Tarnished (41 page)

Peg headed for the door.

‘Oh, Meggy?’ Jean called.

Peg, who had reached the kitchen, stopped. Her shoulders stiffened. She could smell the cigarette Jean had just lit. ‘Yes?’ she said.

‘Could you just clear away the supper things, dear? They’ll make the whole place stink like a chip shop if they stay in here overnight. The girl’ll complain. And we need to keep her sweet just for a little bit longer.’

Peg sighed and turned, and then she went back into her aunt’s bedroom to do as she had been told.

Forty-One

Having packed her belongings, stripped all the beds and put the rubbish out, Peg walked away from Tankerton early the following morning for what she thought was the last time.

In her haste to escape the suffocating way the bungalow seemed to have crept into her bones, trying to bind her to it like a tortoise to its shell, she forgot her London keys. She didn’t realise until she was sitting on the train, halfway there.

When she arrived at the flat, Loz didn’t answer the doorbell, so Peg had no choice but to rouse Sandy, the PARTYBOY downstairs. They had perhaps rather recklessly given him a spare in case of emergencies. Luckily, he was still up – his nocturnal lifestyle meant he had only just arrived home, conquest in tow.

‘Peg love, how are you? Haven’t seen you for ages. This is – um,’ he vaguely gestured to the boy standing behind him in the doorway. Techno music throbbed from inside his flat.

‘Simon,’ the boy said, removing one hand from the sheet draped round him and holding it out for Peg to shake.

‘Loz doesn’t seem to be in and I’ve forgotten my keys. You haven’t seen her, have you?’

‘She was here yesterday during the day, darling,’ Sandy said, licking his fingers and wiping the mascara smudges beneath his eyes. ‘Woke me up making a hell of a racket. About lunchtime, I think it was.’

‘Sorry about that,’ Peg said.

‘Don’t think a thing about it,’ Sandy said. ‘I’m not exactly the dream downstairs neighbour anyway, am I?’

‘Can’t argue with that,’ Peg said, taking the key from him. ‘Thanks.’

‘Happy Christmas, darling,’ Sandy said, kissing her on the cheek.

‘Happy Christmas.’

‘You girls should come down for a drink tomorrow. If you haven’t got any family commitments.’

‘We haven’t. That’ll be lovely. I’ll talk to Loz.’

When Peg opened the door to her flat, the first thing that struck her was the Christmas decorations. Loz had garlanded the living room with streamers and tinsel. A small tree stood on the dining-room table, hung with baubles and fairy lights. A bunch of mistletoe hung over the defunct fireplace. Loz’s favourite song, Fleet Foxes’ ‘White Winter Hymnal’ was playing from the kitchen, set on repeat on her iPod speakers, adding to the seasonal splendour.

But as Peg searched the flat, all this adornment only served to underline the absence of its creator. And it was so unlike Loz to go out and leave the flat in such a state. The bed was unmade, her drawers open, and a towel left flung on the bed, leaving the mattress damp underneath it – something that usually made her very cross indeed when Peg did it.

Even odder, in the kitchen, a glass had smashed on the floor, with the orange juice it had contained pooled around it, and a cup of coffee sat half-drunk and cold on the draining board. The weirdest thing was that Loz had been baking, but had not cleared up the ingredients. There was flour all over the work surface and the floor, and the bowl of her food processor – which she treated like a beloved child, washing and drying each part lovingly by hand – sat dumped in the sink, cake mix crusting its expensive innards. And the cake itself stood on the counter in the heart-shaped tin Peg had bought Loz for her birthday, its sunken surface leathery for having been left out unbaked and uncovered.

Peg switched off the music at last and tried to phone Loz once again, which, she noticed from her recent calls list, was the thirtieth unanswered time in a row.

Perhaps Jean was right. Perhaps Loz
was
flighty. Perhaps she didn’t know her as well as she thought. But a tiny kernel of clarity inside Peg’s head held fast. And that is what made her worry.

She called Loz’s mother, but Naomi said she hadn’t been back home.

‘It may be nothing,’ Peg said. ‘We had a bit of an argument, though . . .’

‘Oh, she can be like this sometimes,’ Naomi said. ‘She’s an awful sulker. Why don’t you check round your friends, see if she’s gone to ground? I’m sorry, Peg, I must go. I’ve got a patient who’s not very. Patient, that is.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Peg said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise. You’re always apologising.’ Naomi spoke so like her daughter it made Peg’s longing for Loz even more urgent. ‘She’ll turn up. She knows what she’s doing.’

Praying Naomi was right, Peg pocketed her phone and sat back on the armchair she and Loz had dragged home from a skip one night. Where could she be? She called round the few mutual friends she had phone numbers for, but no one had seen her. Then she called the restaurant.

‘Nah,’ Cara, the owner drawled. ‘I’ve been trying to contact her all morning. She was due in at eight today because we’ve got like this mega lunch party booked?’

Peg glanced at the clock on the microwave. It was a quarter past nine. Loz was never late for work.

‘If you hear from her,’ Cara said, ‘tell her she’s in serious big trouble with me and she’d better get her sorry ass here as soon as.’

Peg could feel her heart pounding. If Loz was letting the restaurant down, something was very wrong. She might moan about Seed all the time, but she was truly professional in her attitude to her work. Peg hung up and went to the coat hooks by the front door to the flat. Loz’s duvet coat wasn’t there, nor was her bag. She searched the flat, but couldn’t find her keys, phone or wallet.

Was that encouraging? She thought it might be, but even so a sense of panic was rising in her throat. She sat at the dining table, put her head in her hands and tried to breathe it away.

She thought about calling the police. But she had it in her mind they would only respond after an adult had been missing for twenty-four hours, and Sandy had heard her yesterday lunchtime. Or, Peg corrected herself, he had heard noise coming from the flat. There was no guarantee that it had been Loz. And anyway, if she told the police everything about the argument, they’d just put it down to a lovers’ tiff and wouldn’t take her seriously.

But then she remembered Ray’s reaction the night before last when she told him what Loz was planning to do.

Over my dead body is she going to the police.

There was also his evasiveness over Mary, and the awful things he had said about Loz . . .

What if Loz – and Jean – had been right?

What if Raymond was a truly bad man, rather than just a useless father and a man who had loved his wife so much he couldn’t bear to see her suffer any more and complied with her final request? What might he have done to or with Loz in that case?

Peg shook her head sharply. Raymond would be in Spain now, organising darling Paulie’s precious party. She toyed with the idea of calling him, but, even if she could have borne to speak to him, she couldn’t think of a way of asking him if he had any idea where Loz might be which wouldn’t be met with ridicule or disgust. A sudden, crazy thought grabbed her and she rushed to the box-file where, librarian-style, she kept Loz’s and her own papers. Loz’s passport was there, so she was still in the country. Raymond couldn’t have taken her to Spain with him – could he?

Or was that something Archer could arrange for him?

She was being absurd. She was allowing her imagination to run away with her.

She was being like Loz.

As she was pulling on her parka to go out and ask if Loz had dropped by to pick up her daily
Guardian
from the newsagent’s, her phone rang. Grabbing it from the table, she saw it was a number that she didn’t recognise.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Is that Peg?’ A crackled, South-East London voice said at the other end.

‘Yes. Who is this?’

‘It’s Parker. From the garages.’

‘Parker!’

‘Do you know where your friend is?’

‘No. I can’t find her anywhere.’

‘I think you’d better come here as soon as you can. Something fucking odd’s going on.’

Then

‘Where’s the key?’

I’m ill, in bed.

Cuddling my sniffy blanket.

Everything’s woozy.

I hear voices but I can’t make out who they are, how many there are, or where they’re coming from.

‘Where’s the bloody key?’

‘You’ll not find it.’

I can’t even tell if it’s a boy or a girl or a man or a woman or a horse or a tree.

Then it’s all black again.

Forty-Two

‘I was out down the spar yesterday picking up supplies for the holiday season,’ Parker said to Peg as he hobbled alongside her, away from his garage. ‘And, fuck me if I don’t out of the blue bump into my old mate from the regiment. So I go off for a jar or two with him, and it turns into a bit of a session.

‘Then, much later, as I get back, I’m nearly sent flying by this big black Lexus as it comes out of the alley. Whoosh!’ He gestured wildly with his hands to demonstrate how he avoided being knocked over. ‘Which is well odd because no one uses these places got a big car like that. Not any more, anyway. Not since your dad was down here. Anyway, I don’t get a chance to see the driver’s face but I reckon whoever it is is up to no good.’

Raymond
, Peg thought, fear splintering her heart.

‘It had pulled up outside your nan’s garage,’ he said. ‘I know that because these was never here before.’ He squatted by a tyre track in the frosted mud surrounding a puddle in front of the door they hadn’t been able to open.

‘Anyway, while I was looking at the tracks, I found something. Must’ve fallen out the car. Hang on a tick there.’

He led her back to his garage and disappeared inside, leaving Peg standing in the grey, cold air as snowflakes whirled down from the leaden sky. She didn’t know what to think, or what to do.

A minute later, he shambled back out holding a very distinctive sequinned Union Jack purse.

Peg gasped and her knees nearly buckled.

Parker flipped the purse open and there was a photograph of Loz and Peg, giggling, taken when they were newly in love, in a photo booth at Victoria Station.

It was a picture of past history, of happier, more carefree times.

A sort of Eden.

‘I tried calling her when I found it, of course, but there was no reply,’ he went on. ‘And look. There’s all her cards and sixty quid, so she must be missing it.’ Parker showed the wallet to Peg. ‘I found this in it, though, which is how I managed to find you.’

He handed her a Starbucks receipt. Peg flipped it over and saw her name and phone number scrawled on the back, in her own hand. She had written that when they went to coffee after Loz turned up at the library, before they decided to go back to Peg’s flat.

And Loz had kept it.

Peg was surprised – she didn’t have Loz down as the sentimental type.

‘We need to get in there,’ she said, nodding over to the garage.

‘You still got the key?’

Peg groaned. ‘No, I—’

She had left it on the occasional table, along with her flat keys, in front of Raymond.

In front of Raymond
.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know where Loz is, Parker.’ The panic rising in her throat made her speak so quickly her words almost ran into each other. ‘I haven’t seen her since Nan’s funeral. We had an argument and she’s disappeared. I thought she’d just left the flat in a mess, but now I think there might have been a struggle. And if so, my dad’s involved somehow.’

They both looked over at the silent, locked garage. Then Parker turned to face Peg.

‘Fuck it, girl. I’ll get me angle grinder out.’

The security bolts on the garage were tougher than Parker had expected. He worked at top and bottom of the door, cutting through two locking posts which, he explained, ran right through on both sides.

‘Whoever got these put in knew what they were doing,’ he said, lifting his visor which, on top of his outfit of beaten leather jacket and grubby Belstaff trousers, made him look like an aged extra from
Mad Max
.

He set to work again. Peg had to stand back to avoid the flying sparks sizzling into the snow-dusted air.

‘I hope you don’t get into trouble for this,’ she said, as he moved to the other side.

‘Look, girly, I’ve got a feeling this is serious.’ He raised his visor and looked at her, his face grim. He fired up his angle grinder again and, shortly after, he stepped back.

‘We’re in,’ he said, bending to grasp the bottom edge of the up-and-over garage door. As he lifted it, the scene he revealed was so bizarre that it took a few minutes for Peg to register what she was looking at.

‘Shitting Christ,’ Parker said, his sparsely toothed mouth hanging open. A wave of ancient rottenness hit Peg’s nostrils, overlaid by a sweet, chemical smell, a smell she recognised from her childhood, a smell that spelled comfort and being tucked up in bed.

The smell of her sniffy blanket.

The garage was laid out like a cramped living room, with what might have been a dining table in the middle, a couple of armchairs facing the back wall at the far end, and a desk and chair up against the side.

What set it apart from a living room were the stained and rusty implements hanging neatly from hooks on the wall: saws, scalpels, axes and knives, all arranged according to size. A load of brown-stained sheets were mounded up in one of the far corners, and the walls and floor – which was covered in exactly the same lino used for the bungalow bedrooms – were decorated with sprays of reddish brown, as if . . .

Peg passed a hand over her forehead. Something was itching at the back of her memory, but before she could pull it into focus, someone unseen groaned from one of the armchairs.

As she rushed in, followed by Parker, she nearly tripped on a brown bottle, sending it flying.