What You Wish For Page 6

  I sat on the train and tried my hardest not to feel nervous. I needn’t have worried. The meeting went better than I could have hoped. Theresa wanted me to do more regular work, and we discussed a few initial assignments.

  I walked back to Charing Cross with a spring in my step. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell Marie. I tried to call her but there was no answer.

  I tried to call her several more times from the train home. It wasn’t unusual for her to let her phone die, forgetting to charge it, especially if she was coding or chatting on one of the internet forums she frequented. I wasn’t too worried. With the money from the commission I decided I would take Marie away; it might help her get over Andrew’s death. I browsed holiday sites on my phone.

  I took a taxi home from the train station and got the driver to drop me at the little supermarket up the road from my house. I bought a bottle of champagne and walked home, feeling buoyant.

  ‘Marie?’ I called. No response, just silence. I looked at my watch. Just after six.

  I checked every room. I went back outside, that feeling that something was very wrong nibbling at my guts.

  Back indoors, I tried to distract myself, flicking through a magazine, browsing holiday sites again on my phone. I was planning on taking Marie away somewhere hot and exotic, was going to surprise her. She’d been through a lot recently. She deserved a break.

  The ominous feeling that something was wrong intensified, while at the same time I tried to stay rational. There was no sign in the house that anything sinister had happened. No signs of a struggle, no blood. Nothing out of place. I went upstairs and ran a bath, thinking the hot water might relax me. It was eight o’clock now and her phone was still off.

  By ten I had reassured myself that she must have met one of her college friends and gone round to see them, maybe gone out to the pub, was enjoying herself, getting drunk. She deserved to let her hair down. I didn’t have any of her friends’ numbers, would have felt foolish contacting them anyway. I could picture them laughing about Marie’s over-protective boyfriend, teasing her about having a curfew, asking if she’d turn into a pumpkin if she wasn’t home on time. I needed to chill out.

  I checked my phone numerous times to make sure it was working. I looked around again for a note. I poured myself a beer and drank it too quickly, then drank another. Marie’s cigarettes were lying on the worktop. Surely she wouldn’t have gone to the pub without them? She must have bought a fresh packet.

  I had a dreadful thought: what if she had left me? I ran upstairs and looked in the wardrobe. All her clothes seemed to be there. In fact, all that was missing was her jacket and her bag. I relaxed a little. She must be at the pub. I could go looking for her but, again, I didn’t want her to think I was being possessive, the kind of person who goes out to drag his girlfriend home if she’s out late.

  I drank another beer and the tiredness hit me. It had been a long day. Midnight passed and I lay on the sofa. Calico sat beside me and purred. I fell asleep, the cat’s soft purring like a lullaby.

  When I woke up on the sofa the next morning, surrounded by beer bottles, a crick in my neck, she still wasn’t home.

  I felt cold. I tried to call her for the hundredth time. I paced the house. I wanted to stay in, wait for her, but I had to go to work. I scrawled a note asking her to call me as soon as she got home and left it on the kitchen worktop. I hesitated by the front door, tempted to call in sick. But I thought staying in, waiting for her, would be even worse than going to the office. At least there I would be distracted.

  I was on edge all morning. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ Simon asked.

  I didn’t want to tell him. Not yet. I was sure when I got home she would be there and I would feel foolish for being so anxious. So I kept quiet.

  I tried to phone her at every opportunity. At lunchtime I drove home to see if she was there. I ran up the front steps and unlocked the door. The mail lay on the doormat: junk mail, brown envelopes.

  ‘Marie? Marie!’

  She wasn’t there.

  Marie – my Marie, my beautiful Marie, the woman I loved – wasn’t there. She had gone. Disappeared. Like a falling star that shoots across the sky one night and then vanishes.

  She had gone.

  PART TWO

  STARING INTO SPACE

  7

  The first forty-eight hours were the worst. After the euphoria of getting the Telegram commission, my bubble was well and truly burst. I didn’t know what to do or who to contact. I wanted her to walk through the door and say, ‘Sorry, I meant to phone . . .’ and the relief would have been so great I would have forgiven her. I would have forgiven her anything.

  The logical first step would be to phone everyone Marie knew: friends, colleagues, parents. But I didn’t know any addresses or phone numbers that would help me. The only friend of hers I knew personally was dead. I assumed all her contacts were on her phone and PC. The former had disappeared with her, though the charger was still in the kitchen. The PC was password protected. I would get to that later.

  I phoned the local hospital: the Conquest, plus the hospitals in Eastbourne and Tunbridge Wells, just in case. No Marie Walker had been admitted, nor anyone fitting her description.

  I asked my next-door neighbours.

  I knocked on the door to the left. Mr Taylor, an elderly widower who I very rarely spoke to, opened the door and leaned out. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t suppose you saw my girlfriend yesterday at all?’

  He squinted at me. ‘The pretty girl with the red hair?’

  My heart pounded. ‘Yes. That’s her.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Yesterday . . . No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Did you hear anything? Music, the TV, a door shutting?’

  He tapped his left ear. ‘I don’t hear very much these days. A bit mutton, I am.’ This was something my dad used to say: Mutt and Jeff, Cockney rhyming slang for deaf.

  I thanked him and tried my other neighbours, Kevin and Sarah, a young couple who had only recently moved in.

  Sarah came to the door holding their little boy, Jack. ‘Hello.’ She sounded quite pleased to see me. I guessed she must get bored, stuck at home all day with a toddler. Kevin worked as a telephone engineer. I didn’t have much to do with them: just the odd hello over the garden fence.

  I asked Sarah whether she’d seen any sign of Marie.

  She thought about it. Jack gawped at me like I was causing him a terrible affront by standing on his doorstep. Sarah said, ‘No, not that I can remember. Why, what’s happened?’

  ‘Probably nothing. It’s just that . . . she didn’t come home last night.’

  She raised an eyebrow, hoisting Jack on to her hip. ‘Had an argument?’

  I said not. ‘What about Kevin? Might he have seen her?’

  ‘He never sees anything. Lives in a dream world. But I’ll ask him when he comes home tonight.’

  I didn’t really want to go back into my house. It felt too empty; more so, with all her stuff everywhere – her clothes and toiletries and make-up.

  My eye fell upon the landline phone in the corner. I barely used it – only had it because we needed it for the internet connection – and the handset was coated with dust. By dialling 1471 I could check if anyone had tried to call while I was out.

  She hadn’t, but there was a missed call from a local number that I didn’t recognise. The call had come in at just after five p.m. yesterday, the day Marie disappeared. I called back immediately.

  A woman who I guessed was in her fifties or early sixties answered, repeating back the phone number in the way that older people often do.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I got a missed call from this number yesterday afternoon?’

  She breathed heavily. ‘Are you sure?’

  I told her I was sure. ‘My name’s Richard Thompson. So you didn’t try to call me? Can I ask your name?’

  She paused. ‘Is this a sales call? I’m not interested. My husband told m
e—’

  I interrupted her. ‘Can I ask your husband’s name?’

  She made a strange noise, like she was sucking in air through her teeth and groaning at the same time. Eventually, she said, ‘My husband is Fraser Howard.’

  The park ranger. I hadn’t seen him since the ceremony on the hill.

  ‘Can I talk to him?’ I asked.

  ‘No, you can’t.’

  ‘Mrs Howard, it’s really—’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Oh.’ How frustrating. ‘Can you ask him to call me when he gets home? Or does he have a mobile I can call?’

  From the background I could hear a dog barking. ‘I have to go,’ she said suddenly. She put the phone down.

  I slumped on the sofa. It wasn’t unusual for Fraser to call here. He spoke to Marie regularly, although I was sure he usually called her mobile. His wife sounded very highly strung. I decided I would try to call again in a couple of hours if I didn’t hear back.

  Calico ran into the room, looked at me and ran out again. He had been doing this all day, running in and out of rooms, looking for Marie. He kept blinking at me accusingly, like I’d done something to her.

  It was time to call the police. But they told me to wait forty-eight hours and then if she was still missing, report it in person at the station.

  Next, I phoned Simon and told him what had happened.

  ‘Has she done this before?’

  ‘No! Not to me anyway.’

  ‘And you’ve got no idea where she might be? She might have gone off E.T. hunting and you’ve forgotten all about it.’

  ‘I’d remember. I’m not senile yet.’

  ‘Even in all the excitement of this Telegram thing? You have been pretty wired lately. I bet that’s what’s happened. She’s probably camped up on the East Hill again waiting for UFOs.’

  I looked through my front window, up at the hill. Might she be up there? It was possible. God, anything was possible.

  I dropped the receiver and left the house again. I had about an hour before it got dark. I parked and ran along the path that leads to Ecclesbourne Glen, feeling ridiculously hopeful. I made my way to the spot where I had first seen her. Nothing. I looked all around. I met a couple of people walking dogs and asked them if they had seen any tents or anyone who fitted Marie’s description. They frowned and said they hadn’t.

  The sky darkened. I found myself standing on the spot where we had made love. I looked down. That flattened daisy – had we done that? I sat on the grass and hugged myself.

  Back home, I phoned Simon again.

  ‘She’s not on the hill,’ I said. ‘Simon, what the fuck am I going to do?’

  I couldn’t wait forty-eight hours. The next day, I walked down to the police station in town. On the way, I tried to call Fraser Howard. This was my third attempt since I’d spoken to his wife. There was no reply.

  PC David Ashcroft – who I had been at school with – walked into the interview room and pulled a chair out from beneath the table; it scraped across the floor. He looked at me. I must have been a mess. I hadn’t shaved for three days and probably stank of stale smoke. The day I realised Marie was missing I had smoked my way through her left-behind packet of cigarettes. Then I had gone out and bought another carton.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

  ‘Like shit.’

  He opened a notepad and asked me to describe ‘the missing person’.

  ‘Her name’s Marie Walker. She’s twenty-three. White, blue eyes, pale red hair, small stud in the side of her nose, about five foot three, beautiful.’ I had already been asked to complete a questionnaire, giving Marie’s details, which Ashcroft now picked up and scanned quickly.

  He looked up. ‘Have you got a photo?’

  I shook my head. ‘I know, it seems ridiculous. I’m a photographer and I haven’t got a picture of my girlfriend.

  ‘Right,’ said Ashcroft, looking at me curiously. ‘Let me get this straight. You came home two days ago and Marie wasn’t there. You have no idea where she might have gone?’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘And nothing was missing?’ He looked at the questionnaire. ‘Just her jacket, her phone and her bag. What was in the bag?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘The usual woman’s stuff, I suppose.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Any idea what she was wearing? Apart from the jacket?’

  I had thought about this and tried to work it out. I was pretty sure her black jeans were missing, but apart from that . . .

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.

  ‘Does she drive?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does she have a job?’

  ‘Not as such. She’s a student.’ I didn’t want to get into the whole UFO consultancy thing.

  ‘What about family and friends? Have you tried ringing them to check if anyone’s seen her?’

  ‘Her dad ran off when she was a kid and I don’t know where her mum lives. In Hastings, I think, but I couldn’t say where exactly. And I don’t have the contact details of any of her friends either.’

  He shook his head despairingly. ‘How long had you been together?’

  ‘Four months.’

  ‘What about another boyfriend?’

  I was offended. ‘No!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Well, of course . . .’ But was I sure? How could I be? She had so much spare time during the days while I was at work, she could have been doing anything with anyone. My paranoia flared up.

  ‘Had anything happened recently, anything that might suggest why she’d go off? Any bad news?’

  ‘Her best friend died in a car crash.’

  He drummed his fingers on the table and looked around, up at the small, grimy window that hardly let in light. He looked bored. ‘Richard, I’ll be totally honest with you, all right, seeing as you’re an old mate.’ This was an exaggeration. He had been a twat at school and we’d barely spoken. ‘We don’t give much priority to cases like this. She’s not a juvenile or a pensioner. She’s not what we class as vulnerable. She’s an adult, capable of making her own decisions, able to go where she likes. It’s not a crime to go missing, you know. This girl seems to have no ties – no job, no kids, just you it seems – and therefore she’s free to go wherever she pleases, with whoever she wants. I know you’re worried. I expect I would be in your situation. But . . .’ He shrugged.

  I stared at him. I couldn’t think of anything to say. It was obvious he wasn’t going to help. I was wasting my time. I stood up.

  ‘Look, I’ll enter her details on the MISPER database, OK? But I reckon she’s just gone off somewhere to get her head together. I mean, your best friend dying, that’s a pretty big deal, isn’t it? She’s probably just gone off to think. I’m sure she’ll be in touch soon, Richard. Most missing persons reappear within two days.’

  I stepped out into the fading afternoon sunlight and wondered what to do. I was certain by now that she wasn’t going to suddenly reappear. I felt completely and chillingly alone.

  What had happened to her? I decided there were six possibilities:

  1. She had run away with another man.

  2. She had run away for some other unknown reason.

  3. She had been called away suddenly and for some reason that I couldn’t imagine had been unable or unwilling to contact me.

  4. She had been kidnapped or murdered.

  5. She had had some sort of breakdown or crisis (possibly because of Andrew’s death) and had gone away to sort herself out. Somehow. Somewhere.

  6. She’d had an accident and was lying injured or dead in some remote place.

  And there was a seventh possibility, wasn’t there? The possibility that she had been taken away by aliens. I thought it was the craziest thing that had ever entered my head, but the thing was, she had talked about aliens (or visitors, as she called them) so much that I couldn’t help but think of it, even if I immediately dismissed it as ridiculous. I didn’t believe i
n aliens. I certainly didn’t believe that my girlfriend had been stolen away by little grey men. No, whatever had happened to her was something grounded in reality. Something earthly.

  After leaving the police station, I called Simon and asked him to meet me for a coffee. I named a little café in the Old Town. I sat outside, smoking, until Simon arrived.

  He sat opposite me. ‘Bob said to tell you he hopes you have a happy holiday.’ Luckily, the Herald owed me annual leave, so the day after Marie disappeared I had phoned Bob, the editor, and asked for a couple of weeks’ holiday. I didn’t tell him why.

  Simon looked at my smouldering cigarette, then at my face. He said, ‘You look fucking terrible, mate.’

  Simon and I didn’t usually do emotional support. Occasionally, when very pissed, he would tell me about his marital problems and I would tut sympathetically, but that was about the extent of it. Now, wincing, Simon asked, ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Sick with dread. I’m so worried that something awful’s happened to her. She could be lying in a ditch somewhere. And then I think, What if she’s gone off with another bloke? I keep picturing all these terrible scenarios – her being hurt, or wandering around, lost and confused, or in hospital.’ I sucked on my cigarette. ‘You know when you’re having a really bad dream and you wake up and you’re overwhelmed with relief and you kind of laugh but feel a bit shaky? That’s what I want to happen to me. I’ll wake up and she’ll be asleep beside me, all warm, and I’ll lean over and kiss her and not want to close my eyes in case she vanishes again.’

  Simon stared at me like I had lost the plot. ‘Right. I want you to think hard. Did she say anything that morning, or in the few days before, that might give you a clue as to where she’s gone?’

  I ran a finger around the rim of my coffee cup. ‘Monday morning I left really early. She was still in bed. She asked what time I’d be home and said goodbye. That was about it. And no, she didn’t say goodbye wistfully or regretfully. It was just a “What time will you be home, see you later” – nothing more. I’ve replayed that scene so many times that it feels like a hallucination now.’