Evening
I’ve been checking my email obsessively, but I’ve heard nothing from Tom. How much better life must have been for jealous drunks before emails and texts and mobile phones, before all this electronica and the traces it leaves.
There was almost nothing in the papers about Megan today. They’re moving on already, the front pages devoted to the political crisis in Turkey, the four-year-old girl mauled by dogs in Wigan, the England football team’s humiliating loss to Montenegro. Megan is being forgotten, and she’s only been gone a week.
Cathy invited me out to lunch. She was at a loose end because Damien has gone to visit his mother in Birmingham. She wasn’t invited. They’ve been seeing each other for almost two years now, and she still hasn’t met his mother. We went to Giraffe on the High Street, a place I loathe. Seated in the centre of a room heaving with shrieking under-fives, Cathy quizzed me about what I’d been up to. She was curious about where I was last night.
‘Have you met someone?’ she asked me, her eyes alight with hope. It was quite touching really.
I almost said yes, because it was the truth, but lying was easier. I told her I’d been to an AA meeting in Witney.
‘Oh,’ she said, embarrassed, dipping her eyes to her limp Greek salad. ‘I thought you’d maybe had a little slip. On Friday.’
‘Yes. It won’t be plain sailing, Cathy,’ I said, and I felt awful, because I think she really cares whether I get sober or not. ‘But I’m doing my best.’
‘If you need me to, you know, come with you …’
‘Not at this stage,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’
‘Well, maybe we could do something else together, like go to the gym?’ she asked.
I laughed, but when I realized she was being serious I said I’d think about it.
She’s just left – Damien rang to say he was back from his mother’s, so she’s gone round to his place. I thought about saying something to her – why do you go running to him whenever he calls? But I’m really not in a great position to give relationship advice – or any advice, come to that – and in any case I feel like a drink. (I’ve been thinking about it ever since we sat down in Giraffe and the spotty waiter asked if we’d like a glass of wine and Cathy said ‘No, thank you’ very firmly.) So I wave her off and feel the little anticipatory tingle run over my skin and I push away the good thoughts (Don’t do this, you’re doing really well). I’m just putting my shoes on to go to the off-licence and my phone rings. Tom. It’ll be Tom. I grab the phone from my bag and look at the screen and my heart bangs like a drum.
‘Hi.’ There is silence, so I ask, ‘Is everything OK?’
After a little pause Scott says, ‘Yeah, fine. I’m OK. I just called to say thank you, for yesterday. For taking the time to let me know.’
‘Oh, that’s all right. You didn’t need—’
‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘No. It’s fine.’ There is silence on the end of the line, so I say again, ‘It’s fine. Have you … has something happened? Did you speak to the police?
‘The family liaison officer was here this afternoon,’ he says. My heart rate quickens. ‘Detective Sergeant Riley. I mentioned Kamal Abdic to her. Told her that he might be worth speaking to.’
‘You said … you told her that you’d spoken to me?’ My mouth is completely dry.
‘No, I didn’t. I thought perhaps … I don’t know. I thought it would be better if I came up with the name myself. I said … it’s a lie, I know, but I said that I’d been racking my brains to think of anything significant, and that I thought it might be worth speaking to her therapist. I said that I’d had some concerns about their relationship in the past.’
I can breathe again. ‘What did she say?’ I ask him.
‘She said they had already spoken to him, but that they would do again. She asked me lots of questions about why I hadn’t mentioned him before. She’s … I don’t know. I don’t trust her. She’s supposed to be on my side, but all the time I feel like she’s snooping, like she’s trying to trip me up.’
I’m stupidly pleased that he doesn’t like her either; another thing we have in common, another thread to bind us.
‘I just wanted to say thank you, anyway. For coming forward. It was actually … it sounds odd, but it was good to talk to someone … someone I’m not close to. I felt as though I could think more rationally. After you left, I kept thinking about the first time Megan went to see him – Abdic – about the way she was when she came back. There was something about her, a lightness.’ He exhales loudly. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m imagining it.’
I have the same feeling I did yesterday – that he’s no longer really talking to me, he’s just talking. I’ve become a sounding board, and I’m glad of it. I’m glad to be of use to him.
‘I’ve spent the whole day going through Megan’s things again,’ he says. ‘I’ve already searched our room, the whole house, half a dozen times, looking for something, anything that would give me an indication as to where she could be. Something from him, perhaps. But there’s nothing. No emails, no letters, nothing. I thought about trying to contact him, but the practice is closed today and I can’t find a mobile number.’
‘Is that a good idea, do you think?’ I ask. ‘I mean, do you not think you should just leave him to the police?’ I don’t want to say it out loud, but we must both be thinking it: he’s dangerous. Or at least, he could be dangerous.
‘I don’t know, I just don’t know.’ There’s a desperate edge to his voice that’s painful to hear, but I have no comfort to offer. I can hear his breathing on the other end of the line; it sounds short, quickened, as though he’s afraid. I want to ask him if he has someone there with him, but I can’t: it would sound wrong, forward.
‘I saw your ex today,’ he says, and I can feel the hairs on my arms stand up.
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, I went out for the papers and saw him in the street. He asked me if I was all right, whether there was any news.’
‘Oh,’ I repeat, because it’s all I can say, words won’t form. I don’t want him to speak to Tom. Tom knows that I don’t know Megan Hipwell. Tom knows that I was on Blenheim Road the night she disappeared.
‘I didn’t mention you. I didn’t … you know. I wasn’t sure if I should have mentioned that I’d met you.’
‘No, I don’t think you should have. I don’t know. It might be awkward.’
‘All right,’ he says.
After that, there’s a long silence. I’m waiting for my heartbeat to slow. I think he’s going to ring off, but then he says, ‘Did she really never talk about me?’
‘Of course … of course she did,’ I say. ‘I mean, we didn’t talk all that often, but—’
‘But you came to the house. Megan hardly ever invites people round. She’s really private, protective of her own space.’
I’m searching for a reason. I wish I had never told him I’d been to the house.
‘I just came round to borrow a book.’
‘Really?’ He doesn’t believe me. She’s not a reader. I think of the house – there were no books on the shelves there. ‘What sort of things did she say? About me?’
‘Well, she was very happy,’ I say. ‘With you, I mean. Your relationship.’ As I’m saying this I realize how odd it sounds, but I can’t be specific, and so I try to save myself. ‘To be honest with you, I was having a really hard time in my marriage, so I think it was a kind of compare and contrast thing. She lit up when she spoke about you.’ What an awful cliché.
‘Did she?’ He doesn’t seem to notice, there’s a note of wistfulness in his voice. ‘That’s so good to hear.’ He pauses, and I can hear his breathing, quick and shallow, on the other end of the line. ‘We had … we had a terrible argument,’ he says. ‘The night she left. I hate the idea that she was angry with me when …’ he tails off.
‘I’m sure she wasn’t angry with you for long,’ I say. ‘Couples fight. Couples fight all the time.’
‘But this was bad, it was terrible, and I can’t … I feel like I can’t tell anyone, because if I did they would look at me like I was guilty.’
There’s a different quality to his voice now: haunted, saturated with guilt.
‘I don’t remember how it started,’ he says, and immediately I don’t believe him, but then I think about all the arguments I’ve forgotten, and I bite my tongue. ‘It got very heated. I was very … I was unkind to her. I was a bastard. A complete bastard. She was upset. She went upstairs and put some things in a bag. I don’t know what exactly, but I noticed later that her toothbrush was gone, so I knew she wasn’t planning on coming home. I assumed … I thought she must have gone to Tara’s for the night. That happened once before. Just one time. It wasn’t like this happened all the time.
‘I didn’t even go after her,’ he says, and it hits me yet again that he’s not really talking to me, he’s confessing. He’s on one side of the confessional and I’m on the other, faceless, unseen. ‘I just let her go.’
‘That was on Saturday night?’
‘Yes. That was the last time I saw her.’
There was a witness who saw her – or saw ‘a woman fitting her description’ – walking towards Witney station at around quarter past seven, I know that from the newspaper reports. That was the final sighting. No one remembered seeing her on the platform, or on the train. There is no CCTV at Witney, and she wasn’t picked up on the CCTV at Corly, although the reports said that this didn’t prove she wasn’t there, because there are ‘significant blindspots’ at that station.
‘What time was it when you tried to contact her?’ I ask him. Another long silence.
‘I … I went to the pub. The Rose, you know, just around the corner, on Kingly Road? I needed to cool down, to get things straight in my head. I had a couple of pints, then I went back home. That was just before ten. I think I was hoping that she’d have had time to calm down and that she’d be back. But she wasn’t.’
‘So it was around ten o’clock when you tried to call her?’
‘No.’ His voice is little more than a whisper now. ‘I didn’t. I drank a couple more beers at home, I watched some TV. Then I went to bed.’
I think about all the arguments I had with Tom, all the terrible things I said after I’d had too much, all the storming out into the street, shouting at him, telling him I never wanted to see him again. He always rang me, he always talked me down, coaxed me home.
‘I just imagined she’d be sitting in Tara’s kitchen, you know, talking about what a shit I am. So I left it.’
He left it. It sounds callous and uncaring, and I’m not surprised he hasn’t told this story to anyone else. I am surprised that he’s telling anyone at all. This is not the Scott I imagined, the Scott I knew, the one who stood behind Megan on the terrace, his big hands on her bony shoulders, ready to protect her from anything.
I’m ready to hang up the phone, but Scott keeps talking. ‘I woke up early. There were no messages on my phone. I didn’t panic – I assumed she was with Tara and that she was still angry with me. I rang her then and got her voicemail, but I still didn’t panic. I thought she was probably still asleep, or just ignoring me. I couldn’t find Tara’s number, but I had her address – it was on a business card on Megan’s desk. So I got up and I drove round there.’
I wonder, if he wasn’t worried, why he felt he needed to go round to Tara’s house, but I don’t interrupt. I let him talk.
‘I got to Tara’s place a little after nine. It took her a while to come to the door, but when she did, she looked really surprised to see me. It was obvious that I was the last person she expected to see on her doorstep at that time of the morning, and that’s when I knew … That’s when I knew that Megan wasn’t there. And I started to think … I started …’ The words catch and I feel wretched for doubting him.
‘She told me the last time she’d seen Megan was at their pilates class on Friday night. That’s when I started to panic.’
After I hang up the phone, I think about how, if you didn’t know him, if you hadn’t seen how he was with her, as I have, a lot of what he’d said would not ring quite true.