by A J Waines
Time passes. I’ve no idea for how long. If only someone would come to bring me something to eat. Then I’ll have my chance. I’ll tell them there’s been a terrible mistake.
Almost immediately there’s a click outside and bright lines of light appear around the door. Someone is coming. My heart is punching hard and fast inside my chest. There’s a muffled thud, a sharp clunk, then at last the door swings open. My words come out in a mad garble, tumbling over themselves.
‘Hey, what is this? Where am I? My name’s Beth Kendall…don’t you see? I don’t know who you think I am, but...you’ve got it wrong…listen to me…what am I doing here…?’
Something spongy is flung across the floor – a sandwich wrapped in clingfilm – but I take my eyes back to the doorway. The light is so dazzling that I can’t see who is standing there. I reach out, clawing at the blinding light, but the door snaps shut, the light goes off and everything is still again.
It’s as though nothing ever happened. Except that the flash of white light has ignited the raging pain in my head again.
Finding myself abandoned in the darkness once more makes it seem twice as stifling as before. A new thought hits me. What if I run out of air, stashed away in this oppressive little storeroom? I snatch at each breath, sucking it in, panting, my lungs burning.
My inhaler…oh, God, where is it?
43
Rachel
‘Her asthma inhaler…I’ve found it, it’s here.’
It’s Adrian, ringing me the next morning.
‘What?!’
‘Her purse too,’ he adds. ‘I didn’t notice. They were hanging in a bag behind her old jacket in the hall.’
I take a moment to process what he’s saying. When I was last there, I’d looked for her jacket and it definitely wasn’t hanging in the hall. Beth must have gone back to Adrian’s cottage at some point and neither of them told me. Then she must have gone out again, only that time she’d taken virtually nothing. My heart rate charges off into a gallop. She’s gone off without her asthma medication, her jacket and her purse.
‘When did you last see Beth, Adrian?’ I know it’s hopeless as soon as the words are out of my mouth, but I have to ask.
There’s a taut silence on the line.
‘Adrian? Dad! It’s important. I came over on Sunday, remember? We thought Beth might have gone to Southampton. To The Hope and Anchor.’
‘Ginger cake,’ he says emphatically, as though he’s got the answer.
‘Yes, she made a ginger cake, before I came over. What happened after that?’
There’s a small keening sound and I know he’s trying, but the rusty cogs inside his brain have got stuck.
‘It’s okay, Adrian. I’m coming over.’
Seconds later he’s on the line again.
‘Beth rang,’ he says. ‘Her phone.’
‘She rang? She called you?’
He mutters something. ‘Not quite…what I mean is, her phone kind of rattled. Buzzed. That’s it. Someone was on her phone and it buzzed.’
‘Beth’s phone? It’s in your cottage?’
‘Yes. It was under the tea-cosy in the kitchen. I thought I heard a funny noise yesterday evening and there it was again, this morning. There was a call from a chap called Peter. Heard of him?’
I let out a loud huff of exasperation and grab my coat.
As soon as I arrive, I hurtle upstairs and check the box-room. Her few belongings are still there, but laid out slightly differently; a pair of socks is on the floor beside the camp bed and the sleeping bag is smoothed out. I can’t tell whether she’s slept in it since I was last there or not. I go into the bathroom. Her spare toothbrush is still there. A prickly shudder slips down the back of my neck.
My message on the back of the front door has been taken down, I notice, even though neither of them bothered to ring me. I find it squashed into the kitchen pedal-bin with the wrapper of a flapjack bar, Beth’s favourite snack, on top. Beth certainly came back.
I look for further clues around the place, but there’s not much to go on. A copy of the Radio Times is open on the kitchen table, still set to Sunday’s programmes. Beth always ticks what day it is on the kitchen calendar when she’s there, to help Adrian. The ticks stop on Sunday. It’s now Tuesday. Did she go to Southampton, come back and go straight back out again? Without anything? It doesn’t make sense.
I glance at the clock. We’ve lost so much time already. It feels like it’s gone past the point where Beth is going to walk back in any minute.
Adrian hands me her mobile. She has twenty-five missed calls, including several from Peter prior to the time he thought he spoke to her at my place. I go back upstairs and sit on her camp bed, convinced there’s something I’m missing.
Where would she have gone? My mind is charging off all over the place, my heart racing at twice the normal speed. I need to get a grip and think. That’s when I spot them.
Her trendy sandals, behind the door. They were the only shoes she brought over with her, but she kept spare slippers and trainers at Adrian’s, so where are they? I glance under the camp bed. Then check the bathroom. There they are, her trainers, hidden by a dropped towel.
So where are her slippers? Did she go out in those?
I hurtle downstairs, scouring the floor. I check everywhere. Where the hell would she go wearing her slippers?
I call 999 straight away. The first thing I tell them is that Beth hasn’t got her asthma inhaler and she’d never go anywhere without it. I give the address of the cottage. Given the fact that Beth’s been gone this long and left her medication behind, the emergency services tell me someone will be straight over.
An officer I don’t recognise arrives. His name is PC Mallin. He has long fingernails and cheeks peppered with sandpaper stubble. He takes me through a list of questions about Beth’s social media accounts, her access to funds and wants a recent photo. There’s one in a frame on Adrian’s mantelpiece. It was taken at a party shortly after Beth got engaged and she looks glowing and self-assured. PC Mallin takes more than a cursory glance at it, breathing in her image, before taking it out of the frame.
‘Did she take her phone?’ he asks.
‘No. It’s here. It was in the kitchen.’ I hand it to him.
‘Password?’
I write it down for him.
‘And you said she left her purse behind? Is that the only place she would keep any money?’
‘Yes.’ I give him that too. He looks inside.
‘These her only bank cards?’
‘Yes. All in her purse.’
PC Mallin spreads his feet into a wider stance. ‘Is there anything she might be upset about?’
Oh, Lord, where do we start?
I stick to the heavily-edited version. ‘She’s supposed to be getting married next Saturday and we had a bit of a row at her hen party.’
He nods knowingly and actually dares to chuckle. Given how nerve-wracking this is I’m stunned by his insensitivity. I have to lock my hands together behind my back, or else I might hit him.
‘When did you last see your daughter?’ he asks.
‘Sunday afternoon, but she’s been staying here with my father.’ I lower my voice to a whisper. ‘It’s a bit complicated, because he’s got memory problems and he can’t actually remember when he last saw her.’
The PC looks up at Adrian, who’s sitting immobile in front of the muted television.
‘Right…’ he says, pressing a pronounced full stop onto the page. I suddenly think of Peter. He could be on a train back to London by now, but the police will certainly want to speak to him. Then the waters are going to get well and truly muddied when he tells them he spoke to Beth on Monday evening in Winchester. His account of when he last saw Beth and the reality of the situation won’t match up.
‘Wait a minute…’ I say, pressing my fingers into my forehead. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so dizzy with what’s happened, I’ve got myself all mixed up.’ I let out a rush of air. ‘Peter
, her fiancé, spoke to her on Monday, late afternoon at my house. She was locked in her room and she wouldn’t speak to me.
He glances at his notes. ‘So, she was last seen on Monday, not Sunday?’
‘According to Peter.’
‘Did you see her on Monday?’
‘No. I didn’t. Not at all that day.’
‘But she was there?’
‘Well…she must have been.’ I say vaguely.
He stares at me as though I’m mad, but I don’t care. I just need him to find my daughter. Sunday, Monday – it doesn’t matter. She’s still missing.
‘We’ll be taking a look around both locations,’ he says. ‘Do you have a list of people and places she might have gone to?’
‘Not here. At my house.’
‘Okay, let’s get over there. We usually suggest you try to get in touch with as many of her friends as you can.’
I turn to Adrian. ‘Ring me straight away if Beth comes back, okay?’ I say, before we head off.
‘Yes. Of course.’ He ends with a sing-song voice as though I’m five years old. ‘Sleep tight, Way-way.’
It’s not even 2 p.m.
PC Mallin gives me a sympathetic glance as he opens the passenger door for me.
‘It’s awful to see them go like that, isn’t it?’
‘I’ll get the laptop and iPad from upstairs,’ I tell him, as soon as we get to Barnes Road. ‘Together with the contacts on her phone, it should cover everyone.’ I grimace, knowing it will be a very long list.
I set the both devices down on the kitchen table and tell him the password is the same as her phone.
‘We’ll need to take these,’ he says. ‘If you don’t manage to copy over all your daughter’s contacts, we’ll get them sent to you.’
PC Mallin tells me I’ll need a USB cable, so once I’ve found that, I open her ‘Christmas card’ list and transfer it to my phone, together with other lists of college friends, drama contacts, old school mates. In the meantime, he’s checking Beth’s mobile.
‘She hasn’t used it since Sunday evening,’ he says. He holds up the screen to show me the last page she looked at online. It doesn’t surprise me – a press account of the manslaughter of Tracy Limehouse in Southampton.
‘Do you know what this is?’ he asks, scanning the report.
I explain that Beth seems to have found old newspaper clippings in Adrian’s loft and could well have got it into her head to catch the train to Southampton.
‘This was years ago.’ He frowns, looking perplexed. ‘Do you know what it’s all about?’
‘Not a clue,’ I tell him.
I’m getting used to telling fibs, by now and it’s best to keep everything simple. ‘It seems she came back after her visit, so I don’t think it’s significant.’
‘We’ll check CCTV at the station,’ he says.
While PC Mallin takes a look around, he suggests I punch out a private message to everyone on Beth’s phone, so I get straight onto it.
Have you seen Beth? Very worried as she’s missing since Sunday. Police involved. If you know anything, please let me know asap. Beth’s Mum, Rachel.
Responses pop up immediately:
Have you tried Peter’s flat in Chelsea?
Has she gone to see Tina’s new puppy?
Try Maria…
As a result, I send more messages, but everything comes back negative.
Once PC Mallin has left with all Beth’s electronic devices, my next call is to Kate, who insists on coming straight over. Before she’s even made it over the threshold, I fling myself at her.
She grips my arms firmly. ‘We’ll look all day and night if we have to. What are the police doing?’
‘They’ve got her photo. They’re going to check CCTV footage at the station. She might have gone to Southampton, gone back to Adrian’s, then taken off again.’
‘Southampton?’
I throw up my eyes, shaking my head. ‘I know!’ I don’t want to have to tell her about the newspaper cutting, about the pub, about what it means. ‘Beth is just…doing her own thing at the moment.’
My phone rings. I glance at the screen and moan.
‘It’s Peter, I can’t face him…I just can’t.’
Kate snatches the phone from me.
‘No, it’s not…Rachel’s friend, Kate,’ she says. ‘Yes…I know…she’s going out of her mind. Everyone’s looking for her.’ She glances over at me. ‘Er…not now…I’ll tell her you called.’
‘Thank you,’ I say to her, dropping the phone back onto the table.
‘He’s in London,’ she says. ‘He has to do something first, then he’s coming back.’
‘Oh no, that’s all we need.’
Kate is a true gem. She’s always been one to roll up her sleeves and muck in and she doesn’t ask awkward questions. We set about marking the locations of Beth’s local friends on my A-Z. Kate has to get up at 5 a.m. to set up her market stall in Petersfield, yet she’s prepared to get no sleep at all in order to help me.
Jogging at a brisk pace, my map under my arm, I start knocking on doors. Kate has gone to addresses further afield in her car. As I fly from one address to the next, I mull over the conversation I had with Kate, earlier.
‘I’ve seen such a change in Beth recently…you must have, too,’ she said. ‘She’s got no spark. She seems to drag herself around. Not the glamorous, upbeat Beth I know.’ She looked up at me. ‘She’s still head over heels in love with Peter, then?’
Head over heels. I hear Kate’s words and run them around inside my head.
After Carl’s death, I was convinced Beth was feeling too guilty to bring herself to speak to Peter. She was riddled with remorse about the affair, aside from being hounded by images of the way in which we’d dealt with Carl’s body. I thought she loved Peter too much to cope with the hurt it could cause. Then, when she continued to cut him off, I thought the reason she couldn’t face him was because she’d be tempted to confide in him. But maybe that’s not what’s been going on after all.
Another front door is closed after a repeat of the same strained conversation and I jog on to the next one. As I stop for breath, my phone pings with a voicemail. It’s Peter. He’s spoken to the police in London and they’ve assured him that there’s nothing to rush back here for. Thank goodness. He says he’ll be tying up business interests, staying at the flat in case she turns up there, but he’ll call soon.
As I break into a run again, snippets of my exchanges with Beth spanning the past few months drift into my mind. After she and Peter first met, she used to talk about him incessantly. Every conversation started or ended with a reference to him. Peter said this, Peter did that, Peter thinks, Peter likes… For months, he was embedded into our daily lives and our future. But since the fiasco in the cellar, I’ve been the one who’s brought his name into our conversations.
Perhaps I’m the one who should come to my senses.
44
Beth
My inhaler…I frantically pat the mattress, feel my way around every inch of the floor, but it’s not here. Why would it be? I didn’t have it on me when I stepped outside Grandad’s front door. I thought I was only going to be out there for a minute or two.
Panic threatens to steal the air from my lungs. Steady, stay calm, it’s okay. My chest hurts, I’m wheezing. How long can I last without my puffer? In through your nose, out through your mouth. That’s it. Purse your lips so you don’t hyperventilate... I cling on to the words I’ve taught myself and the moment passes.
Time has gone by, but my foggy head can’t work out how many hours. I’m feeling wobbly, but it’s not just because I haven’t eaten much. I reckon there was something in the tuna sandwich. For a moment I wonder if we’re on dry land, then I feel a gentle tugging sensation, a slight rocking, as though the vessel is moored.
If we’re anchored in a marina we’re likely to be close to people. I stand up and let out a deafening scream. I bang on the door, yell again making my throa
t burn. Nothing happens. Maybe everyone has left the boat. Maybe I’m drifting out at sea somewhere all on my own.
A drowsiness claims me soon after, then I’m shaken awake by a dazzling flash of light. Someone has opened and closed the door. I can smell food. A waft of spicy tomato. I kneel on the floor, sweeping my arms in front of me until I feel my way to a tin dish with a plastic fork. I greedily scoop up the first mouthful. It’s baked beans. I never knew they could taste so good. I’m sure there’s going to be a sedative sprinkled in it, but I have to eat.
When I’ve wiped the plate clean with my finger, I put it back on the floor, but it rests on something. I reach out and find a long tube. It’s heavy and made of metal. There seems to be a switch at one end, so I press it and for the first time I have light. A torch – it’s like the most blessed gift imaginable. I can see. There’s a full jug of water standing behind the empty plate and a sheet of paper with a pen laying across it. I shine the beam on the sheet and find a block of text printed from a computer:
Are you ready to confess, yet? Were you having an affair with Carl Jacobson? Tell me the truth. I’ll give you a little more time to think about it, but there won’t be any more food. This is the last of the water, so you’d better make it last.
That’s what this is about! This is no random or mistaken abduction. Is it Peter – did he find out? Or Amelia? Or someone else close to Carl?
I sit back on my heels and use the torch to illuminate the space around me. It’s no more than a glorified cupboard, cleared of everything apart from the mattress and the other items I’ve already found. There is a pull-cord switch above head-height by the door, but there’s no bulb in the ceiling. I sit on the mattress and turn off the torch. I need to save the battery for when I really need it. Once again, I sink into the black hole of obscurity.
Would Peter stoop so low as to act in such a cowardly way as this? It just doesn’t seem possible to me. He’s not that kind of guy. But then, how well do I really know him?