by Tim Weaver
‘Just some of the clothes he left behind.’
‘Can I look?’
‘Of course.’
I walked across and opened them up. There wasn’t much hanging up, but there were some old shirts and a musty suit. I pushed them along the runner, and on the floor I could see a photograph album and more books.
‘These are Alex’s?’
‘Yes.’
I opened up the album and some photographs spilled out. I scooped them up off the floor. The top one was of Alex and a girl who must have been his girlfriend.
‘Is this Kathy?’
Mary nodded. I set the picture aside and looked through the rest. Alex and Mary. Mary and Malcolm. I held up a photograph of Malcolm and Alex at a caravan park somewhere. It was hot. Both of them were stripped down to just their shorts, sitting next to a smoking barbecue with bottles of beer.
‘You said they were close.’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t think Malcolm would remember anything?’
‘You can try, but I think you’d be wasting your time. You’ve seen how he is.’ She glanced back over her shoulder, and then stepped further into the room. ‘There were times when I felt a bit left out, I suppose. Sometimes I would get home and the two of them would be talking, and when I entered the room they’d stop.’
‘When was that?’
‘For a while before Alex disappeared, I guess.’
‘Right before he disappeared?’
She screwed up her face. ‘Maybe. It was a long time ago. All I know is, the two of them, most of the time, were attached at the hip.’
I looked around the room again, my eyes falling upon a photo of Malcolm and Alex. The one person who knew Alex the best was the one person I had no hope of getting anything from.
5
I left Mary’s just after midday. Once I hit the motorway, the traffic started to build; three lanes of slowly moving cars feeding back into the centre of the city. What should have been an eighty-minute drive to Kathy’s family home in Finsbury Park turned into a mammoth two-hour expedition through London gridlock. I stopped once, to get something to eat, and then chewed on a sandwich as I inched through Hammersmith, following the curve of the Thames. By the time I had finally parked up, it was just after two.
I locked the car and moved up the drive. It was a yellow-bricked semi-detached, with a courtyard full of fir trees and a small patch of grass at the front. A Mercedes and a Micra were parked outside, and the garage was open. It was rammed with junk — some of it in boxes, some just on the floor — and shelves full of machinery parts and tools. There was no one inside. As I turned back to the house, a curtain twitched at the front window.
‘Can I help you?’
I spun around. A middle-aged man with a garden sprayer attached to his back was standing at the side of the house, where an entrance ran parallel to the garage.
‘Mr Simmons?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘My name’s David Raker. Is Kathy in today, sir?’
He eyed me suspiciously. ‘Why?’
‘I’d like to speak with her.’
‘Why?’
‘Is she in today, sir?’
‘First you tell me why you’re here.’
‘I was hoping to speak to her about Alex Towne.’
A flash of recognition in his eyes. ‘What’s he got to do with anything?’
‘That’s what I was hoping to ask Kathy.’
Behind me I heard the door opening. A girl in her late twenties stepped out on to the porch. Kathy. Her hair was short now, dyed blonde, but a little maturity had made her prettier. She held out her hand and smiled.
‘I’m Kathy,’ she said.
‘Nice to meet you Kathy. I’m David.’ I glanced around at her father, whose gaze was fixed on me. Water tumbled out of the hose on to the toes of his boots.
‘What are you, an investigator or something?’ she asked.
‘Kind of. Well, not really.’
She frowned, but seemed intrigued.
‘Where’s Kathy fit into all this?’ her father said.
I glanced at him. Then back to Kathy. ‘I’m doing some work for Mary Towne. It’s to do with Alex. Can I speak with you?’ She looked unsure. ‘Here,’ I said, removing my driving licence and handing it to her. ‘Unofficial investigators have to make do with one of these.’
She smiled, took a look, then handed it back. ‘Do you want to go inside?’
‘That would be great.’
I followed her into the house, leaving her father standing outside with his garden sprayer. Inside, we moved through a hallway decorated with floral wallpaper and black-and-white photographs, and into an adjoining kitchen.
‘Do you want a drink?’
‘Water would be fine.’
It was a huge open area with polished mahogany floors and granite worktops. The central unit doubled up as a table, chairs sitting underneath. Kathy filled a glass with bottled mineral water then moved across and set it down.
‘Sorry to turn up unannounced like this.’
She was facing away from me slightly. Her skin shone in the light coming from outside, her hair tucked behind her ears. ‘It’s just a surprise to hear his name again after all this time.’
I nodded. ‘I think Mary feels like she needs some closure on his disappearance. She wants to know where he went for those five years.’
Kathy nodded. ‘I can understand that.’
We pulled a couple of chairs out and sat down. I placed my notepad between us, so she could see I was ready to start.
‘So, you and Alex met at a party?’
She smiled. ‘A friend of a friend was having a house-warming.’
‘You liked him from the beginning?’
She nodded. ‘Yeah, we really clicked.’
‘Which was why you ended up following him to Bristol?’
‘I applied for a job there. It was supposed to be a marketing position. Alex had already got his place at university, and I wanted to be close to him. It made sense.’
‘What happened?’
‘It wasn’t marketing. It was cold-calling; selling central heating. I gave it a week. In the interview, the MD told me I could earn in commission what my friends earned in a year. I never stuck around long enough to find out.’
‘So, you started waitressing?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did the two of you use to do together?’
‘We used to go away a lot. Alex loved the sea.’
‘You used to go to the coast?’
She nodded.
‘How often?’
‘Most weekends. Some weeks too. After uni, Alex got a job in an insurance company. He had a kind of love-hate thing with it. Some Monday mornings he wouldn’t want to go in. So we bought an old VW Camper van and took off when we wanted.’
‘Did his parents know about him skipping work?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t think so,’ I said, smiling. ‘What about your job?’
‘They were pretty good to me there. They let me come and go as I pleased — they sometimes even let me choose my own hours. So, if we disappeared for a couple of days, when I got back I worked for a couple of days to make up for it. The pay was terrible, but it was useful.’
She drifted off for a moment. I waited for her to come back.
‘What did you think of Alex’s dad?’
She shrugged. ‘He was always very pleasant to me.’
‘Did Alex ever tell you what they talked about?’
‘Not really. Not what they talked about. More where they went and what they did. I’m sure if there was anything worth knowing, he’d have told me.’
I nodded.
‘Alex didn’t contact you in the five years before he died?’
‘No.’ A pause. ‘At first, I just used to wait by the phone, from the moment I got home until three or four o’clock in the morning, begging, praying for him to call. But he never did.’
I looked at my notes. ‘When was the last time you spoke to him?’
‘The night before he left. We’d arranged to take the Camper down to Cornwall. He had some time owed to him at work, so he’d been back to his parents’ for a couple of weeks to use up some holiday. When I called him, his mum said he had gone out and hadn’t come home. She said she wasn’t worried, but that he hadn’t phoned and he always tended to.’
‘Was he depressed about work at the time?’
‘No,’ she said, seeming to consider it. ‘I don’t think so.’
I changed direction. ‘Did you have any favourite places you used to visit?’
She looked down into her hands, hesitating. I could tell they’d had a favourite spot, and that it had meant everything to her.
‘There was one place,’ she said eventually. ‘A place down towards the tip of Cornwall, a village right on the sea called Carcondrock.’
‘You used to stay there?’
‘We used to take the Camper there a lot.’
‘Did you go back after he disappeared?’
Another pause, longer this time. Eventually she looked up at me. It was obvious she had — and it had hurt a lot.
‘There was a place right on the beach,’ she said softly. ‘A cove. I went back about three months after he disappeared. I didn’t really know what to expect. I guess in my heart of hearts I knew he wouldn’t be there, but we loved that spot and never told a soul about it. Not a single person. So it seemed like the most obvious place to look.’
‘You two were the only ones who knew about it?’
‘Only myself and Alex. And now you, I guess.’ She looked at me, her eyes half-closed, as if she had something else to add. When it didn’t come, I got up to go.
‘Wait a second,’ she said, placing a hand on my arm, then blushing slightly as she took it away again.
I looked at her. ‘Was there something else?’
Kathy nodded. ‘The cove… If you go right to the back of it, there’s a rock shaped like an arrowhead, pointing up to the sky. It’s got a black cross painted on it. If you find it, dig a little way beneath and you’ll find a box I left there for Alex. Inside are some old letters and photographs — and a birthday card. That was the last time I ever heard from him.’
‘The birthday card?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he give you the card before he went back to his parents for those two weeks?’
‘No. He sent it from their place. By the time it got to me, he’d already disappeared.’
‘I’ll take a look,’ I said.
‘I don’t know what you’ll find,’ she replied, looking down into her lap. ‘But the last time we saw each other he said something strange to me: that we should use the hole by the rock to store messages, if we ever got separated.’
‘Separated? What did he mean by that?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, I asked him, but he never really explained. He just said that, if it ever came to it, that was our spot. The place I should look first.’
‘So, did he ever store anything in there for you? Any messages?’
She shook her head.
‘You checked regularly?’
‘I haven’t been down for a couple of years. But for a time I used to go back there and dig up that box, praying there would be something in there from him.’
‘But there wasn’t?’
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
6
The sky was starting to lose some of its colour by the time I left Kathy’s. I opened the car door, tossed my notepad on to the back seat and then looked at my watch. Three-thirty. I still had something to do before heading home. Something I hadn’t had the strength to do the day before.
I got in the car, fired up the engine and headed off.
On the drive over, I stopped at a florist and bought a bunch of roses and some white carnations, and then spent the next twenty minutes in traffic. When I finally got to the gates of Hayden Cemetery, the sun had almost fallen from the sky. In the car park, lights were flickering into life. The place was deserted. No other cars. No people. No sound. It wasn’t too far from Holloway Road, sandwiched between Highbury and Canonbury, but it was supernaturally quiet, as if the dead had taken the sound down with them. I turned the engine off and sat for a moment, feeling the heat escape from the car. Then I put on my coat and got out.
The entrance was big and beautiful — a huge black iron arch, intricately woven with the name Hayden — and, as I passed through, I could see leaves had been pushed to either side of the path, pressed into mounds and stained by the rust from a shovel. I had a flicker of déjà vu. There and gone again. I’d been in this same position, treading the same ground, a year and a half before. Except, that time, Derryn had been with me.
The Rest, where she was buried, was a separate area. Tall trees surrounded it on all sides and dividing walls had been built within it, with four or five headstones in each section. As I got to the grave, I saw the flowers I’d put down a month before. They were dead. Dried petals clung to the gravestone, and the stems had turned to mush. I knelt down and brushed the old flowers away. Then I placed the new ones at the foot of the grave, the thorns from the stems catching in the folds of my palm.
‘Sorry I didn’t come yesterday,’ I said quietly. The wind picked up for a moment, and carried my words away. ‘I thought about you a lot, though.’
Some leaves fell from the sky, on to the grave. When I looked up, a bird was hopping along a branch on one of the trees. The branch swayed gently, bobbing under its weight, and then — seconds later — the bird was gone, swooping downwards and ranging up left; up into the freedom beyond.
* * *
I was coming down the path and through the entrance to the car park when I saw someone walking away from my car. His clothes were dark and stained, and his shoes were untied, the laces snaking off behind him. He looked homeless. As I got closer, he flicked a look at me. His face was obscured beneath a hood, but I could see a pair of eyes glint, and realized there was surprise in them — as if he hadn’t expected to see me back so soon.
Suddenly, he broke into a run.
I speeded up, and saw that the back window on the left-hand side of my car had been smashed, the door swinging open. Glass lay next to my tyre, and my notepad, coat and a road map were on the gravel next to it.
‘Hey!’ I shouted, running now, trying to cut him off before he got to the entrance. He glanced at me again, panicking. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
The edges of his hood billowed out as he picked up speed, and I caught a glimpse of his face. Dirty and thin. A beard growing from his neck up to the top of his cheekbones. He looked like a drug addict: all bone and no fat.
‘Hey!’ I shouted again, but he was ahead of me now, fading into the darkness at the entrance to the cemetery.
I sprinted after him, out on to the main road, but by the time I got there he was about sixty yards away, pounding down the pavement on the other side of the street. He looked back once to make sure I wasn’t following, but didn’t drop his pace. And then he disappeared around the corner.
I jogged back to the cemetery and gave the car a quick once-over. It was an old BMW 3 series I’d had for years. No CD player. No satellite navigation. Nothing worth stealing.
The glove compartment was open, most of its contents thrown all over the front seats. The car’s handbook had been opened and left; a bag of sweets had been ripped apart. He must have been looking for money. And now he’d just cost me a new window.
7
I woke at three in the morning to the sound of Brian Eno’s ‘An Ending (Ascent)’ playing quietly on the stereo, the TV on mute. I sat forward and listened for a while. Derryn used to tell me my music taste was terrible, and that my entire film collection was one big guilty pleasure. She was probably right about the music. I considered ‘An Ending’ as close to socially acceptable as I was ever likely to get; a song I loved that even she thought was wonderful.
In the area I’d been brought up in, you either spent your days in the record shop, or in the cinema. I’d chosen the cinema, mostly because my parents were always late with new technology; we were pretty much the last family in town to get a CD player. We didn’t have a VCR for years either, which was why I spent most nights, growing up, watching films at an old art deco cinema called the Palladium in the next town.
Her music collection still stood in the corner of the room, packed in a cardboard box. I’d been through it about three weeks after she died, when it had struck me that the one thing music had over movies was its amazing way of pinpointing memories. ‘An Ending’ had been our late-night song, the one we’d play just before bed when Derryn was weeks away from dying. When all she wanted was for the pain to end. And then, when it finally did, it was the song that was played inside the church at her funeral.
When the song finished, I got up and walked through to the kitchen.
Out of the side window, I could see into next-door’s house. A light was on in the study, the blinds partially open. Liz, my neighbour, was leaning over a laptop, typing. She clocked my movement through the corner of her eye, looked up, squinted, and then broke into a smile. What are you doing up? she mouthed.
I rubbed my eyes. Can’t sleep.
She scrunched up her face in an aw expression.
Liz was a 42-year-old lawyer, who’d moved in a few weeks after Derryn had died. She’d married young, had a child, then got divorced a year later. Her daughter was in the second year of university at Warwick. I liked Liz. She was fun and flirty, and, while cautious of my situation, had always made her feelings clear. Some days I needed that. I didn’t want to be a widower who wore it. I didn’t want all the sorrow and the anger and the loss to stick to my skin. And the truth was, especially physically, Liz was easy to like: slender curves, shoulder-length chocolate hair, dark, mischievous eyes; and a smattering of natural colour in her cheeks.
She got up from the desk and looked at her watch, pretending to double-take when she saw the time. A couple of seconds later, she picked up a coffee cup and held it up to the window. You want one? She rubbed her stomach. It’s good.