'Thanks.'
'I hope you find Tamara,' he said. 'For my sake, as well as yours. She's a friend. She talked to me when I was lonely. She's a good woman, Tamara. It concerns me that you say she's missing.'
I gave him a telephone number, so he could contact me should Tamara return after I had gone, and left him in his living room. There was a sense of relief as I shut the door behind me. I slid the key into Tamara's lock. I felt a presence; Jeroen perhaps, on the other side of his door, listening to what I was doing. Or, too late, as I pushed open the door against the mass of mail at its foot, the presence was in
Tamara's
flat and I had made a fatal mistake in coming here. But no, the flat was empty.
I struggled to pick up all the mail - irked that Jeroen hadn't popped in to keep on top of it - and hefted it through to the living room. I suppose I wanted to see some evidence of recent activity, some clue that she would return soon, but the amount of unshifted mail seemed to have put paid to any hope of that.
Green sofas. White walls. The pendant lamp in the centre of the room that I always bashed my head against but she effortlessly swerved around as if she was in possession of radar. Thick rug with a simple petal print. White units. A TV and a mini stereo. The table by the window overlooking the canal where we breakfasted. I went over to it and drew up a chair. This was my chair. She sat opposite. On sunny days the light would catch in her hair and...
I sorted through the envelopes. Nothing of great interest. All of it formal, boring. I checked the drawers in the unit beneath the television: just video tapes, DVDs, a notebook of films she wanted to watch.
In her bedroom I checked the cupboards. Lots of clothes, neatly folded. A notebook by the bed. I found some documents of mine, with my signature on them. I pocketed them, hoping that any further passport hassle might melt away if I waved them around.
Tamara's smell was all over the place. Why had she not come here, if she was leaving me? Where else was there? I sat on the bed and clenched my jaw at the obvious answer to that. I wondered about her ex-lovers. She'd told me about them, talked to me about them. I'd seen photographs. None of them seemed to have captured a particularly special place in her heart. While we were together, she displayed no desire to drop in on any of them to say hi. No lunches. No phone calls. No birthday cards. Which counted for nothing, of course. Trust means never checking. She might have been having illicit meetings; she'd have had plenty of opportunity. I was often away.
But it wouldn't sit right with me.
It was March now. Eight months since my accident. Two months since I'd awoken from my coma. There was post on the table franked with dates from the previous summer. I couldn't accept that she had not been back to this flat in the meantime. She'd have needed clothes. Even if she had found a new man, she would have had to come home first. Set up a mail redirection service. Let the flat, maybe. You didn't just move from one man's bed to another. Not her.
Which meant what?
I couldn't stop thinking about what Ruth had said about the rapist. He'd taken off after he assaulted her, but she couldn't shake the fear that he was still around. I wondered if there was more to him that being a sex criminal. I wondered if the little boy, Kieran Love, had died at his hand. I wondered about me. The hit-and-run. How much damage could one man do? I thought too about DI Keble. There had been a massive police presence at the bed and breakfast, summoned swiftly. I knew nothing about police procedure, other than what I had gleaned from newspaper articles, and fictional takes, but it seemed a lot for such a small village, such a crime. This was no fresh corpse. This was a skeleton. This was old news, surely, like the skulls dredged from the Second World War hunting grounds of the North Sea.
I thought of Tamara in some shallow grave in the marshes outside the village, frozen solid beneath a thin blanket of soil. Bruises on the skin that would never fade.
I wrote her a note asking her to call me urgently. I left it propped up on the table and was going to the door when my bag snagged on one of the kitchen cupboard handles and pulled it open. I went to shut it and stopped. Inside the cupboard, next to the Weetabix and muesli, was a small box, the size of a toothpaste tube. The word Clearblue was written on the side. A pregnancy test. Its seal had been broken. I stared at it for a long time before hobbling down to the street. I hailed a cab.
'Waar?' the driver asked me.
'Schiphol.'
43
Her fingers were raw, but The Man had not noticed. Not yet. She didn't understand how he could have missed what she was doing. Perhaps he had seen it after all, and knew that it would come to nothing. She might very well detach herself from the wall, but the door was always locked. She would not get out. So why bother locking her up at all? She reasoned there were two possibilities. He didn't want her going near the door because the building was in a heavily populated area, which meant someone might hear if she screamed. She preferred this avenue of thought. It made sense. They played music to cover the noise, and the bare earth walls would absorb much of the sound she produced. But if she could get up close to that door, no doubt the acoustics beyond would help her voice to carry.
The alternative was that they had to keep her chained to the bed because they didn't want her to see what was behind the curtain.
It was chewing into her mind, that curtain, with its skirt of blue-black mold, like some offbeat grunge addition to bathroom chic, like a curtain she had once seen for sale in an ironic shop that was patterned with bloody red handprints and arterial sprays.
To take her mind off it, she returned to the eye bolt. It was thick, collared, impacted into the wall much farther than it had been intended, its head - the size of a doughnut - battered into the surface. Picking at it had cracked and splintered her nails. Her fingers were bloody and swollen, and returning to the task after a night's sleep was almost incapacitatingly painful, but after forcing herself, after getting back into the habit of picking and prising and teasing, the task grew easier. Not that the bolt was shifting at all. What she'd discovered was that the wall was less secure than the bolt. If she worked at the plaster, she could get to the brick behind it, which was old, crumbly, compromised by decades of dampness and, possibly, flood water.
It was painstakingly slow work, but she relished it. It honed the mind. It shrank everything down to one action, drew her attention away from too many things that could begin to undermine the bolt that kept her fastened to reality, to sanity. When a piece of music was played on the radio that she recognised - she knew Fauré's Pavane, and Lieutenant Kije, and Brahms' Violin Concerto - it helped to dull the pain and blur time; hours would go by and she'd have to suddenly stop working because she would hear the key in the lock, and the footfalls creaking on the wooden steps, pushing before it the smell of her dinner.
She'd shift the pillows so that her work was concealed, all the while aware of the brick dust and the blood on the cotton, certain that The Man was aware too, but he never said a thing, or made to repair the damage she had caused. He stood and watched through his ghastly orange mask, an ecstasy of bug-eyed pouting and ragged breathing, sweat turning the fabric of his coat patchy with dark. She would scoop up the soup or the stew or the risotto, and push away the plate with its blood-printed spoon, wishing she could conceal the cutlery from him and spare her poor hands. But, without fail, he watched her finish each day and he always took everything away that he brought to her.
It was on the morning of the 43rd day in captivity - she did not know what she would do if her watch alarm should stop working - that a third possibility reached out to her from her mind, with its filthy, thin claws. What if The Man was doing nothing to stop her because the time was fast coming when what he was planning would come to fruition? Maybe he knew she would be dead before she managed to work the bolt free.
She intensified her efforts. She dislocated her thumb, but she enjoyed a breakthrough. A chunk of brick the size of an apple fell clear of the bolt and she was able to drag it clear. For a dumb moment, while she stared at it - thick and rusty, its threads impacted with pulverised brick - she didn't know how to proceed: options spread out before her like too many choices on a menu. While she thought, her hands moved to put the bolt back in the wall. She had to throw it away to stop herself. She swung her legs off the bed and felt the ground beneath them for the first time in what felt like years. She was weak, and unsure. She stared at the curtain and moved towards it, but it was as if there were some kind of forcefield around it: two feet shy and she could go no further. Now she knew what she wanted. She wanted never to see what lay behind that thin, horrible barrier. She wanted more than anything to be through the door and out into the world again, where the air was not tinged with the smell of old dinners, or ancient, damp earth, or rat spoors. She wanted to find Paul and love him back to health, to tell him everything. To apologise. To at least give him a way out that was paved with the truth, rather than the sham she had lived in the weeks up to his accident.
She turned away from the curtain, the skin on her back drawing close as if in preparation for a blow, and rushed to the door. She was through it and up the wooden stairs to the door at the top - which was locked, as she had expected - in seconds, her confidence growing, in both her belief that she would be free and her own physicality.
She pressed her face to the jamb, felt the glorious gust of fresh air kiss against it, and screamed hard and long for minutes, until her throat felt stripped raw and the breath in her lungs had turned to dry, desert fumes. She listened above the roar in her chest but could not hear anything. No returning queries. No sounds of a door being broken down. She called out again, trying to remove the trapped animal from it. She asked for help. She asked if anybody could hear her. And then there was a sound. Of a door opening, snagging perhaps on grit, or its own age. And footsteps descending, which killed her, because that meant she was deeper underground than she'd initially thought. And she knew these feet. This was no rescue attempt.
She ran back downstairs. But there was nowhere to go. The room - her room - was a dead end. Then she must grab a weapon, anything to assist her, but the curtain tugged on her reins. There might have been a weapon behind it, but that would mean having to approach it, having to pull it back, and she was not up to that. The fight left her. She climbed back on to the bed and waited for The Man to catch up with her and reshackle her to the wall.
Chapter Thirteen
Risk of Collision
Move. Move as fast as you can. Into the terminal and across the polished floor. Up to the ticket desk and there's a flight to Heathrow in an hour-and-a-half. A Qantas connection. A 747-400, for fuck's sake. It's pretty full, but there are seats available. So, 500 passengers, or thereabouts. Nothing else. You have to take it. More trouble at passport control. An interview in a small room; a call to the British Embassy. A quick coffee and a volcanic melted cheese sandwich you take one bite from. You're too full of fear to eat. And as much as you try to read the newspaper, as much as you try to distract yourself in the cloying mists of the duty-free perfume displays, as much as you try to unburden yourself of nerves in a toilet cubicle, there's no getting away from the fact: there are monsters out there on the concrete apron.
The palms of my hands were sweating. This used to be me. This was my life. Airports and uniforms and pre-flight checks and thousands of hours' flying time. I knew my way around a cockpit display blindfolded. I had fighter-pilot reactions. And now I was ruined because of something that had never happened. The lure of the train and the ferry was great, but I had to be back home soon. If Tamara wasn't in Amsterdam, then she was in Southwick, or nearby. She had been by my side all that time in hospital, and then not. How did that happen? It sat uneasily with me, the thought that at the time of her disappearance, Ruth had been raped. DI Keble would want to talk to me. Hopefully he'd see I'd skipped town and have me arrested as soon as I set foot on Surt Road. And that was fine with me, because I wanted to ask him some questions too. Like, what was he doing to try to nail this fuckhead that was attacking women and, maybe, killing children?
I felt better after this. It was the distraction I needed. I splashed my face with cold water and passed through to the departure lounge. I bought a large gin and tonic at the bar and drank it down in three gulps. I made my way to the gate. Passengers were boarding, walking past the corridor I was taking, moving what seemed miles and miles further along the boarding bridge to the stern entrance. Big bird. You forget.
I did not look at it. I did not look at the plane.
I got into my seat and fastened the belt so tight I could hardly move against it. The Jumbo filled up. A woman with a small handbag and a large paperback sat next to me. She gave me a small smile, a kind of 'it'll be all right' smile. I realised how I must look. I felt as though I was sweating myself inside out. All the while, all over the planet, jets were taking off and landing, taking off and landing. No crashes. No collisions. No engine failures.