Chapter Twenty-Six

‘Not a chance, Maddie. I don’t care what excuse he might come up with.’ Jess looked at her watch. ‘And what’s more it’s almost four o’clock, we’ll be going in soon.’ She shuffled in her chair, moved her hair back from her face and sipped at the glass of water. ‘How much of this do I have to drink?’

Maddie turned and smiled. ‘You need to drink all of it.’ She pointed to the jug, just as a heavily pregnant woman walked into the room, sat down, crossed her legs and then thought better of it and uncrossed them.

‘You here for a scan, my darling?’ she asked as she dug around in her handbag, pulled out a tissue and noisily blew her nose.

Jess nodded politely. ‘Ten weeks, how about you?’

‘Ha ha, really, wow, you’re barely pregnant.’ She laughed at her own words. ‘I’m thirty-six weeks, love, about to pop. Is it your first?’ The woman was huge.

Jess answered, ‘Yes, my first.’

The woman nodded. ‘You wait till you’ve got six of the little buggers, like me. Then you’ll know about it.’ She laughed, picked up a magazine and began flicking through the pages. ‘See this magazine?’ She looked up at Jess. ‘No way I’d get time to look at this at home, always one of them wanting my damned attention. Can’t even go to the bloody toilet on my own.’ She turned back to the magazine and continued to read.

Madeleine moved closer to her sister and whispered, ‘Now, if that doesn’t put you off having six of them, I don’t know what will.’ She pursed her lips and both sisters tried not to giggle.

Then Jess’s expression turned serious again. ‘Maddie, Jack promised. He said he’d be here.’ She allowed the toe of her boot to graze the edge of the table that was littered with newspapers, magazines and empty Styrofoam coffee cups. ‘He said he’d be here today. What kind of a father will he be if he can’t even do that?’ She knew she was being unfair. Jack would be an amazing father. She looked over her shoulder in the hope that she’d see him, running in through the main door, bunches of flowers in his arms and that cheeky half smile that normally crossed his face when he’d done something wrong.

‘Jess, you said it yourself, Jack doesn’t do this,’ Maddie replied. ‘He never just disappears and, what’s more, even if you two have had a spat, he always turns up.’ Her hand rested on Jess’s knee. ‘Come on, sis, we haven’t seen him, his mother hasn’t seen him, his friends haven’t seen him … don’t you think it’s all a bit odd?’ She stood up and hovered over where Jess sat. ‘Honey, most people would wait, but with our history, someone disappearing concerns me. Don’t you think we should report him as missing, go look for him or something?’

Jess stared at the sanitised flooring of the waiting room, looked up at the signage and once again read the word, ‘Ultrasound’ that was etched into the glass partition. She watched as a doctor entered the room, shouted a name and the heavily pregnant woman stood up and left.

She glanced down at the newspapers and began to read the headlines. A man was missing, another had been attacked with a hammer and a woman had been given a record insurance pay out when her husband had been killed doing his job. One headline after the other spun around in her mind, ‘attacked, killed, missing … attacked, killed, missing.’

‘Oh my God, Maddie, you really think he could be missing?’ Her breathing suddenly became short and sharp. She leaned forward to grab hold of the edge of her chair. ‘What if …’ Jess turned and grabbed Madeleine’s hand. ‘… what if he’s been hurt? What if he crashed his car, you hear of it don’t you, buried in the undergrowth for days on end, while he dies because no one found him.’

‘Jess, you need to drink.’ She felt the glass being pushed back into her hand.

‘Maddie, we have to start looking for him, don’t we?’

Madeleine nodded. ‘It really is unlike him, I’ve never known him to be late for anything, and I know it’s not been long, but we both know that Jack would never willingly miss this scan and seeing his baby for the first time. I do think we have to consider that something must have happened to make him late. But you can put the car crash idea out of your mind. If he’d crashed his car, the police would have come to you, to the Hall, it’s where Jack is registered as living.’ She gave Jess’s leg a reassuring pat. ‘After the scan, I’ll phone around again. I’ll make sure he hasn’t turned up at his mother’s and then, let’s say he hasn’t turned up by …’ She paused and thought. ‘… say six o’clock tonight, that’d be three hours after we’d expected him, that’s when we’ll phone the police. That will have given him loads of time to get in touch, wouldn’t it?’

Jess nodded. ‘But they’ll think we’re nuts. He could have just gone to the shops and lost track of time. Do you think we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves?’ She smiled and tried to convince herself that all this was true. ‘Besides, would they respond that quickly?’

Madeleine sighed. ‘I don’t know, hun, normally with an adult, they’d wait until someone has been missing for at least a day, but with what’s happened in our past, they’d expect us to worry and I’d hope they’d respond quickly. After all, I’d only been missing a couple of hours last year, but if they hadn’t come when Bandit had rung them, Liam would have killed me. It was all down to their fast response that I’m still here.’ She squeezed Jess’s hand. ‘But, first and foremost, we need to get into this appointment, see that your baby is doing okay in there and then, we need to get back to the Hall.’ She looked at her watch. ‘We should be back by five, half past at the latest, which gives us time to look for Jack ourselves before we even think about the police.’ She began to rummage in her bag. ‘Here,’ she said as she passed an old white envelope and a pen to Jess, ‘start making a list. Let’s write down the names of his friends, his associates, of places he normally goes to on a daily, weekly or annual basis. Favourite pubs, gyms, or shops and, if you know it off the top of your head, his mobile number.’ Jess watched as she moved into action. ‘Actually forget that, I have his mobile number.’

Both sisters locked eyes in a determined stare. ‘He won’t be far, Jess. I promise you, we will find him.’