Why Don’t You Come for Me (8 page)

She was not surprised when a thorough search in and among the shoes in the bottom of the wardrobe drew a blank. Never mind – she had all day if that was what it took. For the next ninety minutes she undertook a fingertip search of which any undercover agent might have been proud, taking great care to replace everything exactly where she found it. Trouser pockets, CD cases, the furthest corners of shelves, under the mattress, inside the pillow slips and duvet cover, she probed every possible place, gathering dust from along the top of the doorframe, even feeling along the hems of the curtains, but as she worked her way round the room, it was with the ever-increasing conviction that Sean must have taken the most obvious precaution of all. He had taken the key with him.

When she had tried every possible hidey-hole, she knelt in front of the cupboard and investigated it more closely. It appeared to be homemade, perhaps the result of some long-forgotten woodwork class. At some stage in its history a coat of gloss paint had been applied, which had faded to the shade of cream left too long in the fridge. There was a narrow gap between the door and body of the cupboard and Jo found that by pushing repeatedly against the door she could make it rattle. If only the hinges had been on the outside, she could have unscrewed them. Damn it, he was not going to beat her! She marched out to the garage, returning with a torch and a large screwdriver. When she shone the beam of the torch up and down the crack, she could make out the dark rectangle of the lock – one small metal obstruction which stood between herself and the contents of the cupboard. She slid the point of the screwdriver into the gap at a point just below the lock and began to lever her improvised jemmy against the frame. The first two or three attempts resulted in no more than a series of ugly marks on the paintwork. At the fourth attempt, the screwdriver jerked out of the crack and she narrowly missed gouging a lump out of her cheek. She tried a slower, steadier pressure, until with an elongated creak of protest, the door finally gave way, a jagged split appearing in the wood from the edge nearest the lock to a point just above the lower hinge. Although the tough little lock held firm, enough of the door could be moved aside to see that the cupboard’s contents were unchanged since Sean had reluctantly displayed them a week before.

Jo sat back on her heels, completely at a loss. Maybe he took the knife with him to school. For a moment she thought of ringing to suggest they search his belongings, but then she thought of what Marcus would say if she ended up getting Sean expelled – which could well be the penalty for bringing an offensive weapon on to the premises. Then again, what if she rang the school and her hunch turned out to be wrong? He might have sold it on to someone else by now. Marcus would be just as furious, the whole episode put down to her overactive imagination again.

There had been a couple of occasions in the past when she had got things very wrong, and she could see now that it had probably been a mistake to confide these episodes in Marcus because they naturally reduced the likelihood of him accepting everything she told him at face value. The worst of these had occurred four years ago, when she followed a woman in a car – the impulse of an instant – because there was a little girl in the back, a little girl who had looked just the right age …

She stared afresh at the mess she had made of the cupboard door. The irony of her earlier cautious search was not lost on her; she might as well have turned the place upside down, because there was no way she could pretend the cupboard had met with some accidental injury while she was cleaning the room. Cold fingers of doubt encircled her neck and crept over her scalp. Without the justification of a newly discovered knife, the cupboard simply appeared to have suffered a violent attack from a random maniac. She saw the screwdriver in her hand with fresh eyes. Suddenly she wanted to put as much distance as possible between herself and the cupboard and screwdriver.

She retreated downstairs, noting that the post had been delivered, probably at the very moment she had been breaking into the cupboard, since she had not heard the letterbox. She collected the cluster of envelopes as she passed, flipping through them to see if there was anything interesting. Halfway down the pile she encountered a couple of envelopes addressed to Shelley and Brian, which had somehow found their way among The Hideaway’s post.

The misdirected mail provided her with a welcome excuse to depart the scene of the crime. She would walk into Grizedale and find something to draw, dropping off the stray letters on her way. In less than five minutes she was striding along the lane, resolutely ignoring the threat of rain in the sky ahead. She had intended to drop into the gallery and hand the letters over in person, but when she got there she found the lights were out and the ‘closed’ sign still displayed, so she backtracked to Ingledene where she opened the wrought-iron gate, advanced up the path and climbed the trio of steps to the front door.

As she gained the top step she was met with the sound of loud, angry voices. With no passing traffic, sound penetrated the wood as easily as if she had been in the next room. It was awkward, but it was too late to go back now. If someone happened to see her, she would still have the letters in her hand, so it would be obvious that she had overheard them quarrelling and was trying to slip away. At the same time she was reluctant to open the letterbox, because the feuding parties might be standing in sight of the door and realize she was there.

She tried the flap with a fingertip but it did not move. It must be held in place with a taught spring – the sort of letterbox which would make a loud noise unless handled very cautiously. She pushed a little harder, levering the flap upwards as slowly and quietly as she could, almost letting go in fright when an angry roar erupted from Brian, in which she could make out the words, ‘Oh, no you won’t.’

‘Let me go, you bastard!’

Who would have imagined that gentle Shelley could conjure up such a harridan shriek? Jo fed the letters in and heard them flop on to the encaustic tiles a spilt second before there was a crash of something heavy hitting the floor. Jo let the flap go with a snap. The occupants were making so much noise they probably wouldn’t hear it. She tried not to be in too obvious a hurry to reach the gate – much better to pretend she had not heard anything.

Pretending – always pretending that there was nothing wrong. That’s what I’m doing now, she thought. I do it all the time, pretending that there is nothing wrong between me and Marcus; pretending that I can cope with Sean; pretending that I’m not thinking about what happened to Lauren, every minute of every day.

She wondered where Marcus was just at that moment. Some itineraries she knew well enough to place him almost to the minute, but Border Raids and Battles was a new addition to their repertoire, so she was not familiar with it. More to the point, where was Melissa? Melissa could so easily join up with Marcus on those nights when she was not booked to be away with a tour herself. Man-eating Melissa, who had already worked her way through two husbands. Not that you could condemn a woman just for being married twice – she had been married twice herself – but Melissa, with her fake fingernails and her two divorces, why, why, why had they ever thought it was a good idea to go into business with Melissa?

There had been room for two firms offering a similar kind of thing: plenty of customers to go round, in fact, and even if there had not been, you didn’t have to jump into bed with your competitors, figuratively or literally. It was not as if she had any definite proof, except that Marcus seemed to have changed recently. He had once been her rock: the one person in the world she could always turn to, the one person who would always be on her side. It did not feel like that any more. When they were at home together they skirted around one another, as if each were afraid of too close an encounter, lest they find in the other what they already feared to be there.

When it began to rain Jo drew up her hood and carried on walking. It was too wet to draw, but she did not want to return to the house, where Sean’s cupboard stood fatally wounded in his bedroom. Her boots sounded out a steady rhythm against the tarmac, although she wasn’t sure where she was going any more. It was like the day after Lauren disappeared, when she and Dom had joined the search, carrying on long after the weather turned against them, refusing to stop when everyone advised them to; continuing to look because there was nothing to do
except
go on looking. Scouring the countryside, yet hardly knowing what they were looking for, because it was perfectly obvious that Lauren had not wandered off into the fields on her own. Someone had taken her. Someone had wheeled the pushchair down the street towards the sea, then turned aside into the public gardens and from there up on to the cliff path, where they had tossed the buggy – but not Lauren, thank heaven, not Lauren herself – over the edge of the cliff.

Where was Lauren taken after that? In place of the valley bottom, misty with rain, Jo pictured the cliff path, following the shape of the land where it rose in imitation of a round-topped rolling wave, the path sometimes wide enough to walk two abreast, sometimes narrowing to single file, hemmed in by the gorse which grew there in abundance. She pictured the abductor, a shadowy figure carrying Lauren along the path, further and further away from the village street, which was already alive with rumours of a missing child. Jo began to walk faster in tandem with the figure in her mind, her boots splashing in the puddles, her breath coming harder and harder, but although the figure on the path did not appear to hurry, even encumbered as it was with a child, she could make no ground upon it. The path twisted out of sight and the figure vanished with it. From somewhere down the years, she could hear the voice of a child, fearful, uncertain: ‘Why didn’t you come for me?’

She realized that she was gasping for breath, all but running along the road. She slowed to a steady walk, conscious of the cold perspiration which was running down her back, making her shirt feel damp inside her anorak. It was not Lauren who had asked that question. Lauren had been too young to talk properly when she was taken away. Jo had never heard her speaking in sentences. The voice belonged to that other little girl, standing uncertainly at the kerbside, behind the railings which guarded the William Street School infants’ gate, waiting for what had seemed like an eternity, until someone came to collect her. A car screeching to a halt, the result of last-minute arrangements cobbled together in a hurry, to take care of her until ‘things were sorted out’. That had been the first time they had taken Mum away to the hospital – when she had come home a few days later. Not like the last time. The vision of the wooden garage doors had been growing in her mind, but she pushed it away. ‘No,’ she said aloud. She did not want to go back there.

With a start she realized that she had almost reached Satterthwaite. In her hurry to leave the house she had forgotten to make up her usual flask, but she was briefly cheered by the thought that when she got to the Eagle and Child she could go inside and have a coffee. Alas, when she reached the pub she found it was closed. There was nowhere else to get a warm drink until you reached the Grizedale Visitor Centre, which was at least another mile and a half along the road.

‘This is crazy,’ Jo said to herself.
Crazy
. For a second she caught sight of her reflection in the wing mirror of a parked car. Did she look like her mother, or didn’t she? She had never been able to make up her mind. She turned around and began to trudge back towards Easter Bridge. The rain was in her face now, and blinded her whenever she lifted her head. The Lake Artists Tour – she would focus on that. Maybe when she got back to the gallery the lights would be on and Shelley would be inside, her quarrel with Brian over. They could talk about the tour together, over mugs of hot, bitter coffee. Shelley had appeared enthusiastic about the idea, and now it occurred to Jo that maybe Shelley might like to guide it. The company needed knowledgeable people who were good communicators and passionate about their subject; people who were happy to take on an occasional specialist assignment. She suspected that Shelley was quite often short of money. She hardly ever seemed to buy herself any new clothes, and never had her hair done. Luckily she was a petite natural blonde, who could look marvellous simply by pinning up her hair, putting on a flowing Indian cotton dress and big earrings.

When she eventually drew level with the gallery it was still in darkness – which was very odd, because they were not usually closed on Wednesdays. As she passed beyond the gallery and reached the wall which marked the frontage of Ingledene, she heard a couple of car doors slam in relatively quick succession, and then a car engine coming to life. Brian and Shelley’s estate car shot out from the parking place behind the house, swerving so violently into the lane that it narrowly missed the wall on the opposite side of the road. Brian was in the driving seat, but there was no sign of Shelley.

Jo hesitated at the gate, but then thought better of it. Shelley might be upset after their row, and it was not as if she and Jo were close enough to have a heart-to-heart about a marital contretemps, so Jo walked on towards The Hideaway, while the sound of the speeding car faded into the steady whisper of the rain.

As she walked through their ever-open gates, she noticed that someone had put a seashell on top of one of the gateposts – some passing walker probably, perhaps a child. She wondered absently how long it had been there without her noticing.

Her heart sank when she entered the house. She was dreading the inevitable confrontation when Sean came home. He would notice the cupboard immediately, and flare up. She spent some time rehearsing an argument to the effect that had he not been so duplicitous about the knife, she would not have been forced to take matters into her own hands, but she knew that without hard proof of the knife’s existence, it was a difficult line to pursue. As the afternoon drew on, she began to watch the lane for signs of his approach. She saw their local farmer, David Tyson, trundle past on his tractor, and later Brian’s car returning, before Sean finally came into view.