The Sleeper (26 page)

I smiled as we passed, and she smiled back, conspiratorial, assessing me, I felt, as someone who might have been through it myself.

I was almost surprised that she could see me. I felt I was walking this street like a ghost.

The house was still there, and my parents still lived in it. Their black Volvo was parked on the drive. The same curtains hung at the downstairs windows. I stood on the other side of the street and looked.

All I needed to do was take a few steps and ring the bell. They might not be there. I would not need to explain myself. They would, I knew, be unequivocally delighted to see me back. They loved me. They had lost me.

When I saw a figure at the window, however, I knew I could not do it. Perhaps one day I would, but for now I turned and fled, back along the claustrophobically familiar streets, down to the river, across the bridge and, randomly, into Fulham. At first I thought I heard someone calling my name, but then it stopped.

I called Olivia from a street corner. Happily, she did not bother asking how I was.

‘I was thinking,’ she said, instead. ‘You should talk to Lara’s godfather. Leon Campion. She was close to him. She is, I mean. I tried to talk to him about her when this happened, but he wasn’t going for it. He doesn’t like me. Never has. I’m the enemy, in his book. If there were T-shirts being made up, his would say “Team Lara” across his tits.’

‘Oh. Right.’ The opportunity to concentrate on something other than myself came as a glorious relief, and I forced myself to focus. ‘Who is he? Her godfather? Her actual godfather?’

‘Yes. An old mate of Dad’s. He’s a bit of a player, I think. He’s into mysterious business deals and all that. Kind of smooth. He and Lara have always been close. I’ve never really worked it out. I thought they were shagging for a while, and I still think they might have been at some point. There’s something between them, anyway. It might not be sex. But it’s something.’

‘Where do I find him?’

‘I’ll text you his number. He’ll tell you to fuck off, but it’s worth a try. He must be incredibly cut up about Lara, and I know he’s been at Mum and Dad’s house quite a bit. You should probably do to him what you did to me, if you can bear it. Go to see him face to face. Turn up at his office, not his home. Just in case there’s anything he wouldn’t want to say in front of his wife. Sally. She’s nice.’

I memorised the address and remembered to ask about the baby.

Olivia hesitated.

‘I think everything’s OK. It can’t have done it any good, having this kind of shock flung at it in the womb. I’m knackered and on my own, and my parents are obviously totally fixated on my sister, and I do utterly dread presenting them with a grandchild when Lara’s missing and everyone – including, I think, my parents themselves – is assuming that she accidentally killed a man she was sleeping with. Bringing a new life into the world with a great flourish feels like such an out-of-step thing to do. You know. Typical Olivia. That kind of thing. Always awkward. And fuck knows how I’m going to pull it together to look after a baby.’

‘Is the father … I mean, are the two of you together?’

She laughed, a quick, unamused laugh. ‘No, that was never on the cards. It was a one-off. He doesn’t even know, because I decided I could do without those sorts of complications. He’d either want to play happy families – perish the thought, frankly – or he’d start accusing me of doing it on purpose. Either way, no thanks. This is a one-woman show.’

‘God, Olivia. You’re strong.’

‘Not really. You just do what you have to do.’

I sheltered in the doorway of an office building, and called Leon Campion the moment the number arrived. It was a mobile number, and he actually answered it. I assumed an imperious tone.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Is that Leon Campion?’

‘Who is this?’ His voice was deep and cultured.

‘Iris Roebuck. I’m a friend of Lara’s. Sorry to disturb you, but Olivia gave me your number …’

He cut me off. ‘Did she now? I have nothing to say.’

‘I’m a friend. I just want to …’

‘Nothing to say.’

‘But surely you …’

‘Oh, sorry – was I not being clear enough? Fuck off.’

And he hung up. I looked at the phone and laughed. When I called back, it went, inevitably, to voicemail. I left a long message anyway, despite the fact that he had not sounded like a man who would listen to it.

I was holding on by a thread. Although I thought I was walking randomly through London with no sense whatsoever of where I was going, my legs took me to the one place I had been avoiding.

They walked me directly to a set of traffic lights in central London. It was an ordinary, humdrum junction close to the Euston Road. Railings that had once been covered in flowers with heart-rending notes attached to them were bare, had been bare for five years.

A man cycled by. He was wearing Lycra and riding a racing bike. He was a professional, possibly a courier, and he did not stop for the red lights. I wanted to yell at him. I wanted to tell him.

I had stood here before. I turned and ran away, as fast as I possibly could. I sprinted through London until I had left the place far behind.

When Alex called, I was sitting in a bar near the hotel drinking vodka and tonic and thinking hard. ‘To the Brink’ made me jump. I nearly didn’t answer, but then I did, because I wanted to speak, and I had barely said a word since our conversation that morning.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Are you OK?’ His voice was immediately concerned. ‘Iris, you don’t sound like yourself.’

‘Can you tell from one word? No, I’m all right. Just a bit … assaulted by memories, maybe. It’s OK.’

‘Yes, I bet. That must be …’ He tailed off, and I was glad. ‘Look. I got lucky. I thought I’d try Heathrow, under the circumstances, and I took a chance, called their local police at the end of the day and slightly implied I was my boss. And they did the flight check without paperwork. Now, I cannot quite believe this, but it does seem to be true. Iris, according to the records, you caught a flight some hours after Guy Thomas was killed. At least, someone of your name did. From Heathrow.’

I could not take this in. I still half thought Laurie had done something to my passport, even though I knew he had not.

‘Where,’ I managed to say, ‘did I go?’

‘Bangkok. You were issued with a tourist visa, and you haven’t left Thailand yet. Look. I’m going to come to London, like I said.’

‘Have you told – I mean, I know you are the police, but have you told the ones in Penzance?’

I wanted him to say no. I wanted him to be like a policeman in a film who goes off piste and carries out his own, unofficial investigation. I wanted him to say that together he and I would track her down, under the radar. He did not.

‘Yes, of course. It got a lukewarm reception as far as ideas go. In fact the general feeling was that you were to be filed in the nutters drawer. You’re not, though. They’ll look at it, but I don’t hold out great hopes of anything much happening. I’ll carry on looking at it with you. Because you’re right. If I may.’

‘You may,’ I told him. As soon as I ended the call, I drained the glass and stood up. My sitting around drinking alone was not going to help with anything.

chapter twenty-one

I sat on a bench in St James’s Park and stared at my phone. It was so cold that my fingers hardly worked, and I had never, ever imagined I might become the sort of person who sat in a beautiful park in a huge city, with pelicans nearby, a palace to my right, Whitehall off to my left, and people doing interesting things everywhere I looked, and tried to puzzle out Twitter.

Nonetheless, I was doing it. If Lara was in Thailand, she would have to be looking at the internet. If she was looking at the internet, she might open her Twitter account. I knew, because the media had unearthed it, that she had only ever posted one tweet, that read ‘Trying to work out how to use Twitter’.

She did, however, have over 27,000 followers. All those people had sought her out and followed her, just in case it became one of those dramas that played out on social media. The world was strange.

This was one possible way of reaching her. Facebook was no good, because I was not one of her ‘friends’, and her privacy settings stopped me sending her a message.

My breath puffed out around me. The clouds were pale and low, the air lethal with the promise of snow. Other people were hurrying through the park, stamping feet in expensive boots, shivering in cheap anoraks, each heading to a destination that had walls and a heater.

I had set up a Twitter account. My picture, like Lara’s, was an egg, and I had named myself, randomly, after my poor cats: I was @desi_ophelia. This was a whole new world. It took me a while to realise, to my dismay, that I still could not send Lara a private message, even after I had followed her account, because she had to be following me for that to happen. I forced my freezing fingers to compose something that would stand up to scrutiny when viewed by any random member of the public.

Hi Lara
, my first tweet said in the end.
It’s Iris. I hope you’re OK and I think you are. If you see this, can you message me? I know you didn’t do it. xx

I had wanted to mention Thailand, but since my tweet was technically public (though I could not imagine anyone looking at my account, and so reading it), I didn’t. I would save it for when we were speaking in private, in the unlikely event that that ever happened.

I stood up and started walking. I was not going to leave the park, but sitting still was no good. My fingers were white and unresponsive. I strode to the middle of the bridge and looked out over the ice that was half formed across the water. I had a flash of Holden Caulfield wondering where the Central Park ducks went when their pond was frozen over. These ones were stoically using the unfrozen areas, carrying on as normal, but they must have been miserable. They were putting brave ducky faces on it.

The Catcher in the Rye
was Laurie’s favourite book, and this was his favourite park. He liked it because it was small but rich: ‘distilled’, he used to call it.

Sometimes we would stand on the bridge and feed the ducks. He would never let me bring bread. ‘That is terrible for them,’ he would say. ‘Why the hell do people think that ducks want bread? What good is a diet of processed carbs going to be for creatures that live in water and eat waterweed? Why would you take something that lives off veg and live protein, and stuff it with sugar and salt and preservatives?’ He would pack a careful picnic for the ducks, containing pieces of bacon, and bags of nutrient-rich grains that he would pick up from a pet shop near his office. It was one of the reasons why I loved him so much.

Those were our happy times. We lived in west London and everything was perfect, and I could never have imagined us as we had been for the past few years, cowering away from the world, a shadow of a shadow of the way we had once been.

I walked along the pathways and across the grass, stomping around the park without much purpose. I liked the children, running about with rosy cheeks and excited anticipation of potential snowmen to come. I liked looking at the Whitehall people too, in their suits. They hurried along, still wearing their work auras over their expensive overcoats. They had brought a little bubble of politics to the park and they clearly felt the park should be grateful.

‘There you are,’ he said, and I looked up and there he was, tall and geeky, towering above me, smiling with a hint of nerves.

‘Here I am,’ I agreed, taking a step away from him. Although I was here to meet him, I had somehow not expected him.

Neither of us said anything. It was still freezing. It was still not snowing.

‘You made it then,’ I said eventually, and started walking. He walked with me. He was looking more casual than I had ever seen him before: an off-duty policeman, it turned out, looked nothing like you would imagine. If I hadn’t known Alex was a detective constable, I would have thought he was something far less straight. He was wearing jeans and a bright red jumper with a pattern on it, like someone’s Christmas jumper but somehow just stylish enough. His coat was a downy mountaineering-style one that I would never have chosen for anyone, but that I instantly envied for its obvious warmth.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That journey gets longer, I swear. But it was fine.’

‘I like your boots,’ I told him. ‘They’re like cowboy boots, aren’t they? Like rock-star boots.’

That pleased him. ‘I got them in a charity shop,’ he admitted. ‘I wasn’t sure they were me, but I bought them anyway, and it turns out they’re the most comfortable piece of footwear that has ever been crafted by human hands, so that was lucky.’

‘That is lucky,’ I agree. ‘Shall we go somewhere warm?’

‘I’m starving. Did you collect your passport?’

I started to undo my bag so I could show it to him, but my fingers wouldn’t work the catch properly, so I just said yes.

As we reached Trafalgar Square and started to head past the lions, tiny snowflakes began to fall.

‘So,’ he said, leaning back in his chair. ‘Here’s what I’ve found out, and they are getting pretty pissed off with my meddling, I can tell you. This did come up in the investigation when Mrs Finch initially went missing.’

‘Lara,’ I told him, eating a piece of cucumber.

‘Yes. Lara. Sorry. I forget I’m off duty. I’ve always tried not to think about cases when I’m on holiday. I normally spend my holidays walking on the beach and not reading the paper. Anyway. Lara. About twelve years ago, she charged into a police station, very upset, and confessed to something completely outlandish.’

He took a chip off his plate. We were in an upmarket burger restaurant on the Charing Cross Road, and I was appreciating how very much better you can eat when you’re with someone. Sitting in a restaurant by yourself could be all right, I thought, if you had a book and were in the right mood. However, there was nothing to beat company.

I was chilled to realise that I had not had a friend, apart from Lara, for five years. That was bizarre. Something inside me was waking up, happy. It was pushing aside the things I needed to address, and enjoying the moment.