Precious Thing (8 page)

‘Were?’ DCI Gunn.

I wasn’t sure how to answer that, Clara. You were my oldest friend, you were part of me, that would never change, but we had drifted away from each other. I couldn’t deny it. I didn’t know you properly any more, not bone-deep the way I used to. That was when I made the decision to tell DCI Gunn about your history in case it had a bearing on what happened. It’s not what you would have wanted, but he would have found out anyway and now wasn’t the time for secrets. You were missing. The police needed to be armed with all the facts.

‘She went away,’ I said, ‘when she was nineteen, for treatment.’ I expected that to cause a ripple of interest, but his face gave nothing away. ‘Psychiatric treatment, she had a breakdown.’ I stopped, aware that the situation called for tears. My tears. And Jesus, I could cry buckets watching
The X Factor
but for some reason I couldn’t cry when I needed to, when DCI Gunn expected me to collapse in a puddle.

‘What was the trigger?’ he asked, the policeman in him searching for a cause and effect. But not everything happens like that. Some things just are.

‘It’s hard to say. My mum died and she took it badly.’

‘
Your
mum?’

‘They’d become close. Clara took her death badly.’ That was true wasn’t it, Clara? You didn’t cope with Niamh dying. You crumbled under the weight of your grief. ‘She was away for seven years. I mean she wasn’t having treatment all that time. Her dad paid for her to study in Madrid and then she taught English and went travelling. She came back about a year and a half ago because her dad was dying.’

‘And did she seem different?’

Does anyone stay the same after seven years?

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she was different.’

He made a face and motioned with his hand for me to elaborate.

There were so many ways in which you’d changed, Clara. The things you said, how you behaved. You seemed angry, aloof, distant. But most strikingly the spark in you seemed to have been extinguished. I worried about you, God knows I tried to help, to make it better, but it was never enough.

‘It was as if something was eating away at her,’ I said, aware that the DCI would have wanted a more solid explanation.

I told him how I went to check on you in your flat on that Friday night of your disappearance but you didn’t answer. I described how I walked along and booked myself into a hotel afterwards. And after two hours of explaining and talking I ran out of words, but still I waited, like a schoolchild who needed to be excused before I could get up and go.

‘If I can be of any more help, just call me.’ I said, inviting him to dismiss me.

‘Why didn’t you report her missing, Rachel?’ he said, smiling at me in the way a shark might before it swallows you whole.

It was a legitimate question. I can see that now, but at the time I was taken aback. The truth is it didn’t occur to me that something might have happened to you. I was angry with you. I was being stubborn. I thought you should call me first and apologise for your no-show.

‘Clara has been …’ I searched for the right word. ‘Flaky since she got back. You said yesterday her disappearance is out of character and it is. I mean I don’t think she has ever gone missing for days before. But sometimes she’ll make arrangements and not turn up, or she’ll turn up without warning you. Her moods are unpredictable—’ A knock on the door stopped my flow. DCI Gunn shouted for whoever it was to wait and walked across the room to open it. I turned to see the petite blond officer from earlier. There was a conversation, too hushed to hear. Then DCI Gunn came back in with a brown file.

‘Look, if there’s anything I can do, just call me, OK.’ I stood up to leave but he raised his hand to stop me.

‘There is one thing you can do before you go.’ He put the file on the table and took out three pictures. Images, grainy and blurred. Captured on CCTV.

It was you. I could see that much.

And someone else.

Next to you.

You’d pulled the collars of your coat up against the wind and your body was close to his, like you were holding on to him, holding him up. You weren’t smiling. Neither was he, I took some comfort from that. His eyes looked like they were closed but that could have just been the shot, the moment the image was taken.

‘Do you know who that is?’ The DCI pointed to the male figure.

I nodded; my head was heavy on my neck. A fist clenched in my stomach.

‘Yes,’ I whispered, barely audible.

What else could I say? I’d woken up to his face every morning for almost two years.

T
HERE WAS A
hole, deep and black and bottomless, in that office and I was hurtling through it. My body was stiff with terror. I wanted to grab hold of something to stop my fall but nothing. There was nothing.

I shook my head. I wanted to shake the image out of it. Jonny and Clara. Clara and Jonny. Without me. Why? What was he doing there? Everything was changing. All the things I thought I could hold on to were being snatched away. I didn’t know what I would be left with. I wanted to curl up in a ball and silence the screams inside my head.

‘Why would they have been together, Rachel?’ DCI Gunn asked. There was a harshness to his question. Surely my face told him everything he needed to know.

How the fuck should I know?

I said nothing.

‘Do you have any idea, Rachel, what Jonny was doing there? Were you supposed to be meeting him too?’ He leant forward, across the desk, to force me to look at him. His hot spittle landed on my cheek.

‘Jonny was staying in Gatwick. He had an early flight the next morning.’

‘When was the last time you spoke to him?’

It was an obvious question. I bristled, knowing how he would react to my answer.

‘I haven’t.’

‘You haven’t spoken to Jonny since he was out with Clara?’ The sound of your name in the same sentence as Jonny’s stung me. You and Jonny. Jonny and you. DCI Gunn looked flushed; his upper lip beaded with perspiration. He licked his lips, like he’d smelt blood, ready to swoop down for the kill.

‘He’s a documentary-maker. He was filming in Afghanistan. It’s not unusual for me not to hear from him for days, sometimes a whole week when he’s away filming.’

‘But you would have expected him to call you?’

‘No, I wouldn’t have expected him to call me. I’ve just told you, he’s away filming. In Afghanistan. Sometimes it’s impossible to get a phone line out.’

He leant back in his chair and folded his arms. I imagined he was planning his next line of attack. I wanted to wake up from this dark dream and find myself back living my old life, the one I inhabited before you disappeared. I tried to find my voice, a calm, even voice to defend myself.

‘Look, Roger,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s happening any more. I’m scared shitless, to tell you the truth. Yesterday I found out my best friend had gone missing and today you show me a picture of her and my boyfriend together on the night she disappeared. I have no idea why they were together; he should have been at Gatwick. But I’m certain of one thing – however it looks, you’ve got it wrong. Jonny wouldn’t betray me and he wouldn’t hurt anyone. Least of all Clara. He is protective of her because she’s my friend and he knows we go back a long way.’ I watched him pursing his lips and stroking his chin. I thought I might have got through to him. He looked up and nodded as if he had taken my words on board.

‘Were they having an affair?’ he asked.

‘Jesus, no! Did you hear anything I said?’

‘I have to ask these questions, Rachel. The fact that we know each other doesn’t change anything. We need to find Jonny because as it stands he was the last person to see Clara. I don’t have to tell you the implications of that.’

‘Well, when you find them tell them you’re not the only person who wants some answers.’ I smiled, half forced a laugh to try to make light of the situation. But even as I said it I knew it hit the wrong note.

‘I hope it works out that way,’ he said but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. He stood up and walked round from his desk so he was next to me, reaching out to shake my hand. His palm was cold and damp like putty. I could feel the grip of his hand crunching mine. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said as he showed me to the door.

Outside the police station I slumped down next to the railings. The wind screamed up from the sea. I lifted my face to it in the hope it would wake me from my stupor. Why, Why, Why? Why was he with you, Clara? Why hadn’t you met me? Anger coursed through me, tingling as it ran up my spine and down my arms to the tips of my fingers. The idea of Jonny betraying me with you was so alien it had no place inside my head. I would never believe it, not unless I saw it with my own eyes. All I had seen so far was the two of you together. No one knew what had happened. The police were making assumptions that had no basis in reality.

You see Clara, I trusted Jonny. I would have trusted him with my life. But you? I began to wonder if I even knew you. When you came back after all that time away I thought we could pick up where we left off. Naively, I thought I could recreate that closeness again through sheer force of will. God knows I put the effort in. I wanted to be there to look after you, support you. And I thought it was working. The memory of us all on the skiing trip came back to me: you and me and Jonny and his friend Luke, the four of us together at Christmas. It was only a month ago but it felt like it belonged to a different age, when I was someone else and so were you. All day long we had been carving down slopes under a cloudless sky, floating on powder at the top of a mountain, thinking we’d gone to heaven. When we reached the bottom our smiles lit up our whole faces. We were full of life, bursting with it.

‘My round,’ you shouted as you removed your sunglasses. Your face was tanned and red and glowing. The skin around your eyes was white.

‘Panda eyes,’ I teased.

‘You’re just jealous because I beat you on the slopes, although …’ and you nudged me so I fell over in the snow, ‘you’ve been getting some practice in my absence.’

You disappeared into the bar and emerged with four large beers in frosted glasses.

We sat on the terrace overlooking the piste and the mountains in the late winter sun and all agreed beer had never tasted so good.

‘So Clara, come on, what else can you beat Rachel at?’ It was Luke, Jonny’s friend who obviously fancied you.

‘Swimming, tennis …’

‘All right, sport wasn’t my thing at school. But I do have some skills.’ I stood up and held the beer out in front of me.

‘Don’t tell me you can still do that?’ you asked incredulously.

‘Some things never leave you,’ I laughed, wondering if I could still pull it off, and then I took the beer, threw my head back and downed it. I heard the cheers from Luke and Jonny and you.

‘Bloody hell.’ Jonny was sitting mouth wide open, eyes laughing. ‘I didn’t realise my girlfriend had such hidden talents.’

‘From my ladette days,’ I said, planting a kiss on his lips. ‘Now I am a ladee on TV I don’t do it so much. And to mark my achievement I think we should have a group photo now.’ I handed my camera to a snowboarder next to us. ‘
Vous pouvez prendre un photo, s’il vous plaît?
’ I asked.

‘Yeah, no problems mate,’ he replied in a thick Essex accent which made us collapse with laughter.

We huddled together, sunglasses on our heads, squinting in the sun. I remember wanting to preserve the memory of that moment forever, to stop it fading in time.

When I got home I printed the photograph out and put it in my wallet. Now I found myself looking for it as I walked away from the police station. It was still there, the shot of the four of us, under a sinking Alpine sun. Then my tears fell on the paper – finally, tears – and the colours leaked into each other so our faces became blotchy and smudged. I could hardly see Jonny any more, I couldn’t see myself, but the smile on your face remained.

Heading back to the hotel I called him, ten times over. Each time I listened to his voice, willing it to come alive. But it was only a recording, trapped in time on his answerphone. I had heard it so often I knew where the pause would come, which words he stressed, even the slam of the door in the background.

‘Hi, it’s Jonny, sorry I can’t pick up, leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.’

As soon as I can
. When would he call me? I had never wanted to talk to someone so much, to spill out my fears and have them dismissed, gently:
Rach, it’s OK, I can explain everything.

The not-knowing, the waiting, made me want to claw at my eyes in frustration.

Nick, Luke and Sandra. They were the three names that stood out as I scrolled through my contacts book; Jonny’s friends and his mother. I needed to call them in case he had been in touch but I wasn’t ready to tell them the full story. I wasn’t prepared to create a chain reaction, passing my fears and worries from one person to another and giving the situation the oxygen to breathe and grow and mutate into something far more serious than I hoped it was.

In the end I only spoke to Luke.

‘Hi, I can’t get through to Jonny, I don’t suppose he has called you,’ I asked, trying to sound light and breezy.

‘Rachel … eh, no I’m sorry, I haven’t heard from him. Look, I’m right in the middle of something at work, can I call you back?’

‘No, it’s fine, that’s all I wanted to know.’

Nick didn’t pick up so I left him a message. And Sandra; I couldn’t bring myself to call her. Not yet anyway.

I escaped Brighton that evening, exploiting the small window of opportunity before it started snowing again. Jake said he’d come with me and I was surprised to find I was relieved. I didn’t want to talk. I just needed to feel a friendly presence close to me after hours of hostile combat with DCI Gunn.

‘So where did you get to?’ We were barely out of Brighton. Jake’s tolerance for silence was much lower than mine.

‘Just seeing a few people,’ I said.

‘I thought you had no family left.’

‘I didn’t say all my friends were dead too did I?’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘don’t take this the wrong way but you’ve been acting a little off kilter since yesterday. I know you can be a pain in the arse to work with sometimes,’ I was looking at the road but I knew he was smiling, ‘but for the last day you’ve just been plain weird. So are you going to tell me what the fuck is freaking you out?’