First One Missing (16 page)

‘Don’t forget there’s a restraining order out on you that I know for a fact you’ve been breaking. Think I haven’t seen you out there in your car? You come anywhere near us again and I’ll have you banged up, I swear to God. Just leave us alone.’

Afterwards he paced around his flat, unable to settle. He was angry with himself for losing control. After all the exercises he’d been doing, all the practice. But who could blame him? Keira was his daughter, his flesh and blood. Donna had no right. Thinking about his ex brought bile to his mouth. The way when she opened her mouth she smelled of old ashtrays even though she swore she’d given up the fags. He knew she didn’t have the will-power. The way she used to undress at night with a sly look as she took off her bra as if she thought she was making him hot, as if she thought she had some kind of control over him. Her controlling
him
! The way she’d tried to please him in those early years, the little presents – a bottle of aftershave here, a bracelet there (engraved with both their names, of course). When did those gifts dry up? Somewhere around their second year together? Third?

He’d tried. Jason had always hated to admit he’d made a mistake. He knew that about himself. It was one of the other things he was working on. So he’d tried long after it became obvious he was flogging a dead horse, long after he realized she’d tricked him at the start of their relationship by putting forward a version of herself that wasn’t real – and by the time he cottoned on, Keira was on her way and it was too late. That was the thing about women. They weren’t ever who they pretended to be. They were like cheap gold jewellery: scratch the surface and underneath the shiny stuff it was ugly old tin. And the older they got, the more tarnished. Donna hadn’t been like that when they first got together. She’d had something about her, a sparkle. But now she was all twisted up like a dirty old dishcloth, just like his mother.

He fired up his laptop looking for some kind of displacement activity like he’d been taught, somewhere to channel all the emotions that bitch had churned up inside him like heartburn.

He was so wound up about Donna that he forgot to be on the alert for news items and when the Yahoo homepage came up, his eye was immediately drawn to the headlines: KENWOOD KILLER MOTHER’S ANGUISH. His heart thudded to a stop. He shouldn’t read it. He should shut that page down straight away. Yet somehow he couldn’t. As he read on, he could feel the sweat prickling on his back and neck, his breath coming out in shallow pants. He wouldn’t think about it, shouldn’t think about it. He’d made a pact with himself to seal those memories off, to think of that man as someone else, so he’d never give himself away. Only when lying in bed late at night did he allow himself to relive what had happened. But now here they were let loose and flying at him too fast to stop them. The smell of apple shampoo on clean, shiny hair that had never been wrecked by chemical dyes. The softness of skin that had never been allowed to shrivel up in the sun. The salty taste of another person’s fear. The power pumping through his body, the dizzying knowledge that he could do whatever he wanted to someone else.

And now the blood was pumping everywhere, engorging him until it felt like he was going to explode. But along with the excitement of the forbidden memories, the headlines also brought the usual anger. As he read through this most recent story, Jason was assailed by a sense of helpless rage that he knew from bitter experience would linger for hours. Between that and the conversation with Donna, he’d have to spend twice as long in the gym today trying to work off some of the frustration he felt, before heading off to the City and the club where he worked. People fucked you over. That was the truth of it. They fucked you over, and the only way to survive was to fuck them over first. That’s why you had to get them young, before they had a chance to turn cynical and hard, and start looking for ways to take advantage. When there was still a chance to make your mark.

His stomach was still churning when his phone dinged, advising him of an incoming text. Seeing Suzy’s name flash up soothed him, reminding him that he was still in control. The last date had been amazing!! said her message (winking face). She couldn’t WAIT for the next one!! She knew Bethany would JUMP at the chance of going bowling after school tomorrow. Normally she wouldn’t introduce her daughter to a new bloke so early on, but she felt she’d known him for AGES. His sister was SOOOOO NICE to give them her booking, and wish her better very soon!! Smiley face, smiley face, face with tongue flopping out of the side of its mouth.

He was proud of himself for the work he’d been putting in with Suzy over the last few days – two dates and endless calls and texts. And now it was paying off. He was going to meet Bethany at last. That story about his non-existent sister who’d paid for a bowling session she now couldn’t use had done the trick. Once again he called up the picture of the girl and tried to push those other memories to the back of his head. He wouldn’t think about blood matted in shiny hair, or clear blue eyes turning filmy like old milk. It was just a question of will-power. He could do that. He was the better man.

18

The pills are all that keep me going. I love the popping noise they make as they burst through their foil containers. I love the feel of them between my fingers, the promise of oblivion. Oliver has started hiding them from me. He doesn’t like the way I reach for them before I’m even fully awake, wanting only to be sent straight back to sleep again. He doesn’t like how Mia stands by the side of the bed, shaking my arm. ‘Wake up, Mummy. Wake up.’ She wants to know where her sister is. ‘In a fridge,’ I tell her, and Oliver snatches her away.

This time last week I complained of being tired, but I had no idea of what tired meant. I thought tired was sleeping five hours instead of eight or being woken up at one by a seven-year-old’s nightmare and then again at five by a teething toddler. I had no idea about the kind of tiredness you feel in your very bones. The tiredness that makes words die unsaid in your mouth and everything impossible – standing, sitting. Breathing.

This time last week I met a friend for coffee after school drop-off time. Mia was sitting at the table of the café with a plastic beaker full of crayons, the tip of her tongue protruding as she filled sheet after sheet with wild, single-colour drawings, and I was talking, whining, complaining. ‘It’s not enough, all this. The girls. I need to exercise my mind. I don’t feel fulfilled.’ As if fulfilment were a right. As if Poppy and Mia were holding me back.

This time last week I got up in the morning and cared about my reflection in the mirror, got out the tweezers to pluck stray hairs from my eyebrows, put on mascara even just to take Poppy to school. When I pulled on my jeans, I minded that they had toothpaste drips on the leg and I got out a clean T-shirt because it mattered enough to make the trip from bed to chest of drawers and then to open a drawer and select.

This time last week I thought pills were for people who gave up too easily, who looked for an external fix to internal problems. When I had a headache I held out against paracetamol until my whole brain was throbbing. When Poppy was ill antibiotics were a very last resort. I slid the foil sheet out with mistrust as if the box contained a dangerous wild animal not a mild pharmaceutical aid. Now I stack the pill packets high on the bedside table, so they’re the first thing I see when I claw my way groggily out of sleep. And if the stack is low, I feel a clanging anxiety building in my chest, my heart bouncing in my ribcage like a rubber ball in a box. Because if the stack gets too low, and the foil wraps are all empty, their contents popped, then there is nowhere to go but inside my own head, and that’s the place I cannot bear to be. The pills keep me outside of myself. They keep me in this bed. They keep me away from the door that leads to the hall that leads to the empty room with the ceramic ‘P’ on the door and the piece of paper where the words ‘Mia Keep Out!’ are scrawled in thick red capitals.

I pop another one out from its blister pack, loving the purity of the white capsule, and then I pop one more for luck. Oliver will count them when he comes back and his mouth will tighten into a thin line as it does when he is annoyed.

A week ago he woke me in the morning to have groggy, half-conscious sex and I was half resentful of the precious lost sleep and he kissed my stale-breathed mouth and said, ‘You shouldn’t be so damn gorgeous then.’

I clutch the extra pill in the palm of my hand like a good-luck charm as I slip gratefully back into the void.

19

The woman had that particular hard-faced, red-raw look that comes from a combination of self-abuse and disappointment. Her bleached hair was pulled tightly back from her face, stretching the skin thin over her cheekbones and exposing a good half-inch of dark roots at the temples. When she’d first walked in, Leanne had put her at around forty, but now she could see she was much younger than that. Early thirties, maybe even less. Some people’s lives were ironed directly on to their skin, Leanne often thought. Growing up on a rough estate in Kent, she’d met a lot of women who looked like Donna Shields. Funny how when she told people where she was from they always said how lovely it must have been to grow up on the coast, whereas the truth was the nearest beach was four miles away and without a car it might as well have been four hundred. If you were lucky you got out, like Leanne. If you weren’t, you ended up looking like Donna Shields.

‘I still don’t understand, Mrs Shields, why you believe your ex-husband is linked to these murders.’

Ever since the first murder, there’d been a steady stream of women just like this one presenting themselves at police-station receptions to accuse husbands, stepfathers, brothers, even sons. They fitted the bill. They’d never been ‘normal’. They were perverted, ill, dangerous, evil. They needed to be locked up. It was only a week since the discovery of Poppy Glover’s body, so Leanne fully expected there’d be another flurry of denunciations. Each time she dealt with one, Leanne felt another layer of skin grow over her existing one, until she worried she’d end up with a hide as thick as some of the older police guys who liked to boast that nothing could shock them. The day brutality came to seem like the norm was the day Leanne would hand in her badge and join a hippie commune somewhere to meditate for world peace.

‘He was obsessed with that first murder when we was still together. Spent hours every day on the computer going through all them newspapers. Even the ones he never read like the
Guardian
, which he said was a socialist rag.’

‘Didn’t you ask him why?’

‘Course I did. At least I did at the beginning, when we was still talking. He just used it as an excuse to have a go at me. Our daughter Keira was four then and he said he was just doing what any concerned parent would do and I was showing myself up as a bad mum because I didn’t care enough. That’s what Jason’s like. He twists everything. Except if there’s anyone who’s twisted around here, it’s him. Do you know what he did, he—’

Leanne held up a hand to stop her and tried to stifle a sigh. It was always the female officers who got allocated these kinds of interviews, and it was always like this. Some of these women had spent months, years, lifetimes tiptoeing around violent, abusive men, and then the same amount of time gearing themselves up to reporting them, so when they finally got here, it was like a dam bursting. Every grievance – some heavy-duty, many petty – every misdemeanour, every harsh word, every beating, every mistress, every sexual perversion. Every single disappointment and heartbreak and put-down and slap, every bruise and black eye and ‘walked into a cupboard’. Every lie, every dashed dream, every time you locked yourself in the bathroom and ran the taps to disguise your sobs, watching the door frame shake with his kicks. All of those things came pouring out while Leanne or whoever else was on duty sat on the other side of the table and tried to corral the flood of words into some kind of structure, a neat box to tick.

‘Lots of people read the papers, Mrs Shields. And some people do take a ghoulish interest in the most horrendous crimes. But we can’t prosecute anyone for rubbernecking. You must understand that.’

‘He touched her. He would have done more if I hadn’t caught ’im at it. And after he left, I found there was stuff on our computer. Kids’ stuff. Absolutely disgusting. Filthy!’

Leanne held up her hand again. ‘Hold on a minute, Mrs Shields. He touched who? Your daughter?’

‘No. Her friend. She was on a sleepover. He was in their room. If I hadn’t come in—’

‘Did the girl make a complaint?’

The woman looked at her through narrowed eyes as if she wasn’t quite all there. ‘No, she was asleep, wasn’t she?’

‘Then how—’

‘I told you. I woke up and he wasn’t there, and I knew. I just knew. I went into Keira’s room and there he was with his hands under the covers.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘I put the light on, didn’t I? Bastard jumped up like someone had shot him. Insisted he’d heard her crying out in her sleep and had come in to check on her and she’d thrown her duvet off so he was putting it back. The girls was both crying their eyes out because we’d woken them up shouting.’

‘But you never reported it.’

The woman pressed her thin lips together and shook her head.

‘And what about the porn. Child porn, did you say it was? I’m assuming you’ve kept that.’

The woman widened her eyes as if Leanne had just made the most ludicrous suggestion.

‘You’re kidding, right? As if I’m going to leave that perverted stuff on the computer. My daughter uses that! Anyway, we don’t even have that computer no more. Had to sell it when we split up. I wasn’t exactly left well provided for. In fact, he said he’d stop paying altogether if I came to see you lot.’

‘So, just to get this straight, you’ve got no evidence against your ex-husband, Mrs Shields. Just that he showed a particular interest in the case when you were together.’