32
Ruiz joins me in the lift and we ride down together in silence. My medication is wearing off. I can feel the other “man” waking inside me, ready to dance like a drunk.
“They don’t believe Piper is alive,” I say.
“Maybe they’re right.”
“She deserves more.”
The doors slide open. My right leg stops swinging and I pitch forward. Ruiz catches me. I straighten and pull back my shoulders, trying to pretend that nothing has happened. I can see our reflections in the large pane of glass beside the door-a man with a limp and another with a twitching arm. Both proud. Both damaged.
“You don’t have to stay,” I tell him. “You should go back to London. Where are you spending Christmas?”
“Claire has invited me to her place. I’m worried Miranda might be there.”
Claire is Ruiz’s daughter. Miranda is his most recent ex-wife, the one he’s still sleeping with.
“I thought you two were tearing up the sheets,” I say.
“I’m not complaining about the sex but she wants me to have feelings.”
“Feelings?”
“I told her that I have three of them.”
“Three?”
“I’m hungry, horny and tired-in that order.”
“How did that go down?”
“Not so well.”
We’ve reached the main doors. I remember to ask him something. “That mate of yours-the computer geek.”
“Capable Jones.”
“Are you still in touch?”
“I own his soul. What do you need?”
“Can you ask him to access aerial maps and photographs of Oxfordshire. I’m interested in factories, past and present, that manufactured pesticides, plastics or synthetic rubber, that sort of thing. The forensic report showed traces of heavy metals and chlorinated hydrocarbons beneath Natasha’s fingernails.”
“What’s the search area?”
“Four or five miles from the farmhouse.” He gives me a look. “You think I’m clutching at straws.”
“Atheists aren’t supposed to ask for miracles.”
Downstairs in the charge room Victor McBain is being released after ten hours in custody. Dressed in a blue paper boiler suit, he signs the release form and is handed his clothes and personal possessions, sealed in plastic.
“I hope you washed and pressed them,” he says.
“No, but we checked for traces of accelerant,” says DS Casey, unmoved by the sarcasm.
Opening one of the plastic bags, McBain pats his trouser pockets and pulls out his cigarettes and a Zippo lighter. In one motion, he flicks the lighter open and strikes the wheel with his thumb. Holding up the flame, he smiles at the detective before flipping it shut again.
“Where can I get changed?”
Casey points him down the corridor. McBain recognizes me as he passes, blinking with gin-pale eyes.
“What are you looking at?”
“You.”
I hold his gaze. He pushes past me.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Been there, done that.”
“I’m not the police. We’re not being taped. I’m just trying to understand a few things. Why did you give your niece condoms?”
McBain looks at me for a long time, his nostrils flaring and his lips curled back as though he’s talking to someone who is completely deaf or stupid.
“She asked me for them.”
“Why?”
“Her parents wouldn’t buy them.”
“You don’t think it’s slightly odd-a man your age buying condoms for a teenage girl?”
“She was having sex. I wanted her to be safe.”
“Who was she having sex with?”
“Her boyfriend, I assume.”
“You assume?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nelson Stokes saw you kissing your niece in the front seat of your car when you dropped her at school.”
“Who the fuck is Nelson Stokes?”
“The school caretaker.”
“She gave me a peck on the cheek.”
“And you slipped her the tongue.”
McBain screws up his face. “You’re a sick bastard! You repeat that in public and I’ll sue you for slander.”
“Were you having sex with your niece?”
“Get out of here! You have no right to come in here saying stuff like that.”
McBain is pulling on his trousers, cinching the belt. He pushes his arms into a T-shirt before looping it over his head.
“On the night before she disappeared, Natasha came to see you. She asked you for money. Was she blackmailing you?”
“No.”
“So she didn’t come and see you?”
“No.”
“Why would Emily lie about something like that?”
“Sometimes Tash did some work for me, filing and stuff.”
“Did you see Tash on the night of the Bingham festival?”
“Yeah, I saw her.” He crouches to lace his boots. “I don’t know what the big deal is. Tash didn’t go missing until Sunday morning.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Alice McBain made a mistake. She didn’t see the girls that morning, she heard Natasha’s radio.”
The realization dawns on him. His mouth opens and closes.
“What time on Saturday night did you talk to Natasha? Maybe you were the last person to see her.”
He doesn’t speak now. His mind is weighing up the possibilities.
“You don’t have an alibi for that night, do you? Just like you don’t have an alibi for the night of the blizzard.”
“I was with my brother.”
“No, you weren’t.”
He opens the door and strides along the corridor. I try to block his path.
“Listen, Vic, the police are looking at you now. They’re going to pick apart your life. They’re not going to stop until they find something. Where were you during the blizzard?”
He steps around me and crosses the foyer, reaching the main doors, which slide open automatically. Reporters and photographers have surrounded a car outside. Sarah and Dale Hadley appear from the open doors, quickly flanked by detectives, who shepherd them into the station.
Vic McBain stops and steps back as the couple approach the door. Sarah Hadley looks up and their eyes meet. She looks away. In that moment something passes between them-a knowledge that goes beyond the familiar. Pain. Hurt.
Sarah passes through the revolving door and takes hold of her husband’s hand. There are hairline cracks in the make-up around her lips. McBain watches her, studying her body as she enters the lift and the doors close. Turning, he pushes past the media scrum, head down, his shoulders hunched.
I have seen that look. I have seen it in the mirror. I saw it last night in Drury’s eyes when he couldn’t comfort Victoria. It diminishes a man when he can’t make a woman happy… when he makes her unhappy. The world is no longer rich and colorful. All he can see is the poverty of things.
How did it happen? I wonder. I picture Sarah Hadley standing beside Piper’s bed, holding an article of her clothing, as if discovering something new about her daughter. Recalling the best moments. Trying to keep her alive. She clutched at every piece of misinformation and rumor, consulting psychics and fortune-tellers. Vic McBain introduced her to one of his girlfriends who claimed to have the gift. She told Sarah the girls were alive. She gave her comfort. Hope.
Mourning can be lonely. Grief can be shared. Sarah couldn’t look at her husband because he reminded her too much of Piper. Vic McBain understood. And then one night they came together, most probably in some out-of-the-way hotel room or a clumsy adolescent-style coupling in the back seat of a car. I don’t know who seduced whom. It doesn’t matter. Vic McBain had made it possible for Sarah to be herself again-not the campaigning mother or the media spokesperson or the woman locals took pity upon when they saw her pushing a trolley in the supermarket…
She could escape the whispers and stares, becoming anonymous for a few hours, suspended between fantasy and reality, feeling pleasure instead of loss, or perhaps feeling nothing at all.
For all her campaigning and sacrifice, Sarah Hadley has a streak of self-loathing that is wider than the M25. She married an unattractive man with money, a man who loved her, but she didn’t feel the same way about him. She fucked her way to the middle rather than the top. She could have accepted that and slept in the bed she made, but then her daughter went missing and she blamed herself, thinking she deserved to be unhappy. She deserved a marriage on life support and sordid sex in a cheap hotel room overlooking a cut-rate carpet warehouse.