by Simon Lelic
There was silence for a moment at the other end of the phone line.
“Have you been back?” Holly tested.
“Back?” said Fleet.
“You know what I mean. Back home.”
“No, I . . . I’ve been staying away.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
Fleet glanced again at the green front door.
“I’m serious, Rob. Don’t even think about it. This isn’t the same. Even I can tell from here, it isn’t the same.”
“No, I know. I do know, Sprig, I promise.”
Sprig. When was the last time he’d called her Sprig? It was a silly nickname, one he’d never used other than in private. He couldn’t even remember when he’d started using it. But Holly, sprig of—it was stupid, but at some point it had stuck.
“What are you eating?” Holly asked him, and Fleet had to laugh.
“I’ve been sticking mainly to a liquid diet,” he told her.
She knew he wasn’t much of a drinker. “Coffee, you mean? It’s battery acid, Rob. Especially that stuff they brew at police stations. I know. I’ve tasted it.”
“I’ve cut out the sugar,” Fleet said, resting a hand on his ample belly.
“Meaning you’re basically running on empty.”
Jesus, thought Fleet. He couldn’t win.
He smiled.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Seriously, Holly.” Because he knew that was really what she was calling to check, even if her initial mind-set had been kill rather than cure. And the tone they’d settled into now showed Fleet they’d made progress, of a kind, since their separation. Before, the instinct had always been to pick a fight, on both sides. Their conversations lately reminded Fleet of the time when they’d first started dating, when Holly had lived up in Cambridge and Fleet had been down on the coast. They’d spoken for hours sometimes, deep into the night, the distance somehow drawing them together. These days their conversations were briefer, because irrespective of the cessation of hostilities, it never seemed to take long before matters came to touch on the very thing that had driven them apart. It remained like a chasm between them, wider than any gap that could be reckoned in miles. He could forgive her, and she could forgive him, and still they could never be together.
“You don’t sound fine, Robin,” Holly said, slipping into the use of his full name. In the past she’d deployed it as a sign of affection, because she knew exactly how much he hated it. Or had, once, before Holly had turned it into something good. “You sound . . . thin,” she went on. “Like a ghost of yourself.”
Fleet would have dismissed the description as pointless poetry—another consequence of Holly’s love affair with language—if, as was her habit, she hadn’t summed up the way he was feeling so precisely.
“Look, Holly, I’d better go.”
And somehow, with a sentence, Fleet ruined it. He managed it every time. He was like a clumsy oaf with five thumbs, trusted to look after a house of cards.
“Right,” said Holly, in a tone Fleet recognized all too well. “Of course you do. Take care of yourself, Rob.”
“Holly, wait. Listen, I . . . Thanks. You know, for—”
But the line had already gone dead.
Calling, Fleet thought.
He stared at the screen of his mobile, which blackened and then showed him his shame. He tossed it onto the seat next to him, then raised his head to stare through the windscreen. He lit that cigarette, exhaling the first cloud of smoke through the crack he’d left in the driver’s-side window.
That door was still out there waiting for him.
Don’t even think about it, came Holly’s voice.
And she was right. Always, about so many things, Holly was right. So if he knew it, why did he never listen?
He pulled the car keys from the ignition and unbuckled his seat belt.
“HELLO, MUM.”
Fleet was unprepared for how old she looked. He’d warned himself, braced himself, and yet the face that confronted him when the door opened was as worn and weathered as the faded green paintwork. His mother’s hair, once blonde, was now gray, her posture buckled by the weight of years. And not only that, probably. There were some things, Fleet knew, that aged you quicker than the passing of time: politics, the superintendent had claimed, was one; grief, clearly, was another. If Fleet hadn’t known his mother was only sixty-one, he would have guessed her to be a decade and a half older.
But even as he tried to keep the shock from his expression, another thought struck him. The last time he’d seen his mother he’d been seventeen years old. He was now thirty-six. If she looked old to him, what must he look like to her? Flecks of gray had started appearing in his own hair of late, and he was a long way from the beanpole he’d been as a teenager. On the contrary, his middle-aged spread had kicked in early.
There was a pause, long enough for Fleet to wonder whether his mother recognized him at all.
Then, “I was wondering how long you were going to sit out there,” she said.
That voice. It had been roughened by the years and the cigarettes, just like her skin, but underneath, it was as familiar to Fleet as the voice inside his own head.
Fleet hadn’t cried since the day he’d left home. The urge to do so came upon him now, seizing him as violently as a sudden cramp.
What was he doing here? Why the hell hadn’t he taken Holly’s advice?
“I suppose you’re deciding whether to come in,” said his mum. “Me, I’m deciding whether to let you.”
Which cured Fleet of the urge to cry, at least.
“I suppose one of us needs to make a decision,” he said. “Otherwise we could be standing here for another nineteen years.”
His mother looked beyond him at the weather. Somehow it seemed to make up her mind for her, though she didn’t appear best pleased with the decision.
She turned her back.
“Wipe your feet,” she said, retreating into the house. “And make sure you close the door properly. It—”
“Sticks when it’s raining,” finished Fleet. “I remember.”
There was a glitch in his mother’s movements, but she didn’t turn around. Fleet watched her as she veered into the sitting room, caught the slight stiffness she showed on every second step. A knee, perhaps? A hip? Another reminder of time’s false promise. It didn’t heal. Not always. Often it simply found new ways of inflicting hurt.
Fleet closed the door, shoving it in the end with his shoulder, and found himself alone in the hallway of his childhood home. For a moment nothing seemed real. How often he’d dreamed of this place. When he had nightmares, which was frequently, this house was invariably the setting. Which on the face of it made no sense. Fleet’s childhood here had been safe, secure, dull—right up until the day it hadn’t been. And at that point Fleet had been weeks away from moving out forever. The house, as a setting, had barely featured. Then again, after what had happened, everything about Fleet’s upbringing had become tainted. He didn’t believe in counseling, therapy, all that sitting around excavating old bones, but even he would have agreed that the house had become a symbol. On the one hand, it was a cradle. On the other, a coffin.
He found his mother standing by the fireplace, her back to the doorway and her fingers holding the crucifix that had always hung around her neck. When she looked at him it was via the reflection in the mirror on the chimney breast.
Fleet noticed the pictures on the mantel. They were all of him. Every one of them. As a newborn, as a toddler, as a boy, as a teenager. At the oldest he would have been about fifteen.
His mother saw him looking. “My son,” she said, as though introducing the image to a stranger. She turned, and pulled back her shoulders.
They were all of him. Every one of the pictures was of him. There was not a single photograph of his sister, Jeannie, not even from when
she’d been a baby. It was as though she’d never existed. Never lived, never laughed—never felt compelled to take her own life.
Fleet felt a surge of anger, and in that moment he was seventeen again, his coat on his back, his bag at the door, his mother standing in exactly the same place she was now, holding her crucifix in exactly the same way. The only difference, then, was that she’d been crying.
Fleet forced himself to take a look around the room, using the opportunity to breathe. What had he expected, after all?
There was nothing that surprised him. The same flowery sofa, the same pale yellow walls. The TV was new—not new; different—but probably only because the last one had finally broken down. Even the potpourri on the windowsill was as he remembered it, and for a second he thought he detected the familiar rosewater smell. But it was a ghost, probably. A phantom. The potpourri, by now, would only have smelled of dust.
“I should go,” said Fleet. “I’m sorry.”
His mother laughed out loud: a single, bitter bark.
“What I mean is, I should never have come,” he explained.
“So why did you?”
He hesitated. She was asking him what he was doing here, at her home, but also why he’d come back at all. Why, when he’d left town, had he not just stayed away for good?
“How did you know it was me?” Fleet said, instead of answering. “Out there. In my car.” He peered over the top of the net curtains, out into the road. “You couldn’t have seen me from here.”
“I saw your car. Nobody round here drives a car like that. Like a businessman’s car or something. And I saw the smoke coming out the window. As if you were deciding.” She shrugged. “As if you couldn’t.”
His mother took her own cue, and pulled a tin from the pocket of her cardigan, gray like her hair. From the tin she extracted a pre-rolled cigarette, like the ones Fleet’s father had smoked before he died. His mother, when Fleet was younger, had always smoked Rothmans. Five a day. One before breakfast, one after dinner, and the others at times of need in between. Unless his mother had changed her habits, Fleet gathered this was one of those times.
She saw him looking at the tin.
“Economizing,” she said. “It’s not a choice.”
Once again Fleet felt a tightening within him, from his toes through his gut into his jaw. It’s not a choice. It was one of his mother’s mottos. A phrase she used to disavow her responsibility. Like the pictures on the mantel. It’s not a choice, she would have said. As though she’d been left with no other option.
She lit her cigarette and put the tin back in her pocket. Her free hand went once again to the symbol around her neck.
“I want you to know,” Fleet said, choosing his words, “that I didn’t come back because of anything apart from Sadie Saunders. I’m doing my job, that’s all. That’s the only reason I’m here.”
“Your job,” his mother answered on her out breath. “You couldn’t have been”—she rolled her smoking hand—“a teacher. A traffic warden if you wanted the uniform.” She sniffed. “Although I suppose it was predictable enough that you’d join the police.”
Fleet ignored her. “Also, I wanted to say . . .” Sorry? But that wasn’t quite true. In fact, it was a long way from true. “I wanted to let you know that I’m aware of what people are saying. I hope . . . I didn’t want you to have to deal with any repercussions, that’s all. Not on my behalf.”
His mother’s face puckered as she smoked. She exhaled, sucked, blew out again.
“I thought you were leaving,” she said.
* * *
* * *
In his car Fleet forced himself to start the engine. If he hadn’t been aware his mother would still be watching, he would have given himself time to calm down. He felt drunk on something, inebriated, to the extent his hands were shaking.
He pulled away too fast, and only realized when it was too late that he hadn’t checked the road behind him. But the movement that had caught his eye was only a car pulling out from the side road opposite, turning in the other direction. Fleet eased his foot from the accelerator, slowing the engine and attempting to slow his heart.
He drove. He wasn’t ready yet to return to the station, but he knew that if he stayed on the roads he would find himself heading out of town, from lack of anywhere else to go as much as anything—and if that happened he had his doubts he’d have the willpower to turn around. So he went to the river, and parked on the rise behind the Overlook. Below him, the search for Sadie Saunders went on.
I’m doing my job, Fleet had told his mother. That’s the only reason I’m here.
It might even have sounded half-convincing, if he hadn’t been standing in his mother’s living room when he’d said it.
So why kid himself? Why test himself? Unless the test was the point. Was that why he’d gone to see her in the first place—to see if his motives when it came to Sadie were really as distorted as people were saying? It was possible, Fleet supposed. Probable. Except now, looking down at the river, he didn’t know whether he’d passed or failed.
Abigail Marshall.
Cora Briggs.
Fareed Hussein.
Mason Payne.
And Luke Saunders, if only they could have asked him.
The truth lay buried in their stories somewhere, Fleet remained convinced. But he was missing something, clearly. How was what happened in the woods linked to Sadie’s disappearance? Was there cause there, or only effect? Or was the truth another shade of gray, a blood-flecked mixture of one and the other?
And if Sadie’s friends had really played no part in her disappearance, why did they continue to behave as though they had something to hide?
One of the divers surfaced and headed toward the riverbank. A second followed close behind. The dive teams had progressed a fair distance since Fleet had seen them that morning, and it wouldn’t be long now before they reached the estuary and the superintendent decided their job was done. Another day, perhaps. Two at the most. And then the search for Sadie would be scaled back, to a fraction of the manpower it had currently. Burton would see to that, Fleet could be sure, because although it was technically still Fleet’s investigation, political and publicity considerations were now uppermost in Burton’s mind—meaning the sand in the timer had begun to gather pace. Fleet didn’t even know how much longer he’d be able to hold off on pressing charges against Mason, nor whether he was justified in wanting to wait.
Perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps his instinct—that Mason’s involvement was, at most, only part of the story—was leading him astray. And perhaps, in terms of the dive teams, it didn’t matter either. Because as Fleet’s eyes swept the final stretch of river, there was one thing he was suddenly sure of. If the divers were still hoping to find Sadie, they were looking in the wrong place.
FASH
I HAD NO idea how much time we’d already wasted. Rounding up the others, all the stuff with Lara by the bridge, not to mention the detour we took after that to make sure she didn’t see where we were heading. By the time we made it into the woods, it was already gone lunchtime, and it was only when we started to think about what we were going to eat that we realized we hadn’t brought any proper food with us.
It was my fault, I suppose. Seeing as I was the one to get everyone together. I should have . . . I don’t know. Been more prepared. That’s what the others thought, anyway.
“What do you mean, you didn’t bring anything?” said Cora, when someone suggested we stop for lunch. Abi, I think, even though we’d only just got started. We can’t have been more than half a mile into the forest, although to be fair it definitely felt like farther. We’d lost sight of the outside world a hundred meters in, and the canopy above us was like a ceiling. The forest is mainly beeches and oaks, and the leaves were already turning coppery. Some had even started falling, but the foliage on the branches was still so thick y
ou wouldn’t have known that it was sunny.
“I just . . . I didn’t bring any,” I answered. “I guess I forgot. I brought a blanket,” I added, hoping that might help make up for it.
“Oh, great,” said Cora. “A blanket. Just what we need in this heat. I don’t suppose you brought a scarf, too, did you? And maybe a thick winter coat?”
Cora gets crabby when she’s hungry. She’s crabby most of the time, if I’m honest, but when she hasn’t eaten it goes up a notch. Several notches. And I could tell she was still rattled by what had happened on the bridge. We all were, I think. That feeling we’d had when we’d been laughing after Mason’s house—that sense of togetherness, just like it used to be between us before Sadie went missing—had pretty much evaporated, and it got worse the moment we stepped into the woods. It was the reality of it, I think. The realization that we were actually doing this, and remembering why we were out there in the first place.
And anyway, to be fair to Cora, she had a point. We were all standing there in shorts and T-shirts, apart from Mason in his Doc Martens, and I could feel the sweat beneath the shoulder straps of my rucksack. So maybe a blanket shouldn’t have been first on my list. I just thought—to lie on. That’s all.
“Seriously,” said Abi, “we really haven’t got any food? What are we going to eat?”
“We could kill a bear,” said Mason. “Eat that.”
Which didn’t help with the Abi situation at all. She looked at Mason wide-eyed, and he just stared back at her, flexing his knuckles. I guess those punches he’d landed had started to hurt.
“Shit,” said Cora. “Some search party we turned out to be. We might as well just turn around now.”
Mason shot me this look.
“Wait,” I said. “Have we really not got anything? I think I . . .” I slipped my rucksack off my back and crouched down next to it. “I did! Look.” I pulled a Snickers bar out of the front pocket. I’d bought it a couple of weeks before, after football training, but it had been too hot to eat it at the time.
