The toaster popped up and Polly piled the hot slices onto a plate and went over to the table, so happy to be sitting at it again with three-quarters of the family present at least.
But thinking about what they had to discuss – and do – quickly drained all the joy out of her again. She froze with a piece of toast halfway to her mouth and put it down on the plate. Her mouth had gone dry; she couldn’t eat anything.
Clemmie reached over and took her mother’s hand.
‘Are you OK, Mum?’ she said.
Polly couldn’t answer immediately. She didn’t want to break down in front of them; she was supposed to be the strong one, to help them through it. That was what mothers did, wasn’t it? But she felt so tired from it all.
‘It’s just so nice to have you both here,’ she said, kissing Clemmie’s hand and letting it go.
‘So,’ said Lucas, licking a stray smear of peanut butter from the corner of his mouth, ‘do we know where he is?’
‘No,’ said Clemmie.
‘But we think he’s still alive,’ said Lucas with his usual forthrightness, though Polly could see the uncertainty in his eyes. He was acting gung-ho, but inside he was as confused and hurt as she was.
‘We know he’s alive,’ said Clemmie.
‘He texts her once a week,’ said Polly.
Lucas frowned. ‘He never texts me,’ he said.
‘Or me,’ said Polly. ‘But we mustn’t be cross with Clemmie about that, it’s not her fault. You know Dad. He’s always thought Clemmie was the sensible one, like him, and you and I are more . . .’
‘Fuckwits?’ asked Lucas. ‘Air heads?’
‘I don’t think he would put it that harshly, but at any rate he thinks Clemmie’s the right one to text.’
‘So what do these texts say, oh chosen one?’ asked Lucas.
‘Just that he’s all right and not to worry,’ said Clemmie. ‘Which is not very helpful, so don’t envy me the texts too much.’
‘Can I see them?’ asked Lucas.
It had never occurred to Polly to ask that, but now Lucas had, she desperately wanted to see them too.
Clemmie picked up her phone and handed it to Lucas. He looked at it for a few moments, scrolling up and down with his finger, then handed it to Polly.
‘You’re due one today,’ he said.
Polly looked at the screen, feeling queasy. There seemed to be so many of them, it just showed how long he’d been away. The first few had desperate replies from Clemmie, begging him to answer his phone, or call and tell her what was going on, but there were no replies to them, just the same thing repeated:
I’m all right. Don’t worry. Dad
Could he not have varied it a bit? And couldn’t he have put a kiss on the end or something? It was so stark and cold.
‘How do you work that out?’ asked Clemmie. ‘That I’m due one?’
‘He sends them every Friday at 2 p.m. You’ll be getting one in a couple of hours.’
Clemmie grabbed the phone from Polly and stared at the screen.
‘Oh, my God, you’re right,’ said Clemmie. ‘Why didn’t I notice that?’
‘What were we saying about air heads?’ asked Lucas.
‘Of course,’ said Polly, smacking her hand against her forehead. ‘That’s just what he’d do. You know how he likes his routines. You could set a clock by when he leaves – used to leave – the house every morning. He always works to a timetable, right down to his stupid texts.’
‘Can we use that in any way, Sherlock?’ asked Clemmie, looking at Lucas. ‘To find him?’
‘If we were the police we might be able to,’ said Lucas. ‘They could probably put a track on his phone, or MI5 could, but there’s no way we can trace it. He’s probably bought the cheapest handset possible pay-as-you-go £15 job . . . they’re untraceable, that’s why crims use them. I assume you’ve tried ringing the phone he sends them from?’
Clemmie nodded, pulling a face.
‘Of course, I have,’ she said. ‘It’s always just that recorded message that says the phone isn’t switched on.’
They sat in silence for a moment. Lucas looked up at the ceiling, scratching his head, then turned to Polly.
‘Have you rung his work phone?’
Polly shook her head slowly. She hadn’t. Why hadn’t she? She tried to unscramble her thoughts.
‘He said he was going away on a research trip,’ she said, ‘so that was the last place I thought he’d be.’
‘You didn’t ring the department to find out if they knew where he was on that mission?’ Lucas persisted.
‘Well, no,’ said Polly, ‘because just before he left he sent me an email setting it all out, and saying that it would somehow be disastrous – for all of us – if the university found out his absence was anything other than a normal research trip. So I didn’t feel I could . . .’
Her voice trailed away as she said it. She felt so stupid.
‘What’s the number?’ said Lucas, picking up Polly’s phone. ‘Of the History Department?’
Polly stared at him for a moment, taking it in. He was going to ring them.
‘It’s in my contacts,’ she said, ‘under King’s College.’
Lucas fiddled with the handset and Polly glanced at Clemmie, who looked as surprised as she felt at Lucas’s sudden authoritative manner. He put the phone to his ear and after a few moments handed it to Polly.
She lifted it to her head to hear the familiar voice of the History Department Administration Manager.
‘Oh, hello, Maureen,’ she said, gathering her thoughts on the hop, ‘it’s Polly Masterson-Mackay here – David’s wife . . .’
‘Hello, Polly,’ she said, ‘are you looking for him?’
‘Er, yes,’ said Polly, her voice rising in panic. Did they know he was missing? But Maureen sounded relaxed and normal, not how you would speak to the wife of a missing person.
‘Here you are,’ she said.
‘Hello?’ said a man’s voice. It was David.
Polly was so surprised she froze.
‘Hello?’ said David again.
Polly couldn’t speak. Then she heard him ask Maureen who was supposed to be on the line for him, and was so freaked out when she heard Maureen answer ‘your wife’ she hung up.
The hand holding the phone dropped to her lap. She felt dizzy.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’ said Clemmie, jumping to her feet. ‘You’ve gone white.’
Polly thought she might be about to faint.
‘Put your head between your knees, Mummy,’ said Clemmie, gently pushing her down. Polly surrendered to it, gasping for breath, until she felt calm enough to sit up again. Clemmie crouched beside her, rubbing her back and looking at her with great concern. Polly peered up at Lucas to see him lifting the phone to his ear.
‘It’s Lucas Goodwin,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Very well, thank you. Um, my mum just rang for my father, but they got cut off – can I speak to him, please?’
There was a pause and the expression on Lucas’s face darkened.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘I’ll catch him on his mobile, we couldn’t get through on it before, I think it’s gone a bit dicky. Thanks, Maureen, bye.’
He ended the call and sat down heavily opposite Polly.
‘The utter twunt did a runner,’ he said. ‘What a cock knob. What a pathetic feeble bollock blister. He realised it was you on the phone, Mum, and suddenly found he was urgently needed elsewhere. I can’t believe my own father is such a coward.’
Clemmie handed Polly a glass of water, which she took gratefully.
‘So he’s in London,’ said Clemmie, slowly, as though she were thinking it through as she spoke, ‘and going in to work. How did Maureen sound?’
‘Absolutely normal to me,’ said Polly, then turned to Lucas.
‘Same,’ he said. ‘He’d clearly left her office in a big rush after Mum hung up on him, but Maureen didn’t sound like she’d just seen him again for the first time after a three-
month absence. It seemed perfectly humdrum for him to be in there talking to her, a normal working day.’
They sat in silence for a few moments.
‘He might have been there all the time,’ said Polly eventually. ‘Maybe that’s why he was so adamant about me not contacting King’s, because he knew he was going to be there all along and didn’t want us to find him.’
She could see by their expressions that her kids found that revelation as profoundly upsetting as she did. It was so coldly calculated. Sly.
Polly sat with this new idea, turning it over in her mind, as if looking at an object from different angles, before reaching a conclusion. Yes, this was worse. Somehow the idea of his actually going away wasn’t quite as bad as pretending to be away, so they wouldn’t even try to find him.
‘What a bastard,’ said Lucas, standing up. ‘I’m going to have a shower and then – with your permission, Mum – I’m going to ransack his study to see if I can find any clues as to why he’s behaving like a sociopath.’
‘Feel free,’ said Polly. ‘I’ve already gone through it several times. As you’ll remember, I jemmied a big hole in the door after he locked it, but please have a look. You might spot something I haven’t.’
Lucas paused and then came back and leaned down to give his mother a big hug.
‘Everything will be all right, beautiful Mummy,’ he said, rocking her from side to side and kissing the top of her head. ‘We’ll find out what’s going on with him and we’ll sort it out. We’ll never let you down – will we, Clemmie?’
‘No way,’ she replied. ‘We are here for you one hundred per cent and we’re all going to get through this together.’
‘Thank you, my beautiful darlings,’ said Polly, and as she spoke she had an idea. ‘Just give me a moment,’ she said, and went through to her study.
Yes, there it was in her diary. An invitation to a big party that night for the launch of Sent, the first perfume by pop music’s hottest R & B superstar, Quirk. It was going to be a really big night, with Quirk playing a set.
Polly read the details on the invite. ‘Polly Masterson-Mackay plus one’, it said, but that was no problem, she knew the PR well and had done her a big favour recently with another brand. One phone call would fix it.
Polly Masterson-Mackay would be going to that party. Polly Masterson-Mackay plus three.
‘Yassss!’ said Lucas. ‘Replay, free game, oh yay . . .’
He did a spin and high-fived himself.
‘How are you going, Guy?’ he asked. ‘Game over?’
Guy lifted one hand momentarily from the side of the pinball machine and gave him the finger, before getting back to frantically pressing the buttons.
‘Oh, look, Lucas,’ he said, ‘I’ve got multi-ball. Bring it on. Come to Papa, you little critters.’
Crazy lights flashed and the pinging noises on the game Guy was playing got even more frantic. Polly shook her head at Clemmie, who was sitting opposite her in a booth.
‘Boys,’ said Polly.
They were in a bar in Shoreditch that had a side-room full of old pinball machines, staging what Lucas had dubbed ‘the Pinball Olympiad’. Polly and Clemmie had tired of it after a few games and left them to it.
It had been Guy’s idea to meet there before heading to the launch, which had a late start, in keeping with Quirk’s pop-star style. She wasn’t expected to make an entrance until 11 p.m. Plus Guy had told Polly he wanted to ‘bond’ with Lucas before they went into full-on party mode.
Polly had been a little concerned that any kind of party mode with bottomless supplies of free drink might be too much of a good thing for her son, even if he had seemed to be on top of his drinking, but a conversation in the cab on the way over had put her mind at rest.
When she’d asked him if he could promise not to hit the booze too hard at the Quirk event, he’d waggled his scarred middle finger at her.
‘Don’t fret, Mama,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t fret ’cos I’m on da fret . . . My guitar fret, get it? I nearly lost a crucial playing finger that night and it freaked me out. It’s still a bit sore when I play and I’m not getting stupid-drunk any more.
‘It took a while to sink in, how stupid I was being, but when I got back to uni and saw the guys and we tried to rehearse and I couldn’t play, then I got it. Big-time. I haven’t gone dry – I’m nineteen, I’m at uni, I’m a musician – but I’m not going to put my fingers at risk like that again, ever.’
Just to be sure, Polly had taken the precaution of filling him up with lasagne before they left home, so there would be no empty-stomach scenario and so far, he’d been as good as his word, still nursing the first beer Guy had bought him when they’d arrived at the bar. She just hoped he’d be able to keep it up when faced with the ever-circulating trays of cocktails and champagne that would be laid on at the launch party.
It took the Uber driver several wrong turns before they arrived at what seemed to be the venue: a warehouse building so far out east it was practically in Essex – and not an old brick warehouse of real-estate fantasies, but the nasty corrugated-metal type on a stark industrial estate.
‘Well, this is scenic,’ said Guy, lowering his window and looking out. ‘This is it, according to the postcode on the invite, but I’m not sure I want to get out until I’m certain. It’s a long walk back, even to E1.’
He turned to the driver.
‘Would you mind taking us a bit further, so we can be sure?’ he asked, and the car inched along until they went round a bend and saw ‘Sent by Quirk’ projected on the other side of the building in bright pink light. The video for her latest single, ‘Sliding By’, was playing on a huge screen next to it. Now they could hear loud music coming from inside too.
‘Well, we’re clearly in the wrong place,’ said Lucas, opening the car door and jumping out, ‘but let’s see what’s happening at this party.’
The answer to that was: a lot. There were great DJs to dance to, and then Quirk made her entrance, sliding down a helter skelter onto the stage, and performed three of her biggest tracks, ending with ‘Sliding By’, during which her new fragrance was pumped into the air.
Lucas was almost glowing he was having such a good time – but he wasn’t drunk. Merry, yes, legless, no, and during Quirk’s set he got right up to the front and Polly could see how closely he was watching the musicians.
She was so glad she’d brought him and Clemmie with her. It was exactly what they all needed after that horrible shock earlier in the day.
But thinking about that, even for a moment, was a mistake. Remembering the surprise of hearing David’s voice again instantly dented her happy mood and she was suddenly aware of how much her feet were hurting in her heels.
She leaned in to Clemmie’s ear to shout over the loud music that she was going to the loo, then headed away from the crush towards the back of the space, where there were some tables and chairs. She sat down and took her shoes off, wondering as she did if it was a mistake. She might never get them on again.
All the energy of the pinball bar, the cool crowd, the cocktails and the great music drained out of her as unwelcome thoughts about discovering David in the History Department pushed themselves back into her mind.
She rubbed each foot, wondering what the hell she thought she was doing, flouncing around like a twenty-something party girl. She was a grown-up. A wife – in theory, at least – and the mother of adult children, yet here she was gadding about in a far-flung warehouse in the middle of the night in silly shoes.
It was a Thursday night in March. She should have been at home binge-watching Netflix, drinking a glass of merlot and knitting something tasteful in grey cashmerino, instead of acting like some middle-aged clubber. It was sad. Tragic. She’d be asking around for drugs next.
She got out her phone and looked at the time. It was nearly one and she had to teach a yoga class at eight the next morning – no, actually, that morning. The kids could stay on if they wanted to – and that included Guy �
� but it was time for her to go.
She tried to put her shoes on again, but sure enough, released from their bindings, her feet seemed to have swelled up several sizes. She was squinting at the floor, trying to decide if it would be too treacherous to walk in bare feet, when Clemmie came up.
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Come and dance again, we’re having such a good time. Guy’s an amazing mover, isn’t he?’
‘He is,’ said Polly, ‘but my dancing is over for tonight. I can’t get my shoes on. I’m just trying to determine how much broken glass there’s likely to be between here and the exit.’
‘Ah,’ said Clemmie, ‘it’s fatal to take them off, isn’t it? But don’t worry, I’ve got a solution – stay here.’
Polly was quite happy to do that. She pulled another chair out from the table and put her feet up on it, wondering if she could line up a third one in the middle and have a little lie down.
She closed her eyes, trying to block out all the thoughts about David, and must have drifted off, because she was aware of nothing until a hand touched her shoulder.
‘Hey, Cinderella,’ Guy’s voice said. ‘I’ve got your glass slippers.’
She opened her eyes to see Guy crouched next to her, a concerned look on his face.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked. ‘Clemmie says you’ve got high-heel fatigue and she’s sent me over with these. She had them in her handbag.’
Polly looked down to see him pulling a pair of fold-up ballet flats out of a mesh pouch.
‘Handy you’re the same size,’ he said.
Polly put them on and stood up, wiggling her toes then taking a few tentative steps.
‘Oh, what heaven!’ she said. ‘It’s like having little duvets for each foot after wearing those excruciating heels.
‘Do you think you can dance again?’ asked Guy, picking up her party shoes and putting them into the bag the flats had been in.
‘I’m not sure, but I’ll enjoy watching the rest of you.’
‘This might help,’ said Guy, picking a martini glass up off the table behind her. ‘It’s got a shot of coffee in it.’
The Scent of You Page 27
