by Lisa Jewell
As he stands to leave the room he sees her exchange a look with her teenage son, sees the mask of crisp nonchalance slip for a moment. The boy looks worried and annoyed; he shakes his head slightly. She responds with a firm nod. But he can see fear in her eyes, too. As if she’s starting to doubt her decision. As if she’s starting to wonder why he’s in her house.
After all, he could be anyone.
Four
‘Tell me a little about your husband,’ says the policewoman called Beverly. ‘How old is he?’
Lily pushes down the hem of her top, flattening the fabric against her skin. ‘He’s forty,’ she says.
She can see the WPC’s eyebrow arch, just a fraction. ‘And you’re?’
‘I’m twenty-one,’ she says. It’s no big deal, she wants to shout. Nineteen years. In a life of maybe ninety years. So what?
‘And his full name?’
‘Carl John Robert Monrose.’
‘Thank you. And this is the address where he lives?’ She indicates the small living room of the purpose-built flat where she and Carl have lived since they got back from their honeymoon on Bali.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Of course!’ She knows as she says it that she has been rude. She is aware that sometimes her manner can be quite harsh for British people’s tastes.
The policewoman gives her a look and then scratches words on to a form with a noisy pen.
‘And tell me about yesterday. What time did you last see your husband?’
‘He left at seven o’clock. Every morning he leaves at seven o’clock.’
‘And he goes to work where?’
‘He works in London. For a financial services company.’
‘And have you spoken to his company?’
‘Yes! It was the first thing I did!’ This woman must think she is an idiot, to call the police before calling his office.
‘And what did they say?’
‘They said he left work at the normal time. Just as I expected they would say. Carl takes the same train home every day. He can’t leave work late or he would miss it.’
‘OK. And did you speak to him at all? After he left work?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But he sent me a text. Look.’ She switches on her phone and turns it to face the WPC, the text already there, ready to be displayed.
You know what’s crazy? This is crazy: I love you more now than I did this morning! I’ll see you in an hour! If I could make the train go faster I would! xxxxx.
‘And look,’ she says, scrolling up through their text exchanges. ‘This from the day before.’
How can it be true that I have a wife like you? How did I get so lucky?! I can’t wait to be holding you in my arms. Fifty-eight minutes to go!
‘See,’ she says. ‘This is a man who wants to come home every night more than he wants to do anything else. Do you see now why I know that something bad has happened?’
The WPC passes the phone back to Lily and sighs. ‘Sounds like he’s got it bad,’ she says, laughing.
‘It’s not a joke,’ says Lily.
‘No.’ Abruptly, the policewoman stops smiling. ‘I didn’t say it was.’
Lily breathes in hard. She must try harder, she reminds herself, harder to be pleasant. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m feeling very stressed. Last night was the first time we’ve spent a night apart. I didn’t sleep. Not one minute.’ She waves her hands about, desperately, before bringing them back into her lap.
The WPC softens when she sees the tears filming across Lily’s eyes and squeezes her hand gently.
‘So.’ She takes her hand back. ‘You got the text at five last night. Then … ?’
‘Nothing. Nothing. I rang him first just after six, then again and again and again until his phone ran out of charge.’
The WPC pauses for a moment and Lily gets the feeling that it is finally sinking in, that for the first time since Carl didn’t come home last night someone believes that he might actually be missing and not in another woman’s bed.
‘Where does he catch his train from?’
‘Victoria.’
‘And always the same one?’
‘Yes. The five oh six to East Grinstead.’
‘Which arrives in Oxted at?’
‘Five forty-four. Then it is a fifteen-minute walk from the station to here. So he is home at five fifty-nine. Every night. Every night.’
‘And do you work, Mrs Monrose?’
‘No. I study.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Here. It’s a correspondence course. Accounting. It’s what I was studying at home, in the Ukraine. I left college to be here, with Carl. So, now I finish what I started.’ She shrugs.
‘And how long have you been here? In the UK?’
‘One week. And three days.’
‘Wow,’ says the WPC. ‘Not long.’
‘No. Not long.’
‘Your English is excellent.’
‘Thank you. My mother is a translator. She made sure I could speak it as well as she does.’
The WPC puts the lid on her pen and looks at Lily thoughtfully. ‘How did you meet?’ she says. ‘You and your husband?’
‘Through my mother. She was translating at a financial services conference in Kiev. They needed people to look after the delegates – you know, show them about, get them taxis, that kind of thing. I needed the cash. I was put in charge of Carl and some of his colleagues. It was obvious from minute one that I would marry him. From minute one.’
The WPC stares at Lily, seemingly mesmerised. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘Wow.’
‘Yes,’ says Lily. ‘It was very wow.’
‘OK.’ The policewoman slips the pen into her pocket and folds up her notepad. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Not sure we’ve got quite enough yet to open this up as a missing person. But call again if he doesn’t show up tonight.’
Lily’s heart drops, brick-heavy inside her. ‘What?’
‘I’m sure it’s nothing sinister,’ the WPC says. ‘Honestly. Nine times out of ten it’s just something completely innocuous. I’m sure he’ll be home before bedtime.’
‘Really?’ she says. ‘I know you don’t believe that. I know you believe me. I know you do.’
The WPC sighs. ‘Your husband, he’s a grown man. He’s not vulnerable. I can’t open a case. But I tell you what, I’ll check his details against our database, see if anyone matching his description has been brought in for any reason.’
Lily clutches her heart. ‘Brought in?’
‘Yes. You know. Brought into the police station. For questioning. And I’ll cross-reference with local hospitals. See if they’ve treated him.’
‘Oh God.’ Lily has been picturing this all night long. Carl under the wheels of a bus, stabbed and left for dead in an underpass, floating face down in the dark water of the River Thames.
‘It’s all I can do for now.’
Lily realises that the WPC is doing her a favour and manages a smile. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I really appreciate that.’
‘I’ll need a photo, though. Do you have a recent one?’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Lily fumbles with her handbag, opens her purse, pulls out the photo-booth snap she has in there: Carl looking serious and handsome. She passes it to the WPC, expecting her to pass some kind of comment on how incredibly good-looking he is. Maybe say something about his resemblance to Ben Affleck. But the policewoman doesn’t; she merely tucks it into her notebook and says, ‘I’ll get it back to you, I promise. In the meantime, speak to his friends and family. His colleagues. Maybe someone there can shed some light.’
After the policewoman leaves, Lily stands for a few minutes and stares out of the window. Below her is a small car park. Carl’s black Audi A5 is there, where he parked it after their trip to the supermarket on Sunday. Just the thought of supermarket shopping with Carl makes her want to curl herself into a tight ball and howl.
Then she turns to face their home. The flat that Carl chose for them, a brand-new flat in a
brand-new development, the kitchen never used before they used it, the toilet still with a paper band across the lid. A brand-new place to start their brand-new life. With a heavy heart she starts opening drawers and searching through paperwork, trying to find the one small thing she didn’t know about her husband that might unlock the mystery of where he has gone.
Five
The rain finally stops at five in the morning. The sun’s gentle ascent turns the sky silver-grey and the insolent clamour of birdsong and rasp of boats being heaved down the slipway brings Alice to consciousness. It’s a rough awakening. She fell asleep only an hour ago, having spent the preceding five hours in a state of heightened alertness, aware of every tonal shift in the background hum, every creak of the old house, every flicker of moonlight ricocheting off the surface of the sea beyond her window.
It isn’t the first time there’s been a strange man sleeping in the studio. She’s rented it out to many strangers over the years. And to strangers much stranger than Frank. But at least she knew who they were, where they came from, why they were there. They had a context.
But this man, ‘Frank’, he’d entered stage left, silently, without a script. Charming as he is – and he is, actually – it’s unnerving. The bits and pieces in his pockets revealed nothing other than that he’d travelled to Ridinghouse Bay from King’s Cross on Tuesday night and that at some other point in his recent history he’d spent twenty-three pounds in Robert Dyas and bought a bagel and a can of Coke from Sainsbury’s.
He’d appeared in the kitchen after his bath, in Kai’s clothes, looking pink and raw and deeply embarrassed. His thick hazel hair was damp and wavy and he was barefoot. Lovely feet, Alice had noted. For the record. She’d watched him eating his pizza, seen him trying to control the impulse to stuff it down his throat with pure, wild hunger. She’d offered him beer and he’d looked confused for a moment, possibly trying to decide whether he was a beer-drinker or not. ‘Go on,’ she’d said. ‘At least we’ll know that about you then.’ So, he’d had a beer and it had been a tiny bit awkward, the four of them standing around eating pizza with a big scared man in a teenager’s hoodie. Hard to know what to say, really.
When he’d gone to bed her children had all turned and looked at her with cold disapproval.
‘What’, Jasmine had managed eventually, ‘are you doing? Mum?’
‘Where’s your compassion?’ she’d said. ‘Poor man. No jacket. No money.’ She’d gestured at the kitchen window, at the fat, angry rain pounding off the glass. ‘In this.’
‘There’s other places he could have gone,’ Kai had added.
‘Yeah,’ she’d said. ‘Like where?’
‘I dunno. A B and B.’
‘He’s got no money, Kai. That’s the whole point.’
‘Yeah, well, I don’t see why that’s our problem.’
‘Jesus,’ Alice had groaned, despite knowing that her children were right, ‘you kids. You’ve got no human decency, have you? What do they teach you at school these days?’
‘Er, about paedophiles and conmen and voyeurs and rapists and—’
‘They do not,’ she’d interjected. ‘The media teaches you all that and I’ve told you all a million times: people are fundamentally good. He’s a lost soul. I’m the Good Samaritan. He’ll be gone this time tomorrow.’
‘Lock the back door,’ Kai had said. ‘Double-lock it.’
She’d pooh-poohed his concern at the time but later, after calling out goodnight into the dark space between the back door and the studio, she’d locked the door behind her. Bolted it too. And then barely slept. She’d imagined, at intervals, a big manhand held tight across the soft jaw of her sleeping baby girl, her green eyes stretched wide with terror. Or the pad pad pad of a strange man in her living room, silently opening drawers in search of gold and iPads. Or her older daughter being watched in silhouette as she absent-mindedly undressed in front of the window. Even though her window faced the wrong way. And she would never do that anyway because the ridiculous child thought she was fat. But still.
Alice gives up on the notion of sleep and decides to capitalise on the early start. She crosses the room and unplugs the iPad from the charger, switches it to the webcam app, watches her parents’ empty living room for a while. Since they both became … well, ill, is how she prefers to refer to it, rather than demented, loop-the-loop, bat-shit nuts, they have started to rise later and later. Their morning carer comes at ten and has to lure them out of bed like a pair of sleep-starved teenagers.
She turns off the iPad and pulls open her curtains. The sea is blanket-flat after the rain, pink and yellow as the sun rises over it, as lush as the Caribbean. The fairy lights are still lit, as are the street lights. The pavement below is petrol-black and gleaming. It couldn’t be any prettier.
Alice showers, moving quietly around the house, not wanting to rouse anyone any earlier than necessary. In her room she appraises herself. She never normally has time to appraise herself. Normally she rises too late to do any appraising, rises with just enough time to make sure she doesn’t leave the house naked. Her hair, she realises, is verging on bizarre. Her last set of highlights were quite bold, or, as Jasmine said at the time, stripy. And now the roots are coming through in vivid salt and pepper. And being out in the rain a lot the day before has done it even fewer favours.
She wipes away the shadows of yesterday’s quickly applied eyeliner and starts hunting through the top drawer of her dressing table for her make-up bag, the one she usually gets out only on special occasions. She tells herself that she is doing this because she has the time to do it. That it has nothing to do with the handsome man in her studio room. She pulls the crazy badger hair up into a bun, finds clean jeans, a checked shirt that skims her tummy but clings lightly to the outline of her breasts, a favourite pair of earrings with greeny-blue stones that echo the colour of her eyes.
Alice is a woman often described by men as sexy. Dirty, too. She’s never traded on being pretty. Never thought she’d do better in a tight dress and high heels (although when she does make the effort it doesn’t seem to hurt). Generally Alice lets it all hang out. But not this morning, for some strange reason.
Romaine appears at her bedroom door, blonde ringlets in a disaster, drooping jersey pyjamas sagging at the crotch. Together with Griff, they tiptoe down the narrow, open-tread staircase that leads to the hallway. The other dogs greet them silently with mouths stretched into black-lipped smiles and tails beating against the flagstones. Alice holds her breath vaguely as they enter the kitchen, aware of what lies beyond the back door, nervous of the unknowingness of the day ahead. She loads the dogs’ bowls with meat, makes Romaine a toasted bagel with peanut butter, herself an oversized mug of tea and a bowl of All Bran. All the while she has half an eye on the back door. Wondering. Unsettled.
But by eight thirty Kai and Jasmine are on the school bus and she is gone from the house with the dogs and Romaine and there is no sign of him. The studio is still and silent, as though there is no one in there at all.
Derry looks at her curiously at the school gates, which are only just being unlocked by the caretaker. ‘You’re early,’ she says. ‘And …’ She peers more closely at her, ‘… you’re wearing make-up.’
‘Whatevs,’ says Alice.
‘What’s going on?’
‘The man came in,’ says Romaine. ‘The wet man from the beach.’
Alice rolls her eyes. ‘He didn’t come in,’ she corrects. ‘I asked him in. To dry off. To have a bath, something to eat. I’m pretty sure he’s already gone.’
But when she gets home forty minutes later the curtains are pulled open in the studio and she can see movement inside. She rubs the dirty puddle speckles from the dogs with an old towel, checks her reflection briefly and switches on the kettle.
*
His dreams were remarkable last night. After so many hours of blankness, of a head full of nothing, to be plunged suddenly into this ethereal world of people and experiences and places wa
s quite exhilarating. He clutches on to the fading fragments as he comes to, knowing that there might be something there, a clue to tie him back to himself. But they float away, hopelessly, intangibly.
He sits up in bed and rubs his face hard. The curtains in this room are gossamer thin and the light outside is the particular acid-blue of a morning after rain. He can hear scuffling at his door and peers through the curtains into the earth-dark eyes of a dog. The dog looks as if it is about to smile, but then the mouth stretches further until its teeth are revealed and then its gums and the dog snarls and he lets the curtain drop. At least he can remember where he is now, he thinks. At least he can remember tea in a thermos and pizza in a kitchen and a leggy woman with thick blonde hair and a hot bath in a mouldy, echoing bathroom. And he remembers the name Frank, bestowed on him last night by the little girl with the golden ringlets.
He wants to go to the toilet, he wants to brush his teeth, but the dog is going mental outside the door and he has no idea if it’s the kind of dog that just barks for fun. It’s a … He searches for the name of the breed, but it’s gone. Assuming he ever knew. But it’s the sort of dog that thugs have. Muscly and square with a huge jaw.
He opens the curtains and stares at the dog. The dog barks louder. And then, from the tiny door at the back of the house, Alice appears. She looks cross and shouts something at the dog, and grabs it by its collar; then she sees his face and she walks towards him.
‘Have you remembered who you are yet?’ she asks, handing him a mug of tea with one hand, keeping hold of the dog with the other.
He takes the mug and says, ‘No. Still no idea. Had lots of weird dreams but I can’t remember any of them.’ He shrugs and rests the mug on the table by the door.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘come inside when you’re ready. I’ll leave the door open. I can make you some breakfast if you’re hungry. I’ve got fresh eggs.’
It’s quiet in the cottage when he bows his head down to pass through the back door a while later. No children. Alice is looking at something on an iPad and sighing a lot.
‘Where is everyone?’ he asks.
