They’re neutralising me, thought Katharine, hesitating and unsure about where to stand. Susan was still seated at the table, sipping her coffee. The fish was nowhere to be seen. Katharine went over to the wall and looked out at the sea.
When she spoke, she kept her back to them. ‘When you last saw her, Patrick, did she seem herself?’
Patrick thought of Bea laughing on her back in the grass, saw her opening the wine and dipping strawberries into icing sugar. ‘We had farewell drinks with the staff and she was her usual cheerful self as far as I could tell.’ He thought of her silence as he held her familiar but strange, changed body against his. ‘That was the thing about Bea. Always so full of life. Always happy.’ That had been the point. Bea was the antidote to the ball-breaking business of marriage. He smiled over at Susan. My God, if it hadn’t been for Bea, he doubted his marriage would have survived. She made it bearable.
The phone rang and Susan went inside to answer it.
‘Bea told me that she loved you,’ Katharine said.
He put an olive into his mouth. And then another.
She waited for him to say it. Up here, in this place where he and Bea had spent hidden days, she needed him to tell her that he had loved her sister.
Patrick offered the olives to Katharine and wondered whether she would be interested to know that they cured them themselves, from their own olive grove. It was one of the things they told visitors. Our own olives! Takes four to six weeks. You have to remember to remove the scum from the vat once a week. And change the brine regularly. Endless rinsing. They hadn’t got it quite right yet. This batch were a little on the bitter side.
‘She must have loved you rather a lot for it to last as long as it did.’
He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe she’s just vanished.’
‘Well she has,’ snapped Katharine. And it’s your fault, she wanted to say, except she didn’t know whether it was or not. No more Patrick’s fault than Frank’s, than the job, than hers, their mother’s, their father’s for damn well going and getting himself killed before they were barely out of fairy tales and knee socks.
She explained to him all they had done to try to find her. How the police could find no trace despite a thorough search of hospitals, bank accounts, houses, commons and rivers. She told him that their one hope was that, as they couldn’t find her passport, it seemed probable she had gone abroad. So far, though, there was no record of her from airports or the Eurostar or any of the places where they scanned passports, and anyway they didn’t scan her own passport when she flew out here, they barely looked at it. She didn’t tell him that Precious doubted Bea would have got a plane anywhere. Boats and trains, yes, but not a plane, not these days, with all that being herded into pens and all the queuing clutching your plastic bag of lotions, your documents, your keys and wallet and phone. All that being shouted at to take your boots and belts off. ‘Was she afraid of flying?’ Katharine asked. ‘Oh no,’ Precious said, looking her straight in the eye. ‘Bea just didn’t like being treated like shit.’
The air had grown cooler. Katharine fetched her jacket from the table and looked down the steep hill to the sea. ‘I know she’s alive,’ she found herself saying, although being here with Patrick and his wife in their stone paradise, she was fighting a creeping notion that Bea was dead. ‘But I need to ask you whether she ever said anything that made you think she would do herself . . . harm.’
She was saying the words not because she believed them but because these were the words the Mispers men had used. The word suicide stuck in her throat. It was the
sui
of it, the verb
to be
of it, the
cidere
, the cut and the kill of it. She had trawled the internet all the long nights lately looking for the many ways that the desperate found to commit themselves to the act of death. Downstairs alone in the cold blue computer light, she had learned the preferred means used by women, by men, by the young, the aged and the infirm. She had forced herself to try and see Bea with tablets, with ropes, long drops and railway lines, but she couldn’t, she wouldn’t . . .
Patrick was saying, ‘God, no,’ shaking his head. ‘I don’t think Bea was capable of such a thing. I mean . . .’ Katharine did up the buttons of her jacket. A chill wind was blowing in from the east, the sea had turned a deep dark blue and she didn’t like it here up on this terrace in their wary, beached marriage. The sight of grandchildren’s flippers and masks stored in a box by the wall made her very angry. She had one more thing to say before she went.
‘Not even when she lost the baby?’
Then he looked at her. That did it all right. His face slackened, discoloured and retracted as though she had punched him. He hadn’t known either. Katharine felt sick. Her stomach heaved. She wanted to shit.
Susan appeared beside them, car keys in her hand and smelling of fly spray. Bea was right about perfume, Katharine realised now. It all smelt of insecticide or cat piss and people should stop using it. Susan was telling them that she was driving to Frikes to meet Annabel and the children off the boat. If they left now, Katharine would make it in time for the last flight back to London.
Z
IGZAG LINES
, flickering lights and nausea assailed Katharine as Susan drove her to the port. By the time they reached the waterside, the wind had picked up and waves crested with white rode the inky sea. Katharine stared fixedly at the horizon and ordered her guts to be still.
At Kefalonia she managed to get herself into a taxi. Black dots replaced the zigzags in her vision and her right cerebrum felt primed to explode. In the queue for the plane she forced down a double dose of migraine pills and threw the perfume she had bought on the way out into the bin. Once on board, she collapsed into her seat and balanced the sick bag on her chest ready for takeoff. Somebody asked if she was unwell.
‘You did know your sister had been unwell for some time,’ Susan had told her as they reached Frikes after a silent drive north with both windows open. Katharine asked what she meant but Susan was getting out of the car and waving at a young woman and two children waiting on the quayside with bags and suitcases.
‘Unstable,’ she added, walking towards her family. ‘Patrick had to give her a lot of support.’ The ferry blew its horn. ‘Quick. You’d better hurry.’
‘Unwell’ was a euphemism on the missing websites Katharine had searched. Unwell meant mentally ill. ‘Jason’s family is very concerned about him as he has recently been unwell.’ She covered herself in a blanket and put her eye mask on. She had scrolled through the hundreds of the missing on websites and podcasts, scanning their details to try and find a case like Bea’s but there were very few. Most were either teenagers or middle-aged men. No mystery there, Katharine had thought. And then a few were not from these groups and they were the ones who had been ‘unwell’. No mystery there either, she thought. She knew what that meant. But Bea’s disappearance
was
a mystery. She twitched away Pete’s voice, or was it Jim’s? One of them saying, ‘It’s never really a mystery. It’s just that people only start looking once they’ve already gone.’ Useless, the police had been in her opinion. Absolutely useless.
She accepted a beaker of water from the passing trolley, swallowed a temazepam and waited for oblivion.
Seen
T
HERE WERE
a dozen people in the audience at the Burnley library’s matinee performance of
The Seagull in the Cherry Orchard
, and there were slightly fewer at the question-and-answer session afterwards, three of whom were Lance, Margaret and Wanda. Katharine now employed Wanda as a part-time carer for Margaret down in Hastings. When Wanda phoned, Katharine was in Greece but Richard thought a trip to the theatre would do Margaret the world of good.
It was lucky they were there because they were the only ones who asked any questions. Lance asked what Frank was currently working on, which allowed Frank to free-associate about
Close and Personal
, which at that very moment he decided was going to be a novel, and to talk up the ‘soon to be produced’
Lupa
, which he suspected was still in its envelope under his agent’s assistant’s chair. Wanda asked, ‘Was the sex real?’ which threw Frank completely until the chair of the Q & A repeated the question as, ‘Is the set a reference to Chekhov’s pioneering work in stage realism?’ A woman in a green coat and with hair like a cauliflower asked him where he got his ideas from, then Margaret asked where the toilets were. And then it was over.
They got back to Cambridge late that night. Wanda put the parents to bed and then left for Katharine’s house, saying she would be back in the morning to take them down to Hastings. Margaret slept in the children’s room and Lance slept on the couch downstairs. When Frank climbed into the double bed he lay awake for a time, enjoying the new sheets and duvet. He turned on his side and watched Bea’s egg cups lined up along their newly painted shelves and walls. Katharine had thrown money at Wanda and Urban and instructed a thorough upgrade of the house and garden. She hadn’t bothered to ask Frank; she had just informed him it was happening and told him she wanted Bea to have a proper home to come back to. She hadn’t asked if she could use Wanda as a carer for Margaret, down in Hastings either. She had just done it, or rather given Wanda an offer she couldn’t refuse. True, she was paying for Lance to be cared for down there with Margaret, but even so.
Frank turned over the other way and looked at the curtains. Bea’s bags and boxes and clutter had gone. Wanda had sorted through and packed everything away into suitcases. Something had happened to the carpet so that its colour warmed the room. In fact, the room felt surprisingly spacious. He had a suspicion that Katharine might be paying the mortgage, because he had waited for letters from the building society but none had arrived. He was rather hazy about the mortgage anyway, as Bea had always dealt with that. But even so – he scratched his groin – he was very short of cash. Bea’s salary, still coming in for the first few months, had barely covered the bills and living expenses. Then, all of a sudden, her salary had been suspended ‘pending an enquiry into unauthorised absence’. He turned over on to his back and looked up at the ceiling. Urban had painted the whole room brilliant white so that it glowed through the darkness. There was no doubt about it. He needed to earn some money. The question was, how? He thought of the garden, which Katharine had spent a fortune on in the last few weeks. Urban was digging a pond out there, a terrace of York stone had been built, which Frank was not allowed to call a patio, and there were new trees and shrubs all planted and with their labels still on.
Frank turned back on to his side and looked at the egg cups again. He needed to get on with
Close and Personal
. He should have written a novel years ago instead of fiddling about with plays. His agent was supposed to ring him back with a date for a meeting. Frank had in mind a substantial lunch somewhere like Lawyers where they did excellent traditional food and a collection of rather good wine. He heard someone in the bathroom, heard the catch of the door and the sound of the toilet flushing. He lay on his back again and straightened his pyjamas. He gathered the duvet close around him and thought about Wanda. They didn’t any more, not since Bea went. And anyway they never had at night. It was understood. It had been a couch thing. An afternoon thing. Not really a sex thing at all, more a muse thing. They had never spoken about it and he supposed that Wanda felt guilty about Bea, about that afternoon when she hadn’t given him the message, about abusing Bea’s trust in her that way. He listened to the house. All was quiet again. He liked the feeling of others sleeping in the house around him. It made him feel a part of things, like a small creature in a colony of other creatures. Tomorrow they would be gone again to Hastings. He hardly saw Wanda now. Katharine sent a Hungarian boy round once a week to do the cleaning – Viktor. Frank turned on to his stomach and spreadeagled himself across the bed. He looked sideways out towards the thick velvet curtains that had appeared one day. Purple seemed to him an absurd colour for a bedroom. He was getting an idea. The children’s room was unused now. He might get a good price for that room. He turned on to his back again. Yes. He would do it tomorrow. The answer to all his problems. He would get a lodger. Four hundred pounds a month. A nice lady lodger.
The next day, as soon as the others left, Frank sat at his computer to check on rental prices. When the phone rang he froze. He looked at it. ‘Withheld’ showed in the caller’s number display. He considered not answering it. Phone calls usually signalled an unwelcome about-turn in his life. Any minute now it would stop ringing and leave a message. He stared at it. Withhelds never left a message. He lifted the phone and held it to his ear.
‘Frank? Frank Pamplin?’ A man’s voice. ‘Good morning, Jim here.’
Frank racked his brains. Jim? Jim who?
‘Jim Woods, Cambridge Missing Persons Unit. Frank, we thought you should be the first to know. Frank? You there?’
Frank nodded and mumbled something. Here we go again, he thought. Event, incident, enter, speech, exit.
‘There’s been a development.’
Frank breathed into the phone. There was white winter blossom on one of the trees Katharine had bought for the garden. Tiny birds with yellow and black markings hopped and pecked in the branches.
‘We have a sighting.’
He saw Bea standing at the end of a long tunnel. The house felt empty and he wished he had asked Wanda and the others to stay for breakfast. Jim was talking on the other end of the line.
‘While we wouldn’t want to raise hopes—’
‘Where? Who’s seen her? When?’ Frank rubbed his hand over his face as panic tried to clamber up through the fog.
‘Southampton station. We have CCTV footage which we’d like to bring over, if that’s all right with you.’