‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing to report.’ He stole a glance at Ruth. ‘You look,’ he said, and stopped. ‘You look—’
‘I know. Tired. Drained. Old.’
‘You look like her. I never noticed before.’
When he was gone Ruth took a CD from its case and turned it over and over. It flashed in the late sun, covered the ceiling with rainbows. And then Malcolm came in and stood in front of the window and soaked up all the sun. There was no news, he said, and the rainbows disappeared.
Even though there was nothing to tell them, still the visitors came.
‘You look awful,’ they said. ‘All washed out and haggard. You look like you haven’t slept for weeks.’ They leaned in close, took Ruth’s chin in their hands, squinted at her. ‘You’re not yourself.’
This was something she didn’t need to be told. She knew that Ruth Pearse was neat, washed her hair, didn’t smoke, kept her nails tidy. Ruth Pearse’s cupboards were stocked, her washing folded. Her house was dust-free. She had been known to iron underwear. No, she was not herself. She was a nothing, an absence. She was her daughter.
‘We’ve examined the Mini,’ said the detective inspector, ‘but there’s very little to go on. Usually there’s a hair or two, some footprints. All we have is the blood, I’m afraid.’
‘The blood,’ said Malcolm, yes.’
‘We’re testing it. We’re doing all we can, I assure you.’
Malcolm had always been a little mystified by his daughter. She hadn’t been a teary infant, prone to crying fits the way some babies were, but neither had she been very affectionate. Sometimes, when he’d held her, she’d gone completely still. She’d stared at him as if expecting him to entertain her, to inform her about the world. He tried jangling the car keys, offering her his little finger, nuzzling her cheek with a soft toy, but nothing he did made her smile. She just watched him, becoming more and more still, it seemed, the more he struggled to amuse her. And as she grew older, her stillness grew too.
‘Look, darling,’ he’d said once on a picnic, ‘a buttercup. Shall we see if you like butter?’ He held the glossy flower under her seven-year-old chin. ‘Hmm,’ he said as a cloud crept across the sun, ‘you don’t like it much at all.’
‘Yes I do,’ said Laura, frowning and scratching at her neck where a careless streak of pollen had tickled her. ‘Mummy puts it in my sandwiches every day. Don’t you know anything?’ And she’d turned back to her book, her fingertips imprinting the story with buttery dust.
Malcolm wondered if there would still be pollen between the pages. Laura’s old books were stored in the ceiling somewhere, along with everything else Ruth was keeping for the grandchildren. There were rows and rows of boxes stacked on the roof beams, straddling pockets of glass-fibre insulation which looked like candy-floss but which could cause great irritation to the skin and eyes.
‘You should never go up there without a mask on,’ Ruth warned when Malcolm mentioned Laura’s books, ‘and even then it’s risky. And it’s so dusty, you’ll just make a mess.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’m not going up.’ It was a ridiculous idea, he was aware of that. He wouldn’t know where to start looking, and he had no idea which book to examine if he did find the right box; at the picnic Laura had remained silent when he’d asked what she was reading. And she was still as incommunicative now, providing no clues to her whereabouts.
‘We think she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ he told the many acquaintances who rang or visited looking for news, wanting some scrap of information that wasn’t on television or in the papers.
‘Our forensics team is running some more tests on the Mini,’ said the detective inspector, ‘and we’ll let you know if they come up with anything. They’re a pretty thorough bunch of guys, don’t you worry. You’d be lucky to get much past them.’
Malcolm didn’t like to think of these people, these strangers, combing and re-combing Laura’s car for evidence. The way the officer described them made him think of a sports team, dressed in spotless uniforms and playing silently in her car, passing clues to one another, making secret signals, establishing a strategy. Each player would have certain abilities: there would be a gun man, a knife man, a glass man, a blood man. Malcolm wanted to talk to this forensics team. He wanted to ask them what they were looking for, what their tests had shown so far. He’d been doing some homework. He had researched their tricks, keeping from Ruth the fact that he was doing so.
Every contact leaves a trace, he read; that was the basis of forensic science. People leave behind evidence of themselves when they walk through a room, sit in a chair, brush against a wall. Malcolm could picture Laura doing all those things: strolling through the lounge Ruth had decorated with marble, glass, chrome; running a finger over the glossy leaves of the rubber plant; sprawling in an armchair with her Walkman on, the music leaking from the headset and jarring Ruth’s cool surfaces. Laura, Malcolm learned, would have deposited hair, flakes of skin, droplets of saliva, fingerprints, fibres, footprints. And the person she met that day, whoever he was, would have done the same. It was very difficult—virtually impossible—to leave no sign of one’s presence. And often, when a person tried to cover his tracks, he left more clues than ever.
‘Have you used Luminol on the car?’ he asked, watching the inspector’s face. ‘I understand,’ he said, ‘that Luminol glows in the presence of blood, even after rain.’
The inspector raised his eyebrows for just a moment, then smiled and said they would be sure to let him know if they found anything.
‘It’s not your daughter’s blood in the car, Mr Pearse,’ he told him the next day. ‘We don’t know who it belongs to yet, but it lets us rule out any existing suspects.’
‘You don’t have any suspects,’ said Malcolm.
‘It’s something, though,’ said the inspector. ‘It’s still a very significant lead.’ He was smiling again, wanting Malcolm to be pleased. And in a way, Malcolm was. But not because they now had the DNA profile of a stranger. He was pleased because it meant, perhaps, that Laura had put up a fight, had drawn blood.
Sunday 13 March 1988
Dear Mr and Mrs Pearse,
We feel for you at this difficult time. Words can’t express how dearly we, and the entire country, hope that Laura will be found. She is such a beautiful girl in her photos, so vivacious and friendly. She is the last person who deserves to find herself in such a situation. We pray she is returned to you soon.
March 15 1988
Dear Mr and Mrs Pearse,
I wanted to let you know that I understand what you’re going through, and that Laura’s disappearance has taught my toddler a valuable lesson. I hope this will be a small comfort to you both.
Only last week Benny was separated from me at the Downtown Mall, and was missing for over an hour. It turned out he had wandered into the McDonald’s playground and hidden himself behind Hamburglar, but those sixty-five minutes were the most terrifying of my life. When we got home I showed him your daughter’s picture in the paper and told him that if he wasn’t more careful, he might go missing like poor Laura has. Since then Benny has been very well behaved.
22 March, 1988
Dear Malcolm and Ruth,
I see Laura near water. There are rocks surrounding her, and a broken fence. Her hair and clothes are wet. In the background there is a hilly or perhaps sand dunes. I have a very strong feeling that you must look in rocky places if you want to find Laura. I could give you clearer information if you let me have some personal object of hers. Clothing that has been worn recently and next to the skin is best.
6 April 1988
To Ruth & Malcolm Pearse,
You said all you wanted now was Laura’s body. Have you tried looking for clusters of gulls. If a bodys ended up in the sea or if its washed up on a beach somewhere therell be gulls circling above it.
Monday, April 11, 1988
Mr and Mrs Pearse.
My wife and
I have heard a lot about what a wonderful daughter you had. Every time we pick up a paper or listen to the news we are treated to fresh reports about what a saint she was. It is amazing to us how many of her teachers, relatives, neighbours and friends are prepared to come forward with their glowing opinions, not to mention your own frequent comments. We find this quite tiring. Yes, it is a shame that she’s gone, but please, spare a thought for the rest of us. Your daughter was not a saint.
Malcolm stored the letters in an old suitcase. It had belonged to his mother originally, and had accompanied her on countless family holidays to beaches, camping grounds, rough coastlines, areas of bush. He suspected there might still be dark sand lodged in its crevices, perhaps a sliver of dried grass, a leaf’s spine. The residues of summer.
The case hadn’t been anywhere for a long time, not since he was a boy. Ruth had kept recipe clippings in it for a while, when she and Malcolm were first married, always intending to paste them into scrapbooks. When the letters started mounting up, Malcolm retrieved it from the garage.
‘Are these any good now?’ he said, bringing Ruth a thick sample of recipes which, he knew, she had never cooked. She looked at them—chocolate soufflé, lamb casserole, beef Wellington—and finally shook her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I’ll never use those.’
So Malcolm discarded them. He emptied the case of profiterole diagrams, Hearty Stews, Soups Your Family Will Love, and replaced them with letters from strangers. He and Ruth did as they were told and kept every piece of correspondence, even the unpleasant ones, except for a few the police took and examined and finally discounted.
Malcolm buckled the straps tight each time he closed the case, as if to prevent the letters from bursting out like bad seeds, letting loose papery theories, accusations, condolences. The smell of the leather reminded him of summer, and he shivered.
There were phone calls as well. One man said they would find Laura if they went to church.
‘Why?’ said Malcolm, his voice too loud. ‘Is she hiding in one of the pews?’
Another caller, after asking if Laura had a dog and expressing delight at the fact that it was a labrador, suggested taking it to the wind turbine.
‘Animals—especially dogs—have a sixth sense about these things,’ said the woman. ‘He may well lead you to his mistress. My own dog Truffles has a remarkable psychic ability. He always knows when I’m leaving for work,’
One night the phone rang about eleven o’clock.
‘Hi Dad, its Laura,’ said a voice. ‘Can you come and get me now?’
And then there was scuffling and giggling in the background, and the line went dead.
‘If the car was found so close, she could still be round here somewhere,’ said Malcolm’s colleague Phil. ‘She might have been dazed and wandered off.’
‘Maybe she left the car there on purpose and hitched a lift. She could be at the other end of the island by now.’
‘Or she could have jumped on a train. How much money did she have on her?’
Malcolm’s friends presented their theories as if discussing a football match or predicting the outcome of an election. He knew it was their way of offering him hope, of refusing to voice the probability that Laura was dead.
‘An attractive girl like that,’ said Phil, ‘she’d have no worries getting a ride.’
Malcolm said nothing. The only information he had was that there was no information, and there was no point in telling them that. It would only elicit more guesswork, allow the construction of further improbable scenarios. He had trusted that science would find his daughter, and he knew that in so many other cases science had proved the only reliable witness. Where people failed, or provided half-truths, or were simply wrong, science was exact. It was like accounting; there was only one right answer. But it was a month since Laura’s disappearance, and the police seemed no closer to finding her than they had been on day one. He knew that this wasn’t what his friends wanted to hear. It made them uncomfortable, made them regret their polite inquiries.
‘They’ve done more forensic tests on the car,’ he mumbled. This piece of information stopped even the most persistent questions. Everyone knew what forensics meant, what it meant for an investigation to have reached that stage. Blood was involved, seminal fluid, saliva. The unmentionable secretions of the body, its liquid secrets. Malcolm’s friends nodded grimly, and bought him another Scotch.
There were ways of telling. There were ways of reconstructing an event from one or two muddy footprints, or carelessly placed fibres, or pieces of glass. The shattered window on Laura’s car, for instance, could tell a story. Malcolm hugged this possibility to himself, did not mention it to Ruth or to anyone. He went to the library and found more books, ones detailing the properties of glass, and at night, after Ruth had taken her sleeping pill, he examined them. He pored over sketches showing the various compositions of glass, the many different ways in which it could break. The pieces illustrated were not real, of course; they were hypothetical breakages, shattering which demonstrated rules. In actual investigations, the books warned, the evidence would never be so clear-cut, but Malcolm understood that there had to be a benchmark, a perfect, laboratory specimen. It was the only way of judging the real world, with all its wildcard quirks.
He inspected the pictures through a magnifying glass. He turned them sideways and upside-down, held them under the glow of the bedside lamp. Every now and then he looked over at Ruth, watched her face for signs of waking, but she never stirred. She hardly changed position all night, it seemed. Malcolm took notes from the glass books, made his own sketches of damage. Figure one, he wrote in careful italics. The flat-backed pig. Figure two. The beading of glass exposed to extreme heat. It gave him a sense of satisfaction, this precision. Labelling his sketches gave them dignity, scientific value. He added a little more detail to his drawing of Laura’s car window, and tried to think of a suitable label. The shattering, however, was not as simple as the single shards illustrated in the books. Was it one piece of glass containing many fractures, or many pieces of glass held together like a jigsaw? He turned this question over and over in his mind, and could not fall asleep. Even with his eyes closed he saw the radiating lines he had sketched. They extended out and out, past the edges of the paper and over the bed, and at the centre was a dark mass, the point of impact made solid, a stone thrown into still water.
When the detective inspector came downstairs for breakfast he found his wife crying.
‘What is it, what’s wrong?’ he asked, but received no answer. ‘Tell me what’s the matter, sweetheart, there’s a good girl.’ He crouched on the floor in front of her armchair and she cried even harder. ‘Is it me, is it something I’ve done? Can I get you a cup of tea?’ His voice was growing anxious, but still she said nothing. He looked at his watch. ‘I hate to leave you,’ he said. ‘I hate leaving you so upset, but I really do need to get going.’ His wife waved him away with a damp hand. ‘Are you sure?’ he said. She waved at him again, as if he were an insect.
She heard his car backing down the drive, waiting for a hole in the morning traffic. As the sound of the engine grew distant and faded, she stopped crying. She sat very still in the gold velour armchair, the morning paper resting on her lap. The pages were damp from her crying, wrinkled and puckered like shrunk washing. The girl’s picture was distorted, ugly, and the detective inspector’s wife was glad. She had taken over their lives, this girl. She had captivated her husband, made him passionate. He’d never been so passionate.
On the way to her aquarobics class she glanced at the warrant of fitness sticker on her windscreen. It had expired well over a month ago, and she laughed. The wife of a senior police officer, she thought, driving round without a warrant of fitness. Her husband called them wofs. He liked to talk in initials, and where possible would run them together to make one word, rather than pronouncing each letter separately. This had endeared him to her at first.
On the other side of town,
the man upended a cornflakes box. A small, dusty pile pattered on to his plate, barely covering the sea-shell design. Fuck, he thought. He shoved the box and the plate to the floor. Broken china skittered across the vinyl. More mess to clean up.
As she drove to the pool, the detective inspector’s wife turned on the radio. To put herself in the right mood, she always listened to music before aquarobics. She had so many tapes that they spilled across the floor of her car, rattling in their cases when she drove too fast. She was about to press play when the morning bird call sounded through the speakers: the bellbird. It made her think of the tramping holidays she’d taken with her husband, before they were married. It made her remember nights in dank cabins, tree ferns brushing the windows, her sleeping bag a soft sarcophagus. And then the bellbird was drowned by the electric pips signalling nine o’clock, and all of a sudden the car was filled with the missing girls name, and then with her husband’s voice, and all he talked about was the girl. The detective inspector’s wife didn’t stop at the pool. She kept driving and driving in her wof-less car until she was on the other side of the city, until she was, she considered, about as far away from home as she could be without actually leaving town. And it was at this point she realised she was hungry. Starving.
She steered the trolley from one aisle to another, gripping the cool handle. She avoided the precarious displays of tins and boxes, the young woman giving away Instant Cheesecake samples, the harassed mothers. She was glad she had no children. She didn’t know where anything was in this out-of-the-way store, but she was in no hurry. She perused every aisle, selecting products she never usually bought, items for which she had no use. Luxury items. Pâté, scented toilet paper, gourmet dog food. It was as if she were shopping for someone else, someone with a different life.
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