Precious Thing

by Mcbeth, Colette

  ‘That was nothing. Just some one-night stand she mentioned,’ I said.

  ‘She was different, Rachel. She looked frightened.’ Sarah wouldn’t give up. I sat back in my chair and looked at a slice of sunlight falling on the table. I could see the particles of dust floating, phosphorescent in the air.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Sarah, when we both want the same thing? Clara is out there somewhere. Surely we should be sticking together, not fighting each other.’

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘How long has it been?’ I asked.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Her voice was defensive.

  ‘How long has it been since you and Clara have been friends? Seven, eight months? Has she really told you everything?’

  ‘She’s told me enough,’ Sarah said. It was clearly not the conversation she wanted to have.

  ‘So you’ll know where she was? You’ll know what happened to her in all that time she was away? Because if you don’t you can’t really understand her, not like I do.’

  ‘I don’t care what happened in the past. I want to know where she is now.’

  ‘It wasn’t my idea to come to Brighton, to meet up with you and Debbie,’ I said. Sarah laughed, a cynical laugh.

  ‘You surprise me.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ I said. ‘She wanted us all to go out, she wanted to see me. And then she doesn’t turn up, appears after I’m gone and doesn’t even try to call me. You don’t think that’s just a little bit strange?’

  ‘Whatever you say?’

  ‘It’s the truth.’ My voice was louder than I wanted it to be, louder than it should have been in a public place. From frustration, because my words had no impact on her.

  It was then I saw the look on her face that brought it all back. Fifth year. The two of us in front of the teacher, wet from the water, out of breath and crying. In the distance the sound of an ambulance siren getting closer and closer though we already knew it was too late for Lucy Redfern; the screams of Lucy’s twin James piercing the air. Sarah and I were on the bank shouting our version of events to Mr Payne the PE teacher and even though we weren’t listening to each other I knew her words didn’t fit mine and mine didn’t fit hers. We had blankets placed round us and were told to sip sugary tea which of course we couldn’t because we were shaking so violently. And all the time this look of horror, of disbelief, which didn’t leave Sarah’s face, not for hours, not until her mum came and drove her away in a maroon Ford Escort.

  ‘It was a long time ago, Sarah. An accident.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Don’t play dumb. It wasn’t like that and you know it,’ I said.

  ‘Of course it wasn’t, Rachel.’ Her words were heavy with sarcasm.

  I didn’t answer. There was nothing to say. She hadn’t forgotten the past. Does anyone? I tried to escape it too. But it kept on finding me.

  Sarah took her coat from behind the chair and picked up her bag. I had finished my coffee but waited for her to leave. We didn’t have enough conversation to get us to the door.

  ‘Let’s keep in touch, you know, if we hear anything,’ I said and she nodded. ‘I’m sure they’ll find her soon.’ But my words were lost in the hum of the coffee machine. She was already walking to the door.

  I went back on to the seafront and followed the road round to the pier. Against the sea, so dark and endless, I felt small and insignificant and wondered if I was making too much of the situation. Next week, when you’d reappeared, I would see this for what it was – an insignificant little drama. Clinging to that thought I carried on walking up towards the Old Steine, and then I saw it: the headline gracing the Brighton Argus billboard outside the newsagent’s – FEARS FOR MISSING BRIGHTON WOMAN. You were nowhere and everywhere.

  I ran and ran until I got to the bandstand where there were no shops and posters and no pictures of you. I took out my BlackBerry and dialled.

  ‘It’s Rachel at NNN,’ I said when he answered. There was a pause.

  ‘Rachel, sorry, my hands are tied on this one. And we don’t have much to go on. I promise you’ll be the first to know when we do.’

  ‘She’s a friend,’ I said and listened to a deep breath being sucked in through teeth.

  ‘Is she now?’ The emphasis was on the ‘now’. I thought he would be more surprised.

  ‘An old one,’ I replied.

  ‘When can you come in?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

  Your face was hanging on the wall in the police station, your deep brown hair that fell down in waves, your tanned skin and those eyes, the sharpest, crystal blue. Everyone always said you should have had brown eyes with your colouring; the fact you didn’t made them all the more hypnotic. You looked as if you were peering down into the room and smiling in satisfaction at what you could see. Because in that airless office there must have been fifteen or twenty people, and every one of them was searching for you.

  Underneath your photo, on a whiteboard, was a timeline with locations. Brunswick Place, Marine Parade, Cantina Latina, King’s Road. And then nothing. The point at which you had vanished into the cold night air.

  I stood in the middle of the room waiting for DCI Gunn to finish his conversation with a youngish blond woman in jeans and a pink shirt. She must have been all of five foot next to his six foot five. I tried to eavesdrop, picking up enough to work out what she was doing; trawling the CCTV cameras on Friday night to see if you had made an appearance.

  A phone ringing on the empty desk next to me disturbed my thoughts. I looked around to see if anyone was going to answer it. No one made a move. On and on it went. Each ring amplified in my head. Couldn’t they see it mattered? What if it was someone with information? Or you. And then it stopped.

  Finally DCI Gunn led me to through the room to his office. Until now our meetings had taken place in an old boozer in Hove just off Church Road. I’d call him Roger and order him a pint of Poacher’s Choice and a Diet Coke for me. By the third pint, when his cheeks blushed from the alcohol, he would be more amenable to sharing information. Not that he was alone in that. How else do you think we got our stories? Coppers, criminals who liked to talk, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference in the way you wooed them. Flattery and booze (and the occasional backhander) and before you knew it the exclusives and the tip-offs would be coming your way. It was all part of the game we played to stay ahead of the pack. And getting the senior officers on side meant that when a big story came up you could bypass the press officers and the ‘no comment’ lines they peddled.

  But this inner sanctum was unfamiliar territory for me. I realised my eye was twitching and my eye always twitched when I was nervous. And knowing that made my heart beat faster. I was out of breath by the time I reached his office.

  ‘Please,’ said DCI Gunn, pointing to a seat opposite his desk. His voice was starchy, formal. It was not going to be a ‘Roger’ kind of day.

  I sat down and looked at the neat stacks of paper and files on his desk. On each side of his PC were two lines of yellow Post-it notes, almost flawless in their symmetry. The computer was on an angle, away from me, so I couldn’t see what was written on them. On his desk a Parker pen was positioned parallel to his keyboard; a stapler was on a right angle next to it. I was struck by the perfection of it.

  It’s funny, isn’t it, what a desk can say about someone. Looking at the papers and the pen and the stapler I saw in DCI Gunn a man beaten by the vagaries, the randomness of his job, desperate to instil order wherever he could. Or maybe he was just tidy.

  ‘So,’ he said, making the word last longer than it should, ‘it must have come as a shock, yesterday.’ He let that hang in the air. My eye twitched again.

  ‘I … seeing her face, in that room …’ I let my sentence trail off and tried to compose myself. ‘I’m still waiting for someone to tell me it’s all a mistake.’

  I’m not sure what I hoped to find
in his face, Clara. Hope? Reassurance? I found neither.

  He wasn’t even looking at me. His gaze was fixed on a red elastic band that he stretched out between his fingers which were thin and surprisingly feminine. He kept his nails long, too long for a man’s, and I saw they were thick and yellowing at the tip.

  ‘Good report last night,’ he said, finally looking up.

  ‘You saw it?’ I asked. I always assumed police had better things to do than watch themselves on the TV news.

  ‘I was around all day,’ he said. He took the elastic band from between his fingers and put it in a drawer in his desk. I had his full attention.

  ‘I wasn’t really thinking straight. Everything happened so quickly, after the press conference I was straight on air. I tried to tell them … I didn’t even know what I was saying.’ I paused. He was still staring at me. His stare would not let me go. I didn’t know where to put my eyes so I rummaged in my bag, pulled out my phone and handed it to him.

  ‘I was in Cantina Latina on Friday night. I didn’t want to go but Clara went on and on about meeting up with these girls we used to go to school with. Her new friends. Then she sent this.’ I pointed to the phone, which he still had in his hand. ‘And that was it.’

  ‘But she did turn up, didn’t she?’

  He was leaning back in the chair, with his hands clasped behind his back, a pose that stretched his shirt more than seemed wise. TIME TO CUT BACK ON THE POACHER’S CHOICE.

  ‘So you say, but I don’t understand. I tried to call her all night. Why didn’t she call me?’ I asked.

  He made no attempt to answer.

  ‘Clara’s my oldest friend. The thought of something happening to her … We were always so close.’ My voice was quiet, thin.

  ‘Were?’ DCI Gunn.

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that, Clara. You were my oldest friend, you were part of me, that would never change, but we had drifted away from each other. I couldn’t deny it. I didn’t know you properly any more, not bone-deep the way I used to. That was when I made the decision to tell DCI Gunn about your history in case it had a bearing on what happened. It’s not what you would have wanted, but he would have found out anyway and now wasn’t the time for secrets. You were missing. The police needed to be armed with all the facts.

  ‘She went away,’ I said, ‘when she was nineteen, for treatment.’ I expected that to cause a ripple of interest, but his face gave nothing away. ‘Psychiatric treatment, she had a breakdown.’ I stopped, aware that the situation called for tears. My tears. And Jesus, I could cry buckets watching The X Factor but for some reason I couldn’t cry when I needed to, when DCI Gunn expected me to collapse in a puddle.

  ‘What was the trigger?’ he asked, the policeman in him searching for a cause and effect. But not everything happens like that. Some things just are.

  ‘It’s hard to say. My mum died and she took it badly.’

  ‘Your mum?’

  ‘They’d become close. Clara took her death badly.’ That was true wasn’t it, Clara? You didn’t cope with Niamh dying. You crumbled under the weight of your grief. ‘She was away for seven years. I mean she wasn’t having treatment all that time. Her dad paid for her to study in Madrid and then she taught English and went travelling. She came back about a year and a half ago because her dad was dying.’

  ‘And did she seem different?’

  Does anyone stay the same after seven years?

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she was different.’

  He made a face and motioned with his hand for me to elaborate.

  There were so many ways in which you’d changed, Clara. The things you said, how you behaved. You seemed angry, aloof, distant. But most strikingly the spark in you seemed to have been extinguished. I worried about you, God knows I tried to help, to make it better, but it was never enough.

  ‘It was as if something was eating away at her,’ I said, aware that the DCI would have wanted a more solid explanation.

  I told him how I went to check on you in your flat on that Friday night of your disappearance but you didn’t answer. I described how I walked along and booked myself into a hotel afterwards. And after two hours of explaining and talking I ran out of words, but still I waited, like a schoolchild who needed to be excused before I could get up and go.

  ‘If I can be of any more help, just call me.’ I said, inviting him to dismiss me.

  ‘Why didn’t you report her missing, Rachel?’ he said, smiling at me in the way a shark might before it swallows you whole.

  It was a legitimate question. I can see that now, but at the time I was taken aback. The truth is it didn’t occur to me that something might have happened to you. I was angry with you. I was being stubborn. I thought you should call me first and apologise for your no-show.

  ‘Clara has been …’ I searched for the right word. ‘Flaky since she got back. You said yesterday her disappearance is out of character and it is. I mean I don’t think she has ever gone missing for days before. But sometimes she’ll make arrangements and not turn up, or she’ll turn up without warning you. Her moods are unpredictable—’ A knock on the door stopped my flow. DCI Gunn shouted for whoever it was to wait and walked across the room to open it. I turned to see the petite blond officer from earlier. There was a conversation, too hushed to hear. Then DCI Gunn came back in with a brown file.

  ‘Look, if there’s anything I can do, just call me, OK.’ I stood up to leave but he raised his hand to stop me.

  ‘There is one thing you can do before you go.’ He put the file on the table and took out three pictures. Images, grainy and blurred. Captured on CCTV.

  It was you. I could see that much.

  And someone else.

  Next to you.

  You’d pulled the collars of your coat up against the wind and your body was close to his, like you were holding on to him, holding him up. You weren’t smiling. Neither was he, I took some comfort from that. His eyes looked like they were closed but that could have just been the shot, the moment the image was taken.

  ‘Do you know who that is?’ The DCI pointed to the male figure.

  I nodded; my head was heavy on my neck. A fist clenched in my stomach.

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered, barely audible.

  What else could I say? I’d woken up to his face every morning for almost two years.

  Chapter Six

  THERE WAS A hole, deep and black and bottomless, in that office and I was hurtling through it. My body was stiff with terror. I wanted to grab hold of something to stop my fall but nothing. There was nothing.

  I shook my head. I wanted to shake the image out of it. Jonny and Clara. Clara and Jonny. Without me. Why? What was he doing there? Everything was changing. All the things I thought I could hold on to were being snatched away. I didn’t know what I would be left with. I wanted to curl up in a ball and silence the screams inside my head.

  ‘Why would they have been together, Rachel?’ DCI Gunn asked. There was a harshness to his question. Surely my face told him everything he needed to know.

  How the fuck should I know?

  I said nothing.

  ‘Do you have any idea, Rachel, what Jonny was doing there? Were you supposed to be meeting him too?’ He leant forward, across the desk, to force me to look at him. His hot spittle landed on my cheek.

  ‘Jonny was staying in Gatwick. He had an early flight the next morning.’

  ‘When was the last time you spoke to him?’

  It was an obvious question. I bristled, knowing how he would react to my answer.

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘You haven’t spoken to Jonny since he was out with Clara?’ The sound of your name in the same sentence as Jonny’s stung me. You and Jonny. Jonny and you. DCI Gunn looked flushed; his upper lip beaded with perspiration. He licked his lips, like he’d smelt blood, ready to swoop down for the kill.

  ‘He’s a documentary-maker. He was filming in Afghanistan. It’s not unusual for me not to hear from him for days, sometimes
a whole week when he’s away filming.’

  ‘But you would have expected him to call you?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t have expected him to call me. I’ve just told you, he’s away filming. In Afghanistan. Sometimes it’s impossible to get a phone line out.’

  He leant back in his chair and folded his arms. I imagined he was planning his next line of attack. I wanted to wake up from this dark dream and find myself back living my old life, the one I inhabited before you disappeared. I tried to find my voice, a calm, even voice to defend myself.

  ‘Look, Roger,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s happening any more. I’m scared shitless, to tell you the truth. Yesterday I found out my best friend had gone missing and today you show me a picture of her and my boyfriend together on the night she disappeared. I have no idea why they were together; he should have been at Gatwick. But I’m certain of one thing – however it looks, you’ve got it wrong. Jonny wouldn’t betray me and he wouldn’t hurt anyone. Least of all Clara. He is protective of her because she’s my friend and he knows we go back a long way.’ I watched him pursing his lips and stroking his chin. I thought I might have got through to him. He looked up and nodded as if he had taken my words on board.

  ‘Were they having an affair?’ he asked.

  ‘Jesus, no! Did you hear anything I said?’

  ‘I have to ask these questions, Rachel. The fact that we know each other doesn’t change anything. We need to find Jonny because as it stands he was the last person to see Clara. I don’t have to tell you the implications of that.’

  ‘Well, when you find them tell them you’re not the only person who wants some answers.’ I smiled, half forced a laugh to try to make light of the situation. But even as I said it I knew it hit the wrong note.

  ‘I hope it works out that way,’ he said but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. He stood up and walked round from his desk so he was next to me, reaching out to shake my hand. His palm was cold and damp like putty. I could feel the grip of his hand crunching mine. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said as he showed me to the door.