“Mmmm…suppose.”
Cecilia had come home late on Sunday. Had thought that Ben would already be in bed. Instead she had found Ben and Tom in the kitchen, her son’s small hands thick with azure blue paint. “Look, Mummy.” Ben had waved towards the blue hand prints on the stark white paper pieces laid out across the kitchen table. “I did it, look.” She had known that she should smile, clap her hands. But her head was still too full of the phone call. Heather’s voice. Did you hear? They found Eddie dead. Tragic. Just tragic. But then of course, Heather didn’t know. Why would she know? Cecilia had never told her. Cecilia had never told anyone. And anyway, you had to say something nice, didn’t you, when someone died? Even if they had wandering hands and eyes that seemed to be already dead. So she hadn’t smiled at her son when he waved his paint covered fingers at her, pointing at his work with his little chest puffed out. Instead she had looked at the paint, and the spread newspaper, and the little fingers that surely wouldn’t come clean without a bath, when all she wanted to do was curl up into a little ball and cry tumbling tears of relief. So she had shook her head. Had sighed. Had watched her son’s smile falter and fade away.
“Be lovely.” Cecilia said to Maisie. “You’ll have a great time.”
The old woman didn’t answer.
“Maisie? Come on. Maisie?”
Chapter 6
Jim - Thursday, 15th March - 7.20pm
“Your daughter’s how old? Twenty five?” The man-child detective gave him a look, the kind you give a kid who has mixed up her words. “Yeah. That’s not something we’d be getting involved in.” A ping, and he pulled a phone from his pocket, scrolling through the screen with his thumb. His shirt was creased, tie pulled loose, knot too tight, hanging askew. He hadn’t polished his shoes. Didn’t look like he had ever polished his shoes.
Jim’s hands shook. He’d washed them, once, twice, seemed like a hundred times, but he could still see the blood there. The cat had been purring. Jim had stared at the blood. Had to think, had to calm down, had to think. Because if he could then he could figure this out. There would be an answer, something simple, and then there would be a flooding relief, a deep sigh, maybe even a laugh, his heart still pounding. Would hang his head, sick with relief. He would go home and he would tell Esther, and they would laugh at his fear. Then it would settle down, into some dim and distant corner of his memory, where it would stay forever – the day he thought he’d lost his only daughter.
“Is Nate about?”
The boy didn’t look up, still staring at his phone. “Mmm?”
“The DI. Nate Maxwell. He about?” They’d joined together. Stood shoulder to shoulder as rocks and petrol canisters rained down on them in the Bristol St Paul’s riots, when they’d been pulled in on mutual aid. Played more rounds of golf than Jim could count.
The kid looked up then, nostrils flaring. “I’m the senior officer on tonight.”
You’ve got to be kidding me. Jim rubbed his face, turning slightly.
Jim had stood in the empty house, and it was like he was frozen, somewhere in a no-man’s land where he couldn’t just be a father, because if he was a father than he would lose it, just lose it, and he wasn’t a policeman any more. Stood there feeling fat and old and useless.
Jim had pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket.
There would be an explanation. Libby would answer the phone with her singsong “hello”, and she would laugh when he told her where he was and what he had found. And she would tell him a story, something that he hadn’t thought of.
And then everything would be all right.
It took a moment before he realised what it was that he was hearing, why suddenly the kitchen was full of sound. It took a moment before the sounds coalesced in his head into the ringing of his daughter’s mobile phone.
And he knew then, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that nothing would ever be right again.
Libby’s mobile lay on the floor, half hidden beneath the formica kitchen table.
Funny how such a small thing can tell you everything that you need to know. When it’s your daughter, who you know inside and out, who you have cradled and fed and loved and watched as she grows into the most remarkable young woman you have ever seen. When you and her brother have teased her a hundred times for that mobile phone that she is never, ever without.
“Look, mate, she’s a big girl. If it’d been a couple of days, well, okay, but a couple of hours…Sorry, but my hands are tied.” Sipping his coffee, because he could. This was nothing to him.
“She didn’t show up to work. This morning.”
He’d rung her sergeant. Nice kid, had worked under Jim in his last few years of service.
“Ceri. It’s Jim Hanover.”
“Hiya boss. How you doing?”
“Ceri.” No time for small talk. “Sorry to bother you. I’m actually looking for Libby.” Quick false laugh, because then perhaps his heart will stop beating so hard. “Silly sod left her phone at home.”
There was silence on the line, and Jim found himself praying for maybe the first time in twenty years. Because he knew what silences like that meant.
Then, “Ah, boss, the um…look, thing is I’ve been trying to get hold of her myself. She never turned up for work this morning.”
Had closed his eyes, and the world had swirled around him, opportunity for an easy answer dimming to an ember.
Jim had hoped that Nate, the DI, would be there. He had blown into the station, Irene on the front desk who he’d known forever, who’d bought his kids Christmas presents, whose flat tyre he’d changed, buzzing him through, seeing the look on his face and asking no questions. If Nate had been there it would have been okay. Because Nate knew him, knew that there was no way Jim would be there if he didn’t have to be. That Jim Hanover didn’t piss about. Instead there was this child, with his unpolished shoes, the phone that never leaves his fingers. Looking up as Jim entered the CID office, a barely disguised sigh of impatience. Staring as Jim had stood there, spilling the story about his daughter’s empty house and the jacket and the phone and the blood, all the while this kid standing there, playing on his phone, the occasional “uh huh”, even though it’s obvious he’s not listening.
The kid scratched his ear with a pencil. “Well, what about family? Friends? Anyone spoken to her?”
Jim should have called his son, Ethan. Maybe he’d have heard from her. Although privately Jim doubted it, given what had just happened. Couldn’t see Libby confiding her deepest secrets in her elder brother. Not the way things were between them now.
“No, I…Look, I just know that something’s wrong.” Could hear it, how vapid it sounded, could see how he must look to this kid with the world laid out at his feet, no wedding ring, no pictures of kids on his desk. A daft old git who can’t let go of the police force.
“Tell you what, I’ll make a note. Anything comes up, I’ll give you a shout. But to be honest, mate, best bet is to head off home. She’ll show up.”
“Look, kid, something’s happened. She’s a police officer, for god’s sake. She hasn’t shown up to work. That doesn’t mean anything?”
“Sounds like an issue for professional standards to me.”
“Oh for fuck’s… I did this job long enough. You really think I’d be here if I didn’t know there was an issue?”
His face had flattened out. He was losing him.
“Look, please…” The word tasted uncomfortable in his mouth. “Please. She is reliable. She is dedicated. She has never missed a day. She is never without her phone. And the blood…”
Then there was a look on the detective’s face, the dawning realisation that he should have been listening, that playing on his phone as Jim talked - the empty house and Jim’s missing daughter and the smear of blood tumbling from Jim’s lips - was perhaps a bad idea. He leaned back, pushed himself upright, nodding now, like he had been listening all along. Like he hadn’t missed it.
“Tell me more about the blood.”
Chapter 7
Tom - Thursday, 15th March – 8.45pm
They flocked together, sheep in a pen, the artificially warm hospital air alive with panicked bleats. Pawing at one another, each one more fearful than the next. Waiting.
“I’m so sorry, look, I know you are worried, and this is so awful, but if you could be patient…” Singsong voice almost lost in the sea of sound. The receptionist leaned across the desk, hands narrow with black painted nails. She looked too young to be dealing with all this grief.
The man was elderly, although perhaps older now than he had been that morning. He clung to the desk edge. Tom watched him as he swayed.
“Look love, I know it’s not down to you. But it’s our daughter. She’s…our only little girl. Just look on your computer there…look…you must have something. Please. There must be something…”
He was crying. Tom couldn’t see his face, just the back of his greying head. But his voice was thick with tears. Tom found himself looking down at his own hands. They were broad, nails bitten to the quick, the platinum wedding ring scarred and scratched. They were steady.
“I’m sorry.”
Tom had been only dimly aware of the drive: houses flashing past, the bright glowing lights of Swansea central police station, Dan jumping from the car almost before it had stopped. Shouting to him to wait, do not move. Pulling the handcuffed man – was there a prisoner? He seemed to remember that there had been – from the back seat. And Tom sitting there and sitting there and knowing that it was finally over. Then Dan flying out of the station again, alone this time, jumping into the driver’s seat, not a word, and then they’re flying, screeching out into honking traffic.
Winding on lean roads beneath steep mountains, through the villages that got more and more tired. Drained of coal, drained of life. The sleeping giant stretched across the Cribarth ridges, bathed in snow. His father had always pointed, directing his son’s gaze towards the mountain top. See that? People say that he’ll wake up one day, when people need him most. He never had though, no matter how much Tom had needed him. He stared at the mountains, half-expecting to see colossal arms breaking free. But nothing, just dead rock and snow. They were fenced in, when you thought about it, ringed by precipitous heights so that no matter how high you flew, you still couldn’t escape. The shadows turned the snow grey, the gullies giving way to mountain streams frozen solid. Then the black expanse of reservoir. A stripped bare landscape, skeletal trees, nothing to hide behind.
Then there was the smoke, the reddened glow of fire. The tiny village of Talgarth, narrow streets choked with police cars, fire engines. Knots of people, wrapped in inappropriate clothes, staring up towards the flames. The air hummed with sirens. Ambulances, laid out like bishops in chess, waiting for the right time. Because surely someone will have survived.
The car stopped, pulled up short by police cordons, and Tom was out of the door, running. Ducking under the narrow tape that twisted in the breeze. Cold air replaced by heat, the crackle of flames. ‘Keep Out’ signs screaming at the throng of people that pumped in to the abandoned lunatic asylum. This was where the plane had hit, although there was little evidence left that there had ever been a plane. Apart from the destruction. The main building of the asylum now a blazing pile of bricks and glass and metal. Wooden joists and the boards that had once tried in vain to keep the curious out now kindling for fire, clock tower supine on the weed infested drive. Fire destroying what madness couldn’t.
Tom stopped, pulled up short because there was simply nowhere further to run. Eyes searching for form, anything that you could point to and say “that, I recognise that”. There was no cockpit, no seats, no wings. No jump seat. Ran his gaze up the mountainside, along the trail of fire. How could this have happened? Was it the snow, the whipping wind? Ice?
How does a plane just fall from the sky?
He leaned forward hands on his knees, chest screaming with cold. Breathe. Think.
“Tom.” Dan’s arm was around his shoulder, thick biceps steering him away. He was saying something, words lost to the roar of the fire and the thrumming of blood through his head.
And all Tom could think about was Ben. He was two. He was only two. How could this be right? How could this be the way life was? Two years old and losing his mother twice in one day. And even though his thoughts seemed to have fragmented into a thousand pieces, already in his head Tom was planning the lie. How his mother had adored him. How she would have done anything for him. How tragic it was that she had been snatched away, because she would never, never have left him willingly.
“Tom.”
He felt himself being pivoted, away from the gawking on-lookers, the firemen with their futile hoses, the paramedics with nothing to do. Felt Dan’s dinner plate hands on his shoulders, forcing Tom to look at him.
“Did you hear me? Tom?”
Shaking his head.
“The plane split. They said there’s another site. A couple of miles away. They say there are survivors.”
The hospital smelt of fear. Fear and antiseptic and sweat.
They had found the survivors in a field, halfway up the mountain, the tail of the plane blazing like a beacon. Had taken them to the hospital. Morriston. Oh, so you just came from Swansea? You’ll know the way then. Back to the car, trying to push back a growing sense of the ridiculous. Back along the iced winding roads, going too fast.
The queue stretched out to the doors of the hospital waiting area and beyond. Dense heat, of overcoats and scarves and bodies, punctured by a bitter cold as the doors slid open and closed. The crowds behind him and beside him and in front of him, all with a single goal. That window and that desk and that hapless receptionist with alarm written plain across her face. Beneath the voices, the steady background hum of crying.
Ben had gone to bed already, Tom’s mother’s voice a whisper, taut as piano wire on the phone. He doesn’t know anything. Don’t worry about him. You just go and see…Hadn’t said what he was to see. Likely that neither of them knew where to go from here.
“Isn’t there anyone you could ask?” The man was crying openly now, not even trying to hide it any more.