Missing, Presumed (23 page)

‘Come on, how many?’

‘Not many,’ he says, moving her roving fingers, which have traced the line of hairs around his nipples until he’s laughed and shouted, ‘Geroff!’, then entwined them in his, a lock-down, but playful.

‘C’mon, tell me,’ she nudges him.

‘Um.’ He has closed his eyes, lying on his back. ‘Only one serious one.’

‘How long was that for?’

‘Six months.’

She doesn’t comment on how slight this is for a man of forty-two. She wants him to ask about her previous lovers, the boy from university she nearly married. How much she’d loved him for seven long years, how sad she was to lose him when it petered out.

But he doesn’t ask. All is new, she supposes; all is in the now. This is the new regime! Oh hallowed bed. Who’d have thought that Alan, in all his Alan-ness, would make a right out of all those wrongs – the years alone, the terrible dates. When you meet The One, it all makes sense, it makes the cock-ups seem … intentional. And just in fucking time, too.

Hello, you.

Even making the macaroni che
ese last night, he hadn’t felt right.

Davy thought it would be nice to feed his mother after all she did for him and Chloe on Christmas Day. It’d been a lot of work, his mother had said (quite a few times), especially with no one to help her. He thought a macaroni cheese would be homely and filling for a January Saturday dinner, just him, Mum, and Chloe, who said it was her duty to come along – though he’d begun to have the sense that she was guarding him from his mother, didn’t want them to spend time alone together, because there might pass between them a moment to which she was not privy. And then he’d caught himself having a mean thought like that. These were happening to him more and more.

He’d spooned the macaroni cheese into a square white dish and covered it so tightly with cling film that the plastic was an invisible plane. He’d straightened it so the dish was parallel with the splashback, and squared up nicely beside the hob, but it didn’t give him any satisfaction.

He’s all out of sync with himself, he thinks now, as he peels off the cling film and pops the dish into the oven to warm and crisp up on top. He picks up his work phone and dials Helena Reed’s number, because she’s been preying on his mind – the way she’d slammed into him, her face full of fear. Who was she visiting, all the way in Newnham – and why had she seemed furtive about it? What ‘friend’ had prompted such a tearful state?

No reply. This time, there is a message telling him her voicemail is full, so he can’t even leave another one. It’s the third time he’s tried this morning.

‘Just me again, Helena, checking in. DC Walker, I mean,’ he’d said previously. ‘If you get this, just give me a buzz, let me know you’re all right.’ Still, she has his number if she needs him.

The doorbell goes.

Chloe has straightened her hair so that it hangs in sheets on either side of her face. He’s always thought she looks better when she doesn’t pull down so hard on the straightening irons – like in the early days when he’d pulled her back into bed after her shower so she hadn’t had time for all that gubbins – the fake tan and the heavy black eyelashes which he isn’t sure are hers.

Her arms are full of the Saturday papers. ‘Thought we could catch up,’ she says, breathless.

‘Put them in the lounge,’ he says, and they pile them on the glass coffee table, the poly-bagged glossy magazines sliding out of the folded sheaves. A tower of innuendo, he thinks, slabs of unsubstantiated hearsay. He can hardly bear to look at them.

‘Right,’ he says, clapping his hands as the doorbell goes again. ‘That’ll be Mum.’

They settle, his mum and Chloe, around the kitchen table and Davy says, ‘Who’s for macaroni cheese?’

He’s trying to put the uplift back in his voice but it’s not working. It’s not been working for days. Manon’s rubbing off on him, that’s what it’ll be. Her gloom, the way she sees things – always the uncomfortable underbelly, never the bright side.

Last night, as they left the office together, he said, ‘I just don’t think we’re going to get to the bottom of this one’, and she put her palm across his forehead, saying, ‘Are you feeling all right, Davy?’

He frowned, jerked his head away, the crotchety teenager. ‘I mean it. It’s getting me down this … not getting anywhere. We’ve let Tony Wright go. That boy, in the river, that’s going nowhere as well. And all this love life guff. I don’t like it.’

‘You’ve got to let it emerge, Davy,’ she told him. ‘Ride out the confusion, the darkness. Things will become clear, you wait and see. But in the meantime, you’ve got to allow yourself to be all right with the not knowing.’

And all of a sudden he’d felt completely lost, like a sad hole had opened up beneath him and he was about to fall down into it.

‘What’s this you’ve put in it?’ says his mother, grimacing and pushing something to the front of her mouth, out between her teeth. She picks it out with finger and thumb and peers at it. ‘Nutmeg, is it?’ She wipes it on the table. ‘Didn’t you grate it?’

‘I did grate it, Mum. A shard must have fallen in. There’s a napkin there.’

The macaroni cheese is so dry he’s had to carve it. Even several tablespoons of Branston pickle are doing a poor job of livening it up.

‘Everyone at work wants to know the details,’ says Chloe. More animated, warmer in fact, than he’s seen her in quite some time. She runs a finger down the line of her hair curtain, pushing it from her eyes without disturbing its plate-like flatness. ‘Amazing you’re right at the centre of it, what’s on the news.’

‘Can’t talk about it, Chlo,’ he says, trying to masticate a rigid piece of macaroni.

‘I took some flowers – to George Street,’ says his mother. ‘Outside the house where the other bunches are.’

‘Why?’ he asks.

‘Well, you want to be part of something, don’t you? And it’s terrible. But to have it so near – in the same town. I didn’t want to miss out. What do
you
think happened to her?’

‘He knows everything, but he can’t say, isn’t that right, Davy?’ says Chloe, winking at him.

‘Dead then?’ says his mother hopefully.

‘Male
and
female lovers,’ says Chloe. ‘Who’d have thought? How many?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘More than one though?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘You do know, you’re just not saying,’ she says, the proud wife. ‘Takes all sorts,’ she says to his mother, and they are united at last.

‘Did her boyfriend know about it?’ asks Chloe.

‘I can’t talk about it, Chlo.’

‘No, course. So have the papers been in touch with you directly?’

‘All media enquiries are dealt with by the press office,’ he says.

‘Still,’ says his mother, ‘I bet they’d give you a tidy bit of money for extra info.’

‘I’d lose my job.’

‘Not if you were nice and discreet about it.’

‘But it’s wrong.’

‘Gosh, I bet her mother’s shocked,’ says Chloe. ‘Imagine having a daughter carrying on like that.’

‘And him a famous surgeon,’ says his mother.

Davy is staring ahead, the room’s light harsh and blue. He realises this kitchen is about as welcoming as a dental surgery.

‘They’re people,’ he says slowly. ‘They’re just people.’

He checks his phone again for missed calls or texts from Helena Reed. Perhaps he should pop round there, check she’s all right. But then she might have gone to Bromley to stay with her parents – get out of the heat until things calm down a bit.

She can hear them laughing like day-trippers, smoking around the war memorial down below her flat window, though the curtains are drawn. The curtains have been drawn against them since they gathered yesterday.

First there were only a few, but they flew down like birds on crusts, vying with one another around the narrow blue door to the side of Barclays – her front door which has until now seemed invisible. ‘Helena Reed!’ they called, as if she might open a window and invite them up. When she pulled aside a net to look, they locked onto her, nudging one another, shouting to her and setting their zoom lenses for a grainy shot, so she had quickly retreated. She sat all day yesterday, and all last night, listening to the answer machine click and rewind with each new appeal from strangers luring her with false intimacy – ‘Look, this must be a difficult time, we can help’ – while she chewed on the skin at the edge of her thumbnail. Wondering who’d released her name.

But then, she’s been waiting for this to happen, knowing it would happen, since
Crimewatch
. After slamming into those two detectives outside Dr Young’s, she’s been a prisoner of her thoughts. Three days, four long nights. Would the police check who she had been visiting in Newnham? Would they find out she was seeing a shrink and assume all manner of mental instability from that? Would they talk to Dr Young and would he mention her terrorised thoughts, and what on earth would the police infer? Would they inform Dr Young that she was Edith’s lover, to which he would say, baffled, ‘Well, she never told me that,’ and to all of them she would appear madder and more inscrutable, a dissembler of the facts about Edith’s disappearance?

Thursday afternoon they sent someone round – ‘to sit with her’, the officer said. A babysitter. Helena had moved round this person in her flat, trying to look natural, but inside she was gnawed at by the sensation of being observed in her own home – they were
watching
her – so she said, ‘You go, I’m fine, I don’t need looking after. In fact, I’m going to stay with friends.’ Helena smiled, her hand on her open front door. The officer/babysitter said, ‘If you’re sure?’ but Helena could see she was glad. She’d received some furtive call about childcare arrangements and she couldn’t get away fast enough.

Friday morning, Saturday morning, she ran out early to check the papers, dreading but assuming she would be named, and surprised to find no mention of her apart from in the usual timeline descriptions. So yesterday afternoon, when the crows first gathered at the bottom of her stairs, it was as if the inevitable had taken place.

She stared and stared at the only card she had from the police. DS Manon Bradshaw. The other one – the kindly chap she’d crashed into who’d promised to protect her – his card must’ve fallen out of her pocket in her rush to get home that day. DS Bradshaw appeared not to be available. Dr Young’s practice number clicked through to a machine. She couldn’t think what message to leave so she hung up.

This morning, around 10 a.m., there’d been a noticeable quietening outside and she braved a glance through a crack in the curtain. They seemed to have dispersed, perhaps to a greasy spoon for a Sunday fry-up, leaving one or two hapless representatives to keep watch at her front door. She chanced it, out of the need for bread and milk, running down the back staircase – concrete and municipal, the air hung with the smell of stale cigarettes – which brought her via a door with metal push-bar, out by the bins to the rear of Barclays. The cold and rain drove welcome pins into her hands and cheeks as she ran, clasping her hood, to the nearest newsagent, but she was brought up short by the grey box-grid outside and eight images of herself and Edith, flapping in the wind.

Best friend was missing Edith’s lover

‘Lover’ was with Edith on night she vanished

Girls were lovers

It was like looking at images of a very familiar stranger. She noticed how young she looked, though she feels anything but young. She wasn’t nearly as fat as she assumed; rather slender, in fact. She tried to see herself as the readers of those rags might see her: unstable, predatory, sexually loose. There was a gap – the outside and the inside, and sometimes it was very wide indeed. Wide enough for you to fall through.

She’d given no thought to how she would get back in and soon she was set upon, enveloped in bodies and voices, the smells of strangers, as she struggled for her key.

‘Helena, over here!’ they shouted as she barged the black mass of jackets, arms, and shoulders, careful never to meet a face. Someone pushed a card in her hand – a blonde woman, she thinks – but she was scrunching her eyes shut, trying to get through them, trying to get her key in the door without dropping the milk. This woman had got up very close and said in her ear, ‘We can tell your side of the story. Here’s my card.’

Up the stairs, she’d slammed her inner front door and leant her head back against it with her eyes closed. Scheming lesbian Helena Reed. Jealous lover Helena Reed. Murdering Helena Reed. Edith – cloaked in all the innocence of the un-dead, can do no wrong – lured into Helena’s crimson bed of joy. Now Helena would always be the vamp, in whatever job interview, PhD viva, applying for research funding, meeting a new man, joining a GP practice. Someone somewhere would look up from their desk and say, ‘Helena Reed? From Huntingdon? Weren’t you a friend of that missing girl?’ And the word ‘friend’ would drip with all its sly connotations.

It was typical of Edith, blithe Edith, to leave her with all of this, while Helena did all the worrying. It had been like that from day one, the day Helena had knocked on the door across the halls at Corpus Christi. Edith shouted ‘Come in!’ and there she was, standing on her bed, wearing faded Levi 501s, knocking a nail into the wall to hang up a Modigliani print. On the desk in the window was a vase of anemones, reds and purples and whites, like rich jewels. ‘From my mum,’ Edith said, breathless, still with her back to Helena. ‘Tea?’

Edith was breezy yet determined. She was set on her own course – like the move to Huntingdon – and you could accompany her or you could jog on. Edith, certain; Helena, anxious, following on. She sees how insubstantial she is next to Edith’s luminous features, her charisma. And she hates herself for having been their lapdog. All those Saturday nights watching films on their Netflix account, Sunday lunches in their kitchen, Edith lying on the sofa, reading with her head on Helena’s lap, Will sat on the floor sipping wine. Helena, the only child in audience to the couple.

She wonders, sat here in her airless lounge while she listens to them laughing and talking on the street below, if she should call her parents. But what if they, too, have crows on the front step, imprisoned together, and she would have to hear it and know she was the cause? When will it end, being trapped like this, with the curtains drawn? And if she ever ventured out into the world, what would she find? She’d called the MIT offices yesterday evening, having no responses again from the sergeant’s phone, and she’d got through to a duty person, Constable Monique something, who said she’d ‘look into it’, but nothing had come of it.

‘There’s quite a lot of people outside.’

‘And what did you say your name was again, madam?’

No point calling today. Sunday was bound to be worse, and what could they do anyway? The story was out now and it couldn’t be taken back in. Her own phones – mobile and landline – were filled to the brim with intrusions from people who shouldn’t have her number at all, hectoring and bullying her. She couldn’t bear to play them back, so she switched them all off.

During the night, by about 1 a.m., the crows had flown off (staying at the George Hotel, probably). Another chance: she pictured herself catching a plane to Rio de Janeiro, then another to Manaus, then a boat to where the Rio Negro meets the Solimões River – the Meeting of Waters, she’d always wanted to see that – and then deep into the tributaries of the Amazon. The world is so big and so beautiful and she’d hardly begun to explore it.

She wandered room to room, planning her escape. Where was her passport? What would she wear? Somehow, when she turned around, it was 7 a.m. and the crows were back on her doorstep and she didn’t know how she’d get past them, let alone to the Amazon basin. She found herself staring at the back of the bedroom door – and the hook where her dressing gown hangs.

She can’t see a way clear. She longs for someone – Edith, if she’s honest – to throw a coat over her head and usher her through it all. She stands before the nets in the lounge and the tears flow out of her in a great outpouring. She cries out, though it is silent, her lips cracked. She will never get out, she will never see the Amazon river. She will never be free or happy. And the girl she loves has gone.