Then You Were Gone (13 page)

Melissa lazily opened one eye. ‘Sorry, I’m being so rude here.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Simone said in a hushed voice. ‘Thank you for the coffee. Bye.’

Melissa raised a hand slowly in response. Her eyes were closed again.

Dan followed Simone out into the hallway. ‘Listen, will you be OK? I mean, do you have somewhere to go tonight? Because you can stay here you know, we’ve plenty of room. Any friend of Mack’s is a friend of ours, and I don’t like to think about what he might do to me if he thought I’d kicked you out onto the mean streets of Clitheroe in the middle of the night.’

He really meant it, Simone realised. Despite the tiny baby and the lactating wife and the fact that they had only met Simone once before, and most of that time she had spent screwing in the hotel toilets with Mack. Despite all that she really was welcome in this house. She could sleep in the cold spare room and be woken in the dark hours by shouting children and eat toast with them and their curious stares and colourful plastic crockery. The temptation was almost overwhelming. This place, this house, this village, this family all felt so safe. Dan and Melissa were her kind of people; in another life this could be a social call. If she stayed here it would be like a weekend visit to friends she had not seen in a long time, a break in time from the hell Mack was sucking her into.

But before she came here she had gone to the pub in the village and booked a room, and she knew that going back there was the right thing to do. Plus, she reminded herself, families were something she was only equipped to face when she was feeling rather less fragile.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Really. But I’m fine. I need to keep looking for this guy, don’t I?’

‘Where will you go?’

She hesitated, just long enough that Dan probably noticed. ‘I don’t know.’

Dan moved to open the door, then hesitated. ‘You know, talking about Kielder just then, I wondered… do you think Mack might have gone up there?’

Simone pursed her lips as she considered this. ‘Maybe.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe. Do you think that’s where he would go? If he wanted to hide?’

‘Yes.’ Dan nodded. ‘Yes, I think he probably would. Because if not there, then – where? If he’s not there then he could be anywhere.’

‘I know,’ Simone said. ‘That’s what worries me. So, OK, maybe I’ll try there. I may as well look there as anywhere. If he’s not there then… Well, then I suppose I’ll go back to London. Think again.’

Dan smiled. ‘Good. Worth a try. And let me know, won’t you. You’ve got our number. As soon as you find anything, please let us know. We’ll be waiting to hear.’

‘OK. I will.’

He opened the door letting in a sliver of chill, damp air. ‘You know, I’m sure you won’t mind me saying this. I’ve seen Mack with a LOT of women over the years. And there hasn’t been one of them until you where I’ve thought, yes, this is it, this is what he needs. This is right. But as soon as I saw him with you, I did think that. And I just hope…’ He reached out a hand awkwardly, apparently unsure what kind of gesture was appropriate in this situation. In the end he settled for a pat on the arm. ‘I just hope that this… whatever this is, that it doesn’t cock things up for you both. Because I hope we’ll see each other again.’

‘Thanks,’ Simone said, her throat tight. ‘Me too.’

Chapter Thirteen

Talking about the night the boy died had helped Jessica more than she had thought it would, and more importantly it had made her genuinely trust the strange man who called himself Joe. He could not have been that good an actor that he could have hidden any existing knowledge of the murder so well. Jessica shuddered whenever she even thought the word ‘murder’ in relation to the boy’s death and she had still never spoken it aloud. She had never imagined murder to be a word she used in conjunction with an event in her own life, that the decision to take a taxi home one evening because her poor, fat, pregnant feet were killing her would bring her into the orbit of such a black, ugly word. The man though used the words ‘murder’ and ‘murderer’ all the time, as though he were trying to hammer home to her the enormity of what she had, albeit unwittingly, become involved in.

‘Will he listen to you, do you think? The murderer?’ he asked her out of the blue the morning after she had first told him about the stabbing.

‘Listen to me? About what?’ She had told Joe that she had been at school with not just the victim but Connor Marston, the boy who had stabbed him, too. She had not told him the extent of her friendship with Connor, that they had known each other since they were a pair of four-year-olds crying for their mothers in Reception Class and been in the same classes every year until he had stopped turning up to school halfway through Year Eleven. They had had many overlapping friendships, including Jessica being in the same gymnastics team as Connor’s cousin Savannah, and had often ended up running in the same circles, but there had always been something about Connor that had prevented Jessica from ever becoming what she would have called real friends with him. There had always been something a little askew about him, a slight absence behind his eyes that would shift suddenly into a loud or violent outburst; throwing a chair at a classroom door, pushing a fellow student up against a wall and spitting into his eye. These tendencies only intensified as Connor grew older, and from what little Jessica knew about his home life, she was able to infer that it was an utter mess. He lived with his dad who drank heavily and would sometimes disappear for extended periods, and by the age of fourteen Connor was essentially left to do whatever he liked.

When he and Jessica had been in primary school they had both been part of ‘pet club’ where they took shared responsibility for the school’s tortoise, goldfish, rabbits and stick insects, and still when Jessica looked at Connor she saw the round-faced little boy who would spend every break and lunchtime tirelessly making sure that his beloved creatures were fed and watered.

Joe shrugged. ‘He knows that you saw him. He knows that you’re incredibly brave…’

‘Yeah, or stupid,’ Jessica interrupted.

The man gave her a tender smile that made her blush and look away. ‘You’re brave,’ he repeated. ‘And Connor knows that. He knows that you’re going to do the right thing.’ Joe appeared to notice her shift uncomfortably next to him, to pick up on some guilty change in her demeanour. ‘You are, aren’t you?’

She nodded, her eyes focused downwards on the curve of her ever-growing belly. ‘Yeah,’ she said softly. ‘I have to, don’t I?’ She had come this far, she reasoned. She had already given up so much, almost lost so much. If she was going to chicken out then she should have done it weeks ago, when there was still something to salvage. She had committed to this course of action so completely that to see it through to its natural conclusion actually seemed like the easier option now. She just wished she did not feel so tired.

‘Well, do you think he could be persuaded to make it easier for himself? And you?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean plead guilty. Front up. Be a man, rather than terrorising little girls.’ There was real venom in Joe’s tone. ‘You could write to him.’

‘What, in prison?’

‘You’re allowed to write to people in prison. You can’t email him, I checked. But could you get in touch with his family maybe? You could send an email to them and ask them to pass it on to him?’

Jessica wondered if this meant she was going to be allowed to use her phone. Maybe Mum had given it to Joe and said he could let her use it once he was sure she was not going to do anything stupid. Or maybe he was going to let her use his iPad; she knew he had one, she had found it when she went through his bag while he was in the shower one morning, but it had not been charged up then and she had never seen him go near it since they had been here.

‘I’m friends with his cousin,’ she said, although actually she hardly saw Savannah now they went to different colleges. ‘I could get in touch with her, see if she could get a message to him. What if it made things worse though?’

Joe laughed, although there was little humour behind it. ‘Come on, Jess.’ It was the first time he had called her Jess. ‘How much worse can things really get?’

‘A lot worse. He could fucking kill me, or get his nut-job brother to do it, like he nearly did to Marcus.’

‘Look, you’re already hiding out in the middle of nowhere with some oddball mate of your mum’s you’ve never met before. You’re already alone and pregnant and terrified. Do you think that Connor’s scared too?’

Jessica swallowed. Connor had always seemed scared, even after he turned hard and wild; even when he had the knife in his hand he had seemed scared. ‘Yes.’

‘Do you think he would want to hurt you?’

Jessica thought for a minute. ‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘He might not want to, but that doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t.’

Joe nodded. ‘OK. But he knows that if he pleads guilty he can make things a bit better for himself doesn’t he? He knows you, he associates you with home and a happier time. He hasn’t scared you off yet, so you make sure he knows he isn’t going to. He can make it better for himself now by pleading guilty, or he can wait for you to tell the court the truth. Because that’s what you’re going to do, if he doesn’t.’

‘And what if he doesn’t listen? What if he makes me go down to court and testify against him and I spend the rest of my life having to hide from him and his loony family?’ Her voice was quavering. ‘What then?’

Chapter Fourteen

Jazzy went into work, purely because he could not bear to stay at home on his own any longer and he did not know where else he could go. He had not slept so he left the house early and the sun was only barely beginning to show in the sky as he arrived at the office. As he climbed the stairs, he noticed that a light was on inside. He felt an automatic thump of terror, his body responding as it might be expected to, but his mind could not summon any real emotion. His resources had been drained dry. He unlocked the door and went inside. Ayanna was sitting at Mack’s desk. She jumped to her feet when Jazzy came in, then seemed to sag a little as she sat back down. ‘Oh, thank fuck. It’s you.’

‘How did you get in?’ Jazzy’s tone was aggressive but he did not care. ‘I double locked it.’

She looked at him as though he was stupid. ‘I’m the cleaner? I’ve got a fucking key?’ She lifted a chain attached to her belt, from which dangled twenty or thirty keys of assorted sizes. ‘I’ve got every fucking key.’

‘Stop swearing so much,’ Jazzy snapped. ‘It doesn’t suit you. And anyway, I didn’t realise you still were the cleaner. And why aren’t you at college?’ This girl had not been around for ages, and now she was back out of nowhere, sitting in his office and manifestly not doing any cleaning.

She met his eye and the bolshy young woman fell away, revealing a skinny, frightened child. ‘I can’t go.’ Her voice squeaked, then broke altogether. Huge tears spilled over onto her cheeks. He realised she was shaking.

Jazzy swallowed. Now his mind had agreed to get in on the action. A thousand terrifying thoughts were rushing through it. ‘What do you mean?’

‘A man found me there. He came looking for me,’ Ayanna said quietly. ‘Someone must have told him about me.’ Her tone was plaintive, accusing, and she took a long, shuddering breath.

‘What do you mean, “found you”?’

‘He knew I was there, he’d come specially to find me and scare me.’

‘Who?’ Jazzy was shouting now, his voice shaking, his mind full of the brash, plastic-jacketed man from Rory’s nursery.

‘I don’t know!’ Ayanna yelled back. ‘I told you, some bloke. Skinny little prick, all sweaty and nervy. He grabbed me, really rough, and pulled me into this empty classroom – I was the last one out of class so everyone else had gone and nobody saw him. He kept asking me about Mack, only he didn’t call him Mack – didn’t call him anything. He kept saying, who is he? The man with the black hair and the blue eyes, the tall man, the pretty boy? Who is he? And I acted like I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then he said he knew that Mack – the pretty boy, he kept calling him – that Mack had been to Hakim and then he’d taken Jess,’

‘Jess?’ Jazzy cut in. ‘Who’s Jess? Who took Jess?’

‘I don’t know!’ she shouted again. ‘I keep telling you. I told him too, I said, what Hakim does, that ain’t my business, I don’t know no Jess, I don’t know Mack, not really…’ her voice tailed off, deflated, as though she was finally realising the truth in her words.

Jazzy was at a loss. Crying women terrified him, but he had rarely seen anyone in as much distress as Ayanna just then. He knew he had to respond in some way, so he walked over and put a tentative arm round her quaking shoulders. ‘Did he believe you?’ he asked, trying to sound manly and in control.

Ayanna shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Probably not. But after he’d asked me the same thing over and over again for, like, twenty minutes, I think he realised he wasn’t going to get anything out of me. So he grabbed hold of me like this,’ she squeezed her skinny hand round Jazzy’s shoulder and made as if to shove him back against the wall, ‘and then shoved really hard so I cracked my head off the whiteboard and kind of lost my balance and fell.’ She sniffed convulsively. ‘And I just stayed on the floor, crying. I was so scared. I didn’t know what else he was going to do. Then he leaned right down close to me and said, “You be careful, girl, we are watching you. We know where you live, where you go to college, where your cousins go to school, where your parents work. We watch you all the time, so we know if you talk to this man, if you warn him that we are looking.” And then he went out of the room and wedged the door shut and I had to wait in there by myself for two hours until the next class came in.’ She collapsed into great, heaving sobs, her whole body shaking.

Jazzy tried to process what she had told him. ‘This man,’ he said, trying to raise his voice enough so that it could be heard above her sobs, ‘what did he look like? Did he have really short blond hair, shaved at the sides? Was he wearing a jacket?’

‘No,’ Ayanna sniffed and shook her head. ‘No, his hair was dark – nearly black – and a bit long and messy. Sort of wavy, but more – I don’t know – kind of frizzy. And all gelled and shit.’