How he had loved her, though.
37
With the end of his shift less than an hour away, Eileen Evans looked in on him, and he was grateful to her for making the effort. She didn’t know what it meant to him to have some company. For the past twenty minutes, he had been fighting an overwhelming desire to go to sleep. He had no coffee left, not even a drop. All he could do was stay on his feet. Pace up and down. If he rested his head on his arm for so much as a second he’d be gone. Out cold.
Taking a seat, he bent over the scene log and noted Eileen’s arrival in the mortuary. While he was writing, he asked whether she’d seen Phil.
“He went home a couple of hours ago,” she said. “He’ll be back at eleven.”
Billy put his pen down, then sat back in the chair. Eileen was leaning against the radiator with her arms folded across her chest.
“What about you?” he said. “Have you had any sleep?”
“Not really.” She gave him a look that he remembered from when he met her, in reception; it was searching and yet resigned, as if she believed that the quality she hoped to find in him was unlikely to be there, as if she’d grown used to such disappointments. “It’s been a long night.” She lifted a hand to smother a yawn. “Another long night, I should say.” She yawned again. “Still — excuse me — it’s nearly over now.”
“I’ll be glad, actually,” he said. “I meant to have a nap yesterday afternoon, but somehow I never got round to it. It’s been pretty hard to stay awake.”
“Have you got far to go?” she said. “When you leave, I mean?”
He told her where he lived. “It’s a village. Near Ipswich.”
“I don’t think I know it.”
He began to describe the place for her. It was only small, he said, and most of it was arranged along a single road. He told her about the allotments at the back of the house, and about Harry Parsons and his secret hoard of beer, and he told her about the field where, only a few months ago, his daughter had gone wandering at night. He wouldn’t have seen her if she hadn’t had her glasses on. He laughed softly when he realised how that sounded, and Eileen laughed with him.
“Was she sleepwalking?” Eileen said.
“She’s got Down’s,” he said. “She just hasn’t got it up here.” He tapped one side of his head with his index finger. “She hasn’t got a clue, really.”
He found himself talking about the time Emma went missing in a shopping centre. When Sue rang him, he thought at first that she was calling from the swimming-pool. The background acoustics were the same: voices, laughter, shouting, everything echoing and merging in the huge, hollow space behind her voice.
“I’ve lost Emma,” she said.
She sounded so calm that he thought he must have heard it wrong.
“I came out shopping with her,” Sue said, “and now she’s disappeared.”
He asked Sue where she was. In Tower Ramparts, she said. By the lift. He told her to stay put. It was only half a mile from the police station to the shopping centre, and he ran the whole way. When he pushed through the gilt-and-glass doors, his shirt was sticking to his back. He saw Sue immediately. She was the only person in the place who wasn’t moving. In the context of a shopping centre, her stillness looked unnatural, suspicious.
He took her by the arm. “You didn’t do something, did you?”
“Do something?” she said. “What?”
After all their years together, you’d think they would be on the same wavelength, but they often had difficulty understanding one another; there were none of the short cuts that a long relationship ought to have brought with it.
“Sue,” he said quietly, “did you do something?”
She shook her arm free. “Would I look like this if I’d done something?”
Well, yes, he wanted to say. Maybe. Because her face was drained of colour except for beneath her eyes, where the skin had darkened, and her irises were lighter than usual, as they often were if she was frightened.
“When did you last see her?”
“I don’t know. About twenty minutes ago.”
“She was here? Beside you?”
“Oh God.” Sue turned in a slow circle, as if she were in a trance; she didn’t seem to be able to make any sense of her surroundings.
He told her to start looking on the first floor, and in the various restaurants, while he searched the ground floor and the exits. They agreed to meet by the lift again in ten minutes.
“What’s she wearing?” he asked.
Sue told him.
Unable to find any security guards, Billy ran upstairs to the Centre Management Suite and asked the man in charge to broadcast the following announcement at regular intervals: Would anyone who sees an eight-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome please accompany her to Centre Management immediately? She has shoulder-length blonde hair, and she is wearing a pink T-shirt and jeans. Her name is Emma Tyler.
Having checked all the exits, he began to cover the shops systematically, one by one, ridding his mind of everything but Emma’s hair, her spectacles, and the distinctive, slightly tilted angle at which she often held her head. He talked to himself constantly under his breath so as to stop thoughts forming. Come on, Emma. Please. Where are you? In particular, he was trying not to think about the parents of children who had gone missing. He didn’t want to become one of them. He wouldn’t be able to bear it. “Come on,” he murmured to himself. “Where are you?”
What hellish places these shopping centres were, with their piped pop music, and their groups of sullen teenagers, and their endless bloody discounts and bargains. Every vertical surface had been fitted with mirror-glass, which made the public spaces look twice as busy as they really were, and he kept catching glimpses of himself, a big man, hot and anxious. The glass shop-fronts gleamed. So did the gold rails. Everything reflecting, distorting, confusing.
Once, as he passed a record store, he thought he heard her. That unmistakable tuneless booming sound she made whenever she joined in with West Side Story or Beauty and the Beast. He rushed into the shop, calling her name, but stopped before he reached the end of the first aisle. A girl with Down’s was standing at a listening post with a pair of headphones on, singing along to what was obviously one of her favourite CDs. She was older than Emma. Her hair was brown. He saw how oblivious she was to the world around her. Emma would be no different. It was unlikely she’d be feeling abandoned or lost. She probably wouldn’t even have realised she was on her own.
When he met Sue by the lift, as arranged, she was shaking her head.
“I can’t do this any more,” she said.
He told her to wait where she was.
On his third circuit of the ground floor, he noticed a door marked fire exit. It opened on to a windowless space that had the dimensions of a warehouse, a vast interior of poured concrete and metal stacking-systems, and there under the stark lights, there among the cleaning equipment and the fire extinguishers, was a girl in a pink T-shirt and jeans. Arms in the air, she was swaying to the piped music, but her eyes were on her feet, checking that they were doing what they were supposed to. He wondered whether she had noticed the announcements. If she had, she would probably have imagined that there was a direct connection between the repetition of her name and the songs that were being played. She would probably have assumed that the music was for her. She would have felt special, and that would have encouraged her to go on dancing. In her mind, she was at a party, or in a show. Certainly, she seemed quite unaware of how inhospitable, how inappropriate, her surroundings were. For a few moments, the sight of her held Billy where he was, fifty yards away.