a sales call she’d made back in June. I opened it up. Wine City traded mostly in super lagers, white ciders, tonic wine and other fortified beverages. Sharon reported that although she had left a variety of product samples on-site, there had been no take-up or further correspondence. Moving down to client details I saw that she’d recorded the leasehold of the shop as having been taken over in January of this year by a Mr Keith Veitch.
Veitch. That was a fairly unusual surname.
Opening a fresh window, I typed in his name and hit search. He’d only been at the shop for nine months. Where did he work before then? If I could trace this man back more than five years, I might be able to see where he was working around the time Barney was taken, and if he was based somewhere nearby then maybe I could connect him to his disappearance.
The computer finished its search. I looked at the screen, but there was nothing. It seemed that, prior to taking over the leasehold of the Wine City off-licence, the history of Mr Keith Veitch was a blank – for my company’s sales records, anyway.
I went back to the name of the rep who had written the report: Sharon Hannah.
Scrolling through the company-wide address book, it didn’t take long to find her email. ‘Hi Sharon,’ I typed. ‘Wondering if you can assist me with a client query?’ My fingers hovered over the keyboard while I worked out what to say. It would be too odd for me to ask her about the boy outright, but I needed to make sure that if she had noticed anything strange about the man running the off-licence, or the child in his care, she thought fit to mention it.
It was a stretch, but I decided my best bet would be to say I’d been in the shop on non-work-related business and had noticed one or two products for sale that looked like they might be fake. Head Office had recently sent out a series of memos urging us to be vigilant for signs of profit-damaging bootleg vodka and had promised mini-bonuses for anything that led to a successful prosecution. Explaining I didn’t want to get the manager into unnecessary trouble, I told her that before I made out an official report I wanted to see if she had noticed anything during her last visit to set alarm bells ringing.
The message sent, I was about to close the laptop when a new email envelope popped up in the bottom right of the screen. I felt a tiny ripple of excitement. It was from Sharon Hannah. That was quick – maybe she had noticed something weird about the place and wanted to get back to me right away. But any hopes I had were dashed as soon as I opened the email. Nothing more than an automated out-of-office reply written in turquoise copperplate font, it informed me she was going on extended leave to get married and would respond to my query on her return from honeymoon at the end of October. I checked today’s date – that was over a month from now. Shit. I closed the laptop. Enough. Jason would be wondering where I was.
After taking off my blouse I unzipped my skirt and rolled down my tights. Unhooking my bra, I stepped out of my knickers and was reaching for my dressing-gown when I caught sight of myself in the mirror on the back of the bedroom door. I startled, shocked even after all these years, at the sight of my de-robed body. Once upon a time my bra had rested against skin dense with fat. I’d been a size eighteen. All rolls and pudge. Now, instead, there was a neat pear of a ribcage, a flat expanse of muscle in place of the belly that used to stodge low over my knickers.
I pinched at the meagre layer of fat around my hips.
Everyone sees weight loss as a signal you’ve finally taken control of your desires and appetites. They assume you prefer this smaller, lean version of yourself. They never consider the opposite. That you might be thinner because you lost control, that you prefer your old self. That, if you could, you’d like to go back to how you were. Before.
I cleared the smudged mascara from under my eyes and pinned my fringe up off my face. I’d had my hair coloured its usual dark brown only a few weeks ago,