by Perks, Heidi
Chapter Eight
Grace
Peter Samson, the station officer, is waiting behind a desk in a room at the back of the station. He is thin and balding on the top of his almost-shaved grey head and wears round black glasses that he squints through to peer at Grace. He confirms that no one has reported Anna missing as he ushers her into a seat.
‘So her husband hasn’t called? Only he told me he was going to.’
‘No,’ Samson says. ‘Not as yet. Maybe your friend has already returned home?’
‘I only saw him about forty minutes ago,’ she answers. ‘So I don’t think so. He would have called if she had,’ Grace adds, though she isn’t sure this is true. If Anna is back then they’d likely be in the middle of a blazing row right now, Ben demanding answers to why she’s only just returned.
But she doesn’t believe anything is that simple; and regardless, she is here now to make sure the police handle Anna’s disappearance with the urgency that Ben and all Anna’s other friends should be pushing for.
Peter Samson is a sharp contrast to the officer at the front desk, whose name, Grace realises, she didn’t catch. She wishes he emitted some of the other man’s warmth as he chews the corner of his lip and opens a notepad. He is easily in his late sixties, close to retirement if he isn’t already there, and looks almost too relaxed and comfortable in his thick cable jumper and corduroy trousers. Grace is beginning to wonder if she has been passed off to Peter on purpose, if the officer on the front desk thought she’d be wasting anyone else’s time.
‘Why don’t you tell me about your evening?’ he says. ‘Who you were out with, where you went …’
Grace gives him the names of the other three women, tells him she arrived at the Old Vic at 8.30 p.m., when all four of them were already there, and that she left at midnight. That they went nowhere else all night.
‘Was everyone drinking?’ he asks.
‘Yes. They all drank a lot.’
‘Roughly how much?’
‘I don’t know, Anna and the others were drinking tequila, plus they had near enough two bottles of wine each before I left.’
‘Is this common? Does Anna drink a lot?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Grace says. ‘It was a night out, a pre-Christmas celebration.’
‘Drugs?’
‘No.’
She shakes her head adamantly but he must see something in her eyes because he says, ‘Are you certain?’
She isn’t certain. There were enough trips to the toilets, times when the others had swept each other off, giggling, linking arms, but she cannot imagine Anna taking drugs. Nor any of them, if she is honest. ‘As far as I know Anna wouldn’t do that,’ she says.
He continues to probe for details about the evening. ‘What was she wearing?’ he asks.
Grace describes Anna’s skinny jeans; her chiffon top that showed her bra; the distinctive long red coat that reaches her mid-calves, which she would have been wearing when she left.
‘Was she speaking to any one you didn’t recognise?’
Grace tells him she hadn’t been, that it had only been the five of them clustered around the table all night.
‘And did she suggest going anywhere else after the pub?’
‘Not before I left,’ she tells him.
‘Okay.’ He pauses, scribbling notes furiously into his pad. ‘How would you describe Anna’s mood last night?’
‘It’s difficult to describe,’ she answers. ‘But there was something not right. The whole evening, its atmosphere – it all felt a little off to me.’ She hesitates, not knowing what to give him. All of this is her gut feeling based on the fact that Anna wasn’t the woman she had imagined her to be. Based on a girl she knew nineteen years ago. ‘There’s nothing in particular.’
‘But you say something wasn’t right, that it felt off to you. Can you try to give me a bit more?’ he persists.
Grace’s gaze drifts from him to the far corner of the room, where a video camera hangs from a bracket. She wonders if he has been recording her, though he hasn’t mentioned as much.
She thinks back to the previous night. She needs to relive it in as much detail as she possibly can: the way the women were from the outset, the drinking, Anna’s mood, Nancy’s pawing at her, the lies this morning.
‘Things were tense,’ she starts. ‘Anna was uptight from the beginning of the evening.’
‘What makes you say that?’ he asks bluntly.
‘She didn’t look happy. I could tell there was something on her mind but she didn’t say what it was.’
‘Not at all?’
Grace pauses before shaking her head. ‘No.’
‘Okay, go on.’
‘Like I’ve said, they were all drinking, buying rounds of shots and bottles of wine.’
‘But you weren’t?’
She shakes her head again. ‘I was drinking, but nowhere near to the same level.’
He continues to write, and so she carries on. ‘At one point Caitlyn was in tears. I have no idea what about. She was at the bar with Nancy and Anna too, but …’ She pauses. ‘When she came back to the table it was all hushed up. They didn’t talk about why she’d been crying, just acted like it hadn’t happened, as if they didn’t even think I’d have seen her, though of course they must have known I did.’ She is trying not to say this with contempt, trying to sound impartial as she reels off the facts, regardless of how much it pissed her off at the time.
‘Rachel was drinking the quickest, she was quite frantic in the way she knocked back her shots, but then, I don’t know, maybe that’s just her. She admitted this morning that she and Anna had had an argument.’ Grace tells Samson what she has learned, and how Rachel knew she had left Anna behind.
‘But the odd thing is Nancy and Caitlyn had both been adamant that Anna had already left before them.’
He peers at her through his glasses.
They are lying. The words are on the tip of her tongue but she is trying to infer them rather than be too explicit. If he draws his own conclusions then surely that will carry more weight.
After a moment Grace adds, ‘But if anyone knows what Anna’s state of mind was in by the end of the night then it’s Nancy. She wouldn’t leave her alone all evening.’ She pauses. ‘It’s her you need to be speaking to right now.’
Samson nods slowly, eying her all the time. ‘Anything more you can add?’ he asks eventually.
Grace’s mind flicks back to what Nancy said about Rachel and Anna. They weren’t the only ones who’d had words last night, were they? She wonders what Nancy was trying to imply.
She and Anna didn’t have words. Not like that, anyway. And certainly not anything she is going to mention to Samson, because doing so would only make things worse for Anna in the long run.
‘You need to talk to Nancy,’ she says again, urgently.
‘Ms Goodwin, what has brought you here?’ he asks.
‘What do you mean?’ Grace is taken aback by his question.
‘I mean, why have you felt the need to report Mrs Robinson’s disappearance when her husband hasn’t? I’m just interested,’ he continues, ‘to hear why you think this is so worrying.’
‘You don’t think it is?’
‘I hope it isn’t,’ he tells her straight. ‘And I’ll level with you – plenty of people disappear every day of their own free will and it isn’t a crime. But,’ he adds more softly, ‘I can see you are worried about your friend. So I just want to know why you have come here when Mr Robinson hasn’t.’
‘Because …’ She looks at him blankly before leaning forward. ‘Because there is no way Anna would leave her son,’ Grace tells him. She may not know Anna as a mother that well – she wasn’t there for the stories of labour, the tears through the night feeds or the celebrations of first steps – but Grace was there when Anna was growing up, and she can hand-on-heart tell anyone that she would never leave Ethan like her mother left her. ‘I know that beyond doubt. There is no way she would e
ver leave her child.’
November – 5 weeks earlier
Anna
Sally has become a constant in my life over the last two months. Her face and mannerisms are familiar to me, like the way she always crosses one leg over the other as she settles into her chair, rests her notebook on her lap, smoothing out a page with one hand as the other grips on to her gold pen. The gem on the end of it continues to wiggle furiously as she writes.
They are all soothing, these little things.
She is shuffling into her armchair today, taking off her cardigan and draping it over the back of the chair. The window is ajar because the room gets so stuffy. For a moment she forgets to turn to a fresh page and I see scrawls of handwriting filling her book.
How desperately I want to know what they say. For the most part, I don’t see how we are getting anywhere when we’ve only been scratching the surface.
I think of my life in layers that I can peel away at. We have only been stripping back the outer skins but maybe Sally knows this. Perhaps she doesn’t care; she knows we will get there eventually. There’s a chance she’s already garnered more from our conversations than I give her credit for.
I let out a deep sigh by accident.
‘You seem unsettled today, Anna,’ she says.
‘More than usual?’ I joke, before frowning. ‘I just want everything to go back to normal.’
‘What does normal look like?’
‘Like everything is under control. It isn’t any more. Nancy’s always saying I’m the calmest person she knows, and yet right now I feel like … it feels like it did all those years ago.’ I know I need to start telling her more.
I had just turned fourteen when the new girl arrived at school late one January. Her name was Heather Kerr and her hair was streaked purple at its ends and she wore her socks rolled down under her feet so they barely showed above her scuffed black shoes. She would sit in the back of class in lessons painting Tippex on to her fingernails and punching holes through the end of them so that she could push her stud earrings through like some kind of fingernail jewellery.
She was the coolest girl I’d ever met. Often I’d sit at the back of the class watching her, wondering how it must feel to have that kind of irreverence. To not have to worry about what anyone else thinks.
One night I stopped off at the chemist on the way home from school for a packet of sanitary towels and my attention was caught by the purple hair dye for sale on the end of the rack. If it hadn’t been reduced to £2.99 I might not have bought it.
Later that evening I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and stared at the box for fifty minutes before finally opening the seal and pulling out the instructions. I was still deliberating over doing it, thinking of my dad and what he would say to me if he saw me with purple hair.
Our relationship had increasingly deteriorated by then; we came and went like flatmates, polite and kind but with little of much importance to share.
Often I blamed him for this as teenage girls do, but sometimes I would also blame myself. For spending too much time with Grace’s family, for believing my need for a supposedly perfect family unit was more important than making the best of what I had. He loved me, I knew he did, and yet sometimes I believed different. But might we have had a better relationship if I hadn’t been searching for a different family at Grace’s?
Eventually I ran the colour through my hair and found myself wishing he might even get angry with me. But at dinner that night he looked up, his forehead creased in confusion, and he didn’t utter one word. I was sure he’d noticed but for some reason he didn’t comment.
And yet Grace’s mum, Catherine, did. The following day she ran her hands through my once-blonde locks and said, ‘What’s this? Oh, Anna, what have you done to your beautiful hair?’
There was no malice in Catherine’s voice, no anger, but disappointment flooded out in her words, and in an instant I felt a sickening regret. I had let her down. And that was so much worse.
Grace had been watching from the doorway, her face also dropped into a frown. ‘What have you done that for?’ she asked.
What had I done it for? It now seemed a very good question, because actually when I’d looked at the finished job I didn’t like it one bit. ‘I just wanted to,’ I replied, because that was all it was. Just for once I wanted to do something that wasn’t expected of me.
Three washes later and my hair was ‘back to normal’, as Catherine put it with a smile. Her disappointment had faded along with the purple dye, and I was only left with my own. I was left feeling hollow. Heather Kerr was continuing to pierce body parts and ink drawings on to her own skin and I continued to watch in awe.
I wondered why I’d been so rash in doing what Catherine had expected of me and whether I might have felt better in the end if I’d just stood up for myself.
Two weeks later I bunked off class with Heather for the very first time. Another three and I snuck out with her in the middle of the night. We’d become friends, doling out and accepting dares as if we were invincible, and all of a sudden I felt free to be whoever I wanted to be.
One evening Catherine pulled me to one side. ‘Anna, we don’t see much of you any more. Is everything all right?’ Her face was creased with worry. She and Grace’s dad were at least ten years older than my father, and that evening she was looking her age.
‘What’s Grace said?’
‘Well, actually, Grace hasn’t told me anything,’ Catherine answered, pulling back, hurt. She’s not your mother, Heather had said once of Catherine. I don’t know why you’re bothered about what she thinks.
I was sure Grace must have told her mum everything I’d been up to and even more certain that Catherine would always take her daughter’s side, and as such might even tell Grace not to hang around with me any more. Maybe I was afraid of this, but I was also sucked into my new friendship with Heather. I started pulling away from Catherine and the rest of the family for a short time while taking this very different path. Heather didn’t offer me the comfort I’d once craved from Grace’s family, but she offered me something else: excitement.
It was only a few weeks later, after things had taken a turn for the worse, when I found out for sure that Grace hadn’t uttered one word against me to her mum. She was gutted at what I’d been doing but I was still her best friend, she’d told me. Grace had stood by me, had waited for me to come back to her. How many friends would have done that?
‘I feel guilty,’ I tell Sally.
‘Because of Grace?’ she asks. When I don’t respond she presses on. ‘Do you feel like you owe her for being there for you when you were younger?’
‘Yes. That’s exactly it.’
‘You think she provided a family you didn’t have?’
‘I’ve always thought that. You know a few months back, when Dad and I were properly talking, I asked him if he remembered me dying my hair purple. He did,’ I say sadly. ‘He didn’t say anything because he never knew if he was saying the right thing. He told me, “I didn’t want to hurt you. You were a teenage girl, I had no idea if everyone was dying their hair purple or not.” It made me feel sad that we never had a better relationship,’ I say to Sally.
Sally nods and waits for me to go on, but when I don’t, she asks, ‘Why do you feel like you can’t have a friendship with Grace any more? Because I wonder if there’s a bigger reason here, something else.’
I close my eyes and turn away from her. The intricacies of friendships are too difficult to explain, sometimes even more so than a relationship with a partner or a spouse.
‘Anna, Grace might have been there for you once; don’t you think she’d be there for you again if you needed her?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Actually, I think she would stop at nothing to be there for me.’
Chapter Nine
Grace
Grace leaves the police station and heads back to the apartment she has rented for twelve months from the woman who professed to have a plethora of ren
tals scattered across the town. She knows she is paying much more than she needs to in Clearwater, but there was something very appealing about the ease of moving into the Waterview apartments, so new and clean and furnished. Plus, she and Matilda have panoramic views of the coast and a swimming pool at their disposal, which she hates to admit they haven’t used anywhere near as much as she’d intended.
Back at the apartment, with the wind whipping against the panes, it is hard to concentrate on much other than what might be unfolding right now. Since leaving the police station she’s been thinking about how she told Peter Samson to speak to Nancy and what he took from their conversation. Grace hopes she is his first port of call.
But past 1 p.m. she’s still heard nothing from the police, or Ben, or any of the women who should have been contacted by Samson and his team. Her mobile has been uneasily silent, although she has checked it every five minutes, picking it up and pressing on the screen. Each time a photo of her and Matilda appears, but there are no missed calls or even messages from the class WhatsApp group.
Instead she can only imagine what is unravelling. Surely the police have questioned Ben and Nancy and the others.
Before she left, Samson said to her, ‘Please don’t worry any more. We will be following up on what you’ve told us.’
Don’t worry? Of course she is still going to worry. Anna is missing. And what makes it worse is the sense that she is the only person who is worrying.
But at least Grace has Ethan coming over tonight, she thinks. It might sadden her that this is the first time she’s had him for tea when it is something she’d thought she’d be doing more often, but in Anna’s absence it is almost comforting to think she’ll have him here.
Earlier she had asked Samson what was actually going to happen after she left the station.
‘I’m going to be passing this on to our team, who will speak to Mr Robinson and the friends who were with you last night,’ he assured her.