Night Falls, Still Missing

by Helen Callaghan

  ‘Well, that is how fish work,’ muttered Madison, seemingly engrossed in her smartphone and not seeing or choosing not to see Judy’s warning raise of eyebrows.

  ‘Bon appétit!’ said Tara, sitting down and not eating, but instead staring owlishly at them all while they tucked in, as though daring them.

  ‘Mine’s fresh enough, at least,’ said Hugo dolefully, poking his with a fork. ‘This is still wriggling.’

  ‘Oh … do you want me to put it back in the oven for a little while?’ asked Tara, who appeared to have picked up a slight tremor.

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’ He threw down his fork and turned from the plate as his wife removed it, reaching over for his phone.

  Fiona waited hopefully, but nobody else was offered the opportunity of a refiring and requesting one seemed socially impossible, so after a second or two she resumed eating.

  ‘So how’s work, Fiona?’ asked Hugo suddenly.

  Fiona stilled. Hugo had never made small talk with her, even when they had all been children together. Still, it was a good sign. In the interests of social amiability, she should give a polite response.

  ‘Um … good, thanks. I’ve applied for a senior lecturer’s position. I’ll hear in a few weeks whether I’ve got it or not.’

  ‘Yeah? That’s great. I guess you have to stop being a student and living off my taxes sometime, right?’ He offered her a wolfish smile.

  ‘Fiona’s a lecturer, on a contract. She’s not been a student for years.’ Madison’s voice was flat with displeasure, and she did not look up from her phone. ‘And for her to live off your taxes you have to pay them first, Hugo.’

  ‘Calm down, Sis, I was only having a little joke.’ He was refilling his wine again, and grinned and shrugged at Fiona, as though they were complicit together. ‘Did they not let you take your sense of humour through customs, Madison?’

  ‘Could you both stop it, please?’ asked Judy sharply. ‘You’re giving me a headache.’

  The siblings subsided, Hugo with a superior and slightly drunk smirk, while Judy bent to her raw fish and Tara hovered around the oven wringing her hands in unconscious anxiety, as though this would make Hugo’s dinner cook quicker.

  Fiona felt stifled, uncomfortable, her sundress clinging to her. She had the sense that Hugo was watching her, and once again felt like that little girl who had come to play with Madison, the girl with the drunk father, the girl that everyone viewed with suspicion.

  Don’t let them do this to you, she told herself.

  ‘We’re out of wine,’ announced Hugo to the room, pushing the empty bottle away.

  Fiona saw her chance for a moment’s escape. ‘That’s all right,’ she said, waving back Tara, who had already darted towards the door. ‘I’ll get some more.’

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The wine cellar was down the stairs in a cool alcove in the foundations, the bottles racked against the dewy limestone walls. The damp and chill felt good against Fiona’s bare sunburned arms, her flushed face, almost as good as the respite from the hostilities upstairs.

  We should have gone to Ibiza, she thought to herself.

  ‘All right there?’ rang out a voice.

  It was Hugo.

  ‘Yes,’ she called back, trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. What was he doing here? Making sure she didn’t steal the wine?

  She could hear him coming down the stairs, the rhythm of his steps erratic, and she suspected he was a great deal drunker than she’d previously thought.

  She selected another couple of bottles of the Grenache she and Mads had bought in town a couple of days ago and hastily started back towards the stairs.

  Hugo had reached the bottom and stood on the final step, one fat pink hand wrapped around the wrought-iron rail, the other resting against the wall, blocking her way.

  ‘Hi, Hugo. Excuse me, please …’

  ‘What’s that you’ve got there? Is it the good stuff?’

  ‘It’s just the Grenache. Can you let me through? Our dinners will be getting cold.’ She was hard pressed to keep her voice polite.

  ‘Our dinners are already cold.’ His watery eyes settled on her.

  ‘Hugo, would you mind …?’

  He didn’t move or acknowledge her, and her feelings were sliding from awkwardness to confusion. ‘Hugo …’

  He stood, swaying faintly, and his hand rose from the railing and drifted up towards her face.

  She stepped smartly back, nearly dropping the bottles in her haste and horror. What was he thinking of? ‘Hugo, get out of my way, please.’

  ‘What’s your rush?’ he slurred, and came at her.

  There was a ghastly moment of his thick arms pressed around her, him pressing his hot, hard crotch against her own, his plump, wet lips being mashed against her face. The fingers of his right hand were suddenly digging into her buttock, massaging it.

  The shock at first was so great that Fiona was stunned, numb and nerveless, the bottles in her hands trapped against her breasts, crushing into them.

  ‘Get off me!’ she hissed at him. ‘Get off me, or I swear I’ll scream!’

  His wide left palm was instantly against her mouth, silencing her. His breathing was hard, heavy. ‘Quiet, quiet,’ he sighed. ‘You know you want to …’

  But he had created an opening for her, and gripping the bottle in her own hand tightly, she swung it up and between his legs.

  She had expected him to fall over, to fold, as people did in the movies, but it only seemed to slow him a little, make him bend in the middle with a low oof sound.

  Still, it was enough. She pushed hard, running for the stairs, and over he went. One of the bottles fell to the stone floor, shattering.

  At the top of the stairs Madison appeared, a frown on her face.

  ‘What’s … what’s wrong?’

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The 23:45 to London Heathrow had been full except for a couple who had missed their flight, so there was room. It was just getting ready to board by the time Fiona had made her excuses to Judy, and Madison drove them both off in the rental car.

  It must have been kismet.

  Fiona sat back in her plane seat, gazing out at the stars over Majorca as the plane circled, rose, her stomach bottoming out with the rising acceleration.

  Next to her Madison had been silent.

  ‘You should have called the police,’ she said eventually, though without much enthusiasm. ‘It’s what you would have nagged me to do.’ She folded her arms.

  Fiona could not deny this. It was exactly what she would have nagged Madison to do. She shifted against the cutting weight of her safety belt.

  ‘I just – I just wanted to be gone. To go home.’ She felt weak, hollow with the shock of what had just happened. ‘He didn’t hurt me.’

  ‘Still,’ said Madison.

  ‘I just can’t.’ Fiona let her hands balls into fists. ‘His wife was there. And his mother. I’m in this foreign country. I just …’ She paused, trying to gather her wandering thoughts. ‘I mean, we’ve known each other since we were kids. What the hell?’

  ‘I know. You know, it’s up to you what you do about him. Don’t feel pressured, even if he is my brother.’ Madison rolled her eyes, and then gently patted her arm. ‘I told you he was a twat.’

  23

  The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney, January 2020

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Fiona nodded, and despite herself, felt better. ‘You’re right. It’s very cool.’

  Next to them, on a small rise, was a huge ring of massive rectangular slate megaliths, standing to form a broad, irregular circle containing scraggy heather. All around, the landscape functioned like a bowl, or an auditorium, as though the surrounding hills were paying attention; as though the stones were actors on a huge outdoor stage.

  They regarded the stone circle in silence for a long moment from the front seat of the van, marvelling at its enigmatic beauty, the ancient, unanswerable riddle
it represented.

  ‘They’re amazing,’ she said, moved. ‘I mean, I’ve seen pictures, but nothing like the real thing.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding. ‘It would be criminal to come all this way and miss them.’

  It was kindly meant but it put her in mind of her real purpose here. She was not a tourist, and the howl of the wind from outside the car was cold, desolate.

  She needed to calm down, she told herself firmly. This was a mere travel hiccup, as Jack had told her while they drove, a road bump. If Madison’s disappearance hadn’t put her on panic stations, she’d realise this.

  These weird highs and lows were happening because she was all alone out here.

  And it was then that she felt those first, prickling notes of resentment towards Adi. She could appreciate that Adi had a busy job and important people depended on him, but at what point did she become important? When her best friend went mysteriously missing? When her friend’s mother did?

  Was it when Madison’s corpse was discovered in a ditch somewhere?

  Somehow it had fallen on to strangers to offer her comfort.

  She shook her head. It would do no good to dwell on it now.

  ‘How long have you been digging out here on Orkney?’ she asked. ‘With Iris and the team?’

  ‘Me? This is the first time I’ve dug on Orkney with Iris. But this is where I trained, back in the day. Came out here every summer during my degree, volunteering.’ His eyes widened, as though at a happy memory. ‘Good times.’

  ‘Oh.’ She considered that sense she’d had, that they were old hands together. ‘You and Iris seemed to know one another really well.’

  ‘Ah,’ and it seemed to her that he blushed. ‘I mean, I do know her. Obviously. We were students together. We reconnected workwise a couple of years ago, at Jesmond Hill.’

  Fiona glanced at him in surprise. ‘You dug at Jesmond Hill? Wow.’

  She had read about the dig as it happened. It had, like the story of Tutankhamun’s tomb, a ring of legend about it.

  The dig itself was a simple rescue excavation before the building of a supermarket, a box-ticking exercise for the construction company, a legal obligation.

  The archaeologists had been exploring what they suspected were a trio of late Bronze Age round barrows – ancient graves for important people that had originally been tall mounds in the soil, but which had been ploughed flat in the intervening three thousand years.

  Two sealed urns of cremated remains had been found, hidden in small stone cists, but nothing else.

  It had been almost the final day of the excavation, and after digging for two weeks, in mud and flies and with the bulldozers mere hours from crashing in, the team were in the final exploratory trench, which was a little way from the barrows and would ultimately end up directly beneath the fish counter at the new Asda.

  One of the team, scraping out the bottom of the muddy trench, had run his trowel over the panel of Northumbrian mud, and suddenly, beneath him, bright gold had gleamed through.

  That famous necklace – the Jesmond Hill torc – had been discovered.

  Fiona remembered admiring the finds on the BBC website when the discovery first become public. She’d felt a little stab of jealousy – how amazing would it be to make such a discovery yourself, to be the first to uncover such exquisite treasure after thousands of years?

  It was a find that would have satisfied any other archaeologist for the rest of their career, but there had been others for the team, though less spectacular. Iris had a gift for knowing what sites to choose and how to excavate them.

  ‘So what was that like? Finding treasure like that?’ she asked Jack.

  He looked away then, and she had the sense she’d embarrassed him somehow. ‘Memorable.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘You must get that all the time, you must be bored to death talking about it.’

  ‘No, not at all …’ But there was no enthusiasm in it.

  ‘But it must have been amazing, to see that beautiful torc come out of the ground – there’s just something about gold, isn’t there?’

  ‘It was … something else.’ He nodded, offered her a little self-deprecating shrug. ‘You can dig your whole life and never see finds like that. But ultimately it’s luck rather than talent. Well, certainly not my talent. Whether it’s Iris’s talent is another question. She certainly has a great nose for these things.’ He cocked his head to one side, as though thinking. ‘And she comes across so well. It’s how she got the Discovering the Past gig.’ He sighed. ‘She’s a force of nature.’

  ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t get far without a good team behind her,’ said Fiona politely, wondering if she was intruding on some private resentment, some jealousy. There were a lot of reasons to envy Iris – her luck, her instincts, her career. It was surprising, she supposed, that Madison had not seemed to.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘I’m not so sure. She was something else back in the day, even when she was a student.’ He smiled fondly at the memory. ‘She came from filthy rich people – I forget what they did, something in soap – but she never really got on with them. She had a weird, distant relationship with her father. At home, she had to call him “sir”.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yep,’ continued Jack. ‘Well, I say that. I think once she discovered marijuana and motorbikes that all went out the window. She was the Wild Girl when I knew her at uni. I don’t know how she found the time to graduate. She organised raves most weekends. Made her own jewellery and sold it at festivals. I came off the back of that first bike of hers more than once and nearly broke my neck.’ He scratched at his chin, grinning. ‘It was only years later I discovered that she didn’t have a motorcycle licence.’

  Fiona laughed. Perhaps jealous Madison had not envied Iris because, as the children of distant, grandiose fathers, they understood each other better than most.

  She glanced at Jack.

  ‘You know, I did think when I first met you that you guys might be an item …’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked quickly, as though she had offended him.

  ‘You know,’ she said, colouring uncomfortably. ‘You and Iris.’

  His guffaw of laughter was sudden, shocking. ‘Oh no. Or at least not any more. We tried the, uh, Girlfriend Experience and it didn’t really work out. We’re better off as mates. Soulmates, really. But we don’t – we want different things.’

  So they’re not actually together. The thought flashed through Fiona’s mind like a treacherous darting fish. That’ll please Callum, she thought, with a tiny touch of glee.

  ‘I would find it difficult to work with an ex,’ she said. ‘But then maybe that’s because I never manage to stay friends with them.’ She gave a small laugh, embarrassed. ‘It’s a failure in adulting properly, I expect.’

  ‘Hmm. I dunno,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the windshield, and she had the sense that she’d touched a nerve. ‘Sometimes there’s a lot to be said for a clean break. I don’t think that Mairead and I would still be in touch if we hadn’t had Brand in common.’

  ‘Brand?’

  ‘My son.’ He cast a sideways look at her.

  ‘Oh, right. And how old is he?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Do you get to see him often?’

  Jack shrugged, a stiff, almost ashamed gesture. ‘Not as often as I’d like. Mairead and I – well, it’s still a bit frosty. I … to be honest, I wasn’t a very good boy when we were together.’ He sighed. ‘I’m not a very good boy generally.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ she replied archly.

  He snorted in amusement. ‘I’m not sure I do,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t want you to get totally the wrong idea about me.’

  ‘Or totally the right one,’ she said with a grin, and he laughed again.

  You are flirting, said a grave voice in the back of her head. Which is not like you.

  She ignored it.

  ‘Shall we get out?’ he asked.

  She nodded
– she was eager to see the stones, stretch her legs. Though the sky was blue she knew that when she got out, the wind would knife through her new red coat and ruffle up her sleeves.

  But she’d come all this way. It was time to engage.

  They got out of the van, him walking around the front to help her down as she splashed into the mud, her new boots already starting to rub her heels.

  ‘This way.’

  The stones themselves were deserted, the wind making a thin screaming as it tore through the low-lying heather.

  ‘They’re expecting a gale,’ she said, as he walked her up. ‘I wonder if they’ll cancel the flights soon.’

  ‘Probably. They cancel the ferries pretty regularly.’

  ‘Where are the others today?’ Fiona asked, oppressed by the silence, broken occasionally by the mournful cries of water birds.

  ‘At the house,’ he said. ‘They’re either in front of the internet or down the pub.’

  She laughed. ‘Can’t say I blame them.’

  ‘Well, you know, it’s not like any of us can complain about not getting enough exercise and fresh air.’

  They were about to approach the first stone when, before she could stop herself, she asked, ‘Jack, what do you think happened to Madison?’

  The question wrong-footed him, literally – he seemed to almost stumble.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, you must have a feeling.’

  ‘I …’ and she saw to her disappointment that he was looking away, frowning, thinking, and she recognised the expression.

  She understood that he was not going to give her an honest answer but the one that would make her happiest, or at least most quiescent.

  She grasped instantly that this was probably part of why he didn’t stay friends with many of his exes. From her fleeting acquaintance with Iris, the warrior woman, she suspected that this would have got old for her very quickly indeed.

  But then she thought of that line of Yeats’ that Madison always quoted at such points: It’s certain that fine women eat/A crazy salad with their meat.

  There was no knowing what a woman might refuse to put up with, until you saw her refusing to put up with it.