Loose Ends

by Susan Moody

  She didn’t even have Kate’s address, and although she knew that people – private detectives and the like – were able to find addresses from numbers, she didn’t think that happened any more for normal citizens like herself, what with security and anti-terrorist laws and the like. Besides which, for once being less than efficient, she had mislaid the number Kate had given her.

  When there was nothing from Kate on Tuesday, she went down to the police station. ‘I want to report a missing person,’ she said.

  ‘And who would that be?’ The woman behind the counter had eyes that were less than engaged, as though she’d seen enough of the world’s depravity to know that its denizens did not deserve much benevolence.

  ‘Her name’s Kate Fullerton.’

  ‘Address?’

  Not knowing the address of Kate’s brother, she gave her own. ‘She’s my flatmate,’ she explained.

  ‘And when did you last see her?’ The police officer took her through all the relevant details, including some which she did not seem to consider relevant at all but which Janine insisted she incorporate, such as her absolute conviction that someone like Kate would never let other people down, unless she was constrained in some way.

  ‘Vengeful ex-boyfriend?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Has she recently ended a relationship with someone who might feel he wanted to get back at her?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. At least . . .’ Janine outlined the possible stalker, though she knew so few details that the officer wrote only the single word ‘stalker’, followed by an exclamation mark.

  ‘Any clothes missing, any suitcases gone, did she have her handbag with her, her passport?’

  ‘What? Passport, no, she didn’t have her passport with her, I’m sure, why would she? We went out to have something to eat and then she went back to her home for her last night; she was moving in with me the next day—’

  ‘So you weren’t so much flatmates as about-to-be flatmates?’

  ‘I suppose you could put it like that.’

  ‘And you’ve no idea where she was living with her brother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So she might still be in the house?’

  ‘She could be.’ Janine cursed herself for her complete ignorance of Kate’s details, due to what she had seen as her own delicacy in not asking personal questions until Kate was ready to volunteer them, which in retrospect looked more like indifference than discretion. Now she saw Kate lying at the bottom of a staircase, blood seeping on to geometric tiles of Edwardian red, blue and beige, one leg twisted beneath her at an unnatural angle, or slumped across a bed or—

  ‘Seems odd that you don’t seem to know anything about this woman, even though you were planning to share a flat together.’

  ‘Maybe it does . . . but I knew she was OK, she was a nice person, a good person, someone who wouldn’t let me down.’

  ‘What about paperwork?’

  ‘She was planning to bring all her personal papers with her when she arrived the next day. There’s nothing among her things in the flat, I’ve already had a good look.’

  ‘What about papers to do with her employment?’

  ‘We hadn’t got round to it yet, not properly, and for the things, the forms, she had to fill out, she used our – my – address. And she wouldn’t be paying tax just yet, so we just . . .’ She shrugged. ‘Just let it go.’ Oh God, if only she’d been more efficient, more on the ball.

  ‘See, the thing is, if we knew her address, her old address, we could go round there, check that she’s OK, hasn’t fallen down the stairs or something, can’t get to the phone and so forth, but with this complete lack of any details, you’ll appreciate that we have just about nothing to go on.’

  ‘Yes,’ Janine said humbly, ‘I do see that.’ She had tried so hard to remember if Kate had given any information at all that might be of use, but couldn’t come up with anything. There was that wine bar, where she used to work: had she ever mentioned the name? She rather thought she had, if she could just recall it.

  ‘Not even a phone number?’

  ‘She gave it to me once but I’m not sure where it is.’

  ‘Have a look for it, dear, and let us know.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’ll do that.’ Janine had already dug deep into the memory banks, but could not think where she might have put Kate’s phone number.

  ‘Look,’ said the officer, her face suddenly changing into that of kindness, of someone who understood Janine’s concerns and felt sorry for her. ‘Keep in touch. If anything comes back to you, let us know immediately, and meanwhile I’ll circulate the description you’ve given me, all right?’

  Jefferson

  Twelve

  Jefferson woke with a sense of excitement he hadn’t felt for years. He lay in his huge custom-built bed (seven foot square and sadly underused; he’d originally bought it for himself and Mary-Anne – Mary-Jane, that is – envisaging weekend mornings with little kids snuggling up while he read them a story, drinking tea and going through the Sunday newspaper, commenting on England’s disastrous loss to the Wallabies in the World Cup, perhaps, or listening to Mary-Jane murmuring about the latest must-have handbag or hand-built country kitchen), debating which would be the best time to show up for his rendezvous – if you could call it that – with Kate Fullerton. He wanted to be early enough to ask her for dinner again that evening, before anyone else could chance upon the scene and invite her, but didn’t want to be too early, in case he looked overly puppy-with-tongue-hanging-out eager.

  In the end, he settled for eleven-thirty, coffee-break time, and strolled in, trying hard to look nonchalant. The agency had that particular smell of warm printed matter and anticipation that he associated with travel, filled as it was with the promise of anything and everything, from palm-fringed lagoons and grinning dolphins to hot-air balloons and snow-filled landscapes dotted with penguins and glaciers, plus small tours designed for ‘discerning customers’ possessed of ‘intellectual curiosity’ which seemed to mean an interest in ‘Classical Civilizations of the Aegean’ or ‘In the Steps of Alexander the Great’. Kate Fullerton was nowhere to be seen so he examined brochures offering him trekking holidays in Kenya, cruises down the Loire, adventure trips to Nepal and Peru, sailings to Iceland with a promise of whales and puffins. Kate did not show up after ten minutes, so she was either taking an extra-long coffee break, or . . . or he didn’t know what. After a while, he approached one of the other women behind the long counter and asked for her.

  ‘Uh, Kate’s not . . . she hasn’t – just a moment, will you, I know Janine will want to talk to you.’ The girl – Fran, according to the little black plastic thingy in front of her – got up and went over to a slightly older woman, presumably Janine, who made ‘just-a-moment’ motions at him. She was dealing with a client – Jefferson eavesdropped avidly – who had always dreamed of white-water canoeing in Colorado and knew that if he didn’t do it now, it would be too late and he never would. Janine was trying to explain that at his age and given the bad knee he’d complained of (‘it’s my arthuritis’), it didn’t seem quite the sport for him since for a start it involved kneeling in a canoe rather than sitting. It took her another ten minutes to persuade Arthur Itis that sadly it was indeed too late and that if he insisted on a really active holiday, he might enjoy a guided cycling holiday in France much more. Jefferson wanted to suggest the naked race through Japan, but perhaps Mr Itis wasn’t into that sort of thing.

  Finally Janine was finished. She held out her hand and Jefferson shook it. ‘I’m Janine; you’re looking for Kate, I understand,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right. We arranged that I’d come in and fix up my holiday to Ecuador – the Galápagos Islands.’

  ‘I see. Well, um . . .’ Janine looked round the room and led him to a table at the rear of the room which was covered in price lists and plastic files. ‘The thing is, Mr . . . um . . .’

  ‘Andrewes.’

  ‘The thing is, Kate seem
s to have gone missing.’

  ‘Missing?’

  ‘She was supposed to move in to my flat on Sunday – we’re going to be sharing – and never showed up, still hasn’t. And she didn’t arrive for work yesterday or today. I know she could be ill, or unexpectedly called away or something, but she’s much too reliable not to have let me know.’

  ‘Have you been to the police?’

  ‘I went in to file a Missing Person report, but they weren’t terribly interested.’ Janine screwed up her face. ‘I feel we ought to be contacting her brother, but I don’t know how since he’s away at a conference in California. Like I said, she could just be sick. And then, I don’t know her that well – maybe she often takes off without letting anyone know where she’s gone, but from what I do know of her, it seems extremely unlikely.’

  Jefferson frowned at his hands, which were clasped on the table. ‘Have you ever heard of someone called Michaels?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Stefan Michaels?’

  ‘It doesn’t ring any bells.’

  ‘Has she ever mentioned a stalker?’

  ‘Yes, she has, a couple of times.’

  ‘Do you have any information on him?’

  ‘None at all. Why? Do you think he could have turned violent, kidnapped her or something?’ Janine’s face paled and for a moment he glimpsed in her eyes everyone’s darkest imaginings: chains, whips, rapes, torture, death.

  ‘Almost certainly not,’ he said, without the slightest authority for saying so. ‘Much more likely she’s . . . uh . . . gone down to London for the day. Or up to Edinburgh, I think she told me she had an uncle up there.’

  From Janine’s expression it was clear that whatever bizarre scenario he could conjure up would be more likely than Kate just taking off without telling her. She shook her head vigorously. ‘Never. Some emergency might have come up, but she’d never not let me know, she’s not like that.’ She bit her lip. ‘Should we go to the police again?’

  He liked that ‘we’, that conjoining of the friends of Kate. ‘Any idea when she might have disappeared – if indeed she has?’

  ‘We went out for dim sum on Saturday, after we’d closed up. I waited with her for her bus, then I went home. She was supposed to move in to my place the next day, Sunday, so she could finish putting her things away and settle in, and then . . . then we were going to have dinner quietly at home and she n-never arrived.’

  ‘So she must have gone missing – if she did – between Saturday night and Sunday night.’ He thought about it. ‘Could she have been in a car accident or something?’

  ‘She hasn’t got a car.’

  Jefferson tried to imagine Kate, whom he didn’t know in any meaningful sense of the word, helping an old lady across the road who turned out to be a white slaver and stabbed her with a syringeful of Rohypnol, or rushing into a burning house to rescue a babe-in-arms, only to succumb to smoke inhalation or licking flames. Was she a helper of old ladies, however suspect? A dasher into blazing buildings? He had no idea and, he suspected, neither did Janine. ‘In case he’s involved, we need to get a handle on this Michaels guy, the stalker,’ he said. ‘Find out where he was late on Saturday.’

  ‘Even if it was something to do with him, we don’t know where he lives, or what he does.’

  ‘True . . .’

  ‘The one thing I’m certain of,’ reiterated Janine, ‘is that she wouldn’t willingly have gone anywhere without letting me know.’

  ‘Which suggests that she might not be a free agent.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ Janine got up and twitched at the cravat thing in her white blouse. ‘I’m going back to the police.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  She frowned. ‘What’s your interest?’

  ‘Um . . . well, we . . .’ Jefferson’s mind soared into fast-forward. ‘We’re getting married,’ he said.

  ‘Who to?’

  He gazed at her with all the conviction he could muster. ‘Each other, of course.’

  ‘She’s never said anything to me about getting married,’ Janine said. ‘She hasn’t even got a boyfriend at the moment.’

  ‘Well, that’s what I meant . . . I’m her new . . . um . . . partner.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re the man who came in on Friday afternoon and invited her out to dinner.’

  In the humiliation stakes, this was right up there with the time Melvin Buonfiglio had kicked in the door of the school bogs, where he was sitting reading Playboy and having a quiet wank; half the school seemed to be crowded outside the door, jeering and laughing, Jefferson Wankscrewes, they called him, until he started handing out detentions like they were pizza parlour flyers. He spread his hands. ‘OK, what can I say? I only met her for the first time last week, but that doesn’t stop me being as concerned as you are.’

  ‘How can you be? You don’t know her.’

  ‘Maybe not know know, but I know her, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘I do know the meaning of “know”, thank you.’

  Jefferson was reprimanded. Now he came to think of it, Janine looked a bit like Buonfiglio: same dark hair and black eyes, currently staring at him with both suspicion and dislike. ‘Look, let’s just go to the police, shall we?’

  The police station was unlike anything Jefferson had seen before, being nothing more than a converted shopfront (he was pretty sure it had been a greengrocer’s back when he was a schoolboy here, riding past in a taxi on his way from the station), with the words THE COP SHOP painted along the fascia-board where it used to say J & F Kenyon, Fruiterers & Greengrocers. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned police stations? THE COP SHOP . . . it sounded as though the police weren’t taking themselves seriously enough, pandering to the lowest common denominator, like the Church of England trying to get all matey and playing pop music on acoustic guitars or using colloquial version of the Lord’s Prayer or the Bible, which seemed to produce no discernible gathering in of the sheep which had gone astray, and merely served to alienate the sheep which for years had been faithful attenders on Sunday.

  A desk sergeant, if that’s what he was, listened to what they had to say, turning a felt-tipped pen between his fingers as though ready to use it whenever it seemed worthwhile, though thus far it hadn’t. Behind him, at a different desk, sat a woman leafing through a buff folder in a way which suggested that she couldn’t give a toss about the contents. What was I thinking, Jefferson wondered, looking back at his idealistic sixteen-year-old self and his wish to join the force. He imagined some poor defrauded widow who’d given away her life’s savings to a cowboy builder assuring her that if she didn’t have immediate and costly renovations done, the roof would fall about her ears any day now, possibly that very night, or some old boy with a tobacco-tinged moustache and trousers stained yellow at the crotch being tormented by yobs on a sink estate, a guy whose car had been stolen and torched, a woman assaulted: none of them worth more than a passing interest. He knew this was the wrong image, that generally the police were caring and efficient people who went about their distasteful enquiries with stern resolve, but judging by the atmosphere in THE COP SHOP, it was hard to believe.

  ‘Sorry.’ The man sat up straighter. ‘Maybe your friend’s just decided to take a day off.’

  ‘She wouldn’t do that,’ Janine insisted. ‘She’s not the kind of person to let people down; it’s totally out of character.’

  ‘It takes all sorts,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘Meaning what, exactly?’ asked Jefferson.

  ‘Meaning, sir, that people don’t always do what you expect them to, that they often surprise you by acting out of character.’

  This was so patently true that neither Jefferson nor Janine could think of a response. ‘If you haven’t heard anything in another couple of days, come back,’ the sergeant said, more kindly.

  ‘It’s already been three days,’ said Janine, ‘and meantime, Mrs Fullerton could be lying dead in a ditch.’

  ‘Then – with all due r
espect – there wouldn’t be a lot we could do for her, would there? Besides, if that were the case, someone would have found her by now. A dog-walker, probably, you wouldn’t believe how many bodies are discovered by people taking the family pet out for a walk.’ He seemed prepared to expand on the theme of dogs and their ability to nose out corpses, but Janine cut in on him.

  ‘She could be in need of help,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t see what we can do.’ The sergeant spread his hands. ‘We’ll keep a look out, mind you . . .’

  ‘What would you be looking out for exactly?’ Jefferson, as a detective manqué, genuinely wanted to know (Bodies? SOS messages chalked on a wall? The word HELP! scrawled on a piece of cardboard and held up to an attic window?) but the man seemed baffled by the question and, in fairness, Jefferson could see why. The information he and Janine were able to provide was minimal, giving the police almost nothing to go on, even if they were interested at this early stage, and he knew that, at least for the moment, the current whereabouts of Kate Fullerton were a lost cause.

  As they got up to leave, Janine asked him if he knew that forty-six per cent of complaints against the police were down to either indifference or rudeness.

  ‘Are you accusing me of—?’

  ‘I’m not accusing you of anything,’ she told him. ‘I’m just saying.’

  Jefferson and Janine walked down Eastgate Street, towards the canal, then turned away from it into the heart of the town. After a few moments, they passed a wine bar full of thirty-somethings, many of whom, eager for the pale early-spring sunshine, had spilled out into the street and were standing with glasses of Chardonnay in their hands, or seated at the three wooden picnic tables with integrated benches which had been behind a hedge, growing in a long black wooden box, somewhat similar to a coffin. He saw two of his colleagues there, chatting up one of the women from Mergers and another from Trading, but didn’t make himself known.