The Girl in the Empty Room

by Neil Randall

  “Yeah, I work down Cherrytrees, the turkey place – just temporary, if the money is bloody good.”

  “Really?” she said. “How much can you earn there?”

  He exaggerated wildly. “Four or five hundred quid, on a flat week. I’m saving up to do some travelling, and I’ve gotta keep my motor on the road, so…”

  “What sort of car do you drive?”

  “Nova, a souped-up job.”

  “You’re not a boy racer, are you?”

  “No, no,” he said, feeling that a boy racer was probably the worst thing he could possibly be – in Jacqueline’s eyes, anyway. “More an enthusiast than anything else. Never catch me lapping ’round town with tunes banging out of the stereo.”

  “Ha! That’s funny.”

  They ended up down the pier, smoking weed, Jacqueline literally rolling one joint after another, telling him all about her life, her kids, an ex-boyfriend who treated her badly, her tattoos, rolling up her sleeves and showing him all these mad cool designs up and down her arms. But most of all, she mentioned people in town he was wary of – proper hard men, drug dealers, the kinds of people who cleared pubs if they ever walked in. But not in a flash, name-dropping type of way, to try and impress him, but in the natural course of the conversation, in the story she was then telling him.

  “Do you know Michael Babb, owns, amongst other things, the food factory up the road?”

  Aaron nodded his head. Babb was the town psycho, something akin to a mafia godfather, a huge man mountain, body-builder, had done time before, attacked some bloke with a machete for looking at his bird wrong down the boozer.

  “My best mate Katie has been going out with him for years now. She keeps trying to end things. But he won’t have it, keeps threatening her, telling her he’ll make her life hell if she ever leaves him. They’ve got two kiddies together, see. Makes me sick, those men who think they can control women like that. Do you know what I mean?” She handed him a joint already smoked down close to the roach. “I think pricks like him should be taught a lesson.”

  It had all been going so well; they’d barely stopped talking from the moment he bought her that first drink. The only remotely off-key thing happened around midnight time, still on the pier, when deciding what to do next.

  “Maybe we could go back to yours,” she said.

  But that was out of the question. There was no way he could sneak a bird up to his bedroom, not with his parents in the next room – those council house walls were paper thin. And besides, his mum was a bit of a prude when it came to those types of thing, even if it was innocent, just a case of bunking down for the night.

  “No, sorry. I sorta live with me parents at the minute. Only temporary. So we -”

  “Sorry!” she snapped at him, went all schizo, like his living arrangements had really pissed her off, had changed everything. “Only temporary? Sounds like your whole life is only fucking temporary.”

  Neither spoke for ages; the gusting wind bashing into the shelter, whistling through the gaps in the cracked plastic windows, the only sounds.

  “Well,” she said, finally, “we could always go back to mine. It’s not very tidy, I’m afraid. Running around after two kids all day can be tough, you know. But I have got a couple of bottles of wine stashed away.”

  Aaron didn’t know what to say. Her outburst, when she’d been so relaxed and easygoing, talkative, friendly and funny before, had really taken him aback.

  “Erm, yeah, okay, if that’s what you want.”

  As they got up she said something like “when has anyone ever cared about what I wanted?” which only made him feel warier, about what he said or did next.

  Things got back to normal once they were sitting around her kitchen table. In relative darkness, a lamp on in the next room, she played a few records he’d never heard of before: Talking Heads, Laura Marling – and they talked about all kinds of different things, about town, about people they both knew, about the trouble down the pubs, the way things were getting out of control, bouncers on the doors, kids glassed every other weekend. One thing he noticed, though, was the way she went at the wine, pouring like half a bottle into one of those big, deep wineglasses, and the way she continued to roll joint after joint, stubbing one out and starting to roll another one straight away. Only she didn’t seem to get particularly drunk or stoned, it didn’t seem to slow her down, affect her in the way he’d seen alcohol and weed affect people in the past. If anything, it just made her more talkative, somehow more coherent.

  “I know this looks really bad,” she said, loading another cigarette paper with weed, “ – me drinking and smoking like this, spunking a shit load of money on a night out, when I’ve got two kids and all the financial responsibilities that go with it, when they need so many things for school – new uniforms, books and stuff – but it’s hard, you know, being a single mum. Everyone just expects me to grin and bear it, to get on with things, like I’ve made my bed and all that. But I’m only twenty-six, for fuck’s sake, and I still want to do a bit of living myself.”

  “I understand,” said Aaron. “I mean, it’s not like you’re some kind of robot, is it? It’s not like you can just carry on, day in, day out, that you don’t need a break or a good night out every now and then.”

  “Yeah.” She sprinkled some tobacco onto the weed. “I just wanna be able to do things from time to time, you know: go to gigs, festivals, buy clothes, music. I don’t wanna be stuck in the house all day staring at the walls.” She lit the joint with a cheap plastic lighter.

  By this point, Aaron was feeling completely mashed-up – even though he smoked weed most weekends, he’d never gone at it like this before.

  Slowly turning the joint around in her fingers, she blew on the end so it glowed all fierce and orange in the darkness.

  “Shall we go to my bedroom? It’s a bit more comfortable up there.”

  Chapter Four

  “At this early stage, madam,” said a uniformed police officer, a lanky man with a clipped moustache, “we’re treating this purely as a case of breaking and entering, criminal damage, a possible burglary.”

  “But what about my daughter?” cried Mrs Brooke. “She didn’t pick her children up from school, her phone’s going straight through to voice mail, no-one has seen or heard from her since this morning.” She paused to catch her breath. “And what about the threatening message on the wall upstairs? Surely that shows somebody has got it in for Jacqueline.”

  “I appreciate your concerns, but as you can see” – he gestured to the forensic team dusting for fingerprints – “we’re going over the place with a fine tooth-comb. And if your daughter hasn’t got in touch with you in the next twenty-four hours we’ll put out an official missing person’s report, alert the local press, things like that.”

  “But – But it could be too late by then!”

  Henry Franklin, Jacqueline’s father, a still handsome, bespectacled man in his early fifties, rushed in through the front door.

  “Jane, what on earth has happened?”

  “You got my message then?” said Mrs Brooke, her concern for her daughter overriding the almost reflex need to snipe at ex-husband in some way.

  “Yes. I got here as soon as I could. What’s happened?”

  In chronological order, Jane relayed the details – the phone call from the school, how she picked up the children, and how she found the house like this.

  “And you say someone has written a message on the bedroom wall?”

  “Yes – see how you like it – or words to that effect.”

  “What?” Henry looked around the room, as if only then taking in the scene of devastation. “Look at this mess, everything’s completely ruined. Why would someone do this? Is she in financial trouble again? The other day, she did text asking for a loan, but I told her I didn’t want to go down that old road again.”

  “I just don’t know. After she got that court order that froze her debts for twelve months, I presumed things weren’t su
ch a struggle now.”

  “Not to sound patronizing, but I take it you’ve phoned around, contacting her friends, that type of thing.”

  “Of course,” Jane replied. “But no-one has heard from her. And I know she’s had her moments, has been a bit unreliable, but she’d never just abandon the twins like this. Never!”

  They exchanged a worried glance, one which made them feel a little ashamed, because both knew they were thinking the exact same thing – the worst.

  “And what are we going to do about the twins?” asked Henry.

  “Well, I thought they may as well stay at mine tonight. I’ll make sure they get off to school in the morning.”

  “What about Ryan, though? He is their father, after all. Shouldn’t we be consulting him first, before we come to any big decision?”

  “Let’s leave it for tonight, eh? You know how his mother feels about Jacqueline. You know what a hard time she always gives her. If she were to hear about her not picking the children up from school again, it’ll only give her more ammunition. And, with any luck, she’ll turn up sometime tonight.”

  “Mrs Brooke.” Jacqueline’s friend Katie poked her head around the open door.

  Jane swung round.

  “Oh, hello, Katie.” She walked across the room, being careful to avoid the forensic team still dusting for fingerprints. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I had an appointment, my phone was off.” She, like Henry before her, looked around the room. “What’s happened? Has there been a break-in or something?”

  Jane told her about everything that had happened.

  “Shit! And you can’t get hold of her?”

  “No. Her phone goes straight to voice mail.” Jane sighed and shook her head. “When did you last see her?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. I called round as usual, like I do most weekdays. We had a chat and a cup of tea.”

  “And she didn’t seem upset or worried about anything?”

  “No, not really. She was her old self, you know, she moaned a bit, about this and that, but didn’t act no different, like she had anything on her mind.”

  “And that’s the last you heard from her?”

  “No. We exchanged a couple of texts, and later, about ten-ish, I think, messaged each other on Facebook.”

  Jane nodded a few times, taking everything in.

  “And was she seeing anyone at the moment? A new boyfriend? As you probably know, she never tells me anything.”

  “No-one special,” said Katie. “I think, over the last week or two, she’d met a few lads for drinks, through a dating website, but no-one she really hit it off with, no-one she was planning on seeing again.”

  The policeman who originally spoke to Mrs Brooke walked over.

  “This is Katie, one of my daughter’s closest friends. They’ve got children of a similar age; they see each other almost every day.”

  “I see,” said the policeman. “And when was the last – ?”

  “We’ve just been through all of that,” Jane snapped at him. “Like us, she hasn’t heard from Jacqueline today. They spoke last night but she didn’t indicate that anything was troubling her.”

  The policeman shifted uneasily, clearly stung by Mrs Brooke’s tone.

  He turned to Katie. “Is there anyone you know who might have a grudge against your friend, anyone she might’ve fallen out with recently, anyone who might’ve wanted to get back at her, for whatever reason?”

  “Erm, well” – she hesitated and bit into her bottom lip – “there was this one lad. Something had happened between him and Jacque, not quite sure what, but I think she knocked him back, and he wasn’t very happy about it. Aaron’s his name.”

  “Aaron,” said the policeman, taking out a notebook. “Local lad, is he?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Jacque told me he worked at the turkey farm.”

  “Turkey farm.” The policeman jotted everything down. “Okay. Thank you for that. We’ll bear it in mind, should Miss Franklin not return home this evening.”

  Henry fell in beside the two women.

  “Look, officer,” he said, very much in professional mode, that of an experienced barrister addressing a courtroom. “I really think you should be putting out a search for her. I know people should be missing for x number of hours before you consider them an official missing person, but the situation here is so unusual, surely you could make an exception. If something was to go wrong, if her welfare was endangered, and you were seen not to have acted, it could have serious repercussions.”

  “Well I, erm…suppose I could contact main headquarters, speak to one of my superiors, just to see what –”

  “Cooper,” said one of the forensic team, getting to his feet.

  The policeman turned around.

  “What is it?”

  “You’re not going to believe this.” He made a sweeping gesture, taking in the whole room. “It’s not really possible. But the place has been wiped clean. We’ve not found one single solitary fingerprint.”

  Chapter Five

  When Katie returned home she found the farmhouse lit up; the sensory-activated spotlights on the roof blazing out. Next to Michael’s SUV was a fancy car, maybe a Jaguar or Mercedes – she’d never been too good at telling cars apart. Despite the cold, Michael stood on the doorstep in just a muscle top and shorts, chatting to a skinny, balding, middle-aged man in a dark suit and tie.

  “Hello, babe,” said Michael, after she’d parked up and got out of the car. “This is Mr Wilmot, or Councillor Wilmot I should probably say.” The two men exchanged wide, exaggerated smiles. “This is my partner Katie.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Wilmot, politely shaking Katie’s hand. “Lovely place you’ve got here.”

  “Yeah, it is. Thanks.”

  “We were just talking a little business.” Michael folded his arms across his chest, the word Katie tattooed in a heart shape on his forearm expanding, as if specifically for her notice. “Stuff about the factory.”

  Again the two men shared a smile, like a private joke, maybe at her expense, which made Katie feel paranoid and uncomfortable – pretty much a constant emotional state whenever around Michael these days.

  “Right. I better get off,” said Wilmot, “– my good lady is no doubt preparing a fine meal.” He chuckled. “See you soon, Michael. Remember everything we discussed. If we stick to our original agreement regarding the, erm…merchandise, everyone’s happy. I can see no problems, no red tape.”

  ***

  “What was all that about?” asked Katie, even though she wasn’t particularly interested –Michael had so many business ventures these days, she couldn’t keep up.

  “Never you mind.” He opened the fridge and took out a bottle of Budweiser. “Where you been, anyway?” He unscrewed the cap, took a swig, and put the bottle on the side. “Thought you said you were just popping to the supermarket.”

  “I was, but then I got a –” Michael bounded across the kitchen, grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back.

  “Where the fuck were you!” he yelled right into her face. “Tell me!”

  “I – please, please. Let go. You’re hurting me.”

  He released his grip and pushed her away.

  “Well?”

  “I – I got a text from Jacqueline’s mum. Apparently, she didn’t pick the twins up from school again, her house has been proper trashed, everything smashed up, ruined, and no one has heard from her since yesterday.”

  As if nothing had happened, as if he hadn’t just leapt across the kitchen and accosted her, Michael took a couple more swigs of beer.

  “Be bloody drugs, won’t it? You know what she’s like, owes money left, right and centre, nothing she wouldn’t do to get off her tits, like a bloody crack whore. I heard she gave a couple of blokes head at that party the other week for a line of coke.”

  “That’s bullshit, Mike,” she said with a force that surprised herself – she knew how fu
tile it was to argue with him, “– and you know it is.”

  But Katie remembered the night in question, the house party, a mate of Michael’s fortieth birthday, a really good night, with decks set up in the front room, a proper DJ, disco lights, a barbeque pit outside with a full pig roasting on it, loads of booze, loads of old friends, a nice relaxed vibe, no trouble or hassles, despite Michael, who always seemed intent on making a scene, of ruining things, not just for her, but anyone within a ten-mile radius. With the kids at her mum’s overnight, Katie could have a few drinks, a bit of a smoke, a line or two of coke (when sure Michael was well out of the way), to properly let her hair down. About midnight time, she bumped into Jacqueline at the bottom of the stairs, alone, her hair all a-tangle, trying to light a joint with an old Zippo lighter which had clearly run out of fluid. Amused, finding her friend’s clumsy, intoxicated struggle incredibly funny, Katie took a lighter out of her handbag and dangled it under Jacqueline’s nose.

  “Here, Jacque. Try this.”

  Giving a start, she looked up, her eyes, no more than puffy red slits in her pale, sweaty face.

  “Oh, right,” she slurred, swayed, and simply dropped the Zippo lighter to the floor, discarding it, despite the fact it was a tasteful, expensive thing. It was then Katie noticed the bloody, charred mark on her thumb, where she must’ve been flicking the lighter, repeatedly. “Cheers.”

  “Jesus, Jacque.” Katie handed her the lighter. “You better run your thumb under the cold tap or something. It might get infected.”

  Jacqueline shrugged her shoulders, and lit the joint, taking in a deep lungful of smoke.

  “I’m sure I’ll live.” She exhaled out of the side of her mouth. “And say, could I –” the pounding bass line from the front room swallowed what she said next.

  “You what?” asked Katie.

  Jacqueline leaned closer. “I hate to ask, only I’ve had a bit of coke and a few pills tonight, and I really wanna keep on the up, but I’m skint now. Couldn’t lend us twenty quid until my next payment goes into the bank, could you?”