Whose week was she going to make by handing them that entertaining task?
‘In the meantime,’ Harry said, ‘you should probably go home.’
‘Probably.’ She caught his look and raised both hands in mock surrender. ‘Two minutes,’ she lied. ‘Then I’m out of here, I promise.’
Alex minimised the Internet page and waited to watch the superintendent leave the room. She then searched for the bank of profiles she had earlier retrieved from the missing persons database. If this young woman had been in the river for anything up to two weeks, someone must surely have missed her during that time. Thinking she might be kept occupied by the surprisingly long list of missing people the database had thrown up, Alex went into the quiet corridor and down to the small staffroom to make a cup of coffee. The vending machine in the corridor produced what could only be described as water that smelled vaguely of coffee, deemed worth keeping for emergency caffeine needs should the kettle ever decide to spontaneously combust, which it had decided to the previous week.
There was something irrepressibly tragic about the image of a missing person. Even the photographs that had captured joyful moments – wedding days, graduations, sun-bleached beach holidays – were made eerie by the subject’s updated status as ‘missing’. Smiles became saddened, eyes dulled; gestures became fake somehow, as though the soon-to-become-missing person wished to emphasise that moment in an effort to erase a fate they were subconsciously aware of. As though somehow they had known back when the photograph was taken – had known all along, really – that at some point they would be leaving the world that existed on the other side of the camera.
Alex sipped her coffee as each face greeted her in turn. Missing sons, missing brothers, missing wives. Everyone meant something to someone, even those who might not have believed they did. Where did the missing go? What happened to those people who left their homes one day, heading for work as they did every other morning, and simply disappeared from their lives? It seemed to Alex that it should no longer be possible for a person to just go missing, yet every year thousands did.
Her finger hovered over the keypad, lingering over an image. A young woman – a girl – was sitting on a low wall in a back garden, a small square of overgrown lawn behind her. She wore a summer dress, pale blue with spaghetti straps, and a pair of sunglasses was pushed up on to her head. Her long hair was swept to one side, over one shoulder, and the ghost of a smile sat upon her lips, as though giving in to it might cause her fragile frame to shatter.
The young woman seemed to call to Alex in silence through the screen, and though she had looked so different when the image had been taken, Alex had no doubt that this was the girl whose body had been pulled from the river.
Chapter Six
The group had gone to the pub and ordered drinks; all except Carl, who had made his excuses and left. If no one else noticed that Connor and Sarah had simultaneously disappeared after the drinks had been taken to a table in a far corner – the kind of spot that most of the group was happy to opt for in order to be lost to the rest of the room – then Rachel Jones at least had spotted them, and she sat with her back turned slightly to the others, her dark eyes watching the empty corridor down which Connor and Sarah had slipped away.
Connor followed her to the toilets, reached for her elbow and pulled her into the cold night air of the small enclosed smokers’ area.
‘What are you playing at?’
‘What?’
Connor exhaled loudly and pressed a hand to the brick wall of the pub, his body blocking hers and stopping her from leaving, though they both knew she wouldn’t have left even had it been an option.
‘You know what. All those innuendos in the meeting. You’ve got to stop this, Sarah, please. If anyone finds out—’
‘If anyone finds out what?’
He should never have stayed out with her that first night all those months ago, he thought. They hadn’t been to the pub that night; they had stayed at the hall and he could still remember that night so clearly, all the truths and the admissions that had been spilled by not just them but by other members of the group. He had felt the connection instantly, like some sort of invisible length of thread that passed across the room and pulled him towards her, and she to him. He had felt she understood him, and at the time that had been exactly what he’d needed.
And now it was everything he didn’t.
He might have been initially attracted to her because he had thought she understood him, but the only attraction that had kept him going back was the one he kept feeling in his trousers every time she stood too close to him. The one he was feeling now, even though his brain was telling him how stupid he was and how much trouble this woman could cause him.
‘What you did earlier, the way you spoke like that at the meeting. It wasn’t you.’
‘You don’t know me.’
Perhaps that was true, and why wouldn’t it be? They all professed to honesty, but the real truth was that they all kept their darkest secrets hidden, buried in their own heads. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t need the support group.
‘This has to stop, Sarah.’
She shifted her weight from one foot to another, her body tilted at an angle and her arms folded across her chest. She hated it when he said her name like that. He was older than her, but not by much, so how did it always manage to sound like some sort of reprimand, like a teacher berating a student or a parent scolding a wayward child?
He thought she was going to argue with him, but instead her folded arms relaxed and she breathed a gulp of night air before saying, ‘I know.’
He exhaled. ‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault, all of it. I should never have let it happen. And I don’t want you to stop coming to the meetings, but if you feel you have to then I’m sorry for that too.’
What was he saying? He didn’t care if she stopped coming. It would make his life a lot easier if he never saw her again. But if he told her that, she might decide she had nothing to lose. She would tell the rest of the group what they’d been up to, and then everything would really go to shit.
Sarah closed her eyes. ‘I don’t want to stop coming.’
‘Then what happened earlier. It can’t happen again.’
‘I know,’ she said, looking at him. ‘I’m sorry.’ She didn’t want to make a scene, but going quietly still felt like giving in to Connor. Things had always been on his terms. They met up when it suited him; he answered her calls when it suited him. He picked her up and put her down and expected her to be available whenever it was convenient for him.
How was that fair?