The Disappeared

by M. R. Hall

  'Calm down, Jenny. I didn't come here for any sort of confrontation, quite the opposite. It's cold out here. Why don't we go inside?'

  He motioned towards the gate. She stood her ground.

  'When did he decide this? I thought he was happy here. He's got his girlfriend down the road — '

  'He sees her at college.'

  'The whole idea was to keep him out of the city. He hasn't touched drugs since he's been with me.'

  'He's grown up a lot since last summer. I probably notice it more since I'm seeing less of him.'

  'How did this happen? What's prompted it?'

  'Can't we talk about this calmly?'

  'I'm perfectly calm, David.'

  'You're shaking.'

  Jenny closed her eyes, telling herself not to react.

  'All I'm asking,' she said with enforced restraint, 'is for you to tell me what's changed. You must have spoken to him.'

  'Do you really want to have this conversation out here?'

  'Wherever you want.'

  She strode up the path.

  David said, 'Do you want me to come in or not?'

  'It might be an idea, as you're proposing to take my son away.'

  The front door was ajar. She shoved it open and went straight through into the sitting room, wrenching off her coat and throwing it over a chair. David followed hesitantly.

  'It sounds like he's upstairs,' Jenny said. 'You'd better shut the door.'

  She remained standing, arms crossed, waiting for an explanation. David glanced around the room with its stone- flag floor, low beams and draughty windows, his expression saying: no wonder he doesn't want to stay.

  'Well?' Jenny said.

  David stepped over to the sofa and perched dubiously on the arm as if it might give way beneath him. 'I'll be honest with you, Jenny. He's concerned about you. He thinks you might have too much pressure on you to worry about looking after him as well.'

  'He said that?'

  'Yes.'

  'Because I don't have dinner on the table every evening at six? You work even longer hours that I do.'

  'I do have Deborah.'

  'She's got a career, too.'

  'She's just gone part-time.'

  'Has she? Did you give her any choice in the matter?'

  David rode the punch with a hint of a wry smile. 'Actually, it's her decision. I was going to tell you - she's pregnant.'

  'Oh ... I see.' She felt numb. 'I suppose I should say congratulations.'

  'Thank you. It wasn't exactly planned.'

  Jenny didn't respond. Desperate as she had been to escape from David at the end of their marriage, part of her still resented the presence of another woman in his life. The fact that Deborah was still in her twenties, attractive and sweetly compliant made it all the more galling.

  'I didn't mean to surprise you with that today,' he said with a trace of apology.

  'No need to feel guilty on my account.'

  But he did. She could see it in the heaviness that had settled around his eyes.

  In the brief silence that followed Ross's footsteps moved across the creaking boards in the room above. Drawers opened and closed, the wardrobe door slammed: the sounds of hasty packing.

  'I assume you would prefer me to be honest?' David said.

  She resisted further sarcasm. How would dishonesty ever be preferable? It was always his way to make the wounds he inflicted feel self-imposed. She presumed it was a technique he had learned in his practice, his instinctive method of distancing himself from his patients' suffering and not infrequent deaths.

  David braced himself. 'He doesn't think you can cope, Jenny. He's not being selfish, it makes him feel a burden. And if he stays and sees you struggling, it makes him feel even guiltier.'

  'What makes him think I'm struggling? I love having him here ... I thought we were getting on fine.'

  'There's never any food in the house.'

  'That's not true—'

  'It's not a judgement. I wouldn't do any better by myself.'

  'Why isn't he telling me this? We'll get a delivery.'

  David sighed and drew a hand around his sinewy neck. 'Christ, Jenny, you're not well enough to be looking after someone else.'

  'What do you know? I'm fine.'

  'He told me about the other night, the state you came home in.'

  'I was just tired.'

  'He had to help you into bed. You don't even remember, do you? What happened? Did you take too many pills?'

  The feeling retreated from her hands and feet. Each breath became a conscious effort as her nervous system began a systematic shutdown.

  'It was late, that's all.'

  'What are you doing, Jenny? Are you getting help? You may not believe it, but I do worry about you.'

  'I see someone.'

  'Good. These things can be overcome. I've colleagues who assure me — '

  'You discuss me with your colleagues?'

  'In the past. . .'

  Her look arrested his lie.

  'Only in the strictest confidence. Of course I want to know what more can be done for you.'

  'To hear you talk, you wouldn't think I held down a responsible job, conducted inquests, consoled grieving families—'

  'I know you do. But just holding it down isn't enough, is it? You've nothing to prove to me, Jenny, and money isn't an issue. I just want you to be right. So does Ross.'

  'And this is your way of helping me along?'

  'Sorting out other people's problems won't fix your own.'

  Above them a door closed. Ross's footsteps sounded on the stairs.

  'Give up my career as well as everything else, is that what you're suggesting?'

  'Please don't be like that. You know what's right, I know you do. And our son has problems of his own to work through. He needs security.'

  Ross reached the bottom of the stairs.

  'We're in here,' Jenny said, as brightly as she could manage without sounding hysterical.

  The latch lifted. He looked in, pale and awkward.

  'Hi, Mum.' He glanced to his father.

  'It's OK, Ross. We've had a chat.'

  Jenny forced a smile. Words wouldn't come.

  'We'll sort something out with weekends and what have you,' David said, more to Ross than Jenny. He got to his feet. 'We ought to hit the road. I'm sure you've got work to do.'

  Ross looked at the floor. 'I'll see you.'

  'Soon, I hope,' Jenny said.

  He nodded, hair flopping over his eyes.

  David moved towards the door placing a fatherly hand on Ross's shoulder. 'We can see ourselves out.'

  Their footsteps retreated swiftly down the path. The boot clunked, the engine fired and David sped off down the hill, leaving a silence as absolute as the blackness of the night.

  Jenny lowered herself into an upright chair and sat quite still, wishing she could feel the shame that should have accompanied the images playing through her mind: waking in her clothes, the pills spilled across the floor, the incoherent scrawl in her journal lying open at the foot of the bed. He would have read it, of course, if only for a clue as to why his mother had arrived home staggering, unable even to make it to her own bed. He would know about a man called McAvoy, her guilt, her lust, her ghosts. He wouldn't tell his father of course; that would only double his confusion at having a semi-lunatic for a mother. He would keep it to himself.

  And the worst of it was David was right. She wasn't fit to nurture an adolescent with troubles of his own. She'd deluded herself into thinking that Ross had straightened himself out under her roof, when in fact his relative calm was due to her drama constantly upstaging his own. She hadn't given him space, she had stifled him.

  It felt indecent to think in terms of irony, but she remembered what her late mother, who had abandoned her own family while Jenny was still at school, had once said when she had first talked of divorcing David - that children fared better with unhappy parents together than happy ones apart. How she had railed ag
ainst that thought. How she had resented the notion that a woman oppressed and miserable could do better for her child. Another of her mother's axioms forged from bitter experience: a woman who leaves home, leaves everything. Perhaps she was right after all. She had experienced nothing to disprove it, nor for that matter had Mrs Jamal.

  The telephone rang with a suddenness that jarred her nerves. She answered with a clipped hello but was met with an electronic voice informing her that she had messages on her answer service. Dumbly, she obeyed its request to play them.

  There were eight. DI Pironi had called twice, first to stress that events at Mrs Jamal's flat were strictly a police matter, and second to emphasize that the investigation into the source of the radiation was secret. The press had been told that the white-suited operatives who had descended on the apartment block were searching for further forensic evidence. There were two calls from local journalists fishing for information, one from Gillian Golder asking abruptly for Jenny to call at her earliest convenience, and two from Simon Moreton, the senior official at the Ministry of Justice with responsibility for coroners. In the polite, faux-friendly manner he adopted with his wayward charges, he asked her to call 'on a matter of importance', leaving his home number. The last message was from Steve, asking how she was, and saying he'd like to come over if she was around.

  With blunt fingers she punched in his number, not sure why, or what she would say to him. He answered on the second ring.

  'It's me. You left a message,' she said.

  'Yeah. Look, I ... I shouldn't have left it like that the other night.' There was a quiet urgency in his voice, as if he had been on tenterhooks waiting for her call.

  'Right,' she said distantly.

  'I've been going through some things myself, you know . . .'

  'Uh huh.'

  A pause. He sighed, impatient with himself. 'What I was saying to you - about choices - it cuts both ways. I've been hiding away for ten years trying to avoid the issue.'

  She knew she was meant to say something meaningful, meant to react to the subtext, but she couldn't fathom what it was. 'What issue?' she said.

  'Commitment,' Steve said. 'What I stand for. What I feel.'

  'I see.'

  'I need to speak to you, Jenny. There's something you should know.'

  'Steve, I'm very tired . . .'

  'Jenny-'

  'David took Ross away.'

  'Oh. You're by yourself?'

  'I'm no good to you right now. Don't come over ... I need to sleep.'

  'Jenny

  'Please, don't.' She set down the receiver and felt only relief.

  She was tempted to destroy her journal, to throw it into the grate and reduce it to ashes. She carried it from her study to the hearth and reached for the matches, but was seized by an overwhelming curiosity to read her last entry, to glimpse into the madness that had brought the world crashing around her ears.

  I don't know what happened tonight. That man ... he does something to me. I don't even find him attractive -he's so tired and used up. But when he looks in my eyes I know he's not afraid of anything. What does it mean? Why him? Why now? It's as if

  She had a partial recollection of writing it, of sitting at her study desk seized with a sense of profundity which she couldn't transfer to the page. A nervous tap at the door. Ross had come in and told her it was late. She'd clasped the journal to her chest as he urged her up the stairs . . . Her shoulder had grazed the wall, she'd faltered, the climb too steep. And there her memory faded to black.

  She snapped the notebook shut with a pang of self-disgust, but could only stare at the matches. She could hear Dr Travis back in the early days, warning her to rein in her imagination and not to let instability tempt her into believing nonsense, or finding connections where none existed. 'Stick to terra firma,' he had said, 'even the tiniest piece of land is better than all at sea.' For the recent casualty it was sound advice, but there had to be a time to move on, to strike out to new territory.

  It's as if.. . It came to her now. She reached for a pen, turned back to the page and completed the sentence: . . . he's come to tell me something I need to know.

  It was nearly midnight. She took the journal upstairs and hid it in her special drawer. As she climbed into bed and huddled against the cold, she realized that something had changed. For the first time in hours she felt a flicker of sensation, of fear and anger, and a hint, the faintest suggestion of excitement.

  Chapter 20

  She dressed in the black two-piece she normally reserved for formal occasions: an ivory silk blouse, a plain silver necklace and narrow, elegant shoes that squeezed her toes, dabbed perfume on her wrists and put on her best black cashmere coat. She swallowed a Xanax, checked her makeup and set out along the valley through drifting mist.

  As she cleared the Severn Bridge she called the office number, knowing Alison would not yet have arrived, and left a message saying that she had a stop to make on her way in. She switched off the phone and tossed it into her bag. She drove past her usual exit, continued on to the next and headed towards the city centre and the Law Courts.

  Outside on the steps tired lawyers and a cluster of slouching, hooded young men with their sulking, pinched-faced girlfriends smoked cigarettes and avoided each others' eyes. She picked her way through them, drawing stares, and pushed through the doors into the atrium, thankful that no one had spat at her. She cleared the security check and scanned the noisy crush of lawyers, clients, witnesses and court ushers. If it had been a County Court every other face would have been familiar, but she had never practised criminal law and the Crown Court - where criminal cases were tried - was an alien and daunting world to her.

  She skirted through the crowd and looked into the steamy, crowded cafeteria but couldn't see McAvoy's face. She would have glanced into the solicitors' room but shyness held her back. Instead, she stood in line at the reception desk until, after a ten-minute wait, the heavy-set girl behind the desk came off the phone for long enough to bark out an announcement over the tannoy: 'Would Mr McAvoy of O'Donnagh and Drew please come to reception immediately.'

  She hovered self-consciously by the desk, watching the barristers and their clients arguing and horse-trading. There was an atmosphere of barely suppressed anger: the air was filled with expletives and the police officers who passed through walked quickly, eyes fixed on the ground. Near to where she was standing a young woman suddenly wailed then swore violently at a lawyer who had delivered bad news. Two other girls held her back as she lashed out at him. She struggled, wrenched free and had dug her nails into his face before a court usher and an elderly constable came to the man's rescue. He stood dabbing incredulously at his bleeding cheek with a crumpled handkerchief as his ungrateful client was dragged away.

  'It wouldn't be you taking an honest man from his work, Mrs Cooper?'

  She looked round from the commotion to see McAvoy approaching, carrying an untidy bundle of papers under his arm.

  'I've a man downstairs with his life in my hands - the barrister's proving himself a useless shite - so I can't be long.'

  'Is there somewhere we can talk in private?' she said. 'A conference room?'

  'At this time of the morning? You'll be lucky.'

  'There's a cafe over the road.'

  'I've a bail application in ten minutes. Fella'll have my guts on the floor if we don't spring him - he's got a plane to catch at lunchtime.' He glanced around the atrium then motioned her to follow him. 'Let's see what we can do.'

  Jenny followed him through the shifting crowd that smelled of poor homes and stale sweat and into a small, empty courtroom. The advocates' benches were piled high with thick files and textbooks, suggesting a long-running trial was in progress.

  McAvoy glanced up at the clock above the door. 'We've got five minutes.'

  She'd prepared a speech which she'd spent the entire journey into town reciting. She was Her Majesty's Coroner, she was going to say, a judicial officer charged with a grave and serious
task, and he had not only interrupted her investigation, he had misled her. He had failed to tell her that eight years ago he had discovered facts about Nazim Jamal that could have a material bearing on the case. If he didn't explain himself he would be fortunate not be charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice for a second time in his dubious career.

  She steeled herself, but was torn from her moorings by a rush of anger. 'Who the hell do you think you are, McAvoy? What the fuck are you playing at? You spoke to Brightman eight years ago. You knew about Sarah Levin and Nazim.'

  The smile faded. He glanced to the door, then looked back at her with a convict's eyes.

  'There's nothing to know.'

  'He saw them together. This teenage jihadi was screwing a white girl who was the only person to say anything about him going abroad.' She felt her face glowing with rage.

  McAvoy shrugged. 'The boy was a hypocrite, or he got lucky. What of it? Hadn't his poor mother suffered enough? She was a very conservative woman.'

  'His mother's dead.''

  'I'm as shocked as you are.'

  She took a step towards him. 'Why did you lie to me?'

  'I told you. He was all she had. Why not let her believe he was the only woman he'd ever loved?'

  'You bastard.'

  She went to hit him. McAvoy dropped his papers, caught her wrist and gripped it hard.

  'Are you crazy?'

  'Fuck you.'

  As if by reflex, she grabbed a ballpoint from the desk to her right, swung her arm wildly and stabbed it hard into the side of his shoulder. McAvoy exclaimed in pain, releasing her wrist as he clutched at his shoulder.

  'Je-sus.'

  Jenny stepped backwards, breathing hard, the pen still gripped tight in her left hand. McAvoy looked up at her, jaw clenched. He flicked out a hand, smacking her smartly across the face and sending her tumbling back against the rail of the dock. She caught hold of it and pulled herself upright, more stunned than hurt. She turned to see him straightening, catching his breath. She flinched, expecting another blow, but he stooped and gathered his scattered papers from the floor.

  Holding a hand to her stinging cheek, she watched him sifting and checking the disordered documents as if she wasn't there, grimacing at the pain in his shoulder. There was something obsessive, pathetic almost, in the way he fussed over them.