Paradise City (33 page)

‘. . . so perhaps we could start by asking whether she knew anybody living in the Wandsworth area?’

Howard snaps to. ‘What?’

‘Wandsworth,’ the taller detective says. ‘Did Ada have friends there that you know of?’

Howard shakes his head. ‘No.’

‘You sure about that? She never mentioned anyone she went to visit there or who might have had family in that area?’

He makes an effort to think back. He can’t remember.

‘She used to go to a ballet class as a kid,’ he starts, desperately trying to come up with something. ‘In Clapham. That’s near Wandsworth, isn’t it? I mean, she might have had a friend from there but it’s not like it was ever a big factor in our conversations.’

Both the detectives nod. One of them makes a note of this on a pad of lined paper.

‘What age would she have been then?’

Howard laughs. He can’t help it. It’s so ridiculous to think a ballet class from twenty-odd years ago would have had any bearing on her disappearance.

‘Christ. About eight or nine. I dunno. I can’t really see that this has any relevance.’

‘Can you remember any of her friends’ names?’

‘No! Of course I sodding can’t.’

‘Would your ex-wife be able . . .’

‘Why don’t you ask her?’

‘We intend to, Sir Howard. I’m sorry if this is painful for you.’

He tries to stop the irritation sweeping over him.

‘It’s not painful. It’s a bloody nuisance. I can’t understand why you’re dredging all this up again . . .’ The detectives lower their heads, saying nothing. He chokes back a gust of emotion.

‘If this is going to take as long as I think it’s going to, I need a coffee.’ Howard stands up and shuffles to the door. His muscles are drained of strength. He closes the door behind him and stands in the dim, soothing hallway for a few seconds, forcing himself to breathe deeply. The intake of air helps him think more clearly. Yes, he nods to himself. That’s what he’ll do. He will answer their questions and then a kind of normality will resume. It is a temporary but necessary interlude, he tells himself. A transient period of aggravation, and then he will be able to get on with things. The business. The house. His marriage. All of it still exists.

He goes in search of Theresa to ask her to make the coffee. There’s nothing to worry about, he tells himself, and even as he forms the thought, he knows it not to be true.

Esme

Esme is woken by the beeping of her mobile in the middle of a frantic dream about empty swimming pools. It’s a text from Cathy in the office congratulating her on the piece, which is nice of her. Most of the time, her colleagues pretend they haven’t read her stuff. It’s a discreet form of competitiveness, tinged with the ever-present journalists’ paranoia.

She knows she won’t be able to get back to sleep without first buying a copy of the paper just so she can check the subs haven’t messed it up. Esme rolls out of bed, groaning and pressing the heel of her hand to her forehead. She’d had one too many glasses of Pinot Grigio last night at the pub after work. But it had been Sanjay’s birthday and she’d felt pretty good about the Howard Pink piece, especially after the editor of the paper sent her an email praising her ‘doggedness’ in getting the interview. She didn’t tell him it had basically been handed to her on a plate. It didn’t do any harm to make the boss think she was a reporter in relentless pursuit of the truth.

Esme stumbles into a pair of jeans which she slides on over her pyjama bottoms. No point getting properly dressed. She’ll go back to bed after she’s made the dash to the corner store. She runs her tongue over fuzzy teeth, goes to the bathroom, squeezes a globule of toothpaste onto her index finger and shoves it in her mouth. She grabs her parka, hanging on the hook in the kitchen, stuffs her keys in the pocket and slams the door. Esme has found that, whenever she has a good story in the paper, she is possessed of a crazed energy, consisting of 50 per cent panic (that someone might complain about a factual inaccuracy) and 50 per cent pride (that it might be the seminal piece of journalism that would make her name for evermore).

She turns right onto St Stephen’s Avenue and onto the Uxbridge Road, which is just rousing itself from whatever nefarious activities might have taken place there the night before. There is a dirt and illicitness to this part of town. It is part of what had first attracted Esme to the area – the mixture of estates and terraced houses, of burqas and business suits.

In Shepherd’s Bush, there was none of that pram-pushing prissiness of Clapham or Battersea. Despite the inroads of gentrification, there was still a lazy, sideways knowingness apparent in every slow, squint-eyed nod through a haze of marijuana smoke, in each pair of trainers slung across telegraph wire, in the cars with missing hubcaps and blacked-out windows that swept along the tarmac trailed by a hip-hop number’s jabbing bass lines.

But it was a manageable edginess, offset by the earnest-faced media executives who went to work each day in White City and the dreadlocked woman strung with Indian beads who ran the organic café serving gluten-free pistachio cake. Beyond it all, glinting on the far horizon, there was the newly built paean to consumerist excess: the squat, shining quadrant of the Westfield Centre. Esme had overheard a local estate agent telling someone that the construction of London’s newest super-mall had added 15 per cent on to all surrounding house prices. Which would be great, obviously, if she actually owned her flat.

Fat chance, she thinks, as she rushes up to Damas Gate, the local grocery store run by bearded Arab men. They don’t stock newspapers but she is overwhelmed by a craving for one of their light filo pastry rolls, stuffed with tangy cheese. Perfect hangover fodder. She’ll go there first, then pop to the newsagent’s.

Esme doesn’t allow herself to open her copy of the
Tribune
until she gets back to her flat, puts the kettle on and places it carefully on the fold-out table. There is a photo of Sir Howard on the front page, underneath the pull quote: ‘I’ll never get over it.’ Inside, the interview appears across three pages, complete with pictures of Ada at various stages of her childhood: in a tutu with sparkles in her hair, riding a horse on a beach, wearing a pink wig for a fancy dress party. There is one image of Ada as a teenager, clutching a diploma of some sort, arm-in-arm with her father who is beaming with pride. They look so happy together, with their matching smiles. Esme has never noticed before how similar they are.

She scans the headline, splashed across the top of the spread in 72-point: ‘The Light of My Life’, it says. The word ‘EXCLUSIVE’ is prominently displayed in capitals before the stand-first, which reads: ‘Ada Pink was 19 when she disappeared without trace. Her father, multi-millionaire Sir Howard Pink, has never spoken about her loss – until now. Today, he tells the
Tribune’s
Esme Reade why he’ll “never get over it” and why he’s set up a charitable foundation in her memory.’

Her name is picked out in bold and there is a small picture byline of her. It was a photo taken at the end of her first week in the office and, every time she looks at it, she hates it that little bit more. Her hair is scraped back off her face. Her mouth is twisted to one side which always happens when she’s been fake-smiling for too long. The photographer had told her to grimace less and Esme had tried to go for a ‘serious journalist’ expression.

‘OK. Just relax your jaw a bit,’ the photographer had said.

She hadn’t a clue how you were meant to relax your jaw. Wasn’t it made up entirely of bone? How do you relax your bones? She had tried her best.

‘Now you look like you want to kill me.’

Esme had gritted her teeth, then remembered she was meant to be relaxing her jaw. By the end of it, she was just glad she’d got through it without slapping the photographer in the face.

She was for ever being told by random strangers, to ‘Cheer up, love,’ as she walked down the street. Whenever it happened, she was seized by the desire to tell them something unimaginably awful had just occurred – the death of a close relative, a friend’s tragic diagnosis with some terminal disease – but she could never quite find the courage. It is one of the things she most dislikes about herself: the fatal gap between her righteous anger and the means required to express it. Men didn’t have this problem.

And now, because she meekly stayed silent, because she had been too worried to complain in case anyone thought she was being a diva, she’s stuck with this byline picture and every time Esme sees it, she imagines all her ex-boyfriends looking at it and thinking: Well, she’s let herself go, hasn’t she?

The kettle boils and Esme makes herself a cup of milky tea, then retreats back into her bed with the mug and her filo pastry roll. She spreads the paper out in front of her and reads the first paragraph.

‘Sir Howard Pink has never spoken publicly about his daughter before,’ the introduction kicks off. She’d wanted to start with the chocolate Bourbons, but Dave had snarled at the thought of it.

‘It’s not poetry, Esme, for fuck’s sake. Keep it simple, play it straight. This isn’t about you showing what a clever writer you are. This is about Howard Pink and his missing daughter.’

Esme had gone back and bitched to a receptive Sanjay about how no one understood the subtlety of her prose style. Then she’d sat down at her computer and changed the intro. Because of course Dave was right. Howard’s story told itself. It didn’t need her to interpose herself into the quotes. She hated journalists who made interviews all about themselves, starting each new paragraph with a personal pronoun.

She sips her tea and reads rapidly to the end of the piece. Esme thinks it flows well and there have only been a few minor editorial changes. She’s pleased that Dave put a mention of the charitable foundation in the stand-first and thinks that should mollify Howard’s people, even though she hasn’t mentioned it till three-quarters of the way down the page.

Her phone beeps again. Leaning over to retrieve it from the bedside table, she opens the text and feels a jolt when she sees Dave’s name. ‘Great job, Esme xx’ it says. She smiles.

The kisses do not escape her notice.

She puts the phone back, folds the paper carefully and swipes the filo pastry crumbs off the duvet. She is aware of a tiredness slipping across her sight-line, the grey-white colour of pigeon feathers, and she lies down. She feels her head touch the reassuring heft of the memory foam pillow (an absurdly expensive purchase forced on her by a recurrence of neck and shoulder pain from too much time spent crouched over a keyboard. She’d been half-tempted to claim it back on expenses). But then, just as Esme is about to drift into a satisfied, easy sleep, her phone rings and she is awake, instantly, her heart racing. Was it work? A complaint? Some monumental fuck-up she hadn’t noticed, like the accidental misspelling of Howard Pink’s name? She checks the screen. ‘Unknown number’ flashes up sinisterly. For some reason she can’t fathom, every time she sees an ‘Unknown number’ she is certain she is about to be told off.

‘Hello,’ she says croakily.

‘Oh darling, you sound dreadful.’ Lilian’s voice pulses through the telephone wires, deep into Esme’s eardrum. She keeps forgetting that her mother has somehow worked out how to disguise her caller ID. It’s a fiendishly clever ploy, Esme suspects, to get her children to answer the phone to her.

‘No, I’m fine. I’ve just—’ Esme pauses, unsure whether she wants to admit she’s still in bed. To do so would be to endure the usual five-minute speech on the importance of getting up and getting going and not wasting the day – or, by implication, your entire life – by submitting to the sinful temptations of sloth and indolence. Bugger it, Esme thinks. I’ve earned a lie-in. ‘I’ve just got up.’

There is the unmistakable sound of an intake of breath.

‘Oh, right. I’m sorry, darling. I just thought at this time of day, you’d already be up and at ’em!’

Lilian is the product of Army parents. Her father, a retired brigadier, used to insist his wife measured the exact distance between the rim of a china plate and the edge of the table every time they had a dinner party. He was the kind of man who called everything ‘ship-shape’, who claimed that strong tea ‘put hairs on your chest’ and who ended every declamatory sentence with a sharp, upwardly inflected ‘what’ which wasn’t ever a question. He had died shortly after Robbie was born but Lilian still retained the odd conversational tick from the late brigadier. ‘Up and at ’em’ was definitely one of them.

Esme doesn’t respond. Lilian carries on regardless.

‘You know Grandma always used to get up at 5.30 on the dot, rain or shine, because she always said she got so much done in the mornings before everyone else woke up! And Margaret Thatcher—’

‘Survived on four hours sleep a night, yes, Mum, I know. But I’ve had a busy week. I’ve actually got a big piece in—’

‘I know! I’ve seen it, darling. Very impressive. Gosh, what a lot of words you write.’

Esme is caught between feeling touched that her mother has made the effort to read a paper she wouldn’t normally buy and irritation that the only thing she can think to compliment her daughter on is the amount of words rather than their lyrical quality. She bites her lip.

‘Thanks, Mum.’

‘So depressing though. Poor man. I must say, I do feel for him. I always thought he seemed rather brash, you know. He was on that programme once, wasn’t he? What’s it called? The one with the politicians –’