by Kate Simants
‘You OK?’ Mae asked, handing over the bag and taking the tumbler she handed him. ‘Can’t stay long, I’ve got Bear with me.’
His neighbour thanked him for the food and narrowed her eyes. ‘I thought she was off with her mum now.’
‘She was. We, uh, changed the plan.’
‘You did not,’ she said simply. ‘Something happened.’
He smiled, took a sip of the mahogany liquid, and told her the truth, because it was the only thing he could do. It was possible that one day, some kind of artificial intelligence would be able to edge a lie past Bettina, but it wasn’t something he’d ever managed.
She listened, finished her rum, and got up. ‘Do you know who else comes up here?’
Mae, caught off guard and wondering if she’d been listening at all, shook his head.
‘No one.’ She smiled. ‘I speak to my family in Jamaica on Skype, you know?’
‘That’s—’ he looked for the word. ‘Sad. I’m sorry, Bett.’
‘Hah!’ she said and reached for her tobacco. ‘That’s not what I mean.’
He waited, glancing at the door, conscious that Bear would be freaked out if she woke up alone.
‘I mean, you come. You don’t have to come. I never ask for your presents,’ she said, waving a hand towards the frozen meals. ‘Do you know why you come?’
You listen, he wanted to say. You’re always here. Your place smells like my grandparents’ place. But he couldn’t say that, so he said nothing.
‘You come because you’re good. You’re a good father. I saw you, arriving earlier, you know. With the woman?’ She flashed him a smile, nodding. ‘Beautiful lady.’
‘No, look, she’s—’
‘Hush, I don’t care. I saw you only caring for Bear. Eyes on your little girl, the whole time. See? So you make a mistake. You’re a human being. You must not only count the things you do wrong, Benjamin.’
*
In his own kitchen, he rinsed the three beer bottles and put them in the recycling. He checked his messages: one from his friend Rod demanding a pint, and a few about the CID five-a-side match next weekend. He knocked out holding-pattern replies to both. Then, while the kettle boiled, he went into his bedroom, retrieved the box he kept on the top shelf of the built-in wardrobe, and carried it into the kitchen.
He allowed himself to do this only occasionally now, but when he did it, he did it comprehensively. He lifted the lid and unpacked the box onto the table. Copies of every document from the Arden investigation: statements, photographs, reports, transcripts, the lot. He made a cafetière of decaf, brushed away the mud Kit’s shoes had left on the seat of his kitchen chair. The he sat down, and he read.
*
By the time he responded to the triple-9, Jodie Arden had been missing for almost two days. Her mother, Lucy, called it in. Mae had been at the end of his shift. He was hoping to get home in time to bathe Bear, who had just turned three. But DS Ian Heath, whom Mae had been shadowing, insisted on taking it. Needed the overtime, he said. Had four girls at home. There had been a slap on the back, Mae remembered: and anything to avoid doing bloody bedtime, eh?
So they’d driven over, Heath chuntering all the way about some long-running war of attrition he’d been having with another detective, a woman he thought was getting preferential treatment because of what he liked to refer to as ‘the D-cup effect’. Mae, who’d been a substantive DC for all of a month, did his best to zone his mentor out until they got to the address. Heath was known among his colleagues not only for his hot-headedness but also for his grudges, and Mae knew better than to challenge him.
They swung through the door to the complex and up the stairwell. ‘You can lead on this one,’ Heath said, half-heartedly stifling a burp with a fist and thumping himself on the chest. ‘See if you’ve been paying attention to the master.’
Mae hadn’t had the luxury of experience, but if he had, he would have seen right away when Lucy Arden opened the door that this was something worse than missing. Something about the flat, its laid-back, careworn warmth. Possibly it was Jodie’s room, where Lucy insisted he followed her the moment he arrived. The teenager’s walls were covered with murals which Lucy was quick to tell him were Jodie’s own work.
‘And she’s brilliant, isn’t she?’ Lucy said, when he’d complimented the artwork, the agony red in her eyes. ‘Hates school, but loves art, so that’s what she does. She paints.’
Lucy had already emptied the contents of her daughter’s handbags and schoolbags and drawers and folders and pockets onto the floor and was trawling for some kind of clue. The room was plastered with posters of grunge girls, Courtney Love and Doll Squad, but also demo placards.
‘Wouldn’t catch my girls with these sluts on the wall,’ Heath said under his breath, curling a lip. But Mae wasn’t interested in Jodie’s musical taste. Without even having to look for it, there was evidence all over the place, in every room, of a stable family home, albeit a two-person one. She’d had a so-so relationship with school, had been off for the preceding week, Lucy told him as he looked around.
‘She does that, decides she’s had enough of education, refuses to go in, then comes round again for a while.’
‘And things are OK at home? Between the two of you?’ he asked, examining the photos wedged between the vanity mirror and its frame. Several of them were of the mother and daughter: thin strips of photo-booth images. Fun stuff, moments of real happiness, nothing forced.
‘We’ve had a few fallings-out. She’s just pushing the boundaries at the moment. You know? Teenage stuff.’
Mae nodded, replacing the photos, thinking, fallings-out or not, this wasn’t a home from which you ran away without a very good reason.
When he finally ushered her back downstairs and settled at the kitchen table, the first major, quantifiable alarm bell rang.
Lucy suspected Jodie had a boyfriend. Which would have been fine, except Lucy was concerned that the boyfriend was much older. When he asked her how much older, she gave a sudden sob, just one, and looked away.
‘I don’t even know who he is,’ she told him. ‘I just know there’s someone.’ She proceeded to explain how her daughter had been out a lot, late, how she’d had money. How there had been that row, when Lucy had discovered her daughter had been taking explicit photos of herself on her phone. With Heath hovering in the background doing nothing more useful than helping himself to the biscuits, Mae asked her to write down the names of friends, places Jodie liked to go. As she hunched over the notebook Lucy pulled unconsciously at her eyebrows, and when he took the pad back, he had to brush away a little drift of crescent hairs with the back of his hand.
He wrote down each version of the events of two nights before, increasingly aware of the inconsistencies.
Jodie had been alone, or with her friend, possibly, when she left the house.
She had been wearing a coat, or it might have been just a sequinned dress, but almost certainly Doc Marten boots. But maybe, actually, the Hi-Tecs.
Jodie had been out from six, or eight, or possibly while Lucy was on the phone to her brother, which might have ended at seven, or could have been closer to nine.
Mae tried another tack, already thinking CCTV, door-to-door, phone records, because there was unreliable and there was unreliable and then there was this poor woman, and unless Lucy’s total loss of certainty was down to shock, he was going to be struggling here for much to go on.
‘Let’s think about who else might have seen her since Wednesday then,’ he said. ‘Are there people who visit you guys here often? Friends, family?’
‘A good friend, yes. She’s coming over in a minute.’
‘OK. Anyone else?’
She hugged herself. Eyes downcast. ‘I’ve been seeing someone. Charles,’ she said, looking up with a look of awful realization. ‘I’ve been neglecting her,’ she whispered, her eyes filling with tears. ‘That’s why this has happened. Have I been neglecting her?’
As softly as he could
, Mae assured her that he doubted it, that teenagers were hard, that he was sure she was a great mum. ‘But look, do you think Charles might be able to shed any light on her movements?’
Even years later, Mae could remember the chime of the doorbell that interrupted her, and the sound of sobbing as Lucy met whoever it was who’d come in.
Because as he politely sipped the tea he didn’t really want, into the kitchen and into his investigation walked a fourteen-year-old girl and her mother who would change the course of his life as surely as a fallen boulder changes the path of a stream.
*
He awoke to find Bear standing next to where he sat at the table, her little hand on his shoulder, hot through the fabric of his T-shirt.
‘Daddy,’ she was whispering. Freezing cold in the kitchen. ‘Dad.’
Lifting his head from the table, he wiped his mouth and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a moment. He moved a wedge of papers from his laptop and nudged the mouse to awaken the screen: 03.34. He closed the lid of the laptop and stood, taking her hand in his own.
‘I had a bad dream.’ She rubbed her eyes, and he pulled her into him, started stroking her feather-soft hair. ‘The room was full of water. Grandma was there—’
He stopped stroking. ‘Grandma?’ She’d always called Nadia’s mother Nanny.
‘Your one, Daddy. Your mummy.’
Something clenched inside him, remembering her, but he forced himself to resume the movement of his hand on her head. ‘What was she doing, sweetheart?’ Not, what does she look like? Not, how is she even in your dreams when you’ve never even met her? When she doesn’t even know you exist?
‘I couldn’t swim. And she was there, at the edge, but-but she wouldn’t help. Mummy couldn’t hear, and you were—’ she said, but her voice choked, and she shook her head, crunching her eyes shut.
‘Shhh, Bear.’ He made his shoulders drop, held her close. ‘You’re OK. It’s only in your head.’
‘I’m scared, Dad,’ she said simply.
‘What of, sweetheart?’
There was a long pause, and he had to fight the urge to interrogate her, ask her again about those mean-looking kids he’d seen at school, about whether Mike really was all right to her, as she always claimed.
But he gave her time to form her answer herself. After a long pause, she just said, ‘Sometimes I’m scared of everything.’
Mae took her back to her bed and smoothed her fine black hair away from her face. She was asleep within seconds, but he sat there beside her for a long time. Watching her breathe, telling her in a low, soft voice that things would OK, there was nothing to be frightened of because Daddy was there. And she slept and slept, too deep and still to argue.
23.
Ellie
The regularity of the planes descending above us was decreasing, and the noise from the pubs at kicking-out time had died down. I’d been in my room for hours, but there wasn’t a chance of sleep. I checked the time on my phone: 02.15.
Twenty-seven hours since Matt had disappeared off the face of the planet. Mum must have called the police about the car by now. I guessed it would be the morning by the time we heard from them though. There would be fingerprinting, CCTV. Maybe that would be the end of it all.
Giving up on sleep, I got out of bed and padded across my room for my dressing gown. I pulled it down from the back of my locked door and came face to face with my mirror. Full length but always distorted, made of some kind of plastic so it can’t shatter, because everything in my room has to be safe. I don’t even have a pair of tweezers. I lifted my chin to see my neck. The inky bruises were ringed now with the first bloom of green. There, just below them, was my scar.
Sometimes I forget it’s there. I touched a fingertip to the hard, knotty skin, following the length of the damaged tissue and marvelling that I had gone through with it. It is from when I was fourteen. Three weeks after Jodie. I cut my throat with a knife. I used the serrated one, laser-sharp but scalloped on the edge for gripping meat, slicing through the fibres. I remember weighing it in my hand thinking it was best because it was biggest. It made an awful mess, but it didn’t kill me. I watched myself do it in the mirror. In the last moment, when I dragged that blade across my neck, more than anything I had wanted to see Siggy. I stared myself in the eyes because I wanted her to watch and know she hadn’t won. All I could think, at the time, was that if I wasn’t alive, Siggy couldn’t hurt anyone. I’d just wanted her gone. She had taken my friend, and I wanted her to suffer for it. I didn’t care that it meant me too.
I hit my head on the side of the bath when I lost consciousness, and Mum heard. She broke the door down. Days later in the hospital, a nurse was changing my bandage and he thought I was asleep. He said to whoever was helping him that he’d have to get his wife to carve the roast lamb that weekend in case he got flashbacks. It was a joke, I thought, but neither of them had laughed.
It was all in vain anyway. Siggy never did reveal herself to me that night, anymore than she revealed what she’d done to Jodie. For her part, Mum never told me what she had done with the body. One day I had a friend, the next day she was gone.
Turning a circle, I lifted my top, looking over my shoulder, I could just about make out all the other marks. Half my body covered in a sea of small rucks and troughs, as if the skin had been pinched but not recovered. The swathe of damaged tissue across the skin of my buttock, between my legs, the inside of my thighs.
I’d tried and tried to recall the accident from when I was small, but it was as if someone had taken an eraser to that chapter of my life. I couldn’t remember anything about it: not the accident itself, not the pain or the recovery, not the hospital, nothing. It wasn’t uncommon, Dr Cox said, for that to happen with trauma. The mind can do anything, was what he said. Even obliterate the very thing that causes a person to fall apart.
Mum had told me the story many times though, and I knew it by heart. I was four, just about to start school. Mum had already given up her career in journalism and was working from home doing marking for a local college. It was exam season and she had a lot of work on: she was overworked, couldn’t have eyes everywhere, and I was bored, restless. There was a pan of pasta cooking on the hob, and she had been in the other room. She said that she knew what had happened when she heard the crash, before she even heard the screaming.
Apparently there had been talks of skin grafts, but in the end it was left to repair itself. For a while, it seemed I would make a full recovery. Physically, at least, I did.
It was, Mum said, a few weeks after the bandages came off that Siggy started to visit.
I traced the edges of the scars in the mirror, knowing every twist, every ruck. I thought it made sense that Dr Cox wanted pictures of them. He said it was for his records, so he could show his colleagues if he needed to. Because I was an interesting case. A single incident of physical trauma didn’t usually cause dissociation to the extent that I experienced it, and so he was going to write about it, a full paper at one point.
When he started taking the photos, just the arms and the calves and my shoulders, that was OK. I got nervous about the other ones, where I had to take everything off. But every fourteen-year-old wants to be an interesting case. I couldn’t ask Mum what she thought, because she didn’t even know I was seeing him. Both he and Jodie believed I was sixteen and that meant the decision had to be mine.
Mum found out eventually though, when it all went wrong. I felt as if I’d been turned inside out when she explained to me the real reason he’d taken them, what he was probably going to do with them.
They were still out there, somewhere, those images of me.
24.
Mae
The next morning Nadia was there as arranged, at the school gates. She was retying the belt of her camel-coloured trench coat, and he was struck how slim she was, edging now into skinny, thinner even than before the baby she’d had with Mike two years earlier. He wondered about that baby, Yolanda. Bear’s ha
lf-sister. There were pictures of her in school projects Bear had shown him, but that was as close as they got. He’d never even met her.
Bear broke into a run and launched herself into a waist-level hug with her mother, who whispered something in her ear, hugged her back, hard, and ushered her ahead.
To Mae, she said, ‘I’ve already been in, you’re off the hook.’
‘What? Why?’ The plan had been that both parents would go in and speak to – or, more likely, receive their bollocking from – Bear’s headteacher.
‘Because I didn’t want it escalating. You can get … defensive.’
Mae, instantly defensive, gritted his teeth and summoned every ounce of calm as Bear looked back and waved to him.
‘Remember about the school trip,’ she called back, by way of goodbye. ‘You are still helping, right?’
He rolled his eyes – like I’d forget! – making a mental note to write it down the moment he was back in the car.
Once she was out of sight, Nadia turned back to him. ‘I’m sorry. I was here early, and I thought it would be best to get it out of the way.’
He shrugged, knowing he looked sulky. ‘Doesn’t matter. What did they say?’
His ex-wife rubbed her hand over her pixie cut. Years had passed since her rolling brown curls had been abbreviated to a severe crop, but he’d never got used to it.
‘I told them it was a miscommunication, that we both thought the other was picking her up, and that we would double-check from now on. They’re not happy though. They’re making an official record.’ She saw him bristle, and added, ‘It’s safeguarding, Ben. It’s their job.’
He opened his mouth, thought better of it, closed it again.
‘Oh,’ she said, dropping her bag from her shoulder, ‘before I forget. I found this.’
She held something out to him and dropped it into his hand. A watch. Slender gold-coloured strap, a crack through the disk of glass. He slid his thumb over the casing, knowing every nick and scrape of it, the exact trajectory and length of the break across the face.