Aidan watches Lauren pack. Her movements are as familiar to him as his own.
They met at a wedding, but it was the dates that followed that he really remembers. The day after the wedding. Breakfast at the hotel, was it? They ate croissants – Lauren put cheese in hers, which Aidan told her was wrong. They spoke about weird combinations of food – he’s sure that’s all they spoke about – but when they looked up, they realized that everybody had gone, and hours had passed. They veered from topic to topic. He was an only child. She had a sister. His dad was dead, so were her parents. Both of their fathers had had heart attacks. Her mother had had pancreatic cancer. A swift death, Lauren had said, ripping another croissant in half. They covered the basics but the basics were intimate, for them. Grief, loss, love. She missed her mother, even though she’d been ‘difficult to really like’, Lauren said, looking him straight in the eye.
And now, here. Ten years later. Nine years of marriage – they married quickly, so sure of each other. And now he’s watching her leave him.
His chest is full of panic. It feels like there is something trapped inside him that is fighting to get out. He sits on the edge of the bed while Lauren packs around him. In twenty-four hours, she is going to be taken from him for ever. And he’s not permitted to know where she will be. Already, she has pulled away from him. There are things she cannot tell him.
He sits there, watching her try to decide between two pairs of jeans, then put them both in, and he wonders if he has made the right decision.
He sits on the bed, facing her, so she can’t see his phone, and logs on to his Facebook profile. Within a few minutes, he has deleted all of his friends. Next, he edits his profile, changes his name to something anodyne: James Thomas. Then he removes his photos – anything identifying – but leaves a couple of shots of sunsets and shared posts, just to look like he’s not a brand-new account.
He gives his profile a once over. He’s sure he’s caught most of it. That there is nothing there that he’s missed. He is now James Thomas who likes REM and Tom Hanks and Marvel. Mainstream, unidentifying, popular stuff that everybody likes. It is a kind of witness protection, he concedes. His own new identity. His own way through.
He heads to the bathroom and looks at himself in the mirror. He’s pretty nondescript. Forty-something. Lines across his forehead. Clean-shaven. Round glasses. Mid-brown hair. Tall. He looks at himself. He hopes nobody will connect James Thomas to the man who sat in the public gallery. The injunction prevented the press from running any photographs, but if he meets these people … they might know him. He finds some old sample contact lenses he got and never wore in an old wash bag, and puts them in. He puts his razor away. He’ll grow a beard, too.
Next, he strides into the kitchen and gets out the small black plastic phone he purchased yesterday evening from a market stall in Camden. He places it in the kitchen drawer.
Untraceable.
Undetectable.
Private.
‘The group has now been made private. Aidan doesn’t know why, but his eye through the keyhole is now blocked up.’
He looks at James Thomas’s profile photo – Aidan himself wearing a Hallowe’en costume complete with mask – and navigates to the closed Find Girl A group. After a second’s hesitation, he presses ‘request to join’.
Because that is Aidan’s plan.
He’s going to infiltrate them.
Why do you want to #FindGirlA?
It’s a message from somebody calling himself Kevin Green.
Aidan goes to Kevin’s profile. It’s clearly a fake, a brand-new account set up, created just a few days ago, no friends.
Aidan navigates to Messenger and taps out a reply.
Because I want her to get what she deserves! he types.
A second later, a new notification pops up.
What skills do you have to help find her?
Aidan sits on the bed, thinking. All he knows is computers. How do people find people? He takes a few seconds more to think before replying.
I can build you a scraper, he types. To comb the internet, to find her.
Sold to the man in the mask, Kevin says.
And then I can join? he writes.
We’ll see if you pass first.
Later, he comes out of the shower and stops on the landing after hearing Lauren’s voice. He showered after overhearing her say goodbye to Poppy on the phone.
‘It isn’t that I don’t love you,’ she is saying. She’s sitting on the bottom step, next to the radiator.
He stops, unseen, at the top, just looking.
‘It’s just that sometimes in life –’ she wipes at her nose, ‘– you just have to do the things you don’t want to do. Sometimes, adulthood is rocks and hard places. And I know how much you love to chew rocks, but …’
Aidan shifts on his feet, and sees: she is talking to Bill. His head is in her lap, and she is bent over him, her tears drip, drip, dripping on to his fur.
17
Lauren
Islington, London
Her things are packed. Two black rectangles sitting on her bed containing everything Lindsey will ever know. She’s always been a bad packer, will take eight tops on a weekend break. Hannah used to pack for her. She is ruthlessly organized, overtook Lauren quickly in ‘being an adult’. She cleans a different room every day of the week in her house and has a capsule wardrobe. Lauren needs to ask Hannah how to pack, but she hasn’t even told her she’s going. Lauren can’t find the headspace. She’s lost everything in a single weekend.
There is nothing identifying in Lauren’s cases now. She left her leopard-print Converse trainers in the wardrobe. Photographs of Aidan remain here, on the iPhone she will soon give up to the protection service.
She shakes her head as she struggles to do up the zips.
‘There’s nothing identifiable in there?’ Aidan says.
‘It’s all bland stuff,’ Lauren says. ‘They’ve told me I can’t take anything too personal. No crazy shoes … no zebra-print jumpers.’
Aidan’s mouth twists into a sort of smile. She is sure he remembers the zebra-print jumper she first saw across the street in a shop window while they were on holiday in Devon. The next morning he woke to an empty bed and texted Lauren.
You’re out buying that bloody jumper, aren’t you?
She was, yes, but she was also purchasing his reaction: incredulous, a wide smile, a spotlight on only her.
Her eyes fill with tears as she thinks of all of those memories. The time she went to IKEA and couldn’t fit her shopping in the car. She had sent him a text.
I bought a spontaneous bookcase and it won’t fit.
He’d left work early to come. They’d jostled with the flatpacks, trying to push them into Aidan’s car. Halfway through, he’d said, ‘What even is a spontaneous bookcase?’ and they’d doubled over, laughing.
Lauren walks upstairs to check how Zara’s getting on. As she stands in her doorway, her heart breaks as she watches Zara carefully packing an entire suitcase with library books. ‘I can’t leave them here,’ she says.
‘They’ve got your name on them,’ Lauren says gently.
Zara shrugs. ‘But …’
‘You can bring the ones you own,’ Lauren says.
‘But I’ve not finished this one,’ Zara says, brandishing a pale blue book with a clear plastic library cover.
‘I know,’ Lauren says. ‘Anyone you want to call – before we go?’ she says lightly.
Zara sits on the bed, her hands around her forehead like blinkers. ‘It’s just a bit … it’s all a bit massive, isn’t it?’
‘I know. I haven’t even told Auntie Hannah.’
Zara throws her an understanding smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says sincerely. She looks at her for a second.
‘We can join a new library.’
‘I’m halfway through To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.’
Lauren raises her shoulders to her ears. She doesn’t say any more than tha
t. Doesn’t need to.
‘Fine.’ Zara sets the book down. ‘Let’s bounce, as Poppy would say.’ Zara smiles, which makes Lauren laugh.
‘She was trying to take library books,’ Lauren says when she arrives back in the living room.
‘I wish she hadn’t lied,’ Aidan says. Here, now. Of all the things to say. ‘If she hadn’t lied, this wouldn’t be happening,’ he adds, as though that is an explanation.
Aidan said goodbye to Zara earlier. Lauren doesn’t know what took place in that conversation, but she hopes it wasn’t this.
‘It might. She would have … they would have been angry with her even if she told the truth,’ Lauren says.
‘The CPS wouldn’t have prosecuted,’ Aidan says with the resigned tone of somebody who is seven steps ahead.
‘Yeah,’ Lauren says softly.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ he admits, and she loves him for that.
They’re parting ways. But there’s no divorce, no affair, no death. No illicit text message discovered on a lit-up iPhone. No condom found in a wallet. No traffic accident, no sudden-onset chest pain in the shower. But this is a divorce. This is a death bed. Make no mistake.
‘What about everyone?’ she says. Her brain throws up different problems she is not able to deal with. Poppy was so nice about it, but will she privately think her stepmother has abandoned her? What about Hannah? God, Hannah. Hannah and her baby-making. Years and years of IVF behind her, their latest attempt commenced a few weeks ago. What if it works? What if it doesn’t?
‘I’m going to tell Hannah the truth,’ Aidan says.
‘Yes.’
‘And the rest … I think I’m going to say –’
‘Say what?’ Lauren says sharply.
He is blushing across his cheekbones. ‘Say we’ve split up.’
Her eyes widen.
‘Well, what am I supposed to tell them?’ Aidan asks. ‘That you’ve gone on a fucking holiday?’
‘Don’t swear at me,’ she says, sinking into the armchair, her legs weak. ‘I don’t know.’
‘It’ll result in the least questions,’ he says.
‘They’ll think I’m an ignorant cow, never saying goodbye. My colleagues …’
‘I’ll say I had an affair.’
She looks up sharply. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t taint us.’ Her eyes are wet. Aidan blurs as she looks at him.
‘We’ve got to let that go,’ he says. ‘We can’t care what they think. We need to keep you safe.’
Lauren says nothing, staring at the two suitcases. ‘We haven’t split up,’ she says.
‘No.’
‘Have we?’
‘No.’
Neither of them says anything for a few minutes.
‘Two years,’ Aidan says.
She raises her eyes to him.
He’s looking straight at her.
‘They said yesterday that it’s supposed to be for ever,’ she says softly.
‘Okay … well, I’m not going anywhere.’ He puts his hands on his hips. ‘Am I?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll be faithful. Waiting here for you. I will see you again, I know I will.’
Lauren closes her eyes. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘Okay. Two years. If you don’t hear from me … move on.’
‘I think I will hear from you,’ he says.
As she looks curiously at him, a signal passes between them. She’s not sure what, but it’s more than just chemistry. It is … something.
‘Stay safe.’ He holds her gaze. He reaches behind him for the doorknob, still looking at her. He opens the door a few inches, letting the cool winter air in. ‘Well,’ he says.
They don’t embrace or kiss. It would be too loaded. The final kiss, the final touch. Instead, he does something far more intimate. He reaches over and ruffles her hair, just the ends of it, mussing them up, tangling the ends, his touch on her shoulder light. He retreats through the door, after that. She watches him go down the street, the sunlight behind him, leaving him in shadow.
She reaches for her suitcase and thinks she won’t brush her hair, not ever again. Those strands tangled by her husband will intertwine for ever.
AFTER
* * *
18
Aidan
Islington, London
One day gone
The first sound Aidan hears in his first morning in the afterworld is the ping of Facebook Messenger. It’s Kevin.
Your task: build us a tool to scrape for new social media profiles appearing online that match Girl A’s interests. We stood outside her house last night. It’s all shut up. Neighbours said they’ve gone away. Reckon the police have taken her into protection. Comb for new images too that match this.
Kevin sends over a photograph of Zara, taken from her Facebook profile. Smiling, nervous Zara. Aidan’s heart turns over as he downloads it. He is a double agent. What is he doing?
Sorted, Aidan types, his hands shaking.
They were at the house. Thank God he was at his mother’s. Thank God. He has to move, in case they’re still monitoring the house.
Aidan spends the morning coding a bot that will scrape the internet for any new Facebook, Twitter or Instagram profiles within Zara’s age range and with her hobbies. He sends a video of it working over to Kevin. He scrolls down the results page, presses ‘scrape’, and the links are added to a spreadsheet of viables.
Kevin writes back immediately.
Thanks.
A notification on Facebook then appears.
Your request to join the group Find Girl A has been approved.
Of course, Aidan is going to run the scraper himself and never give anybody the results. He will give the group fake results. Fabrications.
He sits up in bed, where he’s been working, and puts his feet down on to the bare wood floor. They stripped the boards two years after they moved in, using a rented machine to varnish them which Lauren rode around on, her eyes scrunched up in laughter. ‘I want to commute to work on this thing!’ she’d said. God, she was fucking fun.
He opens the blinds. Grey skies. Silence. He closes his eyes. Lauren is just at work, he pretends. She always got up earlier than him, was forever busy. Cleaning with that stuff she loved – Zoflora. Buying ‘oven bags’ and dissolving the contents of their oven, holding up a disgusting bag full of rust-coloured slop. That time she made a rainbow cake and enjoyed using the food colouring so much that she later made him a purple stew. ‘Blue mashed potato tomorrow,’ she’d said.
He is going to move into Lauren’s old flat in Shepherd’s Bush soon. He phoned 101 last night, for advice, alone in bed, where he’s wanted to be ever since she left. ‘Lie low, wherever you think they’re least likely to discover you,’ they said, the language deliberately distanced, as though the decision was for Aidan only.
Aidan used to play chess with his father before he died. Every Friday night. In the garden during summer, by the fire in the winter. His mum would make the drinks. His father was excellent and would often win in a handful of moves. ‘Five steps ahead,’ he would say wryly as he moved so Aidan’s king was in check, tapping the board with his index finger.
Aidan thinks now of the chess matches and his dead father. He never got even remotely good, but maybe now he can. Maybe he can stay five steps ahead.
First, he thinks, looking at the bay window where Lauren used to sit, he will infiltrate them. Become one of them.
Second, he will work out who they are.
Third, he will wait until they’re ready to commit a crime and gather the evidence. He’ll do it so much better than the police. They’re public sector. They would google the group once a week.
And then, fourth, before they do it, he will entrap them. Hand them over to the police.
Timing will be everything.
Fifth, his wife and child will come home.
Five steps ahead. Check.
He starts to pack. He takes more than just a bag, more than just a few clothes. He pa
cks jumpers and T-shirts and shorts, too: he can’t come back here. Two suitcases, just like Lauren did. Thank God. Thank God their rental flat is empty. Thank God they procrastinated over re-letting it.
He looks around the house before he leaves. Bill Gates’s lead is in his hand. Bill trots faithfully after him down the street, following him wherever he will go. Trusting that he is doing the right thing. That he is keeping them both safe.
When he gets to the flat, Lauren’s old flat, full of memories of her, he checks the group, but it’s gone. He messages Kevin, who writes back immediately.
Group’s been shut down. Club only now.
I can be club, Aidan writes, without thinking.
No ur not.
Aidan’s face twists into a smile. Text speak. Fucking teenage yobs. Fans.
You need this scraper. The internet is the fastest way to find someone, Aidan writes. He googles missing people quickly, then types again to Kevin. Search for skip tracing. I know about it, he lies. He can learn. Aidan is a fast learner. My services are for hire.
Kevin types on and off for ten minutes. Okay, he says eventually. We need your services. Come to Warehouse 6B, South Croydon, Tomorrow. 7.30 a.m.
A second message arrives.
Tell no one.
19
Lauren
The M40, northbound
One day gone
Here they are, just Lauren, Jon and Zara in the car, in awkward silence.
When was the last time they were this far north? They went to Cambridge last year, maybe then? It was just after Zara had turned fourteen. This is how Lauren pinpoints dates: using Zara’s age. She has done so ever since she was born. Zara was three, so it was twelve years ago. She doesn’t work in years any more. She works in Zaras.
Lauren sighs as Jon indicates to change back into the slowest lane. He is doing dead on seventy miles per hour. Zara is staring out of the window in the back. They surrendered their iPhones to Jon, but haven’t yet been given new ones. Zara hasn’t complained. She’s not bothered by the smartphone like Lauren is. Zara will probably enjoy being temporarily ‘off grid’.
How to Disappear Page 9
