(1998) Denial

by Peter James

  He wanted her to touch it again, wanted desperately that tight sensation that drilled through him when she held it. She reached forward, soaped her hands and held it again now, and it was harder than ever and he loved that feeling of the soapy hands playing up and down it.

  Now she handed him the Camay. He gripped the pink bar in his small hand. ‘Mummy needs washing now, darling,’ she said.

  He leaned forward, rubbed the bar in slow circles around her navel, really slow, following it in equally slow, circular motions with the flat of his hand, up and over her breasts, working around her nipples, then back down over the soft flesh of her stomach.

  She arched back, raising herself a little, and her blonde bush of hair, darkened almost to brunette from being wet, rose up through the froth. He pressed the soap into it, slowly down through it, and under the front, touching her velvety Secret Place now. The Secret Place that only he knew about.

  And had sworn he would never tell anyone about. Ever.

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  ‘You look terrible, Mike.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘No, I mean it, you look terrible. Are you ill?’

  You’re in my office, when I don’t want you to be in my office, you’re making me feel ill. Piss off, leave me alone, get out of my face.

  That was what Michael thought when his colleague, Paul Straddley, walked into his office just as he was dialling Lulu, but he didn’t say that. He replaced the receiver and said, ‘I’m tired, that’s all.’

  Straddley peered at him more closely. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m a fucking doctor!’ Michael snapped.

  His diminutive, boffiny colleague, in an even more depressing suit than usual, was startled by the outburst but held his ground. ‘I’m a doctor too, Michael.’ His voice had more authority than his appearance.

  There was a brief moment of stand-off. Paul looked at him reproachfully, then he said, ‘Michael, you were going to get back to me on Thursday. I need to talk to you about this patient of mine with his fear of vomiting.’ When he saw Michael’s blank expression, he reminded him, ‘I told you about him – he’s scared of food, can’t eat anything that hasn’t been liquidised, scared he’s going to get tiny lumps stuck in his gullet. This is your field.’

  ‘Right,’ Michael said, remembering vaguely.

  ‘Can you do lunch tomorrow?’

  ‘Let me check my diary.’

  Michael sat down at his computer and called up his Claris Office Manager diary. He hadn’t looked at it for some days. His radio show tomorrow evening – Christ, he wasn’t in any mood for that, although he was hoping to persuade the station to put out an announcement about Amanda – and on Saturday he was reminded, with shock, that he was taking part in a charity pro-am golf tournament, for the mental health charity, SANE.

  He’d been talked into this months back by his best friend, Nick Sandford, with whom he had roomed at medical college for four years. They had originally been at prep school together, back in the late sixties, where they had hated each other, and at the age of twelve, in the school boxing finals, Michael had knocked him out, much to the horror of the teachers and parents.

  But when they had met by chance in their first term at King’s, there was an instant bond between them. The years of maturing at their separate public schools had changed them both. Neither could remember clearly why they had so disliked the other. Michael thought it was probably because Nick had been a bully. Nick thought it was because Michael had irritated him by being the best sportsman in the school. From out of the hazy mists of the past, a brilliantly strong friendship now burned.

  After qualifying as a doctor, Nick had worked for a brief spell as a medical information officer for the pharmaceutical giant Bendix Schere and had then started his own generic-drug manufacturing company. He was now a squillionaire. Both still shared a love of fast motorbikes – or had, until Michael had lost all interest in driving after Katy’s death. But they still played golf together.

  Nick and his wife, Sarah, whom Michael liked, had been a great strength to him in the past three years since Katy’s death.

  Lunch tomorrow was clear. Except that he was reluctant to commit any time at the moment: he had intended to cancel all his appointments for tomorrow to concentrate on Amanda.

  Straddley was studying his face with a distinctly worried look. ‘What is it, Michael?’

  ‘Lunch tomorrow. One o’clock – meet you down in the restaurant?’ Michael said, buoyantly.

  ‘Fine.’

  It was the fastest way Michael could think of to get the man out of his office. And he could always blow out the lunch date in the morning. He desperately wanted to call Lulu before his four-fifteen patient arrived.

  As Straddley closed the door behind him, Michael picked up the phone again and dialled Lulu. She was sounding weary and increasingly edgy – all the confident Sloany punch had gone from her voice. Michael had already recounted to her his frustrating meeting with DC Roebuck on his mobile phone while driving back from Hampstead an hour earlier.

  ‘Nothing – you?’ she said. These were almost always her first words now when she heard his voice.

  They hadn’t met, but Michael had an image in his mind of how she looked. Neat, he thought, but large and horsy, judging from her voice, rather conservative, velvet headband, navy two-piece, twinset and pearls. ‘No. Look, could you do something? Could you fax me or e-mail me a list of Amanda’s immediate family, names, addresses and phone numbers, and all her friends, including Brian Trussler?’

  She said she would do it right away.

  The name Brian Trussler was lodged darkly in his mind. He couldn’t forget Amanda’s look of fear when she had seen the car in the darkness across the street.

  Brian Trussler.

  Is she with you, Brian Trussler? If you’ve harmed her, Brian Trussler, I swear to God I’ll rip your head off.

  Then he hung up, and stared thoughtfully at his computer screen. Thelma still hadn’t buzzed to say his patient was here. He logged onto the web, opened Alta Vista and typed the search request, ‘missing persons’.

  It was a long shot, but that didn’t matter, he was determined to try everything.

  A few seconds later a message appeared on the screen announcing there were 257,891 matches to his request. The first ten were for missing individuals in the United States.

  He cancelled the request and made it more specific: ‘missing persons – United Kingdom’.

  His door opened again. Paul Straddley came into his office once more. ‘Michael, you’re in some kind of trouble – you must be, looking the way you do. I can’t believe you can concentrate properly on your work. Do you want to talk about it? What is it? I am your colleague, you can talk to me.’

  Michael sighed. Why not tell him? ‘Someone – a friend – has gone missing, Paul. I’m worried about her, that’s why I’m a bit chewed up. That’s all.’

  Paul nodded, looked a little less concerned, but not much. ‘National Missing Persons Helpline – they’re the people. Tried them?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of them.’

  ‘Worth a shot.’

  Straddley retreated once more as Thelma buzzed to tell Michael his patient had arrived.

  Michael asked her to cancel his entire list for tomorrow.

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  Shivering, Amanda lay curled up on the mattress, which she had dragged as far away in the darkness as she could get from the –

  Things.

  Dead things. Not dead people, not corpses, not cadavers, no, please not.

  Who were they?

  She had not prayed since the second year at Brighton and Hove High. She’d had problems believing in a God who never answered her prayers. Wednesday, 24 November 1979, the date she had got the results of her maths test and learned she had failed.

  It was no big deal of a test; God could easily have given her good marks. Instead he had chosen to ignore her prayer the week before. So she had never
prayed again. Until now.

  Pressing the sides of her hands together, she sank her face into the palms, closed her eyes, even in this absolute darkness, and whispered, ‘Please, God, tell me this is just a bad dream. Give me something, please, just something to help me.’

  Parched throat. Her heart aching to understand where she was, and why she was here.

  She could smell her urine through the reek of formalin. Felt the raw, stinging dryness in her throat from the chemical. Her thirst was terrible, so bad she almost wanted to press her tongue to the floor. People drink their own urine. You can survive on it for days. I was stupid, I wasted it.

  She thought of Michael, his strong arms holding her, his strong brain, his strong, manly smells, how good and safe she had felt with him.

  Now I’ve found you, Michael, don’t tell me I’ve lost you already. Please don’t tell me I’m going to die down here without ever seeing you again.

  Brian Trussler’s company had made a documentary series about survivors. They had interviewed people who had survived the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, two girls who had escaped from a plane that went down in the Indian Ocean, and others. Always it was the same characteristics. Mental strength. Determination. The will to live. Staying calm and thinking things through.

  Wherever I am, however I came to be in here, if there is an entrance there must be an exit.

  The thought had crossed her mind that she had been in an accident, mistaken for dead, and had been locked in some storage room at a mortuary. But the mattress on the floor kept contradicting that idea.

  All the immediate possibilities had been exhausted and now she was searching for new ones, trying to keep her grip on reality, trying to focus, to make a list, to hold it.

  And trying to ignore a scratching sound she had heard a few minutes ago that might have been a mouse or, worse, a rat.

  She had searched the walls in both chambers for exit routes. She had found ridges in the wall in the chamber with the bodies, which indicated there was a door, but she could find no way of opening it.

  There must be ventilation in here, she realised. Air must come in from somewhere.

  Where?

  She stood, folded the mattress double, her left wrist hurting like hell from where she had fallen on it earlier, jammed the mattress up against the wall, getting good in the dark now, and climbed onto it. This gave her a couple of feet extra height. Balanced precariously, stretching her arms as far up as she was able, she checked every inch of the wall that she could reach, then stepped down, moved the mattress exactly two lengths of her own feet, then repeated the process.

  Thinking for a moment when she stepped down again, she pulled off her T-shirt and dropped it to the ground as a marker, so she would know when she had completed a full circuit of the room.

  It was as she reached the end of the first wall and turned the corner, that her right hand struck something of a completely different texture from the concrete of the wall.

  A metal grille.

  Holding her breath, see placed the palm of her hand flat against it. A cold draught. An air vent!

  Clenching her fist, she made a measuring prong of her forefinger and thumb that she estimated was about two inches wide, and walked them along the base of the grille. Twenty-four inches. Less deep on the vertical, about twenty inches.

  Wide enough to fit through?

  How was the grille fixed to the wall? She worked her fingers around the edge. Found a small raised lump, a quarter of an inch across, no more. A screw.

  Now she moved her hands along, counting. Ten screws.

  Without warning, the mattress sagged. She clawed at the wall, trying desperately to get a purchase. Then, with a yelp, she was plunging through the blackness, torn by the savage forces of gravity, down, headfirst onto the unseen floor, her forehead shattering the concrete silence with a crack as sharp as twisted glass.

  Chapter Sixty

  ‘I’m afraid he’s in a script conference and can’t be disturbed.’

  ‘It’s really very urgent,’ Michael said. ‘I just need a quick word with him.’

  Brian Trussler’s secretary had a cutting voice. ‘Can you tell me what it is about? Perhaps I can help you?’

  Yes, Michael thought, sourly, maybe you can tell me if your boss has kidnapped Amanda Capstick. ‘It’s a private matter. I’d like you to interrupt him and tell him I’m on the line. My name is Dr Tennent.’

  Michael hoped perhaps his name might mean something to her, but from her response, it didn’t. She clearly wasn’t a Daily Mail reader or a Talk Radio listener.

  ‘Perhaps I could get him to call you back after the meeting, but it’s likely to go on for another two hours.’

  Michael looked at his watch. It was five o’clock. ‘Surely to God you could slip a note in to him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, he absolutely cannot be disturbed.’

  Was she covering up for him?

  ‘OK, I’ll be in my office for another hour or so. Then I’ll be on my mobile. I’ll give you my office, mobile and home numbers.’ Then using his warmest bedside-manner voice, he tried appealing to her better nature. ‘Please ask him to contact me tonight. I’m a psychiatrist and someone’s life is in danger. He may have some vital information.’

  She hesitated and for a moment he thought she was going to relent, but then she said, ‘Can you be more specific?’

  Michael thought. Amanda had been having an affair with Trussler; even in his frantically worried state, this did not give him the excuse to start being indiscreet. ‘I’m sorry, no, I would be in breach of a confidentiality.’

  Softening, but only a fraction, she said, ‘Give me your numbers, Dr Tennent. I’ll see what I can do.’

  Michael spent the next hour on the phone to Amanda’s mother, then her sister, then her three closest girlfriends, whose names and numbers Lulu had given him. He arranged to meet up with all of them in turn tomorrow morning, starting with her mother in Brighton at nine o’clock. It was no good over the phone: if any of them was sheltering Amanda they would be able to mask it in their voice, but not so easily in their face.

  Brian Trussler had not rung back. Michael decided, from the attitude of his secretary and from the way Amanda had talked about him, that he was a man who only returned phone calls that were about making money or getting laid.

  He decided to visit him. Now.

  It was shortly before seven by the time Michael had battled through the traffic and found the Bedford Street, Covent Garden, premises of Trussler’s company, Mezzanine Productions. There was a parking space almost directly opposite, in front of a smart-looking bookshop called Crime In Store; tight, but just enough room. Michael braked sharply without checking his mirror, and a cyclist swerved past him with an angry shout.

  He reversed into the space and switched off the engine, but kept the fan blower going, grateful for the gale on his face, though it was just as warm as the heavy air outside.

  He had a straight-line view, through the gap between two parked cars, of the front door of Mezzanine Productions. The downstairs looked suitably media cool: smoked-glass windows, angled slats of limed grey wood. He dialled the number, which he had already programmed into his mobile. It rang several times before Ms Super-Defensive answered.

  ‘I’m sorry, he’s still in conference. I have given him your message,’ she said, in a tone that gave Michael no grounds for confidence that the call would be returned tonight, if ever.

  ‘Would you tell him that I’m now on the mobile number I gave you and I’ll be on it for some while.’ As an inducement he added, ‘I’ll keep the line clear for him. You have conveyed how urgent this is, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Tennent, I have.’ Her tone sounded now as if she was repelling a double-glazing salesman.

  Michael killed the call. At least Brian Trussler was still in the building. He felt shattered, but his brain was whirring. He dialled Amanda’s office number, hoping Lulu was still there. She was.

  ‘Lulu, do you by
any chance know what car Brian Trussler drives?’

  A man in denims and Walkman headphones strode past with a fierce expression as if he was heading into battle.

  ‘Oh, God, he has a Porsche, a Bentley – um – a Range Rover and a Harley Davidson motorcycle, but he’s off the road at the moment,’ she said. ‘He got banned for drink-driving about two months ago. Second offence, he’s off for three years – and he only just scraped out of a prison sentence.’ Then, as if imparting a great secret, she said, ‘I don’t think that’s public knowledge.’

  He thanked her, hung up and dropped the phone next to his briefcase on the passenger seat beside him.

  It was a fine evening, and sunlight still daubed the pavement on the other side of the road. The café a short distance down had put tables and chairs outside, all occupied. Further along, a crowd of people stood drinking outside a pub.

  Then he saw movement behind the front door of Mezzanine, and stiffened, watching carefully. Two men came out, both in their twenties, one in T-shirt and jeans, carrying a large film can under his arm, the other in a loud shirt and Lycra shorts, who made sure the door was shut. They stood chatting for some moments, before walking off in different directions, the one in shorts stopping at a lamp-post a few yards up and unchaining a mountain bike.

  Michael hoped this was the only entrance to the offices. At least, since Trussler didn’t drive, he wouldn’t have a car secreted somewhere around the back.

  Seeing the people drinking at the café and the pub reminded him of his own thirst – and hunger. He’d had a glass of water and a cup of tea in the office, and eaten one of the two shortbread biscuits that Thelma had put on the saucer. Other than that, and the cup of coffee at Hampstead police station, he’d had nothing since this morning. But he was reluctant to leave the car now to get something in case he missed Trussler.

  Keeping one eye on the front door, he hauled his Mac PowerBook out of his briefcase, and booted it up. Then he attached a cable from the modem serial port into his mobile phone, logged onto the Internet, and called up the Mezzanine Production web page, which he had bookmarked earlier.