How to Disappear

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘You’ll start school the day after tomorrow,’ Jon says, directing his gaze to Zara. ‘Millfield. Comprehensive. But we’ll pop over tomorrow afternoon. Sure you’ll have questions, after your first night. Anyway.’ He puts his suit jacket back on. ‘Time,’ Jon says. He raises his eyes to the window, and Lauren sees another car passing by. The beam of the headlights is refracted in the rain into a blurred, imperfect diamond. ‘Practise filling in the gaps tonight. This is just the start – you need to work out your own stories.’

  ‘That’s it?’ Zara says shrilly.

  Lauren looks at her in surprise.

  ‘What about the rest? Who am I supposed to be?’

  ‘You can be yourself, just with a different name,’ Lauren says quickly, but she feels sad as she looks at her daughter, who has always seemed ashamed of herself anyway, without this.

  ‘If you stick to the rules, you’ll be fine,’ Jon says as he scrapes his chair back.

  Lauren sees him into the hallway.

  ‘And just so you know,’ Jon says to her when they’re alone, ‘we have installed this.’ He opens the front door and points above the threshold. ‘A doorbell camera. So you can monitor who comes and goes. Anything unusual, you call me, alright?’

  ‘Okay,’ Lauren says, looking into the eye of the CCTV camera. Aidan always wanted one of these, but she held off, knowing he’d obsess over it. She looks out into the blackness beyond them. The wind sounds so full-bodied, so loud. She draws her jacket around her more tightly, and looks at the camera again. She’s glad of it, that tiny piece of security, here, where they’re so totally isolated.

  Jon shows her the app, then turns again, on the threshold of the door. ‘And in general safety terms,’ he says, ‘we don’t brief kids about these things – don’t want to scare them – but don’t walk places in a straight line. Always check if someone is following you by varying your route. Don’t be too open or too guarded. Don’t answer the phone or the door to anybody you don’t know, and if a car pulls over next to you, go and get somebody’s attention. Anybody’s. Okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lauren says, blinking, overwhelmed by the deluge of information. ‘Don’t walk places in straight lines. Don’t talk to strangers.’

  ‘Right …’ Jon pauses. ‘And I know your husband decided to stay in London …’

  For the first time, Lauren sees a flash of something human cross his features. A brief flicker of his strawberry-blond eyebrows, like a poorly tuned television momentarily picking up a different channel.

  ‘He has another child. Zara isn’t his child,’ Lauren says.

  ‘I know,’ Jon says. ‘You said.’ And, even if she hadn’t already told him, he would know. He must know all sorts of things about her. How many smear tests she’s had. Her grade D in GCSE home economics.

  ‘I’ll stick to the rules,’ she says.

  He pauses, hand on the doorknob. ‘Nobody’s ever been seriously harmed or killed in witness protection in the UK,’ he says.

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘Nobody who has obeyed the rules, anyway.’ He leaves right after he’s said it, as though it is the only sentence he really wanted to utter to her. Or, at least, the most important one.

  20

  Zara

  Coniston, the Lake District

  One day gone

  The bedsheets don’t feel right. They’re stiff and starched-feeling, the duvet crunchy against Zara’s chin. She can hear her mother turning over in the bedroom next door. Just a slim wall divides them.

  Zara tries to think what would make her happy. What would Poppy do? Buy make-up samples and experiment. Maybe she will do that.

  Zara has been ripped from her life. Parts of it – things she took for granted – are hanging loose, like torn threads. That she would often go down for a bowl of cereal at night, and pass Aidan, who had the same habit. They’d stand there chatting, bare legs lit by the light of the fridge, she eating Cornflakes, he Weetabix.

  And now, here she is, in the Lake District with a secret. One she can’t even bring herself to think about, to turn to face and look at.

  She misses the noise of London. The silence of the Lake District keeps her awake. It is punctuated by strong winds that seem to shake their row of terraces, by geese flying overhead, and by an occasional passing car. She listens each time she hears one, her whole body tensed. Is this the car that contains the Find Girl A group? But no. Each car becomes louder and then fades, driving away, and each time, her body relaxes.

  She misses her school friends, Kelly and Hattie. She wonders what they’ve been told.

  She rolls on to her side and thinks about Jamie, and the homeless community. Richie, Anna and the rest. They are Islington’s subculture. They know all about each other, but nobody knows about them. It is so wrong that there is a whole section of society ignored by everybody. God, she wishes she hadn’t caved in in the witness box. She’s let them all down.

  In the end, she gets up and goes to shower, even though it’s late. She enjoys standing there in the steam, the water searing against the back of her neck.

  She’s made her decision now. She’s here. And now she has to follow through with it. And there are things to follow through with.

  Back in her bedroom, Zara checks her new phone. She is ready.

  When she finally sleeps, she dreams of school photo day. The flash of the bulb. Her fixed smile. Her photograph getting into the wrong hands, ending up online, them coming for her, an amorphous group of men in hoodies. She wakes up with a start, her back sweating, and doesn’t sleep afterwards.

  21

  Lauren

  Coniston, the Lake District

  One day gone

  Aidan often used to make an envelope at the bottom of the bed, folding the duvet over itself. Lauren used to say it annoyed her, but now she does it herself, because it feels like he’s in the bed next to her.

  The Lake District is completely silent. Lauren sits there, listening to the quiet, imagining the Find Girl A group closing in. A mechanical whirring rings out in the night, and Lauren feels adrenaline flash across her body.

  No. That’s just the shower turning on. Zara mustn’t be able to sleep, either. She reaches for the iPhone sitting on the bedside table. She logs on to Amazon and she does what she always does best when stressed: she shops. She orders all sorts of rubbish. A heated airer to dry the clothes on. A pack of fancy vanilla-flavoured coffee beans. The witness protection service have provided them with a monthly budget of a thousand pounds, until they’re ‘up and running’ with their new lives, but Lauren isn’t really thinking of that. She is just acting. She spends £150. Candles. Nice cleaning stuff from Method. A cake tin.

  Once the basket is checked out and her new debit card details have been typed in, she feels sated. She will look forward to the packages arriving. Little treats in the wasteland of her life.

  She opens Instagram and signs up under her new name, which she has to think twice about. Lauren Starling is typed so effortlessly, her fingers knowing which keys to push without her thinking. Lindsey Smith is stilted, unfamiliar.

  She browses who to follow. Beyoncé. Mac Cosmetics. She finds a few stock photographs of sunsets and cups of coffee but can’t work out how to backdate them. Should she just ask Jon the next time he comes over? What a banal query. Aidan would know how to do it.

  She wants to look him up.

  But she can’t.

  Instead, she closes her eyes, and imagines his last Instagram photo.

  It was the sunset in his computer room, two and a half weeks ago, before the trial began. Their blond floorboards. Their slatted white blinds that almost bankrupted them but they were too far down the ordering process when they realized the full cost. ‘Morning view’ was the caption.

  It would be so easy to go on to the app and like that photograph. He’d realize, she thinks. He’s smart. Lindsey Smith. Signed up today. Blank profile photo. She could easily tell him who she is. Put up some secret sign or other: they have th
ousands of shared words for things, in-jokes, history, memes he has shown her and laughed at. It would be so easy to contact him. She’s amazed he’s not been blocked for her, this man that she loves. The trust the protection service has placed in her.

  Tears leak out of the side of her eyes and catch in her ears, forming hot, itchy pools. She scratches at them, irritated. She ought to pull herself together. She was a single parent for years. She was fine alone, just fine.

  But she wasn’t in love with somebody then. Her mouth opens in a silent scream and more tears come. Two years. And then what? Life stretches out in front of her without him. It isn’t loneliness, it isn’t starting over, it is heartbreak.

  Early in their relationship, they went to Tuscany. They got a villa, their own pool. Self-catered, though they went out to eat some nights, wanting to save on the washing up, wanting to walk and talk and eat outside, summer air on their skin. The kids – both six – had adjusted easily to the later evenings, and had been well behaved in the restaurants. They’d draw together, wax crayons melting in their little hands in the heat. ‘Are they twins?’ a kindly Italian waiter had asked one night, and Aidan had laughed, not saying yes or no. They’d stayed out too late, gone ten, and Aidan had picked both of them up and carried them, a sleeping child over each shoulder. Lauren had walked the few hundred yards home with him, the sound of crickets at their ankles, dust and sand kicking up miniature clouds between them, and she’d felt that nobody would look after Zara as carefully as him. He’d laid her down in her bed, fully clothed, safe, and smoothed the hair from her forehead, and Lauren had thought: we’ve made it. A blended family.

  Lauren picks her phone back up and stares at the Instagram logo.

  She types in Aidan’s name, then backspaces. She hasn’t done anything, but, nevertheless, it’s a risk, a line already stepped over. An invisible line.

  22

  Aidan

  Shepherd’s Bush, London

  Two days gone

  ‘Yeah, but life is crap sometimes,’ Poppy says down the phone to Aidan, whose heart breaks right there and then. His poor baby, made into a pessimist by the hand she’s been dealt.

  ‘Are you really fine?’ he says to her.

  He glances at his bag across the hallway. Everything reminds him of Lauren. ‘That fucking rucksack,’ she sometimes said to him. ‘Nobody has a rucksack in their forties,’ she’d add, but she would be smiling. It’s brown leather, with two red stripes down the centre. Perfectly inoffensive. He needs it, doesn’t understand how most men live without one. It contains his wallet, spare coins, a bottle of water, his iPad, a charging case. Normal stuff.

  And his burner phone. Ready to communicate with the members of the Find Girl A group.

  ‘Look, I’m a hundy-p.’

  ‘Hundy-p, she says.’

  He can hear her roll her eyes down the phone to him. ‘A hundred per cent,’ she says. ‘You know.’

  ‘Right.’ Aidan laughs quietly.

  ‘I’ve spent a ton on H&M online,’ Poppy says.

  Aidan gives a wan half-smile. His daughter’s dedication to shopping knows no bounds. She could almost be Lauren’s child.

  ‘I’ll transfer you some money.’ He makes a note to write something funny on the internet banking reference. ‘I’ll come over soon,’ he adds.

  ‘Do. I bet it’s quiet over there.’

  He sighs as he thinks of it. Like planets with moons, families come as a set. When a member leaves, the balance is upset: seas flood land, ice ages start, fires rage. He felt it when his father died, and Brenda didn’t have colour in her cheeks for a full year. And he feels it now, too. Zara and Lauren have gone into the void. Some black hole in space – or it may as well be. Aidan tries not to let the thoughts show in his voice. ‘It is,’ he says.

  ‘When I’m lonely I leave the radio on,’ she says.

  ‘Maybe I will.’

  ‘You’ll be fine, I can just feel it,’ she says emphatically, and he doesn’t disagree. He can’t bear to. His little moon, in perpetual orbit of him, her father.

  ‘Hundy-p,’ he says softly.

  Aidan is outside the first Find Girl A meeting.

  It is in a warehouse near South Croydon station, next to a banner that says Christ Embassy, Croydon. It was dark when Aidan got on the overground train, his feet making impressions in the frost. Now, outside the warehouse, it’s only just getting light, the sky a parchment colour, a sepia backdrop behind the buildings. Apparently, it’s less suspicious meeting in the morning.

  He puts his phone in the front pocket of his rucksack. The burner phone is in the main section of the bag, deep inside, in an inner pocket that he made by ripping and sewing it himself. His hands are frozen, his fingers struggling to do his zip back up.

  The warehouse has Dooper Distribution written along the top in amateur-looking bubble lettering. A few pallets are leaning against the wall, evidently unused, covered in splatters of November leaves.

  The silver roller shutter door is down but a red door is ajar. The paint has become mottled in places, faded pink and bright red, intermingled like a rash. He waits outside it, listening, hoping he’s disguised enough, then lets himself in. His heart speeds up. His stomach curls into a tight knot.

  The first thing he sees inside the warehouse is a forklift truck abandoned in one corner. He walks past it and the unlabelled stock, wrapped in so much clear plastic it’s opaque. At the back is a meeting room, and he can see from a small, rectangular window that they’re in there. A man in a brown beanie. A woman with long dark hair standing by the door.

  He pushes it open. The door sticks, then gives, and he almost falls in.

  ‘The final person!’ the man in the brown beanie says. He glances at Aidan, whose fingers instinctively reach to push his glasses up his nose, but he manages to stop himself.

  ‘Welcome,’ the man says. He extends his hand. ‘Brian.’

  Aidan looks at him closely, then releases his hand in shock. The man heading up the vigilante justice group isn’t a child. He isn’t a football fan. A yob. An angry teenager.

  He is Luke’s father.

  He was in the public gallery that day. He will almost certainly recognize Aidan.

  Panic rises up through him, a rushing sound in his ears like running water.

  ‘Nice to see you here,’ Brian says. He’s short, with a dark beard and gold-framed old-fashioned glasses.

  ‘And you,’ Aidan says neutrally, trying to cover the shock on his face. He looks around him. It is more than just members only. Other than Brian, it is only footballers. A couple of lower-profile players. Two people who are clearly coaches – their jackets say so. And the youth team. All sixteen or seventeen. Thirty or so young, strapping men. Aidan swallows. What the fuck is going on?

  He looks to the left of him. And there he is: Luke.

  God, Aidan has been a fool. He thought there would be more people here, that he would be able to hide in plain sight. Not just this. A tiny core.

  ‘James is here to help us with IT,’ Brian says.

  Aidan turns his head immediately. He must become James Thomas. He works in South London. He’s lived there all his life. An ex-wife, a kid. Family around the corner. He practised it on the way over, under his breath on the Tube. He, too, has changed his identity for protection.

  ‘Where are the rest?’ Aidan says. ‘The Find Girl A group?’

  ‘This is private business,’ Brian says, shutting the door behind them. ‘First, a warning.’

  ‘Right,’ Aidan says, his mouth dry.

  ‘You’re here because of your brilliant scraper.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Aidan prattles. ‘I can build as many as you want. To search for the mother, too. They can be designed to capture any new starters on all websites – which we can look through, too, if we can find out what she does for a living.’

  Brian is holding a hand up, and Aidan stops. He is glad to stop talking about his wife in this way.

  ‘Alan is also here,’ Bri
an says, gesturing to a man in a parka in the corner of the room, ‘because of his access to a CCTV database.’

  ‘Okay,’ Aidan replies.

  ‘If you talk about anything that goes on in here,’ Brian says to both of them, his tone icy, ‘we will make your life a living hell.’

  Aidan feels his jaw slacken in shock.

  ‘Okay?’ Brian says. ‘We wouldn’t want that, would we?’

  For the first time, Aidan notices Brian’s muscles. ‘Okay,’ he echoes, thinking only that something very bad is happening. Something worse than he had first thought. Only he doesn’t yet know what.

  ‘Right. To business,’ Brian says.

  Luke shifts his weight against the desk he’s leaning on. He looks uncomfortable. Arms folded. The room is dimly lit, a single bulb in the centre of the ceiling. Some of the men are in the circle of light but most, around the edges of the room, are in shadow, like a sinister congregation, the murderer, Luke, at the near-centre.

  ‘Luke was …’ Brian glances at his son. ‘This time eighteen months ago, Luke was … well, what were you?’ he addresses Luke directly.

  ‘Fit,’ Luke barks. He still has his prisoner’s pallor. His dark hair contrasts with it. ‘About to sign for the Premier League team,’ Luke says bitterly, his lip curling up with the memory of it. ‘Full of … I don’t know –’ he drags a hand over his chin and mouth. ‘Potential.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Brian says in a nurturing tone. ‘Exactly. And then, you defended yourself against a homeless man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now what?’

  Luke clears his throat. ‘A year on remand. Bad food. Limited exercise. Lost my touch. No clubs will take me on, because of “reputational damage”.’ He brings his hands in front of him and clasps them together. The effect makes his shoulder muscles rise up. His eyes look dead.