I don’t know if it was the acrid smell in the air, or the fact that for the first time in ages I’d spent last night alone, but I found myself remembering one particular day when Lauren had been sick. She must have been three or four years old. The sounds of her retching had woken me and I’d gone to her room to check on her. Bleary-eyed, I’d tried to clear the vomit from the carpet: all smushed up pitta bread and pasta shells from her dinner the night before. I remembered how some of its wet warm had grazed my knuckles as I scooped it up with the cloth.
But then I’m not sure that ‘remembering’ is the right word for the way that that particular image had come into my head. I mean, how do you describe it when you suddenly recall something you haven’t thought of since? Something so banal and everyday that it dissolved from your brain almost as soon as it happened? I had many precious memories of Lauren stored away, memories that I liked to turn over like jewels in my hand, enjoying them again and again. But, until now, I’d always thought they were finite, that I’d gleaned my mind for every last drop of her. So, to have something like this come back to me was such a peculiar and unexpected treasure. It felt like I had found a bit of unwatched home-movie footage at the bottom of a cupboard.
I went back into the bedroom, to where my phone sat on the dressing table, and checked for missed calls. But the screen was a blank. Where had Jason spent last night and when was he going to get in touch? I resisted the urge to call around his friends and ask if any of them had heard from him. Something told me I’d be better off keeping this to myself.
Then I had a thought that, even as it formed in my brain, I tried to dismiss.
What if he’d spent the night at Vicky’s?
He could have asked for refuge: a blanket and the sofa and time to sort out his head. She would never refuse him.
It was 4 a.m. I could drive over there now and see if his car was outside.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Swathes of fog rolled low on the ground and old leaves rucked brown against walls and fences. The sun had yet to come up but sparrows were already chittering in the trees. Blanketed by the warm air thrumming from the vents and the dashboard glowing blue and red in the gloom, I drove on towards my destination.
I reached the entrance to Vicky’s cul-de-sac and slowed to a crawl. Parking on the opposite side of the street, some distance from her house, I turned off the engine and sat there in the dark. Populated by identical semi-detached houses, the close seemed to radiate with yellow-coloured bricks, the white gabling around each front door like a fluorescent marker, there to semaphore each resident’s home. Every house, including Vicky’s, was dark, the day to come still sandbagged by closed curtains and drawn blinds. I listened to the clicks and creaks of the car engine cooling and got Lauren’s compass out of my bag. Holding the silver disc in my palm, I completed an inventory of every parked car. There was no sign of Jason’s Golf.
I breathed out, long and slow, and gripped the steering wheel. Once I’d recovered myself, I looked at Vicky’s house, trying to imagine Barney playing football on the crunchy gravel in the drive. Vicky and Jason had bought the place when they got engaged. When they divorced, he’d let her have it as part of the settlement.
My mouth was still coated with an acid, sour residue, the after-effects of my earlier bout of sickness. I searched out the roll of mints I kept in the well beneath the handbrake and my hand brushed against a sheaf of papers. I popped a mint into my mouth and unfolded the four sheets of A4. They were the photo composites of the unidentified people seen in or near Ashbrook House around the time Barney went missing. I must have left them in here the day I brought them to the off-licence. I made a mental note to replace them in Jason’s files before he could notice they were gone. One by one, I held the male faces up to the weak, grey moonlight. Reassured they didn’t