by Unknown
Patrick was saying, ‘God, no,’ shaking his head. ‘I don’t think Bea was capable of such a thing. I mean . . .’ Katharine did up the buttons of her jacket. A chill wind was blowing in from the east, the sea had turned a deep dark blue and she didn’t like it here up on this terrace in their wary, beached marriage. The sight of grandchildren’s flippers and masks stored in a box by the wall made her very angry. She had one more thing to say before she went.
‘Not even when she lost the baby?’
Then he looked at her. That did it all right. His face slackened, discoloured and retracted as though she had punched him. He hadn’t known either. Katharine felt sick. Her stomach heaved. She wanted to shit.
Susan appeared beside them, car keys in her hand and smelling of fly spray. Bea was right about perfume, Katharine realised now. It all smelt of insecticide or cat piss and people should stop using it. Susan was telling them that she was driving to Frikes to meet Annabel and the children off the boat. If they left now, Katharine would make it in time for the last flight back to London.
ZIGZAG LINES, flickering lights and nausea assailed Katharine as Susan drove her to the port. By the time they reached the waterside, the wind had picked up and waves crested with white rode the inky sea. Katharine stared fixedly at the horizon and ordered her guts to be still.
At Kefalonia she managed to get herself into a taxi. Black dots replaced the zigzags in her vision and her right cerebrum felt primed to explode. In the queue for the plane she forced down a double dose of migraine pills and threw the perfume she had bought on the way out into the bin. Once on board, she collapsed into her seat and balanced the sick bag on her chest ready for takeoff. Somebody asked if she was unwell.
‘You did know your sister had been unwell for some time,’ Susan had told her as they reached Frikes after a silent drive north with both windows open. Katharine asked what she meant but Susan was getting out of the car and waving at a young woman and two children waiting on the quayside with bags and suitcases.
‘Unstable,’ she added, walking towards her family. ‘Patrick had to give her a lot of support.’ The ferry blew its horn. ‘Quick. You’d better hurry.’
‘Unwell’ was a euphemism on the missing websites Katharine had searched. Unwell meant mentally ill. ‘Jason’s family is very concerned about him as he has recently been unwell.’ She covered herself in a blanket and put her eye mask on. She had scrolled through the hundreds of the missing on websites and podcasts, scanning their details to try and find a case like Bea’s but there were very few. Most were either teenagers or middle-aged men. No mystery there, Katharine had thought. And then a few were not from these groups and they were the ones who had been ‘unwell’. No mystery there either, she thought. She knew what that meant. But Bea’s disappearance was a mystery. She twitched away Pete’s voice, or was it Jim’s? One of them saying, ‘It’s never really a mystery. It’s just that people only start looking once they’ve already gone.’ Useless, the police had been in her opinion. Absolutely useless.
She accepted a beaker of water from the passing trolley, swallowed a temazepam and waited for oblivion.
Seen
THERE WERE a dozen people in the audience at the Burnley library’s matinee performance of The Seagull in the Cherry Orchard, and there were slightly fewer at the question-and-answer session afterwards, three of whom were Lance, Margaret and Wanda. Katharine now employed Wanda as a part-time carer for Margaret down in Hastings. When Wanda phoned, Katharine was in Greece but Richard thought a trip to the theatre would do Margaret the world of good.
It was lucky they were there because they were the only ones who asked any questions. Lance asked what Frank was currently working on, which allowed Frank to free-associate about Close and Personal, which at that very moment he decided was going to be a novel, and to talk up the ‘soon to be produced’ Lupa, which he suspected was still in its envelope under his agent’s assistant’s chair. Wanda asked, ‘Was the sex real?’ which threw Frank completely until the chair of the Q & A repeated the question as, ‘Is the set a reference to Chekhov’s pioneering work in stage realism?’ A woman in a green coat and with hair like a cauliflower asked him where he got his ideas from, then Margaret asked where the toilets were. And then it was over.
They got back to Cambridge late that night. Wanda put the parents to bed and then left for Katharine’s house, saying she would be back in the morning to take them down to Hastings. Margaret slept in the children’s room and Lance slept on the couch downstairs. When Frank climbed into the double bed he lay awake for a time, enjoying the new sheets and duvet. He turned on his side and watched Bea’s egg cups lined up along their newly painted shelves and walls. Katharine had thrown money at Wanda and Urban and instructed a thorough upgrade of the house and garden. She hadn’t bothered to ask Frank; she had just informed him it was happening and told him she wanted Bea to have a proper home to come back to. She hadn’t asked if she could use Wanda as a carer for Margaret, down in Hastings either. She had just done it, or rather given Wanda an offer she couldn’t refuse. True, she was paying for Lance to be cared for down there with Margaret, but even so.
Frank turned over the other way and looked at the curtains. Bea’s bags and boxes and clutter had gone. Wanda had sorted through and packed everything away into suitcases. Something had happened to the carpet so that its colour warmed the room. In fact, the room felt surprisingly spacious. He had a suspicion that Katharine might be paying the mortgage, because he had waited for letters from the building society but none had arrived. He was rather hazy about the mortgage anyway, as Bea had always dealt with that. But even so – he scratched his groin – he was very short of cash. Bea’s salary, still coming in for the first few months, had barely covered the bills and living expenses. Then, all of a sudden, her salary had been suspended ‘pending an enquiry into unauthorised absence’. He turned over on to his back and looked up at the ceiling. Urban had painted the whole room brilliant white so that it glowed through the darkness. There was no doubt about it. He needed to earn some money. The question was, how? He thought of the garden, which Katharine had spent a fortune on in the last few weeks. Urban was digging a pond out there, a terrace of York stone had been built, which Frank was not allowed to call a patio, and there were new trees and shrubs all planted and with their labels still on.
Frank turned back on to his side and looked at the egg cups again. He needed to get on with Close and Personal. He should have written a novel years ago instead of fiddling about with plays. His agent was supposed to ring him back with a date for a meeting. Frank had in mind a substantial lunch somewhere like Lawyers where they did excellent traditional food and a collection of rather good wine. He heard someone in the bathroom, heard the catch of the door and the sound of the toilet flushing. He lay on his back again and straightened his pyjamas. He gathered the duvet close around him and thought about Wanda. They didn’t any more, not since Bea went. And anyway they never had at night. It was understood. It had been a couch thing. An afternoon thing. Not really a sex thing at all, more a muse thing. They had never spoken about it and he supposed that Wanda felt guilty about Bea, about that afternoon when she hadn’t given him the message, about abusing Bea’s trust in her that way. He listened to the house. All was quiet again. He liked the feeling of others sleeping in the house around him. It made him feel a part of things, like a small creature in a colony of other creatures. Tomorrow they would be gone again to Hastings. He hardly saw Wanda now. Katharine sent a Hungarian boy round once a week to do the cleaning – Viktor. Frank turned on to his stomach and spreadeagled himself across the bed. He looked sideways out towards the thick velvet curtains that had appeared one day. Purple seemed to him an absurd colour for a bedroom. He was getting an idea. The children’s room was unused now. He might get a good price for that room. He turned on to his back again. Yes. He would do it tomorrow. The answer to all his problems. He would get a lodger. Four hundred pounds a month. A nice lady lodger.
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sp; The next day, as soon as the others left, Frank sat at his computer to check on rental prices. When the phone rang he froze. He looked at it. ‘Withheld’ showed in the caller’s number display. He considered not answering it. Phone calls usually signalled an unwelcome about-turn in his life. Any minute now it would stop ringing and leave a message. He stared at it. Withhelds never left a message. He lifted the phone and held it to his ear.
‘Frank? Frank Pamplin?’ A man’s voice. ‘Good morning, Jim here.’
Frank racked his brains. Jim? Jim who?
‘Jim Woods, Cambridge Missing Persons Unit. Frank, we thought you should be the first to know. Frank? You there?’
Frank nodded and mumbled something. Here we go again, he thought. Event, incident, enter, speech, exit.
‘There’s been a development.’
Frank breathed into the phone. There was white winter blossom on one of the trees Katharine had bought for the garden. Tiny birds with yellow and black markings hopped and pecked in the branches.
‘We have a sighting.’
He saw Bea standing at the end of a long tunnel. The house felt empty and he wished he had asked Wanda and the others to stay for breakfast. Jim was talking on the other end of the line.
‘While we wouldn’t want to raise hopes—’
‘Where? Who’s seen her? When?’ Frank rubbed his hand over his face as panic tried to clamber up through the fog.
‘Southampton station. We have CCTV footage which we’d like to bring over, if that’s all right with you.’
There was a silence. Jim said he was sorry if this was a bolt out of the blue and Frank took that as permission to turn grief and fear to rage. These bastards had left him to rot for weeks and now they wanted to talk.
‘Don’t you normally just come and kick the door down?’
There was another silence. They were probably recording this call, he thought.
‘We’re not CID, Frank.’
‘Yeah, well . . .’
‘I’m sorry if—’
‘Does her sister know?’
‘She’s away at the moment.’
‘What are you saying? Have you found my wife? When was this?’
‘No, we haven’t found her, Frank. But we would like you to have a look at some film from a security camera. It’s a few weeks old unfortunately, but . . . Would it be convenient if we dropped by in the next hour or so?’
IT WAS raining when Jim and Pete arrived. Both men were gazing round at the newly planted front garden. Jim smiled at Frank as he came in while the small one, Pete, said, ‘Lovely day for it,’ and gave him a half wave, half salute as he hopped into the house after Pete.
The three men hesitated in the hall and noted the transformation in the house. Frank told them to go through to the kitchen.
Jim was businesslike and brisk. He sat at the table and opened his laptop.
‘We’ve made a DVD for you,’ he said as the screen lit up. ‘The quality is not what we would wish, but as you know, we follow up every lead, and other than this one there have been none at all.’
Frank peered at the screen while Pete did his weird wallflower number.
A snowstorm fizzed and then a series of frames of the station platform appeared. It wasn’t even black and white, which would give some definition, it was just grey and white. Jim paused the disc.
‘There,’ he said.
Frank bent closer. It didn’t help that he had lost his glasses and really he could make out precious little on the small screen. Jim was pointing at a woman standing at the far end of the platform. She was looking away from the camera, up the track, towards the approaching train. The next frame had skipped several moments and when it showed the platform again, the train was standing there but the woman had vanished.
‘Is that it?’ asked Frank.
‘As I say,’ said Jim. ‘Hollywood it ain’t. Let’s look at it again.’
‘Well, did she get on it?’
‘That’s our problem. We don’t know. That is the London train, heading for Waterloo. We’ve checked Waterloo cameras for when that train arrived but come up with nothing. We also checked Southampton station’s ticket office to see whether we could catch this individual either buying a ticket or leaving the station. The camera in the ticket office wasn’t working.’
‘Can I borrow your specs?’
Jim handed them to him and Frank sat ready, head forward, shoulders hunched. ‘OK,’ he said.
It was recorded in the early afternoon of the day she had gone. But he knew straight away it wasn’t her. She didn’t know anyone in Southampton. The woman was holding her head strangely, as if it was too heavy and something about her clothes was wrong. Frank had the feeling that whoever the woman was who had taken herself to the far end of the platform, he was watching a stranger. For a start she wasn’t behaving like a normal person. When the train appeared in the frame and she didn’t step back from the edge, he wondered whether she was deaf or blind or something, because she didn’t respond like the rest of the crowd. She just stood her ground, too close to the edge. The coat looked similar to one he thought he’d seen Bea wearing, he’d give them that. And maybe the bag, although Bea had so many bags he couldn’t be definite.
‘Anything?’ asked Jim.
Frank took the glasses off and handed them back. For the first time he felt that he had the upper hand with these two men. He could feel the tension in the air, the hope that they might have hit on something. They probably got commission for every Misper that they found. They weren’t very good at this and he had been treated like shit. The whole police investigation had an amateurish air to it. He shook his head.
‘It’s not her,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s not her.’
Her
LAURA KNEW immediately it was Bea when she saw the footage. They knelt in the dusk in the empty sitting room, crouched around Jim’s laptop. Katharine’s suitcase stood unpacked in the hall.
‘It’s her.’ Laura got up and walked away, knowing she would not be believed.
‘I think it might be her,’ said Adrian, nodding. ‘That way of standing. When she’s tired. She used to say her head got too heavy.’
Katharine peered at the screen and asked to see it again.
‘It’s terrible quality. I’ve seen ultrasounds clearer than this. I don’t see how we can make a positive identification . . .’ She stopped and studied the time-lapsed frames, the snowy blur of a woman with her back to the camera like a slowed-down silent movie. She creased her brow in an effort to make the strange jerky movements familiar. We have reached this point, she told herself. We are searching closed circuit television footage for my sister. She knew what this meant. They all did. Always, with CCTV, the gritty, grim association of death.
They watched the meagre few seconds again and again, leaning closer into the screen until they could hear one another’s breathing.
‘I don’t know . . .’ said Katharine. Her joints cracked as she straightened up.
‘It’s impossible with this quality,’ said Richard. ‘She could be anyone.’
‘We can just enlarge the image a bit . . .’ Adrian pressed some keys on the laptop and the screen went blank. ‘Oh.’
‘Classic,’ chuckled Pete.
‘It’s her,’ said Laura again. ‘It’s her Happy Coat.’ She picked up the cat and forced it into an embrace it did not want. ‘She bought it to cheer herself up. It’s got a pink lining and everything.’
Katharine looked at Jim in exasperation. ‘Laura is supposed to wear glasses.’ He surely wasn’t going to take the word of a child?
‘What could she possibly be doing in Southampton, though?’ asked Richard.
Pete started to pack away the laptop while Jim led Richard down the other end of the room. ‘Nine times out of ten in a case like this,’ he murmured in a man-to-man kind of a way, ‘someone else is involved. We had a married man the other day, respectable type, lawyer in the city, et cetera. Goes to work one morning, never comes bac
k. Family at their wits’ end. Turns out he’s met a barmaid called Betty in a pub in the Cotswolds. Packed up and gone to live with her. More often than not, with these older types, there’s bound to be a Betty the Barmaid there somewhere. Betty or Bernie . . . someone she met on the internet perhaps—’
‘It’s her,’ said Laura, glaring up at them and leaving the room.
THEIR BEDROOM was empty now. Katharine had put an ad in the paper and a man with a van came round and bought the lot. She preferred the house empty because it was like the way she felt. Stripped down and featureless. She lay on the mattress on the floor and looked up at the curtainless windows. Richard turned the light off and got undressed. She thought of Patrick doing the same in Ithaca, peeling off the lies of his life while his wife lay on the bed and watched him. Richard climbed under the duvet with her and she waited for his embrace, for his words of gentle enquiry and reassurance. They didn’t come. He lay silently beside her for a while and then asked how long they were going to live in limbo. They had done what they could to find Bea, but what if she didn’t want to be found? He asked her whether, in some dim recess of her mind, it had ever occurred to her that Bea might just have had enough – of Frank, of work, of her. He wondered whether Katharine might possibly consider that the lives of her own family – him, the children – were perhaps in need of some attention. That, in case she hadn’t noticed, they weren’t much of a family at all any longer, if indeed they ever really had been. He said that Adrian stood a good chance of flunking his exams because the school had no science teachers and Laura seemed to have a permanent period pain or an upset stomach or sore throat and barely attended school at all. He told her that Claudia had suggested that they hire a private detective because she had heard of a woman in Scotland who had seven children and went to empty the bin one night but never came back until three years later, when she was discovered living half a mile away with the woman who ran the hospice. A private detective had found her. Then he accused Katharine of hypocrisy. He told her she had exploited Bea for years and never given a second thought to the woman until she suddenly wasn’t there any longer. He said it was a bit bloody late to be throwing money at Bea’s house and garden, that perhaps she might have thought of that before, but that this was typical of Katharine, she never gave anyone a second thought; just look at Margaret.
