How to Disappear

by Gillian McAllister

  Reverse image searching – scan the photograph of them to search for similar images.

  Social media research – have they contacted anyone from the past?

  Put up a fake job advertisement they would be interested in and see if anybody applies.

  Monitor any niche or specific hobbies they had, Facebook groups, etc.

  Good old word of mouth, especially if a photograph of their old identity is in their possession. Unless they never leave their house, somebody will find them. Eventually.

  If you need any assistance with skip tracing, do call us on …

  He closes the website down and starts his scraper but, instead of an image of Lauren, he uses a stock image of a blonde woman. Similar enough to yield results that the group will chase up.

  Next, he messages the group.

  What’s the plan, when we find her? He says.

  He’s trying to elicit ‘a conspiracy to harm’ for Lottie.

  What do you think? Kevin writes back now.

  The defendant’s father, also awake in the middle of the night. For different reasons to Aidan, but similar, too.

  Are we prepared? Aidan writes. Do we need weapons?

  Leave that to me, Kevin says.

  Aidan stares at it for a while. It’s almost enough. Almost.

  But look at this, Kevin types.

  A photo appears. It’s Luke, a younger Luke, in the Holloway blue and yellow. Neat football socks pulled up over his shins. Muscle definition in his arms, across his chest, visible even underneath the kit. Pink cheeks. The world ahead of him: that is what Kevin is trying to say.

  Lies ruined this for us, he says.

  Too fucking right, Dr NoGood writes back. I’m angry all over again.

  Aidan looks at the messages for a second. Is it about justice for his kid, or is it about protecting himself from a prosecution? Both, Aidan thinks sadly. The duality of parenthood. Aidan’s actions aren’t solely in protection of Zara, after all. He wants his wife back. For himself.

  He goes back to bed and, as sleep comes for him, the neuroses of the day seem to fall away. The hyper-vigilance, the information gathering, keeping all the plates spinning. And he’s left with what he’s avoiding: loneliness. A loneliness so potent it feels like a physical pain, deep in his stomach. He rolls on to his side and draws his knees up to his chest and clutches them, letting the sobs out. Tears fall sideways, running across the bridge of his nose and into his ears, and still more come. Stupid sobs. They sound wrong, coming from a man. Deep, husky shrieks of pain.

  He misses her, he misses her, he misses her. He found her so late in life, and he’s lost her so fast.

  Bill rolls over and huffs a warm jet of air into Aidan’s ear. He reaches behind him to stroke Bill’s ears, and they fall asleep like that, together. A man and the dog that belongs to the woman he loves.

  32

  Lauren

  Coniston, the Lake District

  One week gone

  ‘And that’s it, now just ease the car into third,’ Lauren’s driving instructor, Janey, says. She’s not at all like how Lauren thought she might be. She’s tall, blonde, glamorous in a sort of undone way, and has a ring on each finger, including her thumbs.

  ‘It won’t go into third,’ Lauren says, wrenching the clutch.

  The car lurches forward, a jack rabbit jump, and Janey uses her brake.

  ‘Okay, let’s start again, in first gear,’ she says nicely.

  Lauren knows the protection service arranged these lessons, knows this instructor has been checked, and yet, she is still tense and terrified, alone in a car with a stranger.

  There are tears in Lauren’s throat. She tries to swallow them down. Restart the engine, okay, now clutch down … she pulls away.

  ‘And now second gear,’ Janey says.

  Lauren slides the gear stick down.

  ‘And now – slowly – up to third as we pick up speed,’ Janey says.

  ‘I’m pretty sure this car doesn’t have a third gear,’ Lauren says, with a strained laugh. ‘It won’t go in!’

  ‘It will,’ Janey says.

  Lauren looks out in front of them at the Lake District rain, the grey stone buildings. Two men are standing at the bottom of the street, and, of course, it crosses Lauren’s mind that they might want to kill her daughter. She stalls the car.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Janey says.

  ‘Just need to get used to driving, I guess,’ Lauren says.

  ‘Maybe somebody could take you out for extra practice,’ Janey says.

  ‘Maybe,’ Lauren echoes. Her loneliness may as well have come and sat in the car between them. Somebody to take her out for extra lessons. A small favour, half an hour, an hour. But she has nobody who could do it. Not a single person. No relatives. No friends. No Facebook acquaintances. No colleagues she can call on.

  ‘I’m a rubbish driver,’ Lauren says, and the tears that are constantly threatening behind her eyes spill over. ‘God, sorry.’

  ‘Learning to drive brings everyone down to the same level,’ Janey says sympathetically. ‘I’ve seen the full range of emotions in this car. But you will get there. Everyone does.’

  ‘I can’t even change gear!’

  ‘You can,’ Janey says.

  ‘Sorry,’ Lauren says again, rubbing at her nose. ‘Been a tough week.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Janey says.

  There is something confessional about a quiet car in the late afternoon in the winter. The heating is on. The headlights make the frost sparkle. And here is a stranger, next to her, who could become a friend.

  ‘Yeah,’ Lauren says. ‘I …’ And then the hands of the protection service grab her, and pull her back, back out of danger. ‘I mean, I … had a bad bereavement,’ she lies.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,’ Janey says, her cheeks reddening.

  Lauren sighs and looks out of the window, the silence feeling too loaded to interrupt. The truth is, the advice for the bereaved doesn’t apply when the person you’re grieving is yourself.

  God, she wants to shop. She wants to go home and buy something ostentatious. A gingerbread house for Christmas. A stack of hotel fluffy towels that cost £50 each. She stares into the distance as she fantasizes.

  ‘Look, let’s stop for today,’ Janey says kindly. ‘Your friend booked the crash course, didn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Lauren says, thinking that Jon is no friend of hers.

  ‘So let me give you my number so you can come direct – if you have any problems, or need to reschedule.’ Janey gestures and Lauren passes her phone over. Janey navigates to the contacts.

  And that’s when it happens. Just a flash, a blink, something flitting across Janey’s expression as she sees the contacts list. Jon. Sienna. And nobody else. Utterly empty.

  ‘New phone,’ Lauren says pathetically.

  ‘Sure,’ Janey says.

  Jon pays them a cursory visit that evening. Lauren hides the burner phone in the back of the wardrobe. She almost laughs as she does it. As if he is going to strip search her, go through her handbag. Hardly. He asks them a handful of questions about how they’re getting on before he stands up to leave.

  At the door, Lauren says to him, ‘Do most people find it as hard as I am?’

  In the November air, she draws her cardigan more tightly around her waist.

  Jon motions outside, and she grabs a coat, follows him and closes the door behind them. His shoes crunch on the gravel driveway as he steps back. They are alone, together, his car keys in his hand, his dinner likely waiting on a table somewhere, wherever he comes from. His breath smokes the air as he exhales.

  ‘It’s an upheaval,’ he says. ‘All change is tough. Would you say you’re coping – or wanting to do things that would jeopardize you?’

  Lauren’s body fizzes in the cold air. She so wants to tell him about the burner phone, suddenly, in the manner of a child confessing to their parent. Attention seeking, rebelling. This is how badly I am coping, she would sa
y, leading him upstairs and showing him the cheap, untraceable flip phone. But she won’t. She’s starting her job at the nursery tomorrow. She’s got to keep it together.

  ‘I can’t imagine,’ Jon says. He nods to her. ‘Let’s go round the block.’ He pockets his car keys and sets off towards the left. It must be safe, mustn’t it, to head out into the night, to leave Zara inside, if he, an ex-cop, thinks so? She falls into step beside him, torn between wanting to confide in him, wanting him to hold her unhappiness outside of her for a while, and wanting to distance herself and her secrets.

  ‘I’m scared all the time,’ she says to him, in the end. She’ll confide, she’ll cry, he’ll console her, but she won’t tell him about the phone. Intimacy is easy for Lauren. Secrets pour from her like a river that’s burst its banks. Indiscriminate sharing. Everyone gets the same thing. Ray next door knows as much about her life as her closest friends. ‘That I’ll make a mistake.’

  ‘But if you live it, you’ll get used to it,’ Jon says.

  Jon is one of those people whose message never changes, no matter the different tactics somebody like Lauren tries. He is never going to tell her she can go back to London, or that one slip-up won’t hurt. Lauren bends, but he doesn’t yield.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Definitely,’ he says.

  They walk past a row of cottages. Inside the first, a woman is serving what looks like soup. Steaming bowls held in oven gloves. Lauren’s heart wrenches as she stares in. Lit-up windows always remind her of Christmas.

  They take a Christmas Eve walk each year. Nothing special. Four o’clock, or thereabouts, around Islington, when it’s just getting dark. It’s usually frosty underfoot. Every house has its windows lit up, a miniature play taking place inside each one. Christmas trees. Dogs on sofas. Stacks of presents sometimes visible, people opening ovens, couples on sofas with their legs tangled up. One time, they looked into somebody’s dining room and saw a whole row of friends and family lining up holding paper plates, taking food from a buffet. Lauren had cried with the magic of it, and Aidan had laughed at her.

  ‘I’ll look back on this and laugh,’ Lauren says to Jon, though she knows it isn’t true. It’s beyond farce.

  Jon says nothing, unyielding again.

  ‘You know the most damaging thing to witness protection?’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A lack of commitment.’ He puts his hands into his pockets.

  The air is cold on Lauren’s bare neck.

  ‘If you’re half in, half out, you won’t last.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you can’t begin over again if you’re not willing to start,’ he says simply.

  Lauren stares into the next house – an empty living room with a football match on the television – and speaks without thinking. ‘Aidan wanted me to agree to two years,’ she says quietly.

  Jon sighs, a small, sad sigh. ‘I see.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She shouldn’t have said it. She regrets it immediately. She hopes she hasn’t got him in trouble. When will she learn?

  ‘I looked after this bloke, once. In protection because he whistle-blew on his gang. He went home for his mother’s funeral, just that one event, and got murdered. They knew he’d go back. I knew he’d go back, and told him not to. But he did it anyway. And now it’s all over for him.’

  ‘That’s so sad,’ Lauren says. ‘It’s all so unfair. We didn’t do anything. I didn’t join a gang. She –’ Lauren deliberately disguises Zara’s name, as natural to her now as looking before she crosses the road, ‘– just witnessed something.’

  ‘I know,’ Jon says.

  They round a corner and the mountains pop up, a consistent, benevolent backdrop to Lauren’s stagnant misery.

  ‘She was in the wrong place, wrong time,’ Lauren says, though she knows it is more complicated than that.

  The air smells of burning wood, of real fires. Chimneys on nearby houses puff out smoke into the night. Her mind scans back over what Jon said earlier. Something isn’t sitting right, but she can’t put her finger on what.

  ‘Look,’ Jon says, gesturing in front of him. ‘This is the hand that you have been dealt. So you can either cling on to the past – or move on. Trust me when I say one will make you happier than the other.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Lauren says.

  ‘Give it a shot, really,’ he says. ‘Any connections. Sever them.’

  Lauren realizes as they turn the corner and her house looms back into view that this conversation is off the record.

  As they arrive back at his car, he turns to her. ‘My sister died,’ he says. ‘Five years ago. I remember it – it felt like I had woken up in a totally new world. But you … eventually, I had to move on. So, this is just to say … I shouldn’t divulge personal stuff. But I want to. To let you know that I do understand.’

  Lauren takes this nugget of Jon’s truth – and empathy – and holds it close to her.

  He nods as she reaches her front door. Her security light pops on.

  ‘Thank you for telling me,’ she says.

  ‘But I mean,’ he says softly, as she turns to open the door, ‘Sacha would’ve given anything to be alive. Even living like this,’ he says, gesturing up to the house.

  He turns to leave, pressing a button on his keys, which flashes his car’s headlights. They light up the road amber, two quick blinks. If you’re half in, half out, you won’t last. That’s the thing that wasn’t sitting right with her. What does he mean? That she won’t be happy? Or … worse? But it’s too late to ask – he’s in his car now, easing it slowly off her driveway.

  As he leaves, Lauren watches, thinking. And that’s when she sees it, lit up by her security light. It’s tucked away slightly, on the parcel shelf, but it’s clear. A sports shirt. A football shirt. She might be mistaken, but she is sure the colours match Holloway FC.

  Lauren closes the front door in a panic. What if Jon isn’t who he says he is? Has she ever seen anybody else from the protection service? What if he isn’t the protection service?

  Her entire body is covered in sweat. This can’t be happening. This can’t be real. She needs help. From Aidan. Maybe she’s gone mad.

  She goes into the downstairs toilet and closes the door, then looks at herself in the mirror. Her hair is snarled, her face off-white and clammy-looking.

  She sits on the toilet lid. She needs to think this through.

  No. Nazir put her in touch with Jon. And Nazir is the police. Jon is who he says he is. He must be.

  He’s had multiple opportunities alone with them. And he hasn’t done anything.

  The football shirt is a coincidence. Or she was seeing things. She tries to anchor herself to this logic, but she can’t. She can’t stop seeing that kit. Blue and canary yellow.

  She lets herself out of the toilet and breathes. She will watch and wait. That’s what she’ll do. And not be alone with him again.

  One of the houses next door has become occupied, and Lauren jumps as the bang of their front door wakes her from sleep.

  She lies in bed, thinking of Jon. She rolls over on to her side. She feels calmer now she has some distance from it. It was just a football shirt. She was mad earlier. A woman who has begun to mistrust everyone, even the police.

  The night hours creep by heavily, like a slow-moving black river. When she dozes, she dreams of angry football fans. When she wakes, she thinks of the shirt again, going back and forth over what it could mean.

  She googles how many kits have those colours on her phone. Somebody has asked that exact question on a site called Quora. She wonders why they were asking. Not for the same reasons as her, surely. The answer is four. Four clubs have those colours. So the risk that he is a Holloway fan is one in four.

  She wouldn’t bet money on those odds. Or her life.

  It’s Lauren’s first day of work, and it’s a dream that does it. The dream, the colleague, the drink and the boiler.

  It is cold when she wakes again in the morning,
this time after only an hour’s sleep. That is the first thing she notices. A draught in the duvet. It’s colder in the Lake District. Gales seem to blow between the hills: no skyscrapers, no buildings, no concrete to buffer them. A blue air vent in the very top of the bedroom kept her awake all night, flapping. She’s not tall enough to reach it. She’ll get a chair from downstairs and try to tape over it. She needs to buy tape. She needs to buy scissors. She rolls over in frustration. There is so much admin involved in building a life.

  She dreamt about sex. That’s all. Simple, messy, beautiful sex with Aidan. He had been kneeling up in bed, she braced against his thighs. She doesn’t remember much except an unnameable but specific feeling that seems to wash over her, the waves getting weaker and weaker the more she tries to recall it, until she feels completely alone again. The ghost of Aidan visited her in the night, but now he’s gone. It’s a fiction. A neurological spark born out of missing him, of sleeping on one side of the bed, her body still expecting him to fill the other.

  Zara is in the bathroom. The extractor fan hums, the light a thick orange stripe underneath the door. She emerges in a fog of shower steam, glances at Lauren, then walks past her without saying anything, rolling her eyes as she goes past.

  ‘Sorry?’ Lauren says to Zara.

  ‘What?’ Zara says, still walking, not turning around.

  Something about it – the morning routine, Zara’s tiresome teenage body language – sparks anger in Lauren. She can’t do it. She just cannot do it. Another miserable fucking day in witness protection. Another day spent jumping at all the noises the house makes. And now, too, spent questioning whether the person charged with keeping them safe is even on their side. Another day of bearing it all on her shoulders, alone.

  ‘All okay?’ Lauren says through gritted teeth.

  ‘Fine,’ Zara says shortly, closing the door behind her.

  Lauren goes in after her. ‘What’s up?’ she says, bewildered. Zara’s room is immaculate. The bed made perfectly, a white fluffy throw along the end of it, a splayed novel – The Hate U Give – on her pillow.