Close My Eyes

by Sophie McKenzie

  ‘Right.’ The woman looks like she’s not sure whether to believe us or not. ‘Well, I’m pretty sure he’s not with us today, though his car’s still outside.’

  ‘His car?’ My mind flashes back to the Mercedes parked in our Crouch End driveway.

  ‘Yes.’ The woman looks at me, her face now covered in confusion.

  I freeze, not knowing what to say. Luckily Lorcan is thinking more quickly than I am.

  ‘Thanks so much for your help,’ he says. Then he turns to me. ‘I think you’re going to have to call head office after all. Track Mr Rafferty down.’ He opens the door and shepherds me outside.

  I follow Lorcan across the gravel, my mind spinning with what we’ve just learned. ‘Why does Art have a car here?’

  ‘You mean “Mr Rafferty”?’ Lorcan shakes his head. ‘How are we going to work out which car it is?’

  There are five cars parked in the hotel car park. A Mini, an SUV and three mid-range hatchbacks. None of them is the kind of car I’d imagine Art choosing. I glance over my shoulder. The woman is still watching us from the doorway of the hotel. She’s looking really suspicious now. I stop walking.

  ‘Go back,’ I hiss at Lorcan. ‘Go back and say you need the toilet or something. Give me a moment to look around, see if I can see anything that’ll tell us which car is Art’s.’

  Lorcan doubles back to the hotel. I reach the first car, the Mini. It’s pristine inside, surely too small and too tidy for Art. And I know he disapproves of big, gas-guzzling cars, so I also only give the SUV a cursory glance. Moving away, I check over my shoulder at the hotel entrance. There’s no sign of Lorcan or the landlady.

  The next car has a pink teddy bear sporting a heart-shaped ‘Be My Valentine’ badge on the dashboard. No way. Not unless Art is undergoing some kind of lobotomy every time he comes here.

  I stop outside a Volkswagen and peer in through the window. A juice bottle and a sandwich packet – both empty – litter the floor. I look in the back. There’s a paper bag on the far end of the seat – pale green – with some sort of greeting card peeking out of the top. I go round the other side of the car, and peer in again. The bag has a tiny logo at the bottom. Written in green swirly lettering, it is instantly familiar from the logo on the chambermaid’s scarf: bibo.

  I’m concentrating so hard on this that I jump when my phone rings. I glance at the caller, expecting to see that it’s Art or Hen, but it’s a number I don’t recognize. Distracted, I put the phone to my ear.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Geniver?’ The voice is female and familiar but I can’t place it. ‘Are you all right? I was so worried about you.’

  I blink, still staring at the writing – bibo – on the paper bag.

  ‘Hello?’ I say. ‘Who is this?’

  The person on the other end draws in her breath sharply. ‘It’s Charlotte West,’ she says. ‘You weren’t at class . . . they said you were poorly. I was just calling to see how you are.’

  Charlotte. I’d completely forgotten about her and the Art & Media Institute. They both seem like they belong to another life.

  ‘Geniver?’ Charlotte now sounds anxious. ‘Are you okay? Is everything all right with Art?’

  With Art? She’s acting like we’re friends, like she has a right to enquire about my marriage. ‘I’m fine,’ I say, feeling confused and more than a little defensive. ‘Er . . . Charlotte, how did you get my number?’

  A long pause. ‘I was just concerned about you. I know Art is worried too . . .’

  Art again. And she’s totally avoiding my question. My mind flashes back to Charlotte’s appearance on our doorstep, the adoring way she looked at Art and the way Art muttered under his breath when he was speaking to her, angry words I couldn’t properly hear.

  ‘You’ve spoken to my husband?’ I try to keep my voice as even as possible.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Now Charlotte sounds injured, as if I’ve hurt her feelings. ‘I was just trying to be nice. I’m sure Art feels badly that you put your real-life relationship in Rain Heart.’

  ‘What? Charlotte, I already told you. Rain Heart was made up. I—’

  ‘Fine, I was only calling to see how you were.’ Now she sounds really upset. ‘I didn’t realize it wasn’t okay. I’ll see you next week. Bye.’

  ‘Wait—’

  But she’s already rung off. What was she talking about? In Rain Heart the husband has an affair with his business partner’s wife. Art’s business partner is Kyle Benson. What on earth is Charlotte suggesting? That Art is sleeping with Kyle’s wife, Vicky? It’s ludicrous. How would Charlotte know anyway? And how on earth did she get my phone number?

  I look up. Lorcan is striding towards me across the gravel.

  ‘Was that Art?’ he says.

  I shake my head. ‘It was this weird woman from one of the classes I teach. She’s says she knows Art’s worried about me, that I’ve written about a real affair in a book . . . I don’t know. I don’t understand why she thinks she knows anything about us . . . or how she got hold of my mobile number.’

  I look down at Charlotte’s phone number. Now I’m studying it, it strikes me that there’s something vaguely familiar about it . . . about those last three digits:

  ‘D’you think she’s somehow involved?’ Lorcan asks.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I’m still staring at the numbers. Where did I see those before? I think back to the way Charlotte gushed over my book, and how she copied my haircut and my handbag, even my blue hat.

  ‘I thought she was a bit odd, but now . . .’ As I speak, it hits me. I fish my phone out of my bag to make sure. Flick through the dialled numbers. There. I knew I recognized it.

  ‘Look!’ I say. ‘Charlotte West is the person who’s been calling Art. Twelve times on one day. And that’s just what I saw on his phone.’

  ‘You looked at his phone?’

  ‘I had to.’ I gasp, another realization occurring. ‘Oh, Lorcan, there’s something else. Charlotte lives in the West Country. I don’t know where exactly, but it can’t be that far from here.’

  ‘You think she could be involved with Art?’ Lorcan says.

  ‘Yes. She came to our house the other day and he was angry with her. I heard him whispering. Why would he do that if there wasn’t something going on between them?’

  Lorcan wrinkles his nose. ‘It sounds a bit weird, though. Why would she come to your writing class if she’s already involved with Art? I mean, it’s asking for trouble, isn’t it?’

  I shrug. I don’t have any answers but there are surely possibilities. Sandrine might look more like the kind of woman Art would sleep with, but Charlotte is obviously interested and she lives nearby.

  ‘Art’s been lying to me for eight years over Beth.’ The words are hard to say, but I have to face them. ‘I’d say after that, anything’s possible.’

  I take a breath, looking around the car park. Lorcan follows my gaze.

  ‘Any idea which car Art might have used?’ he asks.

  I nod, pointing to the paper bag inside the Volkswagen. ‘See that?’ I tell Lorcan about the identical bibo logo I saw on the chambermaid’s scarf. ‘She said Art gave that scarf to her to keep her quiet,’ I explain. ‘And here’s a bag using the same design. This must be his car.’

  Lorcan glances into the Volkswagen. ‘But what’s it doing here? The woman who runs this place made it obvious that Art pays them to leave the car here most of the time. Why here, as Mr Rafferty, when he’s already driven another car to a hotel just up the road, as himself?’

  We look at each other. I can see the same light dawning in Lorcan’s eyes that now flares in my own mind.

  ‘This is where he switches over,’ I say. ‘From one identity to another. He has a separate name and a separate car . . .’

  Lorcan nods. ‘Because a second identity makes it harder to track him down.’ He pauses. ‘But why? Where does he go in this car?’

  We look inside the Volkswagen again. The sandwich packet and dri
nk are from M&S – and therefore could have been bought anywhere around the country. My eyes fix on the bibo logo. ‘Let’s see what we can find out about that,’ I say.

  ‘Good idea.’ Lorcan looks up as a few fat drops of rain start to fall.

  We huddle under a tree in the car park and Google bibo on my phone.

  I click on the first link and stare at the screen.

  ‘It’s just a gift shop,’ Lorcan says.

  The bibo logo is at the top of a web page that’s basically a brochure for a shop. There’s an olde-worlde fascia, with the name Bitsy and Bobs written across it in an ornate flourish. The page is mostly made up of pictures of handmade vases, colourful notebooks and silk scarves like the one the chambermaid was wearing. There’s also a fan-shaped display of greetings cards. I scan the few lines of text, picking out the main words: ‘stationery . . . delightful items for the home . . . highest quality . . . gifts . . .’

  ‘Where’s the shop based?’

  Lorcan scrolls down the page. The contact address is given as Shepton Longchamp in Somerset.

  ‘It sounds tiny,’I say.

  ‘Could there be any business connection between this Bitsy and Bobs place and Art’s company?’ Lorcan asks.

  ‘I don’t see how, it sells birthday cards and felt-tip pens.’ I sigh. ‘It’s probably just somewhere that Art has bought stuff from. Though I can’t imagine why he would want to shop there. The scarf is pretty, for sure, but it’s not his kind of place at all.’

  The rain falls more heavily around us and I huddle closer to Lorcan under the trees.

  ‘Wanna check it out anyway?’ he asks.

  ‘You mean go to Somerset?’

  He nods. ‘Why not? We’re halfway there already. And we don’t have anything else to go on.’

  I look up at Lorcan’s determined face. I still can’t be sure if I can trust him, though my instincts tell me he is sincere in wanting to help. But what choice do I have? Art won’t give me the answers I need, but he has left a trail. And if I follow it, it will surely, in the end, bring me to Beth.

  Either way, I can’t turn back now.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It’s going to take about an hour and a half to reach Shepton Longchamp. I call Bernard and explain what we’ve discovered and what we’re doing now. Like me, he has never heard of the Bitsy and Bobs shop. He reports that Art has been in his office all morning and that he’s going to keep trailing him. He sounds exhausted.

  As the countryside flashes past outside, I decide that if today’s journey doesn’t lead directly to Beth, then I will simply increase the ways in which I look for her. Bernard is doing his best, but he can’t watch Art twenty-four hours a day. I will hire a private investigator to follow Art when he next poses as “Mr Rafferty” and I will hire another to access and trawl through birth and adoption records from eight years ago. It’s surely impossible to hide a child completely. And I refuse to believe anyone would have wanted to harm Beth. If money changed hands, then her life held value for someone. I just need to find out who . . . and what they did with her.

  As we drive, Art calls again. I don’t answer. From the look of the call log, he seems to be trying my number on the hour, every hour. I turn my mobile off.

  Lorcan and I spend most of the journey discussing how best to approach the owner of Bitsy and Bobs. I’m all for asking directly if they recognize Art. Lorcan thinks we should take a more circuitous approach, pretending that we’re looking to match an item a friend bought the other day, and simply showing a photo of Art as a memory jogger.

  ‘We need a reason to show his picture without them getting suspicious. That way they’re more likely to fall into the trap of admitting they’ve seen him,’ Lorcan explains. ‘If we’re convincing enough they won’t suspect we have an ulterior motive. The worst that can happen is they say no. If they’re innocent of everything Art’s done, they won’t even realize we’ve been lying.’

  ‘So you’re suggesting we take advantage of them?’

  I mean my tone to be lightly sarcastic but, thanks to how stressed I feel, my words sound heavy and accusatory. I glance sideways at Lorcan. He’s concentrating on the turning up ahead.

  We’re both silent for a few, long seconds. Then Lorcan clears his throat.

  ‘I can understand if you think I’ve been taking advantage of you, but—’

  My face burns.

  ‘Listen, Gen. I want to be with you,’ Lorcan says in a low voice. ‘Here. Now.’

  My mind flashes back to the conversation we had last night. As with everything with Lorcan, it felt both strange – and completely natural.

  ‘I know you’re in the middle of this terrible situation but . . . we need to see about us . . . where it goes, don’t we?’

  I gaze out of the window. We’re speeding along the motorway. It’s still grey and gloomy outside.

  ‘I’m married,’ I say.

  ‘To a man who stole your baby . . . who has been lying to you for years.’

  ‘We don’t know exactly—’

  ‘Were you happy before?’ Lorcan cuts in, his voice calm but insistent. ‘Tell me you were happy with Art before you found out Beth might be alive, and I’ll back off.’

  I lean against the cold window beside me. Truth is, I haven’t been properly happy with Art for a long time. We worked once, when we were younger and Art shared his dreams for his business with me, and when I was writing. But after Beth died, Art’s focus turned away from me and when I tried to tell him how much I was hurting he couldn’t deal with my pain.

  I glance over at Lorcan. He’s still driving, his face impassive. In all our years together Art has never really understood me. Lorcan, I realize, gets me without trying. He looks at me and smiles and my stomach does a somersault of the kind it hasn’t experienced in a long time.

  ‘I guess . . .’ My voice is a whisper. ‘I guess I want to know where this goes too.’

  Half an hour out of Andover we end up in a traffic jam on the A344. As we crawl along, Stonehenge comes into view. Lorcan nudges me with his elbow.

  ‘Didn’t you say your dad brought you here when you were a kid?’

  ‘That’s right.’ My mind slides over the memory. I haven’t thought about it in years, but I remember clearly that I was little – maybe five or six. It was a summer evening and stickily hot and Dad got it into his head that we should have an adventure. Just him and me. I can remember Mum pleading with him not to take me out in the car and the thrill of excitement when Dad whisked me out of the house and bundled me up in the back of our Ford Cortina with a can of Tizer and a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps.

  Lorcan pulls off the main road. I glance over, shaken from my reverie.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Bathroom break.’ He indicates the Stonehenge Visitor Centre up ahead.

  We park and Lorcan disappears inside. I gaze over at the stones themselves. You can’t get close to them anymore except on private tours. They’ve been sealed off from the general public for a long time – supposedly inaccessible even back in the late seventies when Dad brought me here. Not that that stopped him. The long-dormant memory surges up: in the dark we stumbled across the field and over the fence. It was spookily silent, but I wasn’t scared. I had my dad’s hand in mine, and so what if he fell over three times on the way to the stones? He always got up again. I gasp, suddenly realizing how drunk he must have been. No wonder Mum begged him not to take me. I look out towards the stone pillars. I remember Dad and I reaching the first pillar. Dad leaned against the stone, then beckoned me over. I can still see his long fringe falling over his eyes and the fierce gleam of his expression as he spoke solemnly into the night.

  ‘This circle of stones was brought here by magic, Queenie, all the way from Ireland.’ He spread his palms against the pillar, swaying a little as he did so. I copied him, feeling the cool roughness under my fingers. He closed his eyes. I followed his lead again. And then he sighed. ‘These stones heal the sick, Queenie.’


  I opened one eye and glanced up at him. ‘Are you sick, Daddy?’

  He laughed. I can remember thinking there was something wrong with his laugh, like he had something bitter in his mouth. He didn’t answer.

  I glance once more at Stonehenge then turn away. All my life, whenever I’ve remembered that time with my dad, I’ve remembered it as a special memory, something he did for me. It’s only now that I realize that what I had seen as adventure was, for him, something entirely more desperate. What was he looking for? Salvation? Redemption? Whatever it was, I wasn’t with him because he wanted to give me something. He was drunk and just thinking of his own pain. And my only role was as his witness.

  ‘Gen?’ Lorcan’s voice rouses me again. He’s walking towards me from the visitor centre. ‘Ready to keep going?’

  Shepton Longchamp is a large village, but still very much a village. It’s just gone 3 p.m. as we drive along the main road, taking in the few shops – a grocer and a newsagent and a chemist – plus a small pub, the Dog & Duck, a picturesque cliché of a West Country inn, complete with ivy up the walls and flower baskets hanging from iron hooks.

  ‘So where’s Bitsy and Bobs?’ Lorcan asks, pulling over.

  I consult my phone. ‘It should definitely be on this road; maybe we passed it already.’

  It’s as we’re driving on, looking for a place where Lorcan can turn the car around, that we find the shop. It would be easy to miss, sandwiched between a rather prim-looking boutique and yet another pub.

  From the outside, Bitsy and Bobs looks like any other upmarket gift shop. The window display is different from the one in the shiny picture on the website, but just as expensive-looking. It includes hand made gift cards stuck with glitter and feathers, a row of scarves similar to the one Art gave the chambermaid at the hotel, plus a selection of children’s colouring sets and some locally produced pottery, all set against a backdrop of chintzy wrapping paper.

  The name of the shop is written in ornate swirls above the window. It’s all terribly chi-chi.

  ‘Art would never voluntarily come in here,’ I say as we approach the door.