The Sleeper (17 page)

During my walk back I played fantasy destinations. I tried to picture myself looking out of a train window in India, or learning to tango in Argentina, or bungee jumping in New Zealand. Sometimes I got close to thinking I might actually be able to do it. Then I remembered that I was the least adventurous person in the world and that my grand plans had always stayed in my head, and that my passport had been firmly in the filing cabinet for the past five years. I could not leave Laurie behind; not without telling him. If I left, I had no idea what would become of him.

Lara’s house was an odd little modern one, bright white and unusual, somewhere between a Californian art deco place and a British seaside bungalow. There was a car in the drive, the same blue Renault she had driven when she came to visit me. Because the house was on a hill, the actual garden was at a lower level, and I leaned over a railing and found I was looking down on it from a storey up. It was a nice garden, grassy, with a clematis and a camellia briskly awaiting spring, and a brown-leaved palm tree towering high above everything.

I rang the doorbell, energised by the exercise and suddenly starving, because it occurred to me that I had forgotten the part of my plan that had involved breakfast. I would stop at the shops on the way home and fill my basket with food.

There were heavy footsteps inside and the door flew open.

Lara’s husband was broad and blondish, with bits of grey that were barely noticeable in his light hair. He was wearing jeans and a baggy jumper and old man’s slippers. I took all this in while noticing that the moment he saw me, his face dropped dramatically, from an already low starting point. It was verging on the crumpled.

‘Oh,’ he said. He was shorter than I remembered and his appearance was a million times more shambolic. He was even less welcoming than he had been last time. If he’d had an aura, it would have crackled and sparked with hostility. I tried to stop mine doing the same. Mentally, I smoothed myself down. I stood in the faint winter sunshine and forced a smile.

‘Hi.’ I tried to remember his name. ‘Hi, I’m Iris. We met before. I’m a friend of Lara’s …’

He interrupted. ‘Yes. Lara. Where is she?’

I stared. ‘Where is she?’

‘Is she with you? Have you got a message? What’s happened?’ His voice was rising. ‘Where is she? Tell me. Where is she? What has happened to my wife?’

chapter fourteen

‘You’re sure you haven’t seen her?’ he asked again. ‘Or heard from her? When did you last hear from her? Why isn’t she answering her phone? Why have you turned up if you didn’t know something was wrong?’

I sat on the edge of the sofa. The sitting room was bright, even in this pale morning light. Other people’s central heating always smelled odd, because our cottage was only heated by its wood burner. Radiators made houses feel nostalgically comforting.

‘She’s late getting home,’ I told him. ‘People often are.’ I wondered if I could ask for a coffee, since he clearly wasn’t going to be offering. Food was obviously not going to be an option.

Her train, according to her husband, had arrived at 7.38, right on time. But she wasn’t on it. ‘She’s always on the train,’ he told me. ‘Well, once she wasn’t because the sleeper was late, but she called me to say that and then she was on the next one. And now the next train’s already come and she wasn’t on that either.’

Sam. That was his name. I was almost sure of it.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m sure there’ll be a reason. Maybe she’s lost her phone. Perhaps the train’s late and she’s lost her phone or it’s broken. My phone goes wrong a lot. I bet they’ve broken down outside Liskeard or something, where there isn’t any reception.’

He was staring out of the window, at the Docks station behind the house. It was a good vantage point for examining people arriving: no one could get off the train here without Sam seeing them. I could feel him willing her to saunter off the next train with an excuse that, the moment she said it, would make perfect sense.

‘She works so hard. Spends half her life on the sleeper. All to pay off our debts. It’s taking longer than we planned: her life in London is expensive because her sister … Anyway, I need her. Where is she?’

He was on the verge of falling apart, and, much as I did not want to, I knew I had to take charge. I was afraid on Sam’s behalf: not that she was not safe, but that she wasn’t coming home to him. I kept staring at his phone, waiting, like him, for something to change.

‘Sam,’ I said, and when he did not react I knew I had his name right. ‘Sam. We need to call the train company. First Great Western.’

‘I looked on the website. It didn’t say anything. In the stuff they have about broken-down trains and all that. There’s some things but not that. Can you check it again?’

‘Of course. And can I make some coffee? You look like you could do with it.’

I was pleased with this. Making it for him, supportively, while getting my own much-needed caffeine fix: this was a plan with no down side.

‘In the machine. I always make it when she’s due back. Chuck it away. It’s been there too long.’

His face crumpled again, and I had to push him down into a chair, then go to sort out the coffee. I was desperate for it. There were four croissants on a plate, but I knew it would be too crass were I to eat one. I could not be the woman who came to this house and scoffed a missing woman’s croissant.

‘I’ll call the train people,’ I told him. ‘Websites don’t always get updated, do they? Particularly not early on weekend mornings. So if she normally gets off the train at half past seven, she’s not much more than an hour late yet. Honestly, Sam. She’ll be fine.’

Their coffee machine was a stove-top percolator. I tipped out the old, cold stuff and looked for a pan so I could warm some milk to go with it.

Other people’s kitchens were odd, I thought. There was a strange intimacy to finding your way around, to trying to imagine where they might keep the cups and whether the coffee would be in the fridge or somewhere else.

For a moment I pretended that I was Lara, and that this was a routine domestic chore. It hit me with a flash, and I jumped back, knowing at once that she was bored with Sam. He was boring. She was not. She had probably left him.

I loitered, spooning ground coffee into the right component of the machine. All I could hear was Sam’s laboured breathing, and I became more certain that she would be in touch only to say she was not coming home. She had been jumpy on Christmas Eve. There were things she was not telling me.

According to the website, the train had left London on time, and had reached Truro on time before arriving, on time, at its end destination in Penzance. However, Penzance station, I noticed, was now closed, ‘due to an incident’. That generally meant someone jumping under a train, I thought. It would be hard to jump under a train at Penzance, the terminus: trains would surely be going too slowly to make it worthwhile. Still, people were inventive.

The train had come, but without her on it. She had decided not to return home today. I did not like to bring up this glaringly obvious potential scenario.

Sam sat at the table beside the window that looked out at the Docks train station, and called her mobile every few minutes.

‘Where does she live in London?’ I asked, cradling my coffee. ‘Could you call her flat?’ I wanted him to catch her out, to force her to admit to whatever she was doing.

‘She doesn’t have a flat.’ He did not take his eyes off the train station. There were a few people waiting on the platform, and so I supposed that a train was due soon. ‘She stayed at her sister’s place for a while but that didn’t work out. That’s why we haven’t paid half the bills yet. She’s been at a hotel. Terrible idea financially, but it’s made her happy. I think it has.’

‘Well, call the hotel, then.’

I saw him think about that. ‘Will you do it? Sorry. I don’t even know you. Will you ring the hotel and see if she’s left for the weekend?’

He was looking more wretched by the second.

It took me ages to get through to a human being, but eventually I was talking to a man who was brisk and efficient, with a slight eastern European accent.

‘Lara Finch?’ he said, and I could hear his fingers tapping away. ‘Oh yes. She’s always here on a Monday, and they always leave on a Friday morning. No change this week. She checked out yesterday. Is there a problem?’

‘Yes,’ I told him firmly. ‘There is. She’s missing.’

That startled him. ‘Missing? Do the police know?’

‘We’re about to call them. Um.’ I looked over at Sam. A train had pulled into the little station with a dramatic squeaking of brakes, and he was on his feet, his hands pressed to the window. I left the room and took the phone into the hallway, out, I hoped, of earshot. ‘Is anyone else in her room? Could you go and have a look in there?’

‘I’m sorry, madam. The room has been cleaned and it’s now being occupied by other guests. We have a quite different clientele at weekends from during the week, you see. If Mrs Finch is missing, we will be more than happy to help out in any way we can. I do urge you to call the police. I will ask the cleaner if Mrs Finch left anything behind, of course.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Can I give you a number, just in case?’ I had no idea what Sam’s mobile number was, so I gave him my own number and made a mental note to turn the phone on. Then I wandered into the kitchen and spotted a postcard pinned to the fridge: landline: 551299. I gave him that number too.

‘I am sure she’ll turn up safe and sound,’ he said, talking to me in the same tone I had been using with Sam. ‘We hope to see her on Monday.’

One look at Sam’s face told me that, again, she had not stepped off the train.

‘Sam,’ I told him. ‘You need to speak to the police.’

I sat next to him on the sofa and took his hand, which was squashy and hairless and completely different from Laurie’s. Laurie’s fingers were long and slender and beautiful.

‘Can you put your hand on my arm?’ he said. I looked at him.

‘What?’

‘It’s what Lara does. When we’re talking and things. She puts a hand on my arm, right here.’ He pointed to the spot. ‘And keeps it there while she talks. It’s comforting. Silly, I suppose.’

I put a hand on his forearm, in the spot he had shown me. I had no idea how long I was supposed to leave it there.

I came here to visit my tentative friend Lara, on a whim, and now I was sitting on her sofa, self-consciously holding her husband’s arm, waiting for the sound of her key in the door. This was why I never did impulsive things: you had no idea how they were going to turn out.

Sam was so close to me that our thighs were touching, and I wanted to move away but I couldn’t. I did not want to be that close to him. I wanted her to come back. At the very least I wanted her to get in touch. It was horrible of her to leave him waiting like this, imagining unspeakable accidents.

I imagined it so hard, harder with every second that passed, that it seemed I really heard it. I heard the metallic fumble of a key being fitted into a space that precisely enclosed it. The twisting of the lock mechanism. The pushing of a large wooden flap so there was a gap in the wall. The rustles and footsteps of a person entering the building. A voice. ‘Sam?’

There was a dead weight in my stomach. That was not real. It was not going to happen.

chapter fifteen

When somebody did come to the door, I got to my feet slowly. It was not going to be her, and yet there was the smallest of chances. Perhaps this would be the moment when she walked in with a breezy explanation and salvaged it all, and I got to go home. Maybe, I thought, she was ringing the bell rather than using her key as a gesture of sheepishness, because she knew she had done something bad by not letting Sam know what had happened to her.

Lara had always been full of life and energy. The air around her sparkled with bright white light. If she were there now she would be in a cloud of apologetic maroon. That would be fine.

Sam stayed on the sofa, conspicuously pretending to be casual. I made my steps stay measured as I strolled to the front door, past a formal photograph of the two of them at their wedding, past a framed film poster of Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
. Neither of us alluded to the fact that this was the first approach of the outside world since she had gone. This was, in a way, much the closest she had been to coming back.

There were two police officers. I instantly felt that I was guilty of some terrible crime. The outside world rushed in with an icy blast: it was colder out there than I remembered. I quelled my sudden urge to run down the hill and find my bike and ride home, puffing and frozen.

‘Hi there,’ said the woman, who was much shorter than me. She had hair cropped slightly shorter than her face could handle, and earrings that were studs in the shape of little hearts. She also wore the face of a person who would take no nonsense. ‘We had a call about Mrs Lara Finch.’

The man nodded, looking into my face, assessing me. I looked back, at his Harry Potter glasses and his smooth face, so cleanly shaven that it was still pink, and reminded myself that I had nothing to hide. He was so much taller than she was that together they looked almost funny, but both of them bristled with brisk efficiency, and since they were police, I decided not to point out the comic disparity.

I thought of Laurie, and reminded myself not to say or do anything that would make these people turn up at my house.

‘She’s missing,’ I said, wondering how many times you would have to say those two words before you stopped feeling as though you were parroting lines from a TV drama. If Lara had left Sam, then she was missing on her own terms.

‘Come in.’ I stepped aside like a gracious hostess, noticing the man giving my hand-knitted cardigan an amused once-over as he passed. Sam was on his feet, his hand outstretched before they even came in. He was transparently, pathetically grateful for the attention.

‘I’m Iris,’ I told the woman. ‘A friend of Lara’s. I actually just dropped by to see her. I had no idea …’

‘DC Jessica Staines,’ said the woman.

‘Lovely view from here,’ the man said. ‘DC Alexander Zielowski.’