Paradise City (32 page)

And on the night itself, he remembers walking in halfway through the film, anxious about how she was getting on, and as he opened the door the light from the corridor spooled into the darkened screening room.

‘Dad, what are you doing?’ Ada asked.

‘Just checking you have everything you need, sweetheart.’

‘We’re fine,’ she said and he couldn’t see her expression to make out whether she was annoyed with him or embarrassed or – worse – sad. But then she stood up and walked over to him, teetering slightly in unfamiliar high heels, and she hugged him, kissing his bristly cheek. She had sprayed herself with Penny’s bottle of Opium and the scent seemed too heavy, too grown-up for his little girl.

‘Don’t worry, Dad.’

She smiled as she said it but the smile didn’t feel real, it felt like the wrapping paper on a disappointing gift that buckled and sagged at the edges as the sticking tape worked itself loose.

He glanced over at the group of teenagers behind her shoulder – two boys and three girls – and they all seemed fresh-faced and sensible. Too sensible, a part of him thought, like a thunderclap waiting to break. He patted Ada’s back and, as she turned away from him and walked back to her chair, he felt he was losing her in some indefinable way.

She had been trying – he can see that now. She had been trying to reassure him when, by rights, it should have been the other way round.

He hasn’t watched the film since she disappeared but now he is taken by the desire to do so. He has the DVD somewhere at home. He could get the housekeeper to set up the projector and settle down to watch it with a brandy. He thinks he could probably remember every single word.

There is a rousing cheer from outside. On the small, wall-mounted TV screen above Mike’s head, Howard can see a jockey in purple-and-yellow silks being sprayed with Champagne. The waiters have taken away the starters. A light scatter of breadcrumbs marks the place where his plate was. The tablecloth, like every tablecloth he has sat down to over the last twenty years, is starched white linen. He is sick of starched white linen. It is meant to represent freshness and yet leaves him depressed with its soulless, ironed aridity. Whatever happened to red-and-white gingham?

He needs to go home. He doesn’t fit in here. Never has. The things that used to bring him joy now only seem to irritate him. He can’t even take pleasure in the trappings of wealth, those trivial baubles he had spent a lifetime in pursuit of. He used to think, when he was starting out, that he’d know he’d truly made it when he had earned enough money to be able to waste it. Howard was at that level now, but instead of wanting to acquire more, he finds himself wanting instead to strip it all back. He craves a kind of honesty, an authenticity he has lost along the way without even noticing it was happening.

He thinks of Beatrice Kizza, of her serious face, her defiance, her plain-spoken determination and he wonders if the reason he gave her a job had something to do with the fact that he saw himself as he used to be.

He wonders how Beatrice’s first week at work went. Howard must ask Tracy how his new correspondence secretary is getting on. He takes out his BlackBerry from the inside of his jacket pocket and checks it ostentatiously.

‘Christ,’ he says, just loud enough so that Mike can hear.

‘Not bad news, I hope?’

‘Sorry, Mike, I’m going to have to make a call,’ Howard says, laying the ground for his exit carefully. ‘Bloody nuisance.’

‘Of course, of course. Please—’ Mike opens the door to the box and leads Howard into the corridor before retreating. ‘Take your time.’

Inside the enclosure, Howard can hear the wild screams of drunken Essex girls on a day out at the races. He peers over the barrier into the cavernous levels below and makes out a mish-mash of cerise dresses, fake tan and teetering stripper-style shoes. He spots more than a dozen race-goers in Fash Attack outfits. They’d been stocking a deep purple peplum dress in satin that was selling well and he sees it more than once on women of varying size and shape which is a good sign: he doesn’t like to stock fashion that’s just for skinny minnies.

He lifts the BlackBerry to his ear, dials 121 and gets through to the automated voice telling him there are no new messages. Just in case anyone is still watching, he makes a show of listening intently, as though someone is imparting crucial news. After a sufficient amount of time has passed, he places the phone back into his jacket pocket, stretches out his arms wide, takes a breath and walks back inside the box. He walks straight up to Mike with what he hopes is an expression of sincere but inescapable regret on his face.

‘I’m really sorry, Mike,’ he starts, resting his hand lightly on the man’s arm. ‘I’m going to have to shoot off. Something’s come up at work, you know how it is.’

Mike looks at him gravely. ‘Of course, of course. No need to explain, Howard. These things happen. No rest for the wicked, eh?’

Howard laughs obligingly. ‘You’re right there. But I’m really sorry. I was hoping to make a few quid with your expert advice.’

‘Well. Another time, perhaps?’

Howard nods. ‘And listen, we must get together for dinner. You, me and the girls, yeah?’ He is backing towards the exit even as he is saying this. Howard hopes Mike hasn’t noticed that he can’t remember the name of his wife. He leans close into Claudia’s ear and tells her they need to go. She looks at him sharply, eyes glinting.

‘Why?’ she hisses.

He grits his teeth. ‘Something’s come up, sweetheart.’

Howard notices the man with the moustache glancing at him with suspicion and leans in further to block his view. He can’t stand nosiness.

‘I don’t want to go, Howie,’ Claudia says and although she uses the affectionate diminutive of his name, her face is rigid. ‘You go ahead without me.’

‘How will you get back?’ He speaks in a low murmur. He doesn’t want there to be a scene.

‘You can send Jocelyn back with the car. He won’t mind.’ She leans away from him and snaps a tip off a cheese straw. He can smell Coco Mademoiselle and Elnett hairspray. ‘Go on. Off you toddle. I’ll see you later.’ She pats him on the hand without making eye contact. He straightens up, grins broadly and does all he can to mask his fury. She really can be a complete bitch sometimes.

‘OK, pusscat,’ he says loudly. ‘Try not to lose all my money on the horses.’

She throws him a dirty look, then turns towards the moustached man with an expression of flirtatious intent. As he walks out of the box, Howard can see her propping her chin on her hand, the better to show off her impressive décolletage. The older she gets, the more she insists on wearing dresses with near-indecent necklines. The skin on her lower neck is sun-damaged and pinched, like a basted turkey. Her breasts, however, remain impressively pneumatic, owing to the judicious insertion of silicone through the years. The last time he touched them, which is going back a good few months, Howard had been put off by the preternatural sensation – they felt somewhere between springy and unyielding, like a new mattress yet to be worn in. In the past, he’d always imagined fake tits would turn him on. But that was before Claudia had got hers done and he’d realised, like so many other things, that the imagined promise did not live up to the actuality.

Anyway, the man she’s talking to now doesn’t seem to be unduly put off. He keeps flicking his eyes downwards then mentally reminding himself he’s meant to be listening to whatever guff Claudia is spouting. Howard feels a flash of fellow recognition. Then, before he has a chance to change his mind, he leaves the box and calls Jocelyn. He’ll be home within the hour, he thinks with relief.

In the back of the car, leaning against the sleekness of leather, he drops his head against the upholstery and allows his neck muscles to relax. It’s only as Jocelyn is speeding up the A3 that he remembers – his top hat. The waiter took it. It must still be in some cloakroom cupboard at Ascot. Bugger, he thinks. He can’t be arsed to deal with it now. He’ll get Jocelyn to collect it when he gathers up the remnants of a drunken Claudia later.

His phone rings. The caller ID is withheld. He never seems to get phone calls from actual numbers these days.

‘Yep,’ he says in place of a greeting.

He recognises the small foreign voice immediately as that of his housekeeper.

‘Sir Howard, it’s Theresa here.’

‘Hi Theresa. What’s up?’

‘There are two men here who desire to talk to you.’

He admires the way Theresa uses language like she’s in a period drama. She’s very correct.

‘What do they want?’

‘They will not tell me. But they say it is a matter of some urgency. I’ve told them we are not expecting you back for quite some time . . .’

‘It’s OK, Theresa. I’m on my way back now. Tell them to wait and I’ll be there in an hour or so if the traffic stays like this.’

‘Very good, Sir Howard.’

He hangs up. Immediately, he is anxious. Two men. Howard thinks straight away of bailiffs which he knows is ridiculous. He might be many things, he tells himself, but short of money is not one of them. The bad old days are long gone. The last time he opened the door to bailiffs, he’d been nine years old. He presses the button to lower the partition between him and the driver and he tells Jocelyn to get him home as quickly as possible. Whoever they are, Howard doesn’t want to keep them waiting longer than he has to.

Jocelyn gets him home in just over forty-five minutes. Howard pats the driver on the back as he walks up the pathway to his front door. He washes his hands and splashes his face with cool water in one of the downstairs bathrooms before Theresa leads him through to the drawing room where the two men are waiting. As soon as he sees them, he knows why they are here. They are both wearing nondescript suits and name-badges, strung around their necks with blue-and-white lariats. He has seen enough police detectives to spot the signs.

A coiled knot of dread starts to slip loose just beneath his solar plexus. He walks into the room feeling dizzy and lost. The two policemen stand up simultaneously, one of them knocking the coffee table so that the glass of water he is drinking jingles and clatters. Before either of them has a chance to say anything, Howard speaks.

‘It’s Ada, isn’t it? My daughter?’

One of the policemen, the taller one, holds out his hand, the palm flat as though he is trying to push a block of solidified air away from his chest. ‘Sir Howard, I’m—’

Howard shakes his head. ‘I don’t want to know what your name is. I want to know what you’ve found out. Why are you here? Have you found her? Have you found Ada?’ He can hear the unnatural pitch of his own voice.

‘No,’ the detective says but there is an uneasiness to his reply, an edginess that Howard notes immediately. In business meetings, one of his talents is being able to laser through the rubbish and get to what is really being said underneath the layers of subtext. He can smell bullshit a mile off.

‘We’re here because we’re doing a routine review of some of our missing-persons files and we had some questions about your daughter,’ the detective continues. ‘About Ada. If we could just sit down . . . ?’

Howard nods and takes a seat in the armchair near the unlit fire. He feels at once both relieved and devastated. He isn’t sure any more whether it would be better to know for definite what had happened to Ada and to live with the consequences of that, or whether the torture of not knowing is worth coping with simply so that he can continue believing in the possibility that she is still alive. Which one of these would make him a better parent, a better person? Which one of these is right?

The shorter man looks up at Howard.

‘I know you will have been asked a lot of these questions before, Sir Howard, but if you could bear with us, we might just hit on something that could help us look at this case with fresh eyes.’

Howard nods defeatedly. Over the years, he had grown used to having his personal grief probed and trampled over, his emotions treated like interesting artefacts revealed to the light by enthusiastic archaeologists who kept returning to the same site over and over again. He had thought nothing could be worse than rehashing the same facts, coming to the same inevitably hopeless conclusion, watching the realisation dawn on the face of whichever wet-behind-the-ears policeman they’d sent to him this time around. But just when he thought they would never stop with their earnest chatter, the curiously generic attempts at informal patter (perhaps they all went on the same police training course on How to Deal with Grieving Parents), Howard discovered there was something worse than being asked endless questions. And that was being asked none. The case had slipped downwards through the police files and computer databases, spiralling from the clamour of ‘urgent’ into the silent limbo of ‘unsolvable’. They’d stopped knocking on his door. The phone calls had ceased. The newspaper stories were stashed away in cuttings files, to be accessed every few years or so by a diligent reporter. The picture of Ada they’d used in all the media coverage – big eyes, pale face, staring out from her university ID card – became the fossilised version of her, the imprint left on the public mind, until, many years later, it was at last superimposed by the image of a blonde-haired toddler called Madeleine, the new tabloid poster girl for those missing without trace.

The picture of Ada had been reprinted so many times that, for a while, Howard found that all his own memories were overlaid by this static, haunting face. He closes his eyes tightly now, while listening to the detective’s familiar spiel, and he sees it again: the disembodied Ada, her gaze accusing him of something he’d never known he’d done wrong.