(1998) Denial (29 page)

After he had taken down Amanda’s basic details, the officer asked, ‘Was Miss Capstick depressed at all? Or suffering from any mental disorder?’

‘Not in my opinion, no.’

Watching Michael’s face carefully. ‘Was there any disagreement between you?’

‘Absolutely not. We . . .’ Michael checked himself then decided the officer should know the truth. ‘I don’t think either of us could have been in a happier frame of mind when we last saw each other.’

‘All right. Can you tell me what happened the last time you saw her?’

Michael gave the officer all the details he could; it was a laborious affair, waiting for him to write everything down. When he had finished, Michael handed him the brochure, showing Amanda’s photographs inside it.

The officer looked at them. ‘Very attractive young lady.’ He handed back the brochure.

‘Don’t you want to keep it?’ Michael asked, surprised.

‘Not at this stage, sir.’

Michael looked at him angrily. ‘What do you mean,
not at this stage?
’

‘Sir, with respect, it has been less than forty-eight hours. Obviously we want to help all we can, but this isn’t a long time for someone to be absent. Miss Capstick is not suffering from any mental illness. For all we know she might have decided she needs a little space on her own.’

‘Forty-eight hours is plenty long enough for her to have bled to death if she’s in a wrecked car somewhere, or to have been murdered.’

The officer put down his pen and leaned forward, studying Michael’s face intently. ‘What do you think might have happened, sir?’

The man’s scrutiny made him feel uncomfortable. He knew the police would be bound to have some suspicions about him, as one of the last people to see her, and for reporting her missing.

Michael told him about Amanda’s relationship with Brian, and her concern about the car that had been sitting outside his house, and the officer made notes about this.

‘She had no enemies, so far as you were aware, sir?’

‘Not that she mentioned.’

‘Did she appear in any of the documentaries she made? As an interviewer or narrator?’

‘I’m not sure. Why?’

The officer shrugged. ‘Celebrities often get targeted by stalkers. It’s only a thought at this stage. I wouldn’t get alarmed.’

‘It’s very hard not to be alarmed. Amanda is not some flake, she’s a very bright, very together, sensible person. Even if she never wanted to see me again in her life, there is no way she would fail to turn up to business meetings and not make contact with her office.’

‘I’m afraid it happens more frequently than you think, sir. People disappear, then turn up days later with perfectly acceptable explanations. I’m sure as a psychiatrist you must have encountered people who have done this.’

Michael had, but he was reluctant to acknowledge this. He stared back at the man, not wanting to give him any
leeway. He wanted the police to get out there and start searching for Amanda. Right now.

‘So what are you going to do? Anything?’ he asked, testily.

‘At this stage, sir, we’ll circulate details to other police forces in Sussex and London that Miss Capstick has been reported as a missing person.’ He smiled to try to give Michael some reassurance. ‘Dr Tennent, I’ll keep a special eye on this for you and make sure that everyone knows about it, but beyond that there isn’t much more we can do at this stage.’

‘When can you do more about it?’ Michael asked, frustration fuelling his anger now. ‘When you find her body?’

The officer had the grace to blush a little. ‘Two hundred and fifty thousand people are reported missing every year, sir. Most of them turn up again. I’m sure she will and that she’s fine, sir.’ He fished in his top pocket and pulled out a card. ‘Any time you need to contact me, day or night, it has my direct line and my mobile.’ Then he turned it over and wrote on the back. ‘I’ve added my home number, sir, as it’s you. Please call me if you hear anything – or if you just want to talk more about it.’

Michael took the card and looked at it.

The name printed on it was Detective Constable Simon Roebuck.

Dresses. Shoes. Hat boxes. Wigs. Silk scarves. Jewellery boxes. Two entire rooms in Cora Burstridge’s flat were full of nothing else. Glenn found it hard to believe how many clothes the star had had.

He found a diamond-studded antique Cartier watch in one box that was just sitting on top of a chest of drawers, and more fine jewellery lying around in cupboards and drawers.

Everything was generally tidy – or as tidy as this massive jumble of stuff could ever be. There were certainly no tell-tale signs that an intruder had been rummaging around. Not until he opened the door to the broom closet in the kitchen.

There was disarray in here. A bucket and pail had been knocked over; the handle of a carpet sweeper lay awkwardly on a crate of sherry bottles; several cloths had come off their hooks and fallen onto objects below them; a dustpan and brush had been dislodged and lay on the floor alongside a tin of Brasso, which had leaked out its contents.

A gleam of light shone above his head. It was coming through a loft hatch that was very slightly ajar.

Was someone up there now?

He froze.

The hatch cover was only a foot above his head. He could reach up and touch it easily with his gloved hands. Listening, he stood still, held his breath. His radio crackled and he switched it off, tuned his ears into the loft. Nothing. Music playing faintly under him, a piano tinkling – maybe the flat below?

Reaching up, he placed his palms against the cover. He
was over six foot tall, Cora would have needed a step-ladder. Where was it? When did you last go up here, Cora?

He pushed the cover further open. In the stark light he could see up into the rafters. They looked in OK condition, a few flaps of roofing felt hanging down, that was all. Moving the wooden cover carefully aside, he gripped the edges of the hatch and hauled himself up.

As his head rose up into the loft, he saw the figure towering above him, looking down icily.

A rash of goosebumps erupted on his skin. He let go involuntarily, and crashed down.
Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, sweet Jesus!

He was backing out of the closet, his heart berserk inside his chest. All he could see was the figure, the cold smile, the glossed lips, the long blonde hair, the full-length black silk dress.

Get a fucking grip, man!

Just an almighty bloody scary-looking mannequin.

Remembering now. Of course.
The Lady Is Out
. One of Cora Burstridge’s best films, a real shocker, in which she played the demented victim of a stalker, Anthony Perkins in a reprise of his
Psycho
role. In the climax scene, she had set a trap for him by having this mannequin dressed up to look like her, and standing it in a room behind a net curtain while she waited behind the door with an axe and butchered him when he came in.

He went back into the closet, but slowly, hauled himself up and looked again. The sight of the mannequin was almost as bad the second time. Watching it carefully now, taking his time, just to make sure – that it didn’t move, that it wasn’t a ghost.

The face had been made up with exquisite care in every detail; it looked horribly, terrifyingly real. ‘Nice sense of humour, Cora,’ he whispered, wishing he could share this little joke with her, but not quite able to.

He heaved his whole body up into the loft, his feet kicking out at the walls for a grip. This was how the cloths had come to be on the floor, he thought, and probably the dustpan and brush and the Brasso tin.

On his knees, he looked around. A solitary lightbulb hung from a flex a short distance in front of him. A large water cistern. Suitcases and trunks piled all around. Stacks of pictures or paintings wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, coated in years of dust. The mannequin, too, was dusty, and a large cobweb had been spun on the wig.

This was a treasure trove of Cora Burstridge memorabilia, and Glenn would have loved to have had the time to explore it. Instead, he hefted himself upright and concentrated on his task.

Maybe Cora had come up here and left the light on. OK, I’m Cora, what am I looking for? I’ve come home from buying my grandchild Brittany a Babygro. I have people sending me flowers, phoning me to congratulate me on my BAFTA award. So I put down the bag with Brittany’s present, I get out the steps, I climb up into the loft. What am I looking for?

Something for Brittany? Something that winning this award has reminded me to look for?

Glenn pulled out a small torch he had brought with him, switched it on and ran the beam over each of the trunks, suitcases, brown-wrapped parcels. Dust, cobwebs, mouse droppings. None of these cases had been opened for months – years, maybe.

Careful to step only on the joists, and keeping his head ducked against the low rafters, he made his way across the loft into the darkness beyond the throw of the lightbulb. Then he stopped and turned to look at the mannequin. It spooked the hell out of him again. And his bald head touched a large spider’s web. He jumped, then brushed it away in revulsion. As he did so he felt the feet of the spider running around his neck, and he snatched at it with his hand, shuddering. ‘Yuk! Get away!’

He scrunched his shoulders and shook himself. As he did so, the beam of his torch caught what he thought at first was a moth hanging asleep on a wooden upright.

Free of the spider now, he walked over and looked closer. It was a tiny strip of cloth hanging from a nail. Shoulder-high to him.

He looked at it closer still. Cream threads. Had Cora snagged herself up here? But Cora was only five foot four. This would have been head-high to her.

He left it as it was, without touching it, and walked on, over towards a rectangle of light he could see at the far end of the loft. As he got closer, playing the beam of his torch on it, he could see it was an ancient fire-escape door. Rusted, probably disused for years.

It was secured by a padlocked hatch. Except the hatch had come away from the door and was hanging, twisted, four rusted screws still in place in it, four gaping holes in the door where they had been.

Someone had kicked this door open. Recently.

In 1966 the BBC banned from transmission a documentary made for them by director Peter Watkins, about a fictional H-bomb attack on Britain. It was called
The War Game
. It included footage of shadows on walls in Hiroshima that were the vaporised remains of tens of thousands of people caught in the atomic blast. It showed footage of others, even less fortunate, whose entire body skin was sloughing off them as they ran in blind, screaming agony.

In the notoriety following its banning,
The War Game
became compulsive viewing in art-house cinemas and at private screenings. Gloria Lamark saw it at a special invitation-only preview at the National Film Theatre. Afterwards, like a lot of other people who had been terrified by it, she commissioned the construction of a nuclear shelter beneath her home. It would be dug out beneath the house’s existing cellar and its walls were to be of three-yards-thick concrete.

In common with others who had built such shelters, Gloria Lamark kept it quiet. In the event of a nuclear attack, anyone who knew about your shelter would kill you to get in there first. She went to elaborate detail to disguise the shelter’s existence. If you took the staircase down at the back of the hallway, you would find yourself in a small gymnasium containing an exercise bicycle, some weights, a rowing-machine and a jogging-machine. A wooden door led into a small sauna. The entrance lay through a door below this sauna, of the kind used on bank vaults.

Beyond the door was a chamber, monitored by a closed-circuit television camera. A second vault door, with a
similar lock, opened onto a spiral staircase down to the shelter itself, which was accessed by yet a third door.

The shelter was a small network of rooms, each hermetically sealed by steel doors, like the watertight compartments of a ship. If one room developed a leak, the others would still be free of contamination. There was ventilation ducting, and provision for a generator-run air-purification plant and a water-purification system. Gloria Lamark had intended that she and Tom-Tom could remain down here for months if necessary, living off tinned food and bottled water.

However, the costs of constructing the shelter had been astronomic, even by her own extravagant standards. The shell had been completed in 1965, but by then her fears had subsided a little. She never completed plumbing it, nor did she put in the air purifier or the food stocks. Instead she had locks put on the outside of the doors and sometimes imprisoned Thomas there during his early childhood when he was bad. She stopped this after he reached his teens, and never entered the shelter after 1975. In fact, she had virtually forgotten all about it.

But Thomas hadn’t.

And now, in a sealed chamber deep inside the shelter, thirty feet beneath the ground-floor rooms of the house, Amanda Capstick lay in darkness, deafened by her own heartbeat.

She had fallen again. Tripped over the mattress. She lay still, ear to the cold stone floor, listening. But the darkness was so loud. It sucked each rasp of her breath then echoed it back, the volume turned up as far as it would go. Her ears pulsed with fear. She was a mass of pulses, that was all, pulses, driven by one beat. Pulses, thoughts, pain – those were all that separated her from the void around her. The need to urinate, that separated her, too.

She got back on her feet again, feeling more alert with every moment that passed, trying frantically to figure out where she was.

One step at a time
.

Starting with this giddying darkness; scouring it, smelling
it, still trying to work out what that acrid reek was. She was finding it hard to stay upright. Every few moments she would become disoriented and stumble against a wall, or trip on the mattress and fall.

Surely, however dark a place is, there must be some light – under a door, around a window, through a crack in the ceiling? But not here. Nothing. No relief from the desperate blackness of the void.