Dying for Christmas (11 page)

I smiled, but only because he seemed to be expecting it.

‘While Mummy was pregnant things were almost normal in our house. Mummy went back to her own bed. Mrs Meadowbank stayed in her own house. And I grew to love that canary. Guess what I called him?’

I had no idea.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Guess.’

‘Bertie?’ I said. ‘Buzzy? Buddy the budgie.’

He roared with laughter. ‘I called him Dominic.’

‘You called your canary after yourself?’

‘Yes! That bird was mine, you see. Did you know, Jessica, in the old days servants who accompanied their masters or mistresses to other houses used to be known by their employer’s name, not their own? So were plantation slaves. Maybe if you’d called your dog Jessica, things might have turned out very differently.’

I had a sudden flash then of Sonia Rubenstein, leaning forward eagerly in her chair, peering out over the top of one of her brightly coloured scarves, drinking in the significance of what he’d just said.

‘So what happened?’

‘Well, my parents and this health worker kept laying it on thick about how the bird was a present from the baby and wasn’t it kind of the baby. They were thrilled at how well I’d bonded with the bird. They thought that would make me even better disposed to the baby when it came.’

‘And did it?’

‘All in good time, sweetheart.’ Dominic looked irritated.

‘When my sister was born, I was horrified. You’d have thought I might be glad there was someone else in our dysfunctional family, but I wasn’t. I’d been so used to being the centre of my parents’ attention – for better or for worse – that I couldn’t get used to this needy little creature who was suddenly the focus of the whole household. For years I’d been smothered in love and now it was like they didn’t even bother to find out where I was half the time. It was Annabel this and Annabel that, and is Annabel hot, does Annabel need changing? She even slept in the bed with them and if I tried to get in, they’d say there wasn’t room. I remember one night I started screaming about how I hated the new baby and I wished they’d take her back where they got her from. You know, how kids can get.’

I thought of my own brothers to whom I remained a constant conundrum and had been, as a child, a constant disappointment.

‘My parents were trying to calm me down. “But Annabel loves you,” my mother said.’ Dominic put on a creepy high-pitched voice for this bit and I wondered how much of it he could really remember. He’d been so young after all. ‘“Remember, she’s the one who brought your canary?” They wouldn’t call him by his name, Dominic. They said it was weird.

‘So, can you guess what happened next, Jessica? What might an angry little boy do with the present his enemy had given him?’

He was looking at me, expecting an answer.

‘Set it free?’

He looked at me with disappointment in his eyes. ‘I couldn’t set him free, Jessica. That would have been cruel. He wouldn’t have survived a single night out there in the wild. I took him out of his cage, and held him gently in both my hands, so I could feel his little heart right through his soft furry chest. And then I snapped his neck.’

He’s lying, I told myself. Children that young don’t do things like that, let alone remember them so vividly. Still, my stomach rolled over.

‘That was my first experience of loss. I cried for days. I told Mummy and Daddy what I’d done so they’d know I didn’t owe the baby anything, but they insisted on blaming next door’s cat. They knew it wasn’t true, but that’s what they always said. “Remember when your canary was killed by the cat from next door?” It drove me crazy.

‘After a while they forgot about Dominic, but I never did. Each man kills the thing he loves. Who said that, Jessica? You must have that stashed away somewhere in your archive of a brain?’

‘Oscar Wilde.’

‘There. I knew you’d know it. It was a tough lesson to learn at five years old.’

He’s lying
. I repeated it mentally until it took on a rhythm of its own. He’s lying, he’s lying, he’s lying.

‘Anyway, listen to me, getting all maudlin when we’re supposed to be being festive. Let me bring you your third present. I bet you thought I’d forgotten it.’

He sprang to his feet and crossed to the tree. For the first time, I looked closely at the perfectly arranged decorations. They were beautiful. Round baubles made from coloured glass winking as the flashing fairy lights caught them.

Dominic selected a package from the pile. I wondered how he knew which was which. There didn’t seem to be any markings on that expensive paper.

The present was rectangular, around half the size of a shoebox. I took it from him.

‘That’s right, Jessica, get it all off.’

As before, watching me unwrap the layers of ribbon and paper seemed to get him quite excited and I thought he looked almost disappointed when I was left holding just the plain cardboard box that had been inside.

‘Open it. Aren’t you dying to see what’s in there?’

My first thought was, a dead budgie.

So it was a pleasant relief when I opened it to find an assortment of little paint pots and what looked at first glance to be individually wrapped brushes.

‘Art stuff?’

I’d come to dread the sound of his laugh, which now ripped from his throat.

‘Not quite, Jessica. I want to show you something.’

He was wearing a white linen shirt today, loose over the top of a pair of faded jeans, and he lifted it up, revealing a flat lightly tanned stomach. There was a line of hair that started at his belly button and disappeared beneath the waistband of his jeans. I tried to swallow but couldn’t.

With one hand holding up his shirt, he used the other to push his jeans down at one side. There, nestling in beside one perfectly smooth hip bone, was a tattoo. Of a small, brightly coloured bird.

I looked more closely at the box in my hands.

The little bottles weren’t paints, they were inks. Those individually wrapped brushes? Sterile tattoo needles.

Chapter Sixteen

One of the other archivists got a tattoo a few months ago. She’s a strange person. Most of us there are. She’s forty-two and had been having an affair with a married man for fifteen years. He’s much older than her and had been promising to leave his wife all that time, but never got around to it. Fifteen years of waiting. I expect most people find that unfathomable, but I sympathized. Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent my whole life waiting for something. For my real life to start. Waiting is something I’m good at.

One morning she came into work and there was something different about her. She was buzzing with energy. At first I thought it must have finally happened – at last he’d left his wife. But it turned out she’d had a tattoo done on her shoulder. She showed it to me in the toilets, shyly pulling down the back of her cardigan to reveal a butterfly emerging from the strap of her vest top.

‘I’ve wanted one for years,’ she confided. ‘But Paul hates them. He thinks they’re common.’

Within a week, she’d finished the affair.

So I knew tattoos were powerful things.

All the time I was remembering this, Dominic was jabbing at me with the needle. He’d had the template prepared already – a tiny bird just like his. And of course it was to go in exactly the same place, resting on my hip. He had to shave a bit of my pubic hair first. I don’t think he liked that. Judging by that horrible painting I imagined Natalie was probably one of those women who get the whole lot whipped off.

After shaving it, Dominic had made a big deal of dabbing the designated area with an alcohol wipe. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve thought of everything, Jessica. It’s perfectly safe. Your health is important to me.’ He glanced at me then as if checking that I’d got a private joke. He seemed eager for me to acknowledge how considerate he’d been, so I held back from asking how having me sleep in a dog kennel in the cold, and eat fatty food until it clogged up my veins, fitted in with this concern for my well-being.

In truth I couldn’t have said anything. My voice was frozen in my throat by the sight of those needles and that neat row of little rainbow-coloured bottles.

I was about to be branded, like a sheep or a cow, tied to this man for ever by these matching patches of decorated skin.

‘Please don’t,’ I said, before I could stop myself.

He looked at me and smiled.

And then began the pushing of the needle into skin. ‘You have to penetrate just the right amount,’ Dominic explained. ‘Through the second layer of skin but not so far in that there’s blood all over the place. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear a popping sound as it goes through each layer.’

I didn’t want to hear the popping sound. I didn’t want to see the beads of blood that mixed with the black ink that formed the outline. I didn’t want to see the picture taking shape on my flesh.

‘There,’ Dominic said at last. ‘Don’t you want to look, sweetheart?’

I shook my head, and to my chagrin a hot tear squeezed itself out of my eye and trickled down my cheek.

Instantly he was on his feet. He held me close and crooned in my ear, ‘Poor Jessica Gold. Poor old thing.’

When he stepped back, the look he gave me was so tender I couldn’t help myself from blurting out, ‘Are you ever going to let me go home?’

As soon as I’d said it, I wished it unsaid.

‘But, sweetheart,’ he replied, and his voice was soft as the flesh on the inside of a wrist, ‘this
is
your home now.’

* * *

If you’d never been on the panel at a press appeal before, they could be pretty intimidating. Kim had only done it a couple of times, and her role was only ever to sit next to the family to give moral support, but even so she found herself overwhelmed all over again by the sheer quantity of microphones and cameras flashing in her face.

Nestled in between DSI Robertson and Edward Gold behind a table groaning with terrifying audio-visual equipment, Kim felt horribly exposed. She knew it was shallow to think about her appearance at a time like this, but she was regretting choosing today to try to disguise the shadows under her eyes with the new concealer she’d rashly bought the last time she went shopping, scrunching up the receipt as soon as she’d got it so Sean would never know how much it had cost. The sales woman had assured her it was meant to be much lighter than her skin tone, but now Kim was worrying that it would show up white under the flashlights, giving her that unfortunate look skiers sometimes have when they’ve tanned around their goggles.

Next to Edward Gold sat his wife Liz, looking curiously shrunken since the last time Kim had seen her, as if someone had opened a valve and let some of the air out of her. And at the far end was Travis Riley, his pale eyes anxious behind those black-framed glasses.

They’d already talked about the facts – how long Jessica had been missing, where she’d last been seen, the bank cards that put her in Oxford Street on Christmas Eve afternoon. Now it was time for the Golds to make their appeal. This part always made Kim feel uncomfortable. She was well aware that the family would be judged on how much emotion they showed. Too much and it could be deemed all a show. Too little and they were hiding something. When did people start judging real life like
The X Factor?

Liz Gold was going to do the talking for the family, they’d already decided that much. Well, she’d already decided it. At least she looked the part, Kim thought, wryly. Her green eyes were sunk in dark shadows and her brown hair had a lank, unwashed look, the grey coming through at the parting like mould. She’d put on lipstick though, Kim couldn’t help noticing. That might go against her.

‘Jessica is a quiet, home-loving girl,’ Mrs Gold was saying. ‘This disappearance is so out of character. Someone must know where she is and what’s happened to her. We just want to know our daughter is safe.’

Kim appalled herself by nodding with approval when Liz Gold’s voice wobbled on the last word.

Next up was Travis Riley. He was wearing a black polo-necked jumper and Kim frowned when he flicked his hair out of his eyes before speaking. That might alienate people – it was amazing the things the great British public took against.

‘We love and miss Jessica very much,’ he said, reading from a prepared statement. ‘If anyone has any information about her whereabouts, please,
please
get in touch with the police.’

From her position at the table, Kim could see that Travis’ hand, the one that held the written statement, was trembling, but she knew the cameras would focus on his face, and the wooden manner in which he was reading.

Could he have something to do with it all? Kim’s gut feeling was no, but they were digging around anyway, tracing his movements since Christmas Eve. They’d already checked his phone records – lots of calls and texts to Jessica’s number asking where the fuck she was, but nothing suspicious.

Reporters had been briefed that the family weren’t taking any questions, but still some shouted out, desperate for more. ‘The ed wants more colour,’ these reporters were constantly telling her, meaning personal stuff. The little details that bring the dead and missing to life.

‘Mrs Gold, can you tell us about the self-harming? Do you think Jessica might have done something to herself?’

Kim briefly closed her eyes. How on earth had that got out so quickly? The family were already on their feet, getting ready to leave, but Liz Gold stopped, blinking into the sea of flashlights.

‘No,’ she said, and an angry red flush worked its way up over her throat and face. ‘She would never—’

Kim quickly took hold of her elbow and steered her away, leaving the rest of the sentence hanging in the air.