Then You Were Gone (10 page)

‘I’m not sure,’ Simone said. She did not want to reveal that she had broken into Mack’s flat that morning and stolen his address book. ‘Would you have one?’

Sheila gave a rueful laugh and shook her head. ‘No, love, sorry.’
Why did you bloody ask then?
Simone thought. ‘Sorry I couldn’t be more help.’

‘That’s OK.’ Simone stood to leave. ‘I didn’t mean to worry you.’ There was, of course, the other thing that she needed to ask this woman about, the thing that had been on her mind ever since the first second she saw it. She was aware of the weight of Jessica Novak’s birth certificate in her bag, but as she walked slowly towards the door, she felt the moment slipping away where she may be able to produce it. She did not feel she had bonded with Sheila. She did not feel that this woman was on her side. She still did not have the faintest clue what the hell this birth certificate might have been doing in Mack’s flat but she had a strong feeling that, even if Sheila knew, she would not tell Simone. She believed that Sheila did not know that Mack had gone, or why, but she got the strong sense that there was more she could have told Simone, better ways in which she could have helped, but that she was choosing not to.

‘Oh, you haven’t worried me, sweetheart,’ Sheila said, showing her to the door. She was telling the truth, Simone was sure. Sheila was not worried, but this only had the effect of making Simone more worried. Did Mack have a habit of these disappearances? And if so, why? ‘Joe can look after himself,’ Sheila went on. ‘He’s had enough practice.’

As Simone stepped out of the flat, the woman laid a bony, nicotine-stained hand on her arm and said, her voice much kinder. ‘Listen, Simone. If that boy brings you any trouble, you come to me. OK?’

The address for Dan in Mack’s book was for ‘Dan and Melissa’, which meant, Simone surmised, that the address was less than four years old. Melissa, Dan’s wife, had told Simone during the polite reunion chit-chat that the couple had moved in together only six months before they got married, and that they were approaching their third wedding anniversary. Melissa had been six months pregnant at the reunion, and had shown Simone a picture of their two-year-old boy. In amongst all that, Simone doubted they would have got around to moving house as well. The address was in a village in Lancashire, with Clitheroe listed as the postal town. There was a landline telephone number as well, and Simone had her phone out ready to dial until she paused for thought.

She had gone into a coffee shop near Goldsmiths College, dark and warm and filled with students who should really have been doing something more productive. Simone wanted to stay there, to become one of them, to belong again in their world of revision timetables and two-for-one tequila shots and guest lecturers. She felt as though she was in one of her dreams about being stuck at the top of something tall and terrifying, the only way down being to leap into the unknown. For a second, she allowed the ice cold terror to creep back in and the realisation struck her, as though for the first time, that this was for real. That Mack really had run away, that he was scared and – the thing that brought on the ice cold terror – Simone now felt sure that Mack must have good reason. His mum had been so strange, so remote and cagey. Whether or not she knew where Mack had gone, Simone was certain the woman was hiding something important. Mack had not lost his mind, but he had left his life behind and bought a false identity from a man he had never met. She screwed her eyes shut and the loose, contradictory strands of Mack’s life whipped around her mind. His warmth, his humour, the true, undeniable love she had seen in his eyes mixed with Russian clothing and stolen passports and a birth certificate belonging to a young woman with a foreign name. Something bad was happening, and it was happening to Mack and to her and to the people they loved. Warm coffee shops with acoustic music on the sound system and flyers on the walls for open mic comedy nights were not her world any more. Maybe Jazzy had it right. Maybe it was time to start playing a part; the part of somebody who confronted bad things head on, who found lost people and who protected the innocent.

And, she realised that that person would not phone ahead and give the lost person warning that they were coming. If Mack was with Dan and Melissa, then he would leave as soon as he thought she or anyone else had found him. The one thing he had wanted her not to do was to come looking. The only way that she might find him there was to go and see for herself if that was where he was hiding, and if he was not there, then to get out and away from those innocent people and their safe lives and take her trouble far away from them.

Chapter Ten

‘Rory’s uncle?’ Jazzy stared at the woman, uncomprehending. ‘Which uncle?’

Realising that he was unlikely to manage anything useful with the rest of his day even if he did make it back to the office before four o’clock, he had decided to go straight from Ayanna’s college to Rory’s nursery and pick him up. Petra had a late meeting so might not be home until seven. He pictured getting home, changing Rory’s nappy, feeding him some mashed up slop, giving him a quick bath then sitting down with him to watch The Simpsons. No mysteries, no questions, no fake identities for mysterious under-age girls; nothing more complicated than which particular jar of organic, vitamin-enriched slop he should choose to feed him with and which pair of pyjamas might be clean. All he wanted, for the few hours before he could reasonably go to bed, was to be able to pretend that everything was normal, until he had to get up in the morning and try to work out what the hell he was going to do next.

But when he had arrived at the converted Victorian Methodist church that housed the private nursery, the girl who answered the door to him had immediately looked worried. Jazzy’s heart had flipped, scenarios involving falls from bookshelves or choking on afternoon snacks flooding his mind, but the girl had simply said, ‘Oh, you’re a bit early, Mr Hammett. Rory’s still having his sleep, but Julie wanted a word with you anyway. Is that OK?’

Julie was the manager, a plump, breezy woman with the kind, brisk manner of a nurse who is about to remove a wart. As she had showed Jazzy into her office, his mind had been only half on where he was and who he was with; part of his mind was still blank with confusion over Mack, and partly he was already wondering if he might really get lucky and that tonight’s Simpsons episode might be one he had not seen before. He had assumed Julie wanted to speak to him about money – any time any of the staff wanted to speak to him or Petra it was about money. The fees had gone up, they had to pay extra for sun cream, they had to pay extra for being twenty minutes late last week, they had to pay extra for the music lessons (‘Music lessons?’ Mack had screeched when he found out. ‘For a baby?’ He had shaken his head and said in mock disgust, ‘You people make me sick.’)

‘I just thought I ought to go over our protocols with you again, about approved persons picking up the little ones,’ Julie said as they sat down, handing Jazzy a photocopied form. ‘You see, the only two names we’ve got down for Rory are yourself and Mrs Hammett.’

‘Mrs Shields,’ Jazzy corrected her. ‘Petra kept her own name.’

‘OK then.’ Julie was not to be distracted. ‘So, I’m sure Rory’s uncle will have told you by now that we weren’t able to let him pick Rory up earlier on. We tried Mrs Hamm – erm, Mrs Shields but her secretary said she was in a meeting. Then we tried you at work and on the mobile, but we couldn’t get hold of you either, so as Rory’s uncle probably explained, without explicit written permission he just wasn’t able to take him.’

And now Jazzy was sitting in Julie’s messy, overheated office, desperately trying to replay the last few minutes’ conversation into something that might make sense, and repeating ‘Rory’s uncle? Which uncle?’ over and over again. Both his brothers still lived in Cornwall. The eldest, Jonathan, worked the farm with their dad; the youngest, Jake, was a GP in Truro. Neither of them made it to London more than twice a year, and certainly not without several weeks of planning, phone calls and last-minute cancellations due to work commitments. As for Petra’s brother, Will, he was working for a mining conglomerate in Western Australia and had last been to England for Jazzy and Petra’s wedding.

Julie blinked a few times. ‘Well, erm…’ She flipped the photocopied sheet over. There was something scribbled in biro on the back. Julie squinted, as if trying to make out the wording. ‘Edward. Edward Hammett.’ She looked at Jazzy. ‘So, your brother I presume. Were…’ She took in Jazzy’s pallor and shaky breathing. ‘Were you not expecting him?’

Jazzy swallowed a few times before he was able to speak. ‘I don’t have a brother called Edward.’

The next few hours passed by as though in a dream. He managed to get a description of ‘Edward Hammett’ from Julie; it was both specific enough to be threatening and vague enough to be terrifyingly bewildering. She spoke of a youngish man, no older than thirty, thick-set in the manner of a bodybuilder running to seed. ‘He was, you know, English,’ Julie had said, meaning white. ‘And from round here somewhere.’ Julie was Scottish, and Jazzy had spent enough time with Simone to understand that to a North Briton all southern accents sounded essentially the same. The man had apparently been wearing a bomber jacket that Julie described as ‘plastic’, by which on closer probing she meant imitation leather. ‘I’ve got to say, we were surprised that you would have a brother like that,’ she confided as she showed him out, apologising for the hundredth time. ‘Now, are you quite sure you don’t want us to involve the police? We take anything like this very seriously.’

‘No,’ Jazzy had said, surprising himself at how convincingly he was managing to hold it together, ‘I think I know who it was. He’s, you know, an old friend. Practically family. He won’t have seen the harm in it, but I’ll speak to him about it, let him know the trouble he’s caused.’

He had no choice, he surmised, than to be at least half-honest with Petra. ‘I’m sure it’s absolutely nothing,’ he insisted, even as he was packing clothes for her and Rory into a suitcase and checking the traffic reports for the M4. ‘It’s just that Mack sounded rattled in this latest message and, you know, you could do with a break. You can work remotely from your mum’s for a few days can’t you, and she’ll love the chance to spend some proper time with Rory. But, you know, don’t worry, like I said, it’s probably just another part of Mack’s latest psychosis.’

The lie that Mack had been in touch prompted a flurry of hard to answer questions from Petra, but the sweaty pallor and breathless twitchiness he was displaying must have conveyed the message that there were things she was better off not knowing. Either that or she had concluded that Mack was not the only one experiencing a vivid and debilitating paranoia and that her best option was to humour him. Either way, she and Rory had left London that night and abandoned him to a long night in an empty house, alone with his horrors.

Chapter Eleven

Once the guy started talking, it seemed that he could not stop. He obviously felt that his relentless questioning of Jessica the other day had begun to break down some of the barriers between her and him; barriers such as the fact that she was here against her will, that they barely knew each other, that they were the best part of two decades apart in age, that he would not let her contact her mum or Marcus or any of her friends, telling her over and over that it was for her ‘own good’.

After probing so much into her childhood, he had begun feeding her snippets of information about his own. He had been brought up by a single mother too, he said, and it was fine, wasn’t it?

Of course it was, she had replied truthfully. Plus, she added, she had never known any different so she was bound to think it was fine, wasn’t she? He had nodded his agreement without saying anything, and then gone quiet for a long time.

He had told her other things too, like the fact that he had lived abroad for a while and that he had been to university. She asked him what he did for a living but he just shook his head and said, ‘Oh, this and that. You name it, I’ve done it.’ Then he told her that he wanted to retrain as a teacher, that he was sick of wasting his time on jobs that meant nothing to him, and she wondered whether that was what had prompted him to ask all those seemingly irrelevant questions about her reading and television habits. Maybe he was seeking to understand teenagers better in preparation for the day when he started working with them. When she told him that she was planning to become a nurse once the baby was older, he had nodded approvingly. ‘I wish I’d known what I wanted from my life when I was your age,’ he said quietly. ‘Might have made a bit less of a mess of it then.’

As the trust quietly grew between them, he finally asked her about the night that it had all happened, the night that ruined her life, the night that had brought them here, to this shack-with-pretensions in a grey-green forest at the edge of winter. She remembered what her mother had said, that this man, although he seemed strange and aloof and brash and preening, was actually a good man, that Jessica should trust him, and so she told him. It was a relief to speak of it again, to make the blood and the screams and the swift tilting from one calm reality into a hideous, terrifying ante-world something that lived outside her own mind and body and outside of her restless, haunted dreams. He did not seem shocked, and Jessica guessed that her mother must have told him at least some of the story before he showed up at their house in the middle of the night. But even Mum did not know all of it; Jessica had not told her about the terrible noises the boy had made in the minutes it took him to die. They were part-scream, part-gasp of disbelief, part-moan of pain and terror. Jessica had not told her about how they had been able to see the inside of the boy’s body, spilling out onto the floor. With the medical knowledge she was acquiring from her Biology A-level and her work experience at the hospital, Jessica had known immediately that he could not live, but she had knelt on the bloody floor next to him and held his hand and talked to him. She had asked him if he remembered her, because she remembered him. He said he did, but she still wondered now whether that was true. But the thing about it was, she had told him. She had said, ‘It’s me, Jess. Jess Novak, from school. You remember me, don’t you?’ And now, regardless of whether the poor, dying boy on the floor knew who she was, for damn sure everybody else in that little room knew her, and most of all so did the man with the knife.