Dying for Christmas (7 page)

Nothing seemed like it could possibly be real. Not the winter sun streaming in through the plate-glass windows, nor the medley of Elvis Christmas songs he had blaring from the speakers in the top corners of the room, nor the
Keep Calm and Carry On
apron he was wearing over his black shirt and dark jeans, nor the needles stabbing at the inside of my chest.

‘I’m making you pancakes, princess. How does that sound? Dripping with maple syrup.’

How it sounded was disgusting. My stomach still felt weighted down with whatever remnants of last night’s meat hadn’t found their way into the toilet. While the batter was resting in a large glass bowl, thick and pasty, Dominic reached into his pocket and withdrew the set of keys with the different-coloured fobs. Isolating the orange one, he unlocked a drawer and withdrew a gleaming chrome kitchen knife. He didn’t look at me, but he held it up as if checking for cleanliness so it glinted under the down-lighters. I watched him pull a heaped bowl towards him and begin chopping up fruit. Crisp green apples, fresh oranges, juicy strawberries from the fridge. My digestive tract cried out with longing.

‘Actually, just the fruit salad would be perfect.’

The hand holding the knife froze.

‘The fruit salad is for me. I’ve made you pancakes. I told you.’

I used to have a teacher at school everyone was terrified of, even though she never raised her voice. In fact the quieter she was, the more afraid we were. I can still hear her now: ‘Have you anything to say, Jessica?’ Hardly more than a whisper.

Dominic was like that.

The pile of pancakes, when it arrived, was towering. We were sitting at the dining table now. Dominic was opposite me with his bowl of fruit salad.

‘
Bon appétit!
’ he said, raising his glass of Buck’s Fizz.

I lifted up my own glass, but kept my eyes down. Even so, I felt his gaze burning through me and the force of his expectancy as I cut into the first pancake. Afterwards, he smiled at me like I was a dog who’d learned a new trick.

‘You know, Jessica, I love looking after you. I love feeding you up and watching over you when you sleep. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since we met and yet already I can’t imagine life without you.’

Eight years I’ve been with Travis and he’s never said anything like that. Travis is all about the passive. ‘You make me happy,’ he might say. Or, ‘I feel good when I’m around you.’ Sonia Rubenstein had once advised me to frame complaints in terms of how something made me feel so that it didn’t come across to the other person as a threat. So instead of telling my mother she’s an interfering old bag, I should say, ‘Your concern for my well-being sometimes makes me feel undermined.’ It occurred to me now that Travis has done that all the time. Framing the world in terms of how it affects him. Framing
me
in terms of how I affect him.

If circumstances had been different I might have enjoyed the novelty of being for once the subject instead of always the object.

But they weren’t. And I didn’t.

Chapter Eleven

‘So she’s been missing since yesterday afternoon, as far as you’re concerned?’

Kim saw the twitch around the man’s mouth at that last phrase. He didn’t like the idea that his version of events might not be the only version.

‘She said she was going to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. In Wood Green, just down the road from where we live. I was out and wasn’t home until after six. Like I said, at first I didn’t really worry about it, but when it got to the time we were supposed to be meeting friends and she still wasn’t back, I started to get worried.’

‘But you didn’t call the police then? In fact, you went out to meet your friends.’

‘I thought she might turn up there. She is twenty-nine years old. She’s not a child.’

‘Though she is childlike in some ways.’

The mother had been hovering the whole time, hungry to join in. Kim recognized that expression – the need to be doing something, anything, even if it was just talking.

‘In what way childlike, Mrs Gold?’

‘She’s not as … worldly as other young women of her age. She is a bit of a …’

‘Misfit.’

That was one of the brothers. Kim had forgotten which was which as soon as they’d introduced themselves. It didn’t help that they looked so similar, both swarthy, muscular types with prematurely receding hair and dark probing eyes. She’d practically had to wipe the testosterone off after she’d shaken their hands.

‘Not “misfit”. That’s not the right word at all.’ The mother again, her green eyes flashing. She was sitting on a chair at the end of the wooden table that dominated the kitchen. Her legs, in their black tights, looked thin enough to snap. ‘She’s her own person. She doesn’t follow the crowd.’

‘How do you mean?’ Kim wanted to know.

‘Well, she’s not really one for going out clubbing or parties. And she has these episodes where she, well, hears voices.’

Kim paused then, her biro poised over the notepad in which she’d been scribbling, before saying, ‘Mrs Gold, does Jessica have mental health issues?’

‘God, no, nothing like that.’

It was the first time the father had really spoken. He was in the seat to the left of his wife. Dark like his sons, but less solid.

‘She’s not schizophrenic or anything. It was more like she used to have imaginary friends. Lots of kids do. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them. She’s fine now – she’s got a great job, she lives with her boyfriend.’

A child came skidding in from the living room. A boy of about six. Kim did what every parent does, plotting him on a scale of her own children. Older than Katy, younger than Rory.

‘Aren’t you finished yet? When can we open our presents? You said “soon” ages ago!’

‘We just need to finish speaking to these two kind police officers who are going to find Auntie Jessica.’

Whichever brother that was, he had a completely different voice when he addressed his child. Soft and rich. He’d used the same voice when speaking to his daughter earlier as she’d let them in – a striking girl of about twelve or thirteen with a Smartphone wedged into the pocket of her skinny jeans.

‘Silly Auntie Jessica. She got lost again, didn’t she?’

The child trooped disconsolately back out again, shoulders exaggeratedly stooped.

‘Again?’

From her vantage point leaning back against the fridge, Kim surveyed the faces around the table, her eyebrows arched.

It was the boyfriend, Travis, who spoke. ‘She wandered off once before, about a year ago. That’s why I didn’t call the police straight away.’

‘What do you mean, wandered off?’

‘She sometimes goes into these trances and afterwards she can’t remember anything about them. They’re usually over really quickly, but around this time last year she called me after midnight to go and pick her up from Luton airport – and she had no idea how she got there.’

Kim glanced at Martin, but her colleague was staring at the opposite wall, giving nothing away.

‘Did she go to the doctor?’

‘See?’ The father again, directing himself to Travis. ‘I told you she should have gone to the doctor – it could be something serious, epilepsy or something.’

‘She wouldn’t go. What can I do, she’s a grown woman.’

Travis Riley looked agitated, but not beside himself. Tall and thin, there was a boyish air about him still, although he had to be around thirty. The severe black glasses only served to further emphasize the youthfulness of his angular face. But there was something attractive about him, nonetheless, a quality of earnestness, a smile that came out of nowhere and transformed his face.

‘There’s another thing.’ The mother was looking straight ahead, not meeting anyone’s eyes. ‘She’s been self-harming.’

Travis didn’t like that. ‘Don’t!’

Kim imagined how she’d feel if Katy was grown up and she had to say that about her. The thought was a rip in the tissue of her heart.

‘What do you mean, self-harming?’ One of the brothers now.

‘I’ve seen cuts on her wrists and arms. Bruises too.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

‘She won’t talk about it. You know what she’s like.’

‘It’s private.’ Travis again. ‘She never admitted it and anyway, it only happened a couple of times. She’d be mortified if she thought you all knew.’

Kim sighed inside herself. This put a whole new slant on things. A girl with a history of undiagnosed mental illness had disappeared. It happened depressingly often. Perhaps she’d run away or walked into a wood or a park with a length of rope. They saw it all the time.

Yet there was the television-archive job. Jessica must be pretty together to hold that down. And Travis didn’t seem to be the type who’d hang around with anyone too off-the-rails. A junior doctor, he’d said. Ambitious, she thought.

She could sense her partner’s interest waning. When this had been the uncharacteristic disappearance of a young woman working in television, he’d been all fired up, but now that there was this added element he would be less enthusiastic. Martin was eight years younger than Kim and so fixated on climbing through the ranks, he only wanted the glory jobs. He wasn’t interested in the grubby, tangled ones. She’d hoped that would count against him when it came to them both going for promotion. She was definitely a better, more thorough officer. But he didn’t have kids. He didn’t have to take days off when there was an inset day at school or drop everything to race home when they got sick and needed picking up.

‘The thing is,’ Travis told them, ‘because she was out shopping, we don’t know exactly when she went missing.’

‘Why does that matter?’ One of the brothers. Jeremy. ‘She didn’t come home last night. She didn’t show up this morning. It’s Christmas Day. Who goes missing on Christmas Day? It’s totally out of character. Something must have happened to her.’

‘I do understand your concern,’ Martin said, in his mild, toneless voice. ‘But in the case of someone Jessica’s age, we don’t normally treat it as a missing-person inquiry until they’ve been gone a full twenty-four hours, and that’s what we can’t yet ascertain.’

‘But,’ Kim chimed in before the family could erupt, ‘in Jessica’s case, we would consider her to be particularly vulnerable, so we’ll get moving on it straight away.’

She felt Martin stiffen beside her, but didn’t look at him.

‘Now, we’ll need a recent photograph, so that we can put it on the system.’

Chapter Twelve

Dominic and I faced each other across the dinner table. We were both wearing paper crowns we’d got from crackers. Mine was pink and his was blue. It matched his eyes. So did mine.

In between us was the carcass of a huge turkey that, pre-basted, pre-roasted, had required just forty-five minutes in the oven. For the last twenty minutes it had been joined by foil containers of Brussels sprouts with chestnuts and honey-glazed carrots and mounds of roast potatoes. Also cranberry sauce, bread sauce, apple sauce and gravy.

Now those empty foil cartons were littered around the table and my distended stomach was proof of where they had all ended up. My lips were greasy with turkey fat.

All through that endless first day of Christmas, we had been locked away together listening to festive music and playing Scrabble and Monopoly. Playing games with Dominic was exhausting. If I did badly he’d accuse me of not trying. Too well and he became mean. He quizzed me about how my family spent Christmas Day and when he heard we play charades, he insisted on a game, just the two of us. ‘It’ll be fun,’ he said, the dimple in his cheek winking as he spoke. ‘Just like being at home.’ He threw back his head and laughed. ‘I’m James Stewart.
It’s A Wonderful Life.
’ When he grew tired of games, we watched DVDs using one of the white walls as a screen and projecting the images from a computer.
White Christmas
,
The Wizard of Oz
. All the classics. When I asked if he had a proper TV, hoping I might catch a glimpse of the news and find out if anyone was searching for me, he gave me the look I was coming to recognize as his Disappointed Look.

‘Now why would you want to let the outside world in?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t I enough for you?’

I had to sit on the floor after that. And though before I’d been on the comfortable sofa, I actually preferred it on the bare boards because his finger wasn’t running up and down my arm. Like a cockroach.

After a while he got up from the table and headed over to the Christmas tree.

‘It’s time,’ he said, and I could sense the excitement basking like a shark under the calm surface of his voice.

When he came back, he was carrying a small package, holding it carefully as if it was made of the most delicate glass.

‘But I haven’t got you anything,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart.’ He was magnanimous now and I felt a pathetic twinge of gratitude that his earlier anger had gone. ‘You’re all the presents I need.’