When You're Gone

by Marguerite O'Callaghan

  Then, Lydia sees a comment from someone called ‘Joe Taylor’ under Kate’s photograph:

  ‘best body iv seen in ages’.

  Lydia feels sick and clicks on his profile to see who he is, and if he’s said any other vulgar things about her sister. Sure enough, on his profile wall is a selection of cropped photos of Kate, so they just show her mouth, breasts, or bum. Underneath he’s written:

  ‘Shame this sexy girl has been taken away from us. RIP’.

  Lydia feels herself getting hot with anger and notices her hand is shaking. How dare he write ‘RIP’. Kate’s not dead! She scrolls through the rest of Joe’s wall and sees pretty much nothing but girls, breasts, a pole dancing video and a photograph of him with a baby. Lydia feels a mixture of sympathy for the child, and anger that he’s even allowed to have one.

  She puts her phone away and starts to make her way back towards home, when a poster on a tree catches her eye. She’d usually be walking too fast to even take the time to read something like this, but the fact that it might be a missing poster makes her feel connected to it somehow. Even if it’s just someone looking for a missing pet, she can relate.

  The poster is for a psychic in Hampstead and has a phone number and email address at the bottom. Lydia walks past, thinking that in another life, she is actually the kind of person who would visit a psychic. Then she stops; realising she has nothing to lose and she walks back to take a photo of the poster. Maybe she will contact them.

  When she gets back to the house, it’s after nine. Simon is just stirring. When he sees her enter the room, he reaches his hand out and playfully tugs at Lydia’s coat, pulling her gently towards the bed. She flops down next to him and kicks her shoes off, breathing a sigh of relief.

  ‘That’s it, lay down next to me.’ he says softly.

  Lydia is aware that she’s been very cold and distant with Simon and has little to give to the relationship at the moment, but she’s content to lie here for a while with him.

  They haven’t really talked properly in days, so she tells him about her bad night and going downstairs after her nightmare. Simon asks why she didn’t wake him and makes her promise she will if it happens again. Lydia nods and smiles at him and Simon kisses her gently, holding her face with one hand. She can tell by his breathing and the way he’s kissing her that he wants to have sex and the thought makes her feel like throwing up. His tongue reaches into her mouth, and he gets on top of her.

  ‘I’ve missed you’, he whispers in her ear.

  Suddenly, Lydia cannot bear his smell or the smell of the dirty sheets she’s sweated in all night. She’s exhausted and weak. She tries to kiss him back, but can’t quite bring herself to and starts to push him away. He doesn’t seem to notice.

  Lydia has never rejected him before. She’s avoided having sex or made up excuses when she doesn’t feel like it, but she’s never blatantly stopped things once they’ve got this far. He unzips her jeans and quickly pulls them down so he can move her underwear aside. She wriggles away, and mutters something about her parents being home. But, he’s ignoring her. His fingers are touching her and within seconds, they’re inside of her.

  ‘Simon! Get off me!’

  Lydia feels the rage again. The same feelings she had when she read the disgusting comments online about her sister or when that strange woman, Yukio, told her the ridiculous fairytale. She feels like she is the only person in the world that is taking Kate’s disappearance seriously?

  Simon moves off her and she expects him to apologise. Instead, he looks furious.

  ‘It’s been a month since we’ve had sex, Lyds. Don’t tell me this has anything to do with Kate, because she’s been missing for two weeks and we’ve been off for ages now. I can’t take it anymore.’

  Lydia can’t believe it. She never expected Simon to be feeling what she was feeling, but here he was; angry and dissatisfied just like she was.

  He asks if she thinks they’re working or if she wants to make things right again and Lydia shakes her head. She tells him she’s done.

  And it’s that easy. Within minutes, Simon is dressed and coldly wishing her goodbye and good luck.

  She waits until she hears the front door slam, before she breathes a sigh of relief, then walks to the window and watches Simon march down the street. She realises she feels nothing. Her heart is a cold empty hollow in her chest and she wonders if she ever really loved Simon. She puts her hand to her stomach, and asks herself if she can even remember what love is. Maybe it was all just a convenient illusion.

  When Lydia joins her mother in the living room a little while later, Barbara asks why Simon left without saying goodbye. She had assumed they had a fight, and is shocked when Lydia leans her head on her mum’s shoulder and in a monosyllabic voice, tells her they’ve broken up. Barbara asks if she’s sure, and Lydia tells her that she knows in her heart Simon isn’t the one for her, he doesn’t make her happy anymore, or understand her.

  Barbara decides to tell her about finding him in Kate’s room and how strange he had seemed.

  The thought of Simon in her sister’s room has made Lydia feel dizzy again for some reason, so she tells her mum she needs to lie down and goes back upstairs.

  But this time, she goes into Kate’s room. She doesn’t want to be in her own bed that smells of Simon.

  Under the cool sheets, Lydia immediately falls into a deep sleep and dreams she’s swimming in the ocean. Kate is next to her, splashing and laughing.

  Suddenly, the sand disappears under her feet. She’s treading in deep freezing water and turns to see her sister, but all she sees is the choppy sea. Kate is gone.

  Lydia starts to panic as salty water seeps into her mouth. She’s coughing, drowning, being pulled further and further out to sea. There’s a burning in her throat, her ears are ringing and she’s totally powerless. She can hear someone screaming at her to swim back to shore, but it’s not her they’re screaming for. It’s Kate. Suddenly, a hand grabs her, and Lydia turns to see Simon. She struggles to get away from him, but he pulls her ashore, drags her on to a sand bank and pushes her down, until she’s flat on her back.

  He’s angry and panting, his face distorted and he almost grunts at her.

  Lydia tries to scream, but no sound comes out. Then he grabs her throat with both hands, and starts to choke her.

  She wakes from the dream, screaming, leaps out of bed, and runs downstairs to Barbara.

  ‘I need Dr Hendry, Mummy. I think I’m going insane.’

  16

  McCarthy has received an email from Jared Cooper saying that he and his undercover sex-trafficking team have seen an advert in a private online forum for a ‘Forever Slave’ and they’re about to meet someone about it. They think there is a chance it could be Kate.

  An attached pdf file contains the forum post and advert. It sounds exactly like Kate Stone, matching her in age, weight, height, hair colour and skin tone.

  The trafficking team have seen posts like this before, advertising someone as a ‘live-in slave’. Most of the time the adverts are actually genuine and the ‘slave’ is not a sex worker but a fetishist who wants to be ‘owned’ by a master or mistress.

  But, this advert is different. For one thing, there are no photographs of the ‘slave’ and the user that has placed the advert, ‘MatchFive’, is already known to the team as someone who sells women and girls. They have been working on building a relationship with him over the past few months, purchasing illegal online content and showing an interest in other girls he has advertised.

  By purchasing the content, some of it violent, hardcore and potentially involving underage and non-consenting females, Jared and the team have given the impression that they’re willing to break the law in a very big way. The team have spent a lot of money with this guy, and Jared seems confident that he will be meeting with one of the men behind the advert this evening.

  McCarthy reads a few more of the adverts on the pdf and shakes hi
s head. He can’t believe there are people in the world who actually want to be owned and there are those that want to own them. He has heard that these people even draw up contracts to outline the terms of the relationship.

  It’s power play taken to a whole new level, and one of the reasons the human race never ceases to amaze McCarthy.

  17

  Lydia has been prescribed a mild anti-anxiety medication and is resting on the sofa. Dr Hendry has also written a letter to UCL that will hopefully mean she can take her end-of-year exams in August instead of June. There’s no way she’s able to concentrate on studying right now.

  Barbara pulls a blanket over her daughter and kisses her forehead.

  ‘Your dad will be home from work in a minute and we can all have a nice dinner together.’

  A few minutes later, Barbara’s in the kitchen preparing some vegetables for dinner, when she catches sight of Simon’s camera sitting on a shelf. Her mind immediately returns to the memory of finding him in Kate’s room that night, and how it had given her a strange feeling that she couldn’t seem to shake.

  Without really thinking, she picks up the camera and switches it on. She doesn’t know anything about photography or technology, but after a quick play-around, she figures out how to look at the photos on the little screen.

  She flicks back through a few recent images, and sees lots of boring shots of the heath, some clouds and even their dog, Molly. Barbara finds herself smiling at the innocence of it all and feels guilty for being so suspicious of Simon. He had always been loyal to Lydia, and it wasn’t his fault he was a bit different.

  But then, Barbara sees something that catches her eye and before she even knows what she’s looking at, a cold feeling washes over her. Something is very wrong.

  Even though she only took the first anti-anxiety tablet an hour ago, Lydia already feels better. She picks up her phone and decides to email Yukio to apologise for storming off the way she did the other day and to explain that she’s been having a tough time and would love it if Yukio could forgive her.

  Lydia hates the thought of upsetting anyone and the more she thinks about it, the more she realises she may have overreacted to the fairytale story Yukio told her. She had just been overwhelmed by the situation, and disappointed that Yukio didn’t know where Kate was.

  Brian arrives home at about six, and he and Lydia sit together in comfortable silence, half-watching the news, as Brian flicks through an astronomy magazine, and Lydia browses Facebook.

  Then Lydia turns to him.

  ‘I’m sorry Dad.’

  Brian looks at her curiously, shaking his head, and shrugging his shoulders.

  ‘Lydia, sorry for what? You’ve nothing to be sorry for as far as I’m concerned.’

  Her eyes fill with tears and Lydia tells him that she’s sorry that she’s not stronger.

  Before Brian can respond, Barbara enters the room, and when she sees her husband and daughter looking at one another, she knows they must be talking about something important. The couple aren’t used to Lydia being so teary and vulnerable. Neither of the girls have been particularly open with them about their private lives over the past couple of years and it seems strange now that Lydia is opening up.

  Lydia looks to her mother and is surprised to see Barbara staring out of the window, then notices what’s in her hands.

  Barbara looks down at the camera for a few seconds, then at Lydia, who giggles slightly in discomfort. She can see it’s Simon’s camera and wonders what her mother is doing with it and why she’s acting so strangely.

  Barbara hands it to her and asks her to take a look at the images on it.

  Brian crosses the room to sit next to Lydia. He’s also curious about what Barbara has seen on there that’s suddenly so important and he watches as Lydia scrolls through the images. They are all taken at a distance and at first glance, look like boring shots of random streets around Hampstead, and a few of the garden, the dog, or birds at the feeder. Then, Lydia spots Kate in one of the photographs and zooms in. Kate has her back to the camera, and is quite a distance away, but it’s definitely her. There are twenty, maybe thirty photographs of Kate like this, taken on different dates and at different places, but in every single one, she’s at a distance, and seems unaware she’s being photographed.

  Lydia feels numb, and she hands the camera back to her mother, then runs to the toilet next to the kitchen. She feels like she is going to throw up. She sits in there for a few minutes, trying to work out a plausible reason for Simon to have those photographs. But she can think of none, and instead, she feels the slow creep of panic rising inside of her, until it seems to pulsate in her temples, making her heartbeat sound like a loud drumming in her ears.

  Brian and Barbara sit in silence, waiting for their daughter to return. They are in shock too and know they have to go to the police with the images as soon as possible.

  This is not going to look good for Simon. They don’t want to assume anything yet, but if there is any chance that he’s done something or knows more than he’s letting on, they must get to the bottom of it.

  After a few minutes, Lydia comes back into the room and sits on the sofa with her arms crossed over her chest. She’s already thinking the same thing.

  ‘Simon knows something about where Kate is.’

  McCarthy gets the call from Brian Stone at 10PM, just as he and Fran are settling down with a nice bottle of red wine to watch a film. He whispers an apology to her and takes the call in the kitchen.

  After hearing what Brian has to say about the images they found on the camera, McCarthy tells him they will speak to Simon again, tomorrow and get to the bottom of this.

  Brian agrees to drop the camera off at the station first thing in the morning and not to speak to Simon or anyone else, until then.

  McCarthy returns to the sofa, looking obviously disturbed at what he’s just heard. Fran smiles at him and squeezes his hand.

  ‘Is it Kate Stone?’

  Her husband nods.

  ‘I think the sister’s boyfriend was stalking her. Going to speak to him tomorrow. This one just gets weirder and weirder.’

  18

  Early the next morning, Brian and Barbara take the camera to the police station in Hendon. They barely slept last night, imagining a hundred different scenarios about what Simon might know, or what he could have done. The photos of Kate are undoubtedly strange, but what did they mean, exactly?

  After McCarthy sees the images, they all agree that no-one will contact Simon before the police have a chance to and McCarthy makes it clear that the best thing to do is not give him any idea they have seen the camera, so he doesn’t have time to make a story up. They plan on bringing him in for questioning immediately.

  As soon as Lydia heard her parents leave the house to go to the station, she’d burst into tears. She’d taken sleeping tablets on top of the anxiety tablets last night, and they had left her groggy and heavy-headed, but at least allowed her to temporarily shut out what was happening.

  Now it has all come flooding back; the fact that Kate is missing, and Lydia can feel in her gut that Simon knows something and is lying to her.

  How did she not see this coming? Her own boyfriend was obsessed with her sister, probably in love with her, it seems.

  A new wave of nausea comes over Lydia and she opens the bedroom window to let some air in, then drinks the large glass of water that’s been sitting on her bed-side table all night.

  A thought occurs to her and she grabs her phone, scrolls to the photograph of the poster for the psychic, zooms in on the contact number and jots it down on a piece of paper.

  Lydia dials, takes a deep breath and tells herself that anything was worth a shot at this stage.

  The woman who answers the phone sounds about a hundred years old, but has a warm and patient voice. She tells Lydia that she has one available session this morning at ten, but the next time after that is in three days. Lydia quickly tells
her that she’ll be there at ten, and asks for the address.

  It turns out that the psychic is extremely close to Lydia, only a ten-minute walk away, and forty minutes later, she’s standing outside a large white house on Pond Street, across from the Royal Free Hospital.

  Lydia finishes one cigarette, immediately lights another, then leans in the doorway, trying to gather her thoughts. She had assumed the person she was about to see rented a room in a house, or shared an office with others. In fact, she had imagined a rather dingy place with candles, and scarves over lamps and had assumed the psychic would be a gypsy with long skirts and jewelry around her head and neck.

  Lydia mentally scolds herself for being so judgmental. This was a residential address and there was only one buzzer. It was no caravan, and whoever lived here was undoubtedly very wealthy. The houses along this road were worth an absolute fortune and mostly full of celebrities or city bankers.

  Lydia glances into the downstairs front room, and can make out a large fireplace, high ceilings, and lots of plants and books around the place. It’s modern, tastefully finished and looks more like it belongs to an interior designer than a psychic.

  Suffice to say, this is not what Lydia had expected from someone who left posters on trees next to a duck pond. But, her natural cynicism makes her think maybe this is all part of an elaborate con and the fancy house is purposefully used to lull rich Hampstead folk into a false sense of security, so they’ll be more willing to fall for a scam and part with their cash.