by Karen Cole
‘Did you see Grace yesterday morning?’ I ask Maria, rubbing my eyes.
Maria hesitates. Then sighs. ‘I saw her before school for about a minute on our way to our first class. She stopped to talk to someone. I didn’t want to be late. We had biology and Miss Telalis is very strict so I left her to it. I didn’t see her again after that.’
‘And you didn’t think to say anything when she didn’t turn up to biology?’ Chris’s freckled skin flushes red and he leans towards her aggressively, a big hulk of muscle and simmering anger.
Maria flinches and shifts away. ‘I didn’t want to get her into trouble. I thought she’d gone somewhere with Tom.’
I put a restraining hand on Chris’s arm and pull him back. I don’t think he realises how intimidating he can be sometimes.
‘Has she skipped school before to see him?’ I ask Maria gently.
Maria blushes and her eyes flick nervously to the side. ‘I don’t think so.’
So that’s a yes then, I think. Maria is such a bad liar.
‘Who did she stop to talk to?’ I ask. We’re not going to get anything out of her about Tom, that’s plain, so there’s no point pushing the issue.
‘Andreas.’
‘Which Andreas?’ There are about a million different Andreas’s in the school. Greek Cypriots tend to name their children after parents or grandparents and the same names, like Maria, Andreas and Eleni, get endlessly recycled.
‘Andreas Pavlou.’
‘Oh.’ I think about this. Andreas Pavlou is the boy with bushy hair that I saw in the canteen yesterday. He’s not part of Grace’s usual crowd. ‘I didn’t know they were friends,’ I say.
‘They aren’t really. But he’s always hanging round her. I think he’s got a bit of a crush on her . . .’
‘And Grace?’ I lean forward. ‘What does she think about that?’
Maria shrugs. ‘Not much. She didn’t really want to get involved with him. He’s bad news that boy. He’s a junkie.’
‘He’s a drug addict?’ The words snag in my throat.
‘Yes.’ Maria lowers her voice. ‘And I think he deals them too, but don’t tell anyone I told you. I’ve heard that his brother is mixed up in the mafia.’
‘The mafia?’ I splutter in disbelief.
The mafia is an almost customary part of life in Cyprus. Everyone knows the name of the current mafia boss, and tales of people having to pay a cut to the mafia for their businesses abound. But I find it hard to associate the harmless-looking teenaged boy I saw yesterday with organised crime.
Maria nods and frowns. ‘Well, at least that’s what I heard.’
‘Do you know what they talked about?’ I ask.
‘No. Like I say, I didn’t wait, but I think he gave her something.’
‘What?’ Chris asks sharply.
‘I didn’t see.’ She frowns. ‘I think it might have been a phone. She put it in her pocket. There was something . . .’ She shakes her head. ‘I probably imagined it.’
‘What?’ I lean forward eagerly. ‘It could be important.’
‘Well, it’s just a feeling, but there was something secretive about it, you know, like in a spy movie when they hand over a package.’
Drugs, I think with a chill.
‘Do you have a telephone number for Andreas Pavlou?’ I ask. ‘I’d like to speak to him.’
‘Yes, I think so. Wait a second.’
Chris and I sit in heavy silence as Maria heads back into the sports hall to fetch her phone. A ginger cat slinks past, eyeing us suspiciously, and some kids walk past on the opposite side of the tennis courts, a group of girls tossing their hair and laughing. For a dizzying second, I think one of them is Grace. I’m about to call out to her when I realise it’s not Grace, that she doesn’t even look very much like her, and it’s as though one second, I’m floating in the air and the next, I’m falling, crashing back down to earth.
‘Mrs Joanna?’ Maria is standing over me with her phone. ‘Do you want me to message it to you?’
‘Sorry, yes please,’ I say, swallowing my disappointment.
My phone beeps as she sends me a contact card and I save it to my phone under the name Andreas P. There’s a short silence as I watch the girls skirt the tennis court. I vaguely wonder what they’re doing. Shouldn’t they be in lessons now? I almost hate them for not being Grace.
‘What about Sunday?’ Chris asks, interrupting my thoughts. ‘She wasn’t at home or with Tom. Was she with you?’
Maria frowns and shakes her head. ‘No, I wasn’t here. I stayed at my cousin’s in Limassol at the weekend.’
‘She didn’t mention anything about what she did at the weekend?’
‘No.’
‘Really?’ Chris gives her a sceptical look. ‘I thought you girls talked about everything.’
‘She didn’t tell me anything about her weekend,’ Maria says slightly huffily. ‘We barely had time to talk before school started.’ She sighs and stands up. ‘If there’s nothing else,’ she says, ‘I probably should get back to my lesson.’
Damn you, Chris, I think. Why did you have to go and offend her? ‘Wait,’ I say, grabbing Maria’s arm. ‘Before you go, I need to know . . . Has she said anything unusual to you recently? Was there anything that she was upset about?’
There’s a hesitation. A very slight hesitation.
‘No,’ Maria says. ‘She was fine.’
‘Are you sure? It could be important, even if it doesn’t seem relevant. You want to help find Grace, don’t you?’
‘Yes, of course, she’s my best friend.’ She looks at Chris, opens her mouth as if to say something, then closes it again. And just before she turns away, I think I catch a flicker of fear in her eyes. What is she not telling us? I wonder.
Chapter 8
‘What kind of friend is she? How come she said nothing when Grace didn’t turn up to class? And this fucking school! What kind of school doesn’t know when the students are missing?’ Chris fumes as we return to the car.
He’s lashing out, trying to find someone to blame. I understand the impulse. I just wish that when I try to find someone to blame, I wouldn’t always come full circle back to myself.
‘You’re right,’ I say soothingly. ‘But right now, we need to focus on finding Grace.’
‘Well, what do you suggest we do?’
‘Perhaps we should check out the place by the salt lake Maria talked about,’ I say.
‘How about this Andreas kid? He might know something.’
‘Yes, we should definitely talk to him,’ I agree. ‘But let’s wait until school’s finished. He might tell us more if he doesn’t have to rush back to lessons.’
That’s not the only reason I don’t want to speak to Andreas yet. If I can, I want to find a way to meet him on my own. I know I’ll get more out of him without Chris’s ‘help’. I saw the way Maria clammed up in front of Chris and I don’t want the same thing happening with Andreas.
‘Okay.’ Chris shrugs and starts up the engine. ‘The salt lake it is then.’
As we’re driving along the old airport road towards the lake, my phone rings loudly in my handbag and my heart leaps out of my chest. Chris and I look at each other. I see the sudden flare of hope I feel reflected in his grey eyes and I know we’re both thinking the same thing. Grace. Please let it be Grace. Let it be Grace and let her be safe and well.
I scrabble around breathlessly in my bag for the phone.
But it isn’t Grace, of course, it’s Detective Dino. Another piece of my heart up in flames. Disappointment is an inadequate word for the way I feel.
‘Mrs Joanna,’ he shouts over loud music in the background. Is he in a bar or in his car with the radio on? ‘Good news. We checked the hospital and the morgue. There are no unidentified females.’
The morgue? I shiver even tho
ugh it’s baking hot in the car.
‘We checked all the flight records too and there’s no record of Grace leaving the country either. We did find out that she crossed to the Turkish-occupied area on Sunday morning, but she returned to the Republic of Cyprus that same evening.’
‘She crossed to the North?’ I repeat, glancing over at Chris, who looks as puzzled as I am.
‘Yes.’ Dino clears his throat. ‘Do you have any idea why she would do that? Does she have any friends there?’
‘No . . . unless . . .’ An image: dark curly hair, dark Omar Sharif eyes. I shake it out of my mind. ‘No, not to my knowledge,’ I say.
‘Okay,’ Dino sighs. ‘Well, she hasn’t used her passport again since, so I think we’re safe to assume she’s still in the country.’
‘We found Grace’s passport last night,’ I say, realising we haven’t told him. I’d meant to phone him, but I guess with all the worry about Grace it must have slipped my mind.
There’s a short silence on the other end of the line. ‘That’s good. That narrows our search a little. Well, I’ll keep in contact and I’ll let you know if there are any developments.’
‘Yes, thank you.’
The lake is completely dry. The mud where Jack got stuck in February is hard and cracked and the flamingos long gone, off to cooler climes. We park in a layby and walk around to the hide, trying to keep to the shade of the mimosa trees.
‘She went to the North on Sunday. Did you know anything about that? Why would she go there?’ I ask Chris.’
Chris stares at a line of ants scurrying across the path. ‘There’s only one person she knows on the Turkish side,’ he says carefully.
‘You mean Hakan.’
‘Yes.’
‘But why? She’s never showed any interest in meeting him before.’
We’ve always been open about the fact that Chris isn’t Grace’s biological father. As soon as she was old enough to understand I told her all about Hakan – or as much as she needed to know. And when we moved to Cyprus, I made no secret of the fact that he still lived here, on the Turkish side. I even suggested that she might want to look him up, but she dismissed the idea out of hand. ‘Chris is my dad and always will be,’ she said at the time. ‘I don’t need another.’
‘Yes, but why now?’ I say to Chris as we reach the hide.
He doesn’t answer. We climb the steps in silence. Inside the wooden shelter there’s a crushed can of beer on the floor and graffiti in several different languages: Greek, English, German and Russian scrawled on the walls. There’s no sign that Grace has been here. Of course. I should’ve known that there wouldn’t be. I look out across the lake to the old Turkish mosque on the other side, listening to the buzz of traffic from the nearby road.
‘What exactly are we looking for?’ asks Chris, kicking the can.
‘I don’t know.’ I feel a sudden wave of despair. This is hopeless. How are we ever going to find her?
A breeze shakes the trees, and someone somewhere is using a chainsaw. But there’s another sound carried on the air, from an open window maybe, a sound that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Out on the lake all the water has evaporated, exposing the salt underneath and all the ugly things that people have thrown in over the winter: cans, old tyres, bones of dead animals. I hear it again – a loud cry that pierces the air.
‘Did you hear that?’ I whisper.
‘Hear what?’
‘I thought I heard a baby crying.’
He shakes his head. ‘Nope. Look, I’m not quite sure what we’re doing here.’ He looks out over the dried-up lake bed, then turns to me and gives an exclamation of concern. ‘Jo, what’s wrong? Are you okay?’ I’ve sunk down into the corner of the hide. My chest feels tight, almost as if it’s going to explode; my heart is pounding, and I can’t control the shaking that’s taken over my limbs. Even my head is twitching out of my control. Chris takes hold of my arms and pulls me up so that I’m standing next to him. He wraps me in his arms.
‘It’s okay, Jo,’ he murmurs softly, stroking my head. ‘You’re having a panic attack, that’s all. You need to breathe.’
I breathe in deeply through my nostrils and out through my mouth, counting to four each time, and gradually the shaking subsides.
‘Come on. Let’s go home,’ Chris says. ‘Grace isn’t here, and you look like you could use some rest.’
‘Okay,’ I sigh. I really do feel close to collapsing. I didn’t sleep much at all last night and only a couple of hours the night before. Chris is right. It’s obvious Grace isn’t here. The lake is exposed and there is nowhere to hide. Unless of course . . . but I refuse to think about that possibility. It’s ridiculous and anyway, the ground is too hard and dry to bury a body.
We walk hand in hand back along the path.
‘It’s going to be okay, you know,’ Chris says as he drives us back through town. ‘We’re going to find Grace, and everything will be okay.’
I can’t rest, even though I’m half dead on my feet. Nervous energy propels me. At home, barely aware of what I’m doing, I work frantically, trying to keep the thoughts prowling around my head at bay. I sweep the floor and the yard, put out the bins and I tidy Jack’s room and our room, straightening the beds, polishing mirrors. Upstairs, the washing basket is overflowing so I bundle up a pile of clothes in my arms, carry it downstairs and dump it in front of the washing machine.
I stare at all the clothes scattered on the floor and feel a stab of pain so sharp and unexpected it takes my breath away. Grace’s clothes are there, mixed up with all the others: her jeans tangled with Jack’s T-shirt, a small lacy bra hooked on my dress. I stand there for a second or two unable to move. The clothes are a heartbreaking reminder that just a few days ago everything was normal. Grace was with us and life was okay. I pick up her Little Miss Sunshine T-shirt and bury my face in it, breathing in her scent – the smell of her honey shampoo, her deodorant and something else, something that is purely Grace. I clutch the T-shirt, not sure if I can put it in the washing machine. How can I bear to wash away that smell?
But Grace isn’t dead, I tell myself firmly. There’s no need to be sentimental. She’ll need clean clothes when she gets back, which will be soon. With grim determination I place the clothes in the barrel, one by one, checking each of the pockets in turn. In her jeans I find one euro and a chewing gum wrapper. And in her shorts, there’s a folded piece of paper. On it she’s written the name MARILENA in capital letters. That’s weird. As far as I know, Grace doesn’t have any friends called Marilena. It’s probably nothing, I think, but I fold up the piece of paper and put it in the pocket of my own shorts. You never know what could be important. Then I load the rest of the clothes into the washer and turn the dial.
‘Do you know anyone called Marilena?’ I ask Chris five minutes later.
He’s lying in the bedroom with the curtains drawn. I think he must have nodded off because he starts when I speak, and rolls over, rubbing his eyes and wiping a tiny bit of drool from the corner of his mouth.
‘No,’ he says, blinking at me sleepily.
‘Has Grace ever mentioned anyone called Marilena to you?’
He sits up, scratching his head. ‘I don’t think so, why?’
I hand him the piece of paper. ‘I found this in her jeans pocket just now. It’s probably nothing but . . .’
‘One of her school friends?’ he suggests, handing me back the paper dismissively. ‘I doubt it’s important.’
He picks up his alarm clock. ‘It’s one fifteen already,’ he says. ‘Someone needs to pick up Jack.’
‘Can you go, please?’ I say. ‘I want to stay here in case Grace comes home or rings the landline. Imagine if she came back and there was no one here.’
‘All right,’ he sighs and swings his legs round, standing up and stretching. He kisses me briefly on the cheek as h
e’s leaving. ‘It’s going to be okay, Jo. You’ll see,’ he says.
I wish I could be so sure. I watch out of the bedroom window until Chris’s van has turned the corner. Then I pick up my phone and call the number that Maria gave me for Andreas.
He answers after a couple of rings.
‘Hello?’ he says. He sounds tired, lethargic, as if I’ve just woken him up.
‘Hello, this is Joanna Appleton, Grace’s mother. I’d like to speak to you about Grace, Andreas.’
‘Okay,’ he says after a pause.
‘I mean, I’d like to meet up with you somewhere to talk about her.’
‘Okay.’ Is it my imagination or does he sound suddenly wary? ‘Where?’
‘How about Fini’s on the seafront? Say, two o’clock?’
‘Okay.’
After Andreas hangs up, I go downstairs and outside to check if the clothes on the rack in the shade of the pergola are dry. Lola follows me out, her tail wagging listlessly, getting under my feet. I push her out of the way, feeling annoyed. Why is she such a useless dog? I think. Why isn’t she one of those Lassie-type dogs that can find a missing child from just smelling their scent? The thought gives me an idea. Even though I know in my heart that it’ll never work, I take one of Grace’s damp T-shirts and shove it under Lola’s nose. ‘Where’s Grace, Lola?’ I say. ‘Where is she?’
But Lola just wags her tail furiously, puts her head on one side and then leads me across the garden to her food bowl.
‘Bloody dog,’ I say.
Grace, where are you? I think. What’s happened to you? I can’t shake the feeling that she’s in danger. I shiver and start pegging up clothes, but my hands are shaking. My nerves are on edge today. I freeze as I hear a sound, somebody, something, moving behind me, in the bushes in the next-door garden. It must be Graham, I think vaguely, our elderly English neighbour, but then I remember Graham’s gone to the UK for an operation. There shouldn’t be anyone there.
