When I arrive at the bar in King Street, it’s decorated like Katy’s old bedroom, before I painted over it. Red walls and black beams, music posters lining every surface from the curved walls to the wooden pillars. There’s a small stage with gold musical instruments lying dormant and bright low-hanging lights above small round tables covered in ring stains and sticky mats.
I slot myself into the booth at the back, the only booth in the pub, placing my bag on a worn red bar stool at the end. He isn’t here yet. I scan the room, but only a few tables are taken up, one by a young couple and the other by two older men with half-finished dark ales.
The bartender calls over to me asking what I’d like and I ask for a merlot. The two older guys turn to face me and one of them nods and raises his glass slightly. It’s early for wine, early to even be in a bar, but when Peter suggested meeting at Katy’s favourite bar, I was sucked in, I wanted to be where she’d been.
I look around, slightly ashamed that I didn’t know she came here, but comforted that she might have sat in this booth too, with Joanna opposite her, both of them laughing over a drink, a jazz band playing softly in the background and then louder as the night goes on, Katy giggling and throwing back her head, her shoulders rising and falling to the music.
The thought is swept away by the gust of wind that rushes through the front door as it opens and closes. Peter spots me straightaway, though I hardly recognise him; he’s smaller and skinnier since I saw him at the vigil. His eyes are sunken into pallid skin and he has floppy unkempt dark hair he’s tried to tuck into a grey beanie.
He unslings his backpack as he walks towards me, stepping back as the bartender comes over with a tray carrying a full glass of red wine. He places it in front me, not even noticing Peter until he coughs awkwardly.
‘Oh, sorry, didn’t see you there. What can I get you?’
‘Just a Coke, please.’
The bartender smiles and leaves us as Peter fusses with his backpack and slides into the booth opposite me, avoiding eye contact the entire time. He mutters under his breath until he finally composes himself enough to whisper, ‘Thank you for coming.’
‘You didn’t really give me a choice, did you?’
He looks at me then, sad lost eyes searching my own. I think I see guilt in them, but it’s that look I saw ten years ago. The look that made me discount him.
‘How did you know this was Katy’s favourite bar?’ I say.
He smiles softly, pulling the backpack onto his lap and fiddling with the zip. ‘We were friends.’
‘Friends?’ I say, taking a sip of my wine. ‘No one seemed to think so.’ I go to add that she never spoke about him, but she never spoke to me about anyone. I only found out about her and Graham months after they’d already been dating.
‘We were friends,’ he repeats. ‘It wasn’t like they say, like he says.’
‘You mean Graham?’
He nods, before pushing the bag to the side and smiling up at the bartender as he places the Coke in front of him. He waits until the bartender is out of earshot before saying, ‘I’m sorry for what he’s saying about her.’
I frown. ‘Me too.’
‘She was really good at her job.’ He glances away. ‘I wanted to reach out when she went missing, but—’
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘When they showed me your picture and told me they were questioning you, they asked if I’d ever seen you before, but I hadn’t. I had no idea who you were to her. But doesn’t that say more about me? I guess she was a private person.’
He shakes his head. ‘No, I think she was just smart, a lot of savviness in being reserved.’ He shrugs. ‘It made her good at her job.’
‘As a researcher?’
‘No,’ he says, ‘as a reporter.’
‘She didn’t report on anything.’
He goes to speak, but stops.
‘Did she?’ I ask.
‘She wanted to.’
‘What did you do at the company?’ I ask.
‘I was in IT, but I worked a few desks away from her in the research department. We’d get coffee and lunch together. Sometimes we’d stay late and get takeaway delivered if she was deep into a project.’
‘You don’t work there anymore?’
‘Of course not,’ he says. ‘I left a few weeks later. Well,’ – he raises his eyebrows – ‘I was let go.’
‘When you were questioned about Katy?’
‘Yes, they didn’t think it looked good.’
He bends his head towards the table and raises the glass to his lips, taking small sips. He bites the corner of his mouth. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with Katy disappearing. I’m sorry if you don’t believe me, but I just wanted you to know that. I—’
‘You liked her?’
He nods slowly. He looks so young still; he was younger than Katy when she went missing, younger than what she’d be now.
‘That’s how it went, I was the creepy guy that was always hanging around her. Graham wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to accuse me of being obsessed with her.’ His eyes widen. ‘But we were friends.’
It’s the way he says it, like he’s not just trying to convince me, but to convince himself.
‘What did you want to speak to me about?’ I ask.
He makes a scribbling motion with his hand. ‘The note, Katy’s note, the one on TV.’
‘What about it?’
He shakes his head. ‘I think…’ He hesitates. ‘I think she meant for me to get it.’
I freeze. ‘For you? I don’t understand.’
He lays his hands on the table and removes them straightaway, finding the zipper on his bag to play with again.
‘Katy was working on a story.’
‘I know.’
‘But it wasn’t the story they said it was.’
I shake my head. ‘What do you mean?’
‘They only have what they think she was working on, but there was something else, something she didn’t tell anyone about, anyone but me.’ His hand shakes as he picks up his glass of Coke and drinks the rest quickly. ‘She was acting strange a few months before she went missing: whispered phone calls, staying late by herself, not wanting to go for coffee or lunch. She kind of withdrew into herself.’ He looks up at me. ‘So I asked her, once everyone had left one night, what was wrong, and she told me it was nothing, but I knew it was something. I followed her out and called after her asking if she was okay, but she ignored me. That’s when her boyfriend got out the car. He headed straight for me and pushed me and told me to stop stalking her.’
‘That was it?’ I ask.
‘No, she came in the next day and apologised about Graham, said he could be jealous, but I don’t know…’ He winces. ‘She didn’t exactly stop him saying those things to me. I felt very much like our friendship was one-way, and that maybe she was just trying to ghost me, that she didn’t want to be friends anymore but…’ He pauses. ‘That’s when she told me she was working on something, something big.’
‘What?’ I ask, leaning forward, the top of my jumper catching on the wine glass.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, disappointedly. ‘She said she couldn’t tell me, but that she could trust me that, if something happened to her, I could help.’
‘Did you tell the police this?’
‘Yes, I did, I told them exactly what she said to me, word for word, but they insisted she wasn’t working on anything other than the restaurant assault case, something the whole research department and news team knew about. That wasn’t exactly a secret.’
The bartender appears beside us. Sensing the unease of the situation, he holds up a hand and says, ‘I can come back, just wanted to see if you needed more drinks.’
‘Another round of the same,’ I say before Peter can reply.
‘You don’t know what she was working on?’ I ask him.
‘No, I’m sorry, I did try and tell the police, but it was hard. There was this picture painted around our friendship, that I stalked her, that I was obsessed with her, they wouldn’t listen to me.’
‘Wouldn’t they have found whatever this was on her work computer? They checked that, right?’
He nods. ‘There was nothing on there. I checked myself.’
I tense when he says it. How much can I trust this man? Someone that Katy never mentioned, but seemingly the only person she confided in. I need to speak to Joanna, see if Katy ever talked about him, or spoke about what she was working on.
‘Why did you mention the note?’
‘Well, it’s strange; it’s ripped from her work notepad. I saw her carry it around with her, I even saw her write the title ‘Mum’s birthday ideas’ at the top of the page one day when we were having coffee. But she didn’t write anything after that.’
‘Why do you think the note is for you?’
‘It’s the things she kept on her desk at work. Snow globe, Snoopy mug and an Alien Funko Pop.’
I shake my head. ‘So that could mean anything. Maybe it was a reminder to bring those things home.’ I shrug, but it doesn’t make sense.
‘I don’t know, but those were her only personal items at work. I bought her the Snoopy mug so she didn’t have to use the crappy broken ones in the staff kitchen. She got the Funko Pop when we went into town one lunchtime. They are items she knew I knew.’ He hesitates. ‘I took the mug when she went missing. I…’ He takes a deep breath. ‘I wanted something of hers.
I shake my head, grabbing my bag.
He reaches forward and lightly touches my hand and immediately pulls it away again. ‘She had a USB stick. I told the police this, but they never recovered one. I think she hid it.’
‘This is all ridiculous, I have to go.’ He nods as I grab my stuff, throwing some cash on the table for the drinks. ‘Please don’t contact me again.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, repeatedly. ‘What they’re saying about Katy, how they’re twisting everything, you shouldn’t believe it.’
I stop to look at him. ‘And what will they say about you?’ I ask, and all the pity I felt for him has drained away. I see him in a new light, one where he could be manipulating me, one where his feelings towards Katy went too far.
He thrusts a lined piece of paper at me and says, ‘Take it, in case you want to speak to me.’ I take it reluctantly and leave, escaping into the damp, cold air.
I walk home along the busy roads, grit from tyres spitting up at me from swollen puddles along the kerb. I pull my collar up on my dark purple puffer jacket and take long deep breathes, the familiar tightness of my chest creating uneasy warmth on the bottom of my spine.
- Call Joanna
- Arrange for a TV courier
- Pick up something for dinner
But it doesn’t work this time, I just see Katy’s list, the things on her desk, not ideas for my birthday. A message? Doodles? Was she planning to quit the job and making a note of everything she should take? Joanna will know. She was her best friend. She must know.
When I get home, I charge through the house and straight to my workshop, throwing open the wardrobe door. Beneath all the boxes of my own investigation are the things of Katy’s they returned to me once they’d been combed for evidence. At the bottom is a small red plastic box. The items sent home from work. I pull it out, loose pencils roll across the bottom, all the items fallen to one side. The snow globe. I reach down and pull out the figurine from Katy’s favourite film, of course, it’s of the alien from Alien, something I didn’t recognise at the time.
I carry the items through to the lounge and place them on the coffee table in front of the sofa, staring at them, willing them to mean something to me. I pick up the snow globe and shake it, and little tufts of white rain down onto a pink castle. I can’t believe she kept it. I turn it over and there’s a little switch on the bottom that lights up, but when I flick it, nothing happens. It’s old, the glass scratched and dusty. I run my hands over it and glance back at the plastic box, I can’t see a USB stick, but I would have noticed ten years ago when I was handed this box, wouldn’t I?
The Snoopy mug isn’t here, it’s sitting in a cupboard in Peter’s kitchen. Something stirs in me, something nasty. I want it back; it doesn’t belong to him.