One Week Gone
Nicola led Marc back along the dead-end path to the right of the bridge. He knew what to expect this time, but his hands still shook in his pockets, his tongue felt swollen in his mouth. At the end of the path, nestled between the trees and the water, there was a square of tape. Inside, my blue coat and gray scarf lay crumpled as if I’d just shed them. Marc had cried out when he saw them the day before, a guttural, almost animal wail. This morning he clenched his teeth and forced himself to keep walking.
My handbag was cordoned off by more tape, tipped upside down and missing various items, including my purse and phone. A tire print blemished the mud. Closer to the bank lay a shoe and my houndstooth jumper, a dark stain spread along the side of the torso. They sat on an irregular shadow of black mud and leaves. Smaller bits of tape marked other shadows.
“Is that bl—” Marc had tried to ask yesterday, but crumpled before he could say the word. DI Jones hadn’t answered. Instead he’d quietly asked if Marc was sure the belongings were mine. All my husband had been able to do was nod.
“We’re continuing to question the individual who took the bike,” Nicola said now. “We need to establish a timeline. He says he found the bike last Friday, but denies ransacking the bag. He says he didn’t see the blood. It’s possible he’s telling the truth, but he may just be scared—”
“What if he’s lying?” I imagine Marc interrupting. Nicola and DI Jones had looked at the evidence and settled on a narrative, but my husband couldn’t do the same. As obvious as it seemed and as tempting as a conclusive explanation was right then, I know that even with my blood and belongings displayed before him Marc was ready to clutch at anything. He was desperate for an answer that didn’t lie in the depths of the Ouse.
“What if this guy did something to Alex?” Marc said. “Or took her somewhere? Who is he? What do you know about him?”
Nicola couldn’t tell him much except that the individual in question was a minor with no prior convictions and he appeared to be co-operating fully. “We’re not discounting anything at this stage,” she said. “But we’re working on the assumption that these items have been here since last Thursday and that both the bike and Alexandra’s belongings were taken sometime on Friday, before any appeals went out. After that it seems likely the thief or thieves may have been too worried to report what they found.”
Every hour or so DI Jones came over to give my husband an update on their progress. Four officers bobbed along in kayaks, while six more waded through the brown water in industrial diving suits. Nicola told Marc the ones in suits were called frogmen. “If there’s anything in the water, they’ll find it,” she said.
“They can’t search every inch, though, can they?” he said.
“Actually, dredging a river of this size is remarkably effective. Bodies naturally float, so you just have to disturb the bottom really.”
Marc wished he hadn’t asked.
On the other side of the tape he could see camera crews and reporters as well as a collection of curious passers-by. Nicola told him they’d canceled the Red Boats for the day and they intended to search a mile downriver. Marc wondered how many people’s days they were disturbing.
The work was slow and methodical, nothing like the hectic drama of film and television. I can imagine my husband sitting there, itchy in his own skin, unable to take his eyes from the water. What was he hoping for? Not a body, of course, but some conclusive piece of evidence that would tell them where I was. For me to drift up like a mermaid and sun myself on one of the barges. For an answer to the questions he was too afraid to ask.
Nicola told him he should go home, that they’d phone if they discovered anything. But he couldn’t leave. I know my husband. He would have needed to be there. We saluted single magpies, threw salt over our shoulders and told the girls watched pots would never boil. If they’d have let Marc wade into the brown water, he would have.
Around four, one of the officers manning the cordons tapped him on the shoulder. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, bowing his head. “There’s a woman over there says she knows you.”
Marc turned and saw Susan sandwiched between two reporters with oversized cameras eagerly snapping in his direction. Marc nodded and watched the officer let her through. He felt a stab of guilt at not having checked in with her and Patrick since that first night.
“Marc!” she said as she approached. “My God, are you okay?” She pulled him into a suffocating hug, filling his nostrils with her floral perfume. He saw Nicola retreat to talk to another officer.
“I can’t believe it,” Susan said, straightening her thick woolen coat. “This can’t be happening.”
Marc once confessed to me that he struggled to talk to Susan when it was just the two of them, that he liked her, of course, but they had nothing in common. I took offense at the time, especially given how happy she and Patrick seemed together. It had been hard for us all when Rebecca left; she and Patrick had been a constant in our lives for so long. But I was proud of having introduced him to Susan, of having been the one to successfully matchmake Marc’s oldest friend, especially after everything he’d been through. I’d met Susan at a pottery class and had this strange, intense premonition that this ditzy, hippy teacher was exactly what Patrick needed.
What was Marc supposed to say to her, though, while he sat by the river waiting for someone to pull my swollen cadaver from its depths? While he tried and failed to prepare for the worst?
Observing her twisting her rings and running her hands through her tangled hair, he realized she might actually be suffering. So far my disappearance had seemed like his private tragedy. The girls’ too, of course, but contained within immediate family.
“Are Lizzie and Charlotte with Fran?” Susan said. Marc realized our friends must have talked. Of course they would have, but it made him uneasy.
He shook his head. “My parents drove up this morning.”
“That’s good,” Susan said, touching his hand. “You need support.”
Marc didn’t respond. He returned his gaze to the water, watched a frogman inspect a clump of weeds.
“Do they think she’s in there?”
Marc dug his nails into his palm. “Just because her things are here, it doesn’t necessarily mean…” He trailed off, unable to say it.
He felt Susan’s eyes on him. After a moment she said softly, “It’s been over a week. Fran said there was blood—” She faltered. “I mean, we’ve probably got to prepare for the worst. What other explanation is there? The best-case scenario is that she had a terrible, tragic accident—”
“Don’t,” he said, cutting her off. He felt like someone had punched him in the kidneys. What kind of accident would involve me leaving my clothes and blood on the bank? What scenario exactly did she think that was better than? “Please, I just can’t believe that. Not yet.”
“Sorry,” she said, touching him again. He drew away.
She sat with him for a while, watching the policemen stir up nothing in the murky water. With a primary school teacher’s aptitude for small talk, she told him the Ouse isn’t as dirty as it looks, that it gets its color from the peat fields it drains, that all of York’s drinking water comes from it. Her voice filled the silent air, but Marc’s attention never left the water. Eventually she kissed him on the cheek and promised she and Patrick would pop round to check up on him. He hoped they’d forget. He knew I didn’t belong solely to him, but his head hurt when he tried to think of all the people in my life, all those he might be expected to speak to or receive sympathy from.
They kept searching, shuffling the police tape along the pathway and into town until dusk settled. DI Jones explained they’d pack up for the day and resume at dawn. Nicola drove Marc home and he let himself into a house smelling of his mother’s cooking.
“Your time’s almost up,” he said today.
I was lying on the bed when he came in, my face pressed to the pillow.
“Look at me,” he commanded. My shirt twisted as I rolled over and I saw his eyes land on my stomach, on the long purple scar. I pulled the fabric down to cover myself, but his eyes remained there. I curled around myself, remembering the pain, the slice of the knife through my flesh.
“What do you want?” I said, no fight in me today.
He looked disheveled. There were shadows beneath his eyes. I sat up, my curiosity piqued. What was he worried about?
“I can’t keep you here indefinitely,” he said. “I need to make a decision.”
He says I have one more month to convince him I’m worth saving. Whatever that means in his warped little mind. Four more weeks to figure out the rules and learn to play his game. And if I can’t? What then? Where will he send me? What does he have planned?
How much more is it possible to lose?