It was gone midnight by the time I got home.
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast – I never did get to eat any fish and chips or mussels with Martin on the beach – and I felt weak and light-headed. There were slim pickings in the fridge: a withered lemon and an opened packet of ham that had darkened and curled, so I made some toast and a Pot Noodle that I found lurking in the cupboard. As I poked the dry noodles with a fork, I checked my phone again for any messages from Martin, but still, there was nothing.
Perching on the sofa I chomped down on my still-hard noodles, unable to wait the required four minutes for them to soften. I debated running a bath, dismissing the idea as soon as it occurred to me on account of our noisy plumbing. After all, it was late and I didn’t want to wake Pete downstairs. He was someone I didn’t want to remind of my existence.
I ran the time over in my head, trying to work out if Martin would be done with the police yet. I doubted that these sort of interviews lasted very long, if it had even happened at all. Even so, a carousel of images flickered in my mind. Scenes from various movies and cop shows. Suspects being handcuffed and dragged to the police station, interrogations in small dark rooms. I told myself I was being dramatic, but still, I couldn’t understand why Martin hadn’t got in touch. Not when he had sent me to see Tom Briscoe to discuss his next move. Not when I had sent him a message from Tom’s car, asking him to contact me.
Crossing the room, I sat at my desk and turned my computer on.
I checked my emails – all the accounts for which Martin had my email address – and switched my phone off and on to check whether it was working properly.
My next internet pit-stop was the Daily Mail. My eyes darted around the home page, looking for any story that might relate to Donna Joy. When I found nothing of interest, I repeated the exercise with every major national media site, then re-checked the Met’s police appeal page to see if it had been updated, which it had not.
A voice in my head reassured me that so long as there was no mention of Donna’s disappearance in the press, the less we all had to worry about her. But I felt increasingly on edge. My foot was tapping softly on the floor and I was helpless to stop it. I knew that my conversation with Tom Briscoe had not helped matters. In fact, he had angered me with his talk of victims and reputation-management lawyers, his insensitive implication that Martin was somehow involved in his wife’s disappearance.
Coffee would help me think, but I knew it was the last thing I needed.
Instead, I went upstairs into my tiny en suite and opened the bathroom cabinet, where a white pot of pills sat next to my dental floss and contraceptives.
When I had gone to see Dr Katz a couple of weeks earlier, he had given me some additional medication. I was loath to take it at the time, but I knew that I needed something to calm me down now. Manic episodes frightened me even more than depressive ones. I was someone who liked to be in control, and I had ordered my life in an effort to keep tight hold of the reins. But over the past couple of days I had felt the gremlins in my head coming to life again.
Tipping back my head, I swallowed the pills then looked at my reflection in the mirror. I was pale and sad-looking. My lips were dry, my tired eyes were rimmed with pink, my skin blotchy in the harsh brightness of the overhead light.
Everything about my appearance screamed nervous exhaustion. I was desperate for sleep, but I knew that was not an option. The only thing that could calm my restlessness was reassurance from Martin.
I moved through to the bedroom and sat on the end of the bed, which only served to make me more anxious. I needed to be out there, fixing things, not eating Pot Noodles and sitting in the dark.
I found myself wishing that I had a car. I didn’t have one. Never had. By the time I could afford one, it felt like an unnecessary luxury. But now I felt as if a car, a tiny peppermint Fiat, or some other such girl-about-town vehicle, might give me wings. My mobile phone, in my jeans pocket and pressing into my thigh, reminded me that a solution was only a phone call away.
I called the taxi and didn’t hesitate before ringing Martin. It went straight to voicemail and I left a message, willing myself to stay calm. Zig-zagging the room, I took off my T-shirt, found a bra, and picked a white shirt from the wardrobe. Slipping my arms into the crisp sleeves of a clean shirt always empowered me, and tonight was no exception.
I waited in the hallway until the taxi arrived.
London was still buzzing as we slipped through the streets. As I stared out of the window, watching Angel bleed into the fashionable East End, I envied what I saw. Twenty-somethings on carefree nights out, their blithe, intoxicated joy reminding me of my own pleasure just hours earlier that day. But a switch had been flipped, a change in our universe had taken place, and a Greek chorus in my head warned me that I was wrong to be here. In a cab, hurtling towards Spitalfields at one o’clock in the morning, when Martin hadn’t even replied to my calls.
It took twenty minutes to arrive at the W.H. Miller warehouse. There was no sign of any police car or ‘unmarked vehicle’ outside Martin’s apartment block, which relieved me. I paid the cabbie and got out of the car. Nerves prickled round my body. Three men with elaborate beards laughed as they came out of a nearby bar, startling me.
The cab trundled off into the distance and the fashionable trio disappeared into the dark, leaving me alone. I walked across the cobblestones towards the warehouse. There was a tree outside I hadn’t noticed before; thin, black, spindly. I rested the palm of my hand on its trunk as I looked up to the top floor. There was a faint glow from one of the windows, a sign of life that steeled me to call Martin again.
This time he answered.
‘It’s me,’ I said, trying to tone down the urgency in my voice. ‘The police. Have they gone?’
‘Yes. Did you speak to your lawyer friend?’
‘Yes. He was helpful.’ My voice shook, I was shivering so hard from the cold.
‘You’d better come up.’
Waiting for the lift, I looked up at the atrium ceiling, noticing that it went all the way up to the roof, as if it had been scooped out of the brickwork and metal. As the lift door opened, sound rattled all the way to the rafters, loud at first, disappearing to a soft echo as it rippled upwards.
Martin was holding a tumbler of Scotch when he opened the door. He tossed it back and barely looked at me.
‘I had to come. I’m sorry,’ I said, trying to read the expression on his face.
I stopped myself. I didn’t know why I was apologizing.
‘I should have called,’ he said, putting his drink down on the table. ‘It was all just a bit stressful. The police were here longer than I expected.’
The room was dark, the only light coming from a floor lamp in the corner.
Martin moved restlessly around the room like a cat, his stockinged feet sliding silently across the parquet.
‘She’s still not turned up,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘So what did the police want from you?’
‘Details about Monday night. What time I went home. When I got there. Whether anyone could give me an alibi for that.’
‘You know a hundred and fifty thousand people go missing each year. That’s 0.05 per cent of the population,’ I said, trying to make him feel better.
‘Been on Google?’ he replied. There was a sourness to his tone that I didn’t like.
‘I’m trying to help,’ I said, reminding myself how stressed he must be feeling.
He sank on the sofa and put his head in his hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking up and stretching his hand out for me to take it.
I sat next to him on the sofa. Our thighs touched but I wanted to get closer.
‘Our marriage might not have worked, sometimes I don’t even think I like Donna any more, but this …’
‘What did you tell them?’ I asked quietly.
‘I left at one. Out of the front door. I don’t think she locked it behind me because I left her upstairs.’
I found it difficult to concentrate. It didn’t seem like the time to ask him, why, if he didn’t like Donna, had he fucked her? And there were inconsistencies in his story. He’d told me that he’d left Donna’s at midnight, not one o’clock in the morning.
‘They even asked me about this bloody cut on my hand.’
The one I had noticed in the oyster shed.
‘What did you say?’
‘I fell off my bike.’
‘Did you?’ I challenged.
‘Yes,’ he replied with irritation.
‘So, why are they so worried about her when she has a track record of going away, visiting friends …?’
‘No one knows where she is. She has an Instagram account she uses a lot, posting pictures of parties, her artwork, but that hasn’t been used since Monday.’
‘It’s not much to go on,’ I said sympathetically.
‘Tomorrow they’re searching her house again. Specialist officers, apparently. Cadaver dogs.’
‘And the police told you all this?’
We looked at each other and we both knew what they would find. His hair in the sink, his semen on the sheets. I looked away and tried not to think about the finer details.
‘What about the appeal?’
‘We’re filming it tomorrow afternoon to go out later that night. The police think I should speak. I should definitely be there. With her family.’
‘You should speak to a lawyer before you do anything. You need to tread carefully.’
‘What did your colleague say?’ he asked after another moment.
‘Tom?’
Martin looked at me. ‘You were there long enough.’
I heard jealousy in his voice, and I liked it.
‘He’s recommended a couple of lawyers. You should speak to Matthew Clarkson before you talk to the police again. Robert Kelly keeps things out of the press,’ I said, giving him the phone numbers that Tom had written down.
‘Keeps what things out of the press?’
‘Speculation. The press have to report things very carefully these days, but sometimes insinuation gets through the net.’
I heard him make a soft exhalation of breath.
‘This is mad,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘All I did was go to her house. Our house.’
I nodded, with a sense of shame and disappointment.
I thought about that Monday night when I had followed Donna to the restaurant, and then with Martin to her house. I could picture myself in the pub across the road. But my recollections beyond the first couple of drinks were as clear as they had been when I had woken up on Pete’s sofa. At the time, I was embarrassed at the whole sorry episode, ashamed that I had blacked out and woken up with ripped tights and bloody legs, but now I was angry that I had no fragments of memory that could help Martin.
Had I not been so drunk, I might have known the exact time that Martin left Donna’s house. I might have seen the front door fly dangerously open; I might have even gone across the road and closed it.
‘What do they think has happened to her?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Martin, his voice barely audible.
‘Well, let’s think about it,’ I said as coolly as I could. ‘Perhaps she’s OK,’ I added after a moment’s thought. ‘Perhaps she’s at a spa or a friend’s, or she’s in John O’Groats or Land’s End and hasn’t thought to call, or has thought about calling but hasn’t bothered because she wants to scare you shitless.’
‘And perhaps she’s not OK,’ said Martin, meeting my gaze and holding it.
‘It’s a possibility.’ I nodded. ‘Maybe she got up after you’d left and came after you,’ I said, my mind racing through the myriad of options. ‘The streets are dark at that time, empty. There are drunk drivers on the road. She could have been knocked down, a hit-and-run, and someone panicked.’
‘We can’t think like that.’
‘We have to,’ I said, feeling my eyes widen. ‘Donna has been missing for five days and the police are interviewing you. She also could have been hurt in some way. Assaulted.’
Martin let out a sound, a low, guttural moan of the wounded, and when he looked up there was so much pain in his eyes I didn’t know where to look.
‘I know this is hard, but you’re going to have to toughen up, right now.’
He stood up and paced the grey rug slowly as if his mind was in torment. When he looked back at me, it was as if he had come to a decision.
‘Look, I’m tired. I need to get some sleep. There’s nothing we can do now.’
His body language had become instantly defensive and I knew what he was saying.
‘I should go,’ I said softly.
‘Do you mind?’
I didn’t say anything, simply stood up and picked up my bag. I’d been dismissed and I couldn’t help feeling piqued.
‘With the police coming here, and Donna being missing, I just think … I just think we probably shouldn’t see each other for a few days.’
I knew what he was saying made sense, but as I looked at him and our eyes locked, for a fleeting moment, I hated him.