Then You Were Gone (5 page)

‘Or Anna?’

‘My sister’s daughter is called Anna.’ Simone tried her best to sound sarcastic. ‘Does that count?’

Jazzy ignored her. ‘She’s the cleaner at Anastasia Ltd. – well, the cleaner for the whole office building. Mack was – is – pretty pally with her I think.’

Simone closed her eyes. ‘Are you going to tell me he’s been having an affair with the cleaning lady and that’s why he’s run off?’

Jazzy snorted a bleak laugh. ‘No. And she’s not the cleaning lady, she’s just a girl – seventeen. No, what it is, she told me this morning that Mack had been to see her at her sixth form college one day last week. He was waiting outside for her when she finished.’

‘What?’ Simone and Jazzy were the only diners in the restaurant and at Simone’s loud protestation all three of the waiting staff looked over. One of them, the only woman, suppressed a smirk as she looked away. She clearly thought the two of them were having a lovers’ tiff.

A hundred thoughts shot through Simone’s brain. Hanging around outside the school gates? Surely that was what perverts did. Perverts or parents denied access to their children. Mack did not look like a pervert. He did not seem like a pervert. But… a cold, sick shiver rose from her stomach… when she thought about it, until her most of Mack’s girlfriends had been considerably younger than him. And was there a point where liking them young crossed over into something more sinister? She wiped her mouth with a wax-coated paper napkin. Her hand was shaking. Was she really questioning whether or not Mack was a paedophile? The sick feeling washed higher into her throat. Nothing she knew about him seemed stable any more, everything was lurching and tilting in her mind so that the things she thought she had understood about him had flipped around until they looked as though they could mean something else. Christ, she thought, she was losing her grip here. Mack needed to come back, and fast. Clearly she couldn’t keep her mind together without him.

‘So why had he gone there?’ she said lamely, at a loss for anything more pertinent to say.

Jazzy took a deep breath. ‘Well, apparently Mack was in a right state, pale, fidgety, didn’t look like he’d slept. And then, he asked her…’

‘Hang on a minute,’ Simone interrupted. ‘Did she not wonder what the fuck he was doing there? Or how he’d found her there in the first place?’

Jazzy shrugged and looked sheepish. ‘I think to be honest she might have had a little crush on our Mr Mack – you know the effect he has on young girls. And I guess she must have told him which college she goes to – maybe because she was hoping he’d turn up there one day looking for her.’

‘Which he did.’

‘Well, yes, but not for the reason she’d hoped. Like I said, Mack wasn’t himself – from what she said he was barely even making sense – but apparently he was asking her for help.’

‘Help for what?’

Jazzy winced. ‘This sounds weird – well, it sounds worse than weird. Just remember that this girl has absolutely no reason to lie to us.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Jazzy!’ Simone wanted to reach across the table and slap him, put her hands around his throat, throttle him.
Just tell me!
she wanted to scream, but the waitress was looking sidelong at them and smirking again.

‘OK. Well… What it was… He wanted Anna to get him a credit card and passport in a false name, and to see if she could get him access to a car.’ He blurted out the last sentence in a rush, as though once he expelled the words from his mouth, they were no longer his responsibility.

Simone did not say anything for a minute. She knew she was pulling the kind of face that was expected of her, wide-mouthed, wide-eyed, a parody of shock. She did not know what other kind of face to pull. ‘But Mack’s got a car,’ she said eventually.

Jazzy shrugged. ‘That’s the thing. He needed another one, one that – well, I suppose one that couldn’t be traced.’

‘Traced by who?’

‘Simone, stop shouting at me! I’m not saying all this to you because I get a kick out of it, I’m just telling you what this girl told me!’

‘OK,’ she said, making a conscious effort to moderate her tone. ‘Sorry. Go on.’

‘He didn’t tell Anna who. He just said he needed a fake credit card, a car and a passport – I mean, for fuck’s sake. A false
passport
? Who, outside of the bloody Bourne Identity, needs a false passport?’

Simone could not process what Jazzy was saying. He was right, it was something from a pumped-up, macho, mindless work of fiction, not from the life of a thirty-one-year-old book restorer quietly minding her own business in north London. ‘But… why Ayanna? If he needed help, then why did he go to her? Some kid he hardly knows? Of all the dodgy people Mack knows, surely one of them would have been able to help him out?’

Jazzy nodded. ‘I know, I thought that too. But Anna told me –’ Simone sighed heavily. It was getting on her nerves, this ‘Anna’ business, as though Jazzy was best mates with this girl, on pet name terms with her. Jazzy ignored her. ‘Anna said that he made her promise not to tell Keith about any of it. He made her promise not to tell anyone, but he was particularly firm on Keith.
Don’t tell Keith
. She kept making me promise too. So I think that’s why he went to Anna, instead of one of his dodgy cousins, or even Keith himself, I guess. I mean, if I ever wanted to go underground I think I’d go straight to Keith, he knows half the crims in London. But this Anna, she’s no link to anyone else in his life. Whoever’s looking for him, they probably won’t think to start with her.’

Simone closed her eyes. Too many questions were popping into her mind. ‘And how come she could help him, then? Is she some sort of people-smuggler on the side, between cleaning your office and doing her A-levels?’

Jazzy looked pained. ‘Well, she wasn’t very forthcoming about it really. Apparently she’s got a brother who – well, I don’t think he’s a gangster or anything, but he does… From what she said, he helps people out when they first come to London, or that’s how she put it. The family are Somalian, at least by background, but Anna was actually born here and her brothers have been here since they were little kids. Reading between the lines, I think this brother helps out people coming over from Somalia to join their families, gets them fixed up with papers and stuff if they’re not entirely legit when they first get here. You know the sort of thing.’

‘No,’ Simone said, aware her voice was becoming shrill. ‘No, I do not know the sort of thing. And neither do you.’
We’re way out of our depth here
, she wanted to scream at him,
and we both know it. You pretending you know what’s going on is no comfort to me!

‘Simone, I …’ Jazzy looked as though he wanted to apologise but was unsure for what. ‘Look, do you want to know what she said or not?’

‘Of course I bloody do.’

‘Right, well… She didn’t get him the car. She seemed a bit pissed off about that actually. Said she said to Mack, “What, you think just because I’m Somali I’ll be able to get a car nicked for you?” She told him a fake ID was one thing but if he wanted a car he could go and nick it himself, her brother wasn’t going to risk prison for some flash wanker he’d never met.’

Simone could not suppress a shocked giggle. ‘She actually called him a flash wanker?’

Jazzy shrugged. ‘I don’t reckon she did to his face, I just reckon she wishes she had.’

‘But she got him the credit card and passport?’

Jazzy nodded. ‘She got him them. Or her brother did. And a driving licence. And that’s the last she saw of him.’

They looked at each other. Simone’s moussaka was cold and congealed, only one mouthful having made it from the plate. ‘Oh, Christ.’ Simone put her face in her hands. ‘But all that – false passport, false credit card. That’s what people do if they want to disappear. Like, properly disappear. For ever.’

Jazzy was biting the corner of his thumbnail. It made him look, despite the receding hair line and the incipient paunch, like a little boy. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I know.’

Simone did not go back to work after lunch. For the first time in the six years she had worked there, she phoned in sick and went home.

When she got to her flat, Mack’s letter was on the table in the communal hall. She waited until she was behind her own front door until she read it though. She barely knew her neighbours and did not want one of their few impressions of her to be formed by them seeing her crouched, weeping by the post table. In tone, the letter was similar to the one Jazzy had shown her, full of pleas for her to take him seriously and guarantees that he had not in fact lost his mind, but all the while implicitly suggesting that he had done just that.

The last paragraph, however, was different, and it was that that finally provoked the tears.

Simone, I meant what I said in that text. I do love you, really, more than anyone I’ve ever met, more than I ever thought I could. I’m just so sorry that I was too chicken to say it to your face and that I’ve waited until now. I love you, I love you, I love you, and please believe me that everything I’m doing right now is because I want to make sure that you’ll be safe and stay safe for ever. I want to come back for you, and I will try to, but in the end it might be better if I don’t. And if that happens, please know that it isn’t because I don’t love you. Please, please, please be careful, do not let anything bad happen to you. I love you.

M

Chapter Four

Jessica didn’t know what time it was, only that it was dark. It was often dark here. They were a long way north for one thing – further north than she had ever been before – and it was winter, but also there were so many shadows in these forests. She had gone outside yesterday at midday just to get some air, and she had barely been able to see the rutted mud track beneath her feet. The trees, uniform in their silence and solidity, gave nothing away, standing aloof and impenetrable, the low clouds getting trapped in their highest branches. They let in no light and would let out no sound. If she screamed and cried, begging for help or rescue, if a gun was fired, if the cabin blew up, these trees would hold the sound in, and nobody would ever know what had happened to her.

The baby shifted inside her and pushed its feet up behind her ribs; she sighed and got out of the damp-smelling fold-out bed. This was why she could never sleep. This was why she never knew what time of day it was, whether it was morning or midnight, whether she was hungry because she’d missed breakfast or because she’d missed dinner or because this little creature was sapping her of every ounce of nourishment and she was simply starving bloody hungry all the bloody time.

She stood up and, feeling her feet shrink from the grainy, ice-cold lino, wished for the four-hundredth time that she’d brought her slippers. She wished she’d brought a lot of things. Like a phone, for God’s sake, or her iPad – not that he would have let her use them even if she had. He wouldn’t even switch his own phone on. ‘That’s how people get caught,’ he kept saying.

She waddled to the small hold-all in the corner of the little room and took the small crocheted blanket from the bag she had packed ready to go to the hospital when the baby came. She put the blanket round her shoulders and crept back to bed, tucking her feet under her to try and warm them up.

He had made her bring the bag with the baby things in it, even though he’d kept saying she shouldn’t bring too much stuff. ‘We don’t know how long we might have to be away,’ he had said. She had thought he was mental. Well, obviously she had thought he was mental anyway; what other explanation could there be for what he was doing? But she still had nine weeks to go before her due date. He really was crazy if he thought she would still be in this shack in the woods with him by then.

But now days had passed – maybe a week? She couldn’t tell. All those grey misty mornings that never materialised into a real day, those long, black, wakeful nights wheezing and coughing and trying to get comfortable. All those hours had passed and she was still here.

She could hear sounds now. He was starting to move around in the other room, coughing and shuffling and being conspicuously quiet, as though if he tried not to disturb her in the mornings then that would make up for everything else. For it must be morning, if he was up. Another day, more long hours where nothing happened and still she could not go home. Jessica pulled the baby’s blanket tighter around her shoulders, lay back down and closed her eyes.

Chapter Five

‘You know,’ Petra said, ‘there’s one question you haven’t asked.’

Jazzy looked at her and did one long, slow blink. It was already nearly midnight and they had been sitting at the kitchen table having this conversation for four hours. In five and a half hours’ time either the alarm or Rory would wake them up – if they ever got to sleep in the first place. ‘Go on,’ he said. He genuinely hoped that Petra would provide some insight that had thus far escaped him. If anyone could, she could.

‘Well… I hesitate to say it, but how well do you really know this guy? How well do any of you know him, even Simone?’

At first Jazzy thought she must be talking about Keith; he could not shake his suspicion that Keith must be at the root of this somehow, and he had spent a large part of this evening telling Petra so. She could not mean Mack. Because he knew Mack like a brother; he knew everything about him that you could know about another person. They had lived together in Japan for two years, eaten together every evening, slept every night separated only by a wall of paper, ventured out together to karaoke and sushi bars and sento bath houses at weekends. There was nobody in the world who knew Jazzy better than Mack.

‘I mean,’ Petra continued, ‘what do you really
know
, other than what Mack’s told you? Like, do you even know which school he went to? Have you ever met any of his friends from school? Have you ever met his dad? Do you know what he was doing in between leaving uni and going to Japan?’

‘Of course I know all that,’ Jazzy said dismissively. But he felt a heavy weight settle at the bottom of his stomach. Because Petra had hit on something there. He had never met any of Mack’s school friends, nor even any of his mates from university, though he had at least heard him talk about them – mostly some guy called Dan who had been something of a sidekick by the sounds of him. He did know that Simone had gone with Mack to a university reunion a month or two ago but, reading between the lines he gathered that the two of them had spent most of the weekend in their hotel room shagging.