At night she sat in Charlie’s room holding on to his pillow and the smell of him. Every day a policeman trained to keep his voice solicitous found new ways of telling them there was nothing to tell. Two weeks after Charlie disappeared, some yellow shorts were found on a beach further round the coast. The careful policeman brought them round in a plastic bag and placed them on the edge of the kitchen table. Carrie saw her own stitching in the waistband. She felt as if she was looking at something from another age. A kind of relic.
Then there was nothing else. He didn’t turn up buried in the dunes or washed up on the shore. He had vanished. A woman rang the police and claimed she had seen a boy that looked like Charlie with a man on a bus, but it turned out that that she was well known for seeing the missing and murdered. She had once claimed to have seen a whole family on a fairground carousel, eating ice cream. It transpired that their father had killed them all the week before.
At first Carrie didn’t want any news. No news meant that he might still be somewhere. Her mind threw up the pictures that had been imprinted from television footage and the retrospective chill of CCTV. She thought with horror of flickering computer screens and men with a taste for the pale, thin bodies of children. She imagined her boy in the back of a lorry on a mattress, perhaps with other children, being taken a long way away where he would never be found. She could see him dressed in unfamiliar clothes, sitting on the edge of beds in strange rooms. Sometimes she saw him in the clearings of woods, in shallow graves with soil only just covering his pale, purplish eyelids. As the days passed into weeks, not knowing where he was began to be the chief source of her pain. And all the time what wore away at her was the knowledge that his going had been her fault. She had fallen asleep on her watch and he had suffered for her negligence. She had not done her job and this was her terrible, cruel punishment. When she finally slept she dreamt of him, arms stretched out, floating on the crest of waves.
Putting her head to one side as if she had a crick in her neck, their counsellor stressed the importance of talking to each other about their feelings. ‘Grieve together,’ she told them in the tone of someone recommending a course of healthy exercise. The trouble was that Carrie’s way of grieving was nothing like Damian’s. Whereas she wanted to go over what had happened again and again, as if by repetition some sense would be made of the completely incomprehensible, he preferred to keep moving. He fixed the loose fence. He emptied out the shed. He sorted his CDs into alphabetical order. Then he decided he should go back to work.
‘It’s not doing either of us any good, sitting in the house,’ Damian said, as she lay watching him getting dressed. He paused over his selection of ties, choosing one with a thin navy stripe. It was this slight hesitation while his hand hovered over the tie rack that so astonished Carrie and made her realise how alone they both were. On the days she had bothered to get dressed at all, Carrie had simply pulled on the same black sweater, the same jeans. Part of her knew that he selected one tie over another not because he cared about which tie he wore but simply because this little morning ritual was comfortingly familiar to him – but at the same time she felt excluded by his apparent control which seemed to her so much like coldness.
Damian took to saying that he had stayed on at the office to finish work, but when he came home his clothes were impregnated with the metallic smell of the city at night, a taint that you seemed to absorb when you walked for any length of time by the edges of roads. He avoided coming to bed at the same time as her, choosing instead to sit watching TV late into the night, while she lay silently in Charlie’s bunk bed. When she was brought home from a store in town, because she had been found in the children’s department, her arms full of small shorts and gaily coloured T-shirts, crying square-mouthed at the enormity of her loss, he was impatient with her.
‘You have to move on,’ he said but she didn’t know where there was to go.
‘Talk to me,’ she begged. ‘Tell me how he was. Tell me some of the things he did.’
‘I can’t,’ he replied, but she couldn’t stop herself.
‘Do you remember how when he was a baby his whole naked body used to shake when we trailed a muslin over his stomach?’ she said. ‘Do you remember the way he would hook raisins out of those tiny boxes with a bent finger and make a strange growling noise as he did it?’
Even worse than the way she wanted to talk about Charlie all the time, was the way Carrie picked away at the sequence of events that led to their son’s disappearance. She reminded him of a bear he had seen years ago in a Spanish zoo walking forwards and backwards endlessly in its concrete canyon. She couldn’t let it rest, but carried on down the same groove that gave them both nothing but pain.
‘I slept. Damian. I slept. How could I sleep? Everyone knows that when you are looking after children on a beach, you can’t take your eyes off them, even for a minute. Tell me, how could I sleep?’ Each time she asked him she would look at him with the same wide-eyed incredulity. At first he felt pity for her and felt his own astonishment mirrored in her face, but when she asked him again and again he was maddened by her and no longer had the strength to spare her. It seemed that there was no way for them to help each other. It seemed that in suffering so differently they made each other’s pain worse.
One night he found her standing in Charlie’s room. He came up and touched her on the shoulder and she spun round at him.
‘WHERE IS HE?’ she shouted, her fingers pulling viciously at the soft undersides of her arms.
‘Come back to bed,’ he said, scared of her and the way she had become.
‘I can’t sleep. I don’t know where he is.’ She tried to explain.
‘Don’t you wonder where he is?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Why won’t you talk to me?’
Damian saw his son’s pyjamas folded on his pillow and he knew he was going to start the ending for them.
‘You were supposed to be watching him. Why did you let him go?’ said Damian, and Carrie knew that this was what he had been trying not to say since Charlie had gone. Despite the pain his words brought her, she also felt a kind of relief. She had been waiting for him to blame her because she believed it was what she deserved.
‘I left him with you. I left him with you …’
Damian didn’t hide his face, but looked directly at her as the tears poured from his eyes. He made a sound that was more like rage than sorrow.
Chapter Eight
Shortly after Molly and Rupert returned from Italy, a news story captured the headlines for several weeks. A young woman who had been jogging in their local park never made it home. She was found behind some shrubbery, her throat cut, her skirt pulled over her head to cover her face, then gathered up and tied with a ribbon.
‘If that happened to you,’ said Rupert, ‘I would kill myself. I don’t want you going out alone at night for a while, at least not until they get the bastard who did it.’
Months later, Molly saw a picture in a newspaper of the so-called Ribbon Murderer. He was looking straight at the camera as he got out of the police van. He had an ordinary, quite pleasant face. The sort of face you would trust. However much you scrutinised it, the signs of what he had done weren’t there.
What had started as a short-term solution to the potential threat posed by the murderer became a way of life for Molly. Without really noticing it, she stopped going out by herself. She became so accustomed to her life being managed by Rupert that she forgot that other