DORSET, 2011
THIRTEEN MONTHS LATER
At the back of the beach the cliffs are unevenly hollowed out where the sea has sculpted the rock into little caves and crevices. In the summer these places are sour with the smell of old urine but winter storms have since sucked them clean. As we crouch down out of the wind between arms of rock, there is only the cold scent of salt water and fresh seaweed. Ted bends to light a cigarette, pulling one from a crumpled blue packet. He turns back to face the sea and sighs. The smoky fragrance of Gitanes instantly conjures forgotten images of twisted sheets, books under the bed, notes tossed on the floor. Making love after lectures. When did he start smoking again? Perhaps Beth smokes, though that doesn’t fit my image of her. Perhaps they smoke after sex, as we used to. These thoughts skid alongside the worry for a few seconds and then drown in it.
“So, why didn’t you tell me, Ted?” I ask him again.
He pulls on his cigarette, and there is a little pause. “She asked me not to,” he replies simply. “She trusted me.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that I should know? You could have told me in secret . . .”
Ted shrugs. “You might have felt you had to take it up with her.”
The cigarette smoke stings my eyes. I turn my face away.
He carries on, “Things are either right or wrong with you. Of course I know you would never have told the police—”
Before he can say words that will make it my fault, I stand up. The wind catches my hair, and blows it across my eyes. I snatch at the strands and hold them back roughly as the hot fury rises. I hate him at that moment, but I hate myself more. I want to pull out my hair in handfuls to throw away in the wind.
“She wouldn’t have thought I’d tell the police. I’ve never punished her for anything.” My voice is breathless. “I hardly remember Naomi doing anything wrong. She was always good, even when she was little.”
“That’s exactly it. How could she disappoint you? All that expectation made it easier simply to lie.”
His words are like a net catching me at every move, cutting in. Everywhere I turn I was wrong. The sea has changed: crashing and hissing. My teeth hurt with the cold of the wind.
“I’m going home now.” As I start to walk my legs feel stiff and move slowly. Ted follows me, cupping his fingers around his cigarette, stumbling a little on the shingle.
“Once she’d gone,” I shout over my shoulder above the noise of the waves, “there was nothing left to lose. Why not tell me then?”
He catches up; leans close as he walks and puts his hand on my shoulder so his words are near my ear.
“You had too much to deal with.” He is wheezing slightly. “Anyway, from then on, I watched the ketamine supply like a hawk. Not one vial ever went missing again.” He stumbles once more, and tightens his hand on my shoulder. We have reached the top of the beach and he stops, holding me there with him.
He says more quietly, “I thought it was a one-off.”
He stops talking. Three gulls fly swiftly past us, heading inland, taking refuge from a storm that is brewing out at sea where dark rain clouds reach down to the horizon. He clears his throat as we start walking up the little bridle path that leads to the back of the churchyard, our footsteps quieter on mud.
What would I have done if I’d known at that stage? I would have told the police instantly and anyone else who might have helped, but my feet stop as I remember back to the headlines in every tabloid newspaper: “Doctor’s Teenage Daughter Missing” they had screamed. The school photo alongside had looked grainy in newsprint. Some of the papers used an old one of Naomi receiving a trophy after a swimming race. In her tight swimsuit she was all legs, her small breasts pushed together; she was fourteen at the time the photo had been taken, but pictures of a near-naked girl sold papers. If the media had got hold of the ketamine story, the headlines would have been more sensational: “Doctor’s Druggie Teenage Daughter Missing.” She would have felt betrayed; she wouldn’t have come back even if she could. Then again, if the police had known about the ketamine, they might have found her by now.
I begin to walk quickly, as if by moving fast I can catch up with lost time. Ted’s hand slides off my shoulder. We are now alongside the churchyard, where the path is dark and slippery with overhanging yew branches dipping low; in the autumn they drop their tear-shaped crimson berries and the ground is slimy with their broken flesh. Now the mud is swollen with rain and tiny needles of ice.
We are almost home by the time the rain starts. Mary is feeding her hens. She turns to us as we pass by her gate and we wave to each other, a brief wordless salute. She will understand how sometimes even pretending to smile is too difficult.
As we reach the door, Ted looks at me. His eyes are full of guilt and misery.
“Around the time I found the vials in Naomi’s bag, there was a huge amount going on. I was being threatened with legal action for that girl’s spinal operation, and I was back and forth to Sweden with the stem cell trials, which weren’t going well either. I should have asked her more.”
Inside the house, Bertie comes sleepily to greet us, his wet nose bumping our legs. I bend to him, my hands absorbing the warmth of his solid back, but I can’t stand still. I pace around the kitchen, into the sitting room, back again. A window rattles in the freshening wind and the rain patters thinly against the glass. Ted takes off his coat and flicks the kettle on.
I turn to him as he opens the cupboard for mugs.
“What do you mean, you should have asked her more, Ted? What more do you think you could have found out?”
“I could have asked her for more information. She told me it was for friends. I assumed she meant school friends, but it might have been someone else.”
As I absorb that, a new thought strikes me. “What about Ed? Is there a link?”
“His problem was different. Naomi wasn’t using drugs like him; she just . . . stole them.”
“So did he.”
Ted pushes a mug of tea across the table to me. “They both stole because they had access, but their reasons were completely different. Bad coincidence.”
In the little pause that follows his words I tell myself that there is no such thing.
“I still think she was telling the truth,” Ted continues, as he sips his tea. “It was just a one-off, for friends.”
But she had lied so often. “Was Naomi ever with any of her friends in the hospital, or with anyone you didn’t know from outside?” I ask. Someone encouraging her, taking the drugs, perhaps slipping her money.
“No. I always kept an eye on her, whether she was in the lab or on the ward. I would have seen.”
“I didn’t know she was on the ward as well.”
“Yes, you did.” He looks surprised. “It was your idea for her to do ward rounds with me. She liked the bustle. Sometimes I would find her chatting to patients while she waited for me. I think they took her for a medical student in her lab coat.”
“Did she help with drug rounds?”
“For God’s sake.” He knows instantly what I am thinking. “Those drugs are locked away. You have to be a qualified nurse even to push the trolley around. She just used to sit with people, make friends.”
“Did she meet her?” A sudden new suspicion flashes in front of me.
“Meet who?”
“Your girlfriend, Beth.”
“She’s not my girlfriend now. It’s over.” He gets up and stands with his back to me; he looks out of the kitchen window into the garden, where the rain is now falling in dark sheets. “And the answer to your question is no.”
“How d’you know?”
He shrugs. “She was never round when I picked up Naomi. She often worked late shifts.”
Beth would have seen Naomi, though. Curiosity would have compelled her. She might have wondered what it would be like to have a child of Ted’s, might have played with the idea that Naomi was hers. The thought takes hold.
“Where’s she now?”
“Who?” he asks again.
“For Christ’s sake, Ted. Beth. Perhaps it’s her all along. She’s got Naomi, because she belongs to you and—”
“Stop.” He raises himself on tiptoes and lowers again, hands deep in his pockets. He looks calm except for the fact that his hands are clenched so tightly the trousers are stretched over them; I can see the knuckles through the thick cotton.
“You know she was with me the night Naomi disappeared,” he says quietly.
“I know that’s what you told me.”
“She was in her flat. She has an excellent alibi.”
Is he talking about himself? He turns and catches my glance.
“Not me, the police.” I can see he is still hiding something. “She called them because someone broke into her flat that night.” He pauses for a fraction. “Then she called me.”
“She called you?” My mind begins to jump down steps to a place I hadn’t seen before. “So you weren’t there for the first time, making a mistake because you were tired and drunk. You were already lovers. God, I’ve been even more stupid than I realized.”
“I haven’t had a chance to explain anything—”
How long does it take to tell someone you’ve lied? Minutes? Months? Years? I put down my mug of tea; it tastes unpleasantly flat. “I already know it carried on after you told me it had ended. I hadn’t realized you were lying about when it started as well.”
“How could I tell you with Naomi gone?” He has turned to face me.
I ignore his question; push away the past lies and the future ones. I need to keep focused.
“Beth called the police and then you because her flat had been burglarized.” I speak slowly, working it out for myself. “The police should have made the connection later that Beth’s lover was Naomi’s father and her flat had been vandalized the night Naomi disappeared. This is important. Why didn’t Michael tell me then?”
“He didn’t know.” Ted sits again, facing me across the table. “The police didn’t find out I was . . . with Beth till later, when I went to tell them at the station. That night I waited, parked farther down the street from her flat, until the police had gone.”
What had he been thinking as he hid there, in the dark street? Was he ashamed? Perhaps he had been thinking about his research or the operation that had gone wrong? No, he must have been thinking about Beth. About sex with Beth later, once the police had left.
“Of course,” I said. “Stupid me again. It had to be secret.”
“I was going to end it . . .”
This isn’t the point, I tell myself. None of this is. There’s something I’m missing.
“What were you doing when she phoned you?” I start at the beginning again. One thread at a time.
“Getting into the car. I was bloody exhausted that evening.” He shakes his head at the memory. “The court case had just crumbled, and I was wiped out. I was so relieved that the scheduled op wasn’t going ahead; all I could think about was coming home. I’d even forgotten whether I had to pick Naomi up or not.”
This has the ring of truth and I believe him.
“Then I got Beth’s call. She was distraught and frightened. The flat had been trashed. They had even set fire to the kitchen.”
A faint memory of the scent of burning floats past me, how Ted had stood in the hall thirteen months ago and I had smelled burning on him. I’d thought it was the diathermy he’d used in the operation, then I’d forgotten that instantly in the overarching fear of that night.
“They? More than one, then?”
“The police apparently thought it was a gang of some kind, maybe kids. Even when they knew about my connection with Beth they didn’t think it was in any way related to Naomi’s disappearance.”
“What did they take?”
“Nothing seemed to have been taken.” Ted shrugs; he has accepted the strangeness by now. “Her laptop, television, camera, jewelry—it was all there, jumbled up but there.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd, the night that Naomi disappeared?” I look at him, but he shakes his head.
“Break-ins happen all over Bristol every night.” Ted sounds weary.
A thin child with bruises and tiredness. That combination hadn’t been a coincidence either, or even child abuse. Jade had had leukemia.
“Did Naomi really never see you and Beth together?” It’s getting difficult to sit still; I get up and rinse the cups, turning my hands in the water to warm them.
“No. I just told—” Then he stops as if a memory catches him. “Actually, now I think back, that’s not strictly true. Beth came into my office once, but she saw Naomi and left again. Naomi didn’t even register.”
He was wrong. Naomi would have smelled Beth’s lavender scent as she came in; she would have lifted her head and might have been puzzled at its familiarity, until she remembered she had smelled it on her father’s skin. She would have looked out of Ted’s window, the narrow one above the desk with the peacock-pattern curtains that I sewed years ago. At the same time she would be watching Beth out of the corner of her eye, so she would have caught the tiny glance between Beth and Ted. Naomi would have registered almost instantly.
“I’ll need to phone Michael to let him know.”
“Are you still in touch?”
I thought of his warm hands and serious eyes. Touching his mouth with my mouth.
“Yes.” I look down, then away. Why should I tell him about Michael? I owe Ted nothing now. “You’ll need to stay and see him, if he agrees to come here.”
“Of course. Look, Jenny . . .”
I do look at him then, and beyond the known shape of him, the new stubble and unfamiliar nicotine stains on his fingers, the longer hair and the reassuring smile, I see a middle-aged man grown older, tired, and bitter, as if he knows he has made mistakes and wishes he hadn’t.
“I meant what I said. It’s really over with Beth now.”
“They do food in the pub,” I say. “Come back when you need to sleep.”
AFTER HE LEAVES I try to phone Michael but he doesn’t pick up. I go to the shed. It feels cold and looks messy; usually I don’t notice the mess. I haven’t the heart to start painting, so I tidy jumbled seeds and rose hips. But I don’t dream about them that night. Instead in my dreams I see Naomi throwing broken glass at the walls of Beth’s burned kitchen and laughing. The laughter wakes me, and changes into the cry of a gull, calling in the night from its perch on the roof. I lie in the dark. The landscape of the past has changed. Ketamine. Beth’s break-in. My mind goes round and round. How had I missed so much? But I know how easy it is to miss things. I hadn’t seen what was happening to Ed. It could easily have been too late for him as well.
I give up the attempt to sleep again; I get up, go downstairs in the dark, and make tea. My sketchbook is on the side, but it’s facedown, left open. Did Ted flick through it quickly, or study each picture in turn? Perhaps he was disappointed there are none of him. His wet coat is over the chair; the sleeves have dripped a little pool of water on the floor. I didn’t hear him come in from the pub and go upstairs. I open the door to the garden and look into the black quietness. The storm that came in from the sea has already gone again. I shut the door and sit on the floor with my back to the wood burner, the mug of tea beside me. Scalpels are easy to draw; harder to capture the holding fingers, impossible to show how they were trembling.
BRISTOL, 2009
ELEVEN DAYS AFTER
Ed pulled his arm back and shook his sleeve down. He turned his head away and in the downward curve of his thin neck I saw how far away he had gone. I put my arms around him. I could feel him shivering.
“What’s happened to you?”
He shrugged and moved away.
“I’m not angry.” But I didn’t think he heard. It was true, though. “I want to help.”
He walked into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa, put his head back and stared at the ceiling. I sat beside him.
“Can you tell me what’s been going on?”
His head lowered suddenly, brown eyes staring hotly into mine. “Don’t you fucking dare tell Dad.”
“Were you using drugs from my medical bag?”
No answer.
“There aren’t enough in there to do this.” I touched his inner elbow lightly as I spoke, but he gasped and wrenched his arm back. I had felt a swelling under my fingers, hot through the cotton of the shirt.
“I’m going to make a sandwich and a cup of coffee for both of us.” Perhaps this was how you did it, by pretending to be calm and sensible, although when I saw his face drawn with pain I wanted to weep. “There might be an abscess there, Ed. I could take a look in a while.”
We ate in silence, which didn’t seem to bother him. He stared blankly out of the window as he chewed. Then, as we drank coffee, I began carefully.
“How are you feeling now?”
He glanced at me quickly, contemptuously. “Like shit, what do you think?”
“How long?”
“Dunno.” He shrugged.
“How often?”
“Whenever.”
But his shoulders went down as though talking was loosening something in him.
“What have you been taking?”
“Different stuff.” A pause, then a low mutter that I had to lean in to catch. “Ketamine, mostly.”
The danger he’s been in makes me feel sick. “Where from?”
He looked sideways at me and then smiled scornfully: “Man in a club.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Why drugs, Ed?”
He screwed up his eyes. “Because of all the other shit.”
“What other shit?”
“Stuff.”
“Like?”
“Theo.” He said in a low voice. “Naomi.”
“Theo?” The drugs might help with the guilt he felt about Naomi, although some scars looked old, so he must’ve have been taking drugs even before she disappeared. How did Theo fit in?
“Leave it, Mum.” He started jigging his leg up and down.
I looked around the room as though the tools to unlock this were there somewhere, lying on the sideboard or just out of reach on a high shelf.
“It wasn’t your fault she was taken. We told you that; even if you’d waited—”
“I said leave it.”
“The money?”
He was silent.
“Ed, where did the money come from?”
The jigging got faster and faster, then he got up suddenly and went to the stairs.
“Where are you going?”
“The fucking North Pole.”
I waited until his bedroom door shut, then I sat down and the room seemed to lower itself around me. There was a quiet ringing in the air like after an explosion, but it was inside my head. I looked at my hands on the table. The tendons shone through the skin in pale ridges; they were thinner hands now, but still strong. I had delivered babies, inserted catheters and drips, sewn torn skin, held the foreheads of my vomiting children. I clenched them tightly. I could grasp this. I had to.
HE WAS SITTING with his back against his headboard, earphones in. His bent knees supported a book, and as I came in he began turning the pages quickly.
I sat on his bed and he moved his legs sharply away.
“Some parents might involve the school. Some might involve the school and the police.” The pages stopped turning but he didn’t look up. “Lots of parents would insist on being told the details of what’s been happening; I’m offering a deal.”
He pulled out his earphones and waited.
“If you agree to go to a rehabilitation unit, then we won’t involve the school or the police, and as long as you talk to someone and you stop, then you needn’t tell us anything about where the drugs came from or the money I saw.”
He stared at me silently. Then he looked down at the book on his lap, but his eyes weren’t moving.
“Just leave school?”
“Yes, so you can go to a rehab unit.”
He lay back and closed his eyes.
I gently took his arm, pushed up his sleeve and looked at the scars. Now I could see it clearly; there was a swelling the size of a small plum tensely stretching the skin.
“Ed, this needs draining. We need to go to the emergency room.”
“You do it.”
I didn’t argue; it might make him retreat from the bargain I had held out. I got a sterile set from the locked box in my car. Lynn used to joke that I carried an operating unit around with me, but I’d found it useful over the years for patients who needed very minor procedures and who couldn’t get to the hospital. It was often very satisfying, but this would be different. I found antibiotics in my bag. The thought of cutting my own son’s skin made me feel weak as I walked back upstairs. I washed my hands in the bathroom in water as hot as I could stand. I knew I would hurt him. I had to find a way to deal with that so I could do this properly. I dried my hands on the paper sheet in the pack and slipped on surgical gloves; as I did so, I felt myself crossing that line, mother to doctor. This was just a problem to be solved. It was straightforward; I could do it. I cleaned his arm with an iodine swab, spread the paper above and below his elbow, positioned the cardboard receiving tray, and sprayed freezing anesthetic around and over the abscess.
“This will freeze it, but it will still hurt. You’d get a better anesthetic in the hospital. You sure, Ed?”
“Do it.”
Doctor, not mother . . .
I took the scalpel and cut down sharply through the skin as it thinned over the bulging abscess.
Ed shouted as the skin split neatly apart and thick yellow pus spurted out from between the cut edges, streaming over his elbow into the tray.
“Jesus. Fuck.” His forehead was beaded with sweat as he watched the lumpy mess curdled with blood rise in the tray. “Fucking hell. That hurts.”
“Nearly done.” I felt cold sweat trickle from my armpits, and with hands that I couldn’t quite stop trembling, I carefully pressed the last pus out and syringed in antiseptic. Then I packed the wound with a soft yellow wick, bound it with a dressing, and watched while he swallowed a loading dose of antibiotics, penicillin and metronidazole. Acetaminophen. Tea.
Afterward I sat on the bed and pinned my trembling hands tightly between my knees. Ed was white-lipped.
“Don’t tell Dad,” he muttered between clenched teeth.
“Of course he needs to know. He’ll have to know why you’re leaving school, if nothing else. He won’t like it, but he’ll understand. He struggled to stop smoking himself, years ago.”
“I didn’t know Dad used to smoke.”
“More than cigarettes, sometimes.”
“Yeah?” Ed glanced up at me, his eyes briefly curious.
“Everyone’s fallible. We all screw up sooner or later.”
“Yeah? Even perfect Theo, the perfect son?”
Ah. He looked down at the bed cover, I couldn’t quite see his face, but his words were bitter. I waited for more but he didn’t talk about Theo again.
“I sold them,” he muttered, his voice becoming indistinct. “For ketamine.”
He’d been selling the drugs from my bag to buy the ones he wanted; there would probably always be someone willing to exchange Demerol and temazepam for ketamine. I leaned closer as he mumbled something else. I couldn’t catch what he said and then his eyes closed and he slept.
I closed the door quietly and took the tray and gloves downstairs. My cell went off.
“It’ll be on the news.” The warning tone of Michael’s voice put me on my guard. Ed’s drugs. Someone must have found out, told a journalist. Thank God he’s asleep or he’ll think it was me. Michael was still speaking, and it took me a few seconds to understand that what he was telling me had nothing to do with drugs.
“They’ve found a blue pickup van, abandoned in the woods.”