Why Don’t You Come for Me (31 page)

‘I’m sorry about all that. I was very young and stupid, and I should never have got involved.’

Gilda’s face twisted into an expression which suggested that she had just eaten something unpleasant and was trying not to vomit it back. She stood for a moment, gripping her leaflets, before turning abruptly and walking away.

Jo watched her go before she too turned away, pausing briefly on her way back to the house in order to consign Gilda’s leaflet to the paper recycling bin. Why had Gilda been up so late? Had it been to observe her returning from Claife Station? After a moment or two she called up the stairs, ‘Lunch in about twenty minutes – fish fingers, beans and chips. Are you staying, Harry?’

When Harry shouted back an affirmative, she set about preparing the meal, laying everything out for them to sit and eat at the kitchen table, something she insisted on when Sean subsequently wanted to carry their food upstairs.

‘So,’ she said brightly, affecting to be busy at the sink while they settled down to eat, ‘are you seeing much of that new girl – Becky – who’s moved in across the road?’

‘Not much.’

‘I think she plays with your sister, doesn’t she, Harry?’ Jo pursued.

‘Yeah. Most days.’

‘I wonder what happened to her father.’ When neither boy responded, Jo put it more directly. ‘Has she ever mentioned what happened to him?’

‘He was killed in a car accident,’ Harry volunteered. ‘Or maybe a plane crash.’

‘Why are you so interested in her anyway?’ asked Sean.

‘Oh – no reason. Just making conversation. Her mother came here just now, delivering leaflets.’

‘Then why didn’t you ask her?’

By the time Marcus returned next day, she had fabricated a story about the car close enough to the truth, but altering the time of the accident by several hours, and saying nothing about her real reason for being in the vicinity.

‘That’s a nasty bend above the ferry,’ was his only comment. ‘It’s lucky there was no one close behind, or they might have gone into the back of you.’

A little later he asked, ‘You haven’t been to the doctor, have you?’

‘No. What for?’

‘I thought, you know, maybe you had hurt yourself when the car went into the wall.’

‘No, I was fine. The only damage was to the car.’

‘You haven’t been to see him about your nerves? He hasn’t given you to take?’

‘No. Now what are you saying? That you think I went into the wall because I’m on something?’

‘Of course not.’ He laughed and quickly turned his attention to the TV guide, remarking a moment or two later that BBC4 were showing a documentary about elephants that evening. ‘It sounds interesting,’ he said. ‘I think I’d like to have a look at it.’ In fact he had been wondering if she was on something. Her eyes seemed unusually bright, and she was so restless, scarcely able to sit still. Maybe it was just that she
needed
to be on something. The situation was getting away from him. At one time Jo would have accepted his advice without question: he had been mentor, lover, friend. But looking back, he could see now that he had only been in the driving seat because she had been a willing passenger. Now it was not just that she was travelling separately; they weren’t even going in the same direction any more. Sooner or later there was going to be a collision.

He scarcely liked to admit to himself how glad he was that Sean was going to stay with his ex-wife for a few days. He was very conscious that Sean was uncomfortable with Jo’s increasingly erratic behaviour, and it troubled him that, having agreed to take Sean on with the best of intentions, he might have let his boy down. There never seemed to be enough time to get to know him properly, particularly now that he, Marcus, was away more often than he was at home. In a real partnership these absences would not matter. Twelve months ago he had been encouraged by Jo’s assertions that she welcomed the arrival of his son, and would do her best to make a good home for him, but the reality was that her relationship with Sean had never progressed much beyond the uneasy provision of meals and a laundry service. Marcus was forced to acknowledge to himself that it might have been better for Sean in the long run if, rather than actively encouraging him to come and live up here, he had persuaded him to try and make a go of it with his mother, stepfather and the new baby. Had he encouraged Sean for selfish reasons? Of course he had wanted to spend more time with him, to do the lads-and-dads things which his divorce had mostly denied them. But could it also have been to score a point against the ex-wife, who had hurt him and yet managed to keep their child?

He half wondered whether losing Sean to his first wife, while nothing like so traumatic or painful as the loss which Jo had sustained, had been among the factors which forged the original bond between them. Maybe his getting Sean back – a resolution which, if he was being realistic, was never going to happen for her with Lauren – had helped to fuel her breakdown. Breakdown: the word which so accurately described the condition towards which both Jo’s mental state and their own relationship was teetering.

Without the tours – and heaven knows, she couldn’t be trusted with them at the moment – he was aware that she had very little in her life. He tried to suggest things she could do, because he knew that she was in perpetual need of distraction from the tragedy she carried with her every day, but at the moment there seemed to be nothing much she was prepared to interest herself in apart from perhaps her drawing. His eye fell on her sketch book, which had been left lying on a chair near the sitting-room door. She never liked him to look at her work, but since she was out of the room for a moment, it could not do any harm. He reached across and began to flick through the book.

Jo’s offer to make some coffee had been motivated by an urgent need to escape from the sitting room, where she had been finding it almost impossible to concentrate on what Marcus was saying. Why had there been no one to meet her at Claife Station? Had she failed in some way? Or maybe she was looking at it from the wrong angle. Maybe she had passed the test: after all, she had made it to the rendezvous alone, without telling anyone. The abductor would not want to risk capture by the police, so perhaps the idea had been to see if she would follow instructions to the letter. Claife Station might be just the first of many tests. Only when trust had been established could a real meeting be set up and Lauren handed over.

Or it could have been a cruel, pointless hoax? That had always been the line taken by the Marcus and the police. But why send someone on a wild goose chase, unless you intended to be there to spring a nasty surprise at their destination? How would you even have the satisfaction of knowing whether or not the target had taken the bait … unless you watched them leave and waited up to see them return home?

As she poured hot water into the cafetière, she saw in her mind’s eye the light glowing above the door of The Old Forge. Gilda certainly could not have followed her, then got back to Easter Bridge before she did without being seen; but she would not have needed to. She could have sat comfortably inside The Old Forge, observing Jo’s departure and return. She tried to recall exactly what Gilda had said: ‘I was just drawing my bedroom curtains when I saw your car turning on to the drive. I wonder where Jo has been at this time of night, I said to myself.’ Was there something wrong with that statement? How had she known who was in the car? No – there was no mileage in that. Gilda had been living in Easter Bridge long enough to differentiate her car from Marcus’s.

She put the cafetière, milk jug and two mugs on a tray, then carried them through to the sitting room while artlessly humming a tune, trying to frame a smile as she entered the room. It died instantly on her lips when she saw the look on Marcus’s face and what he had in his hands. The sketch book was open and his face was almost as white as its pages. She stopped dead, a pace into the room.

‘What the hell is this?’

Jo could feel the tray shaking in her hands. The mugs chinked like chattering teeth as she walked across and placed her burden unsteadily on the coffee table.

‘Why are you looking at my drawings?’

‘Is there any reason why I shouldn’t? I wasn’t aware that they were really a secret – not until now, anyway.’

‘Those should have been rubbed out. I should have got rid of them ages ago, put them in the fire.’

Marcus’s voice was taut. ‘It’s Melissa, isn’t it?’

‘No. It isn’t meant to be.’

‘Come off it, Jo. They don’t just look like her, you’ve even drawn in her bloody necklace – the one with the “M” on it.’

Jo was unable to say anything. She sank into a chair before her legs gave way on her.

Marcus glanced down again, sparing the page only the briefest moment of attention, as if he could scarcely bear to let his eyes linger on it. ‘I had no idea,’ he said, slowly. ‘I didn’t imagine you were capable of this kind of – of stuff.’

In a moment of madness she half considered saying, ‘No, they’re pretty amazing, aren’t they? I didn’t think I could achieve such a good likeness, but maybe portraiture’s my thing.’ She knew it was not funny.

‘This is sick.’ He stood up and strode across the room, shoving the book in front of her face. ‘Look at this one – it’s bordering on porn, sadistic porn.’

She tried to draw back, but he shoved the book closer to her face, then abruptly withdrew it and flung it across the room. Jo gave a wail of distress as it landed at an angle against the book case, its pages crushed and askew.

‘Are those the only drawings like that, or are there others somewhere, showing what tortures you imagine subjecting the rest of us to?’

‘It isn’t like that …’

‘Are there any more?’ Marcus thundered.

‘No.’ Jo cowered back in the chair. Marcus hardly ever really lost his temper. He had never spoken to her like this before. ‘There are no others. I didn’t draw them deliberately.’

‘You don’t draw something by accident. They don’t just appear in the book by themselves.’

‘But they do. That’s the thing. They’re like doodles – the sort of thing your pen does when you’re on the phone and you’re not thinking.’

‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous.’

‘I’m not. Everyone doodles. You do it.’

‘No one doodles like that. No one who’s this side of the gates of Broadmoor, anyway.’

‘Marcus, you must believe me. I did them without thinking. I didn’t sit down and draw them on purpose. I don’t really think about Melissa in that way. I’m not even agreeing that they
are
of Melissa – they’re just doodles.’

‘Of a woman who is being tortured or murdered.’

‘I didn’t do them on purpose.’ Her voice had sunk to a whisper.

He returned to his chair, sat down, drew in a long breath, then said more calmly, ‘OK, if it isn’t a deliberate, conscious thing, then it must be something that’s going on in your subconscious mind – am I right?’

‘I’ll get rid of them,’ she began. ‘I’ll do it now. We can light a fire and burn them, if you like. If I had only destroyed them, when I first saw them …’

‘Then I wouldn’t have seen them. But I have seen them, and you have seen them, and we both know that this is not something a normal person –’ he corrected himself quickly, ‘an
untroubled
person – would have done. If these are the kinds of images in your subconscious, then you need –’

‘No, Marcus! Don’t start all that. I am not going to see any damn psychiatrists or –’ She stopped short, catching sight of Sean standing in the doorway.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I think there’s a problem with the broadband. Can you come and have a look, Dad?’

‘Of course.’ Marcus collected himself and rose from his chair.

‘It could wait until later,’ Sean said; but Marcus was all for attending to it there and then. As he crossed the room he scooped up the sketch book in a swift movement, ignoring the crushed pages as he compressed it closed under his arm and carried it from the room.

Jo watched him go without a word, her possessions confiscated like a child found reading an unsuitable book in class, and instinctively knowing that the volume will never be restored to her. Marcus no doubt intended to keep it, she thought. Not destroying, but rather preserving the page of tormented Melissa lookalikes, to use as evidence against her in the future.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The three days before Marcus left to take charge of Battlefields of York and Lancaster was an uneasy period of silences and rows, all of them turning on the question of the disputed sketches.

‘I want my drawings back,’ she demanded.

‘That’s not possible, I’m afraid.’

‘But it’s my book.’

‘You can buy another one.’

‘I want that one.’

‘Agree to come and see the doctor and we’ll see what he says about it.’

‘No. I don’t need to see a doctor.’

She tried hunting for the book, but he had either found a very good hiding place or else taken it off the premises altogether.

‘You didn’t take my book into the office, did you, when you went to Kirkby Lonsdale, yesterday?’

‘No.’

‘You haven’t shown the drawings to Melissa?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Then what have you done with them?’

‘Make an appointment with the doctor.’

She did not buy another drawing book. It was mostly too wet for sketching outdoors, anyway – the worst summer anyone could remember in years. Damp, miserable days slid one into another. The garden dripped, perpetually damp underfoot, with any short-lived blooms starved of sunshine and battered by wind and rain. The view from the kitchen window was like a watercolour done in greens and browns, which had run to deleterious effect.

Sean’s week with his mother turned into a fortnight, after which Marcus took the unprecedented step of taking Sean with him on one of the tours. Jo tried not to think that he was frightened to leave Sean alone with her.

In spite of having plenty of time on her hands, it was hard to get anything done. Emails from Nerys sat on the machine for days, awaiting her reply. What was there to say?

Every day she waited for another sign – a postcard bearing fresh instructions, another seashell, anything to indicate that the abductor was still in contact – but nothing came. Thin strands of grass crept up between the stones which formed her message of compliance on the lawn, and since it was impossible to mow around the edges, the letters began to look untidy. By the end of August buttercups and cranesbill had woven insidious patterns across the stones, transforming their positive message into no more than an overgrown rockery.