Before I go into the police station I call Rob, but he doesn’t pick up so I leave a message, then I summon up the courage and call Kate’s mother. It’s strange to hear myself explain the situation to her. I can hear my positive reassurances that I’m doing all I can to find her daughter and will keep her updated, and I listen in wonder to how calm and how collected I sound. I don’t tell her about the escorts or the drugs of course. All I tell her is that Kate’s missing and that I’ve reported it to the police.
‘Do I need to be there?’ she asks.
I stammer, unsure what to say. In her shoes, if it were Marlow who was missing, I’d already be on my way to the airport. I wouldn’t be asking anyone their opinion. There’s not a stone I’d leave unturned to find her either.
‘I think it might be a good idea,’ I suggest. Partly because I don’t want to be here on my own anymore. I need help with this.
‘I’m getting my hair done,’ she tells me, with a sigh. ‘When I get home I suppose I’ll look into flights.’
‘Right,’ I say, bewildered at the lack of emotional response to the news her daughter is missing, before remembering that Kate has always said her mother is a narcissist who only cares about herself.
‘I’m about to go and talk to the police,’ I say. ‘I’ll let you know what they say.’
‘Is it really that serious?’ she asks, finally seeming to realise the severity of what I’m telling her. ‘Hasn’t she just gone off somewhere? She’s done this before you know. She ran away when she was sixteen. Didn’t even leave a note, just vanished without a word. I didn’t know where she’d gone until she called me a few days later to tell me she was in Ibiza. She had no care for how worried I was.’
A vague memory of Kate telling me this story comes back to me, with a few more hilarious anecdotes thrown in about how she’d stolen money from one of her mum’s boyfriend’s wallets to pay for her flight. She didn’t tell me that she hadn’t left a note telling her mum where she’d gone.
‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ I say but for the first time I hear that a note of uncertainty has crept into my voice. I was so convinced something terrible had happened to her. Not fifteen minutes ago in the car with Konstandin I blurted out that I thought she was dead. And now here I am, after speaking to Toby and her mum, entertaining the idea that maybe Kate’s faking it all. I want to dig my fingers into my skull and yank out all the conflicting thoughts so I can untangle them. Is it true that I don’t really know her? Though I claimed to know Kate better than Toby, can I really say that? Do I honestly know her better than her own mother? Better than the man she married and shared a bed with for years?
‘I’ll let you know if I manage to get a flight,’ her mum says, and then she hangs up on me.
I make for the door of the police station. I’ll go in and tell the police what I’ve found out, then I can leave them to investigate and untangle all these threads, because it’s clear I can’t do this alone anymore.
As I wait for Detective Reza to come out to the waiting room to meet me I upload Kate’s photograph to Twitter and ask for anyone in Lisbon to keep an eye out for her.
I hashtag it #Lisbon #BritishWomanMissing #missingperson #help, and then I hesitate. Am I being overly dramatic? But for crying out loud – if I can’t be dramatic now when can I be? Maybe someone has seen her? Maybe by some stroke of luck the tweet will go viral and someone will have seen something or know something and can help me solve this … whatever this is. Is it a kidnapping, an accident, a murder, a hoax?
Detective Reza invites me into her office where the other detective, Nunes, is waiting, perched on the arm of a chair. This time they seem to take my report much more seriously, which is a relief. They listen and Reza makes notes as I explain about Joaquim and Emanuel and how I tracked them down. She seems somewhat annoyed at