After You (23 page)

He frowned slightly. ‘If that’s what you want.’

She let out a long, silent breath. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.

He patted her knee. ‘Nasty lad. You need to be careful with your friends, Lily.’ He moved his hand back onto the automatic gearstick before she had even registered its presence.

He hadn’t batted an eyelid when she had told him she had nowhere to stay. He had driven her to a hotel in Bayswater and spoken quietly to the receptionist, who had handed her a room key. She was relieved he hadn’t suggested taking her to his house: she didn’t want to explain herself to anyone else.

‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow when you’re sober,’ he said, tucking his wallet into his jacket pocket.

She had walked heavily up to Room 311, lain down on the bed fully clothed and slept for fourteen hours.

He called to say he would meet her for breakfast. She showered, took some clothes out of her rucksack and ran an iron over them in the hope that she looked a little more presentable. She was not good at ironing – Lena had done that sort of thing.

When she came downstairs to the restaurant he was already sitting there, reading a paper, a half-drunk cup of coffee in front of him. He was older than she remembered, his hair thinning on top, a faint crêpiness to the skin of his neck; the last time she had seen him had been at a company event at the races where Francis had drunk too much and her mother had hissed at him furiously whenever nobody else was about, and Mr Garside, catching it, had raised his eyebrows at Lily, as if to say, ‘Parents, eh?’

She slid into the chair opposite him and he lowered his newspaper. ‘Aha. How are you today?’

She felt embarrassed, as if last night she had been overly histrionic. As if it had all been a fuss over nothing. ‘Much better, thank you.’

‘Did you sleep well?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

He had studied her for a minute over his glasses. ‘Very formal.’

She smiled. She didn’t know what else to do. It was too weird, being there with her stepdad’s work colleague. The waitress offered her coffee and she drank it. She eyed the breakfast buffet, wondering if she was expected to pay. He seemed to sense her discomfort. ‘Eat something. Don’t worry. It’s paid for.’ He turned back to his paper.

She wondered whether he would tell her parents. She wondered what he had done with Peter’s phone. She hoped he had slowed his big black car on the Thames embankment, lowered his window and hurled it into the swirling currents
below. She wanted never to see that picture again. She rose and fetched a croissant with some fruit from the buffet. She was starving.

He sat reading as she ate. She wondered how they looked from outside – like any father and daughter probably. She wondered whether he had children.

‘Don’t you have to be at work?’

He smiled, accepted more coffee from the waitress. ‘I told them I had an important meeting.’ He folded his newspaper neatly and put it down.

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. ‘I need to get a job.’

‘A job.’ He sat back. ‘Well. What kind of job?’

‘I don’t know. I kind of messed up my exams.’

‘And what do your parents think?’

‘They don’t … I can’t … They’re not very happy with me right now. I’ve been staying with friends.’

‘You can’t go back there?’

‘Not right now. My friend isn’t very happy with me either.’

‘Oh, Lily,’ he said, and sighed. He looked out of the window, considering something for a minute, then glanced at his expensive watch. He thought for another moment, then called his office and told someone he was going to be late back from his meeting.

She waited to hear what he had to say next.

‘You finished?’ He put his newspaper into his briefcase, and stood up. ‘Let’s go and make a plan.’

She had not been expecting him to come to the room and was embarrassed by the state of it: the damp towels left on the floor, the television blaring trashy daytime programmes. She dumped the worst of it in the bathroom and shoved what was left of her belongings hastily into her rucksack. He pretended not to notice, just gazed out of the window, then
turned back when she sat on the chair, as if he had only just seen the room.

‘It’s not a bad hotel, this,’ he said. ‘I used to stay here when I couldn’t face the drive to Winchester.’

‘Is that where you live?’

‘It’s where my wife lives, yes. My children are long grown-up.’ He put his briefcase on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed. She got up and fetched the complimentary notepad from the bedside table, in case she needed to take notes. Her phone let out a chime and she glanced down.
Lily just call me. Louisa x

She shoved it into her back pocket and sat down, the notepad on her lap.

‘So what do you think?’

‘That you’re in a tricky position, Lily. You’re a bit young to be getting a job, to be frank. I’m not sure who would hire you.’

‘I’m good at stuff, though. I’m a hard worker. I can garden.’

‘Garden! Well, perhaps you could get work gardening. Whether that’s going to bring in enough for you to support yourself is another matter. Have you got any references? Any holiday jobs?’

‘No. My parents always gave me an allowance.’

‘Mm.’ He tapped his hands on his knees. ‘You’ve had a difficult relationship with your father, haven’t you?’

‘Francis isn’t my real father.’

‘Yes. I’m aware of that. I know you left home some weeks ago. It all seems like a very sad situation. Very sad. You must feel rather isolated.’

She felt the lump swell in her throat and thought for a moment that he was reaching for a handkerchief, but it was then that he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a phone. Peter’s phone. He tapped it, once, twice, and she saw
a flash of her own image. Her breathing stalled in her chest.

He clicked on it, making it bigger. Her cheeks flooded with colour. He stared at the photograph for what felt like several years. ‘You really have been quite a bad girl, haven’t you?’

Lily’s fingers closed in a fist around the hotel bedspread. She looked up at Mr Garside, her cheeks burning. His eyes didn’t leave the picture.

‘A very bad girl.’ Eventually he looked up at her, his gaze even, his voice soft. ‘I suppose the first thing we need to do is work out how you can repay me for the phone and the hotel room.’

‘But,’ she began, ‘you didn’t say –’

‘Oh, come on, Lily. A live-wire like you? You must know that nothing comes for free.’ He looked down at the image. ‘You must have worked that out a while ago … You’re obviously good at it.’

Lily’s breakfast rose into her throat.

‘You see, I could be very helpful to you. Give you somewhere to stay until you’re back on your feet, a little leg up the career ladder. You wouldn’t need to do very much in return.
Quid pro quo
– you know that phrase? You did Latin at your school, didn’t you?’

She stood abruptly and reached for her rucksack. His hand shot out and took hold of her arm. With his free hand he tucked the phone slowly back into his pocket. ‘Let’s not be hasty about this, Lily. We wouldn’t want me to have to show this little picture to your parents, would we? Goodness knows what they would think about what you’ve been up to.’

Her words stuck in her throat.

He patted the bedspread beside him. ‘I would think very carefully about your next move. Now. Why don’t we –’

Lily’s arm flew back, shaking him off. And then she was wrenching the hotel-room door open and she was gone, feet
pumping, racing down the hotel corridor, her bag flying out behind her.

London teemed with life into the small hours. She walked while cars nudged night buses impatiently along main roads, minicabs wove in and out of traffic, men in suits made their way home or sat in glowing office cubicles halfway to the sky, ignoring the cleaners who worked silently around them. She walked with her head low and her rucksack on her shoulder, and when she ate in late-night burger restaurants, she made sure her hood was up and that she had a free newspaper to pretend to read: there was always someone who would sit down at your table and try to get you to talk.
Come on, darling, I’m only being friendly.

All the while she replayed that morning’s events in her head. What had she done? What signal had she sent? Was there something about her that meant everyone assumed she was a whore? The words he had used made her want to cry. She felt herself shrink into her hood, hating him. Hating herself.

She used her student card and rode on underground trains until the atmosphere became drunk and febrile. Then it felt safer to stay above ground. The rest of the time she walked – through the glittering neon lights of Piccadilly, down the lead-dusted length of Marylebone Road, around the pulsing late-night bars of Camden, her stride long, pretending she had somewhere to be, only slowing when her feet began to ache from the unforgiving pavement.

When she got too tired she begged favours. She spent one night at her friend Nina’s, but Nina asked too many questions and the sound of her chatting downstairs to her parents while Lily lay, soaking the grime out of her hair in the bath, made her feel like the loneliest person on earth. She left after breakfast, even though Nina’s mum said she was welcome to stay
another night, gazing at her with concerned maternal eyes. She spent two nights on the sofa of a girl she had met while clubbing, but there were three men sharing the flat, and she didn’t feel relaxed enough to sleep and sat fully clothed, hugging her knees, watching television with the sound turned off until dawn. She spent one night at a Salvation Army hostel, listening to two girls argue in the next-door cubicle, her bag clutched to her chest under the blanket. They said she could have a shower, but she didn’t like to leave her bag in the lockers while she got wet. She drank the free soup and left. But mostly she walked, spending the last of her cash on cheap coffee and Egg McMuffins and growing more and more tired and hungry until it was hard to think straight, hard to react quickly when the men in doorways said disgusting things or the staff in the café told her she’d made that one cup of tea last long enough, young lady, and it was time to move on.

And all the while she wondered what her parents were saying at that moment, and what Mr Garside would say about her when he showed them the pictures. She could see her mother’s shocked face, Francis’s slow shake of the head, as if this new Lily was of no surprise to him whatsoever.

She had been so stupid.

She should have stolen the phone.

She should have stamped on it.

She should have stamped on him.

She shouldn’t have gone to that boy’s stupid flat and behaved like a stupid idiot and broken her own stupid life, and that was usually the point at which she would start crying again and pull her hood further up around her face and –

‘She’s what?’

In Mrs Traynor’s silence I heard disbelief, and perhaps (maybe I was being oversensitive) a faint echo of the last thing of hers I had failed to keep safe.

‘And you’ve tried to call?’

‘She’s not picking up.’

‘And she hasn’t been in touch with her parents?’

I closed my eyes. I had been dreading this conversation. ‘She’s done this before, apparently. Mrs Houghton-Miller is convinced Lily will turn up any minute.’

Mrs Traynor digested this. ‘But you aren’t.’

‘Something’s not right, Mrs Traynor. I know I’m not a parent, but I just …’ My words tailed away. ‘Anyway. I’d rather be doing something than nothing, so I’m going to get back out walking the streets to find her. I just wanted you to know the truth about what was going on.’

Mrs Traynor was silent for a moment. And then she said, her voice measured but oddly determined, ‘Louisa, before you go, would you mind giving me Mrs Houghton-Miller’s telephone number?’

I called in sick, noting fleetingly that Richard Percival’s cold ‘I see,’ was actually more ominous than his previous blustering protests. I printed off photographs – one of Lily’s Facebook profile photographs, and one of the selfies she’d taken of the two of us. I spent the morning driving around central London. I parked on kerbs, leaving the hazard lights
flashing, as I nipped into pubs, fast-food joints, nightclubs where the cleaners, working in the stale, dim air, peered up at me with suspicious eyes.

–
Have you seen this girl?

–
Who wants to know?

–
Have you seen this girl?

–
Are you police? I don’t want no trouble.

Some people evidently thought it amusing to string me along for a bit –
Oh, that girl! Brown hair? Yeah, what was her name? … Nah. Never seen her before.
Nobody seemed to have seen her. And the further I travelled, the more hopeless it felt. What better place to disappear than London? A teeming metropolis where you could slide into a million doorways, mingle with crowds that never ended. I would gaze up at the tower blocks and wonder whether even now she was lying on someone’s sofa in her pyjamas. Lily picked up people with ease, and had no fear of asking for anything – she could be with anyone.

And yet.

I wasn’t entirely sure what drove me to keep going. Perhaps it was my cold fury at Tanya Houghton-Miller’s semi-detached parenting; perhaps it was my guilt at having failed to do the thing I was criticizing Tanya for not doing. Perhaps it was just that I knew only too well how vulnerable a young girl could be.

Mostly, though, it was Will. I walked and drove and questioned and walked and held endless internal conversations with him as my hip began to ache, and I paused in my car, chewing stale sandwiches and garage chocolate and choking down painkillers to keep me going.

Where would she go, Will?

What would you do?

And – yet again –
I’m sorry. I let you down.

Any news?
I texted Sam. It felt odd speaking to him while having concurrent conversations with Will in my head, a strange infidelity. I just wasn’t quite sure who I was being unfaithful to.

Nope. I’ve called every ER department in London. How about you?

Bit tired.

Hip?

Nothing chewing a few Nurofen won’t fix.

Want me to stop by after my shift?

I think I just need to keep looking.

Don’t go anywhere I wouldn’t go x

Very funny xxx

‘Did you try the hospitals?’ My sister called from college, in her fifteen-minute break between HMRC: the Changing Face of Revenue Collection, and VAT: A European Perspective.

‘Sam says there’s nobody with her name has been admitted to any of the teaching hospitals. He’s got people everywhere looking out for her.’ I glanced behind me as I spoke, as if even then I half expected to see Lily walking out of the crowds towards me.

‘How long have you been looking?’

‘A few days.’ I didn’t tell her I’d barely slept. ‘I – er – took time off work.’

‘I knew it! I knew she was going to be trouble. Did your boss mind you taking time off? What happened about that other job, by the way? The one in New York? Did you do the interview? Please don’t say you forgot.’

It took me a minute to work out what she was referring to. ‘Oh. That. Yeah – I got it.’

‘You
what
?’

‘Nathan said they’re going to offer it to me.’

Westminster was filling with tourists, lingering at gaudy stalls of Union Jack tat, their mobile phones and expensive cameras
held aloft to capture the looming Houses of Parliament. I watched a traffic warden walking towards me and wondered if some anti-terrorism legislation prevented me parking where I’d stopped. I held up a hand, indicating that I was about to leave.

There was a short silence at the other end of the phone.

‘Hang on – you’re not saying you –’

‘I can’t even think about it right now, Treen. Lily’s missing. I need to find her.’

‘Louisa?
You
listen a minute. You have to take this job.’

‘What?’

‘This is the opportunity of a lifetime. If you had the faintest clue what I would give for a chance to move to New York … with guaranteed employment? A place to live? And you “can’t think about it right now”?’

‘It’s not as simple as that.’

The traffic warden was definitely walking towards me.

‘Oh, my God. This is it. This is the thing I was trying to talk to you about. Every time you get a chance to move forward, you just hijack your own future. It’s like – it’s like you don’t actually want to.’

‘Lily is
missing
, Treen.’

‘A sixteen-year-old girl you barely know, with two parents and at least two grandparents, has buggered off for a few days like she’s done before. Like teenagers sometimes do. And you’re going to use this to throw away the greatest opportunity you’re ever likely to be given? Jeez. You don’t even really want to go, do you?’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘Far easier for you to just stick with that depressing little job and complain about it. Far easier for you to sit tight and not take a risk and make out that everything that happens to you is something you couldn’t help.’

‘I can’t just up and leave while this is going on.’

‘You’re in charge of your own life, Lou. And yet you act like you’re permanently buffeted by events outside your control. What is this – guilt? Is it that you feel you owe Will something? Is it some kind of penance? Giving up your life because you couldn’t save his?’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘No. I understand perfectly. I understand you better than you understand yourself. His daughter is
not your responsibility
. Do you hear me? None of this is your responsibility. And if you don’t go to New York – an opportunity I can’t even talk about because it makes me want to actually kill you – I’ll never talk to you again. Ever.’

The traffic warden was at my window. I wound it down, pulling the universal face you make when your sister is going off on one at the other end of your phone and you’re really sorry but you can’t cut her short. He tapped his watch and I nodded, reassuringly.

‘That’s it, Lou. Think about it. Lily is not your daughter.’

I was left staring at my phone. I thanked the traffic warden, then wound up my window. And a phrase popped into my head:
I’m not his daughter.

I drove around the corner, pulled up beside a petrol station and rifled through the battered old
A–Z
that lived in the footwell of my car, trying to remember the name of the road Lily had mentioned. Pyemore, Pyecrust,
Pyecroft.
I traced the distance to St John’s Wood with my finger – would that take fifteen minutes to walk? It had to be the same place.

I used my phone and looked up his surname along with the street name, and there it was. Number fifty-six. My gut tightened with excitement. I started the ignition, wrenched the car into gear and headed out onto the road again.

Although separated by less than a mile, the difference between Lily’s mother’s house and her former stepfather’s could not have been more pronounced. Where the Houghton-Millers’ street was uniformly grand white stucco or red-brick houses, punctuated by yew topiary and large cars that seemingly never got dirty, Martin Steele’s road appeared resolutely un-gentrified, a two-storey corner of London where house prices were spiralling but the exteriors resolutely refused to reflect it.

I drove slowly, past cars under canvas and an overturned wheelie-bin, and finally found a parking space near a small Victorian terraced house of the kind that existed in identikit lines all over London. I gazed at it, noting the peeling paintwork on the front door, the child’s watering-can on the front step. Please let her be here, I prayed. Safe within those walls.

I climbed out of the car, locked it, and walked up to the front step.

Inside I could hear a piano, a fractured chord being repeated again and again, muffled voices. I hesitated, just a moment, and then I pressed the doorbell, hearing the sudden answering stop to the music.

Footsteps in the corridor, and then the door opened. A forty-something man, lumberjack shirt, jeans and day-old stubble, stood there.

‘Yes?’

‘I wondered … is Lily here please?’

‘Lily?’

I smiled, held out a hand. ‘You are Martin Steele, yes?’

He studied me briefly before he answered. ‘I might be. And who are you?’

‘I’m a friend of Lily’s. I – I’ve been trying to get in contact with her and I understand that she might be staying here. Or that perhaps you might know where she is.’

He frowned. ‘Lily? Lily Miller?’

‘Well. Yes.’

He rubbed his hand against his jaw, and glanced behind him towards the hall. ‘Could you wait there a moment, please?’ He walked back down the corridor, and I heard him issuing instructions to whoever was at the piano. As he came back to me, a scale began playing, hesitantly and then with more emphasis.

Martin Steele half closed the door behind him. He dipped his head for a moment, as if he were trying to make sense of what I had asked him. ‘I’m sorry. I’m slightly at a loss here. You’re a friend of Lily Miller’s? And you’ve come here why?’

‘Because Lily said she came here to see you. You are – were – her stepfather?’

‘Not technically, but yes. A long time ago.’

‘And you’re a musician? You used to take her to nursery? But you’re still in contact. She told me how close you still were. How much it irritated her mother.’

Martin squinted at me. ‘Miss –’

‘Clark. Louisa Clark.’

‘Miss Clark. Louisa. I haven’t seen Lily Miller since she was five years old. Tanya thought it would be better for all of us when we split up if we broke off all contact.’

I stared at him. ‘So you’re saying she hasn’t been here?’

He thought for a moment. ‘She came once, a few years ago, but it wasn’t great timing. We’d just had a baby and I was trying to teach and, well, to be honest, I couldn’t work out what she really wanted from me.’

‘So you haven’t seen or spoken to her since then?’

‘Apart from that one very brief occasion, no. Is she okay? Is she in some kind of trouble?’

Inside, the piano kept playing –
doh re mi fah soh lah ti doh. Doh ti lah soh fah mi re doh.
Up and down
.

I waved a hand, already backing away down the steps. ‘No. It’s fine. My mistake. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’

I spent another evening driving around London, ignoring my sister’s calls and the email from Richard Percival that was marked URGENT and PERSONAL. I drove until my eyes were reddened from the glare of lights and I realized I was now going to places I had already been, and I ran out of cash for petrol.

I drove home just after midnight, promising myself I would pick up my bank card, drink a cup of tea, rest my eyes for half an hour, then hit the road again. I took off my shoes and made some toast that I couldn’t eat. Instead I swallowed another two painkillers and lay back on the sofa, my mind racing. What was I missing? There must be some clue. My brain buzzed with exhaustion, my stomach now permanently knotted with anxiety. What streets had I missed? Was there a chance she had gone somewhere other than London?

There was no choice, I decided. We had to let the police know. It was better to be thought stupid and overly dramatic than to risk something actually happening to her. I lay back and closed my eyes for five minutes.

I was woken three hours later by the phone ringing. I lurched upright, temporarily unsure where I was. Then I stared at the flashing screen beside me, and fumbled it up to my ear. ‘Hello?’

‘We’ve got her.’

‘What?’

‘It’s Sam. We’ve got Lily. Can you come?’

In the evening crush that followed England losing a football match, the ill-temper and associated drink-related injuries,
nobody had noticed the slight figure sleeping across two chairs in the corner, her hoodie pulled up high over her face. It was only when the triage nurse had gone person-to-person to ensure they were meeting waiting targets that someone shook the girl awake and she confessed reluctantly that she was just there because it was warm and dry and safe.

The nurse was questioning her when Sam, bringing in an old woman with breathing problems, caught sight of her at the desk. He had quietly instructed the nurses at the desk not to let her leave, and hurried out to call me before she could see him. He told me all this as we rushed into A and E. The waiting area had finally started to thin out, the fever-ridden children safely in cubicles with their parents, the drunks sent home to sleep it off. Only RTAs and stabbing victims, at this time of night.

‘They’ve given her some tea. She looks exhausted. I think she’s happy just to sit tight.’

I must have looked anxious at this point because he added, ‘It’s okay. They won’t let her leave.’

I half walked, half ran along the strip-lit corridor, Sam striding beside me. And there she was, looking somehow smaller than she had done, her hair pulled into a messy plait, a plastic cup held between her thin hands. A nurse sat beside her, working through a pile of folders, and when she saw me and registered Sam, she smiled warmly, and stood up to leave. Lily’s nails, I noticed, were black with grime.