Dying for Christmas (10 page)

‘Day Three in the Big Brother Household,’ he said dryly, unlocking the shackle. ‘And let’s try to make a bit more of an effort, shall we, Jessica? I’m getting rather fed up of this all being so one-sided. I feel like I’m the one doing all the giving here, and you just take, take, take.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘I suppose you’ll be wanting the toilet, will you?’

He made it sound like I was asking for a bath in ass’s milk.

I nodded. He’d been accompanying me to the toilet since I arrived, and I’d got used to focusing my eyes on a point straight ahead and imagining myself to be alone. Sometimes, during the really embarrassing moments, I recited song lyrics to myself in my head, trying to distract myself from what I was doing.

Usually Dominic looked on with a kind of paternalistic pride, but today he was angry. ‘I shouldn’t indulge you in all these toilet breaks,’ he said as I stared fixedly at the tile straight ahead. ‘You should be more disciplined about it. Your trouble, Jessica, is that you’ve allowed yourself to become spiritually flabby.’

‘Spiritually flabby’. Those were his very words.

‘Take off your clothes,’ he said as I flushed the toilet. ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Jessica.’ He’d clearly seen the sudden fear that passed over me. ‘I just want to see you.’

I took off yesterday’s blue leggings, peeling them down like a wetsuit. I took off the silk tunic. The bra.

‘Not like that. Hands by your sides.’

Dominic perched on the lip of the bath and assessed me like he was buying me at auction. ‘That rash is still there. I’ve got to tell you, Jessica, it’s not attractive. I can’t help feeling your personal hygiene is to blame. And you’re getting chubby.’

I looked down at my stomach where it rolled over the waistband of my knickers. Natalie’s knickers, I should say.

‘No food for you today, I’m afraid.’

As if I’d been gorging willingly on the piles of pancakes and the foil containers of cannelloni and zabaglioni we’d had from the fridge yesterday.

‘It’s for your own good,’ he told me, handcuffing me once more to the radiator before going off to find me more clothes. He reappeared with a red lycra frock and red tights. He removed the handcuffs and made me get dressed, which seemed somehow to restore his good humour.

‘You look very festive, sweetheart. You know, I’m thinking I might quite like to paint you.’

I shot a glance at the hideous half-Natalie, half-cat painting on the wall.

‘Nothing like that. Don’t worry. I just feel I’d like to commit you to paper, just how you look now, in that red dress.’

He started singing that dreadful ‘Lady in Red’ song in a soft voice, and for one awful moment I thought he would ask me to dance. Instead he disappeared again to fetch his paints. It was the first time since I’d got there that I was left alone without being shackled to the radiator. Without pausing to think, I dashed across the room to the heavy front door, but even before I’d got there, I remembered how he’d locked it from the inside with the purple key. When I pulled on the handle, it failed to budge.

‘I hope you’re behaving yourself,’ he called from the inner hallway.

I wondered if he was in the other room. The one behind the door that was always locked. Frantic, I crossed the floor to the kitchen and started pulling on handles, but apart from a drawer with tea-towels and napkins, the others were locked.

Hearing him approach, still humming that song, I ran back to the radiator where I’d been standing before.

‘You sound a bit puffed out, Jessica,’ he said as he placed an A3 sketchbook and a large leather holdall carefully on the dining table.

I held my breath, but he didn’t say anything more. First he pulled out a box of pencils. Then the paints, acrylics from the look of them, and a large wooden palette. Finally he withdrew a leather-bound folder. When he opened it up there was a variety of paint brushes, displayed in order of size. He said something to me then. I watched his mouth moving. But I couldn’t hear a thing over the sound of a woman’s voice screaming inside my head.

* * *

The area Travis Riley and Jessica Gold lived in was what estate agents might call up-and-coming, but what Kim would call a shit hole. They’d tried hard with the flat, that much was obvious. They’d covered the laminate flooring with colourful rugs and the furniture was eclectic and might even be described as shabby chic. There was a Christmas tree in the corner of the living room. Small, but real and tastefully decorated with baubles and candy cones.

‘We’re saving for a deposit on a place of our own,’ Travis explained, twiddling a lock of his hair around his finger. ‘Fat fucking chance. We’ll be drawing our pensions and still saving, the rate things are going up in London. If there are any pensions left by then.’

He sounded bitter, Kim decided. Evidently he felt he was owed something better after so many years studying medicine. Kim knew he’d left the Gold family house the night before, saying he needed to be at home in case Jessica turned up. Probably wanted to get away from the atmosphere as well. She didn’t blame him.

At least he looked like he’d slept, which is more than could be said for her. Last night when she’d finally let herself into her silent house, she’d tried Sean’s mobile at five-minute intervals without joy, then finally, in desperation, rang his parents’ landline.

‘I’m afraid he doesn’t want to talk to you just yet, love,’ his mother told her. ‘Give him a little bit of time.’

‘Well, can I talk to the kids?’

There was a sharp intake of breath then, on the other end of the line. ‘It’s eleven o’clock, love. Surely you remember what time they go to bed?’

She’d drunk the glass of brandy they’d put out for Santa that was still on the mantelpiece. And then she’d drunk what was left in the bottle. But still she’d tossed and turned, lying rigidly on her side of the kingsize mattress, as if there was a wall down the centre. In the end, she’d gone into Rory’s bedroom, and curled up under his Arsenal duvet and fallen asleep with her nose buried in his pyjama top.

‘Have you traced her bank cards?’ Travis wanted to know.

‘We have a few purchases that put her in Oxford Street on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth. Nothing after four twenty-three.’

‘Oxford Street?’ Travis said it as if it was somewhere obscure and remote. ‘But she said she was going locally. What about her phone records?’

‘Nothing since the morning, when she made a call to her parents. And we tried locating her phone using its internal GPS but she appears to have switched off her mobile settings.’

Travis tutted. ‘I’ve told her not to do that, but she insists it drains the battery to leave them on. You think she’d learn, wouldn’t you, after she left her phone in the back of a cab, and another time in the library? But there’s no telling Jessica anything. She appears to be listening, but then she goes and does exactly what she wants. And she still hasn’t set up that synching thing on her new laptop, even though I keep nagging her.’

He sounded annoyed. Kim remembered Gary Sheridan and his crocodile tears at the press conference about his wife’s disappearance.

Travis Riley didn’t look the type. But if there was one thing Kim had learned since becoming a police officer, it was that there wasn’t a type.

* * *

The new painting was propped up against the wall, underneath the half-cat, half-Natalie picture. It wasn’t bad once you got past the fact that the face was just a blur of colour, all features deliberately smudged together, mouth bleeding into eyes and nose.

The hours spent posing on the sofa in my red dress and tights had passed almost pleasantly. Afterwards I was hungry – all the enforced eating of the last couple of days meant my stomach was accustomed to food – but Dominic didn’t offer me anything to eat. Instead, I watched as he selected from the plastic cartons in the fridge. My heart twanged a little when he chose macaroni cheese – something vegetarian at last. He heated it in the microwave and transferred it to a big white dish, and ate it methodically, staring into my eyes.

And now we were on the sofa, and I could tell by the tension thrumming in the air that it was present time again, and I was suddenly glad I hadn’t eaten because my guts were doing weird things and I was dreading what he was going to produce next.

‘You look so lovely.’ His fingertip traced the outline of my lips as if he still had a paintbrush in his hand, and I wondered if he could sense how my whole body stiffened. ‘You deserve another present, I think.’

My hand was still resting on my rash-covered stomach, so I felt it heave through my fingers. All through the night before I’d lain awake in the kennel, mind churning with thoughts of yesterday’s gift, that little purple plastic stool, and the little boy who’d sat there and watched god knows what.

‘This present is a little different.’ Dominic’s excitement caused an unpleasant prickling at the back of my neck.

‘I’m going to tell you the context of it beforehand, set the scene for you, and then give it to you after. You’ll understand why. Can you wait that long?’

I nodded.

‘Did you ever have a pet, Jessica?’

The question threw me. I thought about Winston and something tight and painful wrapped itself around my heart. ‘I have a dog,’ I said. ‘I
had
a dog,’ I corrected myself.

Winston had been my fault. I was never one of those children who fantasize about having a dog. I liked dogs from a theoretical point of view but didn’t really see myself as having Dog Person Genes. Then I saw a programme on the television about rescue dogs and something clicked into place in my head, or heart, or wherever such things live, and that was it, I needed to have one. I didn’t question whether my sudden conversion was connected to that thin blue line in the pregnancy-test window, but it became an obsession I couldn’t shake off.

Travis was completely against the idea because a) we lived in a top-floor flat with no garden; b) we were out at work all day; and c) he couldn’t stand the smell of wet dog. I agreed with every one of his reservations. Yet still I yearned for a dog with every fibre of my being.

A dog would sort out my life.

A dog would give me someone to love.

One Saturday afternoon I happened to go past a pet shop – a pet shop in the East End that was miles out of the way of anywhere I actually wanted to be. And there was the most gorgeous little black and white ball of fluff. I didn’t know then that you’re not supposed to buy puppies from pet shops as they’ve probably been puppy-farmed in Romania. I came back in a cab with Winston on my lap and enough pet supplies to fill up our entire flat.

I took a week off work to settle him in, and by the end I knew it was a mistake. Winston cried when we went out of the room. He weed on the rugs and chewed up Travis’ copies of the
BMJ
. He repeatedly woke us up barking in the night so that we sat unspeaking at breakfast, our eyes lost in black shadows. Travis’ ‘I told you so’ was written into every heavy step he took picking his way around the debris of our living room, every faint, disbelieving shake of his head.

When I went back to work, partings were pitiful, even though I hired a dog nanny to come in at lunchtimes and take Winston out. I returned home dreading the devastation I’d find. Yet, I loved that dog. When he slept, exhausted, on my chest as I lay on the sofa in the evenings and I felt his little heart beating against mine, I thought I might die from love for him.

Travis found someone at work to take him. Someone whose husband worked from home and who had a garden and didn’t mind their rugs getting dirty.

‘You know it’s for the best,’ he said as he loaded Winston’s basket and bowls and his toys into the car. His favourite toy of all was the remnant of a red spotty lead he’d chewed right through. He used to carry that scrap of lead around from room to room as proudly as a lion with its kill. Travis was too mortified to pack that in the bag for the new owners so it stayed in our flat.

Travis made an effort to be extra nice when he got home from dropping Winston off. He’d gone shopping on the way back and he cooked cauliflower cheese with baked potatoes. But then later that night as we were getting ready for bed, he said, ‘Won’t it be lovely not to be woken up in the middle of the night.’

And I wanted to kill him.

Dominic was watching as all this passed through my mind, as if he could suck the thoughts out through my skull and read them like a book.

‘I knew you would be a dog person.’

‘Cat person. You guessed cat person before.’

He ignored my interruption. ‘There’s nothing like it, is there – the devotion you get from a pet? No conditions, no qualifications, no “I’ll love you as long as you do X, or are Y, or give me Z.”’

‘Did you have a dog?’

‘I had a bird. A canary. Does that surprise you?’

I said it didn’t.

But of course it did. Who has a canary as a pet? Wasn’t that the same as a budgie? What was the point of them – they didn’t even talk, did they? They certainly couldn’t lie on your chest as you watched the telly.

‘There’s a funny story about it.’

My heart dropped inside my chest.

‘When I was about five, my mother got pregnant. Yes, Daddy must have taken a breather from porking Mrs Meadowbank long enough to sire another child. I think by that stage I was already starting to exhibit what the authorities called “challenging behaviour” and my parents were keen not to make it worse. They were concerned with appearances, my mum and dad. I bet that surprises you. Someone, a health visitor maybe, told them that to prevent any jealousy it helps to smooth the way if the oldest child is given a present, supposedly from the as-yet-unborn baby. They asked me what I wanted more than anything, and I said a pet, meaning cat or dog, though I knew Mummy would sooner eat her own fat arm than have something in the house that moulted and brought in dirt and mud. So one day I came home from school and there was this canary sitting in a cage on the kitchen table.’