by Lisa Jewell
‘You’re from Croydon?’ Alice interrupts. Just a mile or two from Brixton. All those years. They’d been so close.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I guess I am. That’s not very cool, is it?’
‘But I love Croydon!’ says Alice. ‘The Whitgift Centre!’
Frank smiles at her and then turns back when Lesley clears her throat. ‘When we got home I just sort of took up where I left off. Went back to school. Hooked up with my old friends. Took my A levels. I had, er, well, therapy, I suppose. For a long time. But I never unearthed the memories of that night and I just accepted the police’s version of events. That we’d all jumped in the sea off our faces on drugs and that Mark and my sister had drowned. Without any memories of the other stuff, it was the only logical explanation. I did wonder sometimes if there was something big I’d forgotten, something that would make more sense of everything. But it stayed buried. Until that day in London. When I saw him.’
‘Yes,’ says Lesley, pen poised pensively over notepad, ‘and what can you remember about that now?’
‘I …’ He closes his eyes tightly. ‘God. I’m sorry. My brain is stuck on that moment, the dropped coffee. Just …’ His head drops into his chest, his eyes still shut. ‘Give me one minute.’
‘Absolutely, Frank,’ says Lesley. ‘You take your time. We’re not in any hurry.’
Frank tries to recall the maths competition. Did they win? How did they do? Names bubble around his consciousness: Zach, Nazia, Muhammed, Sam, Aisha, Crystal, Hannah, King. The kids in his group. And then what? Back to school? More lessons? No. It was the Easter holidays. There was no school. Everyone went home afterwards. But how did he get home? Car? Or the bus? He sees the number 712. He sees himself pressing his Oyster card to the reader, taking a seat towards the back, resting a leather bag on his lap. Then back to his flat, the one he remembered the other night. It’s on a scruffy street. A light flashes on as he passes down the alleyway towards his front door. The flat smells of this morning’s cat food. He scrapes it out, cleans the bowl, refills it. The cat called Brenda circles his feet.
He marks homework. He watches TV. He googles the name of the office building he’d seen Mark Tate walking into. It’s a financial services company. He clicks on the ‘Who we are’ link and scrolls down until he finds his picture. His name, apparently, is Carl Monrose. He eats something from the freezer for dinner, lasagne he seems to recall, parcelled up by his mum when he had flu last week.
Then his thoughts take him dizzyingly from eating reheated lasagne on the sofa in his flat to a train platform, looking up, platform four, the 5.06 to East Grinstead, following the day-weary crowds, his eyes pinned to the back of Mark Tate’s head. Then the timeline shifts and he’s at school, sitting in someone’s office. The school is strangely empty and he’s wearing jeans. It’s still the holidays. He’s asking for compassionate leave. His grandfather is dying. Does he even have a grandfather? The man behind the desk, an older man with a weathered face and neatly cropped Afro hair, nods and looks sad and says, ‘Take a few days. We can cover you for a week or so.’ ‘Mr Josiah Hardman’, says the plaque on his door. ‘Head Teacher’.
Alice passes him a cup of tea across the café table. ‘Are you OK?’ she says. Her voice comes to him like the echo of distant music.
He remembers a phone call to his mother. ‘I’m on a training course. Out in the sticks. You won’t be able to contact me.’ He remembers his mother saying, ‘Be careful. I shall miss you.’ He remembers how that felt, how it always felt knowing that he was the sole survivor of his mother’s little family. Knowing that every journey he took, every choice he made, every person he brought into his life caused his mother an animal ache of fear. Knowing that he could never leave her. That he was tied to her, like the owner of a loyal but life-restricting dog, until she died.
‘I followed him,’ he says eventually. ‘I followed the man on to his train.’
Lily shoots him a look of horror. ‘Carl? You followed my Carl?’
‘Yes,’ says Frank. ‘I remember getting on the five oh six to East Grinstead. I sat at the other end of the carriage from him. I watched him like a hawk. He got off at—’
‘Oxted,’ says Lily.
‘Yes,’ says Frank. ‘Oxted. And I followed him. Past shops. Up a dual carriageway. Past a building site.’
‘And then?’ asks Lily.
‘And to a block of flats.’
‘Oh my God,’ says Lily, ‘you came to my home. My God. What did you do then? Did you spy on us? Or maybe you killed him? You took him into that building site. You took him there and you killed him, didn’t you? I’ve seen the flashing light. The one in the window. I knew it was wrong.’
People have turned to look at her; she’s pointing at Frank aggressively and her voice is shrill. She reaches into the front pocket of her little shiny handbag and pulls out an iPhone. ‘I’m calling the police,’ she said. ‘They are working on my husband’s missing-person case and I have their direct number. I’m calling them right now …’
Lesley puts a calming hand over Lily’s. ‘No,’ she says, ‘that’s not a good idea.’
‘It is a very good idea. Maybe he is still alive. They can go there now and see.’
‘No,’ says Lesley more firmly.
Frank’s brain is processing and editing, reordering and refiling. Then suddenly he’s in an empty room. There are wide glass windows covered in sticky film. He sees a phone hurtling through the air. And there’s something behind the image. A noise. A voice. A fragment of something, too small to identify.
Then the scene changes; Frank has moved on again. He’s following Mark Tate, following him to a coffee shop. He’s wearing a baseball cap and he’s watching Mark Tate order a coffee and a pain au chocolat. His manner with the not-very-pretty girl behind the counter is brusque and offhand. He follows him out on to the street and then follows him back to his office. His heart is pounding. He can feel sweat pooling under the rim of his baseball cap. Every time he looks at Mark Tate he feels himself back in that bedroom, he hears the rending of his sister’s T-shirt, feels the deep, hot throb of his broken wrist, the pounding hip hop shaking through the floorboards. His head is flooded red and black with terror and disgust, with rage and loathing. He wants, all he wants, is to kill Mark Tate. But he can’t kill him, because he needs to talk to him first: he needs to find out what happened to Kirsty. Is she alive? And if she isn’t alive, how long did she survive in those dark cold waters? Where is her body? And why? Why, why, why?
Frank pulls Lily’s wedding album towards him now, and forces himself to look at Mark’s face. He remembers the first time he saw that face, that warm afternoon on the beach, how he’d taken an instant inventory of the angles and the proportions of it, how his mind had processed the mathematics of that face in a split second and found it unpleasing. He feels the same way now, looking at this sharp-faced forty-year-old man marrying a girl half his age.
‘Is he nice to you?’ he asks, looking up at Lily.
‘He treats me like a princess.’
‘But is he nice to you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Now Frank’s in Kitty’s conservatory. She’s sitting there, thin and brittle, her hand shaking slightly as she lifts the teapot. He’d taken her demeanour to be unfriendliness, assumed her to be displeased to have uninvited guests. But what if she’d been scared of Mark? What if …?
His thoughts spin away from him. He closes the album and drops his head into his hands.
‘I took some time off work,’ he says. ‘I was due back last week. I’ll probably get the sack.’
‘So, you had a plan?’ Lesley prompts him.
‘I guess, I don’t know … I wanted to talk to Mark. I wanted to make him tell me what happened to Kirsty. I needed space. I needed time. And then—’
He’s back in the empty room with the plate-glass windows. He sees his own reflection in the windows blackened by the night outside. He’s alone and he has
a shoulder bag filled with things. He’s hiding the bag in an empty kitchen cupboard.
‘I found a place and I …’ His memories swarm and teem and he feels nauseous. ‘I took him there.’
Fifty-three
Gray could not, he simply could not randomly accost Mark Tate on the street. Mark would run. He would yell. He would deny that he was Mark Tate; he would tell passers-by that this crazy man was bothering him. He would make a scene and then, once he’d shaken him off, he would disappear. Again.
And this time Gray would never find him.
So Gray made a plan.
He told his head teacher that his long-dead grandfather was dying and asked for some compassionate leave. Just a few days. Just long enough to put everything in place. He told his mother he was going on a training course. And then he began to stalk him.
Mark Tate was nothing if not a creature of habit. The same form-fitting, navy-blue suit every day, the same coffee and pain au chocolat from the same coffee shop at the same time, the same sashay through the revolving door, the same slimy greeting to the hot girl on the reception desk. He was a regular little worker bee. All that talk of being a millionaire – whatever happened to all his grandiose plans?
On Tuesday, having ascertained that Mark Tate had shown up for work as usual, Gray headed home. Here he packed a rucksack with objects from around the flat. Rope. Non-perishable food. A blanket. Some knives. His camera. A toilet roll. A belt. A pillow case. A blow-up pillow. A sleeping bag. Phone charger. Torch. Then he left three packets of cat food and a mountain of biscuits out for Brenda and took the bag with him from Croydon to Victoria and then from Victoria back to Oxted.
He followed the now-familiar route from the station to Mark’s apartment block, but before he got there he stopped and peeled back the rip in the hoarding he’d discovered yesterday outside the construction site next door. He’d googled the development yesterday and, as he’d suspected, having never seen a builder at work on it, confirmed that it had run out of money and building works had been suspended while the developers looked for a new investor. The site had been sitting in a state of limbo for nearly a year, according to the report he’d read in a trade magazine. Completely abandoned.
He made his way, as he’d done yesterday, around the back of the frontline block, the only block that had been fully fitted out. There was a ditch around the back of the building, the kind of area where the wheelie bins might eventually be stored, Gray imagined, and at the bottom of the ditch was a small door into the basement level. And, as it had been yesterday, it was unlocked.
He lowered himself down into the ditch on his bum and bowed his head slightly to get through the low door. Then he took the same route he’d taken yesterday across the polished cement floor of the basement, through a pair of heavy swing doors at the other end and up a service staircase into the foyer.
There were cameras here and there in the foyer, but after nearly a year of abandonment, Gray very much doubted that anyone was watching any more. Still, he kept his face at a low angle and stayed close to the walls. Then he skipped up the next flight of stairs and pushed open the door to the first apartment on his left.
Here. Here was where he would bring Mark Tate. Here, where no one could hear him or see him, where he could keep him for as long as he liked. It was a ‘loft style’ apartment, open plan with some exposed brickwork here and there and a shiny white kitchen built around a central island made of wood. Quickly he prepared the room. There was no mains electricity, but he’d discovered that the light on the extractor hood for the hob worked independently of the mains, as did the pale green strip lighting under the kitchen cabinets. There was no running water either and he unpacked the bottles he’d bought just now from the off licence by the station. He left the various pieces of rope in a pile by the trendy radiator that he intended to tie Mark Tate to. He blew up his pillow and spread out his sleeping bag. He unpacked the food into the kitchen: enough biscuits and crisps to last a week. He placed the toilet roll in the never-used bathroom and in his rucksack he kept his knives, the pillowcase and the torch.
Then he retraced his steps back towards the high street and found a coffee shop where he sat for four hours writing a long-overdue progress report for the head of maths while he waited for Mark Tate to return from work.
If anyone had told Gray that one day he would hide in the shadows of an abandoned building site with a knife in one hand and a pillowcase in the other, watching the minutes tick from 5:50 to 5:51 to 5:52 while a tsunami of adrenaline surged through his veins, waiting to abduct someone at knifepoint and take them prisoner – well, he clearly would not have believed them. But here he was, hand clammy on the handle of a freshly sharpened kitchen knife, and here were the footsteps of the man who had killed his father and maybe killed his sister. And here was Gray, diving from the shadows, an arm around the man’s neck: ‘Don’t move, don’t speak, I’ve got a knife against your throat, don’t fucking move.’
He wrenched him backwards through the split in the hoarding, Mark Tate’s feet dragging doggedly against the cement, his hands grasping at Gray’s arm around his neck. ‘Stop struggling, just stop, I’ve got a knife. Do you want to die?’
Mark Tate did as he was told. Gray threw the pillowcase over his head and dragged him by the arms down into the ditch, through the basement, up the stairs and back to apartment number one. Here he flung him to the ground and quickly fastened him to the radiator with the ropes and plastic ties. He did all this without saying a word.
‘I’ve got nothing,’ Mark Tate was whining through the cotton of the pillowcase. ‘Like a tenner. And a shit phone. But I’ve got money at home. Let me go home. I can get it for you.’
‘Mark,’ said Gray. One syllable. That was all. He saw Mark stiffen. ‘Mark Tate.’ As if he’d just come upon an old mate in the pub.
Gray approached him and removed the pillowcase.
Oh, it was a beautiful moment. He wished he’d filmed it. The spread of awe and disbelief across Mark’s smooth-skinned, ageless face. The slight flinch. And better still, the comically disordered hair that Gray could see him aching to rearrange.
‘What the …?’
‘Last seen on a wild summer’s night, disappearing into the North Sea with my sister. Wow. Long time no see!’
Gray felt strangely high, as though he’d had a couple of shots on an empty stomach.
‘How’ve you been?’ he continued. ‘I see you’ve made a great new life for yourself! Lovely wife, good job. Wow. Got any kids?’
Mark shook his head numbly.
‘No,’ said Gray, ‘probably for the best really. You being a psychopath and all.’
He saw Mark gulp, his winter suntan fading to grey before his very eyes.
‘Can I get you something?’ he said. ‘Some water? A Penguin bar? Doritos? I’m thinking now I should have got some beers. But actually, since you’re going to be tied to a radiator for the foreseeable it’s probably best to keep your bladder empty.’
From outside came the sound of the plastic hoarding flapping in the wind and the drone of rush-hour traffic petering its way out of London through the commuter belt. Gray could hear the rasp of Mark’s panicked breathing and then the insistent buzz buzz buzz of Mark’s phone buried somewhere inside his smart suit.
‘What will she do? Your child bride?’ Gray asked when the phone stopped buzzing. ‘When you don’t come home from work?’
‘She’ll be worried,’ Mark said quickly. ‘She’s new to the country. She doesn’t know anyone. She’ll be scared. Can I just text her? Let her know I’m running late?’
‘No, you may not. Question one: what the actual fuck? I mean … you drowned.’
‘Clearly I didn’t.’
The phone began buzzing again. Gray sighed. ‘So, what happened? Come on, think of scared wifey wondering where you are. Talk.’
Mark rearranged himself awkwardly, pulling against the plastic ties and the ropes, flicking back his head in an effort to get his frin
ge out of his eyes. ‘I got out. I was a mile up the coast. I got out and there was a phone box and I called my aunt and she came and got me and took me to Harrogate. And I nearly died. Blood loss. Hypothermia. It was all a blur; I was in and out of consciousness for days.’
Gray thumped the floor with his fist. ‘I don’t give a fuck what happened to you. What happened to Kirsty? If you got out alive, then what happened to her?’
Mark looked almost surprised to be asked. ‘She just … faded. You know. I had her; I was pulling her into shore. She was there. And then she just … went.’
‘Did you let go of her?’ Gray envisaged Kate Winslet letting Leonardo DiCaprio slip into the freezing water at the end of Titanic, imagined the blue lips and the waters closing over Kirsty’s face, felt sickened by the idea that the last thing she ever saw was the cold, hard face of Mark Tate.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘no. I don’t know. Like I said, I was slipping in and out of consciousness. I was freezing. I was holding her. And then I wasn’t holding her. And she was gone. I didn’t have the energy to look for her. I just kind of floated back to shore.’
Gray sat up straighter. ‘You floated back?’
‘Yeah. I think. I don’t know. I’d lost a lot of blood. It’s a blur …’
‘But if you floated back, then why didn’t she?’
‘I don’t know. OK?’ And there it was, that steel in his voice, that dark emptiness which Gray remembered. It was the voice of the guy he’d seen through the bedroom window kicking the wall when Kirsty didn’t want to kiss him, the guy who’d tried to barge his way into Rabbit Cottage to get to her when she didn’t want to see him, the guy who’d held a knife to his sister’s throat and jumped into the North Sea with her. It was the voice of the man who’d stolen Gray’s life.
Mark’s phone started buzzing again. Gray resisted the temptation to dig into Mark’s pockets, pull it out and stamp on it.
‘Did you look for her?’ he said. ‘After you were rescued? Did you look?’
