Dying for Christmas (31 page)

‘Earth to Jessica.’

I blink as Travis clicks his fingers in front of my face, and am disconcerted to find the whole table looking at me – apart from my brother Jonathan, who is rolling his eyes at James.

‘You were completely away with the fairies there. I was asking about the roast beef,’ says James’s wife Sarah, who used to be important in advertising and still can’t quite shake off her demeanour of authority even though it’s been six years since she went off on maternity leave and never returned to work. ‘Since when do you eat meat?’

My vegetarianism is another casualty of my sojourn in Dominic’s flat. That much of the account is true. Dominic did fill the fridge with meat and meat-based ready-meals that he commanded me to eat. It was all part of his power game. And since then I’ve developed a taste for it.

‘Well, I for one am very glad,’ says my mother. ‘Humans are biologically evolved to eat meat. It’s a fact.’

She’s never really got on with Sarah who once said she believed James’s stubborn concentration on details at the expense of the bigger picture to be an inherited genetic trait.

Grace is sitting opposite me and I glance at her as we eat. Her long brown hair is pulled up into a ponytail which makes her look younger than usual and her soft cheeks are flushed pink from the game she was playing with her younger cousin. For a moment, all my doubts disappear. This is why I did what I did. This is what makes this whole ordeal worthwhile. I feel momentarily vindicated. More than vindicated, elated.

‘I did think about inviting Kim,’ my mother says suddenly.

‘Kim?’ Jonathan’s brows are knitted together so they form one unified black line across his forehead. ‘Policewoman Kim?’

My mother ignores the note of incredulity in his voice. ‘Yes. I like her. And I sense a real sadness there. She and her husband are living separately, you know. And with two small children too.’

I’m astonished, thinking of the quiet policewoman with her neat brown bob and grey eyes.

‘How do you know all that?’

‘Oh, you’re not the only one with dramas in your life, you know.’ Mum doesn’t look up as she carries on eating, methodically moving her fork between her plate and her mouth.

‘She’s not a friend, Lizzie.’ My dad has put down his cutlery and is peering down the table at his wife, his frown echoing his younger son’s. ‘I’ve told you before, you mustn’t let the lines get blurred. Kim is doing a job. That’s all. In the same way that David Gallant is just doing a job. Yes, she’s been supporting us, but she’s also been finding out information about us and reporting back. That’s what she’s there for.’

I go cold when he says that, about finding out information and reporting back. It’s a reminder that I’m still under suspicion, still vulnerable. For a second I feel a jolt of pure hatred for the policewoman whose job it is to find the snags in my story and pull on them until gaping holes appear. Those daily phone calls she makes: ‘Just checking in’, ‘Any more thoughts?’ Then I look at Grace again and I calm down.

No one would blame me if they knew the circumstances.

I am not the one who’s done wrong.

* * *

On a Sunday afternoon the station is a weird place to be. Not empty exactly but a sense of normal life suspended. Robertson is off visiting his married daughter with his wife and their two teenage boys. He always comes back from these weekends ruddier than ever, as if he’s spent the time outdoors. Kim imagines him helping her in the garden. It’s the sort of thing he might do.

Martin is in though. They are matching each other hour for hour, neither wanting to be seen as less committed. Between them they are going through the reports into Natalie Lacey’s disappearance. Another team has been investigating that case, following up leads from the time she was first reported missing, but has drawn a blank. Now Martin and Kim are having a look to see if they can find any connection to Jessica Gold. Any connection other than Dominic Lacey, that is.

Kim gazes at the photo of Natalie Lacey, née Paepke. It shows a blonde woman wearing a black tailored trouser suit with a sequinned top underneath and high silver heels. It was taken from Natalie’s own website where she showcased her skills as an ‘international stylist’. The site has endless .pdfs of magazine fashion shoots Natalie has worked on, and links to many pop videos she’s helped to style.

As a freelancer, it seems Natalie was much in demand – always flying off to Florida or South Africa at a moment’s notice. People who knew her said she always kept a bag packed, ready for the airport if a rush job came up. Kim can’t even begin to imagine such freedom.

Not that Natalie had many close friends from the sound of it. Just hundreds of acquaintances. And those who did profess to know her well said they had hardly seen her since her marriage to Dominic.

‘She changed,’ Mel Newton, who occasionally assisted Natalie on big-budget shoots, said in one of several written statements given by those close to the missing woman. ‘Before, she used to like to go out for a few drinks with the crew after filming was over, but once she got married she was different. If she went out, her phone would be constantly buzzing with texts and calls and sometimes she’d go off into a different room and you’d hear her having a row. After a while it got so she hardly went out at all.’

That figures. From her work in the Domestic Violence Unit, Kim knows that people like Lacey operate by isolating their victims from their support network. She studies the photograph carefully.

‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ she says to Martin. ‘Look at the photo of Natalie Lacey. How would you describe her? You’re a red-blooded male.’

She can tell Martin is pleased by this.

‘Well. She’s a trophy woman, isn’t she?’ he says. ‘She’s A list.’

‘And how about Jessica Gold? How would you describe her?’

Martin glances up sharply as if this might be some sort of trick. ‘She seems like a nice woman. Interesting.’

‘But not trophy?’

Again he glances over, before shaking his head.

‘So why her? Clearly Natalie is his type. His level, if you like. So why would he go for Jessica Gold? He didn’t know whether she was interesting or nice before he sat down at that table and chatted her up.’

‘He’s a pervert. He was just after anyone he could exercise some power over. He’d set everything up at home – the meals, the presents, the bloody dog kennel. All he was interested in was finding someone who’d come back with him. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘But it doesn’t fit any kind of pattern,’ Kim persists. ‘Lacey is a manipulator. He does things that bring about other people’s deaths but he doesn’t kill them himself. Why change now? Abduction? Murder? Why take those risks?’

‘Because he’s upping the ante – making it more exciting for himself.’

Kim is looking at the photograph of Natalie Lacey again. The woman is certainly striking – the kind of looks you don’t forget.

‘I still don’t think it makes sense. If he was going out prowling for victims, why do it there in a busy department store where everyone is rushing about with a purpose? Why not go to a bar?’

Martin shrugs. ‘Jessica Gold was in a department store, on a mission to get her Christmas shopping done, and she still ended up going home with him. He just took a chance. Maybe he’s done it before. Or maybe he’d already been to loads of other places and hadn’t had any luck so he decided to try there.’

It was as plausible as anything else, Kim supposes. Yet still when Martin has gone, she puts the picture of Natalie Lacey on her desk alongside the missing-persons photo of Jessica Gold, and she gazes at them for a long time.

Chapter Forty-Two

‘What’s he waiting for? I don’t get it.’

I’m sitting on the sofa at home trying to avoid looking at the little square in the bottom corner of my laptop screen that shows what Natalie can see from her end – namely my own face gazing out pastily from under my unwashed hair. I tell myself it’s the angle of the computer webcam that makes me look so awful, but I know that’s not true. I look awful because I’ve given up. I no longer go out of the flat except to my parents’ house. I rarely get dressed. Luckily, Skype can’t transmit smells as well. I smell like something that has crawled under the floorboards and died.

‘Jess, you’re such a pessimist. Maybe he’s not waiting for anything. Maybe he’s just a vegetable in a bed, incapable of intelligent thought. Hasn’t that occurred to you?’

That’s the kind of thing Natalie says: ‘vegetable in a bed’. How do I even know someone like this? I try to imagine Dominic so brain-damaged he can’t write or even respond, but I can’t.

‘I’ve just got this feeling it’s all closing in on us. Did I tell you the police are waiting on one of those CSI reports, though they call it something else. SOCO, I think. Yes, that’s it. They’ve been collecting all the forensic evidence – looking for fingerprints, measuring blood spatters or whatever else they do.’

‘Relax. It’s fine. I wore gloves, and everything else happened just the way you said it did.’

‘Yes, but that police liaison woman, Kim, has been asking loads of questions. She calls me every day. To “check in”, she says, but really it’s to catch me tripping myself up. It doesn’t help that my mother has now decided she’s her best friend and tells her everything. She’s probably talking her through my baby pictures as we speak. And now even Travis is being weird. He keeps looking at me like he doesn’t believe me.

‘Or maybe he’s looking at you like a man might look at his girlfriend who went to a hotel with a strange guy, a
married
strange guy, and shagged his brains out.’

For a moment my brain freezes with shock. Travis
knows
about the hotel and the shagging? Then I remember what’s real and my insides are washed by a tsunami of relief.

‘You know very well Travis doesn’t have a clue about that bit. All he knows is I went home with Dominic Lacey for a drink after a random meeting with him on Christmas Eve. And as you also know I had no idea he was married. And if we’re finding fault here, which we clearly are, at least I realized my mistake straight away. At least I didn’t
marry
him.’

Natalie glares at me with her blue contact lenses. Who knows why she wears them when she’s at home in her supposed ‘safe house’, as she insists on calling it. It’s not as if anyone else can see her. In fact, now I think about it, Natalie looks very dressed up today for someone marooned in a house on her own. She never looks exactly slobby, but today she has on a clingy emerald-green dress and, when she stands up to move around, yes, tights. Who wears tights when no one is going to see them?

‘You
are
on your own, aren’t you?’

My voice thrums with accusation and Natalie makes one of her rolling-eye faces.

She flicks back her red hair and drops down into the chair, flinging herself back against the cushion. I have another fleeting twinge of recognition when I see the pattern on the fabric, but it’s gone almost as soon as it arrives.

For a few seconds we stare at each other through our respective screens with an animosity we don’t bother to hide. If Natalie and I had met in other circumstances we’d have had nothing to say to each other. Correction: Natalie and I would never have met. Full stop.

Even when we were putting together the Christmas Plan (that’s what we called it, as if it was a party we were planning), I had major misgivings. She’d left the cottage I’d found her by that time and was moving around the country, trying to keep ahead of Dominic. The friend of a friend who was supposed to be getting her a fake passport proved to be elusive. This is something I quickly came to learn about Natalie. All the friends and contacts she used to boast of didn’t actually exist. Or else they existed, but they weren’t her friends.

We formulated the plan over Skype sessions like this one, while Travis was at work or off with his new hospital friends. It started as Natalie’s idea. My first reaction was derision. The whole idea was preposterous. That I would willingly give in to Dominic’s demands, knowing what he was capable of, was ridiculous. By this stage he was insisting that I spend Christmas with him, cut off from the outside world, just me and him. I think he liked the symbolism of Christmas, the idea that he would be dividing me from my family. It played to his sense of power. Plus, of course, he had no one else to spend Christmas with. That much of my account was true. He was lonely, in his own twisted way. And he wanted me to be lonely too.

When Natalie first suggested I play along with it, or at least pretend to play along with it, I dismissed it out of hand. And not just because the idea of voluntarily spending time with him, pretending to enjoy it, was so abhorrent. There was also the little question of how I’d explain my change of heart so he wouldn’t be suspicious.

‘He’ll know it’s a trick. Why on earth would he believe I’d suddenly give way like that, after he’d drugged me and threatened my family?’

‘Because he’s a narcissist. Remember, he truly believes he can manipulate anyone. He knows you’re shit-scared of what might happen to your niece. Plus he has no problem believing you secretly enjoyed what he did to you in that hotel room and can’t resist coming back for more.’

Still I held out. There would be another way. There had to be. Dominic’s emails grew more threatening. After the message with the photo of Grace I didn’t dare block him for fear of missing some vital clue that my niece was in danger.

Then the second photograph arrived. It was the same selfie idea, only this time he was on a bus and Grace was sitting two rows behind. This time she was on her own, still wearing the school blazer, iPhone ear pieces plugged in. Dominic was wearing a grey suit jacket and a black shirt.