A Person Could Disappear Here Read online

  But locked in this small room, loneliness presses in as I slowly suffocate; a lepidoptera caught in a killing jar, its lid tightly screwed. Flapping my wings is futile, might as well give in, surrender to the inevitability of my demise.

  With a cell-mate, prisoners are never truly alone, but I imagine it’s not just the monotony of menial work, barely edible food and the noise, what gets to those being held at Her Majesty’s pleasure even more than the separation from family and friends, is being shut up. The loss of freedom.

  People are always banging on about Freedom as if it’s a luxury enjoyed only by the few, but whether it’s a republic or monarchy, the citizens of all democratic countries are free in the sense that they have control over their own lives. Russia may be reverting to old ways and increasingly clamping down on foreign travel, but even the people of communist China have the freedom to leave their country.

  Apart from the freedom to travel, the fundamental benchmark of a full democracy over that of a dictatorship is the freedom of speech; the right to criticise, to speak out and march in peaceful protest against your government. Upholding that right to disagree with and question government policy isn’t unpatriotic. It’s the unalienable right of everyone in the ‘free’ world.

  But I’m not talking about the big Freedoms, those with a capital F. I mean small freedoms like being able to just step outside whenever you choose and go for a walk. It’s the loss of simple, every day freedoms that lead the captive to despair.

  I have nothing to take my mind off the reality of my situation, but don’t think I spend every waking moment wallowing in misery. I daren’t. If I were to allow myself to sink into that pit of hopelessness I may never find the strength to climb out again.

  When I am released from my back-bedroom jail cell I rebel in small ways designed to piss him off, but not push him too far. Against his apparent aversion to fresh air and natural daylight by defiantly opening blinds and flicking the latch of the front door, opening it to let in air. The ornate metal outer door may be locked, but still it gives the illusion of freedom; as if I could step outside any time, if I choose to.

  Don’t think I haven’t looked for a way out. The windows are all nailed shut, except for the smaller ones in the kitchen and bathroom, but they’re both screened and look too narrow to squeeze through anyway.

  There’s a door in the hallway. It could just be a cupboard under the stairs, but why keep it locked? Maybe it leads to the basement with a window he’s forgotten to nail shut.

  In my head I climb onto a conveniently positioned old table or chest, slip the latch and shimmy out of the open window that’s just wide enough to squeeze through.

  And I’m free; running over the scrubby grass and down the dry dirt track. My feet slip on the uneven surface. I fall, twisting an ankle, but get up and run on through the pain.

  A beaten-up old pickup appears in the distance; headlights shining through the lavender-grey twilight like two round beacons of hope. Lungs almost at bursting point, my dress dusty from the fall, knees grazed and gritty, I stagger onto the tarmac and wave it down.

  The passenger door opens and a round-faced, grey-haired woman in a floral print dress and wide-brimmed straw hat adorned with fabric flowers gets out. She rushes to my aide. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Oh, your poor dear girl.”

  An arm around my waist, she leads me to the pickup’s cabin.

  Her husband, dressed in dungarees (what Americans call overalls?) and collarless shirt, looks surprised and concerned as I climb in.

  The woman squeezes in next to me and slams shut the door. “Don’t just sit there gawping, Wilbur. Drive.”

  Bizarrely, when I imagine it, my escape has the appearance of a fifties film noir, peopled with good honest, God-fearing folk who look (and sound) like Missus McCarthy from TV’s Father Brown and the Grapes of Wrath’s Tom Joad.

  But even if the locked door does lead to a basement that has a window that isn’t nailed shut, fat lot of good it does me because the key’s probably on the ring he keeps in his pocket.

  And while I am released into the rest of the house I’m never allowed to stray out of sight for long. Like today.

  With no buildings to block their path, sound waves spread like a mushroom cloud. A car backfiring half a mile away sounds like a gun shot just outside the window. So, the noise of the bin men’s truck can be heard long before it comes into sight.

  Jensen was watching ESPN, so his attention was absorbed by the TV. Still, I made sure to walk on tiptoe down the hall from the kitchen, pausing to peak into the living room before darting silently past the open door.

  The truck came to a stop; hydraulics letting out a hiss as it settled. A man jumped down from the passenger side; the thud of his heavy work boots hitting the tarmac audible from where I stood behind the metal outer door.

  I waved, but he didn’t look my way, just wheeled the bin to the platform and waited as it was lifted and upturned, sending black bin bags tumbling into the body of the truck. Then he wheeled the bin back to the side of the road and glanced my way.

  I waved frantically, both arms in semaphore fashion, like I was bringing a small plane in to land, in a way I hoped said: Help Me!

  Hope bloomed in my chest, radiating like petals of a flower opening up to the sun as the garbage man took a step towards me. He was going to come over. Going to know. A knight in a high-visibility jacket, he would stop this and take me away in his clanking, hissing grey steed.

  Hope evaporated; taken away on a lung deflating exhale as Jensen laid a large palm on my shoulder.

  He raised his free hand to the trash man in greeting; tilting his head back in a slight backwards nod as he smiled.

  The last I saw of the garbage man was his nod, right before Jensen closed the front door. And right before he smacked the back of his hand across my cheek.

  “Don’t you get it, you dumb bitch? There is no escape. And no one is coming to your rescue.”

  The slam of his fist to my diaphragm winded me and I fell to my knees.

  He bent over me and grabbed a handful of hair, his sharp, downward tug on it jerking my head back, forcing me to look at him.

  “Do not fuck with me. Not unless you want to get taken out with the rest of the trash. In bits.”

  From the feral look in his eyes, I knew he meant it.

  Chapter Eleven

  CRISTINA

  Blond-haired, blue-eyed Officer Miller looks as wholesome as a glass of milk, and just as fresh. I was hoping we’d be seen by an experienced officer, but he looks no older than Alessandro.

  We follow him from reception into the main open-plan area behind the scenes. An expanse of grey, it’s not what you’d call a hive of activity, with just two other uniformed officers sat at desks staring at computers. Where are all those cops that were slow-chasing Tractor Ted around downtown Denver last night?

  Officer Miller glances at the sheet of paper the cop at reception gave him and signals for us to sit the other side of his desk.

  “Capoo-too. That’s Italian, right? But it says here you’re Bri’ish,” he drawls, bypassing the T entirely.

  I’m guessing Denver isn’t a city Italian-Americans are naturally drawn to. “I am. My father’s Italian, mum’s English, and I was born in London. Oh, and it’s, Ka-poo-toe.”

  “And where are you staying?”

  “We’ve got a room at the Magnolia on seventeenth street. Why?”

  I’m also guessing the upwards twitch of the detective’s mouth as he looks from me to Alessandro isn’t a nervous tic. Americans. Oh, they’re fine with people getting their brains blown out on primetime telly, but get in all sorts of a tizzy over bare flesh on TV. Yet behind all that righteous outrage they’ve all got sex on the brain. And they have the cheek to call the English repressed.

  “A twin room. Not that it’s any of your business, but we can’t be wasting money on two rooms. And eww. Alessandro’s my brother!”

  As usual Alessandro feels the need to apologise on my
behalf. Ever the peacemaker, smoothing the way after I open my big mouth, and before the police officer can respond. “Sorry. My sister’s a bit stressed. We’re here because our friend is missing.”

  “What makes you think she’s missing?”

  Abbey’s my best friend so I answer, even though Miller directed the question to Alessandro. “She hasn’t answered her phone in a week for a start. And she didn’t make her return flight on Wednesday.”

  “Okay. And your friend’s name is?”

  “Abbey Mitchell. Abigail.”

  “What does she look like? We’ll need a description to circulate.”

  “Twenty-five. Five-foot-six. Brown shoulder length hair. Blue eyes. Slim. Size–” I’m about to say ten, then remember sizes are different over here. “Size six American.”

  Officer Miller scribbles all that down on his pad. “And was she staying at the Magnolia too?”

  “No. The Renaissance. But she checked out of there for the weekend last Friday.”

  “Why’d she do that?”

  And now we come to the part where his attitude will change just as detective Blake’s did.

  “Miss Caputo? Why did Abbey check out of the hotel for the weekend?”

  “Okay, she came over here to meet a bloke she met on Facebook. They were going to his grandfather’s house. He supposedly was getting out of hospital and Jensen – that’s the bloke’s name, said he wanted to make sure he was okay, and Abbey went with him.”

  “She flew thousands of miles to meet a man she met online?”

  “It’s not unheard of.”

  “I guess not… Did Abbey say where this Jensen’s grandfather lives?”

  “Nebraska. Some small town about three hours drive–”

  Officer Miller puts down his pen. “Nebraska?”

  “Yes. So?”

  “So why are you reporting her missing in Denver?”

  “Because they met here. It’s where Jensen lives. Or at least where he told Abbey he lives. Where his Facebook bio says he lives.”

  “We can’t investigate something that may or may not have happened in Nebraska.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s another state. You need to speak to the police in Nebraska.”

  “So that’s it? You’re just going to do sweet FA?”

  “Listen, Miss Caputo. I don’t know how it works in Britain, but over here each state has its own law enforcement. We have no jurisdiction there.”

  “I bet you wouldn’t give a toss about jurisdiction if Abbey was American. Be a different story then, wouldn’t it?”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  Special relationship, my arse. “Well, thanks for nothing.”

  Officer Miller gets up as I do.

  “Oh, don’t bother. We’ll see ourselves out.”

  Officer Miller ignores me and follows us back out to reception anyway. I hear Alessandro apologising for me again as I crash through the entrance doors and out into the street.

  He comes out a moment later. “You handled that well.”

  Ooh, so sarcastic. “Why are all men such tossers? It was obvious what was going through his mind. Didn’t you see that look?”

  “What look..? Your problem is you can’t accept they do things differently over here. And even if he was being a tosser, don’t lump all us blokes together. We’re not all dickheads.”

  This is true. Alessandro is his father’s son in all sorts of ways. And the girl who wins his heart will be as lucky as mum. “No, little bro, they’re not. You’re one of the good guys. You restore my faith in the male of the species.”

  “Thank you... So, what are we going to do now?”

  “Now we go to Nebraska and look for Abbey ourselves.”

  “Okay. But where do we start?”

  You have to love the internet. Oh, I know there are all sorts of downsides to it, but finding out pretty much anything online is so much easier than it was in the dark ages, before Google, when your only real resource was the library. Now you can find answers almost instantaneously, and all from the comfort of your hotel room. Like the online map tool I’ve logged onto on my laptop.

  “Right. Abbey said where she and Jensen were going was three hours outside Denver. So, we put in a starting point and mile radius and this’ll show us towns inside that area.”

  “How do we know how many miles to put in? We don’t know how fast he was going.”

  “Thirty miles an hour?”

  “In town maybe, but once he hit the interstate he could do double that. Sixty times three is a hundred-and-eighty miles.”

  Then I suppose that’s what we go with. I enter the hotel’s address as the starting point and a radius of a hundred-and-eighty miles. The size of the highlighted area that’s generated is vast.

  Alessandro looks as disheartened as I feel. “Jesus, how many towns is that? We can’t search all those.”

  I don’t see that we have a choice.

  “Hang on though. Maybe we won’t have to.” Alessandro leans closer to the screen. “Enlarge the picture.”

  I have a feeling all that will do is show up more smaller towns the map hasn’t highlighted already, but I make the image bigger.

  Alessandro points at the screen. “See that dotted line? That’s the state boundary. Half the towns north of Denver are in another state. Only these ones are in Nebraska.”

  That still leaves over twenty towns highlighted, and it’s still a massive area square-mileage wise.

  “So we take the I-25 out of Denver, switch onto the I-80 and start at the first town we come to. What do you reckon, sis?”

  “I reckon now we check out of the hotel and find the nearest place to hire a car.”

  Why do people in places of business over here feel the need to chat? It makes everything take twice as long as it should. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be courteous, but it’s perfectly possible to be pleasant and still get the job done quickly. The constant counterfeit commands to ‘have a nice day’ are as tiresome as the references to our nationality, the love of our accent and how everyone seems to want to visit London, yet they haven’t mastered the simple basics of politeness by saying please as well as thank you. The woman at Nat West was lovely, but she didn’t feel the need to swap life stories when I opened a savings account. In an out in fifteen minutes, unlike the hour it took before the bloke at the hire company handed over the keys to the car.

  Alessandro’s disappointed I wouldn’t get the Mustang. Trust him to pick the flashiest car they had, but the compact Nissan is good enough. And I’d rather spend the money mum and dad gave us on decent places to sleep, and food.

  Abbey’s never got her head around driving on the wrong side of the road, so whenever we hired a car on holiday abroad, I always drove. Driving here is just like driving in Europe, except for the billboards. But less than an hour out of Denver what’s doing my head in is the radio. Or to be more precise, all the bloody adverts.

  Every ten minutes some bloke’s shouting about how I can buy a car for just five-hundred dollars a month, for sixty months. Although they say that last bit bloody quickly, just in case some listeners can actually do maths in their head and work out that by the time they own it, the car will only be worth thirty percent of what they paid for it.

  When they’re not trying to get people to shell out exorbitant amounts of money on a shiny new car, they’re tempting them with mental images of white sands and turquoise waters, luring them to get into debt to pay for the exotic holiday of their dreams, extend their home, or to consolidate the debt they already have.

  And if they’re not enticing people into financial straits by borrowing money to buy crap they don’t need, they’re tapping into their fear of serious illness and their own mortality with endless adverts for prescribed medication. – That headache may not just be because you’re tired, dehydrated or been staring at a computer screen under the glare of artificial light too long. It could be something serious. You need to ask your doctor about Tumour
BeGone – As if the media doesn’t terrify them enough with screaming headlines about the threat of terrorist attacks, North Korea and Iran’s nuclear capability and mass shootings.

  It isn’t legal to advertise prescription drugs to the general public back home, but the British tabloid press is just as guilty of fanning the flames of fear. When even the malleable Daily Mail or Express readers weary of headlines of possible terrorist attacks, the papers switch to other stories: the worsening economy, house prices slumping as the recession drags on, or another recession looms; immigrants taking advantage of the benefits system – always a go-to subject guaranteed to rile the nationalistic minority; the increase in crime, manipulating statistics that, when you delve deeper, actually prove that while the chances of your car being nicked is high, the murder rate, in London anyway, is still just over one in a hundred-thousand; and when all else fails, there’s always the weather – killer heatwaves in summer or killer cold of an arctic winter.

  A scared population is a compliant one. And there’s no end to what a government can get away with to keep its people ‘safe’; so many things done in secret under the guise of National Security. There’s big money to be made from fear.

  Now some woman’s wittering over the airwaves about how her lashes have never looked so long and lustrous. She sounds bouncy; her effervescence as empty as the gaseous carbon dioxide in a can of coke. There’s something deeply irritating about the overly perky, especially when their ebullience is because of something as inane as mascara.

  Driving on the interstate is every bit as boring as driving on the motorway. Music helps take the edge off, gives me something to hum along with. Still, I switch off the radio, cutting off the bubbly blonde (in my head she’s blonde) mid-sentence. There’s a petrol station and shop a mile up the road. Hopefully they’ll sell CDs.

  Along with practically everything else you could possibly want on an average day, they do sell CDs – not a great selection, but you can’t expect much from a petrol station shop, even one as big as this. And they cost more, but then, just as at home, these places survive and flourish because they’re convenient.