. I didn’t mean anything. I’m just knackered, and I’m just, ah,’ she rubbed her eyes. ‘I’m pissed off with Mack. I’m so, so pissed off with him. I mean until now I thought it was just me he was mucking about, but all this stuff about Rory’s nursery, and Ayanna’s college and some creep wrecking your front door and leaving old newspapers in your house. What’s he doing to us? What could possibly matter to him so much that he would do this to us?’

  Jazzy shook his head. ‘I really don’t know. I know now what people mean when they say they haven’t got a clue. But she,’ he tapped the screen, ‘is our only clue. And it must be her, she must be the same Jessica Novak from Mack’s flat. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise, surely?

  Simone closed her eyes. She had never felt so tired. She wished, with that sudden primal yearning for home that sometimes hit her, that she had never left Louise’s house that morning. She wished she was still there, helping Lou grill fish fingers for the kids, then they would crack open their first beer of the evening and watch Pointless and they would laugh about inconsequential stuff then she would go to bed and sleep, properly sleep, in the peace and quiet, surrounded by love. She forced her eyes open again. ‘Right then. We need to find her. Where will she be?’

  Deptford College was not how Simone had imagined it, or at least its Health and Social Care campus, where Jessica Novak was a student, wasn’t. It wasn’t as though Simone had expected it to be Trinity College, Cambridge or anything but she had thought there might be a bit of red-brick, perhaps it would be a municipal-style Victorian building with maybe a strip of lawn and some rose bushes separating it from the main drag. Instead it was like a light industrial unit down a side street in a residential area. On the bus on the way there that morning the three of them had decided that Ayanna would be the scouting party and she strode through the main entrance with a trickle of other students. It was mid-morning, too late for them to be arriving for the first lecture of the day, too early for anyone who did not really need to be there to be hanging around. They probably should have waited until later in the day, Simone reflected, when there would have been more people around to provide cover, but once Ayanna was awake and fully apprised of the situation as it stood, all three of them had been desperate to get out of Jazzy’s house.

  She did not know if it was the lack of sleep or the rollercoaster of adrenaline highs and lows of the last few days, or just the fact of her recent conversation with Louise forcing her to finally see sense, but something made her blurt into the companionable silence that she and Jazzy sat in as they waited for Ayanna to wake. ‘I love Mack too, you know. I know I told you he said he loved me, but I never told you that. That I love him too.’

  He looked at her, his eyes hooded with tiredness, but the smile on his face was full and genuine. ‘I know. Course I know. It was obvious from way you told me what he’d said to you. I’m so glad.’

  It was the best thing he could ever have said and she had to close her eyes for a second to stop herself from crying. For so long, she could now see, she had assumed that Jazzy would be the only one she could ever really let in, that he was the only man she had ever met who she could really trust, who she knew beyond a doubt would never hurt her, was indeed incapable of hurting her. And the fact that he did not want her, despite the chances she had offered
him over the years, despite the fact that it was obvious to every person who knew them both that he could have had her if he wanted her, that meant that there was no other man left who she could feel safe with.

  She and Jazzy had lived together before they even met; they had both arrived at a terraced house in Exeter one September Saturday and found the Yale-locked bedrooms assigned to them by the university housing office, and then they had both gone separately down to the communal kitchen where they had started talking and not stopped for four hours. They were lifelong friends by the end of the first cup of tea and they both knew it. Simone, still fragile and terrified by the harm that Jed had done, had loved him immediately, something she had just as quickly dismissed as rebound freshers’ week madness. But it had lasted, even as their friendship grew deeper; it had got worse if anything. And yet Jazzy had never shown any sign of acknowledging or even noticing her desire for him. She was never forward with men, always waiting for them to make the first move, but she was sure she had been obvious enough that even someone as clueless about women as Jazzy would eventually notice that an opportunity beckoned.

  Throughout their university years she had had far more sexual partners than Jazzy had – in fact she thought he had only had two, both girls that he had met through Simone and who she then had to carry on being nice to despite wishing she could be sick on them. Neither of them had graduated to becoming Jazzy’s girlfriend. And as her own closeness to Jazzy continued unconsummated beyond university and into true adulthood, she slowly began to understand, at least on an intellectual level, that it was never going to happen for them. As they grew closer, as the years went by and they became permanent fixtures in each other’s lives, temptation became easy to resist and the pain lessened. It was so obviously unthinkable to Jazzy that he and Simone should share anything more physical than a head on a shoulder, a linked arm on a cold evening’s walk home from the pub, that the idea soon moved into the realm of unrealisable fantasy for her too. It was a crush, she supposed, if such a small, teenage word could ever be sufficient to describe such life-consuming heartbreak stretching over years of her life, and even the tightest crushes must eventually loosen their grip. In fairness to Jazzy, he had tried his hardest to ensure that he never gave her false hope, but sometimes, like now, she wondered whether he had done just that simply by keeping her in his life.