Precious Thing

by Mcbeth, Colette

  This was what you had driven me to, Clara. I had to paint you as a creature on the edge, someone who was unstable, with a history of depression. I had to demolish the holier-than-thou image of you because you had gone too far, you had killed a man, I was certain of that. And not just any man. You had killed Jonny and you were hunting me. I needed people to see what you were like.

  Were you watching? I hope so because right at the very end of the report was a message for you.

  The best shot, saved until last.

  The painting of the charred pier from your bedroom slowly panned down to the photographs displayed on the chest of drawers beneath. You and your dad, one of him alone. And the one I had added. The smiling shot of you with my mother, the very same one you switched in my bedroom.

  You could torment me with your messages, but I could send you a few of my own.

  Two could play that game.

  ‘Who would have thought it? Jane Fenchurch has talent after all …’ Jake said, kicking me playfully with his foot. ‘Or did you direct her more than you’re letting on.’

  ‘She did it all on her own,’ I said, kicking him back. We were lounging on his sofa, full of wine and tagine, our empty plates discarded on the coffee table in front of us. There was something about Jake’s company that was so easy. He didn’t drown me in sympathy. He didn’t question my behaviour, or demand to see my grief, he just talked and laughed and jibed and allowed me to just be. He was strangely addictive.

  He swirled the wine in his glass, and ran his fingers through the thick flop of hair. A thought hovered and then I tried to hide it at the back of my mind. He caught me watching him but instead of looking away he held my stare.

  ‘What is it about you, Rachel?’ he asked, his brown eyes flashing. ‘You’re a mass of contradictions. I can’t pin you down. You create this tough image for work and then go and shatter it by sticking your neck out for a rookie reporter.’

  The idea of me having a tough image tickled and irritated me in equal measure. It certainly wasn’t something I’d set out to cultivate but at the same time I realised it was probably a widely held opinion amongst my colleagues in the newsroom. And it wasn’t because I was good at my job or ambitious. I was most definitely both of those things but so were plenty of others. It was simply because I happened to be a woman; everyone knows you can’t be ambitious and female without being cold and heartless too.

  ‘So you’re telling me everyone you know is either soft or tough or good or evil. Where have you been living, Disneyland?’ I laughed and poured myself another glass of wine. Jake raised his hands in surrender.

  ‘You just surprise me, that’s all,’ he said. ‘I like being surprised.’ I caught his look and for a moment it locked with mine, and it was there, a charge between us, and then we turned away.

  Not now, so wrong.

  ‘Tell me about Jonny,’ he said. And so I did, honestly and openly.

  ‘I loved him, I don’t know what more to say, the thought of never seeing him again … I don’t know, it could destroy me if I let it. But I can’t,’ I said, ‘I have to keep going.’

  He smiled. ‘Couldn’t have said it better myself.’

  I was helping Jake clear up when Sarah called on my mobile, her inappropriately chirpy voice intruding into the evening. I could never ignore her, you see, still clinging on to the vain hope she might actually ring with some useful information one day.

  ‘How you doing, Rach?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, you know, coping,’ I said in a weak voice, moving away from Jake and the clatter of dishes.

  ‘I was going to ask you if you’d heard anything through work but I guess you’ll have taken a bit of time off, have you? To give yourself a break.’

  ‘I’m still at work. It takes my mind off everything,’ I said.

  ‘Bloody hell, you should go easy on yourself,’ and then she paused, ‘I take it you would have known about Amber whatsherbloodyface giving an interview then? Making out like she thought Clara had topped herself, like she would know. Some people’ll do anything to get their face on TV.’

  ‘I think she was just trying to help.’

  ‘Yeah right, didn’t see her rushing out to put posters of Clara up with the rest of us, did I?’

  I was thinking about how Sarah’s voice had gone from breezy hi-babe chirpiness to vitriolic in a matter of moments when Jake dropped a saucepan on the floor. ‘You at home, babe?’ she said, her breezy tone restored.

  ‘At a friend’s,’ I said, ‘being looked after.’

  ‘You should have said you were with someone instead of listening to me bang on about Amber. Anyway, I won’t keep you from your evening.’

  ‘It’s no problem,’ I said, ‘we’ve finished dinner.’

  ‘Well, I’ll call in a few days. Take care, babe,’ and she rang off.

  By the time the late-night news came on Jake and I were relaxing in the warm glow of wine. Your story had dropped down the running order, bumped from the lead by the first case of bird flu in the UK. There was to be a mass culling of birds at a Bernard Matthews factory-farm in Norfolk. I imagined them weighing it up at the evening news meeting. A hundred and sixty thousand dead birds or one suspected dead woman? ‘But this is the first outbreak of bird flu in the UK,’ someone would have said. ‘It affects more of our viewers than one woman who might just have taken her own life.’

  The birds won out in the end Clara. Dead turkeys over you.

  The bulletin was almost over – the And Finally, a story about a record-breaking week for art sales, with works by Degas and Renoir and Warhol all going on sale – when my phone vibrated in my pocket.

  The message simply read:

  Coming to get you, ready or not.

  Chapter Nineteen

  YOU WERE GOING to be box office, Clara. You were going to be on Crimewatch. Remember when we used to watch it and Nick Ross would say: Don’t have nightmares, do sleep well, which was pointless because they’d just shown a masked intruder kill an old couple in their home and all you thought was ‘if it could happen to them, why not me?’ But we would rather die than admit we were scared shitless and sometimes, if we were having a sleepover, you’d say you could hear footsteps on the stairs to spook me, or worse, you’d tell one of your ghost stories. You’d spin them so well I swore I could see ghosts floating amongst us.

  I’d learnt of the reconstruction after spending the morning in Harrow Road police station reporting the break-in with no obvious signs of forced entry, which generated a wry smile from the PC taking notes, and the malicious texts, which drew a less humiliating response.

  It was Jake’s idea to go to the police and make it official, part of his drive to force me to take the ‘threat’ seriously. I was resistant at first until it occurred to me there were advantages to be gained. I needed the police to have a record of my complaints. If not for now, then for later.

  Out on the street, amongst the shops selling life-size ornamental tigers and halal meats and the fried chicken joints, I checked my phone to find Hilary Benson had left a message asking me to call her urgently. My immediate reaction was that Amber had rumbled us for stretching the truth a little to persuade her to do the interview. Instead, it was my help that Hilary wanted and I was only too happy to oblige.

  I arrived at the Crimewatch studios in White City, a white cube of a building perched on the edge of Shepherd’s Bush, with plenty of time to spare. If you closed your eyes you could almost pretend the sound of the traffic roaring in and out of London on the A40 was the sea crashing around you. I looked up at the sky, so brilliantly, optimistically blue, and thanked the angel looking out for me for dropping such an opportunity into my lap.

  Not that I was without nerves. As I approached the huge BBC sign hanging over the entrance I realised I was apprehensive. Yes, I had plenty of experience facing the cameras, talking live, so much experience that little fazed me. I asked the questions, extracted soundbites from reluctant interviewees. I wrote my scripts, structured my re
ports. But that was the problem. Now the roles would be reversed. And I was about to relinquish control to someone I’d never met.

  From my telephone conversations with Sally McDonald I had assumed she was in her mid twenties. Her chirpy Scottish voice, the way she sang, ‘HEL LO,’ seemed to suggest a youthful enthusiasm unknown amongst more seasoned producers. So I was surprised to see a rather rotund woman in her late forties greet me at reception. ‘HEL LO Rachel,’ she said a little too loudly as she approached. ‘We’ll sign you in and then we can go upstairs and get cracking.’ She must have realised her tone was too jovial because she added with a look of pity, ‘They’re filming the reconstruction in Brighton today, let’s hope it produces some results.’

  On the way up in the lift she told me they had found someone who looked just like you to retrace your footsteps. They always ask a family member or friend if they can, but you didn’t have any sisters to choose from and we didn’t look alike, did we? Different hair, different heights. And of course I was now slimmer than you.

  I followed Sally into a room where the crew, a cameraman and a sound recordist were assembled. The lighting was intentionally low, lit only by a special standard lamp covered with foil. It was the kind of moody atmosphere we often tried to achieve at work, though the time constraints of news meant we rarely pulled it off. Sally asked me if I wanted to put some make-up on and seemed surprised when I declined. I wanted to look the part, Clara, the shattered friend desperate to find you.

  ‘Let’s start if we can,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to be back at work shortly.’

  Sally threw a few obvious questions at me but after the third one it was clear I wasn’t giving her the soundbite she wanted.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said, ‘I’ll ask you the same question a few times over so I can choose the best answer.’ She must have forgotten who she was talking to, I used that kind of line every day when an interviewee wasn’t delivering the clip I needed.

  Not that I minded. Sally could have asked me the same question 100 times over and I would have given her the same answer. It was a trick I learnt from interviewing politicians. Acknowledge the question, then say what you want. If you don’t offer an alternative answer they’ll have no choice but to use the one you want them to.

  Sally persevered for a good thirty minutes and of course I mixed up the words a little so it didn’t seem like I was reading from a script but the message was still the same.

  Sally: ‘Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt Clara?’

  Me: ‘No one would have hurt Clara, she was someone who needed talking care of, made you want to look after her. And I can’t bring myself to think that she is gone. And if she is out there and listening, and I hope she is, I want her to know, I will never give up looking, never. I will find her if it’s the last thing I do.’

  I paused and played with my hands, as if I was nervous, and then I looked up again at Sally, my voice bigger, stronger this time.

  ‘We’ve been friends for so long, I know her inside out. I know what she’s thinking, I know what she wants. So I can’t give up on her, she knows I never will.’

  Thursday night was Crimewatch night and Jake was with me at my flat. We were rarely apart in those days, sharing the same space but somehow allowing each other to breathe. Looking back I can see he was my link to normality, a life raft that stopped me from drowning in Jonny’s loss. He was also separate from you, not yet contaminated by our story which would eventually spill like oil into his life.

  Nine o’clock; my heart thudded in time with the beats of the Crimewatch theme music. No surprise, Clara, you were the top story. Your now universally recognised face so easy on the eye, and your middle-class credentials meant your story had caught everyone’s imagination, while others of missing women and children were given a few lines in the ‘news in brief’ column or ignored completely.

  We waited for the music to finish then Fiona Bruce popped up and, eyebrows knitted in concern, she read the cue to the reconstruction sitting perched on the desk.

  ‘Tonight we want your help in finding this young woman’ (points to picture of you). ‘It’s been more than two weeks since Clara O’Connor, a young artist from Brighton with a bright future ahead of her, was last seen meeting friends in the city on a chilly Friday night. Despite extensive media coverage and numerous appeals the police are still looking for that crucial bit of information that will bring them closer to finding her.

  ‘So if you think you might have seen Clara, please get in touch. Your call could be the one that matters.’

  And then the VT rolled.

  In all honesty I wasn’t convinced your double looked anything like you. Yes, she had long brown hair but it didn’t bounce the way yours did when she moved, and although she was wearing the same mossy green coat you wore on the night you disappeared her gait was all wrong. Jake told me to shut up and watch the film, ‘No one else would notice that,’ he said. The cameras followed your double into Cantina Latina where she laughed with someone I presumed was Sarah Pitts. Then she was outside again on the promenade, saying hello to a man who wore Jonny’s clothes but looked nothing like him. For a sickening moment I thought they might show you embracing, kissing even, a little nod to the police’s narrative of events, but to my relief they just showed you walking along in step with each other.

  That’s where it ended. The pair of you on the promenade, heading into the black night, blown away by a gust of wind from the sea.

  After the reconstruction it was my turn. I wondered if you were watching somewhere, Clara. I hoped you were. Me, sitting in the dim lights of the studio, my ashen face free of make-up, chewing my lips, fiddling nervously with my fingers. Playing the part of the tormented friend. What was your reaction when you heard my words?

  ‘I know what she’s thinking, I know what she wants. I can’t give up on her, she knows I never will.’

  ‘Remind me never to let you on air without make-up,’ Jake said when it was finished. We were sprawled on the sofa. He prodded me in the stomach with his foot.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said. There was a cushion between us. I picked it up and went to throw it in his direction but he saw me and grabbed my hand to stop me. It was there again, the flash between us. A look that lasted too long. He let my hand fall.

  ‘Do you think it’ll work?’ he asked. He wasn’t joking now, his voice heavy, reluctant to say the words that were forming on his lips. He breathed them, so quietly they floated out from him into the air. ‘After all this time, it doesn’t look good.’

  I took the cushion and pushed it into my stomach, leaning forward. Everyone thought you had gone, swallowed up by a January night, sucked into the ether. No one would believe me, would they? But they had to; if I only convinced one person that would be enough and I decided there and then that I wanted that person to be Jake.

  ‘Have you ever just known something?’ I asked. ‘I mean felt it in your bones, had that unshakeable conviction? Sometimes it doesn’t make sense. But you just know. Well, I know Clara is alive.’

  I waited for a pat on my arm, a touch to say there there. A pitying look – poor Rachel can’t face up to the truth. Instead his eyes didn’t leave me, as if what I was telling him had him gripped, as if he had never been as interested in anyone or anything as he was at that moment. Then I took a breath to steel myself.

  ‘She’s out there somewhere,’ I said and I knew from the look on his face he was wondering why that conviction brought me no comfort, why my face clouded with fear. ‘I think she’s out to get me.’

  He listened in silence, for so long, Clara, it broke my heart. He believed me. There was no sliver of doubt, no attempt to convince me otherwise. I told him our secret, I told him what you had done and how it sent you mad. I told him how you blamed me and how I had tried to make things better since you’d got back but how nothing had been right. And I explained how I realised you’d been storing your resentment, bottling it in the deep pit of your stomach, ready for the day when you unl
eashed it and took your revenge.

  Of course there were 300 police officers out there searching for you Clara; your face was so well known it would be hard for you to move around without being noticed. But Jake didn’t question my theory, he didn’t ask how it was possible you could slip through the shadows like a ghost. Like me, he knew anything was possible.

  I was so warm with relief I wanted to cry. It was like one of those secrets you guard and dread sharing, only when you do, you wonder why you thought it was so difficult, because the sharing can be beautiful really. Suddenly you are not alone.

  I wiped my eyes and Jake’s arm slipped round me. ‘I’m scared,’ I told him. And it was true. You had already destroyed so much, Clara, but you could do much more damage. His arm was pulling me in, little by little, and in his arms I couldn’t be scared because they were strong and I was protected, sheltered. And his breath was hot on my face and I was tingling from that and from his hair which brushed my cheek. We looked at each other and it was there between us, so obvious we couldn’t ignore it, and then I felt his lips, warm, like velvet on mine, and I didn’t pull away. Not when his kisses trailed down my neck, not when his fingers were undoing my shirt, tracing the outline of my chest, not when his hand moved across my breasts. I didn’t pull away. I was warm and alive and melted into him as if we were fusing together. And much later, when he was inside me, I wanted him to stay there forever because we seemed to fit so well but mostly because lying there with him made everything else go away.

  I know what you are thinking, Clara: that it was all so wrong, so utterly wrong, such a betrayal of Jonny. But it wasn’t a betrayal of him, not really. It was because I loved Jonny so much, because of the huge gaping hole he left inside me that I had to fill it with something otherwise I would have died. So don’t judge me, not until you’ve walked in my shoes.