When Sarah doesn’t come, when the bridge of sunlight has shrivelled behind the row of houses opposite, when the cakes have sunk and dried, I get changed ready for my evening at the Stag’s Head.
The first Saturday of every month they buy a ticket and line up to have their fortunes told. I try not to let my anger influence what I say but I might not be able to resist predicting a little tragedy or disappointment for one or two of them. I snap the curtains closed against the street, even though it stays light until nearly ten o’clock, even though I like passers-by to get a glimpse of my solitude. I don’t want Sarah peeking in if she decides to come knocking later. I wouldn’t want her to see the baby basket I bought for her all tied up with ribbon and filled with tiny velvet sleep suits laid out as a surprise. I’d feel silly if she knew that I’d redecorated the back bedroom, Natasha’s old nursery, in modern pastel colours and bought a lamp with rabbits on the shade and shifted the box of toys down from the loft that Sheila so speedily packed away when my baby was lost. Before I go out, I drop to the floor and hold all the new baby things to my face, crying and laughing at the same time.
The Stag’s Head is already full. It hums with loud conversation, punctuated by an occasional peel of laughter, and reeks of smoke and beer and hope. I greet the landlord through the layers of punters at the bar and he rushes me through to the usual room out the back where three other clairvoyants are already doing their trade. It’s as if he can’t hold back the hordes any longer, all desperate to touch the other side of life.
But apart from the usual mêlée of clients, who get to see me for only ten pounds if they buy two adult meals at the bar, I sense that there’s something else waiting for my attention. A rather more pressing matter than making contact with long-dead aunts or delving into the minutiae of someone’s hopeless future. I’m getting that feeling, and I don’t like it one bit, that something is about to happen. I think of Sarah and her baby. I look at my watch and then at the face of my first client as she sits down at my stall. I wonder what to tell her as I am heaped with a fear that has absolutely nothing to do with this woman.
‘Hi,’ she says but I don’t answer. I stare at my upturned palms stretched out on the purple cloth covering the table. The lines are strawberry-coloured against the paleness of my skin, each one a map of truth or lies. I remember Sarah laughing, studying them and pretending to tell my fortune, predicting I was going to have a baby. And it is then, just as I look up, that I catch the eye of a stranger staring at me from beside the bar, slowly sipping his pint.
TWENTY-THREE
Robert and Louisa watched the old woman clattering about making tea. The Wystrach kitchen smelled of disinfectant and a faint tang of gas. When the tea was made and she had completed what seemed to be a sacred tray-laying ritual, Mrs Wystrach guided the pair through to the living room, while her husband carried the tray. Robert and Louisa sat beside each other on the edge of a floral sofa. They were offered a bitter orange brew in a rattling cup and saucer.
‘Have you lived here long?’ Robert didn’t really care. He simply wanted to know about the photograph in the locket, weigh up the possibility of a link to his wife and then get the hell out of the depressing house. Neither of the old couple answered his question.
‘Tell me where you got this.’ The old man creaked to his full height, which was impressive, and dangled the locket in front of Robert as if trying to hypnotise the unwelcome visitors into telling the truth.
‘It belongs to my stepdaughter,’ Robert said honestly and with a tone that he would use for particularly mistrusting clients. He offered a reassuring smile and reached up for the item but the old man jerked it out of the way. The locket spun on its chain, glinting in the morning sun filtering through the grubby net curtains. Robert took a sip of his tea, winced and noticed a tear beading in the corner Mrs Wystrach’s eye. A car cruised along the street. ‘Who is Ruth?’ he asked. ‘You said the locket belonged to Ruth.’ A faint trail of exhaust filtered through the open window.
Again, silence, but Mr Wystrach lowered himself back into the chair next to his wife. It creaked under his weight. The couple bowed towards each other, their shoulders touching, their united frailty showing.
‘Ruth was our daughter,’ Mrs Wystrach said, looking at her husband, perhaps for permission, when she spoke.
‘
Is
our daughter,’ the old man growled. A tiny muscle twitched beneath his eye.
‘I’m not sure I understand.’ Louisa’s crystal voice cut a line through the heavy air. ‘Is, was?’
Mrs Wystrach touched her husband’s knee with her bony hand and when she replied, her accent made her sound as if she needed to clear her throat. There was great sadness in her voice, the pain transcending language. ‘After all these years, I believe Ruth must be dead.’
‘No!’ Her husband exploded into full height again. ‘Ruth is alive.’ It seemed as if there was more the man wanted to say but the words choked his throat, clogging it up with fear, sadness and desperation.
‘If she’s alive, perhaps Ruth would like the locket back.’ Robert spoke gently, familiar with the art of eking out information, although he wasn’t convinced it would lead them anywhere useful or that it had anything to do with Erin. ‘I’m sure my wife and daughter would like to see it returned to its rightful owner.’
Another long period of silence. Robert heard kids playing in the street and wondered why they weren’t at school. The steady thud-thud of a ball repeatedly bounced on hot tarmac and the piercing wail of a toddler followed by a raised adult voice alarmed him so that he strained to see into the street. The warm summer air transformed mundane noises into tantalising sound bites. There was a whiff of burnt toast and then fumes as another car with a throaty exhaust chugged past the open window. Mrs Wystrach’s greying nets billowed in the summer breeze and Robert thought that the old couple had died in their seats, such was their inertness.
‘Is it possible to locate Ruth, to return the locket to her?’ As if a switch had been flicked, Mrs Wystrach leaned forward, her gaze dancing cautiously around the room. Her eyes narrowed to slits and her thin lips disappeared as they stretched over her teeth.
‘You won’t find Ruth. Everyone’s tried.’ A glance at her husband brought him back to life also and he nodded in agreement. ‘Ruth’s gone, you see. Vanished.’ The old woman gestured a mini-explosion with her hands and puffed air out of her cheeks.
Fleetingly, Robert had an image of Ruth, a faceless girl, dissolving into thin air before his eyes. Then he thought of Erin and Ruby’s vanishing act.
‘I’m sorry,’ he found himself saying but really he meant it about his own situation. ‘Have the police done all they can?’
‘Of course. The investigation was over and done with many years ago.’ Mrs Wystrach took the knitted tea cosy off the pot and stirred the contents. ‘More?’ Robert held out his cup; he needed to prolong the meeting to prise out information. ‘She’s been gone thirteen years. There’s nothing else to be done.’ She tapped the spoon on the side of the teapot. ‘They say she’s probably dead.’
Robert sipped his tea, anything to distract his body from mirroring the involuntary twitches that consumed Mr Wystrach as he fought internal conflict, refusing to believe his wife’s resignation. Common sense told Robert to get up and leave, that to be wrapped up in the old couple’s story was both misleading and dangerous, that he might learn something that would steer him away from the truth about his wife, that he might learn something that would make him more obsessed.
‘Mr and Mrs Wystrach, do you know anyone called Erin Lucas? Does the name have any connection with this locket?’ Louisa asked, placing her teacup on the coffee table, glancing at Robert briefly.
‘I have a photograph of her,’ Robert said. He took his wallet from his back pocket and flipped it open, offering it to Mrs Wystrach. She took a look, leaned against her husband and clapped a hand to her forehead. Her head bobbed vigorously and her lips suddenly pursed as if a drawstring was tightening around the words that wanted to come out.
‘He says do we know this woman,’ Mrs Wystrach said to her husband, trying to control herself. She was acting as if he had suddenly become deaf or dumb.
‘We don’t know her,’ he replied too swiftly. His face tightened at the sight of Erin and colour leaked into his broad cheeks, revealing doubt, distrust and certainly regret. A faint grimace curled at one side of his mouth like a leaf preparing for autumn. Robert glimpsed the pale blonde wisps of Erin’s hair as Mrs Wystrach held the picture in trembling hands. He recalled taking the photo in a high wind on Anglesey. Erin had one hand at her neck and the other brushing back her flyaway hair.
Mr Wystrach pushed his fat fingers through what remained of his greasy hair and sighed. ‘Have you lost someone too?’ he asked, the tight accent receding a little, the signs of recognition ebbing, as if he had taken control of his feelings. Mr Wystrach, for some reason, was striving to give little away.
‘Possibly. I’m not sure yet.’ Robert realised he sounded stupid – either someone is lost or they aren’t – but the man’s evasion, despite his obvious recognition of Erin, had thrown him. ‘It’s my wife,’ he added, although they weren’t listening. Mrs Wystrach was whispering excitedly in a foreign language to her husband and they both smiled and frowned, as if a small valve had been released but with a great pressure behind. Whatever they were hiding, Robert was reluctant to reveal anything about Erin. She was still his wife.
Mrs Wystrach crossed herself and stood up. ‘You wait a moment.’ She shuffled from the room, her rubber-soled slippers making no noise, and soon returned clutching a box file to her chest. ‘We’d like to show you some things about Ruth.’
The old woman placed the box on the coffee table and carefully opened it, a light spray of dust scattering off its top in the sunlight. As she fingered through the many papers it contained, Robert could see that most were newspaper clippings. Louisa leaned forward, a shaft of sun filtered by the nets dappling her hair. Their bodies were close, their thoughts closer still.
‘This is Ruth. And this one and this one.’ Suddenly Robert and Louisa were wrapped in newspaper clippings and photographs as Mrs Wystrach handed them all over in an excited flurry. Her breath and anticipation were hot on his skin as Robert shared the pictures with Louisa.
Staring up out of the yellowed newspaper was an insipid girl with vacant eyes against a pale blue swirly background in what was obviously a school photograph. Above it, the simple headline stated:
Schoolgirl Missing
.
Robert’s heart knotted in his chest as he stared at a much younger Erin. In his mind, there was no mistaking that the girl in the newspaper had matured into his wife. He wasn’t sure whether to leap up and hug the old couple – in case they really were his parents-in-law – or keep the discovery to himself in case they clammed up. From body language alone, Robert was certain they knew more than they were letting on and he didn’t want to put up a road block. He would tread carefully; contact them again if necessary.
Either way, Robert couldn’t help imagining that it was Erin and Ruby who never came back, that it was their pictures he had supplied to the police and the newspapers, urging the nation to search for his missing family. A line of sweat prickled underneath his shirt, dampening the length of his spine.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he found himself saying, hardly able to look at the young girl. She had already sent a jolt through him. ‘It must have been very hard.’
Robert heard Louisa mouthing the words of the accompanying report of the missing girl, noticing only key words as they left her lips –
runaway
,
abducted
,
plea
,
police
. . .
‘She was only fifteen. A child.’ The old woman’s voice contained a thread of hope, ridiculously, as if Robert, a complete stranger, had been delivered to relieve them of their loss. ‘She was everyone’s favourite little girl.’ She placed a worn-out hand on her husband’s back. ‘We were a close family.’
At this comment her husband stood and moved to the window, angling his oversized and ageing body into the column of sunshine that struck across the room. ‘One day she was here. Then she ran away.’ Mrs Wystrach joined her husband in the light and they stood staring out of the window, leaving their visitors to riffle through the clippings.
There were several copies of the same newspaper, containing articles about the missing girl. One clipping had come from a national daily. All dated from the same month – January 1992.
‘What do you think?’ Robert lowered his voice, as if that would make his words unintelligible to the old couple.
‘I was about to ask you the same question.’
‘Look at the mole. Look at the cheekbones. I know the hair’s different, but the foundations are there.’
‘I have a mole,’ Louisa whispered and pointed to her temple. ‘It doesn’t make me the girl in the picture.’
‘This girl could never be you.’ Robert held up the black and white photo again. ‘But it certainly could be Erin.’ If he’d been alone, Robert would have whispered to the girl directly. She looked as if she had a secret, the way her eyes were stilled with fear and her lips sat slightly apart with the story they wanted to tell. Did she know that she had been in all the newspapers?
‘Uh-uh. Sorry,’ Louisa chided. ‘This girl was fifteen years old in nineteen ninety-two. That would make her twenty-seven, twenty-eight, depending on her exact birthday. How old is Erin?’
‘Thirty-two. OK, Sherlock. I’m just telling you what I see. There is a very strong likeness between this young girl and my wife.’
‘You’re being suggestible, just like the old couple when you showed them the locket.’ Louisa sighed and sat back. ‘Rob, I can’t see it. Don’t hang out on this.’
Robert didn’t respond to her scepticism. While he had the chance, while the Wystrachs’ backs were turned, he removed several pages from one of the newspapers, folded them tightly and tucked the wad inside his shirt.