Say You're Sorry

by Michael Robotham

  According to the TV weather reports, a dense block of cold air is sitting over Greenland and Iceland, blocking the jet stream from the Atlantic. At the same time winds from the Arctic and Siberia have “turbo-charged” the cold because of something called an Arctic Oscillation.

  Normally, I don’t mind the snow. It can hide a lot of sins. London looks beautiful under laundered sheets, like a city from a fairy tale or a sound studio. But today I need the trains to be running on time. Charlie is coming up to London and we’re going to spend four days together in Oxford. This is a father–daughter bonding weekend although she would probably call it something else.

  A boy is involved. His name is Jacob.

  “Couldn’t you find an Edward?” I asked Charlie. She gave me a look—the one she learned from her mother.

  I don’t know much about Jacob other than his brand of underwear, which he advertises below his arse crack. He could be very nice. He may have a vocabulary. I do know that he’s five years older than Charlie, and that they were caught together in her bedroom with the door closed. Kissing, they said, although Charlie’s blouse was unbuttoned.

  “You have to talk to her,” Julianne told me, “but do it gently. We don’t want to give her a complex.”

  “What sort of complex could we give her?” I asked.

  “We could turn her off sex.”

  “That sounds like a bonus.”

  Julianne didn’t find this funny. She has visions of Charlie succumbing to low self-esteem, which apparently is the first step on the slippery slope to eating disorders, rotten teeth, a bad complexion, tumbling grades, drug addiction and prostitution. I’m exaggerating of course, but at least Julianne turns to me for advice.

  We’re estranged, not divorced. The subject is raised occasionally (never by me) but we haven’t got round to signing the papers. In the meantime, we share the raising of two daughters, one of them a bright, enchanting seven-year-old, the other a teenager with a smart mouth and a dozen different moods.

  I moved back to London eight months ago. Sadly, I don’t see as much of the girls, which is a shame. I have almost come full circle—establishing a new clinical practice and living in north London. This is how it used to be five years ago when Julianne and I had a house on the border of Camden Town and Primrose Hill. In the summer, when the windows were open, we could hear the sound of lions and hyenas at London Zoo. It was like being on safari without the minivans.

  Now I live in a one-bedroom flat that reminds me of something I had when I was at college—cheap, transitory, full of mismatched furniture and a fridge stocked with Indian pickles and chutneys.

  I try not to dwell on the past. I touch it only gingerly with the barest tips of my thoughts, as though it were a worrying lump in my testis, probably benign, but lethal until proven otherwise.

  I am practicing again. There is a bronze plaque on the door saying JOSEPH O’LOUGHLIN, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST, with various letters after my name. Most of my referrals are from the Crown Prosecution Service, although I work two days a week for the NHS.

  So far today I have seen a cross-dressing car salesman, an obsessive-compulsive florist and a nightclub bouncer with anger management issues. None of them are particularly dangerous, simply struggling to cope.

  My secretary, Bronwyn, knocks on the door. She’s an agency temp who chews gum faster than she types.

  “Your two-o’clock is here,” she says. “I was wondering if I could leave early today?”

  “You left early yesterday.”

  “Yes.”

  She departs without further discussion.

  Mandy enters, aged twenty-nine, blonde and overweight, with terrible skin and eyes that should belong to an older woman. She has been sent to see me because her two children were found alone in a locked flat in Hackney. Mandy had gone clubbing with her boyfriend and slept over at his place. She told police that she felt her daughter, aged six, was old enough to look after her younger brother, four. Both children are fine, by the way. A neighbor found them fluttering like chickens over the biscuit crumbs and feces that dotted the carpet.

  Mandy looks at me accusingly now, as though I’m personally responsible for her children being taken into care. For the next fifty minutes we discuss her history and I listen to her excuses. We agree to meet next week and I write up my notes.

  It’s just after three. Charlie’s train arrives in half an hour and I’m going to meet her at the station. I don’t know what we’ll do in Oxford on the weekend. I’m due to talk at a mental health symposium, although I can’t imagine anyone showing up, given the weather, but the tickets have been sent (first class) and they’ve booked me into a nice hotel.

  Packing my briefcase, I take my overnight bag from the cupboard and lock up the office. Bronwyn has already gone, leaving a hint of her perfume and a lump of chewing gum stuck to her mug.

  At Paddington Station I look for Charlie among crowds of passengers spilling from the carriages of the First Great Western service. She’s among the last off the train. She’s talking to a boy who is pushing a mountain bike with all the nonchalance of a Ferrari driver. He’s wearing a duffel coat and is cultivating sideburns.

  The boy rides away. Charlie restores a set of white earbuds to her ears. She’s wearing jeans, a baggy sweater and an overcoat left over from the German Luftwaffe.

  She offers me each cheek to kiss and then leans into a hug.

  “Who was that?”

  “Just a guy.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “On the train.”

  “What was his name?”

  She stops me. “Is this going to be twenty questions, Dad, because I didn’t take notes. Was I supposed to take notes? You should have warned me. I could have written you a full report.”

  The sarcasm she inherited from her mother, or maybe they teach it at that private school that costs me so much money.

  “I was just making conversation.”

  Charlie shrugs. “His name is Christian, he’s eighteen, he comes from Bristol and he’s going to be a doctor—a pediatrician to be exact—and he thinks he might work in the Third World for a while, but he’s not my type.”

  “You have a type?”

  “Yep.”

  “May I ask what your type is?”

  She sighs, weary of explaining things. “No girl my age should ever date a boy her parents would approve of.”

  “Is that a rule?”

  “Yep.”

  I take her bag and check the departures board. Our train to Oxford leaves in forty minutes.

  “So is there any news I should know about? Any latest developments?”

  “Nope.”

  “How’s school?”

  “Good.”

  “Emma?”

  “She’s fine.”

  I’m interrogating her again. Charlie isn’t a talker. Her baseline demeanor is too-cool-to-care.

  We buy sandwiches in plastic triangles and soft drinks in plastic bottles. Charlie puts her headphones back in her ears so I can hear the fuzzy thunga-thunga-twang as we board the train and sit opposite each other.

  She has dyed her hair since I saw her last and has an annoying fringe that falls over her eyes. I worry about her. She frowns too often. For some reason she seems compelled to figure out life too early, long before she has the equipment.

  The train leaves on time and we pass out of London, the wheels playing a jazz percussion beneath my feet. Houses give way to fields—a landscape frozen into still life, where the only signs of life are smudges of smoke rising from chimneys or the headlights of cars waiting at crossings.

  A couple are kissing in the seats across the aisle, locked together. Her leg is pressed between his thighs.

  “That’s disgusting,” says Charlie.

  “They’re just kissing.”

  “I can hear suction.”

  “It’s a public place.”

  “They should get a room.”

  I glance at the couple again and feel a
Pavlovian twinge of arousal or nostalgia. The girl is young and pretty. She reminds me of Julianne at the same age. Being in love. Belonging to someone.

  Just outside of Oxford, the train slows and stops. The wheels creak forward periodically and then shudder to a standstill. Charlie presses her hand against the carriage window and watches a long line of men move across a snowy field, bent at the waist, as though pulling invisible plows.

  “Have they lost something?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The train nudges forward again. Through the sleet-streaked window I see a police car bogged axle deep in snow on a farm track. A muddy Land Rover is parked on the nearby embankment. A circle of men, figures in white, are erecting a canvas tent at the edge of a lake. Spreading a domed arch over the spars, they fight against the wind, which makes the canvas flap and snap until pegs are driven into the frozen earth and ropes are pulled tight.

  As the train edges past, I see what they’re trying to shield. At first it looks like cast-off clothing or a dead animal, but then I recognize the human shape: a body, trapped beneath the ice like an insect locked in clear amber.

  Charlie sees it too.

  “Was there some sort of accident?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Did they fall from a train?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Charlie presses her forehead to the glass.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t look,” I say. “You might have nightmares.”

  “I’m not six.”

  The train shudders and picks up speed again. Snow swirls like confetti from the roof. For a brief moment, the world has tilted out of true and I feel a sense of growing disquiet. There is a void in the world… somebody not coming home.

  I’m here.

  I want to shout it.

  Scream it.

  I’m here.

  I’M HERE

  I’M HERE!

  Three days. Something has gone wrong. Tash should be back by now. Maybe George caught her. Maybe he hit her over the head with a shovel and buried her in the forest, which he always said he’d do if we escaped.

  Maybe she’s lost. Tash doesn’t have a great sense of direction. Once she managed to get lost at Westgate Shopping Center in Oxford when we were supposed to meet at Apricot to spend my Christmas money on a beaded belt and a pair of dark wash jeans.

  That’s the day Tash got into a fight with Bianca Dwyer and threatened to stab her with a pen because she was flirting with Aiden Foster. She would have done it too. Tash once stabbed me with a pen, right through my school tights. I have the world’s tiniest tattoo as evidence. She was angry because I lost the friendship ring that she gave me for my twelfth birthday.

  Anyway, Tash has a terrible sense of direction—almost as bad as her taste in boyfriends.

  I’m so cold it’s unbelievable. I’m wearing every piece of clothing—and some of Tash’s stuff too. I know she won’t mind.

  I pull the blanket over my head. Smell my stale breath. Sweat. Every little while I poke my head out and take a few gulps of clean air and then duck under again.

  Maybe I will die of the cold before they find me.

  It was different those first few weeks. It was summer and the attic room was hot under the tiles. We had a proper bed, decent food and could watch the TV. George told us we’d be going home soon. He didn’t seem like a monster. He brought us magazines to read and oversized chocolate bars.

  I don’t know if George is his real name. Tash came up with it. She said it suited him because he looked like a younger, fatter version of George Clooney, but I think we should have called him Freddy like the guy in Nightmare on Elm Street or that other sicko who wears a hockey mask and carries a chainsaw.

  In the beginning George talked a lot about a ransom.

  “Your parents are rich,” he told me, “but they don’t want to pay.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “They don’t want you back.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  It was another lie. There was never going to be a ransom demand. How can you pay for something if nobody knows the price?

  Chained together on the bed, we watched the TV, waiting for news. Meanwhile, the country watched their TVs and waited for news. Everybody had an opinion. Every rumor was dissected. We were kidnapped by an Internet pedophile, according to one story. He’d met us online in a chatroom and made us take off our clothes. As if!

  A clairvoyant from Bristol said we were dead and our bodies had been dumped in water. The police dragged the river at Abingdon and searched dozens of wells and drainage ditches.

  Mrs. Jarvis, our next-door neighbor, told police she saw a man peering through her bedroom window when she was undressing. Tash laughed at that one. “Jarvis leaves her bedroom curtains open every night, hoping someone might look.”

  A London cabbie claimed he’d seen us outside a cinema in Finchley. And a motorist in High Barnet reported seeing two girls in the back of a white van pressing their hands against the windows.

  Why is it always a white van? Nobody ever sees kids being snatched by people in purple vans or yellow vans.

  Tash’s brother Hayden told reporters that he’d seen a man acting suspiciously in a field not far from Bingham. He took them back to the scene, pointing out the exact place. When he talked about Tash he almost cried, wiping his eyes and threatening to kill anyone who hurt her.

  It’s amazing how the truth can be stretched so thin that if people turned it sideways it would probably disappear. It’s like they invented a fantasy version of our lives and pretended it was real.

  The Sun offered £200,000 for information leading to our recovery. Suddenly, there were “sightings” in Bristol, Manchester, Aberdeen, Lockerbie and Dover—surges of hope and then despair.

  The Oxford Mail revealed there were 984 registered sex offenders in Oxfordshire. More than three hundred lived within a fifteen-mile radius of Bingham. Who knew there were so many perverts living so close?

  One of them was old Mr. Purvis, who has a house opposite the green. He’s a creepy old guy who hangs around the train station telling girls they remind him of his daughter.

  Police dug up Mr. Purvis’s garden but they didn’t find anything except the skeleton of his dog Buster. By that time, people had marched on the house, calling him a child killer and a pedo.

  The police had to rescue Mr. Purvis, taking him away with a blanket over his head. You could just see his baggy trousers and his brown shoes with one sock hanging down. Somebody pulled the blanket away and he looked like a frightened old man.

  Things just got worse after that. Tash’s Uncle Victor drew up a list of people who were new to Bingham—foreigners mainly. Outsiders. He had a mate who was a plumber and they put together a posse of “concerned locals.” Then they drove from house to house, saying someone had reported a gas leak and they had a legal right to enter.

  The police arrested Victor, but not without a scuffle. He told the TV cameras the police weren’t doing enough. They should never have closed the local police station, he said. I didn’t know Bingham had ever had a police station.

  The same people who were quick to weep were quick to hate… and to criticize. The police were accused of making mistakes. They reacted too slowly or rushed ahead or searched blind alleys or ignored the obvious or kept families in the dark.

  When the chorus grew loud enough, the police pushed back. Rumors began circulating. We weren’t the angels we’d been portrayed as being. We were promiscuous. Feral. Delinquent. Tash was a wild child who had been expelled from school. Her father had spent time in prison. My dad had taken obscene bonuses while taxpayers were bailing out his bank.

  Almost overnight Bingham went from being a quaint, sleepy village to being the heart of darkness—full of teenage sex, drugs and binge drinking. The same well-wishers and do-gooders who had searched for us and written sympathy cards and donated money were tut-tutting and shaking their heads. The whole town hummed with disapproval and the country follow
ed.

  Flowers rotted in their cellophane, balloons sagged to the ground, soft toys grew damp and the handwritten notes began leaking. The gloss began wearing off Bingham like cheap nail polish and underneath was something ugly and rank.

  2

  Oxford is blanketed by snow, surprised by its own silence. Mounds of dirty ice have been plowed to the sides of the roads or shoveled from driveways and footpaths. The dreaming spires look particularly pensive, shrouded by mist and guarded by gargoyles with beards of ice.

  I’ve spent the morning preparing my conference speech, sitting on a sprawling armchair in the lounge of the Randolph Hotel. There is a Morse Bar—named after the fictional detective—with photographs around the walls of the lead characters.

  Charlie has been shopping all morning in Cornmarket Street. She’s standing in front of the open fire, warming up.

  “Hungry?”

  “Starving.”

  “How about sushi?”

  “I don’t like Japanese.”

  “It’s very healthy.”

  “Not for whales or for dolphins.”

  “We’re not going to eat whale or dolphin.”

  “What about the blue fin tuna?”

  “So you’re boycotting all things Japanese?”

  “Until they stop their so-called scientific whaling program.”

  My left arm trembles. My medication is wearing off and an unseen force is tugging at my invisible strings like a fish nibbling on a baited hook.

  I can give you chapter and verse about my condition, having read every paper, medical journal, celebrity autobiography and online blog about Parkinson’s. I know the theories, the symptoms, the prognosis and the possible treatments—all of which will delay the progress but cannot cure my condition. I haven’t given up the search. I have given up obsessing over it.

  Glancing over Charlie’s shoulder, I see two men in the foyer, shrugging off their overcoats. Beads of moisture spray the marble tiles. They have mud on their shoes and a farmyard smell about them.