Dying for Christmas (13 page)

‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘I’m so cold.’

‘It’s a lovely photograph.’ I said it to drown her out and because I knew he was waiting for my reaction. But actually it
was
a lovely photograph. They were so obviously siblings, and seemed to be so close.

‘Tell me about your schooldays, Jessica. I want to know all about you. So far it’s been all me, me, me. Now it’s your turn.’

I knew he didn’t really want to know about me. Or only inasmuch as what I said might shed more light on himself.

‘I was a bit of an odd child,’ I began. ‘Even at that age’ – I indicated the photograph – ‘I knew I wasn’t the same as the others. I remember spending a lot of time staring at other children, trying to work out how they did it.’

‘Did what?’

‘How they knew how to talk to each other and play with each other, and what to do in break times and how to act. Everything was difficult for me. Nothing came naturally. Even in primary school I felt like I was playing the part of a normal kid.’

‘And why would you want to be like the others, Jessica? Enough sheep in the world, don’t you think?’

‘I had two brothers at home who kept laughing at me for being weird. All I wanted was to find the magical key that would make me fit in.’

‘And did you?’

‘Not really. Though I did learn that if you work hard enough at it, you can fake being normal. Most of the time, anyway.’

‘That’s fascinating, sweetie.’ He had shuffled along the sofa so that he was sitting right next to me, stroking my hair like I was a pet cat.

‘What’s her name? Your sister?’

His fingers became abruptly still, resting on my head.

‘I thought I already told you. Annabel. We called her Bella.’

Immediately I heard her again. Her tinkling voice. ‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘So cold.’

‘It looks like you two were close.’ I was still staring down at the photograph, hoping he wouldn’t look at my face and guess what I was hearing.

‘Does it?’ His voice was barely louder than a whisper.

For a moment I thought I’d said the wrong thing and my chest tightened, but then to my relief he started talking again.

‘Has there been anyone in your life that you feel so strongly about you just can’t tell what those feelings are? Like when you put your hand in water that’s so extreme in temperature, for a moment you can’t tell if it’s boiling or freezing?’

I thought about Travis and how, when he walks into a room, my head says, ‘There’s Travis,’ and my heart says nothing at all. I thought about the cards he used to write me on birthdays and Christmases that he signed off with ‘lots of love’. Not ‘all my love’. Not even just plain ‘love’. As if there was an ever-replenishing pool of love and he’d reached into it quite casually and scooped out a random load and ladled it on my plate before moving on to the next person. I thought about the times he’d called me to say he’d gone out straight from his shift at the hospital, and my reaction was relief that I could watch whatever I wanted on the telly.

‘Not really,’ I admitted.

‘Well, that’s how it was with Bella. Right from the word go, these enormous, churning feelings I didn’t know how to process. On the one hand, she was so tiny and helpless she made me want to jump in front of trains to save her or pull her out of burning buildings. But on the other hand, I was also eaten away with jealousy. You see, Mummy and Daddy adored Bella. Everyone did. Like I said before, Bella even brought them back together for a while. Mrs Meadowbank kept away, and they slept in the same bedroom, often with Bella, even though she had her own room.’

‘Surely that must have been a relief?’

He’d started stroking my hair again and I felt his fingers shake as he laughed.

‘Sweet Jessica, you are so touchingly naive. Don’t you know that people will do anything for attention from those they love, or think they love, even if that attention hurts them?

‘As she grew bigger, those conflicting feelings just intensified. I used to spy on her when she played with her friends, following them around like a shadow. I didn’t want her to have friends, you see. I wanted her to need only me. But when it was just us at home with our parents, I did everything I could to put her down and make her look stupid. I wouldn’t let up until she cried. Sometimes at night I’d go into her room to watch her sleeping.’

‘I’m cold.’ Her voice was louder now, more strident. When she spoke I felt tiny bumps of coldness popping up in sympathy all over my skin.

I shut her out.

‘So where is she now? Bella?’

Dominic made a claw of his fingers and clamped them down hard on my head.

‘Patience, Jessica,’ he said, digging them into my scalp.

* * *

Kim felt like she had entered an entirely new time/space dimension. A combination of lack of sleep and the guilt that ate away at her whenever she allowed her mind to relax meant she was on constant alert, throwing herself into work in a way she could only have dreamed of when the kids and Sean were at home.

‘Sean’s taken the kids to his parents’ for a visit,’ she explained to Martin when he complained, only half joking, that her industriousness was making him look bad. ‘I need to make the most of it.’

She didn’t tell him that Sean had given her a week to find somewhere else to live. Or how sad his voice had sounded when he said he’d had enough of feeling like him and the kids were getting in the way of her career. She didn’t mention how she felt energized at being free to work as long and as late as she liked, or how much that realization made her hate herself, or how Sean had left a space at the end of his speech for her to tell him she’d been a fool and wanted them back, and the silence had stretched on until she’d heard the gentle click of him ending the call.

In her overheated, sleep-deprived state, Kim knew she was over-obsessing about the Jessica Gold case. There was still nothing to show that she hadn’t gone off with a friend or a secret lover. She could be using a pay-as-you-go phone and have another hidden bank account. People did that all the time. When Kim was first starting out she’d worked on a case where a man, by all accounts a loving father and husband, had set off to buy a Lottery ticket and never been seen again. Eventually he’d been tracked down to a bedsit in Eastbourne. ‘I’ve always wanted to live by the sea,’ he’d said.

So she knew it happened. But somehow she couldn’t believe Jessica Gold had walked out of her own life.

Today Kim’s restlessness had led her to Perivale on the fringes of west London. When she’d first heard that Jessica Gold worked for a television company, she’d imagined somewhere cool and bustling, staffed with trendy young things in designer clothes. Instead, she found herself on an industrial estate, in front of a square newish-looking building that, according to the security guard, used to be some kind of factory. When she got inside, the people working there were on the whole scruffily dressed in jeans and jumpers and working at banks of computers scattered through the building.

As it was still that no-man’s-land between Christmas and New Year, there was only a skeleton staff on, and Jessica’s boss would be on holiday in the Caribbean until the following week, but the boss’s deputy, Joe Tunstall, was on hand, an eager-to-please young man with curly red hair and freckles on his forehead that joined together when he frowned, as he was doing now.

‘Don’t get me wrong, everyone likes Jessica, it’s just that no one is her particular friend, if you know what I mean,’ he was saying. ‘She likes to keep to herself. We always ask her to join us if we go out for lunch, but she always has some excuse and scurries off before the rest of us have even got our coats on. And she’s usually back after us as well. Not that I’m saying she takes the piss or anything. She works bloody hard.’

Kim had met lots of people like Joe in the force – insecure young men who latched gratefully on to the camaraderie of life in an organization, accepting every invitation that came their way, thankful for that sense of belonging to a team, and threatened by anyone who refused that lunchtime sarnie in the cafeteria or that pint after work. She’d seen their faces when she said she was sorry but she had to rush back to bath Katy and Rory before putting them to bed. And she’d hated that treacherous part of her that felt she was missing out.

‘Did she strike you as … troubled at all?’

Joe wasn’t sure what she meant, so Kim clarified it. ‘Did she seem preoccupied or depressed?’

He shook his head. ‘No. Like I say, she’s quite private. She seems to get a lot of texts, if that’s any help. She sits next to me and even though her mobile is on silent, it vibrates when a text comes in and I can feel the vibrations through my desk.’

Kim didn’t like to think of how many texts she received over the course of a day. From Sean, asking what time she was going to be back, from the childminder who took the kids home from school two days a week, from Sean again, to find out why she still wasn’t back when she said she’d be, from Rory, wanting to know where the game she’d confiscated the day before was, from Sean again, informing her in clipped tones that she needed to pick herself up a takeaway on the way home as her dinner was ruined. Oh, and not to rush, because the kids were in bed already.

‘How would you describe Jessica?’ she asked Joe as he walked her over to reception.

He looked taken aback at the question, as though what she was asking him was somehow improper. ‘I’m not really sure,’ he said. Then something seemed to occur to him. ‘Slippery,’ he added. Immediately the freckles were forced together into a dark splodge as he frowned. ‘No. Not slippery. Mysterious. Just when you think you’ve worked her out, something changes and you realize you’re still way off the mark.’

‘Not a team player then?’

Kim watched his face relax in relief at being on more solid ground.

‘No. Not a team player at all.’

Chapter Nineteen

The locked room.

Ever since I’d arrived in that flat I’d been wondering about that closed door leading off the inner hallway. I knew there were three rooms – the bathroom, Dominic’s bedroom (I couldn’t bring myself to think of it as
our
bedroom) and the mystery room. It could have been a closet, but then, why would a closet be locked?

That night when I lay once more across the foot of the bed unable to sleep, I fantasized about breaking into that room, and what I might find. A telephone, an arsenal of weapons, a trap door leading to the flat below. I already knew there was a computer in there. And broadband. Not to mention the bags of presents I’d bought before Christmas. In my imagination, the room became like a gateway to another world. The world outside.

I’d now passed beyond hunger into a state of constant empty ache but still my mind played tricks on my body, visualizing breaking open the door and finding tables groaning with the kind of food I missed. Pasta, pizza, perfect bananas, still slightly green at the tips, biscuits, baked potatoes oozing with butter and cheese. Comfort food. I knew by now that Dominic had a strange relationship with food, and that night I shared it – picturing dishes that summed up my childhood until my tastebuds wept with the loss of it all.

I wondered if my parents were asleep in the double bed they’d had ever since I can remember. I hoped my mum wasn’t using my disappearance as an excuse to go back on to the prescription pills she’d only recently weaned herself off: the codeine, the mirtazapine, the chlorphenamine for when she wanted to ‘take the edge off things’. She’d got into them after I left home. After the Buddhism failed. And the meditation. And the Hatha yoga. Sometimes it helped, she said, to be outside of yourself. I didn’t blame her. I only wished I had even one sleeping pill that I could take and escape everything for a while. What wouldn’t I have given for just a few hours of total oblivion?

I tried to shift position without moving the chain attached to my ankle, but I’d misjudged how close I was to the iron bedframe. The clanking sounded like an explosion in the still of the room.

Instantly I knew Dominic’s eyes were open. There was a change in the quality of the air, a tingling.

I pretended to be asleep but he kicked me through the covers. Hard.

‘You’re not an attractive sleeper, Jessica. Has anyone ever told you that?’

It shouldn’t have hurt, but it did.

‘You sound like an asthmatic sow. This is the sound you make.’

He made a noise that I won’t even attempt to replicate in writing.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and to my complete shame, felt hot tears at the backs of my eyes.

‘To tell you the truth, Jessica, you’re turning out to be a big disappointment to me. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if I’ve made a mistake. A lot of preparation went into all this, you know. Now I’m doubting we’ll even get to the twelfth present.’

He was growing sick of me.

And I knew that my continued survival here depended on holding Dominic’s interest.

* * *

At breakfast on that fifth day, Dominic’s bad mood clung to him like a needy lover.

‘Stop watching me eat,’ he commanded. ‘It’s really off-putting.’

I couldn’t help it. My stomach was so desperate to be fed, it hijacked my brain, sending instructions to my eyes to follow every movement of spoon to mouth.

‘You want to eat?’ he snapped.

I knew it was a trick, but I nodded.

‘Fine. You can eat. I’ll even make you a smoothie.’

He got to his feet and started throwing anything he could see lying around the kitchen into a blender that he’d retrieved from one of the kitchen cupboards. Cereal, butter, eggs, last night’s leftover wine, all went in together and were blitzed on the top speed setting.

‘There you are, sweetheart.’