Land of the Living Read online

  I felt a spasm of irritation at his self-pity. "Or why Sally?" I said.

  The next morning Ben phoned Jo's parents. They were back from holiday and I could hear the mother's voice. No, they hadn't seen Jo since before their holiday; she hadn't come with them. And, yes, they'd be delighted to see Ben if he was in the area and of course it was fine if he brought a friend with him. Ben's face was tight, his mouth drawn down as if he'd eaten something sour. He said we'd be there by eleven.

  We drove in silence through north London, to their house in Hertfordshire. It was foggy and damp; the shapes of trees and houses loomed up at us as we passed. They lived just outside a village, in a low white house at the end of a gravel led drive. Ben stopped at the top of it for a few seconds. "I feel completely sick," he said angrily, as if it was my fault. Then he drove on.

  Jo's mother was called Pam, and she was a handsome, robust woman with a firm handshake. Her father, though, was skeletally thin and his face was etched with lines. He looked decades older than his wife and when I shook his hand it was like grasping a bundle of bones. We sat in the kitchen and Pam poured us tea and produced some biscuits. "So tell me, Ben, how's everything going? It's been ages since Jo brought you over to see us."

  "I've come for a reason," he said abruptly.

  She put down her mug and looked at him. "Jo?" she said.

  "Yes. I'm worried about her."

  "What's wrong with her?"

  "We don't know where she is. She's disappeared. You've heard nothing at all?"

  "No," she said in a whisper. Then, louder, "But you know how it is with her, she's always gadding off without telling us. She can go weeks without getting in touch."

  "I know. But Abbie was sharing her flat and Jo just went missing one day."

  "Missing," she repeated.

  "You have no idea where she might be?"

  "The cottage?" she said, and her face brightened with hope. "She sometimes goes and camps out there."

  "We went there."

  "Or that boyfriend of hers?"

  "No."

  "I don't understand," said Jo's father. "How long has she been missing?"

  "Since about January the sixteenth," I said. "We think."

  "And today's what? February the sixth? That's three weeks!"

  Pam stood up. She stared down at us and said, "But we must start looking! At once!"

  "I'm going to the police now," said Ben, rising too. "As soon as we leave here. We've already talked to them about this well, Abbie has anyway, but they don't take it seriously for the first week or so. Unless it's a child."

  "What shall I do? I can't just sit here. I'll ring round everyone. There'll be a simple explanation. Who have you talked to?"

  "It might mean nothing," said Ben helplessly. "She might be fine. People are always going missing then turning up."

  "Yes. Of course," said Pam. "Of course that's true. The thing is not to panic'

  "We'll go straight to the police now," said Ben. "I'll ring you later. All right?" He put his hands on Pam's shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks. She clutched at him briefly then let him go. Jo's father was still sitting at the table. I looked at his parchment skin, the liver spots on his brittle hands.

  "Goodbye," I said. I didn't know what else to say. There wasn't anything.

  "Ben, this is Detective Inspector Jack Cross. This is Ben Brody. He's a friend of Josephine Hooper, who I told you about last'

  "I know. I visited her flat, remember? And you told me about wearing her clothes, and you told me her name's Lauren."

  "I'm glad you let Terry go," I said. "Now you know he's not guilty, you must realize there's someone out there who is, and maybe Jo .. ." - "I can't comment on that," Cross said warily.

  "Shall we begin by telling Detective Inspector Cross what we actually know for certain, Abbie?"

  Cross looked at him with faint surprise. Perhaps he had thought that anyone connected with me was bound to be mad: contamination by association.

  Much of it I had told him before, of course, but then the words had sounded like yet more confirmation of my paranoia. They sounded more plausible when it wasn't me saying them.

  We went over everything, several times. It was very technical, like filling in a complicated tax return. I wrote down the times and dates that I'd worked out for the missing week, both for myself and for Jo. I handed over Jo's photograph. Ben gave him the telephone numbers for her parents and her ex-boyfriend and told him which companies she regularly worked for.

  "What do you think?" I asked.

  "I'll consider this," Cross replied. "But I'm not'

  "The thing is .. ." I stopped and looked at Ben, then resumed. "The thing is, I'm very scared that if I'm right about Jo being grabbed by the same man as me, then, well, she's very likely, she's probably, you know .. ." I couldn't say the word, not with Ben sitting beside me. I couldn't even remember meeting Jo; he'd known her half his life.

  A series of expressions chased across Cross's face. When he had first met me, he had believed my story without hesitation. I was a victim. Then he had been persuaded not to believe me at all, and I had become a victim of my own delusions; an object of pity. Now he was filled with shifting doubts.

  "We'll just take it bit by bit," he said. "We'll contact Ms Hooper's parents. Where are you staying?"

  "With me," said Ben.

  Cross looked at him for a few seconds, then nodded. "All right," he said, standing up. "I'll be in touch."

  "He's beginning to believe me, isn't he?"

  Ben picked up my hand and twisted the ring on my little finger round. "Do you mean about you or about Jo?"

  "Is there a difference?"

  "I don't know," he said.

  "I'm so sorry about Jo, Ben. I'm really, really sorry. I don't know how to say it."

  "Sorry?" he said. "I still hope the phone will ring and it will be her."

  "That would be nice," I said.

  He poured us both some more wine. "Do you think a lot about the days when you were his prisoner?"

  "Sometimes it just feels like a terrible nightmare and then I even think, Maybe I did dream it, after all. But then other times usually in the night, or when I'm on my own and feel especially vulnerable it comes back to me as if I was actually reliving it. As if I was actually in it again, and had never escaped, and all this' - I waved my hand around the brightly lit kitchen, the plates and wine glasses on the table 'was the dream. Everything's jumbled up, what I remember and what I imagine and what I fear. You know when I wake in the early hours, when everything seems grim and sad, what I sometimes think? I think that I'm on a wheel, going round and round. And that I've done all this before because in a way I have, haven't I, searching for Jo, falling in love with you? and I'm about to disappear into the darkness again."

  "It'll soon be over now."

  "Do you really think so?"

  "Yes. The police will deal with it and, God, they'll want to get it right this time. You can just lie low for a few days, here with me, and then the nightmare will be over. I'm sure of it. You'll be off your wheel."

  Twenty-four

  Ben was at work and I was in his shower in the middle of the morning. That was one of the many good bits about Ben's house. It was modern and technological and things functioned in a way I had hardly even imagined before. The so-called shower at Terry's was like a dripping tap six feet above the bath. You stood under it and it drip-drip-dripped on to you. Even when the water was hot, the drops got cold on the way down. Ben's shower, on the other hand, was a real machine, with an apparently inexhaustible supply of hot water and the power and concentration of a fire hose. And it wasn't in the bath. It had an entire space to itself with a door. I crouched in a corner and I imagined that I was on a planet that was perpetually bombarded with hot rain. Of course, such a planet would have had its disadvantages when you wanted to eat or sleep or read a book, but just then it felt fine. A jet of hot water hitting my head with considerable force was a good way of stopping myself thin
king.

  I'd like to have stayed in there until spring, or until the man was caught, but I finally switched off the shower and dried myself with the slowness and attention to detail of a woman without a pressing appointment. I wandered through to Ben's bedroom and dressed myself largely in his clothes: tracksuit bottoms and a floppy blue T-shirt many sizes too big for me. And some huge football socks and a pair of slippers I found in the back of his cupboard. In the kitchen I boiled the kettle and made half a pot of coffee for myself.

  One day I was going to have to start thinking about taking my career out of its current state of abeyance, but that could wait. Everything could wait.

  I drank my coffee then made some half-hearted attempts at cleaning and tidying. I didn't know Ben's house well enough to do much. I didn't know what implement went into which drawer or on which hook and I wasn't keen enough to scrub the floor or anything extreme like that so I contented myself with doing the dishes, wiping surfaces, straightening out the duvet and generally putting things in neat piles. Even that took less than an hour and left me with an empty day stretching out until Ben came back. I had a chance to spend time in the way I'd always planned to but never had the time. I could flop on a sofa and drink coffee and listen to music and read and be a woman of leisure.

  Women of leisure wouldn't listen to the jangly pop music that made up the bulk of my own collection. They would want something more sophisticated. I browsed through Ben's CDs until I found something that looked jazzy and mellow. I put it on. It sounded very grown-up. More like a soundtrack than something you would actually listen to, but that was fine. I was going to be reading and sipping coffee and I just wanted something in the background. The problem with having an entire day of leisure was settling on a particular book to read. I wasn't in the mood to tackle a proper serious book and there was no point in starting a big fat thriller. In fact, as I took books out of the shelves and inspected them, it quickly became clear that I wasn't quite in the mood to be an authentic woman of leisure. Despite my long shower and my empty schedule, I was still very agitated. I couldn't concentrate on anything. I couldn't stop thinking about the one thing I wanted to avoid.

  Ben had a stack of photography books and I sat flicking through them, unable to settle on one in particular. I lasted the longest with a collection of photographs from the nineteenth century. There were exotic landscapes and dramatic events, battles and revolutions and disasters, but what I looked at were the faces. There were men and women and children. Some were distracted, terrified. Others were celebrating at fairs and fiestas. Sometimes a face would look round at the camera with a conspiratorial smile.

  That was what struck me most. The strangeness of those faces. I thought, and I couldn't stop thinking, that all of those people, the beautiful and the ugly, the rich and the poor, the lucky and the benighted, the evil and the virtuous, the religious and the godless,

  now had one thing in common: they were dead. Each of them, singly, utterly alone, in a street or on a battlefield or in a bed, had died. All of the people in that world were gone. I thought about that but I didn't just think about it. I felt it like toothache. This was part of what I had to get over. I looked at the higher shelves at the spines of the smaller books, which wouldn't have any pictures in them. Poetry. That was what I needed. I've probably only read about eight poems in the years since I left school but I suddenly felt the need to read a poem. It would also have the extra advantage of being short.

  Ben obviously wasn't much of a poetry reader either but there were a few of the sort of anthologies that grandparents and godparents give you when all inspiration fails. Most of them looked too much like textbooks for me or else they were poems on subjects that didn't interest me, like the countryside or the sea or nature in general. But then my eye fell on a volume called Poems of Longing and Loss, and even though I felt like an alcoholic reaching for a bottle of vodka, I couldn't resist it. I sat with my coffee and dipped into the book. I was hardly aware of tracing the meaning of individual poems. Instead, there was a blur of grief and regret and absence and grey landscapes. It was like being at a party of depress-ives, but in a good way. Trying to pretend that I was happy and relaxed had been a mistake. It was much better to find that there were other lost souls who felt the way I did. I was among friends, and after a while I found I was smiling with recognition.

  I liked the book and turned to the beginning to see who had compiled this wonderfully bleak anthology and I saw that a message had been scrawled on the title page. I experienced the tiniest flash of an impulse that it was wrong to read the message. I ignored it. It wasn't as if I had rifled through Ben's desk and found his diary or some old love letters. An inscription in a book is like a postcard that has been pinned to a wall. Even if it's addressed to a single person, it's still a sort of public declaration. At least, that's what I told myself in that fraction of a second, and when I saw the first three words of the inscription, which were "Dearest darling Ben', I began to suspect that this wasn't really a public declaration but by that time I was reading it and this is what I read: "Dearest darling Ben. Here are some sad words which are better at saying what I feel than I am myself. I am so so sorry about all this and you are probably right but I feel torn apart and terrible in different ways. And this is a hell of a message to write in a book. All of my love, Jo." It was dated November 2001.

  And there wasn't even the tiniest bit of me that even tried to believe that this could be some other Jo. I had been living in Jo's flat for days and her writing was all over the place, on shopping lists, memos, on the covers of videos, and I knew it almost as well as I knew my own. I felt scalding hot all through my body, through my hands and my feet, and then I shivered uncontrollably. Fucking Ben. Fucking fucking Ben. He'd told me all about that bloody Leah. He'd been all sensitive about that relationship and how beautiful she'd been and everything, and he'd just omitted to mention the minor little detail that after he'd split up with her he just happened to have been fucking the woman whose flat I was living in, the woman who just happened to have disappeared. I thought of him casually ringing her doorbell. They were friends, it was no big deal. We had spent huge amounts of time wondering where Jo was. Or, at least, I had been wondering. What had he been thinking? I feverishly went over conversations I had had with him. What had he said about her? He had fucked her in the same bed that he had fucked me. He hadn't thought to mention it. But, then, he hadn't mentioned to me that he had already fucked me. What other secrets did he have?

  I tried to think of the innocent reasons he might have had for not telling me. He didn't want to upset me. It might have been awkward. But the other reasons kept intruding. I needed to think about this. I needed to sort it out in my head. But not here. I was starting to tell myself different stories in my head, and all of them definitely required that I get out of Ben's house as soon as possible. I looked at my watch. The day didn't seem so long any more. I ran into his bedroom and took my clothes off his clothes as if they were contaminated. I started to mutter to myself like a madwoman. I wasn't sure I could get it to make sense but the one thing that Jo and I had in common was that we had been sexually involved with Ben. There was no doubt about that. Not only-that, we had both been sexually involved with him just before we disappeared. I quickly pulled on my own clothes. I just couldn't get it to make sense. I had to think about it somewhere else, somewhere safe and quiet. Because I wasn't safe here any more. The quietness of the house closed round me.

  Once I was dressed I moved quickly around the flat retrieving what I absolutely needed. Shoes, bag, sweater, purse, my horrible warm red jacket. What was he playing at with me? He'd lied to me, or sort of lied, or omitted to tell the full truth, and I wasn't going to sit here and wait for him to come home. I tried to remember that voice out of the dark. I'd heard Ben's voice in the dark as well, next to me in bed, murmuring in my ear, groaning, telling me he adored me. Could it be the same voice?

  I ran over to Ben's desk and started rummaging through the drawers. I pus
hed files and notebooks aside impatiently until I found what I was after. A strip of passport-sized photographs of Ben. I contemplated it for a moment. Oh, God, he was a handsome man. I had asked whether people had seen Jo. But I had never asked had never thought to ask whether they had seen Ben. I had been tracking myself tracking Jo. I might consider tracking Ben. I hesitated, then picked up his mobile phone. I needed it more than he did. I opened his front door and before leaving I turned and looked back, as if to say goodbye to a place where I had been briefly happy.

  I couldn't rely on anyone now. I had to be quick. I was running out of safe places.

  Twenty-five

  I was running. Running down the road, bitter wind on my cheeks and my feet slipping on the icy pavement. Where was I going? I didn't know, I just knew I was going, leaving, moving on to somewhere else, something else. I'd closed the door on the warm house that smelt of sawdust and I hadn't even taken a key. I was on my own again, out here in the winter weather. It occurred to me that I was very visible, in my red jacket, but the thought flitted vaguely through my head like a snowflake then melted. I just kept running, my heart thumping in my chest and my breath coming in gasps, and the houses and trees and cars and the faces of other people were a blur.

  At the bottom of the road I forced myself to stop and look around. My heart slowed down. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of me, though you never know. Think, Abbie, I told myself; think now. Think for your life. But I couldn't think, not at first. I could only feel and see. I saw pictures in my head. Ben and Jo together, holding each other. I closed my eyes and saw darkness, and it felt like the darkness of my lost time, folding around me again. Eyes in the pitch black; eyes watching Jo, watching me. A butterfly on a green leaf, a tree on a hill, a shallow stream, then clear deep water. I opened my eyes and the harsh grey world came back into focus.

  I started moving again, walking this time, not really knowing where I was going. I walked past the park and down the bill. I walked towards Jo's flat, though I knew I mustn't go there. On the main road, which was full of traffic and lined with shops selling pastries, hats, candles, fish, I saw Jo's face. I blinked and stared and of course it wasn't her. It was just a woman, going about her day, with no sense of how blessed she was.