Dark Place to Hide (16 page)

I try your mother first as the easier option, but my call goes straight to the answerphone; I don’t have a mobile number for her. I fall back on Alexa.

‘Have you heard anything?’ she says, warily.

‘No. Have you?’

‘No.’

‘I wondered if you could help with something,’ I venture. ‘It could be useful to the police.’

‘I’m at work.’ I can hear a persistent boomy thud in the background; it sounds like she’s in a nightclub, not a gym.

‘I want to know if Diane has accessed her bank account and I don’t have her online passwords.’

‘Can’t you wait until she gets back?’

‘I’m worried about her.’ I can’t believe Alexa is so nonchalant. ‘It’s been eight days. I haven’t heard a thing. It’s important.’

She sounds like she’s chewing gum. I can hear her tossing it around in her mouth, enjoying the power she has over me. ‘You want her password?’

‘I’m not going to
do
anything with her money – I just want to check it. See if she’s withdrawn cash, used her cards.’

It crosses my mind that I could clear out your account, Dee, and you’d be forced to come running back, but I dismiss the thought immediately. I don’t want to trick or force you like that.

‘Sorry,’ she says, coolly. ‘I don’t have it.’ Chew, chew, chew. ‘Why can’t you leave her be? She’ll come back when she’s ready. I’ve got to go.’

The phone goes dead before I can say anything further.

I haven’t told your sister that I know for certain the baby wasn’t mine. She would only rub my nose in it and I refuse to give her the satisfaction, although it’s silly really, she’s probably worked it out given you’ve told her I’m infertile.

I open my laptop and stare at it, as if my resolve will be enough to open up your records. The only password I have of yours is for your email account, so I open that instead. I’ve never done this before and I hate myself for snooping. I may very well regret it, too – but I need to know who you’ve been in contact with. Have you left behind the trail of an affair; illicit messages, covert invitations, erotic exchanges? My fingers tremble and I brace myself.

I go back to the start of May and look at every sender’s name. Most are people I recognise; Tara, Alexa, Jackie, Lorraine and colleagues from work. There are several receipts; you’ve made more donations to animal shelters than I thought and recently bought cufflinks. Are they for me? For our anniversary in September? There are a few spam emails and a message from the deputy head, Stephen Morrell, thanking you for running the assembly at the end of term. I remember you were worried about that; Dennis, the teacher who joined the school just before you did, had done a brilliant one on archaeology and you didn’t know how you could compete. We’d talked it through and you’d chosen astronomy and spent hours on delivering the basics about stars and outer space in a way that would captivate six to ten year olds.

I hate every moment of this. Checking up on you. But investigating officers will be going through all this on your own laptop too; none of this can be kept private anymore.

There are no names cropping up I don’t recognise. I scan through recent documents you’ve opened – most are connected to your presentation. You’ve also updated our Christmas address list. I check the photo file; there are several of you astride Rupert, taken at the stables, but not the one of Frank you posted on the Facebook page. That one must only be on your phone. There are several of us together in the garden, taken last summer, and they make me shiver. I feel desperately and irrationally homesick, even though I am standing right here in our own kitchen.

A brainwave slashes across my mounting resignation. I open the first page of your current back account and try the same password that you use for your emails. The police are also looking into this, but I haven’t heard anything yet. I draw a sharp breath. It works. I have no option. ‘I’m sorry, Dee, but I have to do this.’

The screen opens and there it is: three days after you left, a withdrawal of fifty pounds from a cash machine. I check the details:

Sat 2 August – ATM Stop ’n’ Shop 3918 TW6 £50

There’s nothing else, but it’s a start. I call Neil straight away.

‘The investigating officer will look into it,’ he assures me, ‘but you could track down the
Stop’n’Shop
and find out exactly where it is.’ There’s a gap. ‘TW6 is Twickenham.’

I do as he says and locate the store online.

I am no longer feeling jubilant at my discovery. The ATM is five-hundred metres from Heathrow Airport.

7 August

I’m still standing in the kitchen holding the disconnected phone. Neil has gone.
Stay calm.
My head feels like a washing machine that’s just jolted into fast spin mode. I mustn’t run away with myself. I have to take hold of this thread carefully and follow it to see where it takes me.

You used an ATM three days after you left, within half a kilometre of Heathrow.

Using the details I found online, I ring the convenience store and ask about CCTV. The ATM is inside the store and there’s no built-in camera – I know from my own criminology experience that usually only the high street banks can afford them. The shop itself has a camera, but it’s currently out of order, the manager tells me. This one vital lead is a total dead end.

I’m fired up now and check through all your personal effects: pockets, bags, all the paperwork I can find. It feels like a complete violation – a savage pillaging of our relationship, but I need to find you. I’m looking for evidence of plane tickets or someone else involved. There’s nothing. Not one thing to indicate an affair or imminent departure. Either you’ve been incredibly clever or you didn’t plan on going anywhere beyond the village shop.

I return to the kitchen and fling the soggy dishcloth left on the table, into the washing-up bowl full of dirty water. It splats on the surface then disappears. I am utterly powerless. All this new information has done is clog up my mind with more questions. Why Heathrow? Did you get on a plane? Did you go of your own free will? Are you alone or is someone with you? My worries are shifting. I need to know if you’ve gone of your own accord or if someone has taken you.

In my frustration, I have a tremendous urge to fling my coffee mug at the wall, smash glasses and expensive dishes. I crave the sound of destruction ringing in my ears, but I mustn’t give in to it, or who knows where it might lead. I shut my eyes, my fists so tight I feel like my nails are going to break through to the other side of my hand.

I unlock the back door and slam it open so hard it hits the side wall with a crash. It makes me gasp.

It reminds me of another time.

The outburst at Christmas with my mother was nothing in comparison. I try to block out the ‘other’ time – the shameful ‘episode’ when I heard Dad had died; I try to force my mind elsewhere, but images from that day flash inside my head in full colour.

Mum got the phone call as we were watching an old rerun of
Dad’s Army
on television. She was laughing as she picked up the receiver then her face collapsed. The next thing I remember was the house filling with people I hadn’t seen in years. Everyone was crying and upset. They talked about Dad being taken before his time, how the heart attack wasn’t his choice, how he hadn’t meant to go.

I was fifteen and it brought it all back. That day when I was eight, when he’d packed his bags and walked away. He must have got bored with me. In spite of Mum’s reassurances, a nagging question remained and had never been answered –
If he’d really loved me, he wouldn’t have left, would he?
Now he’d gone for good.

The anger I’d felt as I threw his press cuttings off the cliff, three months earlier, had nowhere to go. You don’t harbour ill will towards the dead. It had to be parcelled away – it was wrong and shameful. But Dad had let us down twice and I was furious. Everyone in our sitting
room was melting with grief, but I felt bolt upright; strong, my bones primed with steel. I had to
do
something.

I left the house and went to his; I’d got the address from my uncle – it was only three miles away. It was dark and no one was there, so I climbed the back fence and broke in through the kitchen window. I raided his display cabinets and took all his trophies; from the medals he’d won at school through to the end of his career. I ran off, through the side gate, carrying them in a large bin bag over to the sewage plant in Enfield. Building work was underway, but had finished for the day, so I chucked them over a temporary fence into a deep pit. That was where they belonged – buried beside all the shit. I knew it wasn’t going to hurt him, but it was all I could think of.

I was lucky; no one saw me leave the gathering, everyone was too concerned for my mother, who had never stopped loving him. I got out and blended back in again without anyone noticing. Luckily for me there had been some gang-related street crimes in the area where Dad lived and the police put it down to a random hate attack.

I find myself wandering aimlessly around the garden. Ironically, reliving that episode has calmed me down in a way I can’t explain. Perhaps it’s because it reminds me that I can fight back when I need to. I may be infertile, but I have enough self-respect and guts to stand up for myself when the going gets really tough.

I sit on the swing and think of Marion’s ravaged garden. It doesn’t take long for nature to become overgrown, out of control. Ours is heading the same way, already. I haven’t appreciated until now how much attention it requires. Dead flower heads need clipping off, the roses need cutting back, there are weeds in the cracks along the path and soil has tumbled on to the lawn –
Frank’s doing, I presume. I don’t know where to start and it feels wrong to interfere. This is your domain and I’ll only spoil it; get something badly wrong and when you come back you’ll be furious with me.

When you come back.
Those words hang around my head like an angry wasp.

My phone rings. It’s Paul Whitaker.

‘Hey, Harper – we had a squash match booked for twenty minutes ago…’

Shit. I’d completely forgotten. ‘I’m sorry to let you down, mate,’ I say. ‘But as it stands, I don’t think I can make any more match arrangements – until…you know…’

‘Sure. No problem. I know she’s not back yet. I understand.’ He says what everyone else does – that you just need time on your own and you’ll be back soon.

I can hear trainers squeaking on court in the background. Paul will be able to fix a game with another partner without any trouble; he’s a good player and in demand at the club.

I take Frank out again; a long ramble that wipes a few more inane hours out of my day. When I get back, it’s 7pm. I ought to cook the pasty I took out of the freezer this morning, but eating doesn’t come naturally to me now. I’m living with a lingering nausea the whole time and have to set an alarm to remind me to eat. Yesterday, I was surprisingly resourceful and cooked oven chips from frozen. I didn’t taste them. I can’t taste anything. Frank had most of them. You wouldn’t have been happy about that.

I pour cornflakes into a bowl and add milk. It’s all I can manage. I’m here and I’m not here. I pour a whisky. I know I shouldn’t, but I need something to help get me through the stark evenings. I put a notepad in front of me on the kitchen table and consider all the facts.

Everything is open to interpretation; I can find no certainties anywhere. Your bank card was used at the ATM, but was it you standing there pressing the buttons? Did you drive all the
way to the airport? Did you leave the car there? Have you left the country? I think about how much you withdrew. It was only fifty pounds. It isn’t much. Have you also used your credit card? I tap the page with the pen – I tried the same password I used for your current account to access your online credit statement, but it didn’t work, so I won’t know until the paperwork arrives – or the police come up with something in the meantime.

If you aren’t taking money out, then someone is definitely with you. But who?

I’m looking at our life together and wondering where the holes are I’ve not seen. Did your feelings for me start mutating into tolerance and acceptance instead of love? Did you fall for someone else right under my nose? How many secret phone calls did you make? How many times did you go sneaking behind my back?

I finish the glass and pour myself another. I didn’t see any of it, Dee. I’ve been a blind fool, living in denial, not noticing that you were drifting away from me. Thing is – it’s so hard for me to believe – even now. I didn’t spot
anything
to give me concern. Not. A. Thing. You have the kind of face that allows every nuance of emotion to dismantle it. I would have seen something. I notice things, I pick up details and signals. It’s my job, but it’s also a legacy after Dad left. If that period in my life taught me anything it was to watch, listen, to look out – and never take anything for granted.

I get nowhere. I cross through the notes I’ve written with big black scrawls. In the end, there is only one question I need an answer to:
Are you coming back?

The pain hits me, envelops me, consumes me; it’s the first thing I’m aware of. A searing rip wrenches at my side – have I been stabbed? Has my appendix burst? Internally, I feel like parts of me are broken, twisted, buckled – I want to touch my abdomen, stroke my side, but I am unable to move. I’m feverish; a cold layer of moisture trails over my skin like a troop of wet ants – there’s something badly wrong with me. There is pain in my wrist and my head. Like I’ve fallen from a height onto concrete.

I glance down and notice trails of liquid down my fleece. I blink. Is it orange juice? No – wrong colour – it’s dried blood. I have so many tender and aching places it’s hard to know where the drops have come from. Where am I? What has happened to me? It’s getting dark now, but I know the light has broken through and faded several times – so days must have gone by. I don’t know how many. There are great landscapes of time I know nothing about. What’s been going on in all the gaps where I have no recall? What am I doing here?