Precious Thing (21 page)

He said they would release the postmortem results in the next hour and no, he wouldn’t tell Jane anything in advance. He refused to say whether Jonny was still a suspect. He was about to hang up when Jane announced we had an interview with Amber and explained in detail what she had said. A long silence followed.

‘I’m not prepared to speculate,’ he said finally, police-speak for fuck off. I waited in dread for Jane to thank him and hang up and kiss our chances of a lead story goodbye.

‘You are aware that she had a history of mental health problems aren’t you?’ she said instead, scribbling furiously as she spoke.

‘We are aware of that, yes,’ DCI Gunn said defensively.

‘But what you’re saying is that you have categorically ruled out any link between that and her disappearance.’

‘No, that’s not what I said. We are considering all possibilities.’ I could hear Jane’s breaths through her words. The nerves and adrenalin that came with knowing you were closing in on a good story.

‘So it’s one of several possibilities?’ she asked. And I smiled; she’s not going to give up, I thought, I was wrong to underestimate her.

‘Yes,’ he conceded, wearily, ‘that would appear to be what I’m saying.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jane, her pen finally stopping on the page. And when she hung up I didn’t have to look at her to know there was a smile of satisfaction on her face. Jane Fenchurch had finally got her big break.

In what was left of the journey we discussed how to structure the package, what shots to use, which clips of Amber to include, and when we reached the studios I dropped her at the door, handed her the tape and drove off. A little bit further up the road I called Robbie to brief him on the news lines and suggested it was a lead story. ‘Jane was amazing,’ I told him and listened to him snort. ‘You should give her another chance.’

I headed over to Jake’s where he had offered to cook me dinner, sensing, I think, that I was keen to spend as little time alone in my flat as possible.

At six o’clock, with a glass of wine and the smell of lemon and saffron and lamb cooking in the oven, we settled down to watch the evening news. From the headlines I knew it was the lead story and I sat back and waited to see if Jane had executed my carefully laid plan.

Amber’s anguished face filled the screen behind the presenter as he read the cue to the story:

‘Police searching for the missing artist Clara O’Connor say they are now considering the possibility she may have committed suicide. Miss O’Connor, who had a history of depression, has been missing for almost two weeks as Jane Fenchurch reports.’

It was you again, the smiling photograph so infamous, but this time it zoomed in slowly until your deep blue eyes filled the shot. Jane’s words ran over it: …‘troubled artist … who friends fear may have taken her own life’.

It cut to Amber, sitting in your living room, so obviously your living room because in the wide shots you could see your photos, your furniture, your mug sitting on the coffee table.

‘On the day she disappeared,’ Amber told the camera, ‘she was all over the place, up and down. Her mood was so unpredictable. Looking back now I can see it was something that had been brewing for weeks, months even. She wasn’t stable. She kept on saying that she would feel better about everything after Friday evening but she wouldn’t say why. Now I’m just so worried she had planned something, you know, she’s done something to herself and I could have stopped it.’

This was what you had driven me to, Clara. I had to paint you as a creature on the edge, someone who was unstable, with a history of depression. I had to demolish the holier-than-thou image of you because you had gone too far, you had killed a man, I was certain of that. And not just any man. You had killed Jonny and you were hunting me. I needed people to see what you were like.

Were you watching? I hope so because right at the very end of the report was a message for you.

The best shot, saved until last.

The painting of the charred pier from your bedroom slowly panned down to the photographs displayed on the chest of drawers beneath. You and your dad, one of him alone. And the one I had added. The smiling shot of you with my mother, the very same one you switched in my bedroom.

You could torment me with your messages, but I could send you a few of my own.

Two could play that game.

‘Who would have thought it? Jane Fenchurch has talent after all …’ Jake said, kicking me playfully with his foot. ‘Or did you direct her more than you’re letting on.’

‘She did it all on her own,’ I said, kicking him back. We were lounging on his sofa, full of wine and tagine, our empty plates discarded on the coffee table in front of us. There was something about Jake’s company that was so easy. He didn’t drown me in sympathy. He didn’t question my behaviour, or demand to see my grief, he just talked and laughed and jibed and allowed me to just be. He was strangely addictive.

He swirled the wine in his glass, and ran his fingers through the thick flop of hair. A thought hovered and then I tried to hide it at the back of my mind. He caught me watching him but instead of looking away he held my stare.

‘What is it about you, Rachel?’ he asked, his brown eyes flashing. ‘You’re a mass of contradictions. I can’t pin you down. You create this tough image for work and then go and shatter it by sticking your neck out for a rookie reporter.’

The idea of me having a tough image tickled and irritated me in equal measure. It certainly wasn’t something I’d set out to cultivate but at the same time I realised it was probably a widely held opinion amongst my colleagues in the newsroom. And it wasn’t because I was good at my job or ambitious. I was most definitely both of those things but so were plenty of others. It was simply because I happened to be a woman; everyone knows you can’t be ambitious and female without being cold and heartless too.

‘So you’re telling me everyone you know is either soft or tough or good or evil. Where have you been living, Disneyland?’ I laughed and poured myself another glass of wine. Jake raised his hands in surrender.

‘You just surprise me, that’s all,’ he said. ‘I like being surprised.’ I caught his look and for a moment it locked with mine, and it was there, a charge between us, and then we turned away.

Not now, so wrong
.

‘Tell me about Jonny,’ he said. And so I did, honestly and openly.

‘I loved him, I don’t know what more to say, the thought of never seeing him again … I don’t know, it could destroy me if I let it. But I can’t,’ I said, ‘I have to keep going.’

He smiled. ‘Couldn’t have said it better myself.’

I was helping Jake clear up when Sarah called on my mobile, her inappropriately chirpy voice intruding into the evening. I could never ignore her, you see, still clinging on to the vain hope she might actually ring with some useful information one day.

‘How you doing, Rach?’ she asked.

‘Oh, you know, coping,’ I said in a weak voice, moving away from Jake and the clatter of dishes.

‘I was going to ask you if you’d heard anything through work but I guess you’ll have taken a bit of time off, have you? To give yourself a break.’

‘I’m still at work. It takes my mind off everything,’ I said.

‘Bloody hell, you should go easy on yourself,’ and then she paused, ‘I take it you would have known about Amber whatsherbloodyface giving an interview then? Making out like she thought Clara had topped herself, like she would know. Some people’ll do anything to get their face on TV.’

‘I think she was just trying to help.’

‘Yeah right, didn’t see her rushing out to put posters of Clara up with the rest of us, did I?’

I was thinking about how Sarah’s voice had gone from breezy hi-babe chirpiness to vitriolic in a matter of moments when Jake dropped a saucepan on the floor. ‘You at home, babe?’ she said, her breezy tone restored.

‘At a friend’s,’ I said, ‘being looked after.’

‘You should have said you were with someone instead of listening to me bang on about Amber. Anyway, I won’t keep you from your evening.’

‘It’s no problem,’ I said, ‘we’ve finished dinner.’

‘Well, I’ll call in a few days. Take care, babe,’ and she rang off.

By the time the late-night news came on Jake and I were relaxing in the warm glow of wine. Your story had dropped down the running order, bumped from the lead by the first case of bird flu in the UK. There was to be a mass culling of birds at a Bernard Matthews factory-farm in Norfolk. I imagined them weighing it up at the evening news meeting. A hundred and sixty thousand dead birds or one suspected dead woman? ‘But this is the first outbreak of bird flu in the UK,’ someone would have said. ‘It affects more of our viewers than one woman who might just have taken her own life.’

The birds won out in the end Clara. Dead turkeys over you.

The bulletin was almost over – the And Finally, a story about a record-breaking week for art sales, with works by Degas and Renoir and Warhol all going on sale – when my phone vibrated in my pocket.

The message simply read:

Coming to get you, ready or not.

Y
OU WERE GOING
to be box office, Clara. You were going to be on
Crimewatch
. Remember when we used to watch it and Nick Ross would say:
Don’t have nightmares, do sleep well,
which was pointless because they’d just shown a masked intruder kill an old couple in their home and all you thought was ‘if it could happen to them, why not me?’ But we would rather die than admit we were scared shitless and sometimes, if we were having a sleepover, you’d say you could hear footsteps on the stairs to spook me, or worse, you’d tell one of your ghost stories. You’d spin them so well I swore I could see ghosts floating amongst us.

I’d learnt of the reconstruction after spending the morning in Harrow Road police station reporting the break-in with no obvious signs of forced entry, which generated a wry smile from the PC taking notes, and the malicious texts, which drew a less humiliating response.

It was Jake’s idea to go to the police and make it official, part of his drive to force me to take the ‘threat’ seriously. I was resistant at first until it occurred to me there were advantages to be gained. I needed the police to have a record of my complaints. If not for now, then for later.

Out on the street, amongst the shops selling life-size ornamental tigers and halal meats and the fried chicken joints, I checked my phone to find Hilary Benson had left a message asking me to call her urgently. My immediate reaction was that Amber had rumbled us for stretching the truth a little to persuade her to do the interview. Instead, it was my help that Hilary wanted and I was only too happy to oblige.

I arrived at the
Crimewatch
studios in White City, a white cube of a building perched on the edge of Shepherd’s Bush, with plenty of time to spare. If you closed your eyes you could almost pretend the sound of the traffic roaring in and out of London on the A40 was the sea crashing around you. I looked up at the sky, so brilliantly, optimistically blue, and thanked the angel looking out for me for dropping such an opportunity into my lap.

Not that I was without nerves. As I approached the huge BBC sign hanging over the entrance I realised I was apprehensive. Yes, I had plenty of experience facing the cameras, talking live, so much experience that little fazed me. I asked the questions, extracted soundbites from reluctant interviewees. I wrote my scripts, structured my reports. But that was the problem. Now the roles would be reversed. And I was about to relinquish control to someone I’d never met.

From my telephone conversations with Sally McDonald I had assumed she was in her mid twenties. Her chirpy Scottish voice, the way she sang, ‘
HEL LO
,’ seemed to suggest a youthful enthusiasm unknown amongst more seasoned producers. So I was surprised to see a rather rotund woman in her late forties greet me at reception. ‘
HEL LO
Rachel,’ she said a little too loudly as she approached. ‘We’ll sign you in and then we can go upstairs and get cracking.’ She must have realised her tone was too jovial because she added with a look of pity, ‘They’re filming the reconstruction in Brighton today, let’s hope it produces some results.’

On the way up in the lift she told me they had found someone who looked just like you to retrace your footsteps. They always ask a family member or friend if they can, but you didn’t have any sisters to choose from and we didn’t look alike, did we? Different hair, different heights. And of course I was now slimmer than you.

I followed Sally into a room where the crew, a cameraman and a sound recordist were assembled. The lighting was intentionally low, lit only by a special standard lamp covered with foil. It was the kind of moody atmosphere we often tried to achieve at work, though the time constraints of news meant we rarely pulled it off. Sally asked me if I wanted to put some make-up on and seemed surprised when I declined. I wanted to look the part, Clara, the shattered friend desperate to find you.

‘Let’s start if we can,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to be back at work shortly.’

Sally threw a few obvious questions at me but after the third one it was clear I wasn’t giving her the soundbite she wanted.

‘Forgive me,’ she said, ‘I’ll ask you the same question a few times over so I can choose the best answer.’ She must have forgotten who she was talking to, I used that kind of line every day when an interviewee wasn’t delivering the clip I needed.

Not that I minded. Sally could have asked me the same question 100 times over and I would have given her the same answer. It was a trick I learnt from interviewing politicians. Acknowledge the question, then say what you want. If you don’t offer an alternative answer they’ll have no choice but to use the one you want them to.

Sally persevered for a good thirty minutes and of course I mixed up the words a little so it didn’t seem like I was reading from a script but the message was still the same.

Sally: ‘Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt Clara?’

Me: ‘No one would have hurt Clara, she was someone who needed talking care of, made you want to look after her. And I can’t bring myself to think that she is gone. And if she is out there and listening, and I hope she is, I want her to know, I will never give up looking, never. I will find her if it’s the last thing I do.’