Gone Again Page 2

  Mark laughed. It wasn’t really, but good imagination. ‘So it is.’

  Nathan placed the piece down carefully on the table. ‘I’ll put it with the collection after tea.’ He started into his strawberries and yoghurt.

  Mark looked at the clock again. He’d distracted himself for all of five minutes talking to the boy, but now worry swamped back in.

  If she just forgot it was her turn to pick up Nathan, she would’ve been home by now. Maybe she went shopping after work. That wasn’t like her, and anyway, why would her phone be off? Out of juice? She was always forgetting to charge the bloody thing. She wouldn’t have gone for a drink with anyone from Caledonia Dreaming after work either, she never did anything like that. And it was even less likely at the moment since she wasn’t drinking and was so tired all the time. First trimester and all that. And sick too, not just in the mornings. Certain smells set her off – coffee, toothpaste, lilies. Maybe she’d gone to the doctor or hospital. But the surgery would be shut now, and it was crazy to phone the ERI when she’d only been gone for two hours. Wasn’t it?

  He kept coming back to the same thing. The time after Nathan was born. When she couldn’t cope and had fallen off the earth for ten days, leaving him alone with the baby, having to explain to midwives and doctors and family and friends and then the police. But not really understanding it himself, just that she’d been down, had struggled to bond with the baby, struggled to cope.

  ‘I’m finished,’ Nathan said in a sing-song voice. ‘Please can I come down?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And please can I play on my DS again for a little bit?’

  That was never usually allowed, not after tea, not on normal days. This wasn’t a normal day and Mark needed time to think.

  ‘Sure.’

  Nathan made an exaggerated shocked face and Mark laughed.

  ‘Weren’t expecting that answer, were you?’

  Nathan leapt towards him, all sharp elbows and frantic energy, and gave him a hug.

  ‘Thank you, Daddy.’

  Mark held on for a moment longer than usual, then let the boy go.

  4

  Still no sign of her by Nathan’s bedtime. Mark peeled the boy away from his DS for the nightly routine, and he looked puzzled for a moment.

  ‘Where did you say Mummy was?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, where is she?’

  ‘She’ll be home soon. It’ll be after you’re asleep, though.’

  ‘Tell her to come in and give me a kiss.’

  ‘I will, Big Guy, don’t worry.’

  Nathan tilted his head. ‘I’m not worried.’

  ‘Come on, let’s get you into your jammies and get those teeth brushed.’

  Nathan rough-housed his mouth with the brush. The first two of his milk teeth were loose, bottom row centre, and he was desperate to shake them out, cash in with the tooth fairy. Mark didn’t like the deception of that, he disliked Christmas for the same reason. We spend our time warning kids to tell the truth, then feed them packs of lies whenever we get the chance. Lying to Nathan made him feel sick, even stupid little lies like the tooth fairy.

  They both had a feel of the two teeth, shoogly but hanging on. Nathan pouted, flicking the teeth with his tongue.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ Mark said.

  He hustled Nathan into bed with a glass of warm milk. Nathan asked for What Was I Scared Of? for his bedtime story.

  As usual for kids’ books there was a moral shoehorned in there, but Dr Seuss handled it better than most, having written it before all that became so heavy-handed. The book was about someone scared of a spooky pair of empty pants. As in American pants, trousers. Mark had to explain the difference several times when they first read it. Tonight, when he got to the best bit, the lines where the little critter confessed to lying when he said he wasn’t afraid‚ Mark felt a chill.

  He left Nathan with the bedside light on and a Clone Wars comic open, and headed to the kitchen. Cracked a Beck’s open and took a long slug. Half gone straight away with these tiny bottles. He remembered Lauren’s dinner was in the oven. Opened the door and pulled it out. Shrivelled up and cold, fat congealed under the sausages. He tipped the contents into the bin, put the plate in the sink and went through to the living room.

  Eight fifteen. She’d only technically been AWOL for five hours. He tried her mobile again. No answer. He flicked through the address book on his phone. Dreaded making calls to their friends, but he knew he would have to. Everyone knew about what happened last time. He would hear their thoughts down the line, their silent condemnation, in between the platitudes they churned out.

  He went over to the desk, flipped the MacBook open and powered it up. Sat staring at the little logo. When the icons appeared he logged into her Gmail account. The password wasn’t a secret, ‘naphan1’. With a ‘p’ instead of a ‘t’ after her account got hacked and spewed out weight-loss spam to all her contacts. She had a few junk emails from Gap, Ikea, Amazon. An email from her work account, sent yesterday, probably just paperwork to do at home. It was blank with an attachment. He clicked on it. An Excel spreadsheet of numbers, the columns full of company acronyms. Nothing that made much sense. He closed it. No other emails. He checked her sent folder. Nothing today.

  He went on to Facebook and checked her status. No activity since yesterday evening. Did the same with Twitter, but it was all quiet.

  He blew out a sigh and sat back in the chair, then began phoning round the friends they still had in town. Not nearly as many as they’d had a few years ago. Kids got in the way of that, couples settling down, moving away, shifting themselves to places they could afford with gardens, nearer to grandparents, immersed in the middle of careers now.

  Plus they’d never had that many friends anyway, no higher education background to gang them together with people. No real social networks except for the handful of folk they’d worked in bars with, but if ever there was a transient bunch, it was young pub staff. Mark hadn’t kept in touch with anyone from school in Dundee, and Lauren couldn’t wait to get away from the stuck-up bitches at the private Catholic school her mum and dad had paid fees for.

  Of the few friends he called, no one had heard from her. No surprise. He tried to play it down, making the excuses he’d prepared in his head. No one bought it. He could tell from their voices they all thought she’d run off again, into the same dark place as before. He didn’t blame them for thinking that.

  That just left the hardest phone call of all. Ruth, Lauren’s mum. He thought about it, tried to work it out in his head. He hadn’t spoken to her or seen her in five years. Not since the big bust-up. It was technically against the law for him to phone her, with the restraining order. There was no time limit on that.

  It had all come out when Lauren went to counselling and therapy. Not at the beginning, it took months for the therapist to dig down far enough. Searching for possible underlying reasons behind her postnatal depression. Eventually stumbling on Lauren’s thing with her now-dead father. Not just the typical troubled father–daughter relationship. After some intense sessions, Lauren uncovered stuff she’d apparently suppressed her whole life, memories of her dad interfering with her, abusing her from when she was five to when she finally learned to say stop three years later.

  Lauren never told her mum at the time, but looking back on it in the therapy sessions, she thought Ruth must have known. How could you not know something like that was going on under your own roof between the two people you were closest to in the whole world?

  Lauren confronted her mum, who was horrified. She refused to believe such a thing could have happened. Couldn’t believe that the man she’d loved her whole life was capable of something like that. She accused Lauren of making it up, finding an excuse for her own terrible behaviour in abandoning Nathan and Mark after the birth. A series of angry exchanges ended when Mark intervened. Ruth said some terrible things to the woman he loved, a woman struggling to get her sanity back togeth
er in the wake of it all, and Mark snapped.

  He slapped Ruth in the face while they stood on her doorstep. Slapped her hard.

  It ended the argument. And it ended Mark’s relationship with his mother-in-law. Ruth took out a restraining order against him. She and Lauren didn’t communicate for almost a year. Finally a desire from Ruth to be a part of her only grandson’s life brought some tentative conversations between mother and daughter, but it was never anything other than strained, and Mark wasn’t allowed to be anywhere near Ruth when she came to visit. Not that she came often, maybe twice a year, things too awkward between her and Lauren.

  And there was the added complication of Lauren’s dad, the way William died. He just disappeared one day. Supposedly went out for a walk and didn’t come home. It was a vanishing that was mirrored by his daughter two years later.

  Only in William’s case, there was nothing like depression that anyone knew of to explain it away. Although in retrospect, maybe he was haunted by his own demons. His body was found three months later nestled amongst the reeds at Portmore, his favourite fly-fishing haunt. The body was bloated and rotten, but there was no sign of violence. He had simply drowned. His car had been recovered long before that at Prestonfield Golf Club, which didn’t make any sense. How did he get to Portmore? Why was he there? There was never any satisfactory answer and the police eventually closed the file.

  All of which piled up on top of Mark now as he thought about phoning Ruth. But he had to know if Lauren had been in touch with her, so he pressed in her number.

  ‘Hello, 449 4421.’

  Such an old person thing to do, recite your number when you answer.

  Mark rubbed his neck.

  ‘Ruth.’

  A long pause. ‘You’re not supposed to phone here, Mark.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t want to speak to you.’

  Mark breathed in. ‘Lauren’s missing.’

  Another pause. ‘What do you mean, missing?’

  ‘She didn’t pick Nathan up from school today. I can’t get hold of her.’

  He heard her exhale down the line. ‘My goodness, you had me worried for a second. That’s only a few hours.’

  ‘But it’s not like her. She’s not answering her phone.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s just out after work or something.’

  ‘But why would her phone be off?’

  ‘Maybe she wants to relax. Or maybe she can’t get a signal.’

  ‘Has she been in contact with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean, at all in the last few weeks?’

  ‘No, Mark. I haven’t spoken to her since Nathan’s birthday.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure, I know if I’ve talked to my own daughter or not.’

  ‘OK.’ Mark sucked in air. ‘There’s something else.’

  A sigh down the line. ‘What?’

  ‘She’s pregnant again.’

  Crackle on the line, then quiet.

  ‘Really,’ Ruth said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Eventually Ruth spoke. ‘I see.’

  ‘She’s about thirteen weeks gone now. We’ve had the first scan, everything seems normal.’

  Mark thought back to the first time. He and Ruth had shared something back then, the terror of Lauren’s disappearance. For Ruth, it was compounded by the recent memory of William’s death, the way that had happened. For Mark, it was compounded by the wide-eyed panic of fatherhood on his own. They had bonded after a fashion, Ruth helping out with the new baby when she could, the two of them forming an unlikely alliance.

  Then they had thrown that away after Lauren’s return. It was so easy to go from mutual support group to hated enemies, all it took was a simple truth being exposed.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Ruth didn’t sound convinced by her own words. ‘I’m sure she’ll turn up soon.’

  ‘What if she doesn’t, Ruth?’

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

  Mark thought about that ‘we’. There hadn’t been a ‘we’ between him and Ruth for a long time.

  ‘Just let me know if she gets in touch,’ he said.

  ‘And you do likewise.’

  He hung up. Rolled his neck and heard the cartilage crunch. His mouth felt dry. He went to the kitchen and opened another Beck’s. Closed his eyes and held on to the sink with one hand as he glugged it down.

  He tried Lauren’s number again. Nothing.

  He’d run out of options. He called Portobello Police Station. Got what sounded like a pubescent boy on the front desk who put him through to a young woman. DC Ferguson. She sounded the same age as Miss Kennedy, and that old line about coppers getting younger flitted through his mind.

  ‘I’d like to report a missing person.’

  ‘OK, sir, hang on till I find the form.’

  He heard paper rustling. Took a deep breath.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘It’s Lauren Bell, my wife.’

  ‘And your name is . . .’

  ‘Mark Douglas. She never took my name when we got married.’

  Ferguson didn’t care about that. ‘Address, Mr Douglas?’

  ‘Twelve Marlborough Street, flat three.’

  ‘And how long has it been since you saw your wife?’

  This was all too calm, too normal.

  ‘She was supposed to pick our son up from school earlier.’

  ‘Earlier today?’

  ‘Yes, at quarter past three, but she never showed.’

  ‘That’s only six hours ago.’

  ‘I know how long it’s been.’

  ‘How old is your wife, Mr Douglas?’

  ‘Thirty-nine.’

  ‘And I take it you’ve tried contacting her?’

  ‘Of course I have, I’m not a fucking idiot.’

  ‘OK, calm down, Mr Douglas, I appreciate this is a stressful situation for you.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘And you’ve phoned round friends, family, colleagues?’

  ‘Obviously, or I wouldn’t be calling the police.’

  ‘The thing is, Mr Douglas, we can’t log her as a missing person until she’s been gone for a reasonable time.’

  It sounded like she was reading from a script.

  ‘What the hell is a reasonable time?’ Mark said.

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On whether your wife is in any of the risk categories.’

  ‘What are the risk categories?’

  ‘If she’s suffering from mental or physical illness, depressed or suicidal, addicted to any substances or in any other way vulnerable.’

  ‘Jesus, that’s quite a list.’

  ‘I realise this is hard, Mr Douglas.’

  It was the second time she’d tried to be reassuring. He didn’t feel reassured. She spoke again.

  ‘Does your wife fall into any of these categories?’

  Mark rubbed a knuckle in his eye and cricked his neck again. He thought about mentioning it, but that had all been six years ago. A lifetime, really, a different universe. She seemed fine recently, better than ever, and she was genuinely excited at the scan, eyes shining, full of life. He didn’t have a reason to suspect her current mental state, no evidence that it was coming back. He couldn’t get into this with the police, couldn’t handle it right now.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘I see. Well, all I can do at the moment is give you a police incident report number. In the vast majority of these cases, the missing person turns up safe and sound in a very short space of time.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘I would recommend that you phone the Accident and Emergency Department at the ERI just in case.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘And I can give you the number for the Missing People twenty-four-hour helpline. They provide round-the-clock support for people in your situation.’

  ‘My situation.’


  ‘I’m sorry we can’t do more at the moment, Mr Douglas. If your wife is still missing in, say, twenty-four or thirty-six hours’ time, do please phone again and we can register this as an official missing persons case.’

  ‘Is that the best you can do?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She gave him the charity number and he scribbled it down on the back of a note from Nathan’s school then hung up.

  So much for the police.

  He should’ve told them about the postnatal depression. He knew that, but he didn’t want to go down that road. Not until he had to.

  He went to the window and looked out. Almost dark now, just the outline of the disused church across the road, the Celtic cross on its roof stark against the violet fringe of sky behind.

  He looked up the street, willing her car to come round the corner at the top, slowing at the speed bumps, searching for a parking space. Nothing. The wind was still gusting like crazy out there, making their old sash-and-case window rattle in its frame. He could feel the change of pressure in the room as the glass juddered.

  He got the number for the hospital and called. Nothing. Unless she used another name, of course.

  He got another beer from the fridge and came back.

  He tried to think of this morning, to conjure up the last image of Lauren he had in his mind. It was the usual chaos of getting Nathan ready and out the door for school. Despite the fact the boy woke up at seven sharp every morning, they somehow always struggled to get out the door for half eight. He tried to think about how Lauren had been, if there was anything unusual. Did they kiss goodbye? Did she kiss Nathan? He couldn’t remember. Just another day as a family.

  Outside the window, a car trundled down the street. Wrong make and colour to be Lauren’s.

  Mark sighed and dragged his eyes away from the window, but he didn’t shut the curtain. He looked around the room – brown leather sofas, shelves overstuffed with Lauren’s thrillers and crime novels, cheap Ikea rug on the badly sanded floor. It was all familiar yet now somehow alien, replaced by exact replicas like on a film set.