I Know You

by Annabel Kantaria

  Funny how lies can make you care so little for someone you thought you loved.

  *

  I come down when the police arrive. It’s DS Baldwin and DC Jones again. They nod and I take a seat at the dining table, a silent witness to the interview. They take Vivian’s details, then they ask Jake, just as I did, for any leads and I watch as my husband paces the living room, trying to come up with a list of places he and Vivian used to go – places that meant something to them. There’s a notepad in front of me and I pick up the pen lying next to it and start doodling. Boxy, angry doodles with lines and lots of hard shading. For god’s sake, I’m thinking: how difficult can it be?

  ‘Think back to when you first started going out,’ DS Baldwin says. ‘Who did she know? Did she mention any family, friends, colleagues? Where did she work? Who did she talk about?’

  ‘Her parents lived in Bristol but she didn’t have much to do with them when we were together,’ Jake says, tapping his head. ‘She used to go to her grandmother’s sometimes.’

  ‘What was her name? Do you have a number for her?’

  ‘Granny Sue, it was. She lived somewhere in north London, I think. Acton? God, I had her number in my address book. I’m sure I did.’

  Jake goes off and comes back with his old address book.

  ‘Here it is. But maybe she’s no longer with us. She was old, as I remember. In her late seventies even then.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  Jake struggles through a few names but isn’t sure about any of them. ‘I can picture faces,’ he says. ‘God, I just can’t remember the names. My memory…’

  ‘Where did you used to hang out with her?’ DS Baldwin asks.

  Jake runs both his hands through his hair – a pastiche of a distressed man. ‘We didn’t go out a lot. She didn’t like “sharing” me with other people, even strangers in restaurants. That’s how mad she was. If we went to a restaurant, she’d be paranoid I was talking too much to the waitress, and we’d end up fighting. It was too stressful. We hung out at home. Watched movies. Got takeaways.’

  ‘Love’s young dream,’ I say under my breath.

  He whirls to face me. ‘I told you she was nuts.’

  ‘And you married her?’

  We stare at each other: both accusing, both angry. It’s him who looks away first.

  ‘How about hotels?’ DC White asks. ‘Did you ever go for weekends away?’

  ‘We camped,’ he says, his voice flat. ‘She’s not going to have gone back to a campsite… is she?’ He walks to the window, lifts the curtain and stares out, then he turns back to the room and perches on the window ledge, stroking his chin. The rain’s got harder; the sky’s an unrelenting, heavy grey. I can’t bear to think of my baby in a tent in this weather.

  ‘Oh god, anything’s possible with her.’ Jake presses his fingers to his temples. ‘We used to camp down in Kent. There were a couple of farms there where you could pitch up. She liked horse-riding… near Maidstone they were, I think. I remember driving down the A20. And sometimes by the beach, near New Romney.’

  ‘Did she like any of them enough to go back? Were any of the holidays particularly special?’

  He closes his eyes. ‘I don’t know. Who knows what goes on in a mind like hers?’

  ‘Have you got any photos?’

  He laughs, a bitter bark. ‘She kept them all.’

  ‘Would you remember where they were?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Not without seeing pictures. Seen one campsite, seen ’em all.’

  ‘Could you find them online?’

  Jake tuts, but DS Baldwin asks for the iPad and calls up a map of Kent campsites, and Jake tries to remember all of the places he went with Vivian. After nearly an hour, there are five he’s ‘almost’ certain about.

  ‘We’ll look into it,’ says DS Baldwin. ‘We’ve got a few leads to go on here.’

  *

  Jake closes the front door after everyone when they leave, and walks back into the living room. It feels odd to be just the two of us. I feel like I’ve been abandoned with a stranger. I look about the living room, noting escape routes to the front and back doors, then realize how absurd I’m being. Jake buries his head in his hands.

  ‘We’re never going to find her. She’s created a new identity before. What’s to stop her doing it again? She could be anyone… anywhere!’

  We sit in silence for a minute or two. Blame hangs in the air – me blaming him; him blaming me.

  ‘I can’t believe “Anna” was Vivian,’ Jake suddenly says. ‘I can’t get my head around the fact it was her you were spending all that time with… What was she like?’

  I shrug. ‘She was all right, actually. I can’t deny it. I liked her.’

  ‘She made you like her. She’s clever like that. She knew everything about you and she made herself into something she knew you’d like.’

  Shame slides over me: isn’t that what I’d done to try and get her to like me? Look at the way I’d offered to help her design her living room, knowing that she’d just moved in.

  ‘She must have given something away,’ Jake says. ‘She was always round our house. You knew her for three months. You stayed with her! And she gave nothing away in three months? Nothing that made you suspect?’

  ‘No. I thought she was my friend.’

  ‘Oh please!’ Jake scoffs. ‘Friend? If you weren’t so desperate for friends, none of this would have happened. She saw you as an easy way in. You know that, don’t you?’ He shakes his head. ‘God, you were such a soft target.’

  ‘Hang on, hang on. You can’t go throwing this back at me. After what you’ve done, you cannot seriously blame me for this.’

  He holds up his hands. ‘Sorry… But, god, couldn’t you see she was a fucking nutcase?’

  ‘And couldn’t you “fucking” see that gambling was never going to solve our financial problems?’

  We glare at each other, quits.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ll sort it out, I promise. I’ll talk to the bank and come up with a repayment plan. All right? I don’t care if I have to work till I’m a hundred. I’ll pay that money back, okay?’

  I snort. ‘How did it happen? I just don’t get it.’

  Jake shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. Bored. Hotel rooms. An ad on a website. It looked like fun. I had a few wins, got too confident.’ He laughs bitterly. ‘I guess that’s how they sucker them all in.’

  ‘I can’t believe you fell for it. You of all people.’

  We lapse into silence. I put my face in my hands as if I can wipe it all out. Open my eyes and find it was all… what? A dream? Jake sits on the sofa, staring at nothing.

  ‘What did you talk about with her?’ he asks after some time. ‘Did she ask about me?’

  I close my eyes, like, do I really need to answer this?

  ‘She did, didn’t she?’ he says. ‘What did she ask? Nothing can be worse than what’s already happened.’

  My eyes are still shut and I’ve got my hand over my mouth. I honestly feel as if I’m going to throw up again.

  ‘What is it? You’ve got to tell me.’

  ‘She wanted to know about our sex life.’ My voice is a whisper.

  Jake spins his head to face me. ‘What?’

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘She asked you about our sex life and you didn’t think that was odd?’ Jake speaks slowly, as if he’s explaining to a child.

  ‘It was in context. To do with being pregnant. Women always talk about these things. It wasn’t odd.’

  But then I remember her questions about how Jake and I kept our love life alive… I remember that I told her about the kinky photos, about the role play, and I sink backwards on the sofa. What must she have thought? Did she do that with Jake, too?

  ‘Well, it’s not going to change anything now,’ I say. ‘What you need to do is figure out where she might be.’

  Jake slams a fist into a sofa cushion.

  ‘I don’t know! I don’t blood
y know!’ He lets his head slump down, and I realize that he’s crying. More than twenty-four hours after our son was taken, my husband actually cries.

  I file that thought away for the divorce court.

  Fifty-five

  I don’t know how either of us got any sleep that night but somehow, I guess, the body takes what it needs, even in times of stress. I was convinced there was no point in going to bed but did so just because what else was there to do? And the next thing I knew was Jake shaking me awake. He was crouched over me, his eyes sunken and lined, and thick, dark stubble making him look like some sort of runaway, his hair all over the place. Even though he was dressed, there was a rancid smell of sweat coming off him. I remember recoiling.

  ‘What? Have they found him?’ I ask, jolting awake.

  ‘You got an email from Vivian! It’s on the iPad.’ I’m too shocked to worry about the fact he’s been going through my email.

  ‘What?’ I’m upright now, rubbing sleep from my eyes. ‘What does she say? Is Joe okay?’

  He thrusts the iPad at me and I read: ‘I know you’ll get over this. Yeah, I get that that sounds harsh, but don’t forget the main thing here: I know you.’

  I stop and look at Jake. He raises both eyebrows at me.

  ‘You’ve read this?’ I ask and he nods. I look back down at the words, finding my place again.

  Sometimes, as I watch you floundering about in your pathetic life, worrying about pathetic Sarah coming on to your husband, I think I know you better than you know yourself. Actually, not sometimes: always.

  I’m watching you pack for our States trip now, and I have to stop myself laughing. You’re such an innocent; so easy to manipulate. You make my job too easy. ‘Yes, Tay, course I’ll carry a bag of essentials for Joe. Course I will, hon, it’s no trouble.’ You do realize you’re packing me a bag so I can take his baby, don’t you? Oh god, I have to look away lest I laugh. And I watch you planning for the flight and I want to laugh again: you’re not going anywhere, sunshine. There’ll be no flight for you.

  But the thing is, Jake’s baby should always have been mine. Did you know we were trying for a baby when he met you? Has he told you that yet?

  So, this is all your fault. That day you sat on that fucking plane with him; that was the day you set the ball in motion. You could have ignored him. You could have put your fucking headphones on, watched a movie, gone to sleep, done anything except ruin my marriage.

  But, you know what? Karma’s a bitch and she’s been chasing you. Did you feel her snapping at your heels as you met your new best friend? As you interior-designed her living room and invited her to join your book club? You take something from me, and I’ll take something from you. It’s how life works, honey. Tit for tat. An eye for an eye – isn’t that what they say?

  Oh, I had fun playing with you. I had fun winding you up about Sarah and making you think Simon was stalking me. Poor Simon. The police won’t find anything on him. He was just a pawn. Collateral damage, if you like.

  And you – yeah, you’ll get over this. You barely knew Joe. It was me who took care of him, and me who loved him, not you. You never looked like you enjoyed being his mum, so let’s say I’m giving you a second chance. Jake’s son belongs with me.

  It’s the baby he promised me.

  He’s mine now. And, when he finds us, Jake will be mine too.

  ‘She wants you to find her!’ I say, dropping the iPad on my lap.

  ‘Come on! Think! You’ve got to know where she is. She wants you!’

  Jake is striding up and down the bedroom, a parody of ‘man thinking’. At the window, the curtains are growing lighter as the first rays of the sun spider towards the horizon. Nearly dawn. And then the iPad pings and another email comes in. The name ‘Anna Jones’ right there on my screen. I open it and my heart stops: it’s a photo, which opens in the body of the email.

  ‘Joe!’ Tears erupt from my eyes and I wipe them away as I stare at the photo, devouring it, desperate for clues. She’s taken it since the airport. He’s there in the same outfit, with the same blanket, lying flat on some sort of makeshift bed. He looks… okay. Smaller than I pictured in my mind – oh god, so small – but okay. The lighting is dim; it doesn’t look like she’s inside a house of any sort. I enlarge the picture as much as I can, raise the phone to my lips and kiss the screen.

  ‘Show me,’ Jake says and grabs the iPad from me. I watch as his eyes move over it, presumably taking in the same details as I did. He expands the picture, examines it, and then he looks upwards as if he’s reading some invisible text written on the ceiling, and pumps the air with his fist.

  ‘I’ve got it!’

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘Got it! I think I know where they are!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I can’t explain, let’s go.’

  ‘Now? Shouldn’t we wait for the police?’

  ‘Sod the police. I know where she is!’

  I jump out of bed and pull on yesterday’s clothes while Jake runs downstairs. As I wash my face and drag a comb through my hair I can hear him jangling the keys in the hall downstairs.

  ‘Come on, it’s not a bloody fashion show,’ he shouts.

  I’ve got that slightly panicky feeling, slightly giddy, like my mind hasn’t yet connected with my body. I look around the familiar room, not knowing what I’m looking for. Do I need to take anything? I clatter down the stairs, grab my coat from the hallway and follow Jake out of the front door, closing it behind me with a decisive bang. I feel underprepared without the pram, the car seat, the nappy bag. Underprepared, too, in thinking about what’s going to happen if we find her. She’s convinced he’ll want to stay with her. What will I do when I get Joe back? Jake starts the car then blows on his hands and rubs them together.

  ‘The heater’ll come on soon.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘It’s a warehouse. Not far.’

  ‘A warehouse? What?’

  But Jake just shakes his head.

  The rush hour’s starting and traffic isn’t as thin as I’d have hoped. Jake drives badly, in a silence marred only by the metronomic swish of the wipers and the curses Jake throws at cars that pull out in front of him or traffic lights he misses. He under and overtakes where he can, cutting in to the front of queues, hooting and being hooted at. We start to leave the main part of town and head in a direction I don’t know, into a more industrial area. The road widens and the houses give way to warehouses, set back from the road. Jake slows down, checking what we’re passing on the left until he sees a turn and swerves into some sort of industrial estate. He takes a right and a left, then pulls up outside a warehouse and stops the engine.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘It’s a long shot, but it looked like she was here.’

  I look at the warehouses all around. ‘Do you actually know where we are?’

  Jake nods forward. ‘Just a bit further. There was a disused warehouse here. We used to climb up the fire escape to the roof and look at the stars. You had a pretty good view of London, too. She liked to go up there and look at the skyline.’

  Jealousy rises in me, and I try to scribble out images as fast as they form in my head: Anna and Jake climbing the fire escape – her running ahead, maybe, young and pretty, leading him to her special place. I know Anna, she’ll have thought of everything – she’ll have gone ahead and put a blanket up there, taken a bottle of wine. I see the two of them lying back to look at the stars – maybe even making love. Oh my god! It hasn’t hit me till now, but the thought that Anna was married to Jake! Had sex. Went to bed together. Woke up together. That my best friend knew my husband so intimately. But she’s not my best friend, I tell myself, with yet another sinking realization that the whole friendship was fake. All this passes through my head in a fraction of a second.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s still disused – maybe someone’s bought it – or if you can even still get up there. This was a good few years ago,’ Jake says.

  I e
xhale. ‘You really think she might have come here?’ I can’t keep the doubt out of my voice.

  ‘I can’t think where else,’ Jake snaps. ‘If she wanted me to find her, this is where she’d come. It’s where we…’ His voice trails off and I complete the sentence in my head: first kissed? First slept together? Got engaged? Tiredness makes my eyes pop.

  ‘Right,’ says Jake. He unbuckles his car seat and I do the same. We get out and pull our hoods up: the rain is steady and cold. Jake indicates that we should walk in single file, sticking to the shadow of the warehouses. The sun’s barely up.

  ‘It’s a little way,’ he says, turning back to me. ‘I didn’t want her to see the car. If she’s here, I don’t want to scare her off. Who knows what state of mind she’ll be in. She’s not exactly stable.’

  He turns another corner and then stops, holding his arm out to stop me, too. The building we’re facing is derelict, the majority of its windows broken. There’s graffiti daubed on its grey walls, weeds flourishing, and rubbish littered all around. The rain’s already plastered my fringe to my head, and rain trickles down my face. I wipe at it with hands already stiff with cold.

  ‘Is this it?’ I mouth.

  Jake nods. ‘The fire escape’s round the back.’

  He starts to skirt around the perimeter of the building, picking his way through industrial rubbish: planks of wood, empty paint canisters, piles of bricks, lumps of broken concrete, decaying black bags, a snarl of barbed wire, a broken toilet, and piles of jagged boarding. I follow, gingerly, trying not to catch my clothes or twist my ankle. Up ahead, Jake stops and holds up his hand. I freeze, then shrug as he remains motionless. He puts his finger to his lips to shush me, then mimes listening towards a door to the ground floor of the warehouse. I strain but can’t hear anything so I tiptoe closer until I’m standing slightly behind Jake. He’s tilting his head towards the door, then he holds up his index finger, pointing towards the door, and turns to me questioningly. I shrug – I didn’t hear anything. We both lean closer to the door and then, just as Jake raises his finger again, I hear it too: the murmur of a voice coming from inside. Jake and I look at each other, his face mirroring the panic that I feel. Is she inside? Suddenly I realize we have no plan. If it’s Anna in there, and if she has Joe, will she simply hand him over? Jake and I stare at each other, our eyes hooked to each other, then he mouths ‘Okay?’ and I nod.