(1998) Denial (25 page)

He unwrapped his sandwich, took a bite and, chewing slowly, started to scan his newspaper. He was finding it hard to get into any of the stories until one headline caught his eye.

249,762 persons went missing in Great Britain last year, according to figures published this week by the National Missing Persons’ Helpline. Astonishingly, 34% will never appear again if the trend of the past decade holds true.

Wheelchair-bound mother of three, Paulette Flowering, is one of the latest parents to experience the nightmare of a missing child.

Her son, 19-year-old trainee journalist Justin, disappeared twelve days ago, after leaving the offices of the
Mill Hill Messenger
newspaper, where he had been working for the previous six months.

‘Justin was finding the job very stressful,’ she said. ‘And he was unhappy about the attitude of some staff members towards him. He ran away from school twice, but on both those occasions phoned me within a couple of days to let me know he was all right. I’m very worried about him.’

Michael took another bite of his sandwich and read on. The highest percentage of missing persons was among teenage children, but there were plenty of adults too, in all walks of life. A senior editor at a London publishing house had been missing for nearly three weeks – Michael recalled there had been heavy press coverage of that, and pictures of the attractive, dark-haired woman had been on national television news.

A fair number of seemingly successful professional people disappeared each year: in the past twelve months there had been bank managers, lawyers, estate agents, an airline pilot and – a
psychiatrist
.

‘We can assume a small percentage of these people have engineered their own disappearances for convenience,’ said retired Chief Superintendent Dick Jarvis of the National Missing Persons’ Helpline. ‘Insurance deceptions and bigamous marriages are two of the most common reasons; you may remember the famous case of the postmaster general, John Stonehouse, who left all his clothes on a beach in Miami in 1974, to imply he had
drowned. In fact, he was alive and well and living under a different identity in Australia.’

Michael ate the last mouthful of his sandwich. Then he checked his mobile phone. All five black dashes sat there in the window, smugly reassuring him of perfect reception in this area.

She’s probably stopped for lunch with whomever it was she was meeting. You’re not likely to hear from her until after two, so stop fretting
.

But he couldn’t.

He got back to his office on the dot of two. By a quarter past she still had not rung. His next patient was in the waiting room. A twenty-eight-year-old hot-shot commodities broker, who worked eighteen hours a day to earn one and a half million a year and wondered why he was suffering panic attacks.

Michael told his secretary to send him in. At least his mind would be occupied for the next forty-five minutes. By then it would be three o’clock.

Amanda would have to be back in her office by then.

Surely?

Michael’s four-thirty appointment was late. He had two more patients this afternoon, a short staff meeting, and he had to visit, briefly, two in-patients. Then he was finished – at least, here in the office. This evening, at home, he had to write his weekly piece for the Thursday
Daily Mail
and fax it through in the morning. Tuesday, ten a.m., was his copy deadline. Any slippage on that, and his editor would get twitchy. He didn’t like to be late, it was unprofessional.

He didn’t imagine Amanda would be unprofessional either. Which was why the news he was now hearing from the yahoo-voiced young woman on the other end of the phone disturbed him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘She still hasn’t arrived. You’ve rung earlier, I recognise your voice.’

‘Yes, I’m Dr Tennent. Amanda’s doing a segment with me in your documentary series on therapy.’

The young woman’s tone warmed considerably. ‘Dr Tennent! Yah, of course. I’m Lulu, her assistant.’

‘Right. Lulu, do you have her mobile number? Maybe I could try that.’

‘Yah, I’ll give it to you, but I think it’s switched off. I’ve been trying and I just get the answering-service.’

Although they had slept together, Amanda was still a stranger to Michael, and her private world – home and business – was unfamiliar territory to him. He was aware that he had no right to pry into her life but he just could not believe she deliberately wouldn’t call him.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘Lulu, is she OK?’

The assistant hesitated. ‘Actually, we’re getting worried.’

The words sent a deadweight of fear plunging in free-fall through him.

Lulu went on, ‘She had an important nine-thirty meeting at the BBC this morning, and I’ve just heard that she never showed up – or rang. And we were expecting her in the office for a meeting here at twelve and haven’t heard a word from her. She’s normally very good about keeping in touch. I hope she hasn’t had an accident over the weekend or something.’

It was too soon to start panicking, but Michael couldn’t get the feeling out of his system that something was very wrong. He had no idea how close or otherwise Amanda’s relationship was with Lulu, but knew he should not be divulging details of her private life to her office staff, so he kept it as professional-sounding as he could. ‘Amanda and I – we . . .’ He hesitated. ‘We met on Sunday afternoon. I had a patient driving in a stock-car race at Arlington, near Eastbourne. Amanda thought it might add a bit of production value to the piece if –’

Lulu saved him from having to go on. ‘Yes, she told me she was seeing you. She was looking forward to it.’

Michael could have sworn he detected a hint of humour in her voice, as if Amanda had told her a
lot
more than she was letting on. ‘She left the race meeting about half three to drive to her sister, somewhere near Heathfield.’

‘Chiddingly,’ Lulu said. ‘If she hasn’t come in by the end of the day I’m going to go round to her flat and make sure she’s not lying unconscious or anything.’ There was a brief pause, and then she added, unconvincingly, ‘There’s probably a perfectly good explanation. Maybe she’s double-booked herself and completely forgotten about the Beeb meeting. And she’s just got a new mobile – she’s been complaining about the reception. I’m certain there’s a perfectly good reason.’

She didn’t sound at all certain.

Michael felt agonisingly impotent. He wasn’t sure what else he could do or say at this point. Yet he wanted, desperately, to do
something
.

He clutched at one final straw. ‘Lulu, tell me something.’
He was glad he had her name: using it made him feel he was now at least some part of Amanda’s inner circle. ‘Is it like her to forget a meeting?’

‘No,’ Lulu said. ‘It isn’t. It isn’t like her at all.’

A woman answered the phone. Polite.

He needed to be tactful. For all he knew, Tina Mackay could have been having an illicit affair with someone down here. ‘This is Detective Constable Branson from Hove Police making a routine inquiry. Does a Mr Robert Mason live at this address?’

‘
Robert
Mason? No, no Robert Mason. You don’t mean
Dave
Mason?’

‘We’re looking for Robert Mason.’

‘I’m sorry. My husband’s name is Dave.’

‘You don’t by any chance know a
Robert
Mason?’

Brief pause for thought, then, ‘No, no, I don’t.’ Not over-bright, but she sounded straightforward enough.

Glenn thanked her, hung up, and put a line through the photocopied phone-book entry. Nine down. Six so far were negative. One hadn’t answered, and two were answering-machines, neither of which gave a name. He cursed DC Simon Roebuck of the Met yet again for lumbering him with this search.

It was a quarter to five, and he’d only just got back to the office after going off with his partners to arrest a suspect drugs dealer, who was a former kick-boxing champion. They’d gone in a team because they thought he might be violent. He turned out to be a pathetic, ageing wreck, in a drugged stupor, and gave them no trouble.

Glenn tried the tenth number on the list. Eliminated that. And the following six. At ten past five, he tried one of the numbers he had rung earlier. This time instead of the answering-machine, he got a breezy male voice with a mid-Atlantic twang.

‘Hi, Robert Mason!’

Glenn introduced himself, then asked him if the name Tina Mackay meant anything to him.

‘Tina?’ All the energy seemed to drop from his voice. ‘Sure. Jesus, we had lunch just a few weeks back. This is terrible about her disappearing, I’ve been reading about it. Did you find her yet?’

‘I’m afraid not. Would it be convenient if I were to come up and ask a few questions? I won’t take much of your time.’

‘Sure. You want to come now? I have to go out at seven.’

Glenn needed to be home by six thirty to baby-sit Sammy. Monday nights Ari went to her English-literature evening class, but he didn’t say that. He said, ‘No problem.’

His instincts told him that Robert Mason had not abducted Tina Mackay, and when he met the guy twenty minutes later he was convinced he was right. Mason was a thirtysomething record producer and lived in a palatial, ostentatiously decorated flat overlooking the sea, only a short distance from Cora Burstridge’s. He had met Tina at a book launch, and had invited her down to one of his regular lavish Sunday-lunch parties, at which ‘I throw people in the arts together’. Simple as that. Innocent.

Dead end.

Glenn drove slowly past Cora Burstridge’s building as he headed home. The rain had stopped and the evening sun was breaking through the clouds over the Channel. The tide was out. A row of gulls sat on a weed-draped breakwater. An old man swung a metal detector backwards and forwards on the shiny wet sand beyond the end of the pebble beach. This had been Cora Burstridge’s view.

He stared up at the actress’s third-floor bay window and wondered if anyone was up there now. Her daughter, Ellen? The one he’d phoned in Los Angeles and to whom he’d broken the news? She’d sounded deeply upset, the kind of grief that has a whole load of guilt attached, the worst kind, when you realise it’s too late to do all the things you should have done.

I’m still with you, Cora. I’m still fighting your corner. I’m out
here in my car and I’m thinking about you day and night. It wasn’t your looks I loved, it was your brilliance as an actress. You’ve given me so much in my life, I’ll do whatever I can to give you something back
.

That’s my promise.

He built a Lego tower with Sammy, then put him to bed and read him a Roald Dahl story. Sammy liked to go to sleep after laughing at a story, and Glenn liked to watch him close his eyes with a smile on his face.

Ari had left his dinner in the microwave, and all he had to do was switch on the timer. But when she came back from her class, at half past ten, her head full of Graham Greene and
Brighton Rock
, and of strange characters called Pinkie, Spicer, Dallow, Cubitt, Ida, she found a mess of Lego bricks on the floor, and Glenn sitting on the sofa, his face buried in a thick tome titled
Postmortem Examination
, by Dr Nigel Kirkham, MRCPath.

And she found his chicken casserole with mushrooms, tomatoes, runner beans and duchesse potatoes, still sitting, mortuary cold, in the microwave.

Holding on to her temper, she gave him a wan smile, and perched down beside him, nuzzling his cheek. ‘Good book?’

For an answer, he turned and looked at her with big round eyes that were fogged with exhaustion.

Michael sat in his den at home in front of his Mac Power-Book, typing his notes for his
Daily Mail
article:

Symptoms of mental disorder include: Altered perceptions – frequently visual and taste. For instance, flowers smell like burning flesh. Sweet food tastes bitter.

Illusions. Hallucinations. Elementary
: Hearing bangs and whistles.
Complex
: Hearing voices, seeing faces, whole scenes. (Need to elaborate.)

Disorders of thinking
: Delusions, obsessions, disorder of stream of thought, formal thought disorder, abnormal beliefs. Talking past the point. There is a German word for this,
Vorbeireden
. The patient is always about to get near to the matter in hand, but never quite reaches it.

He folded his arms. The inspiration wasn’t coming, the article was going to be crap. The Grolsch he had poured lay untouched. He looked at the clock on his screen. It was seven thirty. Amanda’s assistant, Lulu, hadn’t rung him. She promised she would after she had been to Amanda’s flat. So why hadn’t she?

He dialled Amanda’s home number again. Listened to her voice on the answering-machine. It sent a pang of yearning through him.

‘Hi, sorry I can’t come to the phone right now. Leave a message and I’ll call you back!’

He tried her mobile instead. As before, the answering-service cut in before it had even rung. ‘You’ve reached Amanda Capstick. Leave a message and I’ll get right back to you!’

He hung up.
Why haven’t you rung me, Lulu?

He looked back at what he had written on the screen. There was no flow. It was a mess. Normally when he sat down, some miracle happened, the muse came, the words poured out.

Maybe I should go over to Amanda’s flat.

But Lulu was already doing that.

He picked up the phone, dialled Directory Enquiries and asked for the number of the Sussex Police headquarters.

When the switchboard answered, he asked if anyone could give him information about road-traffic accidents in their area during the past twenty-four hours. He was put through to the traffic control room. A helpful male voice. ‘Amanda Capstick? One moment, sir.’ There was a pause, then he came back on the line. ‘No one of that name has been reported in any accident in the Sussex area, sir. I’ve checked the past forty-eight hours for you.’

‘Thanks. You don’t by any chance have a list of hospitals in that area with Accident and Emergency departments? She might not have had a car accident, she might just have been taken ill.’