The Disappeared jc-2

by M. R. Hall

  'Was she pretty?'

  'For God's sake, Jenny.' For once he was closer to tears than she was. 'You've got to stop being afraid. Letting yourself feel loved is a gamble, don't I know it, but you won't even try.'

  'I ... I do ... I try all time.' The words sounded empty even to her.

  Steve said, 'I've been thinking more about your dream - the part of you that died. Why would you have it again now? When we got together I watched you come alive. You smiled and laughed and lost yourself. And then it was as if you felt too guilty to let yourself be free again.' He tossed his cigarette end onto the fire and drew his palms back across his face. 'What I'm trying to say is, sometimes being faced with a choice is the best way to get bounced out of a rut.'

  He stood then leaned down and kissed her lightly on the forehead. 'Think about it. Give me a call.'

  He disappeared down the steps and into the night.

  Chapter 18

  Jenny had suffered many insults from many men over the years, but no one had accused her of being lifeless in bed. True, she'd allowed herself to think about someone else during sex, but she'd done that many times with her ex-husband and even in the midst of their acrimonious split David had had the good grace to say that he had few complaints about the physical side of their marriage.

  Studying her face in the mirror she did detect a certain absence, a dullness in her eyes, a lack of vitality in her features. She felt sure these changes had occurred since she had been on her latest regime of medication. Yes, the malaise Steve had detected was partly existential, but she could see in her own reflection that it was partly physical too. The pills had been a useful support at her low points, they'd staved off the melancholy and anxiety which forced their way in when her mind wasn't absorbed with work, but they'd blunted her edge, diluted her passion.

  Steve was right: part of her had died, the part that wasn't afraid to feel the rush of life.

  It was time for a new strategy; to cut loose. The deadening drugs must go. Across the wet grass and into the dark stream with Dr Allen's poisons. She'd rather live raw and true, be like McAvoy - a force of nature, a raging gale or a barely moving breeze depending on how the spirit moved her.

  And if she faltered, a glass of something nice or a tranquillizer or two couldn't do any harm.

  She checked in the bottom drawer of the oak chest where she kept her special things - silk underwear, white cotton gloves with delicate pearl buttons, a pair of stockings she had worn only once - and dug down to the bubble-wrapped package she'd stashed there months before, when she'd vowed that the single container was for life-saving purposes only. She slit the sticky tape with nail scissors and released the small brown bottle. Xanax 2mg. Contents 60. A reassuring rattle. She unscrewed the lid and pulled out the plug of cotton wool just to make sure.

  She had her parachute. Now she could jump.

  The phone woke her shortly before seven a.m. on Sunday morning. Jenny went downstairs, turned the ringer to mute and had breakfast in peace. She had no intention of answering any calls today. She had nothing to say to anyone until she had some more answers. Two cups of strong coffee took away her sluggishness. She felt more exposed without Dr Allen's pills; a small hard kernel of fear sat stubbornly between her throat and diaphragm, but there was also an energy she wasn't accustomed to. A sense of excitement, of unleashed emotion. The day felt fresh and full of possibility.

  She arrived outside the Crosbys' home in Cheltenham shortly after nine. It stood in a terrace of identical regency townhouses, distinguished from one another only by the varying designs of their intricate wrought-iron porches and balconies. Built with the first flush of serious colonial money to reach the hands of the merchant classes, these stuccoed streets in the heart of the town were an idealized vision of what it was to be English and civilized. Even on a dull February morning the buildings seemed to shine.

  It was Mrs Crosby who answered the door, her hair still slightly rumpled, though she'd had time since Jenny's call half an hour before to dress and, judging from the smell, burn some toast. She took her through to an elegant, unfussy drawing room that matched tasteful contemporary sofas with an antique chandelier. The paintings were modern abstract, the huge decorative mirror above the white marble fireplace was tarnished with age. Eight-feet-high windows looked out over a mini Italianate garden.

  Jenny said, 'It's lovely. So light.'

  Mrs Crosby offered a sad smile and glanced up at the door as her husband entered, hair still wet from the shower, his irritation at being stirred so early on a Sunday morning written across his unsmiling face.

  'Found a body, have you?' he said, taking a seat next to his wife.

  'No. There's no body, nothing to suggest she's dead.'

  Husband and wife exchanged a look of relief tinged with a sense of anti-climax.

  'This may sound odd,' Jenny said, 'but the reason I need to speak to you is that a small trace of radioactive material was found on the body of woman connected to another case I'm investigating. You might have read about it - Nazim Jamal.'

  Mrs Crosby looked puzzled.

  'I've read reports,' her husband said, abruptly. 'What's this got to do with Anna Rose?'

  'Maybe nothing. I don't know. Let me explain.' She gave them the bare bones: a brief history of Nazim and Rafi's disappearance, Mrs Jamal's campaign, her bizarre death and the traces of caesium 137 that could only have originated in a nuclear power plant. She told them that, from what she'd managed to find on the internet, the main source of black market radioactive material was the former Eastern bloc, but Anna Rose's job at Maybury presented her with a coincidence that needed at least to be discounted.

  Mr and Mrs Crosby listened in silence, exchanging the occasional fretful glance. Jenny sensed she had touched on something, but finished her exposition before asking if it brought anything to mind.

  There was a pregnant pause. Mrs Crosby spoke first. 'You didn't know that Anna Rose studied physics at Bristol?'

  'No—'

  'She graduated last summer,' Mr Crosby said.

  'I see . . .'

  The three of them sat in silence for a long moment.

  Jenny said, 'When did she go missing, exactly?'

  Mr Crosby said, 'We spoke to her on the phone on the night of Monday, 11 January. She was at work on the Tuesday, but didn't arrive on the Wednesday.'

  'Where was she on the Tuesday night?'

  'In her flat, we think. The bed looked slept in. Her boyfriend called her mid-evening. Everything seemed fine.'

  'Did she take anything with her?'

  Mrs Crosby said, 'It looked like she'd packed a bag. Her wallet and passport were gone. She took five hundred pounds from an ATM near her flat at seven-thirty on the Wednesday morning.'

  'Has there been any activity on the account since?'

  'No,' Mr Crosby said definitely. 'And no record of her leaving the country that we can find.'

  Jenny said, 'Was there any indication that anything was wrong?'

  'It was a complete bolt from the blue,' Mrs Crosby said. 'She seemed perfectly happy. She had a good job, a new boyfriend—' She stopped mid-sentence and glanced at her husband, who seemed to have been struck by the same thought. She let him take over.

  'We think she might have been seeing an Asian chap last year,' he said, as if it was a source of great shame. 'My wife was visiting one day last October and saw him leaving her flat. She said he was just a friend, but . . . you know. One has an instinct.'

  'Do you know who he was?'

  'Salim something, I think. She never mentioned a surname.'

  'What did he look like?'

  Mr Crosby turned to his wife, who said, 'Mid-twenties, a little older than Anna Rose. Perfectly respectable,' adding apologetically, 'quite good-looking, really.'

  Mr Crosby said, 'Christ, I knew we should have said something. What the hell has she got herself mixed up in?'

  Mrs Crosby put a calming hand on her husband's back. 'I don't think it was still going on. She was
really taken with Mike. They met at work.'

  'At Maybury?'

  'Yes . . . He was her first line manager, her boss, I suppose. She started a two-year training programme last September - the graduate programme.'

  'This Asian friend, do you know anything more? Was he involved politically in any way?'

  'I've no idea,' Mr Crosby said. 'I've never heard Anna Rose talk politics in her life.'

  'What are her interests?'

  'Having a good time, as far as I could make out,' he said. 'Stunned us both completely when she went straight into a job. She only took physics because she thought there would be less competition getting onto the course.'

  'Did she do well?'

  'Not particularly,' Mrs Crosby said. 'A z:z. She was lucky to get on the graduate scheme at all. She'd always talked about going off travelling for a year.'

  'Her looks probably helped,' her husband said. 'Men would do anything for her.'

  Jenny glanced at the few tasteful black and white family photographs arranged on a polished walnut bureau. Anna Rose in her late teens had shoulder-length blonde hair and a twinkling, mischievous smile that spelled trouble. She was more elemental, less refined than her adoptive parents.

  Jenny said, 'How did she end up in this job? It sounds almost out of character.'

  Mr Crosby shrugged, seemingly at a loss to explain it other than as just another of his daughter's many surprises. His wife said, 'She got on very well with one of her tutors - Dr Levin. I had the impression that she pushed Anna Rose in that direction. Pulled a few strings, probably, but Anna Rose would never have admitted to taking someone else's help.'

  'She was very independent?'

  'Oh yes,' Mr Crosby said. 'And headstrong. It didn't matter how wrong she was, she was always right.' His tone suggested he'd already made up his mind about what had happened: his feisty, naive daughter, too good-looking for her own good, had got involved with some damn-fool foreigner. If she wasn't already dead, she was certainly beyond any help they could offer.

  Mrs Crosby said, 'Does this mean there will be a criminal investigation?'

  'Of course there will,' her husband snapped. 'It's bloody obvious. She's up to her eyes in something.'

  'You don't know that, Alan,' she protested, pained by his anger.

  'You know how impressionable she is. She's been like it since she was small.' He turned to Jenny. 'I'll be honest with you, Mrs Cooper - we were amazed she survived her teens. Expelled from two good schools, God knows how many unsuitable boys. She was always getting into trouble.'

  Mrs Crosby, succumbing to tears, said, 'That's not fair—'

  Jenny said, 'I've no reason to talk to the police at the moment. But I would like to look around your daughter's flat, and also talk to Mike Stevens.'

  Jenny left the Crosbys' home with a set of keys to Anna Rose's flat and Mike Stevens's mobile number. She called him from her car, hoping to meet him later that morning, but he answered from a hotel room in the Lake District. He was on a week-long business trip to the nuclear reprocessing plant at nearby Sellafield. There was nothing to be gained from staying at home, he said: Anna Rose's parents had followed up every one of her friends and acquaintances they knew, who were far more than he did. They had only been together for a little short of three months.

  Jenny said, 'I know this is going to sound a little strange, Mr Stevens, but would Anna Rose have had any access to radioactive material, caesium 137 for example?'

  She was met by what she interpreted as a stunned silence. When Mike Stevens found his voice, he said, 'Why would you ask that?'

  'It's just that traces of that substance have turned up in another case I'm investigating.'

  'A death?'

  Jenny said, 'Don't panic. There's no connection with Anna Rose apart from the caesium. I just need to know if any could have escaped from your plant.'

  'God, no. Do you know anything about the nuclear industry? Everything's dealt with by robots.'

  'You're saying it's impossible for her to have got hold of such a substance?'

  'You'd have as much chance. What is this? What's she meant to have done?'

  'Nothing. It's probably just two unconnected events. One more question - what do you know about an Asian friend of hers called Salim?'

  'Never heard of him.'

  'Her mother saw him leaving her flat last October.'

  'Where the hell is all this coming from? Anna Rose doesn't have a friend called Salim. She was seeing me last October.'

  'Sorry to have troubled you, Mr Stevens. Mr or Mrs Crosby will fill you in. Try not to worry.'

  'Hey—'

  She hung up and dialled Alison's home number. It rang seven times before she answered with a cautious hello.

  'I thought you might be at church,' Jenny said.

  Alison ignored the comment. 'You're alive then, Mrs Cooper. Half of Bristol's trying to get hold of you. Everyone thinks you know something.'

  'Not yet, but I'm working on it. Has it hit the news yet? I haven't heard anything.'

  'Not a squeak. There must be some sort of blackout.'

  'I don't know if that's frightening or reassuring. I need to get hold of a dosimeter.'

  'A what?'

  'Andy Kerr's number will do.'

  Andy took her call from what sounded like a gym with bad pop music and weights clanking in the background. There was obviously no girlfriend to keep him occupied on a Sunday morning. He still had the dosimeter in his lab coat pocket, he said, but the entire mortuary building had been sealed off while it was being decontaminated. He wasn't expecting to be allowed back in before mid-week. He would have called Sonia Cane, but he'd heard she was writing a report complaining that he'd acted improperly in not informing the Health Protection Agency immediately he discovered radiation on Mrs Jamal's body.

  'What's she frightened of?' Jenny said.

  'Same thing as me - getting sacked. I've already been told not to discuss it with anyone, not even you, apparently.'

  'I won't tell. So where can I get a dosimeter?'

  'Today?'

  'It'd be helpful.'

  Andy sighed. 'I'll make some calls.'

  Jenny picked up the badge dosimeter from the junior radiographer working the Sunday shift at the Vale. He didn't ask any questions and Jenny didn't offer any explanations. He had a queue of casualties waiting, and in his line of work the badge was a standard and unremarkable piece of equipment. It was nowhere near as sophisticated as Sonia's handheld device: a small piece of photographic film contained in a credit-card-sized badge with a colour key. When exposed to radiation the film would turn a steadily darker shade of green.

  It was less than a fifteen-minute drive to Anna Rose's flat in a new build not far from Parkway station on the northwest edge of the city. An area punctuated by business parks, industrial estates and arterial roads, it was charmless but convenient for the motorway, and less than twelve miles to Maybury. The block was a three-storey building wedged into a far corner of the estate. Every inch of narrow roadway was lined with parked cars. There wasn't a space to be had, so Jenny left her car blocking a turning circle.

  There were two keys on the ring the Crosbys had given her. The first opened the door to the confined communal hallway, the second unlocked the door to Anna Rose's flat. Jenny checked the dosimeter: it remained the lightest shade of green.

  She entered a small, conspicuously orderly one-bedroom apartment. The door opened straight from the outside landing into a kitchen-cum-living room furnished with a few items of simple modern furniture. A window looked out over a fenced-off area of scrub that had been cleared for development which had never happened. The dosimeter remained unchanged. She moved around the room, glancing over a shelf unit laden with university text books, opened drawers, checked the bathroom and thoroughly searched the tiny bedroom, poking the dosimeter into every corner, but it stuck stubbornly at no hazard.

  She was both relieved and disappointed, and a little weary. She sat down on one of the two ch
airs at the small pine dining table and took stock. It was what she hadn't found that was most interesting. There was no suitcase or rucksack, no computer, camera or mobile phone. No wallet or toothbrush. There were empty hangers in the wardrobe, only a few pairs of socks and underwear in the chest of drawers. There were no signs of forced entry at the front door. The pile of mail on the kitchen counter and the few items she had picked up from the mat were unremarkable - bills or junk. Unlike Nazim and Rafi, it seemed that Anna Rose had packed and left deliberately.

  Jenny tried to avoid the temptation to speculate, but she had an instinct she couldn't ignore, a sixth sense that told her this room belonged to someone who was alive, still in the game. It didn't smell dead; the atmosphere was disturbed but not leaden.

  She scanned the room one last time for any hint of a clue. There was nothing. No notebooks, no scraps of paper, no rubbish in the bin. Virtually no trace of Anna Rose except her textbooks and a number of paperbacks lined up on the shelf beneath them. Jenny glanced at the titles: all light, slightly risqué fiction aimed at young women and a couple of trashy celebrity biographies. Anna Rose might be intelligent, but she couldn't be called cultured. It seemed odd to Jenny that a bright young woman would have no intellectual curiosity beyond her narrow subject, yet the syndrome felt somehow familiar. She turned her attention to a framed poster - the only object approaching a piece of art in the flat. She had barely noticed it before: from a distance it looked like a crude cartoon rendering of the Mona Lisa. Up close it was a collage of hundreds of photos of a younger, barely clad Britney Spears striking provocative poses. It was clever, Jenny thought, and imagined it appealing both to the scientist and the party girl in Anna Rose: sexy and serious at the same time. She was reminded of her visit to Sarah Levin's home: the young academic who spent her days with her head in particle theory but came home at night to MTV and glossy magazines. They struck an attitude, these young women: took a whole lot of things for granted Jenny's generation never had, but felt strangely shallow and unformed for it. What did they believe in? What then did they have to fall back on in times of crisis?