Captured Read online

  Long time no see!

  Mary’s been trying to get in contact. Nothing urgent though she’s a bit vexed. She likes to worry, it gives her something to do.

  Anyway I’m sure you’re fine and all that. I’ve tried to call a couple of times. But you’re not returning my calls either, which frankly is just rude.

  Get your priorities right and give us a call then!

  Stever. (Remember?)

  His finger hovered over the keyboard for a moment. He pressed ‘Send’ before he could over-think it. Then he ambled off to get a beer, trying not to worry.

  But to Stever, the future was a dark wood in which lurked unspeakable things. He couldn’t help it.

  11

  Three days later, Pat met Paul Sugar in the same café. He gave her the information. In return, she slipped him an envelope containing two hundred and fifty pounds in cash.

  Paul was immense, hangdog, commiserating. ‘What can I say? I’m sorry. It’s just the way of the world.’

  When he’d gone, Pat stuffed the information – summarized on a laser-printed sheet of A4 - into her handbag.

  She popped into the King’s Head for old times’ sake, had a quick Jameson’s.

  Nobody recognized her.

  With the two hundred and fifty pounds deposited in his pocket, Paul Sugar parked behind P. Sugar Private Investigations Ltd, which currently occupied three rooms above a dry cleaner’s on Fishponds Road.

  Before going in, he slipped a twenty from the envelope and popped to the chemist. He bought a box of Imodium, a bottle of Pepto Bismol and a tube of 1 per cent hydrocortisone cream.

  He popped two Imodium in the street, swallowing them with a scowl before they could dissolve on his tongue and leave him tasting them until Christmas. Then he trudged up to the office.

  He’d left Steph – his PA and sole remaining member of staff – to man the phones, but hadn’t been expecting any calls. It had been a quiet week. It had been a quiet month. It had been a quiet year.

  A mute glance from Steph, reading Heat behind her desk, confirmed that no miracles had taken place during his brief absence.

  Paul didn’t know what phenomena lay beneath this deathly silence. But whatever it was, it was killing him.

  The previous autumn, in order to stay in business, he’d set aside all private foreboding and enacted the Doomsday Plan: he’d blackmailed a former client, the wealthiest client who ever employed him. He offered to keep the photographs of her daughter off the internet for a few more years.

  The client had wept. Paul sat there, embarrassed, wanting to hold her hand or something. Eventually she got hold of herself and spat in his face. After that, she paid him enough to cover rent and wages for half a year, if he economized.

  None of this came without personal cost: Paul developed migraines and his childhood eczema came back – there were scaly, vermilion patches inside his wrists, elbows and ankles; weeping blotches on his chest; a flaking, oozing neighbourhood inside his pubic hair.

  The last three times Paul got laid, he’d been obliged to poke the old Hamilton through the gap in his underwear. He knew there weren’t many things in the world less sexy than a cheerfully pink erection jabbing through the vent in a fat man’s Y-fronts. But what could he do?

  The blackmail had temporarily kept P. Sugar Private Investigations Ltd afloat, but Paul was still running on fumes. Week by week, he watched the supply of sullied money run lower and lower, and became more and more unwell.

  Then the engine of his business sputtered and died and he was cut adrift, not knowing how to do anything else.

  He was too scared to exercise the Doomsday Plan again; he thought the self-hatred might kill him. So instead he paid a visit to a loan shark called Edward Burrell.

  To fill his days, Edward Burrell still cut hair – half price for pensioners, Monday to Thursday; half price for the under-tens, who got a lollipop for sitting still. Wash, cut and blow dry from £7.50. Lesbians went there to get flat-tops.

  But he’d been a Shylock since before the Watergate scandal. Paul had known him for years, had even done some work for him. Which is why Burrell agreed to lend him twenty thousand pounds, every penny of which faded away like desire after orgasm.

  Paul was left up to his ears in the worst kind of debt. He considered running away. But he didn’t, because he couldn’t afford to.

  So he drove out to Edward Burrell’s house and explained himself – money was short, times were hard. He evoked their long history of co-operation and friendship.

  Two of Burrell’s boys threw Paul in the back of a Commer van and drove him to a quiet place, where they kicked the shit out of him without fear of interruption.

  Paul sold his car to make the next payment, replacing it with a 17-year-old Honda Accord for which he paid seventy-five pounds. Paul was five sizes too big for it. He squeezed behind the wheel like an elephant in a cartoon.

  He lay awake at night, scratching himself as the debt to Edward Burrell silently divided and spread like frost on a windowpane.

  As he applied hydrocortisone to the weeping skin between his nipples, he brooded on the kind of action he knew he’d have to take in order to free himself of these vexations.

  He wondered how long you could feel shame for the kind of deed committed when there was absolutely no choice. There was a limit, surely?

  He totted up the worst things he’d ever done and went to some mental effort, tabulating how long he’d felt truly bad about the very worst of them. After some deliberation, he arrived at a maximum of five years.

  That seemed credible. It represented a lot of Imodium Plus and a lot of hydrocortisone cream and a lot of looking in the mirror and despising what you saw. But it was way better than the alternative.

  Whatever was required, Paul knew he could do it.

  Scratching his chest, he could look himself in the eye and feel a strange kind of dignity – and know his moment was coming, screaming towards him like a locomotive down a long tunnel. All he had to do was grab it, jump on board, not be dashed on the tracks as it passed.

  12

  It was Wednesday morning, not quite 9 a.m., and it was raining. Weston’s sea-front arcades and souvenir shops were still shut. A westerly wind carried the faint scent of chips, vinegar, a hundred years of candy floss.

  A couple of kids were scootering along the promenade. Ancient couples sat in bus shelters.

  Kenny stepped on to the Grand Pier. It had been around since Edward VII, and the boards underfoot seemed rattletrap and loose; he could imagine the entire structure cracking down the centre like a traumatized femur.

  He walked past men who leaned on the railings looking out to where the sea should be. They squinted in the rain, the wind blowing in their hair. Kenny wondered what was going through their minds.

  At the end of the pier, the amusement arcade was clamorous and deserted. Inside was a ghost train, a crazy house, one-armed bandits; all unchanged for decades.

  It was cold, and he wished he’d bought a baseball cap to keep the rain off. His white hair was ottered to his scalp. He huddled into his windcheater and looked back at the town.

  Then he turned to face the other way, and saw the faint blue haze off the Welsh coast. Kenny had never been to Wales. From here, it looked like a foreign country: Annwn, the land of departed souls. And Weston-super-Mare, this Edwardian pier, was a way station, a departure point for the dead.

  Pat had said to meet here at 9 a.m.

  Kenny was early, because he couldn’t sleep. So he huddled, waiting in the rain, until Pat appeared in jeans, white unbranded trainers, a blue anorak. He experienced a wash of tenderness for her, bordering on love – she looked so slow and crabby and helpless in the rain, just another old person in this town of old people.

  He said, ‘Morning.’

  She gave him a look. He saw pity in it, and grew scared.

  They went to a coffee concession that was just opening then strolled down the pier.

  Now and again the sun pe
eked out and reflected like a diamond on a passing car. Already, some cars had parked at the south end of the beach. Inside them were people with flasks and picnic breakfasts. They would sit inside those cars all day, if need be – and promenade in the blustering wind, wincing in the scouring sand.

  Pat and Kenny found a bench. They sat close, almost touching.

  He didn’t speak, just sat waiting, not wanting to hear it. At length, Pat said, ‘Okay. Callie Barton’s parents were Ted and Alice. She was an only child, late and unexpected. By all accounts, they treated her like a princess.

  ‘Ted was some kind of manager at one of those petrochemical companies, up in Avonmouth. He took his family to London in 1980 because he’d been promoted.’

  ‘So that’s where she went. London.’

  ‘London, then Singapore. Came back to England in ‘eighty-nine. Callie did Tax Accountancy at Poole College. Ninety-four, she took a job with a little accountancy firm in Bath. Ninety-seven, she met the man she married.’

  Kenny’s stomach lurched at those words. He took a moment to steady himself.

  Pat said: ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’m fine. Coffee on an empty stomach.’

  He watched a seagull strut, a few feet away, mangy and arrogant. Its head was velvet and snowy; in the grey light it seemed to fluoresce with a blue-white chemical glow.

  The gull was joined by another. They clacked over a scrap of something gristly. Kenny watched the surprising span of their wings, heard their deranged cawing.

  ‘So where is she? How many kids? Is she happy?’

  Pat sipped coffee. ‘No kids.’

  ‘No? Did they have problems?’

  ‘Fertility problems?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of. Medical records aren’t accessible. But I do know she was admitted to hospital in 2004.’

  ‘Was she ill?’

  Pat sucked on her dentures, then reached into her anorak for her cigarettes.

  ‘Broken wrist, fractured orbit of her left eye. Cracked ribs. Scratch on her lung.’

  ‘How do you know this – if medical records are off limits?’

  ‘These aren’t medical records, love.’ She let him think about it, then gave up. ‘They’re police records.’

  He’d crushed the waxed paper cup and was moving it between his hands like a ball. ‘What happened?’

  ‘What happens to most women. She married the wrong man.’

  By now, the two gulls had been joined by a third: a flock of seagulls. It made him think of a song, something about wishing for a photograph. Then he laughed a bitter laugh. ‘Jesus Christ, Pat. Did they lock him up?’

  ‘She never pressed charges.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They just never do.’

  ‘So where’s she now? Is she happy?’

  Pat had smoked her cigarette to the halfway point. She crushed it between thumb and index finger, placing the butt in her anorak pocket. ‘June 2004. Callie Barton’s husband was interviewed about her disappearance.’

  The pier was moving in muscular waves beneath Kenny’s feet. He supposed it was the tidal current sucking at the steel piles that kept the pier anchored in the estuarine clay.

  ‘What do you mean “disappearance”?’

  ‘Just that. One day, she’s there. Next day, she’s not. She just vanishes. The husband was interviewed four times, but no charges were ever brought. Insufficient evidence. It was all in the papers and whatnot . . .’

  ‘What’s his name? The husband. Who is he?’

  ‘I’m not telling you his name. What good would it do?’

  ‘If I don’t have a name, I can’t give him a face.’

  ‘He doesn’t deserve a face.’

  The tide was tugging harder at the pier now: the entire structure jolted to the left. For a moment, Kenny feared it would collapse.

  Then he remembered the tide was out. There was no tide yanking at it. He closed his eyes and his hand, blind and urgent, sought Pat’s.

  He bent double, hissing through his teeth, saying something that sounded like gak.

  Pat took his hand. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Just stay.’

  A convulsion threw him on to the deck. Pat squatted at his side, holding his hand, talking to him, reassuring him as he writhed and juddered.

  She stayed until it had passed and he lay curled on the ground.

  Watching them were all those lonely men, men with the wind in the remains of their hair.

  Pat looked at them and said with the voice of unfaded authority: ‘Piss off out of it. All of you. On your way, now.’

  Ashamed, they looked elsewhere.

  Kenny told her he didn’t need a doctor. What was the point? He wasn’t getting better.

  Pat argued for a while, then gave up. She gave Kenny her anorak, because it was longer than his windcheater and would hide most of the urine stain on his trousers.

  She drove him to the Combi. At the wheel, she said: ‘You’ll leave this thing alone. Worrying about this is no way to spend your last days.’

  He said, ‘Of course.’

  He was lying, but felt no guilt. He didn’t have time for guilt.

  13

  Kenny slept eighteen hours and rose the next afternoon feeling cleansed and invigorated, like mountain air after a violent storm.

  Stripped to the waist and barefoot in pyjama trousers, he made coffee and sat down at his laptop.

  He knew he was looking for local news stories which dated from around June 2004 to around June 2005. They would involve a missing local woman whose first name was Callie or Caroline.

  Even so, he didn’t find it straight away. First, he had to endure the smiling snapshots of other dead and missing women. But he was persistent; in the end, he found it.

  ‘PHONE HOME’

  HUSBAND’S EMOTIONAL PLEA TO MISSING WIFE

  The husband of missing Bath woman Caroline Reese, 34, today issued an emotional plea for her to get in touch with her family so that he can ‘start picking up the pieces of my life’.

  Husband Jonathan Reese’s plea comes six weeks after Callie apparently failed to return home after a night out with friends.

  Reese, a landscape gardener, has been questioned by Avon and Somerset police for several days and was subsequently released without charge.

  A police spokeswoman said that the police are treating the disappearance as a missing person case at this stage but refused to rule out foul play.

  In his statement, issued through a solicitor, Reese said that he just wanted to know that his wife was safe.

  ‘I don’t need to know where Caroline is. I just want to know she’s safe and happy. It is my profound wish for Caroline to come home. But if she feels she must stay away, I wish she would just let me know she is safe, so I can start picking up the pieces of my life.’

  Kenny read the article three times before allowing his eyes to settle on the picture which ran with it.

  The photograph, a snapshot really, was zoomed and cropped to make a portrait. It showed a dark-haired and pretty woman, smiling into the sun. Her teeth were even and her squinting eyes were pleasantly crinkled. She wore a baseball cap and had a ponytail.

  Underneath was the caption: ‘Missing: Caroline Reese’.

  Kenny had a passing moment of strange fulfilment. Behind the adult face, this was the girl from the class photograph.

  Next, Kenny scrutinized the face of the husband, whose name he now knew to be Jonathan Reese. Lean, dark curly hair cropped short. The photographer had captured him outside a police station, looking gaunt and anxious and hunted.

  Kenny went to the bathroom and threw up.

  He rinsed with mouthwash, then returned to the computer to Google: LANDSCAPE DESIGN + BATH + REESE.

  This led him to the rather dated-looking website of a company called Bath Garden Landscapes.

  The home page displayed a stylized, semi-architectural sketch of an idyllic English garden. Down the left of the
screen ran a number of hyperlinks.

  The first was ‘About Us’. Kenny clicked through and read:

  Bath Garden Landscapes is Bath’s leading landscape gardeners, catering for commercial and private customers. We cover all aspects of landscaping and tree surgery, including paving, fencing, water features, timber decking, driveways . . .

  He stopped reading to look over the remaining hyperlinks. ‘Garden Design and Process’ . . . ‘Planting Plans’ . . . ‘Concept Design’.

  Finally, right at the bottom, he found ‘Contact Us’.

  The page read: Jonathan Reese, 25 Coney Lane, Bath BA2 1JP. It listed a company email address, landline and mobile telephone number. It gave Kenny all the information he needed, but none of the knowledge.

  He wondered what he was doing, sitting there in his pyjamas with the sour taste of vomit and mouthwash burning his throat.

  He wiggled his head, hoping to see the reflection of his face on the glossy computer monitor. But all he saw was movement – the deep grey shadows of his head and shoulders silhouetted on the screen. His face was a shadow over hers, like a cloud passing over a sunlit hill.

  He saw that Pat was right – that little girl was gone, and had been gone for many years. All that remained was a radiant particle of memory; a sprite captured in the round of his skull. She was nothing but a web of connections between his synapses, a web soon to dissolve because the vessel containing it would be empty, just a hollow skull.

  Time was running out.

  He knew it was his duty to rescue Callie Barton. She was his Guinevere, taken into darkness by the King of the Summer Country. It was his charge to reach into the darkness, find her hand and bring her back from over the edge of the world. To make her a story with an ending.

  He went to the hallway cupboard to get his rucksack. He packed quickly, not needing much.

  14

  Kenny considered parking the Combi in an out-of-town lay-by; there were plenty between Bristol and Bath. But locals of his generation well remembered what happened to unwary New Age travellers round this time of year – hippies with dirty dreadlocks and skinny dogs, who stopped their vans and buses on private land. Kenny didn’t want to be dragged from the back of the Combi, still half asleep, then kicked unconscious in the bushes.