Dying for Christmas (9 page)

* * *

Kim had arrived at work half an hour early that morning, prompting a few raised eyebrows, but people had swiftly looked away as soon as they caught sight of her blotchy face and puffy pink-tinged eyes. Most mornings she came rushing in, out of breath after dropping the kids off at breakfast club (as press officer for an IT company Sean was in work by eight-thirty). Even if she was on a later shift, there’d be something to hold her up – a doctor’s appointment about Rory’s asthma, a forgotten lunch box to drop off, a supermarket trip that took longer than she thought, the endless round of cleaning, shopping, cooking that seemed to engulf whole days – so that she’d arrive flustered and already on the back foot. Sean did what he could, but his hours were rigid, and his job more precarious than hers, so she was the one who called into work pretending to be sick when one of the kids was running a temperature and couldn’t go to school. Anyway, Sean had always been less fazed by it all, more able to compartmentalize the kids’ stuff from the house stuff from the work stuff, while with her it all blurred into one big jumbled mess.

At home she was always cutting corners to get on with the next thing she had to do, and getting frustrated with the kids when they noticed. ‘You missed out a page!’ Katy would cry when Kim was reading her a favourite book for the tenth time in a row. While Rory would give her that look when she started gathering their things together in the park. ‘We can’t go now – we just got here.’

And all the time she was watching her mostly male colleagues putting in the hours, showing willing, staying late, moving up. She knew she was good at her job, better than many of them. Was it wrong to be ambitious?

Sean thought so. ‘Where’s our family life?’ he asked her. ‘Where’s our quality time together, just the four of us?’ And the perennial complaint: ‘Why can’t you get a job with normal hours?’

‘You didn’t need to come in today, you know.’ The boss was staring at her and Kim knew her tear-stained face wouldn’t go unnoticed. ‘I told you,
either
Christmas Day or Boxing Day. You didn’t have to do both.’

‘It’s no problem. Sean’s taken the kids to his parents’ today.’

She didn’t tell him she didn’t know if they’d ever be coming back.

The same as she hadn’t told Sean she had a choice about working the day before.

‘I want you to go back over to see the Gold family,’ the boss said.

‘She still hasn’t turned up?’

‘No. I’ve asked for her bank records to be checked, and her mobile phone. But everything’s taking much longer than it should because it’s Boxing Day. And while we’re waiting, I’d like you to act as FLO for the Golds, seeing as you’ve already established a relationship with them.’

She didn’t relish the idea of being Family Liaison. She’d done the training and had taken that role several times in the past, but now that she was free to put in long hours, Kim wanted to stay at the station so her superiors could see how hard she was working – how much more deserving she was of promotion than Martin. But she knew better than to protest. Detective Superintendent Paul Robertson, with his large square face that went straight down on to his shoulders without any obvious sign of a neck, was not the kind of boss who encouraged a lively debate once he’d told you to do something.

‘The boyfriend is still with them, apparently. Sounds very cosy, doesn’t it? What was your take on him?’

She frowned, remembering Travis Riley’s sudden transformative smile, and the petulance in his voice when he’d talked about having to pick his girlfriend up from Luton airport that time.

‘He seemed nice enough. Concerned, but not weeping and wailing, not like Sheridan.’

Gary Sheridan had done a televised appeal when his wife disappeared, sobbing uncontrollably throughout. She was found two days later in the chest freezer in his disabled grandmother’s garage.

Don’t take anything for granted, that’s what they were always being told. People are rarely who they seem.

Chapter Fourteen

Now I knew the rash was there, I couldn’t stop touching it. I was wearing clothes that Dominic had given me. Skin-tight leggings in an electric blue, and a silk tunic that was designed to be clingy, but billowed around my narrow frame. I assumed they used to belong to her, his wife, and horrified myself by actually caring how they fitted.

I kept pressing my fingers to the place I knew the rash to be, feeling how the skin was bumpy under the thin silk. Dominic had seemed displeased when I first got dressed in the clothes he’d given me.

‘There’s something not right,’ he’d said.

Then he’d rummaged around in a cupboard in the ensuite bathroom and brought out a bulging make-up bag. I’m not a great expert on make-up – I’ve basically stuck to the same things I first wore as a student, brown eyeliner, mascara, a neutral-coloured lip gloss, that’s if I wear makeup at all. But even I knew that the stuff in this black cube-shaped patent-leather bag was expensive. Like take-out-a-mortgage kind of expensive. There was a little pot of cream in there that I knew would have cost more than the entire contents of my bathroom cabinet put together.

He lowered the lid of the toilet and got me to sit down, and then set about applying make-up to my face. I’m one of those people who would rather stick needles in my eye than stop at a make-up counter of a department store and have one of the Orange Women, as Travis calls them, make me over. I tense up just getting my hair washed at the salon, which is why I only go once a year. Somehow the delicate touch of Dominic’s fingers on my eyelids and lips, skin fluttering against skin, was almost worse than the shower had been. Violently intimate.

I held my breath for fear of breathing in his.

When he was finished, he surveyed his work approvingly.

‘Better.
Much
better. Take a look.’

The woman in the mirror had shimmering eyelids and black-lined eyes with perfect flicks at the corners. Her lashes looked a centimetre longer than normal and perfectly curled, and her lips were deep wine-red.

‘Here,’ he said, twisting my hair up behind my head and securing it with a tortoiseshell clip. ‘See how easy it is to become someone else?’

He was suddenly back again to his most charming self, as he’d been on that first day in the café, as if I was a new person he needed to woo all over again.

He led me into the living room and settled me on to the sofa, once again acting as if I was a date he was trying to impress.

‘I’ve got a little present for someone,’ he sang, heading towards the tree.

When he came back he was carrying a large, oddly shaped present, as beautifully wrapped as the one he had given me the day before. He held it with the utmost care as if it was more precious than gold.

As he laid it in my lap, it was surprisingly light. I glanced up at him.

‘Go on, silly. Open it.’

I slowly undid the wrapping – the two ribbons, then the thick glitter-encrusted paper, taking care as I slid open the tape, so that the paper would remain intact.

It was a child’s plastic stool. Purple. About a foot tall. I put it down on the floor in front of me and for a few seconds we both regarded it in silence.

‘It’s a stool,’ I said.

‘Not just a stool. Tell me, Jessica Gold, what’s your earliest memory?’

The question threw me. But he was expecting an answer. I tried to peel back the layers of memory methodically like an onion. Finally an image flittered across my mind and I grabbed it before it disappeared.

‘I’m with my two older brothers. I’m about three. We’re inside. I think it’s snowing outside or raining heavily. Anyway we can’t go outdoors and my mum is trying to entertain us. She’s produced three big cardboard boxes. The kind you get kitchen appliances in. Maybe we’ve just moved into our house?’ I glance at him for validation, as if he might be able to confirm the exact chronology of my memory. ‘So we each have a box, my brothers and I. And these boxes are our homes. And I’m sitting inside mine and I’m feeling really happy and safe and … well, that’s it, really.’

He had been listening to me with an unnerving intensity. Not so much hearing the words as devouring them. His eyes were damp. He reached out for my hand.

‘This is exactly what I was after, Jessica – both of us laying ourselves open, letting ourselves be known.’

‘So this stool is tied in with your childhood?’

He nodded. ‘Just like your box, Jessica. My earliest memory is of sitting on this stool, watching my father.’

Something unfurled slightly inside me then. I hadn’t been aware how rigidly I’d been clenching my muscles against whatever he was about to say. And after all, surely it was merely a benign memory. Perhaps a father pottering in his tool shed while his small son looked on, keeping up a stream of questions, or maybe outside fixing his bike.

‘He had this friend. Well, she was our next-door neighbour, really. She was called Mrs Meadowbank. Big name for such a tiny woman. My mother used to say if anyone looked at her she’d snap. Anyway, my dad used to set my stool up in his bedroom. I was so little, my feet didn’t even touch the floor, I remember that. And I would watch him and Mrs Meadowbank fucking.’

It was one of those times where you know you’ve heard something perfectly well, but it’s so different to the thing you were expecting to hear that your brain won’t let you process it.

‘Fuck-ing.’ He helpfully enunciated each syllable crisply. ‘My earliest memory is of sitting on this stool watching my father tie Mrs Meadowbank’s wrists and ankles to the bedposts with blue twine – the kind you use for a washing line – and fucking her. She had a body like a boy’s. I can still see it now. And he was on top of her going at it. Of course I had no idea what they were doing. He was a very fit man, my dad. Maybe I thought he was doing press-ups. On top of Mrs Meadowbank. Funny how little kids’ minds work, isn’t it? But then it got so I wasn’t a little kid any more but I was still on that stool watching them. I remember a time when I’d grown enough for my feet to be resting on the floor, and later for my knees to be right up under my chin.’

I almost gagged on the horror of it. ‘But surely you’d have said something to your mother? You were too young to know what to do.’

He laughed – a sound that was like a slap.

That time I made it as far as the kitchen sink before everything came up in one unstoppable torrent. Lumps of croissant blocked the plug-hole, leaving the sink half full of foul-smelling yellow-coloured liquid.

I felt Dominic’s hand on my back. ‘That’s right,’ he said softly. ‘Let it all out, sweetheart. Think of this whole thing as a purging. Afterwards we’re going to feel so light and cleansed. I can’t wait.’

Some foolish spark of hope ignited then when he said ‘afterwards’, like the thinnest sliver of moonlight through a gap in a blackout curtain.

* * *

The atmosphere at the Golds’ house was very different from the day before. Then there had been worry but it was more of the cerebral kind (well, let’s see, when did she last do something like this) not the kind that eats into your gut so you can’t eat or even breathe properly. Travis, who was anyway one of those pale-skinned types, looked bleached out like an overexposed photograph. The parents, Edward and Liz, were noticeably quieter than they had been the last time Kim met them. Though the brothers were still there, she was relieved to find the small children gone. She didn’t know how she would have coped with seeing children today. She was working hard to keep her mind off her own kids, but she knew that just one grubby cuddly toy clutched to a child’s chest, or one cry of ‘Mummy’ would have brought her to her knees.

Liz Gold brought out a selection of photographs to be used in a media appeal. ‘They’re none of them very good,’ she apologized. ‘It’s what happens now everything is digital. We have all these pictures on the computer that we never look at. And the one time you do want to get some of them off there, of course the printer is playing up.’

Kim had seen a snapshot of Jessica the day before, but this was the first time she’d had a chance to study her properly. Not conventionally attractive. Lots of thick dark hair, probably too much, so it overpowered her small, fine-boned face (if Kim had hair like that, she’d layer it or something, take some of the weight out), dark eyes with thick, unruly black eyebrows; surprisingly full lips. In one of the photos she was sitting at a table – the one in the Golds’ dining room – leaning back and looking at someone just out of shot as if listening intently. In another, she was on a sofa, not the one in this house, with a puppy on her lap.

‘How cute,’ she said without thinking. Then, to Travis: ‘You have a dog?’

‘Not any more,’ he said, not meeting her eyes.

They hadn’t always been in agreement then, Travis and Jessica. Kim recognized the signs.

‘I need all of you to tell me everything you can about Jessica – who her friends are, where she hangs out, what she likes, what she hates. Everything.’

Kim didn’t miss the look that passed between the brothers then, the faintest shrug that said, ‘How the fuck would I know?’

Chapter Fifteen

On the third day, when I woke up in the morning, I had a metallic taste in my mouth and my stomach was straining horribly as if something was alive in there and trying to get out. When I put my hand to my forehead, it felt hot and clammy.

At that moment there came a tug on the metal cuff around my ankle. I froze. Dominic’s face appeared framed by the archway. He didn’t appear to be in a good mood.