‘Someone who couldn’t let the brutality of the world go unchallenged.’
Sarah gave up then, as perhaps Joe had hoped she would.
‘Well, I’ll be glad to help, if you’d like me to,’ she announced briskly. ‘I can get a few checks run.’
She had taken him by surprise. ‘You could? What sort of things?’
‘A witness trace. We’re always asking the police to find people for us.’
‘It wouldn’t be too much trouble?’
‘God, no. It’s a five-minute job. No big deal. I’ll just pop her name into the hat with a whole lot of others. But don’t get your hopes too high, Joe. If people make an active decision to lose themselves they can do it very effectively, believe me.’
‘Even from the police?’
‘Sure. Once someone decides to opt out of the nanny state, once they refuse to play the bureaucratic game - national insurance, electoral roll, driving licence, all that sort of stuff then they effectively become a non-person. There’s no way of tracing them through the data bases.’
‘Then what happens?’
‘With witnesses? If it’s an important case, the police go and question their associates - relatives, lovers, enemies, creditors, drug dealers. Someone nearly always knows. Whether they talk, of course, is an entirely different matter.’
‘And then?’
‘Oh, there are still a couple of things one can try.’
Something in her tone should have warned him against asking, ‘What kind of things?’
She frowned at him. ‘I don’t know because I don’t ask.’
‘Look, Sarah, I’m very grateful, but don’t do anything that might be difficult for you.’
‘It won’t get me into trouble, if that’s what you mean,’ she replied crisply. She rummaged in her bag for a pen. ‘Just give me her full name, Joe. And date of birth, and last known address. The national insurance number would help too, if you can get it, but it’s not essential.’
She extracted a sheet of paper from her planner and passed it over. Joe wrote down Jenna’s full name, birth date, married name, and the address of the rented flat in Brondesbury.
Watching him, Sarah murmured, ‘My goodness - off by heart.’
Something in her tone made Joe glance up. In the moment before she dropped her eyes he caught a sharp quizzical expression and for a wild moment he wondered if she was jealous.
‘And the husband,’ Sarah added. ‘His details as well, if you’ve got them.’
‘His birthday’s in March. I can’t remember the exact date.
But he’s a year older than me, so …’
She wrote it down. ‘And his full name?’
‘Jamie - James - Chetwood. Middle name, not sure. I’ll have to check.’
‘Originally from?’
‘Weston Farm, somewhere near Swindon, I think it was.
Wiltshire anyway. But the village… No, can’t remember.’
She added these fragments to the slip of paper.
‘Occupation?’
‘Ah, now there’s a question. It’s more a case of where you’d like to start. Aid worker - a lot of that in the early days -
Somalia, Bosnia. Then waiter, travel guide, translator, importer of ethnic rugs. But the last time I saw him it was definitely rugs. Oh, and art dealer. Though, knowing Chetwood, that should probably be taken with a large pinch of salt. He had a soft spot for tat, the louder the better. Once, he caught me out, good and proper. Made this huge fuss about his latest find, went through all this rubbish about how lucky he was to have stumbled on it, and of course when he unveiled the bloody thing it was this cheap plastic madonna from Manila with an illuminated halo that flashed pink and blue to the sound of “Ave Maria”. He loved it. Couldn’t get enough of it.’
It was a moment before Sarah reacted. ‘Oh, I see, yes. Yes.’
She gave a belated nod. ‘Shall we say rug importer then, with “art” as a question mark?’
Joe nodded.
‘Anything else?’
‘He used to go and work in an orphanage in Jakarta twice a year. Raised money in this country, shipped out equipment, books, that sort of thing.’
‘And Jenna? Anything more there?’
‘I don’t think so.- I’ll get her national insurance number when I see Alan and Helena tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘I’m going down first thing.’
‘Does that mean we’re not going to the Gilbert Exhibition?’
Joe’s face must have been a picture because she said quickly, ‘It was a joke, Joe. A bad joke. Of course you must go and see your friends. Exhibitions can wait. I owe my family a visit anyway.’
Impulsively, Joe reached out and gripped her hand.
‘Thanks.’
The food arrived just then. She had the perfect excuse to extract her hand and look away.
Joe’s starter was good, but he lost his appetite with the next course, which was altogether too rich. Outside, it was still raining heavily and, when he put his face to the window, fingers of condensation wafted out across the glass. In the reflection of the street-lamps the raindrops seemed to hang on the glass like strings of amber, and in a shift of memory he was reminded of a day last winter, a steamy cab window streaked with rain, and a blurred figure half glimpsed on the far side of the street.
‘I thought I saw her once - Jenna.’
Sarah looked up from her fish. ‘Oh? Where?’
‘In Oxford Street.’
‘And was it really her?’
‘I thought so at the time. In fact, I chased after her. But now… well, I’m not so certain. She always hated London.’
‘You didn’t manage to catch her then?’
‘I was in a taxi, I had to pay it off, the streets were very crowded.’
‘Did she see you?’
He hesitated unhappily. ‘I’m not sure. She was a long way off. Maybe. But by the time I got to her she’d disappeared.’
‘If it was Oxford Street she’d probably gone into a shop.’
‘Oh no. I looked everywhere, I searched for ages, I searched every shop. No—’ Reliving the frustration, he gave a ragged sigh.
In the pause that followed, he became aware that Sarah was looking at him with the same intense look as before. ‘Why, Joe …’ she breathed at last, so softly he almost missed it. ‘You really cared for her.’
‘What?’ He made a face. ‘No, I told you! I explained - we were just kids together.’
He had spoken more sharply than he’d meant to. She dropped her eyes, her mouth twitched in what looked like disappointment, as though it pained her to catch him out in such a needless untruth.
He couldn’t believe she didn’t get it. ‘I feel responsible, Sarah. That’s the problem.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I introduced them of course. Because everything was fine till she met him.’
‘It’s hardly your fault—’
‘It is my fault. Okay?’
She stared at him before looking away across the restaurant.
Beneath her expressionless gaze he thought he detected an undercurrent of anger. But he had misjudged her. Turning back, she said in a tone of commiseration, ‘Heavens, what a week it’s been for you, Joe!’ She gave a sudden half-formed smile, and awkwardly, in a public gesture that obviously came to her with difficulty, leant across and kissed him quickly on the lips.
Joe’s flat was on the sixth floor of a mansion block a street away from Battersea Park. It was two rooms with a shoe-box for a kitchen, and a bathroom only marginally larger. It was the first place he’d ever owned, and he still wasn’t entirely used to the idea. It was dark and cold when they got in, an impression accentuated by the tall black rectangles of the windows, which had been without curtains since Joe had moved in eighteen months ago. He traced the source of the freezing air to the bathroom window, which he’d thrown open that morning and forgotten to close.
While Sarah made herself a cup of t
ea he rooted around for some wine which Sarah wouldn’t want and he almost certainly didn’t need. Eventually he found a bottle of cheap Chianti left over from a party.
‘Joe?’ Sarah was leaning back against the counter, hunched in her coat. ‘I was thinking - have you a photograph of your friend?’
‘What, for the police?’ He had a vision of a computerised image being flashed around the country.
She declined the wine with a small shake of her head. ‘No, I was thinking that if the computer turned something up, you might want to hire a private investigator, to go and check.’
The wine tasted cold and sharp, and he almost abandoned it. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to go and knock on her door?’
‘And if it’s not her? If it’s someone with the same name who inhabits the far north of Scotland?’
He saw immediately that she was always going to know more about this business than he ever would. ‘I’ll ask Alan and Helena tomorrow.’
‘You haven’t got a picture yourself?’
‘If I do, I don’t know where.’ This wasn’t quite true; he had several photographs of Jenna sitting in the top drawer of his desk among a batch he’d been meaning to sort and arrange in albums for some time. One showed him standing beside Jenna on a beach in Cornwall when they were both about seventeen, during one of the three or four summer holidays he’d spent with the Laskeys. Another, which he could picture in the clearest detail, showed Jenna standing on Glastonbury Tor, during a June weekend at the end of his first year at Bristol. It had been a blazing hot day, without cloud or wind, and she had a hand angled to shade her eyes from the sun, like a sailor executing a rather jaunty salute. With her broad infectious smile, she gave the impression of a girl in an old-fashioned musical, about to launch into ‘Ship Ahoy’.
He said, ‘They were from so long ago. They wouldn’t be any good.’
Sarah nodded. She looked so pale and chill, with her coat lapels clutched close under her chin, that he went over and gave her arms a brisk rub in one of those gestures that promises far more than it delivers. ‘Sorry about the Arctic.’
She gave a pantomime shiver. ‘I’ll survive.’
He looked into her eyes - such a misty shade of grey-green - and it seemed to him that a spark of understanding passed between them. He thought: We’re two of a kind, and she knows it. Both a little wary, both anxious not to ask for more than the other is ready to give, both wanting to avoid hurt: to each other, but also to ourselves. There must be hope for us.
It seemed to him that it was a terrible mistake to want it all - passion, love, commitment - and that only the most demanding of men would be dissatisfied with this: a quick mind, a beautiful mouth, and eyes that promised no harm.
‘It would be warmer in bed,’ he said.
Her eyes glittered. ‘I would hope so. But I’d love a bath first, if that’s all right.’
He checked the hot water and, leaving her in the bathroom, emptied his wine down the sink. In the darkened bedroom, he went to switch on the bedside lamp only to glance up at the rain-specked window and pause, caught once again by the image of the cab-ride down Oxford Street. Still in darkness, he went to the window and stared out over the street. While nothing he’d told Sarah about that day had been untrue, he hadn’t quite told her everything either. In the weeks immediately after the sighting he’d re-run the scene obsessively, trying to decide what he’d seen, yet the more he’d tried to fix the images in his mind the more frayed and indistinct they’d become, like a flimsy map which with constant use threatens to fall apart in your hands. Now, driven to pick through the memory one more time, he cautioned himself: Take it slowly, go from one1 sure thing to the next. No agonising allowed. No what-ifs. Just firm ground.
January, eleven months ago. He’d been to see his dentist in Devonshire Place. With no early-morning appointments available, he’d settled for the first afternoon slot in the hope that his dentist would come back from lunch on time. In the event the guy was twenty minutes late - some sort of emergency, he said - and by the time Joe hit the street he was already fretting about getting to his three o’clock meeting late. It was raining steadily and he had to walk almost the full length of Wimpole Street before he found a taxi. The traffic was appalling; the cab took an age to nudge and inch its way into Oxford Street, and Joe began to wonder if he wouldn’t do better to sprint for the Tube and take his chances there, though his meeting was miles from any station. The fretting was significant; it made him restless. Otherwise he would almost certainly have had his head down, going through the papers for the meeting. As it was, he kept rubbing the condensation from the window and staring in frustration at the traffic, wondering if it was ever going to free up.
The cab was fifty yards from Oxford Circus when he saw her in the crowd on the opposite pavement. At first she was just another woman in a pale coat, walking in the rain. He had no idea what made him look at her a second time. It might have been the absence of an umbrella or the way she held her head high despite the rain, or the long dark hair hanging in rats’ tails around her shoulders. In the downpour the taxi window was like bottle-glass, it made her image distort and shimmy and blur. Yet even as he wiped the fog impatiently from the glass, something in the woman’s half-profile, in the line of her jaw, in the way she walked, made him sit up and press his nose to the window. The red wall of a slow-moving bus blocked his vision at the critical moment, but he knew.
It was Jenna.
He must have yelled aloud because he remembered the cabbie twisting round and saying something. He didn’t hear what it was though, he was too busy clawing at the narrow metal lug on the top of the window, trying to get enough purchase to haul it down. He forgot all about the window-lock set into the door, the lever that in a more rational moment he would have remembered to flick across before swinging his weight on the lug. He had the impression of almost losing his fingertips before he finally managed to overcome the resistance of the lock and drag the window halfway down.
He thrust his face against the opening. She was still there, walking parallel and just ahead of the cab. Now everything about her seemed totally familiar to him: the set of her shoulders, the fluidity of her stride, the shape of her head with its plastering of wet hair. He lost any remaining uncertainty: it was her. His heart gave a violent lurch of excitement and joy, rapidly followed by a surge of panic, the sort that comes from being trapped in a confined space, a sensation exacerbated by the sudden acceleration of the cab. He shouted for the cabbie to stop, he rattled and wrenched at the door handle. But if the battle with the window had been hard, the door was impossible - the red eye of the central-locking system wasn’t glittering its warning for nothing - and it wasn’t until the cabbie had stamped on the brakes and driven Joe hard against the jump-seat, not until the two of them had exchanged feverish insults through the partition, not until the cabbie had allowed himself to be bought off with a twenty-quid note, that the electronic click of the door-release finally set him free.
Joe burst out of the cab and stood in the middle of the road, scanning the opposite pavement. The crowd seemed to have thickened, the umbrellas to have formed an unbroken canopy of black, then at last, further ahead than he’d expected, he glimpsed the pale coat, the proud wet head. He stepped forward and, in the moment before the cyclist cannoned into him, he bellowed Jenna’s name, he yelled so hard that his throat seemed to seize from the effort.
Suddenly, the man and bicycle were a fast-approaching blur on the periphery of Joe’s vision. In the split second before impact, the cyclist tried to swerve and Joe tried to jump out of his way, but they both chose the same direction. As Joe flung up a protective arm, he held in his mind’s eye the last fleeting image of Jenna as she looked round for the source of the shout, the dark wet head of hair giving way to the pale oval of her face.
It was all he needed. Even as the combined weight of man and bicycle slammed into him, even as he felt the breath driven out of his lungs, he was working out how to roll clear, how to
scramble to his feet and get running. It was years since he’d paid scant attention to the rugby instructor’s exhortations on how to fall harmlessly, but he succeeded in hitting the ground at a roll, shoulder first, and to feel nothing worse than a slight crack on the head before he managed to pick himself up and weave a path through the traffic to the opposite side of the road, where he ran parallel to the pavement, searching the crowd.
His lungs rebelled. Forced to halt and suck in great gulps of air, he looked ahead helplessly, only to see her - and this was where it all became indistinct - maybe to see her running away. His memory - or his imagination - had her running so fast that her hair was flying out behind her. It was the run of someone who had taken fright, or was desperate to escape, which was perhaps the same thing.
When his lungs allowed, he loped on, half in the road, half on the pavement. At one point he thought he glimpsed the top of her head, but after that, nothing. If she had gone into a shop, she had hidden herself well; he ducked into them all, he sprinted round each floor, he knocked into people who shouted and stared. Down at the gates of the Underground, facing three different escalators, he finally gave up. He looked down and saw blood. His cheek was dripping; by the time he found a handkerchief it had stained the front of his coat.
That night, the doubts began. Was the running woman Jenna or someone else with dark hair? Surely Jenna’s hair had been too wet to fly out behind her? And he had no memory of the running woman wearing a pale coat - had he missed it, or had there been no pale coat to see? Even the desperation of her escape took on an innocent quality when he recast the woman as a fitness enthusiast trying to catch a bus.
It might have been the effect of hitting his head - going to bed, he discovered a large bump high on his temple - but it was only a short step to doubting he has seen Jenna at all.
What had he really seen, after all, but a half-profile and a head of long bedraggled hair? And in the adrenalin-charged microsecond before the bicycle hit him, when he saw her stop and begin to turn, she’d been further away than before, her face no more than a pale smudge in a mass of jostling figures.
A Death Divided Page 3
