Dying for Christmas (12 page)

* * *

That night, Dominic let me sleep across the foot of the huge bed. I was still shackled by the ankle, the chain much shorter than before, but the feeling of having a soft mattress underneath me was indescribable. I was so grateful I cried.

Later, when my eyes became accustomed to the dark I peered over the satin eiderdown at Dominic. He had a disconcerting way of sleeping without making any noise at all, no heavy rhythmic breathing, nothing to tell you if he was unconscious or staring straight at you, his close-together eyes shining in the darkness like a cat’s. Now his face was turned away, his chest gently rising and falling. The size of the bed meant that even though I was lying horizontally across the bottom, his feet still weren’t against mine, although if I reached out a hand I’m sure I could have touched him. Making sure not to move the ankle connected to the chain, I raised myself up a bit more and looked around to see if there was anything I could use as a weapon, but there was nothing. The bare dressing table with its closed drawers was out of reach. The dull ache in my empty gut had intensified and I put a hand over my stomach, wincing when I touched the skin still raw from that afternoon’s tattoo.

I began to think about my family and wondered what all this would be doing to them. My parents have always worried about me more than my brothers. Once, when I was about thirteen and nosing around in the loft looking for my old diaries, I came across a notebook in which my mum had listed, in her spiky, almost illegible handwriting, all my odd behaviour as a child, observations painstakingly dated and recorded.
10.30–11.20 a.m., March 2nd 1987: Stared into space. 3.15, September 9th 1988: Had conversation in the garden with someone who wasn’t there.
She was mortified when I confronted her with it. ‘I just didn’t want to be … remiss,’ she said. ‘You can’t imagine what it is to be a parent, how much you want your children’s lives to be as easy as they can be, for them not to struggle.’

I wondered if the crisis would have prompted my mum to take up Buddhism again. I pictured her in that shrine she made in the corner of the room that used to be my oldest brother’s, chanting for my safe return. James had been furious when he’d come home and found it there. ‘Why
my
room?’ he’d said petulantly. ‘Why not one of the others?’

It seemed important suddenly that they realize I’d ended up here out of naivety, as could happen to anyone, rather than out of some inherent personal weirdness.

Lying across the bed, too nervous to move, I nevertheless relished the softness of the mattress under me, such a relief after the hard wooden floor of the dog kennel that had dug into my hip bones. I wondered what had prompted this sudden generosity, and then it hit me.

Sleeping on the bed was my reward for being broken.

Chapter Seventeen

Sonia Rubenstein had a way of looking at you as if she was at a gallery and you were a particularly fascinating painting. Kim found herself considering what she was about to say before opening her mouth, for fear of giving herself away. Though what she was afraid of giving away, she couldn’t have said.

‘I appreciate your reservations, Ms Rubenstein,’ said Kim, stumbling as usual over the pronunciation of that word
Ms
. ‘However, you’ll appreciate our priority is to find Jessica, so you need to tell us anything she might have said that could give us some insight into her state of mind before she disappeared.’

The psychotherapist smiled, her red-lipsticked mouth matching exactly the hue of the silk scarf loosely knotted around her neck.

‘Sonia, please. Of course I want to help in any way I can, Detective Harper. But you must understand I also take patient confidentiality very seriously. If Jessica turns out to have just … taken a breather from her life, shall we say … I don’t want her to feel I compromised her in any way.’

Though Kim was a few feet away from Martin, she could feel impatience pouring off him like sweat.

‘And do you think that’s likely, Sonia? That Jessica would have taken off for a breather, as you say, without telling anyone?’

The psychotherapist’s smile remained fixed on her face as if it had been thrown there and stuck, like not-quite-cooked spaghetti against a wall.

‘It would be uncharacteristic for her to act in that way,’ she said eventually. ‘But I wouldn’t rule it out. Jessica is a highly unusual person. I wouldn’t want to risk predicting her behaviour.’

‘Unusual in what sense?’ Martin was itching to get the diagnosis they’d come for and be off, she could tell.

‘She doesn’t think in the same way other people do. She’s highly intelligent but sometimes you’ll talk to her and it’s like she’s not even there, as if she’s gone into another world altogether. She sometimes struggles to fit in.’

‘We understand she’s said in the past that she hears voices?’

This evidently wasn’t news to Sonia Rubenstein.

‘Yes, Mrs Gold mentioned that to me when she booked our sessions. She said that there was, how shall I put it, a childhood history of internal voices. However, Jessica never mentioned that to me. She said she had episodes where the outside world disappeared, but she never talked about voices.’

‘And you didn’t think to ask her?’

Kim wished Martin wouldn’t sound so adversarial. It was just going to put the woman off.

‘I wouldn’t lead the sessions in that way, no. If Jessica had wanted to talk about voices in her head, she had plenty of opportunity to do so, but she didn’t.’

‘And I suppose she didn’t mention self-harming either?’ Martin pressed.

Now the psychotherapist did look shocked. ‘No. Never. Who told you that?’

‘Jessica Gold’s mother saw cuts and bruises on her arms,’ he insisted.

Sonia took a moment to digest that information before she spoke. ‘That really does surprise me. I would not have imagined Jessica was in that mind-frame at all.’

‘And she never gave you any indication of being suicidal?’

‘Suicidal? Not at all.’

From the corner of her eye, Kim saw Martin frown. She decided to step in before he had the chance to pursue that vein of questioning any further.

‘Ms Rubenstein, Sonia, can you give us some insight into the relationship between Jessica and her boyfriend, Travis Riley? Might she be running away from him?’

The therapist was shaking her head before she’d even finished her question.

‘I very much doubt it. And if you’re thinking he might have been responsible for those cuts and bruises her mother saw, I doubt that too. Jessica often complained … no, that’s too strong a word for it, she … observed … that the relationship was marked by a deficit of passion. I think if Jessica had wanted out of the relationship that badly, it wouldn’t have been too difficult to end it.’

Kim tried not to think about Sean and how it had been over the last few months, with his mouth a thin line every time she came home late from work and her feeling more and more like work was the place she went to relax, and home was where everything tensed up again. All the times she’d wanted there to be less passion, fewer intense moods, so she could concentrate on holding together the things she really did feel passionately about, work and kids. Did it show in her face? she wondered. The failure of her marriage?

Sonia Rubenstein kept glancing at the clock above the door in the consulting room where they sat.

‘I’m afraid I do have another client arriving soon,’ she said eventually. But as Martin and Kim were about to leave, she held on to Kim’s sleeve. ‘She’s tougher than you think, you know. She’s one of the toughest people I know.’

Then, abruptly, she turned away. ‘Can you show yourselves out?’

* * *

I had become institutionalized.

I understood it on the fourth day when I looked out of the huge glass windows at the tiny cars moving across the bridge in the distance, and felt anxiety in place of longing. The outside world still looked beautiful, but also scary.

Go figure, as Travis used to say in a fake American accent when he was trying to be funny.

So how did Dominic and I fill our time together? It’s hard to recall. Time does weird things when you’re in that situation, winding itself around and around you until you’re in a cocoon where you can’t tell the difference between a minute and an hour. We watched films. We played Scrabble and I didn’t say anything when Dominic used American spellings to win points. We read. There was a large drawer under Dominic’s bed crammed with books. At first I was disappointed to find they were all non-fiction and mostly concerned with the Second World War, but after reading a couple I became fascinated by the way it all unfolded. For the first time I saw history is just a succession of consequences, one after the other. Without end. Don’t ask me why, but I found that a comfort in my current predicament. Dominic and I and this million-pound prison in Wapping didn’t exist in a bubble outside of everything else. We were part of a chain of events, cause and effects, that had led us here, and would continue on long after this had all been resolved.

Occasionally I even forgot the circumstances and would find myself chatting to him almost as if he was a normal person and this a normal social situation. I had a glimpse during those moments of how Dominic might have been in a parallel universe where there was no Mrs Meadowbank, no smothering mother, no plastic stool. Then he’d get up to go to the bathroom and cuff me to the radiator, or I’d look down and see how the skin around my tattoo was pink and raised and decorated with tiny blobs of congealed blood, and reality would come crashing back in. On one occasion we were talking about films and we got on to discussing Heath Ledger, the
Batman
actor. And I was saying he was in
Brokeback Mountain
and Dominic disagreed, and we were almost like a married couple bickering good-naturedly over the Sunday papers. All of a sudden Dominic jumped up and disappeared around the wall of the kitchen, and I heard the sound of a key being turned in the lock, and assumed he was opening the other door, the one that was always locked. Immediately my thoughts raced. My eyes cast wildly around the room. Could I pick up that floor lamp and swing it at him? What if I jumped up on the kitchen island and smashed a plate down on his head? Before I’d even had a chance to put my thoughts in order, I heard the key turning again in the lock and he was back.

‘You’re quite right,’ he said, and his mouth was smiling, but his eyes weren’t. ‘He
was
in
Brokeback Mountain
. I just Googled it.’

After that he refused to talk to me for an hour. But that was all right because all I could think was, ‘There’s Internet here.’ The knowledge warmed my cold heart like a flame.

That fourth day, I plucked up courage to ask him about her. Natalie. He was telling me about his first car and he was trying to describe the colour. ‘Like that,’ he said, getting up to indicate a shade in the hideous half-cat, half-woman painting on the wall facing the sofa.

The conversation was flowing so easily, it just popped out, without me even thinking about it. Maybe it also had something to do with me being so light-headed now due to lack of food.

‘What happened to her?’

‘Who?’

I gestured towards the painting.

Dominic’s voice was dangerously soft when he replied. ‘And why would you want to know about her, sweetheart?’

‘No reason,’ I said. ‘No reason at all, I just—’

The slap came from nowhere. One second, I was looking at his blue eyes and willing them to soften, and the next I was flying backwards, clutching my hand to my burning cheek. I crouched down on the floor by the sofa too shocked to speak. For a long moment we looked at each other, him and me, and then he walked over and leaned down and scooped me up, sitting carefully back on the sofa cushions with me on his lap like a child.

‘Poor Jessica Gold,’ he whispered in my ear, stroking my cheek that was flaming with pain.

We sat together rocking gently.

‘Poor old you,’ he said again.

Chapter Eighteen

The fourth package was rectangular, quite heavy, and I instinctively knew even before I’d fully unwrapped it that it would be a photograph. The frame was solid silver, old style, and the picture was the kind you have taken in primary school – fixed smiles and grey V-neck pullovers with white shirts and grey and yellow striped ties. The boy looked about nine or ten and his smile was tight, as if he was trying to hide his just visible front teeth which had grown through huge, like pebbles, dwarfing the other baby teeth around them. The girl was much younger – four or five – and her smile was big enough to drive a bus into.

The boy was unmistakably Dominic. The blue eyes were intense, even then, although there was something, a light, in them that was now missing. The girl had light brown hair in two tight short plaits, and huge eyes, the same colour as her brother’s but with a navy ring around the iris, and astonishingly thick black lashes, and a matching dimple in her cheek. She looked bursting with life. He had his arm around her in a traditional protective big-brother mode.

‘Me, and my sister,’ he explained, unnecessarily.

And then I heard her, for the first time. A tinkly voice that drifted down around my ears like glitter, making me think of the children in the snow globe on the front of my parents’ Christmas card.