by Jane Shemilt
“I’m sorry,” he says.
He gives me the cup of coffee he has just made and spoons grains into another. He continues quickly, as if he thinks I might interrupt him before he can say what he has planned.
“She loved you.”
I don’t need him to tell me this. I curl my hands around the mug and lean against the draining board. The sun streams through the glass and lies in bright divided blocks on the floor, showing up the dust and stains at the edges.
“I did so many things wrong,” he goes on, stumbling over his words in the silence.
“What, exactly?” I reach into the cupboard and then tip porridge into a pan. But I know there isn’t an exactly. Everything I got wrong was somewhere in the shifting space between expecting too much and not seeing enough.
“Away, busy . . .”
How can he think it’s that simple? That the reason Naomi went missing was because he was busy, as if all the other things he’d done and hadn’t done didn’t matter.
“What about the rules you broke?” I measure water into the oats, my hands shaking with anger. “So that she thought rules didn’t matter . . .” I look at him, catching his small impatient shrug.
“If you mean Beth, I told you: Naomi didn’t know. I was careful.” He adds, as if it follows, “You know, it really isn’t over between us.” He moves closer, looks over my shoulder. “Why not put some milk with that? Makes it nicer.”
“Michael’s coming.” I move a step away, adding a half cup more water.
“I’ve got an operating schedule tomorrow, so I’ve got to go back to see my patients. After that, I thought perhaps we—”
“I spoke to him this morning.” I don’t look at him as I stir. “He’s coming to talk to us about the ketamine.”
I scrape the porridge into a bowl, and put it on the table for him.
“I’ll wait, then.” He speaks slowly, watching me.
The air in the kitchen feels tight with words that aren’t being said. “I’m going to work for a while,” I tell him and shut the door behind me.
IT’S THE WRONG time of year for the flowers I need for my circle, but there may be something in the hedge in the field. My sleeve snags as I open the gate. A single frozen rosebud hangs by a blackened stem from the thorny branch that has hooked me. The outer layers must have died first, the tender inner ones later. I disentangle myself; the bud and its attached stem come off in my hand; the spider’s web between the head and the stem stretches fractionally, then breaks.
Inside the shed, the rosebud defines itself on thick white paper. The petals are dark and stiff at their edges, which are folded back in tiny ragged collars; some of the petals are pink near the calyx but stained with spots and lines of mauve and deep brown. They are still tightly cupped in layers that meet at a point. If I start with pink for the petals and then overlay it with black I might get the glazed ash color. I don’t want Blake’s poem in my head, but as I work the words are there anyway, as if they have been waiting for me:
Oh Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Thirteen months ago her world was safe. Home, school, friends. Now I know beyond that lit circle the world was full of hidden danger, waiting for someone to step outside into the dark shadows. It would take only one person, one contact. The rest of the poem unfurls in my head.
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
I try to paint, to focus so hard that all I see are dark colors and curved shapes. If someone loved her, surely they wouldn’t destroy her. I shape the outline of the bud and my mind is so full that when the door creaks open, I spin around, surprised.
“I’m sorry, I’ve done it again.” Michael is wearing a coat and scarf, his car keys are in his hand. He guessed I would be here and came straight across the lawn. His broad shoulders curve a little as if he is offering himself as a safe place.
I touch his face and the skin is warm under my fingers. “It’s good to see you.”
He turns his lips into my hand. “You look tired. I should have come sooner, but I thought you had the boys here.”
“They left a few days ago. Come into the house or Ted will come and look for us.”
Ted has laid out knives on the draining board like in an operating theater. There are neat heaps of chopped onions, little piles of spices, sliced parsnip. As we go into the kitchen he is holding the blade tip of the knife down with one hand and seesawing the handle rapidly with the other, mincing green strands of parsley. His coat and case are nowhere in sight.
“I want her to have a nourishing meal,” he tells Michael after they have shaken hands. “She’s been looking after me and now I need to look after her.” As if he has sensed our closeness and is trying to reclaim me. He tips the onions into a pan.
Michael goes through to the sitting room. “Why don’t you both come and sit down?”
Ted pulls the pan off the heat and follows us in, sits down next to me, a little too close, and puts his arm along the back of the sofa.
Michael takes the chair opposite and leans forward, intent and professional, looking at us. “When Jenny mentioned ketamine to me I ran a check. Our software enables us to access national lists of known users and dealers, and we can cross-correlate with other crimes committed as well.”
Crimes like kidnapping, or crimes like rape and murder? I glance at Ted to see if he is thinking this too, but his head is down, absorbing the impact of Michael’s words.
“I’ve brought some lists, starting with Bristol; when I typed ketamine in, about a hundred names appeared. I need you to look at them to see if any are familiar.”
“Why would they be?” asks Ted.
“A name you might have heard Naomi mention in passing, for example, or a friend of a friend of the boys.”
“I doubt she often came into contact with criminal drug users,” Ted says drily.
“Naomi stole drugs. So did Ed.” I turn to face Ted, my voice rising. How can he still believe so implicitly in his children’s innocence? “Of course they could have come into contact with criminal drug users.”
There is a silence. Ted pulls his arm back. As Michael looks down at his list, his cheeks are red. I feel a flash of disappointment; he is embarrassed because I lost my temper. I look away from both of them, out of the window to the grass and the sky and the trees.
Michael hands identical papers to each of us.
“Anything that jumps out at you, for whatever reason, would be useful to hear,” he says.
Tom Abbot, Joseph Ackerman, Silas Ahmed, Jake Austin, Mike Baker . . . I read the names on the sheet. I’ve never seen any of them before. It’s a relief and it isn’t, it means we are no further forward. Ted shakes his head.
“Sorry. Nothing rings a bell.”
“I’ve got an even bigger list that takes in the southwest.” Michael is pulling more papers from his bag.
Ted starts reading down the new list; he reads quickly and turns the pages faster than I do. I want him to take longer, look more closely, but he’s always read more quickly than me, cleanly taking what he needs from the text as though cutting it out. I read and reread, glancing at Michael, wanting to signal my gratitude, but he is reading the list as well, frowning slightly. He must be tired. I picture him going into his office earlier today, starting up the computer, printing the lists for us, driving for two hours to Dorset instead of what he normally does on Mondays. I don’t know what that is, and it feels strange that I know so little about his life.
Ted has read through the new list before I finish. He puts it down.
“No luck,” he says briefly. He walks into the kitchen and starts rummaging noisily through cupboards.
I carry on reading, trying and testing each name. Nothing is familiar. Michael walks over to me and puts his hand on my shoulder. A machine whizzes from the kitchen, stops and starts again. The heat from Michael’s hand burns through to my skin. I close my eyes; after a few seconds he moves back to his briefcase, and pulls out two thicker sheaves.
“I’ve got a national list here.”
“My God,” says Ted, reappearing with a tray of steaming mugs. “You’ve cast the net wide.”
Michael takes a mug of soup, and sips. “Thanks. I expect it’s the same for you, when someone’s sick and you’re not sure why. You’d work through all the possibilities. All those blood tests and scans. Detective work.”
Ted nods. “You’ve got a point. Sometimes it’s just finding that extra bit of information—a different pattern to the headache symptoms, for example, the smallest shift in electrolytes, or the most obscure shadow on the scan—and there’s your diagnosis.”
The soup is warm and spicy. Ted has learned how to cook. For a second I see Beth, my image of Beth, flushed with heat from the stove, stirring a pan of soup. Ted leaning over to look, kissing her neck. My eyes hurt with reading the small type. I fetch the glasses I now need for close painting, from the shed. When I come back into the room, Michael, noticing my glasses, gets up and switches on the light.
Ted smiles at me. “So my wife wears glasses nowadays. Suits you.” I sit down opposite him, on the chair next to Michael.
Michael hands us the sheaves of paper. “This is the national list; where the drug users are linked with other crimes there is an asterisk by their name. This one covers Scotland, North England, the Midlands, East Anglia, Wales, and back down to the south, including London.”
“There must be thousands here,” Ted says.
I don’t have to read thousands of names, though. It is there, on the second page down, with an asterisk by it. Yoska. Yoska Jones. That strange Christian name again; suddenly I feel winded, as though I’ve been punched in the chest.
“He had a Welsh accent,” I say slowly. “That was odd.”
“Who did?” Michael gets out of his chair and crouches by mine. “What was odd?” His voice is urgent as he looks at me.
“It was odd because Yoska isn’t a Welsh name.”
Michael looks at the list of names I am holding, scanning down quickly.
“Yoska Jones, you mean? You remember him?”
“I remember a man called Yoska,” I reply, looking down into Michael’s face, and instead of his searching gray eyes I see brown ones, in a narrow face. Powerful hands, a slim, strong body, dark hair, high cheekbones. Then another picture replaces that and just for a second I see her handwriting: XYZ. The Y hidden between the X and the Z, drawn in red and touched by a heart. He would have warned her never to write his name in full.
“What was the matter with him?” Michael asks.
“That’s the thing, I never found out.”
“Why not? Didn’t he say much? Was he difficult?” Michael’s questions are fast, like bullets, hitting into me.
“The opposite. He was charming.”
“Could you remember what he actually said?” Michael is looking at me hopefully. Ted, watching from the other side of the room, is shaking his head, and I can see he doesn’t think I’ll be able to reach that far back.
“Some bits, maybe,” I tell Michael. “But it was over a year ago.”
I remember that when he first walked in and sat down he didn’t look like he needed anything, and that was strange in itself. People usually looked ill when they came to see me: in pain, or worried, or sad. Yoska’s color was good, and I think he was actually smiling, or at least his mouth was. Perhaps there had been a scar, a small one under his left eye, which made the rest of his face look even smoother. The brown eyes in the slim dark face had watched me very closely. He hadn’t looked ill at all, just curious.
“Write down what he said, if you can.” Michael reached into his bag and gave me a blank piece of paper, already neatly attached to a clipboard. He felt in his pocket for the pen he always carried.
“It could be important. Write it down just as it happened.”
“Word for word?”
“You’ll be surprised what can come out of your memory when you do this. Try.”
Then he smiled, as if it would be the easiest thing in the world to remember a seven-minute consultation that happened over a year ago. It was November the second. I know that for certain because he came in before Jade, so the date is imprinted in my memory.
I write the date at the top of my piece of paper, and underline it. Then I write what I think we said, and in between I try to remember how it was.
November 2, 2009
“How can I help?”
I must have said something like that; I think I kept it brief. I can remember being in a hurry because I had gotten behind early on. He had leaned toward me and put his hand on the table. I remember that clearly because patients didn’t usually touch the table: it was my territory. Yoska’s hand had been too close to mine and I had taken my hand away. It had felt like a power game, which he was winning. He’d been quick to answer.
“Back pain, runs in the family.”
Back pain isn’t usually genetic but I sensed he wanted a reaction from me, so I didn’t argue.
“What do you think brought this on?”
Sometimes patients don’t like that question, thinking the doctor should know; they don’t realize it’s useful to have their opinion. Yoska didn’t mind. His answer came as quickly as if he’d prepared it.
“Carrying my kid sister around. She likes to sit on my shoulders, but she’s getting heavy.”
I could tell he didn’t like it when I suggested he let his sister walk on her own. I had him down for the kind of man who didn’t want to be told what to do, especially by a woman.
His straight-leg raising was limited on the left. I told him it was sciatica and gave him a script. I remember he smiled and shook my hand. I’d smiled back, relieved it had been simple after all.
Michael scans through the dialogue I’ve written, and Ted gets up and reads it over his shoulder.
“Will it help?” I look at Michael.
“Definitely.” He nods emphatically. “If it’s the same Yoska as on my list; though it’s a bit of a long shot, of course—”
“It seems to have been a straightforward consultation,” Ted says. “It’s hard to see how this could connect to Naomi.” He walks to the sofa and sits down again and begins to stroke his right eyebrow back and forth.
“I should be able to get a photograph from the database,” Michael continues.
“Then what?” I stare at him, feeling the little hope of the moment fade away. “Even if the Yoska I saw in my office is the same man as Yoska the ketamine dealer on your list, what will that really prove?” The red Y in the diary seems to fade as I speak, the little hearts evaporating into nothing.
“I can’t say precisely yet, but it could give us something to work with.” Michael smiles at me then. “Step by little step. That’s how it usually works, remember?”
Later that evening, after they had both left, I remember when Michael had said that to me before, about little steps and how they get you there in the end. It was eleven days after she had gone; a time when I had thought we were going nowhere at all.
BRISTOL, 2009
TWELVE DAYS AFTER
As we approached the bend in the road coming from Thornbury toward Oldbury on Severn, we saw the traffic cones and the yellow and blue of the parked police car shining brightly through the gloom of a winter afternoon. Already the light was going, and the rain was falling hard.
Michael stopped the Jeep tight against the hedge, got out, and walked over to where a policeman was waiting. Through the raindrops on the windshield, I watched them move toward each other and w
alk together through the cones toward the open gate, then disappear from sight up a puddled track.
I was glad Ted was on call and it was just Michael who had brought me in the police Jeep. If Ted had been here we would have been alone together now, waiting for Michael to come back; the fear becoming larger as it moved between us or surfacing in angry words. Instead he was with Ed, who was still in bed with a bandaged arm, and on hand for the hospital should he be called in for emergencies. I was here because of a compulsion to be where Naomi might have been since we last saw her.
After a few minutes Michael got back in the car, bringing with him the wet freshness of outside. His mouth had set in a grim line.
“The car’s been left in a little copse to the side of the field, farther up the slope.” He nodded to the open gate and the field beyond that. His fingers tightened their grip on the wheel.
“What is it, Michael?” I asked him, but he was looking straight ahead. “What’s happened?”
He took a hand from the steering wheel and put it over both of mine as they twisted together on my lap. “It’s been partly burned out,” he told me.
The warmth from his hands seeped into mine. For a moment I wanted to cling to them, but Michael leaned forward and started the car again. We edged slowly toward the open gate, where the policeman pulled the cones back and let us through.
My head was full of her name, like a prayer, as the car lurched onto the rutted farm track, steadily climbing up the sloped land of the field. I took in the ditch by the hedge, the thick twiggy hedge, and the curving brown fields. The ditch had been neatly cut and was full of brown water. I thought of rats and the small dead things that might be under the surface. On a separate little rise, set back from the field, I could see a group of trees up ahead. From here it looked like any other brown clump of winter trees in south Gloucestershire, distanced by the misty air.
Michael halted the car below the rise and got out. I followed him. It had stopped raining; the air was dank and cold, smelling of mud and wet grass. It was quiet after the noise of the engine, but the silence slowly filled up with the sound of starlings in the trees and the sudden harsh calls of crows circling far above. I could hear cattle a long way off and the closer, quieter dripping of water as it came off the trees onto the ground. The gray sky was wide up here; we were higher than I had realized.