Mac was silent for a while. ‘Did he ever talk to you about when Emily went missing?’ he asked.
She glanced at him. ‘No, not really,’ she admitted.
He nodded. ‘I moved down to Suffolk from Glasgow right after she disappeared. I was the lanky new kid with a weird accent. The other lads made mincemeat of me, until Luke stepped in. We just hit it off and, well, I was only a kid, but fuck me it was a horror show round at his place for a while.’
Clara frowned. ‘Go on.’
‘They were all totally destroyed by it. Rose went to bed for months and barely ate or spoke. His dad barricaded himself in his study and Tom went completely off the rails.’
She looked at him in surprise. ‘Tom did?’ It was a side of Luke’s rather uptight, pompous brother she wouldn’t have guessed at.
‘Yeah, it was like he’d just checked out of the family. He was sixteen by then and hanging out with a bad crowd – off getting pissed and high, that sort of thing, you know? I think Rose and Oliver felt they’d lost their grip on him. But the point is, after that it was as though Luke became the centre of their world, like they became fixated on him. With Emily gone and Tom out all the time, everything began to revolve around him – he was still only ten when she left, remember.’
‘What do you mean, “fixated”?’
Mac shrugged. ‘They’d never leave him alone. He couldn’t move without them breathing down his neck. They wouldn’t even go out for the evening without him, even if Tom was around to keep an eye on him. They became obsessed with everything he said and did, his schoolwork, how he was feeling, what he was thinking, every word that came out of his mouth … It was intense, like they wanted to make up for how wrong things had gone with Emily.’
Clara frowned. ‘OK …’ she said.
‘Well, so anyway, maybe growing up like that made Luke feel responsible for his parents’ happiness, for everyone’s happiness. Or maybe the attention lavished on him made him a bit selfish, a bit entitled. But you need to hear from him how sorry he is, how much he regrets it. He told me it was over with Sadie, he said it was the worst mistake he’d ever made, that he didn’t want to lose you. I believed him. Honestly, Clara, I really think it made him realize how much he loves you.’
She put her head in her hands. ‘Where the hell is he? I can’t bear this … nothingness. There’s so much I want to say to him.’ She glanced up at Mac. ‘Maybe he has left me. Maybe he just couldn’t find the balls to tell me to my face.’
Mac shook his head. ‘No. Not like this, not without his phone, without telling work, his parents … me.’
They were suddenly interrupted by an explosion of music from the flat above; a pounding bass so loud it made the ceiling vibrate. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Clara shouted, jumping to her feet. With a sudden fury she stormed from the flat and up the stairs and began hammering on her neighbour’s door. There was no response. The music blared on. ‘Answer the bloody door,’ she yelled, giving it a kick. ‘Open it! Just bloody well open it right now!’
Unexpectedly it swung open. Her neighbour stared back at her, eyebrows raised in mock innocence. ‘What?’
‘Turn the bloody music down. It’s insane. I can’t live like this!’
Slowly, and with an infuriating smile on her face, the woman turned and sauntered to her sound system, then flicked the dial down a notch. She turned back to Clara. ‘Happy?’
Clara stared at her. She was so very thin, her shapeless oversized T-shirt only accentuating her bony limbs and sharp angles. Her finely featured face, peeping out between curtains of long lank dark hair, was covered by a thick, elaborate layer of make-up that was almost mask-like. She was gazing back at Clara with prickly belligerence. What on earth was her problem? Glancing past her at the flat, Clara saw that it was a tip; clothes and plates and CDs strewn everywhere, a potent smell of dustbins coming from the kitchen. And who the hell listened to trance these days anyway? ‘Yes,’ she said with icy sarcasm. ‘Thanks so much.’ She was about to leave when her gaze caught something draped over one of the armchairs. It was a sweatshirt. Luke’s sweatshirt. She stared at it in astonishment. A distinctive green and red design with an eagle on the back that he’d bought in New York a few years before. He loved it. She remembered how annoyed he’d been when he’d lost it. When was that, exactly?
The woman followed her gaze. Quickly she began shutting the door. ‘I’ve turned it down, now piss off!’ she said, and for a few seconds Clara stood staring at the closed door in astonishment. She remembered how she’d said, ‘Where’s Luke?’ the day he’d gone missing; the strange, knowing smirk on her face. ‘Open the door!’ she shouted, hammering on it. ‘Open the fucking door right now!’ But the music pounded on and the door remained closed. Eventually, with a cry of frustration, Clara ran back down to her own flat. When had the sweatshirt gone missing? Had it been around the time they were broken into? That sort of fit, she thought. They’d believed nothing had been taken, but … perhaps the reason why the police had no idea how the intruder had got in was because she’d been living amongst them all along. Had she been the one sending the emails?
‘Are you OK?’ Mac asked when she raced back into the flat. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
Without replying, she fetched her phone and found DS Anderson’s number. He picked up immediately. ‘Hi, it’s Clara Haynes,’ she said. ‘I have something I need to—’
‘Clara, I’m glad you called. I was about to ring you. We’ve discovered something interesting. How soon can you come to the station?’
Cambridgeshire, 1988
I made the phone call one afternoon while Doug was at work, my fingers shaking as I dialled the number. It began to ring and I felt such a rush of panic I almost hung up. Then I heard the click on the other end, the familiar voice saying, ‘Hello?’ and the words stuck in my throat. ‘Hello? Hello?’ a note of impatience now. ‘Who is this, please?’
So strange to hear that voice again after so many years, to know that its owner was standing in the house I’d once known so well. In my mind’s eye I saw the duck-egg blue wallpaper in the hall, the light falling across the floorboards in two vertical slants. For a moment I was back there again, smelling the familiar smell – a mixture of lavender furniture polish and fresh coffee, the bowl of potpourri on the windowsill – hearing the ticking of the clock above the stairs, looking into those familiar eyes that used to cry so much in those days. I swallowed hard and at last, in a whisper, I said, ‘This is Beth Jennings.’
There was absolute silence. ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘Please, please don’t hang up. I need to see you. I need to speak to you.’ And then I burst into tears. ‘Can we meet?’
The voice was ice cold, tinged with fear. ‘Absolutely not. We made a deal. You promised.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t call if I wasn’t desperate. I need to talk about what happened. I thought I could live with what we did, but I can’t. I just can’t. I think we need to put it right, I want to go to the police.’
‘No! No, Beth.’ There was a long silence, until finally it came. ‘All right I’ll meet you. But not here. You can’t come here. Give me your address.’
Surreal to see that face again, that familiar figure sitting at my kitchen table. Within minutes I was crying again, my words spilling out of me. I talked about everything – about what we did, how the guilt had never left me. I talked about Hannah, my marriage, how I felt I was losing my mind. I realized how desperate I’d been to have someone to confide in, how much I’d missed having a