A Person Could Disappear Here Read online

  “I’m just saying, quid pro quo. I do something for you…”

  “Were you born a shitbag or did you have to take a class?”

  “Hey, there’s no need to get nasty.”

  “My best friend is missing. Probably taken by the yank she went to see, who’s not the romantic hero she thought he was but a sleaze-bag who’s doing Christ knows what to her God knows where, and you won’t help without me handing out sexual favours? Yeah, I think that qualifies you as a first-class shitbag!”

  “Bloody hell, Tina, calm down. I’ll help. But you can’t blame a bloke for trying.”

  I suppose not, but why do men always have to conform to the stereotype of thinking with their dicks?

  His cheeky grin does have me smiling though. I can’t help it. Come to think of it, he is pretty cute. With that whole sexy-boy-next-door thing he has going for him, he reminds me a bit of Alfred Enoch. Blimey, hasn’t he grown up gorgeous? But no matter how good-looking a man he’s become, you know he’ll always be remembered as the boy in the Harry Potter films who said, ‘Hey, look. Neville’s got a remembrall.”. So yes, Nathan’s definitely doable. But I make a point of never blurring the lines with male co-workers. It has the potential of getting messy, and me a reputation.

  “Okay, you come round to my place after work tonight and I’ll feed you. Tagliolini con Vongole. How’s that?”

  “And tiramisu? Like you brought to the Christmas office do.”

  Blimey, he has no idea the faff that is to make. “Sure. Seven o’clock, okay?”

  “Great. I’ll bring the wine.”

  Bloody hell, he makes it sound like a date…

  It’s almost seven by the time I get home after making a detour to pick up two portions of tiramisu from Mediterraneo in Notting Hill. It’s the only Italian restaurant worth eating at really, as the Italians who pack its tables every Sunday lunchtime will attest to; and Nathan will never know the difference.

  Bang on seven there’s a knock on the door and I open it to find Nathan, grinning, a bottle of wine in each hand. Sauvignon blanc from the Emilia Romagna region of northern Italy no less. The boy knows his wine, I’ll give him that. And even more impressive, when he hands them to me, I realise the bottles are already chilled.

  “Nice place,’ he says, glancing in the sitting room as he follows me into the kitchen.

  “Thanks. In another life I would have been an interior designer, but in this one I somehow found myself in IT. The house is Abbey’s childhood home. With it having been rented out for years, she wanted it redecorated when we moved in after graduating and trusted me enough to pretty much give me free rein.”

  After putting one of the bottles of wine in the fridge to keep cool, I pour us both a glass from the other.

  “Cheers,” Nathan says, clinking his glass against mine before taking a drink, letting the wine coat his mouth fully before swallowing and sighing his appreciation. Seems he really does know his wine. “Right then, point me in the direction of Abbey’s laptop and I’ll work my magic on that while you work yours in here making my dinner.”

  After leaving him in the sitting room settled on the sofa with Abbey’s laptop, I head back into the kitchen to make both our dinners, which after the busy day at work I’ve had I’m more than ready for.

  Nathan spoons the last remains of tiramisu from his plate. It’s no exaggeration to say if it had a pattern rather than being pure white, he would have scrapped it off in his eagerness to consume every last scrap of the creamy coffee confection. And I don’t blame him. It was yummy. And I have absolutely no qualms whatsoever in accepting his praise when he says how delicious the meal was, especially dessert.

  “No, seriously, Cristina, you’re restaurant good. I suppose you get that from your mum.”

  “Dad actually. He’s the Italian one. Although mum’s a whizz at English food. Her Sunday lunch? Roast potatoes to die for.”

  “I don’t go home all that often. My mum’s a crap cook. Plus, she and dad don’t get on. I don’t know why they don’t just call it a day to be honest. So I usually have Sunday lunch down the pub.”

  Okay… I’m not sure if the bottle of wine Nathan’s drunk is making him over share, or if that was a veiled way of getting an invite to Sunday lunch at my parents’. Oh God, maybe he does see this as a sort of date. Blimey, I better knock that idea on the head right now and change the subject, quick.

  “So, Abbey’s laptop. Password. Are you any closer to finding out what it is?”

  “Yeah, I found it.” Nathan tears a page out of his notebook and hands it to me. “Here. You can get into her Facebook account any time you like.”

  Sneaky wotsit. Did he think I’d chuck him out without feeding him if he’d told me that before dinner?

  “You would have still got fed if you’d told me that earlier. A deal’s a deal after all.”

  He grins. “I know.”

  After kicking Nathan out, I dive into Abbey’s Facebook account only to make the alarming discovery that if there were any messages between her and Jensen they’ve been deleted. Why would she do that?

  The answer is, she wouldn’t, she has no reason to. But he might.

  I’ve never so much as set foot inside a police station before tonight. There’s something simultaneously exhilarating and unsettling about being behind the scenes. As a civilian you’re only ever back here after something bad has happened; when you’re the victim of a crime or the perpetrator of one. Either way, you end up here. The sign on the door is innocuous enough, but the Interview Room I was shown to would work equally well for interrogation. How many suspects have squirmed on this uncomfortable moulded plastic chair as they looked across the well-worn wooden table into the eyes of their interrogator?

  Detective Inspector Blake looks across the table at me. “So, you say your friend is missing, Miss Caputo.”

  I don’t say it, I know it. “Yes. In America.”

  “America’s a big country. Can we be a little more specific?”

  And right off the bat his patronising tone pisses me off. “She went to Denver, but when I last heard from her she was in Nebraska with the man she went to the States to meet.”

  The detective’s nasal huff is pure derision.

  “Look, I read online that I have to register Abbey as a missing person with the police and you contact the UK side of Interpol, so–”

  “All in good time, Miss Caputo. I need some details from you first.”

  I slide him the envelope containing a recent photo of Abbey, her social media addresses and any information I could think of that might be useful.

  DI Blake nods as he looks through it. “This should make our job easier, and Interpol’s. If they get involved that is.”

  “Why wouldn’t they? Abbey is a British citizen. Isn’t it their job to protect her regardless of where she is?”

  “Yes, but they’ll only contact the relevant police precinct in the States if they consider her to be a missing person at risk of harm. And we haven’t even established your friend is missing yet.”

  Clearly I’m not recounting what happened at the police station tonight fast enough. Alessandro’s impatience is evident from his huff.

  “Cut to the chase, sis. Have they opened a missing persons case?”

  “Yes, but from the look on DI Blake’s face when I told him Abbey had gone to America to meet a man she met online, I don’t think he’s taking it all that seriously.”

  “So what are they doing?”

  “He said he’d contact Interpol, but doubts they’ll get involved without definite proof Abbey is missing, beyond her not making her return flight. Meanwhile they’ll monitor her social media accounts.”

  “What good will that do? Her phone’s off so she’s hardly likely to post on Facebook.”

  The look on Alessandro’s face has me worried again that he feels railroaded by dad into going to America with me.

  “Are you okay with this? Going to the States with me I mean. Because you don’t have t
o.”

  “I was waiting for mum to finish letting off steam, then dad got in before I could say anything, but I was always going with you.”

  “You were?”

  “Of course. You think I’d let my only sister go alone?” Alessandro’s gaze shifts from my face to rest on the photo of me and Abbey on the mantle. “Besides, it’s Abbey.”

  True, I am Alessandro’s only real sibling, but Abbey and I have been best friends for so long she’s part of the family. I’d thought he’d grown up thinking of her as just another older sister, but maybe now he’s a man his feelings have changed.

  Either way, I’m glad he’s coming with me. I’d never admit it, but I was more than a little daunted at the thought of going alone.

  Even though I can’t be sure she’ll see the message, I can’t wait to let Abbey know that Alessandro and I are definitely coming for her.

  “What are you doing?” he asks as I tap away at my phone.

  “Messaging Abbey. Updating her of the rescue plans.”

  Ignoring my protests, Alessandro snatches the phone from my hand and deletes my half-written text.

  “What did you do that for?”

  “Sometimes you can be really dense, you know that Cristina?”

  “Oh really. Kindly enlighten me how I’m being dense.”

  “For one thing we don’t know for sure Abbey isn’t answering her phone just because she’s holed up somewhere with this Jensen bloke, shagging like bunnies.”

  “Unlikely, but go on.”

  “But if you’re right and he is holding her somewhere against her will, then don’t you think he would have taken her phone so she can’t contact anyone?”

  Oh... Little brother is right. I am being slow on the uptake.

  Then I’m hit with an awful thought. What else have I said in texts and voicemails to Abbey since she last contacted me? If Jensen does have her phone, what have I given away to him already?

  Chapter Five

  ABBEY

  JOURNAL ENTRY FOUR

  Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that the more accurately the momentum of a particle is measured, the less accurately its position can be known, and vice versa. So, at no point can both the position and momentum of the particle be measured simultaneously with a high degree of precision.

  Did you understand any of that? Chances are, unless you’re a physicist, it’s as mind-blowingly unintelligible as it was to me.

  I felt the wind of incomprehension whoosh over my head with the velocity of a fighter jet as Neville Lumsden tried to explain it to me one day at uni. I got it as much as I understood how Schrodinger’s cat could be alive and dead simultaneously, just because it’s in a box.

  I’m pretty sure Neville wanted inside my knickers, but droning on about particle physics in the spirit of ‘brainy is the new sexy’ (which is it, but only up to a point) wasn’t the way to get there.

  He might as well have been declaring his undying love in Norwegian or Swahili for all my understanding of what he was saying. And to be honest, he never stood a chance. Never mind that he suffered from their usual social ineptitude, with his (unsexy) black rimmed glasses, argyle sweaters and Hush Puppies, he was the physical embodiment of science nerd. And then there was his name. Seriously, Neville is not the name of a romantic hero, not a name you’d cry out in the throes of passion. Poor sod. I don’t think he got his leg over once during his three years at uni.

  However, unlike Heisenberg’s principle and Schrodinger’s thought experiment which only physicists and liar’s claim to understand, one thing Neville prattled on about that did make sense to me was the Observer Effect. Or, in a real-life application rather than quantum physical, the Hawthorne Effect. That the truth of what we see can be manipulated by the observer’s preconceptions, or the observed, knowing they are being watched, altering their behaviour and thus affecting what the observer sees.

  When under the scrutiny of a time and motions study, workers are keen to appear industrious. Whereas, when the boss is away it’s feet up on the desk and an extra long tea break.

  How we behave on a first date, (showing our best side, listening attentively, laughing at his jokes) is very different to months, or years down the line. Uncomfortable push-up underwired bras and lacy knickers eschewed in favour of sensible M&S cotton underwear.

  The conclusion to all this is, it’s impossible to view things with any kind of neutrality because we all come at things from our own frame of reference. It’s all about perspective.

  In other words: how we look at things affects what we see. And appearances can be deceptive.

  We may like to think we’re above judging someone on something as superficial as their looks, but we all make assumptions based on appearance every day. Nothing so lazy as racism. A more subtle, more nuanced criticism. An unconscious knee-jerk assessment flitting across our minds so fast we often don’t even realise we’re doing it.

  Ever stood behind the obesely overweight in the supermarket, checking out the contents of their trolley (cake, biscuits, fizzy drinks, ready-made meals and frozen pizzas, party-size packets of M&Ms and Doritos made for sharing but probably won’t be, those tiny tubs of rubber-band noodles that, once reconstituted with boiling water, have no more nutritional value that the plastic pot) and thought, if you tried eating vegetables once in a while and walked further than to and from your car, maybe you wouldn’t be so fat? Yeah, of course you have.

  The tart in the too short dress, flashing plenty of thigh and too much cleavage who’s no better than she ought to be. Well up for a one-night stand. A slapper using sex to get what she wants. Far too stupid, she couldn’t possibly come up with an intricate plan for revenge. The only thoughts in her silly head are getting some bloke to buy the drinks.

  It’s so sad, getting old. But who’s to say the pensioner is worthy of our sympathy? The unspoken ‘aww’ the elderly elicit. It doesn’t automatically follow that they’re nice, just because they’re old. That little old man shuffling home with one bag of groceries might have been a right bastard in his prime. The little old lady mean-spirited in her younger days. People don’t have a volte-face the day they reach retirement age. Leopards and spots and all that.

  A suit and tie equals respectability. A dog-collared man of the cloth is without sin. Glasses signify intelligence – probably from all that reading. But the suited businessman may go home and beat his wife. The pious preacher may conceal truths that, if revealed, would shock his congregation. And the glasses may indicate nothing more than hypermetropia.

  In movies the villain often has a physical flaw; something that marks him out as the bad guy. He’s played by an actor less attractive than the hero. A character actor blessed with talent rather than the impossibly perfect white smile and unblemished good looks of a star.

  Life is easy for the attractive. Beautiful girls can wind men round their little finger – well people in general really, but men especially. Handsome men get what they want. They don’t even have to try.

  Then there’s the charmer. The conman. The liar.

  Like Jensen Sharrow.

  It was clear as soon as we arrived at the house he had lied; or at least misrepresented himself, but his deception runs so much deeper than his pretence that lured me here. He’s lied to everyone. No one knows the real Jensen Sharrow, and what he’s capable of.

  He was drunk, as usual. Maybe that’s why he told me. In vino veritas. From the self-satisfied smirk on his face he certainly took pleasure in seeing the shock register on mine when the implication of his revelation sank in. Or maybe he told me simply because he knows I’ll never have the opportunity to tell anyone else.

  The drunker he gets, the more he hits me. His excuse this time was I’d taken too long bringing him fresh ice for his bourbon. His first punch to my abdomen had me doubled over, the barrage of body blows that followed sent me sprawling to the floor. The well-aimed kick to my ribs he finished off with, knocked the air from my lungs.

  “Chris
t you’re ugly, face all screwed up like a snivelling snot-nosed kid. Shut up and sit down.”

  I did as I was told.

  Before it was Jensen’s, this house was his grandfather’s. Well, that’s what he told me anyway. I asked what he thought his grandfather would say about what he was doing to me.

  “That mean old bible thumper always said I was going straight to hell when I die. He sure as shit never missed an opportunity to remind me I’m the bastard offspring of the town tramp. His failure to beat God into my mom didn’t stop him trying to thrash him into me.”

  I never cease to be amazed by how the devout are often the most judgemental, non-forgiving and brutal in their discipline.

  “Hypocritical sonovabitch. Spouting all kinds of shit about God and family values while all the time doing what he did to some of his church boys, and his own grandson. His congregation would have been appalled. Then he got old, and wished he’d been nicer to me.”

  What about his mother? Jensen had been so close to her; misses her still. Or so he’d led me to believe. What would she think?

  “My grandfather was right about one thing. My mom was a whore. She started spreading her legs for any man who’d buy her a drink when she was in high school. She was barely sixteen when she got pregnant with me. She got what she deserved.”

  He laughed when I said no one deserves to get cancer.

  “Oh, how sweetly naïve you are. No, really, it’s endearing… She didn’t have cancer, you dumb bitch.”

  He took a slug of his drink before telling me how his mother had been drunk the day she took a tumble down the stairs, breaking her neck in the fall. Then he smiled. A slow smile that spread into a grin.

  “At least that’s what I told the cops. That she fell.”

  What makes it so scary is, Jensen was only twelve years old at the time. Which is why it probably never even crossed anyone’s mind that Betsey Sharrow’s death was anything other than a tragic accident.