I Found You (29 page)

Gray’s fingers lost their grip on the rim of his coffee cup and it fell to the ground; steaming coffee pooled around his feet and trickled away into a drain cover.

He looked quickly in the direction of the university and then back in the direction of the man across the street. He was turning the corner. Gray picked up his
pace and followed him, stopping as he saw him run through a revolving door and into an office block.

He swayed for a moment in the buffeting wind, made a note of the name above the doors and then headed back to his students, his hangover now a distant memory, his thought consumed by only one thing.

Mark Tate was alive.

And if Mark Tate was alive, did that mean that Kirsty was alive too?

Lesley Wade walks into the café and Alice knows before she has even approached them that she is a journalist. She is a very small, brusque woman with cropped white hair and funky, diamanté-studded reading glasses.

‘So,’ she says now, smoothing down the sides of her paper napkin with sherbet-pink-tipped fingers and appraising Frank with fascination, ‘you’re the mysterious teenage son.’

‘Am I?’

She nods. ‘It was the weirdest thing, that story. Just the weirdest thing. How much can you remember?’

Frank shakes his head. ‘Just my dad, dying in my arms. My sister, in the sea. The white house. The man called Mark. And then seeing him. In London. Going
into the office. And I remembered. He attacked my sister. And I dropped my coffee.’ He shakes his head again. Alice’s heart aches for him. ‘Then I don’t remember anything until Alice found me, on the beach.’

Lesley spreads her fingers open on the tabletop, looks down and then up again. ‘So,’ she begins, ‘in 1993, a young man called Graham Ross was found by a local woman sitting by the dead body of his father on the beach. He didn’t know what his name was or who the man was or why he was there.’

Alice’s breath catches. This has happened to Frank before.

‘His sister was missing, as was his sister’s boyfriend, Mark Tate. Neither of them were ever found. The conclusion at the time, without any witness evidence available from Graham, was that Graham and Kirsty Ross had been at a party at Mark’s aunt’s house; there’d been drugs and alcohol. They’d all decided to go for a late-night swim, got into difficulties, and that having failed to find them at Mrs Tate’s house, Mr Ross went to look for them on the beach and died of a massive heart attack attempting to rescue them. And that the shock of his father dying in his arms caused poor Graham to enter a temporary fugue state.’

‘He’s in a fugue state now,’ Alice says.

‘Really?’ says Lesley, bringing her hands down into her lap. ‘In which case, he should really be in hospital. Don’t you think?’

Alice stiffens defensively. ‘I told him that,’ she said. ‘Right from the beginning. But he refused. And I was taking him to the police station. Today. Literally. This was our goodbye coffee before we went.’

Lesley ignores this and turns to Lily. ‘And remind me again,’ she says, ‘where you come into this?’

‘I told you,’ says Lily. ‘I am married to the man who you say supposedly drowned in the sea here in 1993.’

Lesley pauses for a minute, draws in her breath, says, ‘Listen. Maybe we should hold off on taking Frank . . . Graham . . . whoever . . . to the hospital or police just yet. I think, maybe . . .’ Shiny pink fingernails tap, tap against the table. ‘I think maybe we could do something here. Something, with just us.’

Derry looks up sharply. ‘You mean you want to run a story?’

‘Well, no, not necessarily a
story
as such, more a catch-up piece. You know. Whatever happened to the boy on the beach? That kind of thing.’ Lesley smiles the smile of a cat upon a mouse. It’s clear what she’s after, but Alice doesn’t care. She gets to keep Frank a bit longer.

Derry throws Alice a look of disquiet. Alice shakes her head at her. Derry rolls her eyes.

Lesley has already pulled a pad and a ballpoint pen from her bag and is sitting, poised. ‘So, Frank, Graham . . .’ She pauses. ‘Which would you prefer?’

‘Frank,’
he whispers and Alice’s heart melts.

‘So, Frank,’ Lesley says, ‘you left Ridinghouse, you went back home with your mum, without your sister, without your dad. What happened next? Did you get your memory back?’

‘I think so. I mean, I must have. I remember my mum now. I still know her. I live virtually next door to her. I remembered my dad and my sister; I remembered being in the pub that night, with Mark and his friends and going home and letting them persuade Kirsty to come to the party with us. I remembered some of the party, too. Loud music, some weird people. Kissing a girl called Izzy. And I remembered things from before the holiday, my friends in Croydon—’

‘You’re from Croydon?’ Alice interrupts. Just a mile or two from Brixton. All those years. They’d been so close.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I guess I am. That’s not very cool, is it?’

‘But I love Croydon!’ says Alice. ‘The Whitgift Centre!’

Frank smiles at her and then turns back when Lesley clears her throat. ‘When we got home I just sort of took up where I left off. Went back to school. Hooked up with my old friends. Took my A levels. I had, er, well, therapy, I suppose. For a long time. But I never unearthed the memories of that night and I just accepted the police’s version of events. That we’d
all jumped in the sea off our faces on drugs and that Mark and my sister had drowned. Without any memories of the other stuff, it was the only logical explanation. I did wonder sometimes if there was something big I’d forgotten, something that would make more sense of everything. But it stayed buried. Until that day in London. When I saw him.’

‘Yes,’ says Lesley, pen poised pensively over notepad, ‘and what can you remember about that now?’

‘I . . .’ He closes his eyes tightly. ‘God. I’m sorry. My brain is stuck on that moment, the dropped coffee. Just . . .’ His head drops into his chest, his eyes still shut. ‘Give me one minute.’

‘Absolutely, Frank,’ says Lesley. ‘You take your time. We’re not in any hurry.’

Frank tries to recall the maths competition. Did they win? How did they do? Names bubble around his consciousness: Zach, Nazia, Muhammed, Sam, Aisha, Crystal, Hannah, King. The kids in his group. And then what? Back to school? More lessons? No. It was the Easter holidays. There was no school. Everyone went home afterwards. But how did he get home? Car? Or the bus? He sees the number 712. He sees himself pressing his Oyster card to the reader, taking a seat towards the back, resting a leather bag on his lap. Then back to his flat, the one he remembered the other night. It’s on a scruffy street. A light flashes on as he passes down the
alleyway towards his front door. The flat smells of this morning’s cat food. He scrapes it out, cleans the bowl, refills it. The cat called Brenda circles his feet.

He marks homework. He watches TV. He googles the name of the office building he’d seen Mark Tate walking into. It’s a financial services company. He clicks on the ‘Who we are’ link and scrolls down until he finds his picture. His name, apparently, is Carl Monrose. He eats something from the freezer for dinner, lasagne he seems to recall, parcelled up by his mum when he had flu last week.

Then his thoughts take him dizzyingly from eating reheated lasagne on the sofa in his flat to a train platform, looking up, platform four, the 5.06 to East Grinstead, following the day-weary crowds, his eyes pinned to the back of Mark Tate’s head. Then the timeline shifts and he’s at school, sitting in someone’s office. The school is strangely empty and he’s wearing jeans. It’s still the holidays. He’s asking for compassionate leave. His grandfather is dying. Does he even have a grandfather? The man behind the desk, an older man with a weathered face and neatly cropped Afro hair, nods and looks sad and says, ‘Take a few days. We can cover you for a week or so.’ ‘Mr Josiah Hardman’, says the plaque on his door. ‘Head Teacher’.

Alice passes him a cup of tea across the café table. ‘Are you OK?’ she says. Her voice comes to him like the echo of distant music.

He remembers a phone call to his mother. ‘I’m on a training course. Out in the sticks. You won’t be able to contact me.’ He remembers his mother saying, ‘Be careful. I shall miss you.’ He remembers how that felt, how it always felt knowing that he was the sole survivor of his mother’s little family. Knowing that every journey he took, every choice he made, every person he brought into his life caused his mother an animal ache of fear. Knowing that he could never leave her. That he was tied to her, like the owner of a loyal but life-restricting dog, until she died.

‘I followed him,’ he says eventually. ‘I followed the man on to his train.’

Lily shoots him a look of horror. ‘Carl? You followed my Carl?’

‘Yes,’ says Frank. ‘I remember getting on the five oh six to East Grinstead. I sat at the other end of the carriage from him. I watched him like a hawk. He got off at—’

‘Oxted,’ says Lily.

‘Yes,’ says Frank. ‘Oxted. And I followed him. Past shops. Up a dual carriageway. Past a building site.’

‘And then?’ asks Lily.

‘And to a block of flats.’

‘Oh my God,’ says Lily, ‘you came to my home. My God. What did you do then? Did you spy on us? Or maybe you killed him? You took him into that building site. You took him there and you killed him, didn’t
you? I’ve seen the flashing light. The one in the window. I
knew
it was wrong.’

People have turned to look at her; she’s pointing at Frank aggressively and her voice is shrill. She reaches into the front pocket of her little shiny handbag and pulls out an iPhone. ‘I’m calling the police,’ she said. ‘They are working on my husband’s missing-person case and I have their direct number. I’m calling them right now . . .’

Lesley puts a calming hand over Lily’s. ‘No,’ she says, ‘that’s not a good idea.’

‘It is a very good idea. Maybe he is still alive. They can go there now and see.’

‘No,’ says Lesley more firmly.

Frank’s brain is processing and editing, reordering and refiling. Then suddenly he’s in an empty room. There are wide glass windows covered in sticky film. He sees a phone hurtling through the air. And there’s something behind the image. A noise. A voice. A fragment of something, too small to identify.

Then the scene changes; Frank has moved on again. He’s following Mark Tate, following him to a coffee shop. He’s wearing a baseball cap and he’s watching Mark Tate order a coffee and a pain au chocolat. His manner with the not-very-pretty girl behind the counter is brusque and offhand. He follows him out on to the street and then follows him back to his office. His heart is pounding. He can feel sweat pooling under
the rim of his baseball cap. Every time he looks at Mark Tate he feels himself back in that bedroom, he hears the rending of his sister’s T-shirt, feels the deep, hot throb of his broken wrist, the pounding hip hop shaking through the floorboards. His head is flooded red and black with terror and disgust, with rage and loathing. He wants,
all
he wants, is to kill Mark Tate. But he can’t kill him, because he needs to talk to him first: he needs to find out what happened to Kirsty. Is she alive? And if she isn’t alive, how long did she survive in those dark cold waters? Where is her body? And why? Why, why, why?

Frank pulls Lily’s wedding album towards him now, and forces himself to look at Mark’s face. He remembers the first time he saw that face, that warm afternoon on the beach, how he’d taken an instant inventory of the angles and the proportions of it, how his mind had processed the mathematics of that face in a split second and found it unpleasing. He feels the same way now, looking at this sharp-faced forty-year-old man marrying a girl half his age.

‘Is he nice to you?’ he asks, looking up at Lily.

‘He treats me like a princess.’

‘But is he
nice
to you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Now Frank’s in Kitty’s conservatory. She’s sitting there, thin and brittle, her hand shaking slightly as she lifts the teapot. He’d taken her demeanour to be
unfriendliness, assumed her to be displeased to have uninvited guests. But what if she’d been scared of Mark? What if . . .?

His thoughts spin away from him. He closes the album and drops his head into his hands.

‘I took some time off work,’ he says. ‘I was due back last week. I’ll probably get the sack.’

‘So, you had a plan?’ Lesley prompts him.

‘I guess, I don’t know . . . I wanted to talk to Mark. I wanted to make him tell me what happened to Kirsty. I needed space. I needed time. And then—’

He’s back in the empty room with the plate-glass windows. He sees his own reflection in the windows blackened by the night outside. He’s alone and he has a shoulder bag filled with things. He’s hiding the bag in an empty kitchen cupboard.

‘I found a place and I . . .’ His memories swarm and teem and he feels nauseous. ‘I took him there.’

Gray could not, he simply could not randomly accost Mark Tate on the street. Mark would run. He would yell. He would deny that he was Mark Tate; he would tell passers-by that this crazy man was bothering him. He would make a scene and then, once he’d shaken him off, he would disappear. Again.

And this time Gray would never find him.

So Gray made a plan.

He told his head teacher that his long-dead grandfather was dying and asked for some compassionate leave. Just a few days. Just long enough to put everything in place. He told his mother he was going on a training course. And then he began to stalk him.

Mark Tate was nothing if not a creature of habit. The same form-fitting, navy-blue suit every day, the
same coffee and pain au chocolat from the same coffee shop at the same time, the same sashay through the revolving door, the same slimy greeting to the hot girl on the reception desk. He was a regular little worker bee. All that talk of being a millionaire – whatever happened to all his grandiose plans?

On Tuesday, having ascertained that Mark Tate had shown up for work as usual, Gray headed home. Here he packed a rucksack with objects from around the flat. Rope. Non-perishable food. A blanket. Some knives. His camera. A toilet roll. A belt. A pillow case. A blow-up pillow. A sleeping bag. Phone charger. Torch. Then he left three packets of cat food and a mountain of biscuits out for Brenda and took the bag with him from Croydon to Victoria and then from Victoria back to Oxted.