Precious Thing (17 page)

I typed in the password and clicked on the compose button.

In the address field I wrote: [email protected]

And then:

Dear Sir,

At 67 my eyesight is certainly not what it was. However I am convinced I have just seen your reporter Richard Goldman fiddle with his penis during his report on the one o’clock news. I’m hoping this kind of behaviour is not encouraged at NNN. I have always enjoyed watching your news programmes but I’m not beyond defecting to the other side.

Yours,

Jean Beattie

I read it once over before hitting the send button.

Thirty-two minutes later a response dropped into Jean’s inbox.

Dear Mrs Beattie,

Thank you for your e-mail. I have looked at the report in question and although his hand does quite clearly appear to sit in that general area I doubt it was for the purpose you mentioned. Please accept my apologies if this offended you in any way. Rest assured I will be talking to the reporter in question to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

I hope you continue to enjoy our news coverage.

Regards,

Robbie Fenton

News Editor

I gave it ten minutes before I sauntered up to Robbie’s desk, the taste of freshly applied lip gloss in my mouth, ready to execute the next part of my plan to get Richard off the story.

I saw him look up.

‘Nice package from Richard at lunchtime,’ I said without a trace of irony.

He mumbled something under his breath. ‘Everyone else was busy.’ I took a step to move away and then turned as if I had just remembered something.

‘I met Amber Corrigan the other day,’ I said. His features screwed up as he struggled to put a face to the name. ‘The girl from the press conference,’ I reminded him.

‘Ah … her,’ he said. ‘Will she talk?’

‘I doubt it,’ I said, ‘she was only speaking to me as Clara’s friend. She’s told everyone else to get lost.’

‘I see,’ Robbie said, stroking the stubble on his chin, ‘I see.’

And I knew he did.

The idea formed in my head a little later in the afternoon. At first I thought it was too cruel but I told myself he’d only fall for it if he was as ego driven as he’d led me to believe. And, I reasoned, if that was the case,
he
would be the author of his own downfall, not me. Besides there were more important things at stake than Richard Goldman’s career, such as finding you, Clara. The more information I could glean, the better chance I would have of tracking you and Jonny down.

I checked the running order of the bulletin. Richard was the second story. A report from Brighton then a live DTL – or down the line with him immediately afterwards. I knew he’d be thinking of something wise to say, some analysis to offer or, even better, a piece of exclusive information. I also knew it was unlikely he’d have any to give.

I waited until five fifty-one to make the call. I imagined Richard pacing up and down the promenade rehearsing his lines for the live, the adrenalin pumping through him. To be honest I thought I might have left it too late. He could have switched his phone to silent, but I had no choice. I didn’t want to give him enough time to make any check calls.

It rang four times before his plummy voice answered.

‘It’s Rachel,’ I said. ‘Look, I’ve just had a call from one of my contacts in Sussex to say they have found Clara’s car abandoned up near Devil’s Dyke. They haven’t released it officially yet, but thought we should be the first to break it.’

‘You’re giving it to me?’ he asked incredulously, just as I had expected.

‘Call it professional generosity,’ I said, knowing my explanation wouldn’t convince him. ‘Look, if you want the truth, it pains me to give it to you, but since I can’t do anything with it myself, I’d rather you get it first than the competition. The lesser of two evils so to speak,’ I finished with a laugh.

‘And he’s a good contact?’

‘One of my best. I can’t tell you to go with it, it’s your call. And you can’t tell anyone it came from me. Maybe you should wait, I think they’ll announce it to everyone later. You better go, you’re on in five minutes,’ I said and I hung up.

I wasn’t at all convinced he had the balls to do it. My only hope was he would find the prospect of a scoop too delicious to resist.

Five minutes later Richard Goldman announced on national television, in a voice an octave higher than usual, that he could
reveal exclusively
how Clara O’Connor’s car had been found abandoned in a ditch near Devil’s Dyke.

It only took another three minutes to bring him back to earth when Sussex police rang the news desk to complain that they had made no such discovery. Ten minutes later my BlackBerry vibrated with an e-mail from Robbie. ‘I need your help with the Clara O’Connor story. Talk tomorrow.’

I was buoyed. A door that had been shut in my face had swung open again. I took it as a sign that finally events were shifting in my favour and when Jake suggested we go for a drink I surprised him by taking him up on the offer.

We stayed in the pub until they threw us out, two bottles of Bordeaux to the good. My head was warm and fuzzy and mellow; I even laughed at his jokes, blocking out for a few blissful hours everything else that was happening around me.

Out on the street Jake flagged down a taxi and said I couldn’t go home alone ‘not after the break-in’. It was the first time he actually referred to it as if he believed it. But when we pulled up outside my flat, we realised I wouldn’t have been alone anyway.

A police car was sitting directly opposite with its lights off. As we paid the fare I heard the door of the police car slam and, heart lurching, I watched two officers make their way towards us. Jake turned to me for reassurance, information, whatever. I wasn’t able to give him any. When they reached us, one of them introduced himself as PC Simon Ramilles, ‘Can we come in?’ he asked in a solemn voice which told me it wasn’t a question.

The WPC followed him up the path and gave me a pitying smile as I let her in. Once in the living room I sat down and tried to focus to stop the room spinning. From the kitchen I could hear the sound of the kettle boiling and Jake crashing about, opening cupboards to find mugs and tea bags and sugar.

The moment before PC Ramilles spoke stretched out for so long I thought it would never end. A suffocating silence bore down on all of us. Finally, perched on the edge of the sofa, with his hands clasped together, he took a deep breath and told me that they had found a body.

Brighton’s mortuary looked like a seventies chalet bungalow with a carport fixed on to the side as an afterthought. Inside a synthetic blue carpet lined the floors of the waiting room. Cheap paintings of the sea and the beach hung on the wall. They looked like they’d been picked up at a car boot sale.

An elderly woman offered me a cup of tea as if tea had the power to make everything better. But tea can’t prepare you for being taken into a side room with red velvet curtains and flowers and being cold, so cold you think you might never ever feel heat in your bones again. It doesn’t prepare you for what you are supposed to say when they remove the cover and you see a person that you once knew but who is now grey and waxy and still. So still it’s like they’ve never been alive. Like you only imagined the life they led. I looked at the toes first, which were yellow but blue underneath the nails, and then slowly up the legs, which were thick and strong and lifeless, and to the groin, a source of pleasure once, now flaccid, limp. The chest where I’d lain, where a loud heart once thumped out. And then the face, that beautiful face I first saw almost two years ago. It wasn’t you, was it, Clara. It was Jonny. Cold and dead and gone forever.

They’d asked me to identify him at Sandra’s request. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. To see her baby, her boy, lying there like that. His hopes and future cut short on a slab in the mortuary. She was waiting outside, with a cold cup of tea. And when I came out she looked, a begging look that will haunt me all my life, pleading with me to tell her something I couldn’t. That it was a mistake. That it was some other unfortunate soul in there. I have never wished that I could do something so much. Instead I shook my head and held her as she crumbled in my arms.

I
N MY NOTEPAD
I still have the words I wrote down when I was told how Jonny died. My handwriting is unsteady and would be illegible to anyone but me. I think I can see the words without actually reading them. Their imprint will stay in my mind for the rest of my life.

I remember the WPC, our family liaison officer, relaying the details softly softly with her head cocked in sympathy, looking at Sandra, then turning to me and saying a million times over, ‘I understand, I understand.’

She told us that Jonny’s body was found not far from Preston Park in a wooded area which ran off a path. It had been covered for days, they presumed by heavy snowfall, until Monday when it melted and a dog walker came across it.

‘When we found his body, he wasn’t wearing a coat, just jeans and a T-shirt. It was minus six over the weekend.’

He was out there alone and needing me and now he was gone.

I told them Jonny would never be that stupid, he wouldn’t have just got drunk and fallen asleep. ‘He was supposed to be flying out to Afghanistan the next day.’

Sandra was sobbing next to me. The WPC took her hand and gave me a look that said,
This isn’t helping.

‘I understand it’s a traumatic time,’ she said again, as if she had just seen the person she loved most, cold and blue on a mortuary slab.

On the train back to London I sat alone, staring out of the window as the empty, frozen countryside zipped past. Daylight was falling; a dark gloom settled over the carriage. I wondered: what if the sun never rose again; if the world stopped turning on its axis and we were forever trapped in this grey half-light. Would the trees and plants be the first to shrink and die? Then we would surely follow.

Because we all need to feel the warmth of the sun to survive, don’t we? Just as we need to be loved and wanted, to be the focus of someone’s attention and adoration. If we don’t have that, how do we know we even exist?

I had basked in the heat of your attention once, Clara. I’d sprung to life like a flower under your gaze, and then you let it drift elsewhere and I was left to shiver in the cold. I remembered the pain of it so clearly, like a knife slicing through me, hollowing me out. Oh, I’d recovered, Clara, I’d found a way through it, but it wasn’t until Jonny came along and made me the centre of his universe that I realised how cold I had been, how much I had missed the warmth. Now he was gone I could feel the freeze gripping my bones again and a suffocating blackness rolling in like sea mist. I was sinking into it, disappearing once more.

The invisible woman.

I heard the sound of the drinks trolley trundling through the aisles and looked up just in time to see it pass me without so much as a word from the steward. Had I vanished already? Only when I ran my fingers through my hair, pulling hard, did the strands of red in my hand convince me I was still there.

I didn’t want to be alone again. I didn’t want to go home, slip through my front door and disappear. I needed someone to see me and talk to me and reassure me I was still living and breathing.

Jake
.

He was the only one I could turn to.

I arrived at his flat early or late, I can’t remember which. The concept of time had evaporated. I was caught in a drift. Minutes and hours belonged to another world. The one I was stuck in had no beginnings and no ends.

His flat was on the ground floor and when I buzzed he came out to meet me. I remember falling into him, as if the effort of holding myself up became too much at that precise moment. He held me for what seemed like a long time, still and silent, before leading me inside.

I took my shoes off and curled my legs beneath me on the sofa as he went to the kitchen, emerging with a bottle of wine and two glasses.

‘Here,’ he said, handing me one of them.

I glugged at it and waited for the heat of the alcohol to warm my throat. But my body had been cold for so many days now it had forgotten how to absorb heat.

We didn’t say anything for a while, just listened to the music playing and a man singing with a deep velvet voice, a soothing sink-into-yourself kind of song. I let it wash over me, taking sips of wine.

It was then it occurred to me.

‘I haven’t cried since I saw his body, not one tear. I feel like everything has dried up, like I have nothing left.’

‘Everyone reacts differently,’ Jake said. He put his wine glass on the table and got up to change the CD. I watched him scan his collection, fingering the cases, pulling one out only to put it back again until he found what he was looking for. There was a Banksy hanging on the wall, a picture of people in a bowling club playing with bombs instead of bowls, along with a faded
Star Wars
cinema poster. The walls were a dark neutral and the light was low, inviting, a kind of effortless cool that would have impressed me normally, but not that evening when my senses were numb.

I heard the music playing softly again and then he was sitting next to me, his arm round me. ‘Go easy on yourself, Rachel,’

‘Everything’s disappearing; sometimes I think I might have imagined it all,’ I said, my voice flat, emotionless. His hand touched my chin, lifting my face up to his, surprising me with the heat of his touch.

‘You will get through it. I promise. You are the strongest person I know,’ he said, pulling me towards him in an embrace. Against my chest his heartbeat vibrated, thud, thud, thud. I wanted to stay there long enough so its beat could jump-start my own heart, so the heat from his body could thaw mine. So the cold in my bones and the numbness in my head would ease. Finally he pulled away, his dark eyes shining into mine. I think I must have closed mine at that point because I didn’t see him lean into me again. All I felt was the touch of warm lips on my cheek. When I looked again his lips were all I could see, red and warm and full, and I was drawn to them, pulled in by a desire to touch something that wasn’t cold and blue and dead. And for a second I didn’t think about how wrong it was, all I thought about was that kissing his lips might be the only thing that would keep me alive that night.