Pig Island (33 page)

It took two hours, dawdling along the tourist roads, stuck behind caravans chugging out sooty fumes, testing strategies as I went, the Massive Attack CD ramming itself into my head. I’d thought about Lexie so much I should have felt better when I pulled up outside the rape suite. Instead I felt like the king of all shits, caught flat-footed, and busy eating myself alive from the inside out. I couldn’t go in. I had to sit for a long time, my hands on the steering-wheel, staring at the lines of grime under my fingernails, my thoughts inching laboriously into opening sentences, mentally walking myself into the house, mentally sliding into the conversation. The storms had passed. The streets were wet, glistening in the late sunlight, but the curtains in the living room were closed and I pictured her sitting in there, bolt upright in one of the blue Formica chairs, staring at me when I came in. Angeline would be upstairs.

When I’d been there for five minutes and I still couldn’t think of an opening sentence, I started the car and moved it forward a little, coming to a halt at the crossroads. I looked left, right. The police surveillance car was in its usual place, facing me about ten yards to the right, parked casually, just far enough along for the officer to see the front of the rape suite. The sunlight bounced off the windscreen and for a second or two I didn’t realize there were two people in the car. Then a cloud rolled across the sun, the light dimmed, and I saw Angeline in the passenger seat, a handkerchief jammed into her eyes. The officer had his arm across the back of her seat. Not actually touching her, but only inches away.

I parked the Fiesta and jumped out, crossed the road, knocked on the window. The central-locking system disengaged and the officer shot a thumb over his shoulder. I opened the back door and stuck my head in. “What’s going on?”

“An argument.” He turned to me. He had very messy red hair and I noticed he didn’t take his arm off the back of Angeline’s seat. She was inclined towards him, as if at some point she might have been crying on his shoulder. She kept pinching her nose, like she was trying to hold something in.
She’s a cripple, mate
…
have you noticed? A cripple. Let me tell you about what she’s got under that coat
.…

“Two young ladies. Had a wee misunderstanding.”

I got into the back and closed the door. They had the heating on full blast and one of them had been drinking. Or both of them. It stank in there like a south London minicab.

“Well?” I said to Angeline. “What’s happened?”

She shook her head, pressing her eyes with the handkerchief. The sound of her tight breathing filled the car.

“I’ll know eventually, so you may as well tell me. What happened?” The officer shot me a glance in the mirror and I caught it, raising my eyebrows calmly at him. If he said, “Don’t be harsh on the lass,” I’d ask him why he had his arm round her and why he had a face like a dog’s arse. “Angeline. I asked you a question. What’s been happening while I’ve been gone?”

She dropped the tissue from her eyes and met my eyes unsteadily in the mirror, this congested look on her face. So, I thought, it’s you who’s been drinking.

She’s no one, Oakes, no one to you. You’ve known her five minutes
.…

“I took some money from your briefcase.” She wiped her nose and began to pull things out of her pockets, placing them on the dashboard in front of her. Two packets of kids’ sweets, three miniature Stolichnayas, four miniature brandies and a couple of empty Doritos bags. It all went rolling across the dashboard, into the air vents and on to the floor. The officer had to pull his arm off her seat and make grabs for it all.

“Easy there, hen. Ea-sy.”

“She was in your bedroom and I went into the kitchen and borrowed money from you.” She jerked her chin in the direction of the Spar shop on the other side of the estate. “Got all of this and some vodka and I’m already drunk. You see?” She pulled a handful of notes and change from the other pocket and dropped it on the dashboard. A five-pence piece rolled off, hitting the gear lever and falling tails up, an inch from my toe into the leather sleeve at the bottom of the handbrake. “I’m a thief and I’m drunk and I’m probably
just like my father because I hate her and I hate you too
…‘

“Hey, hey, hen, go easy on yourself.”

He put his hand on her shoulder and she dissolved into tears. I sighed and looked out of the window at the rape suite. What a shitty fucking place to be doing this, a godforsaken abandoned scheme with its crap lying around everywhere, dead lawns and the horizon bruised yellow, like there was a poisonous cloud coming up from the west. A car nosed out of the street parallel to the rape suite, the road that went to the playing-fields. When it saw our car it did a hasty right and disappeared. Fly-tippers. Offload your shite. Come here to Shitening Grove Estate and offload it. Leave it on the tracks. Someone else’ll deal with it.

“Wait here,” I told Angeline, opening the door. “When I come back we’ve got to talk.” I hesitated then tapped the officer on the shoulder. “I’m going to be ten minutes. But I’m only over there. I can see you from the front window.”

He started to say something, but I closed the door on him. I stood, zipping up my jacket, turning up the collar and staring across at the rape suite. Like
High Noon
or something, which is a joke, because when I got over to the house all I was facing off with was stale air and some ageing soft furnishings. Lexie wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the house.

Chapter 2

I stood in the living room, blinking at the chairs, the blank TV, the cold kettle. I went up and checked in our bedroom, but she wasn’t there. She’d gone. I stood in the hallway for a few moments, my head thumping, thinking, She’s left me. Not the other way round—
she’s
left
me
. Then I went back to the car. This time the officer didn’t wait for me to knock. He opened the window and looked at me blankly.

“She’s not there.”

Angeline turned, her cheeks red and mottled, and looked past me to the house. “She was there when I left.”

I put my elbow on the roof and dropped my face into the window close to the officer’s. “Well?” I said slowly. “What time did she go?”

A line of red appeared across the bridge of. his nose. Another travelled from his neck up to his forehead. There was a few moments’ silence, and then it dawned on me.

“Oh, you fucking clown. You left your post. Didn’t you?”

He glared at me, grinding his jaws in small, tight circles.

“You left your fucking post.” I slammed the roof of the car, making him jump.

“He came to find me,” Angeline said. She got out and faced me blearily over the top of the car roof. Her breath was white in the cold air and I could see she was suddenly panicky, looking over my head at the rape suite. “It was my fault. I went for a walk and he came to find me.”

I didn’t answer. I looked around myself at the empty streets, the bleak houses and the burning horizon. The curtains closed in the rape suite. I turned and headed for the house, a sweat breaking out over my skin. Angeline limped behind me, unsteady, worried. “Don’t panic,” she said. I could hear in her voice she was as scared now as I was. She was sobering up quickly. “I’m sure everything’s all right. She said she was going back to London. She said she was going. I’m sure she’s OK.”

A J-cloth had been hung over the kitchen tap to dry. As I waited for Lexie’s mum to answer the phone I watched a drip forming under the cloth, slowly fill until it was too heavy, then drop with a metallic
ping
into the sink. We didn’t get on, me and Lexie’s ma. She’d never quite swallowed the fact that her daughter had married me, a Scouser who didn’t even make a token effort to conceal his working-class roots. Where she came from, you boasted that the kids had got into Oxbridge; where I came from, you boasted that they’d stayed out of the nick. And another thing, she’d told Lex, I didn’t make enough money. Not nearly enough. So you can see it was never going to be the world’s best relationship. When the phone rang six times, then shuffled over to answerphone, part of me was relieved. I didn’t leave a message. I called the house in Kilburn and left a message: ‘Call me, Lex, when you get in.“ I hung up and went into the kitchen to make a brew.

The house was silent. Angeline had gone upstairs. Probably knew the stray voltage that would crackle up if we tried to talk just now. I listened for her as I made the tea, threw some milk into the cup, turned to put the teabag into the bin and…

I stopped, the bag extended on the spoon, a little pulse beating in my temple.

Lexie’s bag was hanging on the back of the chair.

It was her brown leather Gap bag. Her favourite because it had straps that could make it a rucksack or a tote bag. I’d got it for her for Christmas last year—she used it all the time, swimming or shopping or the pub. She was never separated from it.

Very slowly, like a quick or unexpected movement would make the bag leap up and scuttle away, I dropped the teabag into the bin, threw the spoon into the sink, unhooked the bag from the chair and unzipped it with trembling hands. A faint smell of leather and Airwaves berry chewing-gum came up from it, and inside I found a pocket packet of tissues, a half-finished tube of Lockets, her spiral-bound diary and a spare pair of tights, still in their packaging. I fumbled it all out on to the table, my mouth dry. At the bottom of the bag was her wallet. Her wallet, her keys and her mobile phone.

I stared at the phone in my hand, at the zigzaggy signal icon, my pulse falling to a low, monotone thud. The wallet was closed, and when I opened it I found some loose change, our joint NatWest card, a newspaper cutting of her boss, her library card and a tattered picture of me, tanned and with lots of young-man hair, standing on the Tarmac in front of a Boeing 747 at Athens airport on the way back from our honeymoon in Kos.

I stared at the picture, blank and welded where I stood, all the light and sound in the kitchen muffled.
Lex, Lexie—you wouldn’t have left this if you were going to London … would you
? I went woodenly into the hallway and began to climb the stairs, moving arthritically, clutching the wallet in my numb fingers. I was at the top when I saw Angeline, coming out of the bathroom door. I knew instantly something was wrong.

“Joe,” she whispered, her eyes bright and glittering. “Joe. Look in the bathroom. I think you’d better look.”

Chapter 3

“This is a crime scene.” Chief Inspector Danso stood on the landing with his hands in the pockets of his navy raincoat, peering into the bathroom. Earlier when I came upstairs the door had been standing half open, just enough for me to tell that no one was in there. But I hadn’t bothered to push it open wide. If I had I’d have seen the shattered glass in the window above the sink, letting in a cold square of greyish outside light, I’d have seen the towels thrown untidily in the bath, the shower curtain ripped from the rings overhead. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to call it a crime scene. Let’s go downstairs. The Crime Scene Manager’ll be here any time now.”

We went down in silence. Police car lights flashed blue outside. From the moment I’d seen Angeline’s face on the landing I’d known. I’d known that whatever I thought I’d seen over at Crinian, Dove had been here in Dumbarton all the time. The driver in the cap was a
doppelgänger –
a spectre, a blind coincidence. It was only now, with Danso here and back-up cars on the way, that shock set in. As I got to the bottom of the stairs I began to keel sideways.

“Hey up.” Danso came up behind me, catching me under the arm. “There you go, big man. That’s it, through here, let’s sit you down before you fall.” He led me into the living room and lowered me on to the tattered sofa where I sat heavy, my feet planted a pace apart, my hands on my knees, staring at nothing, solemn and stony as old Lincoln in the Washington memorial. Angeline sank on to the sofa opposite me, blinking rapidly, her eyes puffed from crying. “Still with us, eh?” Danso, bent over with his hands on his knees so he was eye-level with me, studying my face, reassuring himself I wasn’t going to fall over like a skittle. He straightened and scanned the living room and kitchen. “Have you a drop of something about the place?”

“Jack Daniel’s.” I nodded automatically. “Yes, Jack Daniel’s.” I looked up at the kitchen, and then, like the noise of my own voice might drown the static in my head, I repeated it a few times, “Jack Daniel’s. Jack Daniel’s. Jack Daniel’s. Over there. See it? In the kitchen.”

“Will I fetch you a drop, then? Just a little—just to get your head back on, eh?”

If there was any evidence worth preserving in the living room Angeline and I had already destroyed it, walking back and forward down there, waiting for Danso to arrive. But the bizzy habits were in Danso’s blood, and he went carefully, automatically tearing off a length of kitchen roll to pick up the bottle because with these break-ins they always make a beeline for the booze. When he saw the cracked cupboard door he took a step back, like he’d been slapped, holding his hands up.

“Me,” I said dully, shaking my head. “Me. The other day. Bull in a china shop.”

He looked at it a bit longer, then slowly lowered his hands. He got a cracked Rangers mug from the back of the shelf, splashed a couple of inches of JD into it and handed it to me. The mug smelt of coffee and sour milk, but I sipped it gratefully, hearing my breath come back at me from inside the mug.

Danso went to the chair. “This her bag, then?”

“Yes.”

“And she hasn’t taken any clothes?”

“Nothing.”

“Your bedroom just as you left it?”

“It’s just the bathroom. The bathroom’s the only place that anyone has—‘ I broke off and pressed my fingertips to my throat, moving my Adam’s apple in a circle as if that would stop me choking. ”Anyone has … you know …’

“Yes,” Danso said quietly. “Yes. I know.” He scratched his head, then pinched up his trousers by the knees and sat on the sofa next to me, his giant spider’s legs black and sharp and thin. “When you came in, did you notice anything unusual about the house? Anything strike you as odd?”