Lullaby (31 page)

I thought I heard his breathing quicken a little and I felt myself start to fall headfirst into my own longing. My glass went slipping to the ground. And then—

And then I caught myself. Just in time I caught myself. What in hell’s name was I doing?

‘Not yet, you’re not,’ I said unsteadily, pushing away from him.

‘What?’ he said, and his accent seemed a little harsher, more pronounced than usual.

‘Not yet, you’re not going anywhere-but you will be. And I’ll have to deal with things on my own. That’s what I’m used to.’ I picked up the glass shakily so I didn’t have to look at him, and shoved it back onto the table. I moved back towards the hotel, away from him. I felt the hot, ugly plunge, the emptiness of unfulfilled lust. ‘And anyway, there’s Louis. I must just concentrate on Louis. We both must.’

‘Jessica—’ he started but I ran away. I ran from him and me, I ran inside. ‘Wake me in time to go, please,’ I whispered over my shoulder, and I launched myself into the lift before he caught up with me, willing the doors to close. I glared at my tousled reflection in the yellow-lit mirror, my mouth all swollen still with General’s bruises, finally with some colour actually in my cheeks; I stared at myself and turned away. I went to bed and lay sleepless and terrified, sweating under my sheet for what seemed like hours.

Sometime soon after I lay down, Silver knocked gently on my door and called my name, but I put a pillow over my head and blocked up both my ears, like a little kid would do. Eventually he went away.

I am dreaming of Louis, my little Louis: a shirtless Silver is holding him aloft, but he keeps putting him down and I run to pick him up. Each time, Silver gets there first, mockingly moves him further on, so I never quite reach my son. Then my mum and dad are standing in the doorway of that tumbledown old cottage which is gone now, arm in arm they stand grinning inanely, like the wooden couple in a cuckoo clock who pop in and out, and it is that rainy summer from my childhood.

I woke up drenched in sweat, the sheet twisted around me like a shroud. Freeing myself, I scrabbled for my inhaler, trying to block that pathetic holiday from my whirring mind. The holiday that ended abruptly when my mother suddenly discovered my dad was due back in court the next day for sentencing. That he’d only been let out on bail because his cancer was malignant. The beginning of the proper end.

I realised someone was knocking on the door. Blearily, I blinked at the luminous alarm display. 5.32
a.m. The morning of the tenth day. The day we’d find my son…

‘Jessica, we need to go.’ It was Silver, and I was immediately anxious, and I felt like he was on the wrong side of the door, but also the right side, and I realised that however much I fought it and knew it was wrong, that I still wanted him to be near. I sank back into the bed for a hopeless moment.

‘I’ll be down in a second,’ I called brightly after a second, but there was no reply.

I got dressed. I pulled on the gleaming white underwear that young policewoman had brought; I cleaned my teeth and splashed my face and thought that if the hollows under my eyes got any darker they’d start to look indelible. The grazes on my forehead made my face look kind of dirty, and I wondered why I’d even think that any man would ever want to kiss me again.

Silver was waiting in the foyer, pacing in front of the yawning receptionist, tapping his phone against his leg. He was tie-less, and his shirt was undone. For the first time since we’d met he was unshaven, dishevelled even. I felt quite shy.

‘Breakfast?’ the receptionist asked politely, trying to stifle her yawn. ‘I’m sure we can rustle something up.’ She indicated the dining room, but there was no time. Silver shoved a paper cup of coffee into my hand, a packet of biscuits from his room’s tea-tray. He propelled me out into the car park without actually touching me. Something like hostility emanated from him. I tried to smile, but he looked grim.

‘Just for the record, Jessica,’ he plucked open the car
door without looking at me, ‘I’d never try it on with anyone I worked with. Never.’ He slammed the door before I could speak. When he slid in the other side, he studied me, just for a second, almost sorrowfully it seemed. Then he said, ‘I just want the best for you. The best result.’

I tried to formulate my thoughts, to think past my son, past being a ‘result’, and after a while I began to talk, but he didn’t want to hear now.

‘Just leave it, will you?’ he said curtly. He turned the radio up, opening the window very wide so I shivered in my thin summer dress, and had to hold my hair back with my hand. It was best if I was quiet anyway. I didn’t want to admit the feelings that had pulsed through me last night.

The sun was coming up over the sea, and I watched a little white yacht smooth over the horizon, and thought,
This might be it—perhaps I will see Louis now, please God
, and a new kind of longing penetrated my bones.

The red and white lighthouse was on a small promontory, cut off by the tide for hours each day. Pretty as a storybook illustration, it glimmered tantalisingly out in the water as we slid down the sloping stony beach. The sun was still low, clouds dribbling gently over the horizon; no one around yet apart from a random dog-walker.

It was quite obvious who we were there to meet. The small cluster of men waiting at the water’s edge looked as conspicuous as donkeys on Derby Day,
uncomfortably suited and booted in the early-morning heat. The eldest man detached himself from the huddle to greet us, his incongruous shiny brogues blemished by the treacherous chalk pebbles, bespectacled and grim-faced. He nodded perfunctorily at me despite my hopeful smile, addressing Silver directly over my head.

‘The boat’ll be here any sec, Joe.’ On cue, a small police-craft chugged round the headland towards the beach. ‘The lady staying here, is she? Williams can wait with her.’

‘I’d like to go too, please,’ I said, as calmly as I could. Glasses cocked an eyebrow at Silver. Women, hey, pal? his sympathetic look read.

‘It’s not really procedure, madam,’ was what he actually said.

‘I couldn’t care less about procedure, frankly. I just need to find my son,’ I replied carefully. ‘I’m sure there’s room for me on the boat if we all squeeze up.’ I didn’t wait to see if Silver exchanged his look.

In the end we went on foot because the tide had finally turned, slipping out far enough to let us walk. I stumbled and slid across the seaweedy rocks in my old sandals, frustrated by the time this precarious hike was taking, stoutly refusing hands whenever one was offered. Especially Silver’s suntanned one.

‘My dad told me the seaweed was the mermaid’s hair,’ I said to no one in particular. I imagined my bow-legged father there on the beach behind me, shrimping-net in hand, willing me on. Was he watching out for his grandson, somewhere near, grinning the ubiquitous grin he’d had for his little girl?

‘Sounds like a bit of a dreamer, your dad.’ At last, Silver smiled at me.

I returned it weakly, my father still flitting through my mind. ‘You could say that.’ We were silent for the rest of the walk, speeding up as we neared our goal; concentrating on our individual hope, we were, I guess.

At the foot of the lighthouse, I looked up at the hundreds of stairs, trying not to feel daunted, then took a great breath and climbed as fast as I could manage. I followed Silver’s giant strides, driven by a rising, frantic beat that echoed in my chest. I thought I heard a baby—and I nearly cried out with joy. Then I realised it was just the mewling of a solitary gull; I bit down painfully on my lip. I hoped beyond all hope that this would be the end now; I saw my Louis chuckling at the top, happy and unharmed, eyes wide with wonder at it all—and I climbed a little faster. By the time I reached the final level, my breath was ragged and I needed my inhaler. I couldn’t deny the sinister silence above me-but still I burst into the room at the top with a final stab of sickening hope.

It was painfully obvious that no one was here. The place was deserted. My devastation was so complete now, I wanted to rail at Silver for letting me get my hopes up again, but I bit my tongue, and sat down heavily, sat before I crumpled where I stood. I struggled to retain my composure; I couldn’t look at anyone. Silver smacked the window in frustration.

‘Local kids, I’d say.’ Glasses hadn’t even broken a sweat. He kicked a pile of rubbish in the corner, and lit a smelly cheroot. It was apparent even to an uneducated
eye that someone had been doing drugs here. On the old wooden table that rattled every time someone passed was strewn the works—old foil, matches, a bent teaspoon. In the corner, a syringe rolled spent beneath Glasses’ foot, along with fag-butts and a discarded packet of Golden Virginia tobacco. There was a flagstone floor very like the one I remembered from the video, and a small pyramid of chalky stones stacked on the windowsill. But there was no sign of a baby having ever been here. No sign of my little baby.

The forensic team—the SOCOs as Glasses called them—arrived in their crackly paper jumpsuits, and I trudged behind Silver back down the stairs, across the sand that shone like plate-glass in the morning light; hobbled back over the smooth stones on the beach, up the wooden steps. Following Silver back to the car, I felt limp with a new, unprecedented despair.

On the way back through the twisting lanes, a light rain began to fall. Wistfully I remembered the fairy grottos my dad had whispered of as we’d driven so hopefully through the night, packed into the old Cortina for that one last summer holiday. Before my family fell finally and irrevocably apart.

Silver put something suitably tragic on the stereo, some aching blues, and he still wouldn’t really talk to me, apart from a murmured ‘Sorry’. I did try rather feebly to engage him once or twice, but eventually I gave up. I drifted into a light and flicky sleep as Silver drove, and my dreams were filled with giant syringes, and images of my brother, who suddenly looked just like my son. When I woke with a start, we were almost
home and I’d been dribbling. I checked to see if Silver had noticed but his eyes were fixed on the clogged-up road in front. And I couldn’t push Robbie from my mind, my baby brother and his glazed look, his empty eyes narrowed to nothing but a pinprick in General’s flat the other night.

But something else was worrying me. I kept thinking about the empty Golden Virginia packet in the lighthouse this morning. I’d seen a packet of tobacco somewhere else recently, other than in Robbie’s hand. It was driving me quite mad now that I couldn’t recall where.

There was something different about the front of my house as we pulled up outside, but I wasn’t quite sure what. It took me a moment to realise that my car wasn’t there. For the first time since Louis’s disappearance it had gone; someone else had parked haphazardly in its place. For a weird moment I thought Mickey must be back. Then I thought that maybe Louis had been brought home in that strange car, and I stumbled wildly towards the door.

Kelly and Deb came out onto the path together like some odd welcoming committee. Something was most definitely up.

‘Is Louis here?’ I shouted hopefully, but Egg-belly looked all mournful.

‘Sorry, no,’ he said. For once, he wasn’t eating.

‘Did you give Maxine some time off?’ Deb asked me, rather anxiously, and I shook my head. ‘Why?’

‘She’s done a bunk, and we rather think—we think she may have company.’

Silver stuck new gum in his mouth. ‘What kind of company?’ he snapped, and Deb looked a little flustered and said, like an apologetic mother, ‘We think she may have gone off with Robbie.’ She couldn’t quite meet my eye.

Silver swore under his breath. ‘I told you to pick him up again last night, didn’t I?’ He looked at Kelly, but he was as mild as ever, entirely unruffled by his boss’s anger.

‘We were intending to, Guv, and we will—once we find him.’

My brain felt slow, full of mush. I turned to Deb. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said stupidly. ‘Maxine and Robbie? Together? Why?’

She gave a little shrug, flicking a nervous look at her boss. ‘I’m not sure yet, Jessica.’

Silver glanced at me, then jerked his head at Kelly. ‘We need to get on,’ he said, and he got back in his car without a word, drumming his fingers impatiently on the wheel. I looked at him; he couldn’t see me from where he sat now, and I thought, I’m doubly sad now—sadder even than when I left here yesterday. Then I shook myself like a dog coming out of cold water.

‘I need to see Mickey, Deb,’ I said quickly, because it seemed like a sensible, married sort of thing to say. It covered my doubts, papering across the cracks a bit. I grabbed my things from Silver’s back seat and fled into the house without a second look. I heard him berating Kelly as I went.

‘Why the fuck wasn’t I told of this?’ were the last
snarled words I caught. Silver was finally losing some of that cool.

Now what?

Two things, that was what. Leigh had caught Maxine and Robbie together in my bedroom last night, and had called Deb up in panic. Deb wanted me to ring my sister now; she thought she should be the one to explain.

Within twenty minutes Leigh turned up, wearing a horribly lurid pink tracksuit—presumably to match her truly foul mood. She’d been at home spring-cleaning, a true sign of her stress. Her hair was lank and swept back, and tension pulsed through her slim frame.

Deb made us tea—eternal tea lady that she was, poor woman—while Leigh stood by the back door and chain-smoked. She was really rattled. Apparently, she’d turned up unannounced last night to see if I was all right, and had seen the lights on in my bedroom. Getting no answer at the door, she let herself in with the key I’d given her and went upstairs, thinking I’d fallen asleep. Instead she found Robbie attempting to shag the au pair in the middle of my bed, without much success, it seemed. To Leigh’s horror, Maxine had been tied to the bedposts with various things, mainly Mickey’s belts and ties apparently, while Robbie snorted something off her back as he straddled her from behind. Both of them had been completely wasted; whisky and worse—blood—spilt across the sticky silk bedspread, fag-butts on the floor, in wine glasses; foil and spent
matches in the en-suite sink, an open jar of pills strewn across the floor. My pills.