I nearly say, No shit, Sherlock, which is one of Milly’s favourite expressions. Milly loves the word shit. Instead, I manage a more restrained, ‘Thanks for your wisdom,’ and for the first time in forever, Maxine visibly blanches.
Two years and four months earlier
Cornwall, Mid-December 2016
Zac left for London early this morning for a British Cardiovascular Society symposium. Tomorrow he will fly to the Ukraine for a fleeting visit, to do some teaching in a hospital in Kiev. Before he drove away, I leaned into the open car window for a final kiss goodbye, my hair unbrushed and circles under my eyes after a night of endlessly being sick.
I watched the car disappear out of sight, fantasising that I would get out my journal and write. Instead, I wandered through the house nibbling a special ginger biscuit that was supposed to help with nausea but was proving useless. I was ten weeks pregnant but the sickness wasn’t getting any better.
Zac hated clutter, but this place was decorated in a romantic style that seemed to invite it. The personal things were all mine – the cardigan thrown over the cabbage roses sofa, the pregnancy magazines covering the distressed coffee table, the pot of lip gloss and ponytail holder on the white-painted chimney piece, the novels on the chintz armchair. Zac was constantly putting them away, then scrubbing the artificially aged surfaces with disinfectant wipes. I was trying to be more orderly, because it was painful to see him so unnerved by what he would call mess and I would call the ordinary chaos of human life.
Since Maxine’s ambush on the cliffs two months earlier, I’d stepped up my efforts to search the house for some sign of Jane. I poked my fingers into the toes of Zac’s socks when I tossed the clean pairs into the drawer. I ran my hand under the mattress when I made the bed. I examined the seams of his suits when I hung up his shirts from the dry cleaners. I checked his books as I dusted, to see if any were mere shells with cavities for hiding things. So far, I had found nothing. His taste in books, all hardbacks and dust-free, was unsurprising – medical ethics, law, artificial intelligence, and the surveillance state. He especially liked it when these subjects intersected. His current book at bedtime was about the use of technology by a group of anonymous hackers to promote political and social change.
As I closed the lid of a shoebox that lived in his wardrobe – it contained a pair of unworn black Oxfords – I had a flash of Zac loading a new carbon-fibre suitcase onto the passenger seat of his sports car. Everybody saved their old suitcases for packing stuff when they moved, didn’t they? Before I had finished this thought I was rushing down the stairs to the cupboard that runs beneath them.
My own suitcases were towards the front. I’d used them to transport my stuff from what I referred to as the brown house. My attic bedroom, with walls that I’d painted all the colours of the rainbow, was the one exception to the law of brown. The rest of the house was filled with brown carpets that my grandmother vacuumed every day, brown tapestry curtains that I was always opening and she was always closing, and brown sofas covered in bobbled brown blankets that I was always tearing off and she was always putting back. ‘I don’t want my fine furniture destroyed by the sun,’ my grandmother would say.
I actually felt a kind of nostalgic affection for the brown house as I started to drag my suitcases from the cupboard beneath Zac’s stairs, sliding and pulling them into the wide hallway behind me.
I couldn’t help but smile at my grandmother’s blue vinyl train case, which was like seeing an old friend. When I once expressed surprise at the pretty colour, she told me my grandfather bought it for her. ‘Horribly impractical. See how it scuffs,’ she said. But she looked at it with reluctant affection. After all, she’d brought it from their farm to my parents’ house when she moved in to look after me. I in turn brought it to Zac’s, stuffed with my bathroom things and make-up.
It wouldn’t occur to Zac that I’d enter this dank and dusty place, which he avoided, given the germs that must infest it. I had to crawl inside to reach the final suitcases. They were old, made of tan canvas and trimmed with tan fake leather in the corners. The larger of the two was too bulky and heavy to comply with today’s airline specifications.
I shone my phone torch over them. Flimsy padlocks linked the zippers. I lifted each of the identification tags. Zac had written his name on both. He’d probably dragged them around the continent during his gap year grand tour, and kept them out of nostalgic fondness.
I tugged Zac’s clunky things into the hall, then unfastened my grandmother’s train case. Tucked within a silky stretch pocket on its topside was a snap-closing coin purse filled with tiny keys for old suitcase locks. The purse – quilted fabric, and brown, of course – had lived in that pocket for as long as I could remember. I could hear my grandmother’s voice. Brown is a practical colour, Holly. It doesn’t show the dirt. Hurrah for brown. For once, I was glad of my grandmother’s fixed habits. In an instant, I spilled the keys onto the stripped floorboards with a clatter.
The good thing about suitcase keys, my grandmother used to say, was that so many of them worked in multiple locks – you just needed to gauge the size by eye. Perhaps my grandmother had a bit of spy in her, too. The third key I tried fitted perfectly into the lock on Zac’s larger case. There was a satisfying click and the shackle popped out.
I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find inside when I unzipped it, kneeling on the cold floor. Secret documents? Stacks of cash? Jane’s body? My expectations were unreasonably high, so my stomach fell when the lid of the case flopped onto the floor with a puff of dust and I saw that it was empty.
The same key worked on the lock of the medium-sized suitcase, too. ‘Oh,’ I said out loud. Because there was no way that the suitcase nested inside belonged to Zac.
Despite my grandmother-shaped aversion to brown, the hidden case was quite charming. The diagonal lines of four-petalled flowers and interlocking Ls and Vs processed in their determined order, stamped in muted gold on a brown background. One of my hands floated towards the monogrammed canvas and slid extra-lightly across the PVC coating, surprised by how smooth it was. But I quickly got down to the business of unbuckling the leather tag to check whether there was a name on it.
JM was hot-stamped on the surface. It had to stand for Jane Miller. Had to. To my delight, there was a piece of thick cream paper inside the tag, though there was no writing on the front. I took it out and flipped it. On the reverse, in Zac’s perfectly regular cursive, it read Jacinda Molinero. There was no address or telephone number or email. Just the name. Hardly of any use if the suitcase were to be lost.
My language skills had languished since that final MI5 interview. Practising them hurt like an imperfectly healed wound when you picked off the scab. But there was something about the word Molinero … I needed to remember what it meant.
I closed my eyes to try to think. What came to me was the illustrated deck of cards from when I first started to learn Spanish. The teacher thought the cards would help us with the words for different occupations. It was a kind of un-cosy version of Happy Families, where the dentists and plumbers and shopkeepers all looked tired and overworked. There was a particular card I was fumbling for, in whatever dark corner of my brain it was filed in.
I squeezed my eyes shut more tightly, and the picture began to form. An old lady scowling in her blue apron and white hat, letting flour fall from her fingers into a huge yellow sack. Behind her was a red-roofed wooden house with a windmill attached to it. Señora Molinero. That was what it said beneath her. Mrs Miller.
Molinero was Spanish for Miller. Jane Miller. Jacinda Molinero. The first names started with the same letter. Jacinda had to be Jane. Zac’s handwriting on the suitcase label seemed to confirm this.
If you come across any objects of Jane’s, tell us about them in as much detail as you can.