Katie sidles down the stairs, folding her arms in front of her and shaking her dark curls back from her face. I can see in her eyes that she’s still unsure, but also that on some level she’s impressed – the drama of this situation, and her role as the one who holds the knowledge I’m after.
‘Well …’ she says slowly. ‘You know there’s this boy, Jaxon?’ I nod, urging her on. ‘Well, she said she’s going to meet him tonight. Like a date?’
‘A date,’ I echo stupidly. I look at Rachel, but she looks as confused as I am. I can’t see what this has to do with Natalie, or how it marries up with our fears and suspicions. ‘The hospital told me that she had gone home with – with my wife.’ Out of the corner of my eye, I see Katie’s mother shoot a confused glance at Rachel, readjusting her assumptions.
Katie nods. ‘Yeah, that’s what she said. She said Natalie’s going to take her to meet him. I thought that was pretty cool. Like, my mum would never do that.’ She shoots her mother a quick venomous glance, as if this is digging up old graves, but it’s all I can do not to give in to the tears that are threatening to choke me, because she doesn’t understand what love is about – it’s about protection, shielding.
Her point made to her mother, Katie turns back to me and smiles. ‘So, I guess it’s OK,’ she says. ‘Because Natalie’s with her.’
Rachel must sense that I can’t speak, because she cuts in, smiling back brightly at Katie. ‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘You’re right, that’s helpful. But would it be possible to see the messages she’s sent you tonight? Just in case there’s anything we need to know.’
‘I don’t think …’ Katie begins, but her mother cuts in.
‘Just get your phone, Katie,’ she says. I look at her grave expression, and I can tell that she isn’t fooled. She knows there’s something very wrong here.
Katie sighs and fishes in her pocket. ‘This is kind of embarrassing, you know,’ she mutters. ‘Like, I don’t usually write messages to my mates thinking their dad’s going to read them.’
I’ve regained some control, and I hold out my hand for the phone. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘and I won’t look at anything beyond what was sent this evening, I promise.’
Unwillingly she hands it over, and my eyes flick over the conversation, seeing it at a glance, but double-checking, making sure I haven’t missed anything.
guess what?!!
what?
I’m getting out of hospital and natalie’s taking me to meet up with jaxon!!!
what?! u mean right now?
yeah. omg I am so nervous. what if he doesn’t like me anymore?
don’t be stupid babe. he will luuuurve u. where you meeting?
I dunno exactly yet. he said portslade
portslade??!! that’s a fucking dump isn’t it :-o
yh I know :-/ but errrr maybe it’s better than we think. or maybe he just knows a nice romantic place … oooohhh
sorry had to have dinner. ahh this is so exciting!! you have to let me know how it goes
Jade’s last message was sent only forty minutes ago, about twenty minutes before we arrived at the hotel room. I can’t believe she’d have voluntarily left her phone behind, and it means I have no way of contacting her, other than to go to Portslade and scour the streets. Briefly, I think about calling the police. But Jade’s been missing a couple of hours, if that, and I have so little concrete information to give them. I don’t want anything to slow me down – I want to get out there and do my best to find her.
‘Thanks,’ I say, passing the phone back to Katie. ‘If she does get in touch with you somehow, will you let me know straight away?’ I recite my number and she keys it in, then stares at Rachel and me wide-eyed for a moment, as if she’s still trying to figure out what all this means. I grunt an awkward goodbye and thanks before turning on my heel and striding back towards the taxi.
‘Portslade,’ I tell the driver. ‘Somewhere central.’
We’re back on the road, whizzing down the long narrow streets and past Hove Park, out towards Portslade. Even though it’s so close, I haven’t been here for years. White Tudor-style houses, squat, neatly rounded trees; a quiet little town, where nothing much ever happens. It is almost completely dark now, and I find myself looking in the windows of the houses as we travel down the long road that leads to the high street, caught in momentary traffic. Across the road, a man pulls his curtains shut, twisting his head around as he does so to talk to a child hovering behind. A little farther along, a woman is carrying plates of food to the table, setting them down with a flourish. Ordinary people in ordinary homes. They’ve never seemed so seductive or desirable. I so badly want this to be another normal day, another cog grinding in the works of an untroubled routine.
The taxi pulls up again with a screech. ‘All right here, mate? Are you going to need me again? Because I’ve got another job up in Hove.’
‘I don’t know.’ I can’t focus on the taxi driver’s workload right now. ‘Never mind. You can get off.’ Portslade is a small town. We can get around on foot, and we’re better off that way, having the freedom to search as we choose.
When he has pulled away I turn to Rachel. ‘I don’t know where to look.’ Against reason, something in me hopes that she’ll just know where Natalie is. I look frantically up and down the winding street we’re standing on. It’s deserted, the dim light of streetlamps faintly illuminating the pavements. ‘There’s nothing fucking here.’
Rachel puts her hand on my arm, steadying me. ‘We just need to keep going. Ask in some of the bars, something like that.’
It’s a reasonable idea and I seize on it; farther down the street I can see a pub sign bearing a painted image of a knight on horseback. I stride towards it, bursting through the door and instantly taking in the small number of punters; mostly elderly men nursing pints and staring down at the tables, lost in their own thoughts.
I approach one of them at random. ‘Excuse me, have you seen a girl? About fourteen, blonde hair, maybe with a woman who could be her mother? Or maybe with a teenage boy?’ My vagueness frustrates me. The man doesn’t even bother to reply, just peers at me in suspicion and shakes his head in silence before returning to his contemplation of his pint glass.
I go round each of the punters in turn, asking the same question and getting the same short shrift, until Rachel gently pulls on my sleeve. ‘Come on, Alex. We’ll try somewhere else.’
We spend the next twenty minutes ducking in and out of pubs and late-night corner shops, asking everyone we find if they’ve seen Jade. After a while I realize that I should be showing them a photo of her on my phone, and the thought gives me a new injection of energy and hope, but it rapidly becomes clear that it makes no difference. No one has seen her. We’ve walked for what seems like miles, and no matter how much ground we cover, we don’t seem to be getting any further forward.
Eventually I sink to my knees on the street, not caring who sees. ‘We’re not going to find her,’ I say, and voicing it aloud makes it so sickeningly real that for a moment I actually think I might throw up. I know it’s hopeless, but I dial Natalie’s number again. This time it goes straight to voicemail.
Rachel sits down beside me, her brow creased intently in thought. ‘Hold on,’ she says. ‘You don’t have a car, right? And I don’t think Sadie – Natalie – would have taken a taxi with Jade. Whatever she’s trying to do here, she wouldn’t want to risk being remembered by anyone. So they must have come by train, mustn’t they? We should go to the station – they might have CCTV, or a guard might have seen them – someone will know something, I’m sure of it.’
The conviction with which she speaks is enough to galvanize me, and I scramble to my feet. She’s right – it makes sense to go to the station.
I set off down the road, keying the location into my phone and seeing that we’re less than five minutes away. My feet pound on the street, the rhythm shaking its way through my body, the sound of my own breath hard and fast in my ears. The outlines of the bui
ldings lining the street are blurring in front of my eyes, but I force myself to keep going, running now, with Rachel at my heels. I can see the long white building of the station up ahead and as we reach it I slow down to catch my breath. But then I hear something. At first, I think I must have got it wrong. But when I turn to Rachel she’s staring at me, her eyes wide, lips parted in dismay, and without a word we’re running again.
Sadie
September 2017
ONCE WE’RE ON the train I choose the emptiest carriage I can and slide into the window seat, motioning for Jade to sit down opposite me. It’s a ten-minute journey at most, but the train crawls along, and we end up sitting between stations, with a bored announcer telling us that we’re being held at a red signal for what feels like a ridiculously long time.
Jade doesn’t say anything, but she can’t stop fidgeting. I try and remember what it felt like, to be so eager to meet up with a boy that it’s vibrating all the way through your body. When you’re older you lose that eagerness, that lustful one-track-mind focus. But I remember how it was with Kas, when I used to travel up to the club, and for a moment it’s like I’m back there, staring at my own reflection in the window against the darkening sky, imagining the look he’ll give me when he sees me and the scent of his aftershave curling towards me through the air. Usually when I get these kinds of flashback I cut them off at the source, brutally, with no time for weakness. But tonight I let my memories drag me back there. It feels right somehow. It’s almost like he’s here, right over my shoulder, watching me.
Jade is fiddling with her pocket mirror, examining her lipstick, twisting her face this way and that to check that it’s perfectly applied. It’s a crimson one of mine, a shade I’ve never seen her wear before. It doesn’t totally suit her – she’s too pale. But there’s something striking about the way it draws the eyes to the lips. It lets you know that the wearer wants you to be looking at them. She pouts uncertainly at herself in the mirror, then brings the back of her hand to her mouth, blotting the colour and leaving a perfect imprint of her own lips on her skin.
She sees me watching and glances up. ‘Do I look all right?’
It’s the sort of question I hate. If you don’t know the answer, you shouldn’t be asking. Still, I force a smile. ‘Knockout.’
She grins, glancing down at the dark blue minidress I’ve lent her. It’s a little looser on her than it is on me, but it skims her figure nicely enough. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve been a bitch to you at times, Natalie. Honestly.’
I’m jolted by the way it comes out of nowhere. ‘You haven’t.’
‘Yeah, I have,’ she insists. ‘It just wasn’t easy, you know, getting used to Dad having someone else. It was just him and me for ages.’
‘I know.’ I don’t want to have this conversation. Something about it is making me itchy and uncomfortable, prickly heat rising up through my body. It makes her too human, too vulnerable. And I don’t want her apologies anyway, because at the end of the day teenage girls are fickle and changeable and she probably wouldn’t mean them tomorrow.
The train has finally lurched into motion again, and I glance out of the window, seeing we’re pulling into Hove. Just one more stop, and we’ll be there. I change the subject, turning the conversation in a direction I know she’ll like. ‘So, are you looking forward to seeing Jaxon? It’s been a while you’ve been talking now, right?’
‘A few weeks,’ she says, grinning again. She’s looking at me a little slyly, as if she’s hugging a secret to herself – all the stored up words of those conversations that she thinks are only between her and this boy. Maybe she’s remembering the interchange we had a couple of weeks ago, when he started getting a bit frisky and she told him to stop. You’re over exciting me. Didn’t take much. If she really was seeing Jaxon tonight, I’d bet he’d be getting more than a peck on the cheek. Deep down, I don’t think Jade’s that different from me, funnily enough. And of course that only makes her even more dangerous.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘I’m sure he’ll be pleased to see you too.’
‘God I hope so.’ She looks unsure again, twiddling a strand of her fair hair in her newly painted fingernails. She did those herself, in the hotel room, her head bent in concentration, and her hands were trembling just a bit too much, so that the varnish has splashed a little on to the skin at the side of her nails. It’s endearing, kind of. ‘I realize it might not work out,’ she says now, ‘but I just really want it to. It would be so great to have a boyfriend. A guy who puts me first, you know?’
‘You’ve already got one of those,’ I point out. She looks blank. ‘Your dad,’ I elaborate.
Her expression is half baffled, half amused. ‘Well, yeah,’ she says dismissively. ‘But it’s not, like, the same, is it.’
I’m silent, turning my attention to the lines of square flat-roofed buildings whizzing past outside the window. I’ve always known it, but it’s gratifying to have her spell it out so baldly. It’s not, like, the same, is it. That’s what Alex gets for fourteen years of blind devotion. Whatever he does, it’ll never be enough. He’ll never be number one with her, not like he is with me.
‘Look,’ I say after another couple of minutes. ‘We’re here.’
Only five or six others get off at Portslade. Just as I’d thought, the platform is deserted within seconds. We’re on the far side of the cross-bridge, sheltered from the eyes of the cameras. There’s a wind picking up, and a blue plastic carrier bag rustles along by our feet, making me jump. I’m on edge. I lean back against the wall, folding my arms and looking out across the tracks. There’s no one there.
‘Shit.’ Jade is digging in her bag beside me, suddenly frantic. ‘I can’t find my phone.’
I fake concern, turning to her with eyebrows raised. ‘Are you sure? It hasn’t just slipped down the lining or something?’
She keeps turning out the bag, pointlessly going over the same ground. ‘No … Oh crap, I must have left it in the hotel room. I don’t get it. I’m sure I put it in here.’
‘What a pain.’ I congratulate myself on having thought of the phone. I took it from her bag while she was in the toilet, keeping it in my pocket and turning to throw it back into the room at the last minute as we left. I’m not stupid enough to think that Alex won’t find out that Jade left the hospital with me. For this to work, I’m going to have to tell him that she gave me the slip – that I’d brought her back to surprise him, then popped out to get some treats. I’ve got no idea what kind of software or apps she’s got set up on her phone; I can’t risk the possibility that there’d be a tracking device on it, something that Alex might be able to access.
Jade throws the bag aside, on the verge of tears. ‘What if he’s trying to contact me? What if he’s running late or he wants to meet somewhere else instead?’
‘Hey, calm down,’ I say, putting out my hand to stroke her shoulder briefly. ‘He said he’d meet you here at the station, didn’t he? So we’ll just wait here. He’ll turn up soon, I bet. It’s …’ I shoot a look at my watch. ‘Almost nine o’clock.’ It’s taken longer than I thought, getting her out of the hotel room, walking to the station and then the delayed train. But maybe it’s for the best; the later it gets the more this place seems to clear out.
Jade looks mollified, nodding. ‘I guess so. OK.’ She takes a deep breath and settles down next to me, folding her arms in an unconscious mirror of my pose.
I’m good at regulating my expressions, and I know that if someone took a photo of me right now I’d look serene, unruffled. As if I was just hanging out, doing nothing special. But inside my mind is whirring at top speed, and I’m wondering exactly how and when I should do this. The trouble with premeditating is that you have too much time. Too much time to think things through and over-complicate them in your own head. This ought to be easy, for me. But for some reason it isn’t.
I peel myself away slowly from the wall and walk towards the tracks. I glance at the departure board. I’ve got about two minutes unt
il the next train comes in. I stand close to the edge, just by the yellow line, looking out across the tracks again. ‘Come here,’ I say.
She trots up obediently, peering out, trying to see whatever it is I’m seeing. ‘What?’
‘I thought I saw a man. A boy.’ I squint into the darkness, as if I’m looking through the gap in the wall that leads to the exit. ‘Maybe not.’
She’s still at my side. I can smell the lime shampoo she washed her hair with before we left the hotel, the scent of it sharp and strange on the night air. When I turn my face towards her, she is so close to me that her features are barely in focus. She’s all big, dark blue eyes and bright red lips, an innocent little teenage fantasy. I take in a breath, and with the rush of cold air into my lungs I feel stronger. I open my mouth to speak again, but as I do so, I realize that my lie has turned into reality. There is a man opposite, walking quickly towards the footbridge that spans the two platforms, ascending the stairs. It’s so dark, the one lamp on the far platform barely shedding any light, that I can’t see his face, but he’s definitely heading our way. I breathe out again, talking myself down. I’ll just wait for the next train. He won’t be sticking around. It’s fine. I hear his footsteps down the steps, deliberate and slow. I twist my head to see, and then I realize that it’s Dominic.
My face breaks into a smile. Relief is flooding me like oxygen, swift and pure. He’s changed his mind. He’s come through for me after all. I won’t have to do this. I won’t have to get my hands dirty, not this time.
My eyes meet his across the twenty feet or so between us. They’re blank and steady, two marbles set deep in his face. And at the same moment, Jade turns round too. She’s clutching my arm, whispering nervously. ‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s OK,’ I say.
She looks closer, and I can tell exactly when she recognizes him. Her body goes rigid for an instant, and then she’s plucking at my sleeve again, her hand shaking. ‘It’s him,’ she hisses. ‘It’s the man, the man I’ve been seeing. The one who was in our house.’ Her voice is cracking with hysteria now, her hands getting more insistent, trying to pull me away. ‘Please, Natalie. We need to go.’
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