Authors: Melody John
They didn’t come back.
We sat in the stuffy van, the atmosphere seeming to grow even more oppressive around us with each passing second. Ted turned on the radio after a bit, and we sat and listened to Classic FM. I closed my eyes and tried to fight the rising nausea.
After about forty minutes, Dmitri said sharply, ‘Wait.’
I opened my eyes and scrambled upright. ‘What? Where?’
‘There’s Jamie,’ he said, pointing.
I looked wildly after his pointing finger, and could just about make out a figure ambling towards the van, coming up in the direction from the town. ‘What? Are you sure?’
‘That’s not him,’ David said.
‘It is him,’ Dmitri said firmly.
I glanced back at him. He met my eyes and raised his eyebrows slightly. I looked away again.
The figure took ages to reach the van, but when it got closer, we could all see that it was Jamie. He didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry; he was shambling along with his head down and his hands in his pockets. When he was still about twenty feet from the van, I lost patience. ‘Oh for God’s sake—’ I flung open the side door and hopped out. ‘Jamie!’
He looked up as casually as though nothing was wrong. ‘Yeah?’
‘Where’s Laura?’
‘Laura?’ He shrugged. ‘How the hell should I know? Mouthy bint’s probably off on her soapbox somewhere in town.’
I was so angry I could hardly speak. ‘She’s missing! Where did you go?’
He shrugged. ‘Just out for a walk. Why? There’s not a law against that, is there? Is it a crime?’
‘No, but it was dumb of you to leave your phone behind,’ David said, getting out of the van behind me. ‘What if something had happened?’
Jamie didn’t look as though he much cared. ‘Whatever, man. I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk, but I got lost in the town. And now I really need to sleep, okay?’
‘No!’ I said. ‘Are you sure you didn’t see her?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ he snapped.
‘Was she still in the van when you went out for your walk?’ I demanded.
Jamie looked at me. Then his gaze slid past me, onto the wall of the house behind me. He looked away immediately, glared at me, looked away, and pushed past us and climbed back into the front seat of the van.
‘All right, mate?’ Ted asked.
‘Peachy,’ Jamie said. He grabbed his quilt and rested his head against the window and closed his eyes.
I turned around and looked at the wall behind me where Jamie had been staring. It looked normal, just old red brickwork with the grey cement crumbling away in a few places.
Dmitri inhaled sharply. ‘Look.’
David and I moved in closer, looking at where Dmitri was pointing. There was a faint dark brown stain on the bricks. It was almost camouflaged, but Dmitri’s finger pointed at the rule of cement underneath that line of bricks. Stark against the dusty grey were some dark red spots of something that looked scarily like blood.
‘It’s just dirt,’ I said, feeling as though I was moving in a dream.
‘Yeah,’ David said quickly. ‘It’s just dirt.’
Dmitri said nothing. He touched the red stains with his finger, and drew in a deep breath.
I looked at David, trying to squash down the fear that stung like bile in the back of my mouth. ‘We’ve got to go look for her.’
He nodded. ‘But she might try to come back to the van. Someone should stay here.’
We looked back at Ted and Jamie. Jamie looked as though he was already asleep, and Ted was yawning and scratching his chin.
‘Leave them,’ Dmitri said. He threw me my coat, and then climbed out with his and David’s jackets.
I put my coat on gratefully as Dmitri told Ted that we were going into town to look for Laura, and to phone us if there was any trouble.
‘Right-ho,’ Ted said.
‘And no more smoking!’ I added. ‘If you’re going to smoke, do it outside so you don’t gas the rest of us to death.’
‘You won’t even be here,’ Jamie said, still with his eyes closed. ‘So it doesn’t matter where we do it.’
‘It stinks up the van!’
He groaned and rolled over. ‘Whatever, grandma.’
I joined David and Dmitri, and we hurried down the street. ‘God, I could slap Jamie,’ I said.
‘He’d probably enjoy it,’ Dmitri said.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘You know, not that we’re criticising someone’s kinks,’ David says. ‘If they’re into that, good for them.’
Dmitri laughed. I didn’t.
David nudged me. ‘Come on, Lizzie. Laura will probably be in town, and we’ll yell at her and then go home and tell our grandchildren about what a terrible anti-climax all this was.’
I managed to smile. ‘And your grandchildren will say “Ew, granddad, no more about your climaxes, please, we’ve heard enough, TMI”.’
That made both of them laugh, and I felt a tiny glimmer of hope as we got closer to the town. It was a nice town, a bit grubby and touristy, with lots of little shops selling engraved shells and wooden boats, and with creaking stands full of sun-faded seaside-themed postcards outside. But there was a place selling fish and chips near the seafront, and they smelled so good that I stopped and brought three paper cones full of chips.
‘Chips for breakfast,’ David observed. ‘How hipster we are.’
The chips were piping hot, and I burned my tongue on the first one, but they were really tasty—crispy on the outside and white and fluffy on the inside. We walked along the tiny high street, eating chips and licking the grease off our fingers. It was still early, and only a few shops were properly open. A car occasionally whizzed past, and the grey sky was filled with white seagulls mewing and wailing overhead. For a moment, I was able to forget why we were there, and pretend that we were just there on a day trip, my friends and me celebrating the end of term.
But Laura wasn’t there. So few of the shops were open that it was very easy to check who was in them, and even when we split up and worked up our way up and down the street, and asked the shopkeepers if they’d seen her, we didn’t find her. Laura just wasn’t there.
I tried to stay positive, but when we met together at the bottom of the high street by the chip shop, both David and Dmitri were looking as worried as I felt. We headed back to the van, and I hoped desperately that she would be there, waiting for us when we got back.
But she wasn’t. Jamie was still asleep, and Ted was flicking through a book that he’d brought. ‘No luck?’ he asked absently as we opened the van door.
‘No,’ I snapped. His careless attitude made me want to scream at him.
‘Right,’ David said. ‘Okay.’ We all looked at each other for a moment. David took a deep breath. ‘We should go to the police.’
‘She won’t be a missing person, though,’ Dmitri said. ‘You have to wait twenty-four hours until the police can do anything.’
‘Oh god.’ I tried to push down the tears that I could feel rising up. ‘What are we going to do? We were only meant to be here for the night. David, you’ve got your train to catch.’
‘Screw the train,’ David said angrily. ‘Obviously I’m not going to swan off and leave you guys here.’
‘But there’s nothing we can do! Even if we do wait here for twenty-four hours, all we can do is just tell the police at the end of it and leave it up to them!’
‘Guys, be quiet,’ Jamie muttered. ‘She’s fine.’
‘What?’ I rounded on him. ‘What do you mean, she’s fine?’
He yawned. ‘I mean, she’s probably fine. This town is like the arse end of the country. They probably haven’t even had a hit-and-run in twenty years.’
‘Jamie, shut up,’ Dmitri said curtly.
Jamie grumbled into his pillow.
It was too cold to stay outside the van, so we ended up getting back inside. I chewed on my thumb and stared out of the window, a horrible, heavy feeling of hopelessness twisting in my stomach. I tried to think of all of the reasons that Laura would have left the van. The toilet? There was a scummy little block of toilets near the steps down to the beach, but we’d looked in there on our way down to town. And even so, she would have come back to the van.
Maybe the question wasn’t why had Laura left the van, but why hadn’t she come back to the van.
I hated to think of all the reasons why she wouldn’t have come back. For a second, the horrid thought struck me that maybe she was angry with me about the thing with the dresses, and last night hadn’t actually sorted anything out between us, and she was still mad at me. Mad enough to leave the van and go off by herself because she just couldn’t bear to spend any more time with me.
No. No, that was stupid. Laura wasn’t like that. And even if she was like that, and even if she was still angry (she wasn’t, though, I insisted to myself, she wasn’t), she wouldn’t have gone off without telling someone. She knew that we weren’t here to stay long, and no matter how mad she might be at me, she wasn’t mad at David, and she knew that he had his ticket booked. We were students, so none of us were rolling in wealth, and I shuddered to think how much money a new ticket would cost.
No, the reason why Laura hadn’t come back to the van must be because she wasn’t able to. Which meant… I didn’t want to think about it. Abducted. Knocked down. Mugged. Beaten up. Killed.
God, no, stop being so dramatic! Jamie was right when he’d said this town was the back end of nowhere. It looked almost ridiculously safe and cute, and I didn’t think it was the sort of place where gangs of thugs went around and beat up random students.
But you can never be sure, can you…
‘God, I’m starving,’ Ted announced. ‘Who wants to go get breakfast?’
‘We already had chips,’ Dmitri said.
‘Oh, and where’s ours?’ Ted demanded.
‘Chips for breakfast, oh my,’ Jamie said sardonically. ‘Isn’t that going to wreak havoc on your thighs, Dmitri?’
‘Shut up,’ David and I said simultaneously.
Jamie glared at us from over the edge of the seat. Dmitri half-smiled.
‘Well, alrighty then,’ Ted said. ‘I’m going to get breakfast, because I’m driving, and it’d be kind of crap if I keeled over halfway up the motorway, wouldn’t it?’ He looked over at Jamie. ‘Jamie. You coming?’
‘Yeah,’ Jamie said. ‘Yeah.’ He hauled himself upright, and stretched so long that I actually heard the joints in his shoulders crack.
They got out of the van, and Ted said, ‘So where’s that chip place?’
‘Down there,’ David said, pointing.
‘Cool. Well. See you, then. And don’t expect me to bring you back a saveloy.’
Ted marched off, and Jamie trailed behind.
There was a little silence in the van.
I said, ‘We probably should have brought them back something. Ted is driving.’
‘Yeah,’ David said. He sighed. ‘I’m finding Ted rather difficult to like at the moment.’
‘I guess it’s not his fault,’ I said, trying to be charitable. I was actually feeling a little guilty over Ted’s obviously hurt feelings that we hadn’t thought of him. ‘He doesn’t really know Laura.’
‘I thought they were in the same class?’