Night Falls, Still Missing

by Helen Callaghan

  If it was true, Madison must have been astounded to see him on the doorstep. Why hadn’t she sent him packing? Was it because, like Fiona, she was here in this remote corner of the world, alone with him, and she hadn’t wanted to get him angry?

  Or, once she got over her shock and annoyance, had she been flattered by the attention? Fiona had seen the way he shook when he mentioned her; his desperate, ensorcelled adoration, strengthened rather than vitiated by his rage. For Madison, raised by her distant, unapproachable father, such proofs of love and emotion, however toxic, would have exerted an irresistible call.

  She’d unceremoniously dumped Caspar, after all. Could it be because she wanted to take things up again with Dominic?

  Fiona might be repulsed by him, but to Madison, Dominic Tate had always exerted a bizarre appeal.

  Perhaps he had again, after a year’s break.

  It’s certain that fine women eat/A crazy salad with their meat.

  Could it have happened this way? Did Madison feel threatened, and contact him?

  Or was this some romantic embellishment, some white knight fantasy, and even now he knew where Madison was lying, dead and rotting?

  At this thought, it seemed to her that knives were digging into her heart every time she breathed.

  He’s a liar, she thought firmly to herself. Never forget that he is a liar.

  ‘So I ended up staying,’ Dom was saying, ‘and then she told me the landlord had seen me and wasn’t happy. She wasn’t allowed to have any guests, like, and he’d threatened to kick her out and tell her work on her.’

  Could Dominic have been the person who Maggie saw on Madison’s doorstep? From a distance he could look similar to Jack.

  ‘And nobody else knew you were here?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘No. I wanted us to go out, you know?’ He glanced at Fiona then, and there was something furtive and vulnerable in him, something pathetic. ‘I wanted to go to the pub and do things, you know, together. But she said that it was a bad idea. Considering all that had gone on.’

  ‘So, you left …’

  ‘Yeah. On Sunday last. You were coming up on Friday anyway so I couldn’t be here. She said she’d call me when you went back.’

  ‘Did she say what she needed me to come up for?’

  He shrugged. ‘I only know what she told you that night.’

  ‘What?’ Fiona was confused, thrown. ‘What night?’

  ‘When she rang you last week. You remember – you were in Cambridge. I think you were in the bath at the time. She said to come up.’

  Fiona could only stare at him for a long moment.

  ‘You were here? When we had that conversation? You were here in this house?’

  ‘Yeah, of course I was.’ He offered her his thin, unpleasant smile, which was somehow worse than his rages. ‘You were a complete fucking bitch to her, as I recall. Going on about it being “term time” and being “too busy”. She always said that you were all about your career.’ His eyes were flinty in that instant. ‘You made her beg for you.’

  Fiona did not answer. This was at once so accurate and yet so unfair she had no reply. She felt sick.

  She had made Madison beg. It was true.

  He gave her a mocking shrug.

  ‘But you don’t know what she needed me for?’ asked Fiona.

  ‘No. Moral support, maybe?’ He smiled again. He was enjoying her discomfiture, her despair. ‘She was going to tell the others, her work pals, that you were coming up to see the metalwork.’

  She was terrified, she was furious, she was grief-stricken, but, as she realised with a little jolt, she was also thinking. Yes, he’d heard their conversation that night. She remembered how evasive Madison had been when she’d talked about him, and she remembered how surprised she’d been when Madison wouldn’t directly accuse him.

  Yeah, he’d been in the room with her, all right.

  Such an enormous number of emotions moved through her then that she was paralysed. Rage, grief, fear, and yet one was first and foremost, one pricked her sorest, one tipped in poison – betrayal.

  Her words, when she spoke, felt like powdered glass in her mouth.

  ‘So you left Langmire a week ago today, and then you came back yesterday. And she was missing.’

  His smile faded. He must have been recalling that he had nothing much to smile about.

  ‘Yeah. I wanted to talk to Madison and thought I’d get her after you’d gone to bed. I had the key …’

  ‘She gave you a key?’ asked Fiona incredulously.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, his eyes meeting hers, that high colour appearing in his cheeks. Selling in the lie, like he had in court.

  ‘But straight away I could tell something was off. Your car was here and hers was gone.’ He slapped a meaty hand to his chin. ‘I mean, I was angry, like, because she wasn’t properly speaking to me, but I knew I couldn’t do anything stupid. If I … if I lost my temper … So I had to keep calm.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I had the key, so I just … I peeped inside. I didn’t come in this room,’ he added quickly, in the face of Fiona’s dawning horror, the memory of being woken in the night by the sounds of someone in the house. ‘I didn’t come in the bedroom, I swear, I could see through the window. I just saw you asleep, your face like, because the moon was out. It was really bright. And I didn’t understand, ’cos this was Mads’ bed and she told me you’d be staying upstairs when you arrived.’ He shrugged again, a big, theatrical gesture – so what would you do if you were me? ‘I just nipped up the stairs, to look for her. And of course there was no sign. Bed was stripped. All her shower things gone. None of her clothes there. Then I think I heard a noise downstairs, so I just left.’ He sniffed, added by way of afterthought, ‘Sorry if I frightened you, like.’

  You aren’t sorry, she thought. You despise me.

  But she did believe, unrepentant and committed liar though he was, that he was telling her the truth about that night.

  She believed Madison had sent him away on Sunday because she’d been expecting Fiona to come, then, after Wednesday, Madison’s texts had started to arrive.

  And unlike Fiona, Dominic Tate had known, with the restless, obsessive ear of an infatuated, narcissistic lover, that he was no longer communicating with the real Madison. As Fiona should have known, but didn’t – because she was too caught up in her own drama, her own sense of martyrdom at having to drop everything and come up here.

  Her shame was complete. Dom had known Madison better than she had.

  Of course Dom had come back to Orkney, looking for her, to demand an explanation.

  But did he find her in the end? And where?

  Did he do something to her?

  ‘What did you think had happened?’ asked Fiona, forcing herself to sound neutral, unthreatening. ‘When you found she wasn’t here yesterday?’

  ‘I dunno.’ He scratched his head, looked shifty now. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘But you must have thought something, Dominic.’ She sat forward, met his gaze. ‘Did you think she was with another man, perhaps?’

  ‘No!’ His eyes widened. She’d hit a nerve. ‘But maybe I … I thought maybe she’d given you her phone, told you to pretend to be her, like.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Fiona asked, mystified.

  ‘Well, you’ve got involved before. I’ve got to tell you, Fiona, me and Mads used to talk all the time about how very interfering you are.’ His words were tight now, bitten off. That surge of underlying rage was visible again. ‘I mean, it was you that persuaded her to put up those cameras in her flat and get me into trouble. It was you that made her take me to court. You wouldn’t even talk to her for me. If you hadn’t gotten all mixed up in things that are none of your business, Madison and me would have sorted things out months ago and things would never have … wouldn’t have come to this.’

  She stared at him. So, was it me that stalked her? Slashed her tyres? Me that posted mes
sages saying she ought to be raped and have her head cut off?

  ‘Dom, you need to go to the police.’

  ‘I … I dunno.’

  ‘What else are you going to do?’

  He glanced at her then, and his gaze was flat, expressionless. It seemed to Fiona, in a moment of pure horror, that a thought, just now a mere seedling, had begun to grow in his mind.

  Fiona was an inconvenience.

  It would be good if Fiona was not here.

  She needed to stamp on this seed, before it blossomed into action.

  ‘Dom, this is serious. You need to …’

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong! I’m not lying!’ He was growing red again. ‘I have all the texts, all the messages!’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’m sure you do,’ she said, dropping her voice so it was silky, honeyed – the voice Madison had doubtless used on him. ‘But you have to go to them, Dom. You have to show them the messages …’

  ‘But they won’t know I’ve ever been here … not if you don’t tell them.’

  ‘Of course they know you’re here. They know that right now. You’re the very first person they will look for,’ she said, trying to keep her voice soft, light. ‘They know there was a restraining order. They’ll have CCTV – they’ll know you were on the ferry, they’ll know you were on the island …’

  ‘But …’

  ‘You and I both know she never gave you a key to this place.’

  ‘No, she did,’ he interrupted, almost stammering. ‘She …’

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ said Fiona, with such decisiveness that he fell silent. ‘I’d bet a thousand pounds on it. You borrowed hers and had one cut for yourself. And in a tiny place like this, someone is going to remember that. Don’t you want to be the one that tells the police what you did and why, rather than them finding out?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘It’s only a little island. There’s nowhere to hide even if you wanted to, and no way to get off without being caught. You don’t want to be caught, do you? You want to volunteer.’ She fought to find the right words, the ones that would appeal to him. ‘You want to walk in a like a man.’

  He was mute, pale. She had made an impression upon him.

  ‘You need to go and explain everything to them, the way you explained it to me. You need to give me that key …’

  ‘STOP NAGGING ME!’ he yelled. His face was screwed up in an agony of indecision. ‘Stop going on! I get it! I get it!’

  Outside, there was the sudden purr of Iris’s Taurus approaching.

  His face whipped from her to the window and back again.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he snarled. That menace was back.

  She opened her mouth to speak, to deny, but suddenly his hard, furious fist was curled in her sweater, jerking her towards him. His breath was hot and stinking in her face.

  ‘You fucking bitch. Did you tell anyone I was here?’

  ‘No … I didn’t know you were here!’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Madison’s boss. She’s taking me back to Stromness …’

  He glared at her for long seconds, while she held her breath. His frantic desperation was a palpable, living thing.

  Then he flung her back against the floor. ‘Get rid of her. Get rid of her or I will.’

  28

  Grangeholm, Orkney, January 2020

  ‘Urgh, God, sorry, I thought I’d never get away from them. Why is it that people think asking you the same question a dozen times in different ways will magic the answer out of thin air? Never mind. I suppose it was a lot for them to take in. Did you manage to … Fiona, are you all right?’

  Iris had emerged from the porch into the hallway, kicking her boots off and talking brusquely, her face fresh from the cold.

  Fiona did not reply. She was still breathing hard, her heart pounding, her clothes and possessions strewn over the bed.

  ‘Fiona?’ asked Iris, peering up the stairs before coming into the bedroom.

  ‘I …’ Fiona looked up at Iris, swallowing against her dust-dry mouth.

  Iris frowned. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘Has something happened?’

  Behind Iris, in the shadows of the hallway, a stray flicker of moonlight licked against Dominic Tate’s sweat-damp brow. His eyes gleamed, like a feral wolf.

  ‘Um, no.’ Fiona was shaking now. ‘No. I just got … I haven’t packed. I … sorry, I think we just need to get out of here.’

  Iris patted her shoulder, coming into the bedroom. ‘No, I can see you’re upset. It’s all right. Is there anything I can do to … oh my, what happened to the wardrobe?’

  She had stilled, her hand on Fiona’s arm, staring at the broken mirrored door. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Oh … that?’

  Oh, for God’s sake, Iris, let’s go.

  ‘Uh, it happened before Mads went missing. Jack said the Fletts already knew about it …’

  ‘Madison told us she’d just cracked the glass!’ Iris stepped up to it, her hand to her chin, amazed. ‘Fiona, somebody’s head has gone into that.’ She pointed at it. ‘And is that blood?’

  ‘Um, yeah, a little bit, I think so …’ She swallowed again, desperate to get Iris out of here, get them both into the car.

  Her eyes flickered to the darkened hallway, despite herself.

  He was gone.

  Where had he gone? Not out of the front door, they’d have seen him. Nor had she heard him on the stairs.

  Weren’t the knives in the kitchen?

  ‘The Fletts said Madison told them she fell against the mirror getting out of bed,’ Fiona said, desperate to placate Iris, desperate to get her to go.

  ‘Fell? From where? Upstairs? The bed’s only a couple of feet away. Whatever this was, it happened with real force.’ She put her hands on her narrow hips, her dark ponytail twitching. ‘Fuck,’ she said. She turned to Fiona. ‘Do the police know about this?’

  ‘Um, yeah, I think so …’ She wasn’t even sure they did. She just needed Iris to …

  Iris paused for a second, then simply sighed, pulling open the wardrobe door. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll help you pack. Let’s get out of here. The sooner the better, frankly.’

  Oh, thank God, she thought. Let’s get out. Get out now.

  The hallway remained dark and empty.

  Fiona packed her suitcase, her fingers trembling, her heart pounding, while Iris rooted through drawers, the wardrobe.

  She was just forcing the suitcase lid down when she looked up and saw that Iris had vanished.

  ‘Iris?’

  There was no answer, merely a determined, quick tread heading up the stairs.

  ‘Iris?’ she shouted again, her voice growing louder, cracking with fear.

  ‘I’m just going up. These toiletries, are they yours?’ Iris called back down.

  ‘We can always get those later …’

  ‘Don’t be silly. We’re here now …’

  Despite herself, Fiona darted forward, into the kitchen.

  It was now empty.

  Was he upstairs?

  ‘Iris,’ she said again, barely able to raise her voice above a squeak. ‘Iris, I think we should …’

  ‘What?’ She’d appeared again on the stairs, her arms full of plastic bottles and deodorant. ‘I think I got everything … oh, there’s a draught in here. Can you just pull that window in the kitchen shut?’

  Shaking, Fiona moved over to the window to close it, and saw a key lying on the kitchen table.

  It must be Dominic’s. Her own was in her pocket.

  She quickly swept it up.

  Iris offered her a smile. ‘Is that it? Are we ready to go?’

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  ‘Iris …’ Fiona could hear how small her own voice sounded.

  ‘Yes?’ Iris was heading back to Stromness. Over the dark sea the lighthouse on Helly Holm flashed and was still.

  ‘Iris, Madison’s ex was just at the cottage.’

  Iris stilled. ‘What?’

 
; ‘Dominic. He was here. He said Madison invited him up. He had a key cut.’

  Fiona held it up in her fingers, and the brass gleamed in the interior lights of the car.

  ‘He did what?’ Iris appeared stunned. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I thought he’d hurt us.’ Haltingly, Fiona explained all that had happened since Iris had gone up to the Fletts’.

  Iris did not interrupt, but at the end, sighed.

  For a long moment she was silent, thinking. Then she looked up, into the rear-view mirror, and Fiona had the sense that, for a second, Iris was thinking of heading back there.

  How like Madison she was, Fiona thought, with a sense of wonder. She was a warrior, like Madison. Nothing scared her.

  ‘Iris, he’s a very dangerous man, and …’

  ‘Fiona,’ Iris said, with a certain tactful delicacy. ‘Have you considered that he just told you a pack of lies?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘You said yourself that he’s an expert in mobile phones. Perhaps he tricked Madison into believing somebody else was pursuing her on Orkney, inveigled himself into “helping” her, somehow …’

  ‘I don’t know, Iris. He was very convincing. He’d definitely been in the room for a conversation I’d had with her last week. I mean, I …’

  ‘Of course he’s convincing,’ said Iris contemptuously. ‘These people always are. He could easily have bugged her. My point is, he’s on the island and now Madison’s car is in the sea and she’s missing. As for the rest, I think that’s for the police to unravel and that can start with us telling them all about him. Right now.’

  Fiona nodded.

  ‘You promised to help Madison, didn’t you?’ Iris had grown firm, her jaw set. She was punching a number into her phone, which she then held out to Fiona. A tiny voice – ‘Police, Fire, or Ambulance?’ issued out of it.

  ‘Yes.’

  Iris handed her the phone.

  ‘Then go on. Keep your promise.’

  MONDAY

  * * *

  29

  Nordskaill, Stromness, Orkney, January 2020

  When Fiona woke, cramped and exhausted, from her nest of blankets on the sofa, it was a beautiful winter’s day outside. The smattering of snow from last night had held, and the sun glittered over it. The sea was a sparkling dark blue.