(1998) Denial (26 page)

The operator suggested a few hospitals he might try. Michael phoned the first two and was about to call the third when Lulu rang. Music was blasting in the background and he could barely hear her, even though she was shouting.

‘Michael Tennent? Hi, sorry about the noise, I’m in a pub – the only phone I could find, my mobile’s battery’s dead. Look, I’ve been round to Amanda’s. No answer from her doorbell. One of her neighbours has a key and we went in. No sign of anything wrong. Her car’s not outside – I’ve taken a good look around all the side-streets, so I’m pretty sure she’s not there.’ A brief pause, then, ‘Also I rang her sister before I went there. Amanda left her house to drive back to London at nine last night. She said she seemed very happy.’

The words were like a torment to Michael.
Very happy
. He saw her drive off from the race-track, waving, so cheery, so vulnerable.

Very happy
.

He remembered a film he had seen,
The Vanishing
, where a guy’s girlfriend – or was it his wife? – disappeared from a motorway service station forecourt and was never seen again.

These things happened.

But not to Amanda, no, please not. This couldn’t have happened to her, there was some other explanation, something simple that both he and Lulu had overlooked.

What?

‘I’ve tried Sussex Police,’ Michael said. ‘And I’ve started phoning hospitals. I’m going to work out the route she would have taken back to London from her sister and check with all the police stations and hospitals on it.’ He hesitated. ‘There is one other thought I have. Um – her previous boyfriend?’

‘Brian?’

‘Yes.’

‘I already rang him, this afternoon. He said he hasn’t heard from her.’

‘It’s just that she struck me as being a bit nervous about him. There was a car parked outside my house for a while when she was over and she got quite twitchy.’

‘I don’t think she’s with him.’

‘No?’ He felt embarrassed now. ‘OK.’

‘I’m heading home,’ she said. ‘I have the numbers of some of her friends – I’ll do a ring round. Will you call me if you get any news? You have my home number?’

‘Yup, you gave it to me. Likewise, you’ll call me if you hear anything?’

She promised she would.

Two hours later, Michael phoned Lulu. He’d drawn a blank with the police and the hospitals. Lulu had drawn a blank with Amanda’s friends, her sister, whom she’d tried again, and with her mother, and with Brian once more.

He went out for a walk around the block to try to clear his head. There were no messages on his machine when he got back.

He microwaved a seafood lasagne and ate it, dutifully but with no enthusiasm, in front of
News At Ten
. Then he went back to his computer and knocked his article into shape. It still felt ragged and stilted, but it would have to do. Shortly after midnight, he faxed it to his editor at the
Daily Mail
.

He tried Amanda’s home and mobile numbers and again got nothing but her recorded voice. On the off-chance, he tried her office number, and there he got Lulu’s recorded voice.

He took two paracetamol and went to bed.

At three in the morning he stuck a melatonin tablet under his tongue.

But it didn’t bring him sleep.

Thomas Lamark observed the dials on the dash of Dr Goel’s navy blue Ford Mondeo. He checked each one in a sequence that had become routine to him.

The odometer showed he had driven one hundred and nine miles since leaving Holland Park at seven o’clock this morning. Exactly half a tank of petrol remained. Oil pressure was fine. Temperature was fine. Speed was zero. RPM was a steady five hundred.

No warning lights showed on the panel.

Good.

The strip-light bulb from the kitchen that required replacing sat on the passenger seat beside him. The tape of Dr Michael Tennent’s voice on the answering-machine was in the slot of the cassette-player. He would listen to it again, soon. Once every half-hour was good.

Just to remind him.

He checked the gauges on the dash again. Everything was fine. He looked in the mirrors and the rear view was fine, too. He looked inside his head and retraced his steps out of his house. He had checked the window locks. Checked the door locks. Set the alarm. Brought in the milk. Locked the front door. This was the way to combat his memory lapses. Step-by-step checks.

Later, he would look for a shop that sold strip-light bulbs. But this was not the reason he was sitting in Dr Goel’s car at traffic lights on the outskirts of the handsome spa town of Cheltenham at half past eight on a Tuesday morning. He had not driven one hundred and nine miles in order to buy a strip-light bulb.

Green now. Just to make sure, he looked at the traffic
lights again. The car behind hooted. Thomas glanced in his mirror and did not like the face of the man in it. He looked at the lights a third time. Definitely green. Satisfied, he drove on.

Today he was a commuter going to his office. Just an ordinary man in an ordinary motor car. He stopped at another set of lights and looked out of his window at the car on his right. Another ordinary man in a suit: this one had ginger hair and a sad face. Thomas watched him, enviously. Just a normal man going to work. With a normal life. Friends. Probably a wife. Children. He gave the man a nod.
I’m like you
, he wanted to say.
I’m just an ordinary man going to work. I’m normal, I’m not wrong in the head. I’m the same as you. I’m normal
.

The man did not see him, did not nod back. The lights changed and the man drove out of his life. Thomas ran through his checks, then he drove off too. He’d only been to Cheltenham once before, but the map of the town was printed in his mind and he knew exactly where he had to go.

There were plenty of parking spaces outside the elegant but slightly dilapidated Georgian terraced crescent, whose Cotswold stone façade glowed a soft gold in the morning sun, the pavement stippled by shadows of leaves. He could feel the warmth of the sun on his back. It was going to be a fine day.

His watch read 8.40, the car clock 8.42. He remembered a quotation: ‘A man who wears one watch always knows the exact time. A man who wears two watches never does.’

He played the tape of Michael Tennent’s voice on the answering-machine, and listened to it intently. When it had finished, he said, ‘How many watches do you wear, Dr Michael Tennent?’

At nine o’clock he got out of the car and walked a short way along the terrace to number 20. The steps up to the front door were spattered with birdshit. The door had been painted green a long time ago, and needed redecorating. Beside it was a metal entryphone panel in much better condition than the building. There were several names
against the buzzers and he selected the one that said,
CHELT. BUSINESS COMMS. CENTRE LTD
.

A pukka man’s voice crackled a brisk, ‘Hallo?’

Terence Goel identified himself.

There was a sharp buzz. He pushed open the door and went into a large hallway with tired cream paint and a tired red carpet. The place was dingily lit and smelt of failure.

There was a staircase in front of him and a dubious-looking lift to his right. A wooden panel on the wall listed the companies in this building. The Cheltenham Business Communications Centre was on the second floor. Beneath the panel was a shelf on which lay an assortment of post. He glanced down. Mostly mailshots, addressed to a foreign-sounding company.

In an office somewhere above him a phone was ringing, unanswered.

He decided to take the stairs.

Why didn’t anyone answer the phone?

There was a mirror at the foot of the stairs, screwed to the wall, a fine, gilded mirror, but the glass needed dusting. He checked himself in his reflection, touched his hair with his fingers. Today he was wearing Terence Goel clothes. Dr Goel was an American working in England. The differences between an American working in England and an Englishman working in England were subtle. Nuances. From his studies of Americans on television, more American men than Englishmen wore wedding bands.

Dr Goel wore a plain gold wedding band.

He wore a cream Daks linen suit, properly crumpled, a button-down midnight-blue shirt with a yellow tie, matt leather shoes with thick crêpe soles. Americans, he had noticed, went in for practical shoes rather than stylish ones.

He looked OK, he decided. He looked fine, he looked the way Terence Goel always looked.

Then suddenly he leaned closer to the mirror. Closer still. Shock. How come he hadn’t noticed this before?

He took off his jacket and looked at the left shoulder. A tiny strip of the fabric, only a few threads wide and less
than half an inch long, was missing. It must have snagged on something. Getting out of the car?

Luckily it hardly showed: the lining was the same colour and you’d have to look pretty closely to see anything. Anyhow, Dr Goel was a scientist, an academic. Academics the world over tended to be slovenly. If Terence Goel had a rip in his jacket that was no big deal.

He shook his head and his reflection echoed his confirmation of this. ‘No big deal. Uh-huh.’

Second door on the right along the corridor. A smart brass panel fixed to it bore its name. The panel added a touch of style, Thomas thought. Like a lawyer’s plaque. The style began and ended with this plaque.

The door opened onto one small room, with a telephone switchboard, a clapped-out-looking computer, and about twenty telephone-answering machines. One wall was lined floor to ceiling with wooden pigeon-holes of the kind found behind a hotel front desk. Coffee simmered in a glass jug, surrounded by a handful of squalid-looking mugs. Blue curls of cigar smoke hovered below the ceiling, and slowly leaked out through the slats in the Venetian blinds that were lowered against the sunlight.

A solitary golf-club was propped against a wall. Beside it, a cheap suitcase lay with its lid sprung open and a mass of folders spilling out. There were several dusty certificates on the wall, one of which proclaimed,
MEMBER OF THE CHELTENHAM CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
.

The bulky proprietor of the Cheltenham Business Communications Centre looked like he had been lowered into the chair behind his ludicrously small and cluttered desk, and then the rest of the furniture had been dumped all around him. Amid the clutter, Thomas saw a national lottery ticket with two numbers circled.

The man’s full title, according to the wooden sign on the desk, was Nicholas R. Lubbings, BA Com, MBA. Next to the sign, a soggy cigar burned in a round metal ashtray with Martini emblazoned on it. From where he sat, Lubbings could operate the switchboard, the computer, and reach a bank of filing-cabinet drawers without moving.

He was a massively overweight man in his mid-forties, whom Thomas decided could do with a bath and some fresh air. He had a large square head with sagging jowls, topped with short, neat, Brylcreemed black hair cut in an old-fashioned style. His beer gut sagged out of his blue blazer, straining his shirt buttons.

Lubbings studied him warily, then his eyes gleamed in recognition. Thomas had once seen a documentary on television in which an elephant was hoisted out of the cargo hold of a ship. The manner in which Lubbings now rose to his feet reminded him of this.

‘Good morning, Dr Goel! Good to see you again!’ He seized Thomas’s hand as if he had found a long-lost billionaire uncle, pumped it hard and beamed furiously, exhaling brandy vapours, despite the early hour.

‘Good morning, Mr Lubbings,’ Thomas replied stiffly.

‘And how is the world treating you on this fine morning?’ Another blast of brandy breath. Lubbings released his hand, plodded out from behind his desk and swivelled round a beat-up leather chair for Thomas to sit down.

Thomas did not reply. Instead, he said, ‘You have the package for me?’

The telephone rang. Lubbings lunged back towards his desk and tapped two keys. Instantly, words were displayed on the computer screen. Reading them, Lubbings lifted the receiver and said, ‘Southern and Western Import-Export Limited, good morning.’

Thomas watched him.

‘No, I’m afraid he’s not in the office. May I take a message?’ Crooking the phone under his ear, he typed out a message on the computer, his fingers working the keyboard with a dexterity that surprised Thomas.

As he hung up, the phone rang again. He raised an apologetic finger, again tapped the keyboard, and read off the screen as he answered it. ‘Cheltenham Sporting Saloons, good morning.’

Thomas cast his eyes at the huge rack of pigeon-holes. Many contained letters and larger packages. Now he noticed on the floor beside the desk a grey Royal Mail sack,
with a mass of post inside it spilling out onto the carpet. Ranked alongside it were several small piles. Lubbings was presumably sorting them out for the different companies for whom he provided an accommodation address and related services.

‘A Ford Granada Scorpio, not more than fifty thousand miles?’ Lubbings said. ‘I’m afraid none of our sales staff are available at the moment. If I could take your number, I’ll have someone call you back in a few minutes.’ Lubbings again typed furiously, thanked the caller unctuously and returned his attention to Thomas. ‘Not usually so busy this early! Now, your package – ah, yes, yes indeed. It came yesterday. You rang, didn’t you, Dr Goel? Can I get you some tea? Coffee?’

‘Just the package.’

‘I have a new brochure, since your last visit. More services, might be of interest to you, won’t take a moment to run through them.’

He thrust a drab leaflet at Thomas, then went over to the pigeon-holes, stared up at them blankly. ‘Ah, yes!’

He ducked down beneath his desk and retrieved a large square box, marked
FRAGILE
. It was addressed to Dr Terence Goel, PO Box 2876, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire GL7 8RS.

‘We now have an e-mail facility, Dr Goel. And voice-mail. I don’t think we offered voice-mail before, did we?’

‘I don’t think you did,’ Thomas said, ‘but I must go now. I’m keeping someone waiting.’

‘Of course! Good to see you, Dr Goel. If you ever need conference facilities, we can offer those too. I could show you the conference room, if you like?’