‘Everything OK?’ asks Drew as I join him outside.
‘Think so.’
‘Did you close the kitchen door this time?’
‘Yes, I closed the kitchen door.’ I resist the temptation to check. I did. I can see myself staring at it a few seconds ago. Shut. The problem is, I also can see myself closing it when I left at midday. My brain has become accomplished at filling in gaps with plausible images, an inventive liar. If it does it over something so trivial, is it doing it at other times when I don’t realise? And if my mind is rewriting my reality, what does that make me? I’m like the actress who finds her role replaced by a CGI character, her actions just discernible as the foundation for the pixels.
‘Jess, don’t beat yourself up. No one’s been hurt; problem dealt with. Let’s go.’
‘Yes, you’re right. Perspective.’
He pats the back seat and I get back on. Revving the little sewing machine of an engine, we scoot off through the evening traffic.
It’s getting dark by the time we reach Dean Street. 5a and the surrounding buildings are in a much quieter stretch than the parts further north towards Oxford Street and south towards China Town with their pubs, clubs, theatres and restaurants. I’m relieved that I have Drew with me. These streets make me cringe, especially after dark. Come on, Jessica. Don’t go there. Concentrate on why you are here. Many of the premises have already put out their bins for collection the next morning, making the road look like it’s in the middle of an invasion by square green Daleks, victims reduced to slumped heaps of black plastic beside them, innards of non-recyclables leaking out where a dog or urban fox has attacked. The pile outside 5a is encouragingly big, a massacre of bags.
‘What are we looking for?’ asks Drew, wrinkling his nose as he crouches down beside me.
‘Anything – everything.’
‘Great. Glad you were able to narrow that down for me.’
I tug open the top of the first bag. Yuck. Marek appears to live on takeaways. The next includes some empty paint cans – ‘White with a hint of apricot’ – I totally missed that hint. I take them out and find only paint-stained plastic beneath.
‘What about this?’ Drew lifts up a corkboard leaning against the wheelie bin in the hope of being free-cycled.
Thank God. ‘Yes, that’s ours.’ I undo the ties to another sack and hit the jackpot. ‘Drew, my notebooks.’ I fish them out. They’re a little swollen with damp. Under them are two mugs, one chipped, the other with such a faded design that no charity shop would take them. I recognise them as they were my contribution to our kitchen. I dig in my shoulder bag for the foldaway carrier Mum gave me last birthday – a disappointing gift to open but, hey, isn’t it proving useful? I load up my treasure.
Drew, meanwhile, has been searching the last bags and the wheelie bin itself. ‘Nothing obvious. Do you want to check in case you recognise anything?’
He’s right. No computers or office equipment, just the things belonging to me. Unless Jacob drank out of my mugs that last day and only swilled them out rather than washing them, I wouldn’t even have a physical trace of him.
‘It’s like he never existed,’ I say.
‘I guess he must be a pro at that. But why leave your notebooks?’
I flick through them. These are the ones I designated for my missing persons research so I’d kept them at the office. My handwriting is atrocious and I have a methodology of highlighting and footnoting that only I seem to be able to understand.
‘He didn’t need these. I typed up my findings in the computer records. This is just the background stuff.’
Drew knuckles my forehead lightly. ‘You are so analogue, Jess, actually writing things down.’
‘But it’s a good thing I do, as I can reconstruct most of what I found out from here.’
Two police officers turn into the street and approach us at a leisurely pace. Drew begins furtively resealing the bin bags.
‘Everything all right?’ asks one, a twenty-something blonde with her hair tied back in a no-nonsense ponytail.
I show her my mug collection. ‘Yes, just looking for my things. Got chucked out by my old landlord.’
‘Good luck with that.’ As I predicted, the officers aren’t that interested in people stealing from bins. ‘Try not to make a mess.’ They walk on.
Drew sits back on his heels. ‘You weren’t the least bit worried, were you? Why am I the one to feel instantly panicked when confronted by anyone in uniform?’
‘Guilty conscience?’ I’ve been moved on for far worse than ferreting through stuff that no one wants. This is nothing.
We stack the sacks more or less how we found them.
Drew sniffs his fingers then grimaces. ‘I need to wash my hands before I touch the scooter.’
Carlo’s will be closed but there’s a pub on Bateman Street, a short walk from here. ‘I know a place – and I’ll even buy you a drink for being such a star.’
‘I would ruffle your hair and say “what are friends for?” but that, at the moment, would just be gross.’
‘Thank you for restraining yourself.’
We sit across from each other in a quiet corner of the Dog and Duck. It’s cramped inside, combining eatery and bar with all the polished wood and colourful tiles such a small space can embrace. I find it strangely reassuring. Drew sips on his half while I indulge in a Bloody Mary, needing the kick of fiery Worcester sauce to drive off the taste of rubbish. It feels the right kind of retro drink to have in such an antiquated place.
‘So what are you going to do now?’ asks Drew. He flicks through one of my notebooks. ‘You’ve done so much work on these girls. You’re not going to give up, are you?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t understand right now. What was Jacob doing investigating them in the first place?’
Drew scans the other people in the bar, fairly quiet on this Monday night, a couple of office workers, some tourists in optimistic shorts, a gaggle of student types looking effortlessly young. That’s what I notice but I wonder what he sees when he looks at people? Coffin sizes? God, that’s macabre. He’s not like that. His job makes him celebrate life; I’m the one with the Gothic imagination.
‘Jess, if he was asked to do that by family or friends, then they might have another way of contacting him. He’ll want to be paid.’
‘Don’t we all?’ I wonder how it would go, trying to contact some of the nearest and dearest to the missing. I cringe at the thought.
‘I suppose there’s another possibility.’
‘What’s that?’
‘He’s insane, obsessed by these cases for no particular reason, living out some kind of fantasy where he’s the intrepid detective and you’re his Dr Watson.’
I don’t like to leap so quickly to the accusation that Jacob was living in a world of his own invention; that has come my way too before and I know how difficult it is to wriggle out from under such an allegation. ‘Surely I should’ve sensed if he were delusional? He appeared perfectly rational to me.’
Drew just smiles. ‘You, my friend, are easy to fool because you are so nice. Me, I’m a little nastier, and I suspect everyone.’
‘You’re not nasty.’
‘Oh, I am. But you don’t see it. I have motives within motives.’ He reaches out and takes my hand where it is loosely looped around the base of my glass. ‘It’s not anyone I’ll go through bins for.’
I let my hand stay in his. Right now, I just need the comfort that someone finds me the least bit necessary to them.
‘It’s too soon, isn’t it?’ Drew brushes my fingers with his.
‘Too soon for what?’
‘You and me.’
Major gaydar malfunction. ‘Drew, are you saying … oh my God, you are, aren’t you?’
He gives me a funny look. ‘Not exactly the reaction I was hoping for. Polite refusal, yes; incredulity, no.’
‘I thought you were like my gay best friend.’
He moves back. ‘You thought I was
homosexual?’
‘Or maybe bipossible. Oh shit, I’ve made a hash of this, haven’t I?’ I’m blushing worse than when I was thirteen and asked the out-of-my-league boy to a party.
Drew gives a grimace. ‘Or maybe the hash is mine?’
‘No, no, it’s my fault. I just assumed… kind of built a picture of you based on…’ I tail off. What had I based it on? The fact that he made me feel at ease. That is all, really. I’ve made a fantasy role for him and moulded him into it in my ridiculous mind.
‘I thought you knew me better than that.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘God, this is embarrassing. Bit of a dent to the old ego.’ He sips his drink.
‘No, no, it’s not you, it’s me.’
He laughs at my joke, which is also the truth. ‘Jess, you are something else.’
I shrug. ‘I’m so sorry for being dense. And I want you to take a long hard look at me. I’m this.’ I gesture to my own hopelessness.
‘That’s fine by me. You need to get away from that dickhead Michael. He’s destroying you, you know that, don’t you?’
I didn’t really. There were times when I thought he’d been saving me. ‘I can’t blame him, Drew. He’s tried his best. People do, and I still mess things up.’ I gaze out at the street. A girl in a brief black skirt and off-the-shoulder blouse is coaxing a guy into an alley with the practised moves of a pro. He looks furtive but follows. I shudder. There is so much that Drew does not know.
He squeezes my hand and lets go. ‘I get it. This is a process. You need to make the break, then we’ll talk.’
‘Now that I know you’re not gay.’
He manages to laugh. ‘Yeah, that’ll help my case. Speak to him when he gets back. Not because of me but because you really need to do this for you.’
Drew’s right. This train has been coming down the tracks for a very long time now. If I had any objectivity about my own relationships, I would’ve told myself, lying on my own therapy couch, that something that started with such an unequal balance of power, made more exciting by being a rule-breaking secret, would fail when it became respectable and had to face real problems. Michael accuses me of spinning fantasies but he has as well over our relationship, using me to flatter some version he has of himself. I need to free him so he can either grow up or, more likely, enter another round with a younger model. He is going to be nothing but disappointed with me from here on. None of us, the women in his life, live up to his dead wife, so he is destined to repeat unless he works out how to move on.
But that’s now his problem, not mine.
‘OK, I’ll talk to him when he gets back.’
Chapter 11
Emma, 13th January 2011
It’s been a rough week. This treatment cycle is no picnic and there are times when I just want to opt out, pretend none of it is necessary. I can see myself doing it, ripping out the IV, flushing the pills, striding out into the sunset. I would if I had the energy but I’ve had a continually streaming nose and felt like death since the weekend. Funny, as the treatment is the thing that’s supposed to stave that off, not bring it prematurely into my body. I sit on the sofa in the kitchen, too tired to do much else but watch Michael at work. I’m so grateful to our friends helping out to give us this time. Biff has gone with Katy to the shops getting food and some supplies for the house. They’ll enjoy that time together and it gives me a break.
I wish they’d stop asking me what I want to eat, though. I don’t bloody well want to eat anything.
I asked Michael how his book is going. He went off on a little lecture about the limitations of Eysenck’s personality types as applied to the personalities of serious offenders in the judicial system. I won’t tell him that it’s not what he says but how he says it that I’m listening to as I murmur ‘really?’ and ‘that’s interesting’ at appropriate moments. He has hopes the book is going to take his work to a larger audience than he’s managed so far on the conference circuit. The police might appreciate him but I know he craves a bigger stage. I’m pushing him to come up with a catchy title. Anything with Eysenck in it will remain on the academic shelves. Type M for Murder is my best so far, with a wordplay on Michael’s use of the concept of personality type. I’m sure I can come up with something better if I lay on the sofa much longer; some good has got to come of enforced inactivity.
Michael certainly has the face for popularising psychology; the camera will love him with his square jaw, astute gaze and wavy auburn hair – no geeky egghead here, no sir. He may not be the most academically successful psychologist ever, but he certainly is in contention for the most handsome. It’s like Hollywood has already cast him in his own biopic. I tease him that he wants to be a celebrity and he gets flustered, so I know I’m on the right track there. I can read people; I suppose that’s one of my talents.
Being this sick gives me plenty of time to think about my own career – one of the drawbacks, really. Have I done the right thing with my life? If I do get out of this and recover enough to return to work, would I go back to the same job? No, I think I’m done there. I can’t imagine walking into the classroom to preach what I didn’t practise. I can’t tell the students that I got away with skirting the rules just barely and some of the things I did seem crazy in retrospect. God, I was so driven – I saw myself as a crusader, saving young lives from radicalisation, ends justifying the means and so on. I can’t claim that I wasn’t warned. You get sucked in, thinking it’s your responsibility to save the day. It’s not a job where you can shelve your concerns as you approach home and put some distance between yourself and what weighs on you. Even doctors have that luxury. No, like a soldier in a combat zone, you have to live it twenty-four seven.
And what does weigh on me? I don’t think I’ve been fair to some people I met. They might’ve had better intentions than I gave them credit for and still I reported them. But I have a priority now that goes above and beyond any person I brushed up against in the job. Biff says I made the right choice leaving. Michael is a great guy, a safe pair of hands. He’ll make up for any shortcomings that I introduced into the situation. On my own I’m pretty crappy; with him I make half of a good team.
That’s got to count for something. I hope Katy will think so when I explain.
Chapter 12
Jessica
Drew tells me he has to go out to deal with a DB from Florida so I decide I’d better go to work too. I minimise the photo of the page in Emma’s diary that I’ve been reading on the laptop and resolve to spend the day reconstructing my cases. I hadn’t realised she’d moved into teaching. Had she been tasked to keep a watchful eye out for student extremists? That’s what I took from the last paragraph. I don’t think I could do that. It must’ve been so awkward. I’m enjoying reading her words, though, puzzling through the hints of people around her, the regrets. I can get back to her later. I have to focus on the now if I’m going to get out of this fix Jacob left me in.
I’d reached some conclusions about the missing girls individually but seeing them like this, I begin to make some new connections. They’ve all vanished in a two-year period with indications that they were headed to London, or at least away from their home town where things had become unbearable. Lillian and Clare had both come out of the care system so had the smallest support network but Ramona and Latifah have families who are presumably still anxious to know what has happened to their daughters. I remember I had suspected that Latifah’s exit had partly been motivated by the desire to avoid an arranged marriage – there had been talk of a cousin coming to meet her last summer. She was an all-A-stars A-Level candidate but missed out on taking her place at Royal Holloway. I’d felt particularly close to her when I saw that she had been down to do Criminology and Psychology. The irony is that Latifah would’ve been one of Michael’s students now if she had taken her place last autumn. I make a mental note to check she hasn’t reapplied this year. I don’t suspect foul play with her; I think she’s just biding her time. I suppose I
have to consider that there’s a vague possibility, a notion prompted by Emma’s diary, that she might’ve been radicalised and gone to Syria, but there is no sign of that on her social media or in anything her friends say about her. It would be lazy to leap to such a conclusion just because the press sees every story about a Muslim runaway in terms of terrorism. No, I think Latifah has her head screwed on. She’s OK.
I am more worried right now about the other three. They seem more vulnerable. From some of the things Ramona let slip, her father looks like he might’ve been abusive. I can well imagine her running away, but with little or no qualifications and no money, she is unlikely to have landed on her feet. Same goes for Lillian and Clare. They all seem to have vanished into the crowds of the city.
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
T. S. Eliot is haunting me at the moment. Little fragments pop up in my mind every time I hear an echo of one of his words. I can’t make a hot drink without his Prufrock telling me that he’s measured out his life in coffee spoons. I wonder how many other people suffer from this same cultural commentary as they go about their ordinary business? I suppose there could be worse poets to carry around with you.
Where was I? I tap the pen on the notes I made on Ramona. Margate, February 2014 was the last sighting. I remember visiting the seaside town around then with Michael. It’s an odd place: great beach, tatty seafront, boarded-up shops in a failed high street and then this world-class art gallery on the quayside.
On Margate sands,
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
Thanks, T. S. How true. We were attending an event at the Tate Contemporary and I’d enjoyed the landscapes by Turner that Michael had abhorred. He’s got this thing about anything impressionistic. He accuses late Turner, Monet, Manet and their followers of chocolate-box painting, softening reality, avoiding sharp edges. He is not interested in the theories of light that they were exploring or their message about art being in the fleeting perception of the artist. His own taste runs more to the blocks and shouting colours of the De Stijl movement and Pop Art. Our house – his house – is decorated with reproductions and the occasional canvas by a contemporary artist who meets his exacting standards. Perhaps my rebellion when I furnish my next home will be to make it a homage to Monet’s water lilies, what Michael calls the apogee of Impressionist wallowing.