Dolphin Junction
Mick Herron
I
“Don’t try to find me,” the note began. It was written on the back of a postcard. “Believe me, it’s best this way. Things aren’t working, David, and they haven’t been for a long time. I’m sorry, but we both know it’s true. I love you. But it’s over. Shell.”
On the kitchen wall, the clock still ticked, and outside the window, one of the slats in the fence still hung loose, and the fence remained discoloured where ivy had been peeled from it during the garden makeover two weeks previously. The marks where it had clung still resembled railway lines as seen on a map. If you could take a snapshot of that moment, nothing would have changed. But she was gone.
“And this card was on the kitchen table.”
“As I’ve already told you, yes.”
“And there’s no sign of a break-in, no disturbance, no—”
“I’ve told you that too. There’s no sign of anything. She’s just disappeared. Everything else is the same as always.”
“Well. You say disappeared. But she’s fairly clearly left of her own accord, wouldn’t you say?”
“No. I wouldn’t say that at all.”
“Be that as it may, sir, that’s what the situation suggests. Now, if there were no note I’d be suggesting you call her friends, check with colleagues, maybe even try the hospitals just in case. But where there’s a note explaining that she’s gone of her own free will, all I can advise is that you wait and see.”
“Wait and see? That’s what you’re telling me? I should wait and see?”
“I’ve no doubt your wife will be in touch shortly, sir. These things always look different in the plain light of day.”
“Is there someone else I can talk to? A detective? Somebody?”
“They’d tell you exactly what I’m telling you, sir. That ninety-nine point nine per cent of these cases are exactly what they appear to be. And if your wife decides to leave you, there’s not a lot the police can do about it.”
“But what if she’s the point one per cent? What happens then?”
“The chances of that are a billion to one, sir. Now, what I suggest you do is go home and get some rest. Maybe call into the pub. Shame not to take advantage, eh?”
He was on the other side of a counter, in no position to deliver a nudge in the ribs. But that’s what his expression suggested. Old lady drops out of the picture? Have yourself a little time out.
“You haven’t listened to a word, have you? My wife has been abducted. Is that so difficult to understand?”
He bristled. “She left a note, sir. That seems clear enough to me. Wrote and signed it.”
“But that’s exactly the problem,” I explained for the fourth time. “My wife’s name isn’t Shell. My wife — Michelle — she’d never sign herself Shell. She hated the name. She hated it.”
In the end I left the station empty-handed. If I wanted to speak to a detective, I’d have to make an appointment. And it would be best to leave this for forty-eight hours, the desk sergeant said. That seemed to be the window through which missing persons peered. Forty-eight hours. Not that my wife could be classed a missing person. She had left of her own accord, and nothing could convince him otherwise.
There’d be a phone call, he said. Possibly a letter. He managed to refrain from asserting that he’d put good money on it, but it was a close-run thing.
His unspoken suggestion that I spend the evening in the pub I ignored, just as he’d ignored the evidence of the false signature. Back home, I wandered from room to room, looking for signs of disturbance that might have escaped me earlier — anything I could carry back to the station to cast in his smug stupid face. But there was nothing. In fact, everything I found, he’d doubtless cite as proof of his view of events.
The suitcase, for example. The black suitcase was in the hall where I’d left it on getting home. I’d been away at a conference. But the other suitcase, the red one, was missing from its berth in the stair-cupboard, and in the wardrobe and the chests of drawers were unaccustomed gaps. I have never been the world’s most observant husband. Some of my wife’s dresses I have confidently claimed never to have seen before, only to be told that that’s what she’d been wearing when I proposed, or that I’d bought it for her last Christmas. But even I recognized a space when I saw one, and these gaps spoke of recent disinterment. Someone had been through Michelle’s private places, harvesting articles I couldn’t picture but knew were there no longer. There were underlinings everywhere. The bathroom cabinet contained absences, and there was no novel on the floor on Michelle’s side of the bed. Some of her jewellery was gone. The locket, though, was where it ought to be. She had far from taken everything — that would have entailed removal lorries and lawyerly negotiation — but it seemed as if a particular version of events were establishing itself.
But I didn’t believe Michelle had been responsible for any of this. There are things we simply know; non-demonstrable things; events or facts at a tangent from the available evidence. Not everything is susceptible to interrogation. This wasn’t about appearances. It was about knowledge. Experience.
Let me tell you something about Michelle: she knows words. She makes puns the way other people pass remarks upon the weather. I remember once we were talking about retirement fantasies: where we’d go, what we’d do, places we’d see. Before long I was conjuring Technicolor futures, painting the most elaborate visions in the air, and she chided me for going over the top. I still remember the excuse I offered. “Once you start daydreaming,” I told her, “it’s hard to stop.”
“That’s the thing about castles in Spain,” she said. “They’re very moreish.”
Moreish. Moorish. You see? She was always playing with words. She accorded them due deference. She recognized their weight.
And she’d no more sign herself Shell than she’d misplace an apostrophe.
When I eventually went to bed, I lay the whole night on my side of the mattress, as if rolling on to Michelle’s side would be to take up room she’d soon need; space which, if unavailable on her return, would cause her to disappear again.
II
The mattress is no more than three inches thick, laid flat on the concrete floor. There is a chemical toilet in the opposite corner. The only light spills in from a barred window nine foot or so above her head. This window is about the size of eight bricks laid side by side, and contains no glass: air must come through it, sound drift out. But here on floor level she feels no draught, and outside there is no one to hear any noise she might make.
But he will find her.
She is confident he will find her.
Eventually.
III
Forty-eight hours later, I was back in the police station.
Much of the intervening period had been spent on the telephone, speaking to an increasingly wide circle of friends, which at its outer reaches included people I’d never met. Colleagues of Michelle’s; old university accomplices; even schoolmates — the responses I culled varied from sympathy to amusement, but in each I heard that chasm that lies between horror and delight; the German feeling you get when bad things happen to other people.
At its narrower reach, the circle included family. Michelle had one parent living, her mother, currently residing in a care home. I’m not sure why I say “currently”. There’s little chance of her future involving alternative accommodation. But she’s beyond the reach of polite conversation, let alone urgency, and it was Michelle’s sister — her only sibling — that I spoke to instead.