Yannis stood up in his boat and put the bucket down on the quayside. He called to Patrick and offered him a plump, gleaming fish. How marvellous, thought Patrick, taking the fish with a smile and trying to explain to Yannis that he would pay him next time he was in the village with trousers on. Yannis waved him away, started his engine and chugged slowly out of the harbour. Patrick looked at the fish. Susan would be impressed with this, he thought, making his way to the shop. She could grill it with thyme and garlic and they would eat it with bread and roast tomatoes. He put his hand on the shop door handle and hesitated. That phone call from Precious had been awkward. And an email from the police, for heaven’s sake. He shook his head. No, he did not find it out of character! Not from what he knew of Bea. And no, he did not know of her whereabouts. Really, he had left all that behind him. Although sometimes, when he woke early to the sound of the cockerel, long before the cicadas started up, he couldn’t deny that Bea occasionally crept into his mind.
And then he saw her.
It was Bea, a photograph of her on a poster with
Have You Seen Her?
printed across the top.
Have you seen her?
whispered his wife when he climbed into bed in the dark, hoping that she was asleep.
It’s all over
, he told her then, and mainly it was true.
It’s over
, he told Bea and there were no scenes. She just nodded her head against his chest and said,
I know
. She was always very good like that.
Precious’s phone call had alerted him, of course, but he had almost put it out of his mind. It was so hard to think of the office existing, of the people and routines, out here in this great sweep of sea and sky. A mild guilt nudged him, guilt laced with desire. He had assumed, during the conversation with Precious, that Bea had rowed with Frank, had enough of work and buggered off for few days. Leave of absence without pay. She’d done it before – played hooky with him on the occasional Friday when he’d had a local government conference in Birmingham. But this poster disarmed him. It was like an accusation. It meant they were on to him. Not Precious, here, surely? Patrick looked about him. A catamaran rounded the entrance to the bay and approached the harbour. The meat van blew its horn. He studied the poster again. A full-colour photograph of Bea looking pretty and tanned, caught in the middle of a laugh. He had seen that look on her face here, in Ithaca, the last time, the one last time before she gave up waiting and found herself a husband of her own. She had never been a beautiful woman, but she was a handsome woman and so full of life, up for just about anything, and God knows he missed that. A sickening thought occurred to him. What if this was Bea’s idea of a joke? He wheeled round and scanned the empty harbour. Yannis’s threadbare dog sat splay-legged in the road scratching its ear, an expression of rapture on its face. The road winding up from the village was deserted. Yannis’s mother came out of the shop with her broom and swept away some nutshells. No, this wasn’t the kind of prank that Bea would pull. She was nothing if not discreet. My God, he sometimes thought she cared more about the feelings of his wife and kids than he did. She was forever reminding him to delete the texts; they’d pay for the hotel rooms with her card not his. Even that last time when they’d made love by the river, she’d woken him up to tell him he should go, so that his wife didn’t worry. That had been such a delicious afternoon – all the more so for being so unexpected. After all, it had been years since they’d done that. He’d thought of Frank as he moved between her raised thighs. Thought of how he was erasing that pompous old fart, imagined Frank stumbling upon them when they were too far gone to be able to stop. He hadn’t realised how much he’d missed all that. There was nothing apologetic or careful about sex with Bea. Just a glorious animal fission. He looked at her face again. No, this was someone else’s work, not Bea’s. He reeled back through his mind for the names of the people who knew about him and Bea, but the list was a long and confused one, what with Cambridge being such a small and gossipy place. He cast a furtive glance up at his own house but the sun was in his eyes. He readjusted his grip on the fish. He jumped when the bread van careered round the bend and stopped outside the shop. With a bolting heart, he understood. It meant that Bea was dead. That was what these posters were, wasn’t it? They were memorials to the departed; despair disguised as hope; the prayers of those left behind that they themselves might not be lost in grief. The catamaran dropped its anchor, the rattling chain echoing round the hillside. Who had been here then? There was a mobile phone number with an English code at the bottom. Frank? Her sister? Something leaked from the mouth of the fish and he wiped his hand clean on his shorts.
Patrick gave the poster a sharp pull and ripped it from the wooden panel. He sometimes wished Bea had been more demanding. He strode up to the other two posters and snatched them down. How could he dare to detonate his marriage if Bea never stated that was what she wanted? And what if Susan saw the pictures now? All the pain and hard work would be wasted. He might even be stranded in old age on his own. Anger filled his chest. One of the posters floated away on the breeze and settled on the surface of the water by the harbour wall. He watched her face darken and sink. It really wasn’t any of his business now, he told himself as he stuffed the remaining posters into his pocket. Whoever had put these here should know better. Bea would never come here, although he sometimes wished to God she would. He began to walk, through the village, along the road that skirted the coast and up the steep path of the hill. He walked fast and without stopping to shop. He needed to get back home to Susan before whoever had made the connection between himself and Bea got there first.
W
HEN
K
ATHARINE
stepped off the ferry from the neighbouring island of Kefalonia earlier that afternoon, she was exhausted. The closer she got to Ithaca, the less of an idyll it appeared to be. The flight to Kefalonia was much longer than expected and then there were delays in getting to the ferry. She could see that the crossing to Ithaca might lift the spirits, but once on the island, her very first impressions were of starved cats, concrete and plastic bags. Tuscany was always a safer bet. The Mediterranean could be so shabby. At the port, there was a long wait for the bus to Kioni, the village featured on Bea’s postcard to Precious, and the journey itself was a diesel-ridden lurch from one rain-slicked hairpin bend to another. She wished she had hired a car, but the whole point, impressed on her by Adrian and Laura, was that she should follow the route that Bea might take. Bea would be saving money. Bea was always careful with money. They were certain she would not drive. Katharine left a trail of posters wherever she went, and when she finally reached Kioni in the late afternoon she had no trouble finding out where Patrick lived. The woman in the village shop took her outside and pointed out his house, perched high above the rest, with views across the Ionian Sea.
Katharine climbed the steep road that led out of the village and looked down at the harbour. She had to admit that it was beautiful in a simple, rugged sort of way. As she climbed higher, the headland appeared and she saw three stone towers, ruined windmills looking out to sea. She rested on a low wall and got her breath back. Now this was a view; a silent drama that must have seemed a million miles from Bea’s job, from the flat greys of Cambridge, from the quiet massacre of their childhood.
When she reached the house, she climbed halfway up the steep steps to the terrace and called out.
‘Hello? Anybody home?’
A woman’s face appeared over the terrace wall. Small and pale, she didn’t look like she spent time in the sun. She had a reluctant air to her, as if she didn’t anticipate any visitors.
‘Can I help you?’ she said.
Katharine came to the top of the steps and wondered what she was going to say. Obviously this was the wife. She cleared her throat and raised her head. She took a breath and put on her work face. Businesslike and brisk was always the best approach.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ she said, climbing the remaining steps, panting and pulling one of the posters from her bag. ‘But does Patrick live here?’
Bitter
P
ATRICK WORRIED
that his heart might burst. His run had slowed to a jog by the time he reached the final bend and then become a tortured, drunken stagger as he made it up the steps to the terrace. He clung to the rough stone of the wall at the top and groaned for breath. His wife sat drinking coffee with a strange woman, a poster of Bea on the table between them.
Patrick said, ‘Oh God,’ and bent at the waist, supporting his weight with one hand on the wall.
Susan said, ‘I’ll get more coffee,’ and went into the house.
Katharine looked at the fish in his hand and said, ‘I’m here about Bea.’
She put her hand to her hair in that gesture that was Bea’s, and he nodded and said, ‘You’re her sister.’ He sat down opposite her with his back to the view and poured water for himself from a glass jug full of ice and lemon. ‘Katharine, is it?’
Katharine was disappointed. She had been imagining Patrick as a balding Irish bureaucrat in an ill-fitting suit and pale skin. She hadn’t expected him to be so tall or so hairy. Richard’s body was hairless, even his legs for some reason, but Patrick – his chest, stomach, thighs, calves, everywhere was thatched in startling black hair. She looked away. Red and white geraniums stood clustered in pots and she imagined Bea in his arms. She thought of Richard, with what friends described as his classic English good looks. Jane said Richard looked like Cary Grant in
North by Northwest
, and Paul remarked that he did sometimes have that being-pursued-by-a-crop-duster look about him, a comment that Katharine had not found amusing. She straightened her back and eased the fabric of her trousers at her groin. They were too tight and hot for this weather. Patrick pushed a bowl of shrivelled black olives towards her and waved a fly away from the fish.
‘I ought to get this out of the sun,’ he said.
She looked at his eyes, which were brown and not meeting hers. He was watching the house as though wondering whether to make a dash for the fridge. He looks French or Greek, she thought. Lethal, no doubt, in Deeds, Convents and Registrars or whatever it was that Bea’s department was called.
‘Bea’s disappeared,’ said Katharine.
Patrick nodded and she wanted to kick him. ‘I saw the posters. But she wouldn’t come here. We—’
‘You had an affair.’
His eyes flicked to the door of the house again. She saw him calculating speed, distance, velocity, working out if he had time to deflect the missile before it hit his marriage.
‘We were very good friends for a long time. An affair is not the word I would have used.’
‘What would you call it then?’
Patrick poured water for them both. ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s happened? Of course I will do what I can to help.’
She told him, while he nodded and listened, hands clasped before him on the table. He was in work mode, she thought. He was managing her like a problem from Lifts, Toilets and Parking.
When she had finished he looked down at a neat row of children’s buckets and spades and said, ‘What happened between Bea and myself was a long time ago. And it was a mistake . . .’
Katharine stopped him. ‘I’m not here to judge.’ She had done that already, she thought. Men get away with bloody murder. ‘I’m here to find out more about her. I know she came here with you once.’
The olives were mean and salty. She spat the stones into her hand and recognised the painted bowl from Bea’s kitchen collection.
‘I’ve been told that when people go missing they often find their way to places or people from their pasts. Apparently, they can’t help it . . .’ Her voice tailed away. She put Bea’s postcard to Precious on the table and pushed it towards him. Patrick looked at it fearfully.
The vast sea stretching out there to the horizon looked suddenly dreadful, and Katharine wished she’d never come. Finding Bea, so far from home seemed impossible. Neither of them spoke. The olive grove below seemed to shiver and shake like a shoal of fish, becoming silver then grey then blue.
‘You think she’s come here?’ Patrick’s tan took on a yellowish tinge. ‘How long did you say again?’ He looked her in the eyes briefly but his gaze kept fidgeting between the view and the postcard and the door to his house. In the end, thought Katharine, it was the house and the view he feared losing, more than her sister.
‘She was last seen six weeks ago.’ It sounded as if Bea was dead, she knew that. He thought there was a fair chance she was dead, she could see that on his face. ‘Has she contacted you at all?’
He looked up as Susan came out with more coffee. She was small and bird-like with a precise, clever air to her. Katharine wanted to push her down the steps. Susan poured coffee with a steady hand and sat down next to her husband. The postcard had vanished.
She said, ‘That looks like it might be past its best,’ and waved the flies away from the fish.
‘Yannis gave it to me,’ said Patrick. ‘It’s fresh.’
‘I think it needs to go in the fridge,’ said Susan.
Katharine got up and asked if she could use their bathroom.
She ran water into the sink and lowered her face into it. When she raised her head and pulled back her hair, she looked in the mirror and saw Bea for an instant. Smile! She left the bathroom and hesitated in the darkened corridor. Framed family photographs lined the walls leading to the bedroom. Katharine peered at them. They looked like all family photographs – everyone smiling, smiling, smiling!
‘I was just telling Susan about Bea,’ said Patrick, when Katharine came back outside. He had put on a loose red shirt. ‘You work with someone for years and years and then this.’ He picked up the missing poster. ‘It’s such a shock.’