Losing You (24 page)

Sheldrake Road wasn’t far from Karen and Rick’s house, although as I jogged along the unlit street, gasping for breath, it felt impossibly far. I raced past Miller Street and on to the Saltings; the road ran along the shoreline. On my left there were houses with lights glowing through drawn curtains, smoke rising out of chimneys, on my right the dark, lapping water. The tide was nearly up now. I could hear little waves rattling against the shingle.

The lights were still on in Rick’s house, but when I rang the doorbell and banged furiously with the knocker, no one came. I banged again, then stood back and yelled their names.
My voice echoed over the water behind me. There was no response. I faced the water. I could see the lights of the mainland to my right, where the causeway was. Opposite me was the army range, empty, silent and bare.

Maybe, I thought, Eamonn was in the pub. I retraced my footsteps towards Graham and Rosie’s house, and pushed open the door of the Barrow Arms, squinting in the smoky brightness. People lifted their heads to stare at me, but I ignored them and gazed around, trying to see Eamonn.

‘Looking for someone special, love?’ called a voice from a corner. There was a splutter of laughter around him.

‘Eamonn,’ I said. ‘Eamonn Blythe.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘The Goth.’

‘You’ve come to the wrong place.’

I backed out. There was another pub in the town, near to Rory’s restaurant that never was. I could try there. I knew it was hopeless. I knew Eamonn wouldn’t be there, that I wasn’t going to find him like this, but I didn’t know what else to do and I had to do something. This time I ran all the way down Sheldrake Road to Tinker’s Yard, where old boats were turned belly-up beneath rotting tarpaulins, and rusting trailers stood in a skeletal line along the fence. Past the restaurant, with its boarded-up windows and old sign flapping in the wind, and into the second pub. It was smaller and dingier than the Barrow Arms, cracked orange lights draped round the bar and an ancient dog lying in front of the jukebox. Eamonn wasn’t in the front room. I went to the back, where four youths with shaved heads and tattoos on their bare arms were playing pool in a fug of cigarette smoke, and asked if they’d seen him.

‘Who?’

‘Eamonn Blythe.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘He’s got long hair in a ponytail and usually wears black clothes. You’d remember if you’d seen him.’

‘The Goth? He never comes in here. He wouldn’t dare.’

The boys smirked at each other and turned away.

‘Thanks,’ I said miserably.

I stood outside in the icy darkness, thinking. If I couldn’t find Eamonn, I had to concentrate on finding out who the dead girl was. I turned and walked along the seafront, past the old restaurant once more, past Tinker’s Yard and the boatyard, where the massed shapes of boats drawn up for the winter stood, and to my front door. The house was dark, its windows like blind eyes.

In the gloom, I fumbled the key into the lock, and as I pulled the door open Sludge shot forward and banged into my legs, nearly bringing me to my knees. Her pink tongue slavered at my hands and she jumped up, putting her paws on my chest, all smelly fur and hot mouth and shining eyes. Had she been fed? I couldn’t remember. My memory for such things had stopped working. Sludge’s behaviour was no clue to this. She always behaved as if she was hungry. If food was put in front of her, she would always eat it. If any food of any description was put on any surface that was accessible to her, and there was no one in the room to restrain her, she would eat that too. I had lost entire meals to her. On Jackson’s previous birthday she had eaten half of the cake. I might as well give her something.

As I brought her inside I saw an envelope on the mat. I picked it up and felt something heavy inside, like a large coin.
I tore it open. It was my car key and there was a note with it from Tom the vicar: ‘Dear Nina, The terminals just needed a wipe. Buy me a drink some time. Cheers! Tom.’ I took that to mean my car was functional once more.

I picked up Sludge’s feeding bowl and she started quivering and pirouetting, giving a strangled excited yowl. I flung some dried dog food into the bowl, scattering most on to the floor, and put it down for her. She ate it all in a few seconds. I filled the bowl with cold water and she drank that with huge laps of her long pink tongue.

I plugged my phone into the charger and a little digital plug on the screen winked at me.

I thought of seeing Eamonn that morning, wandering sleepily out while his father was trying to fix my car. Eamonn and Charlie. Eamonn and my little girl. I tried not to think about them together and so, inevitably, that was all I could think about. My daughter had been living in the house with me, talking to me, eating meals and doing her homework, and meanwhile everything important in her life had been happening elsewhere in a world I knew nothing about. Her boyfriend and her betrayal of her boyfriend, if that was what it was, and then her fears of being pregnant, and then… And then what?

She had been living in my house like a double agent, maintaining her cover. She had told me nothing. Was it that she didn’t trust me? Or didn’t respect me? Or was it that I was an adult?

I took the list from my pocket and flattened it out on the kitchen table. Brampton Ford. I opened the cupboard that contained telephone directories, maps and holiday guides. I found an old road atlas and looked it up. It was a village
further down the coast but a few miles inland. So she was from nearby but not near enough to walk or cycle. I had an idea. I ran upstairs. Before entering Charlie’s room, I opened the door to my own bedroom. It was dark but I couldn’t hear Renata’s breathing and neither, when I went to the bed, was there a submerged hump there. I turned on the light and saw she had gone. No case, no clothes, no Renata. Then I saw a scribbled note on the pillow: ‘I was only in the way,’ it read. ‘I’ll be in touch. Rxxx’.

Charlie’s bedroom was like an orange from which I had extracted the juice but which I kept squeezing and squeezing to see if there was any left. But in truth the problem was the opposite. There was a Niagara Falls of juice and what I had to do was find something I could use. There was so much data, so many clues, so much information that I could lose myself in.

I sat at Charlie’s laptop and went to Google. I typed ‘Brampton Ford’. This was hopeless. There were a quarter of a million entries. It turned out that there was a Brampton Ford in Australia. It had a squash team that had been promoted to the third division of a league in New South Wales. There was a car dealership in Canada. There were also entries for every time ‘Ford’ and ‘Brampton’ appeared in the same entry.

Charlie had been good at searches. What would she have done? I looked at the list. I drew a circle round Brampton Ford. What would the sort of information I need consist of? Nobody knew yet that the girl was dead, but her body had to have lain there for a few days. I added the words ‘girl’ and ‘missing’ and pressed search again. I knew instantly that I had found what I was looking for: ‘Local schoolgirl, Olivia
Mullen, 16, has been missing since…’ I clicked on the link. It was a series of short items on a news report from the south-east of England. ‘Local schoolgirl, Olivia Mullen, 16, has been missing since 12 December, when she failed to return from a shopping expedition at the Coulsdon Green centre. At a press conference, her parents, Steven and Linda Mullen, made an emotional appeal for information.’

Steven and Linda. Two people who had been waiting for their daughter, as I had. Had they been told yet? Two uniformed officers on their doorstep with undertakers’ expressions. Some time today or tomorrow they would have a last look at her for identification purposes. When would I next see Charlie’s face? Would she be lying under a sheet? I had to push thoughts like these away because they would drive me mad, but they kept forcing themselves into my mind.

Olivia Mullen. It provoked a distant, elusive memory. Olivia Mullen. Livia Mullen. Livvie Mullen. Liv Mullen. Li Mullen. I knew that name. I went through my memory, looking for it as if it were a book in a library, eliminating section after section. I’d never met her. The names of her parents meant nothing to me. I said the name aloud to myself: ‘Olivia Mullen. Liv Mullen. Liv.’ I was sure. I had never heard her name spoken. So I had seen it printed. No, not printed. Written. In handwriting. Where would I have seen a girl’s name written out by hand? It could only have been here in Charlie’s room. I made an effort of searching my memory that was almost physical, that hurt, as if I were pushing my hand into a tiny dark space for something that was just out of reach. It was on a letter or a postcard. I was sure of it. No problem. Charlie’s bedroom was now my special sphere of
knowledge. I was the world expert. Charlie kept her letters in the bottom two right-hand drawers of her desk.

I pulled them all the way out, one by one, and tipped them on to the floor in a large pile. One by one I scanned them. Words and phrases leaped out of the page at me, confidences, revelations, gossip, betrayals, judgements, descriptions, denunciations. Secrets, other worlds. Some of them, in stiff, halting English, were from Charlie’s French-exchange student. None of it mattered. I was just scanning for names, running my forefinger down the middle of the page, moving the letters to another pile when I had found no mention of Li or Livia or Olivia. There were names I knew and names I had never heard of. How had Charlie made time for all these people? And me as well? The pile shrank and then I was at the end and I almost howled. I had found nothing. But I was right. I knew I was right.

I started pulling out the other drawers and tipping the contents on to the floor. I rummaged through them, looking for a letter or a card I might have missed but there was nothing. In this one lonely respect, Charlie had been organized. She might have lived in chaos but it was an organized chaos. The letters and cards she received went into those drawers and nowhere else.

Except for one other place. Charlie had spent much of the last few months working on her coursework for her art GCSE. This consisted of a bulky, Byzantine scrapbook full of drawings, text and pictures. There were images downloaded from the Internet, cut from magazines. And postcards. It was probably Charlie’s most precious possession. She had expended so much time, thought and imagination on it. I sat at her desk and began to flick through it, ripping out postcards
and checking the text on the back. In some cases I had to rip the whole page apart to get at a card that was part of an interlocking whole. I felt as if I was pulling pages out of an ornate medieval Bible. Suddenly I thought of what would happen if there had been a simple misunderstanding and Charlie was to walk through the door and see me destroying her coursework and that must have been the closest I came to laughing in all of that terrible day, and it wasn’t very close.

And then I saw it, and knew immediately, without having to turn it over to see the writing. It was a picture, sub-Impressionist in style, of a row of beach huts, in pastel colours: blues and yellows, greens and pinks. A cross had been drawn on one in ballpoint pen and the single word ‘Remember?’ written perkily beside it. I peeled off the card and turned it over. That was it. She wrote in a large, beautifully formed schoolgirl handwriting: ‘And being blown over in the wind? And the wettest wetsuit in the world. Sorry for silence. Computer down. Yeah, you’re right. Gonna finish it. Don’t know why I ever let it start. See soon. Luv Liv.’

That was what I’d remembered. The funny salutation, like a tongue-twister from the Dr Seuss books I used to read to Charlie and then Jackson: ‘Luv Liv’. I stared at the words until they blurred. ‘Gonna finish it. Don’t know why I ever let it start.’ What did that mean? Finish what? Finish with whom? For a moment I wondered if I was right to connect the Liv of the postcard with the Olivia I had seen lying in the abandoned hulk. Was I just like someone looking at clouds and seeing shapes that weren’t anywhere except in my imagination? But I put the thought away. I felt instinctively certain that Liv was Olivia Mullen, and that Olivia Mullen was the girl I had found dead in the hulk.

Charlie had known Olivia. Olivia had disappeared; she had been killed at the hulks where Charlie used to go with Jay. Perhaps Olivia had gone there to finish ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ was. Whom had she met there? And now Charlie had disappeared too and… The thought rose in my throat, choking me. I jumped up and ran downstairs, catching my foot half-way in my hurry and twisting my ankle. Somewhere, far off in the distance called normality, I felt a sharp, searing pain. I reached the phone and dialled the number for the police station from memory. When a woman answered I cut her off half-way through and said I would like to speak to DI Hammill or DC Beck, at once, now, an emergency. To do with the dead girl, I added, to make them hurry.

It did make them hurry. In less than thirty seconds, Beck was on the phone.

‘It’s Nina,’ I said.

‘Nina – Ms Landry – would you please come to the station immediately,’ she said, trying to inject authority into her voice. ‘DI Hammill is not at all pleased that you disappeared. Well, actually, I’ve never seen him so furious. He’s usually very calm even when things are going wrong. I’d hate to be in your shoes right now. He’s talking about an –’

‘Never mind all of that now. I have some important information for you. Charlie was a friend of Olivia Mullen.’

‘Olivia Mullen? But how do you know? What makes you think –’

‘I don’t have time to explain. I know who the dead girl is and I know that Charlie knew her. There’s a postcard from Olivia to Charlie that I’ve just found.’

‘But –’

I heard a voice and the rattle of the receiver being seized.

‘Is that her? Let me take it. Give it to me now.’ Beck was right. DI Hammill sounded very cross indeed. ‘Ms Landry, I am warning you that if you don’t come to the police station this instant – and I mean this instant – there will be serious consequences.’

‘Shut up!’ I shouted over him. ‘Charlie knew Olivia Mullen.’

‘How do you know?’

‘There’s a postcard from Olivia to her. I’ve just found it. And it has a picture of beach huts on it. That may be important.’