Dark Place to Hide Read online

  What am I looking for? A black Astra at the roadside? Maybe you had a flat tyre, but wouldn’t you have called if you’d broken down? I try to recall. Yes, I’m sure you took your bag; your phone would be in it.

  The headache brings waves of nausea with it. Too much vodka – idiot. It’s got to stop. Everything about the baby, about my part in it, or not – and my diagnosis – has temporarily got the better of me, but it’s no excuse. There are more important things at stake here. I force my eyes to search the tarmac. What else am I looking for? Skid marks? Did you have an accident?

  There is a stretch of road coming up with a steep bank on the left. It drops away into woods and undergrowth. If the car left the road, the undergrowth would break the fall, wouldn’t it? We reach that spot. I examine the slatted fence, the bark of the large oak tree, the turf, for signs. Nothing is damaged or disturbed. What else am I looking for? I feel like I’m in one of my own lectures; I’m used to problem solving and I’ve always been good at it. I always spot the whodunit in my detective novels way before anyone else. As a child, I was always the first to find my way out of the park maze; I always won at Cluedo. I just have that kind of mind.

  Frank and I reach the crossroads. You would have gone straight on here. I check near the white give-way markings for glass, the orange plastic of a shattered light. Nothing. Frank’s tongue flops to one side now. We must have speeded up. I check for fresh ruts along the verge, tyre marks in the mud outside gateposts. We reach the village green. I stride into The Eagle and ask Terry, behind the bar, if he’s seen you. When I mention the shop, he points towards Marvin Baines, the owner of the one and only village shop. Marvin is sitting with three other men, all with pint glasses drained to the same point. He rolls Frank’s soft ear between his finger and thumb. He hasn’t seen you either. I ask around. We moved to our cottage three years ago, so all the locals know us by now. I get nothing but shakes of the head.

  I come out. It’s still light. I check the car park, the verges, the kerb for a black Astra. It isn’t there.

  Where are you?

  It might be nothing, but when I get back I notice my paperback is splayed open on the coffee table. I never do that; I use a bookmark. I’m inclined to spot these things. Being a so-called expert in criminology and forensics makes you look at the world in terms of puzzles and clues. You’re always telling me I’m turning into Jack Reacher, the fictional creation of Lee Child, with my ability to instantly ‘read a room’. I stand still. The laptop has moved. Have you been back? Did you wonder why I wasn’t here and set out looking for me? I call your name. The place looks messy. I hate things being untidy, but we’ve had to clear the alcove so the surveyor can see the cracks in the wall when he comes. Piles of paperbacks crowd the fireplace and you’ve been very patient about ‘my collection’, in boxes in the porch. How do we find a new home for fifteen antique typewriters? Thank you for not suggesting the garden shed.

  Frank goes looking for you, too – in the garden and upstairs – but returns alone.

  I do a circuit of the garden myself, go down to the river, calling your name. The end of the day is buried in a bruised sky. I come back inside and check my phone. There’s no sign of you. I sit on the armchair nearest the front door and wait. I keep the curtains open, I don’t want to shut you out.

  Chapter 5

  9.45pm

  ‘Have you seen her?’ I ask.

  ‘Who?’ asks Alexa.

  ‘Diane, of course. She hasn’t come back from the village. I’m worried.’

  ‘No. I haven’t seen her. Did you call her?’

  ‘Of course – there’s no reply. You didn’t go after her?’ I ask.

  ‘No. I had to meet someone – in Cosham.’

  ‘It’s been over two hours.’

  ‘Maybe she’s gone to the pub.’

  ‘I’ve been there – no one’s seen her or the car.’

  ‘Maybe she’s broken down.’

  ‘I walked the entire route there and back.’

  ‘Well…then…maybe she stopped off somewhere else?’

  ‘There is nowhere else. Just a shop and a pub, remember?

  ‘Yeah, okay. But, maybe she’s dropped by a neighbour’s or gone to a friend’s for the night.’

  ‘She wouldn’t do that without telling me.’ There’s a snide silence as if Alexa thinks otherwise. I wonder if she knows more than she’s letting on. ‘Has she rung you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please call if she rings, won’t you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I call a couple of our friends in the village, but no one has seen you. I try the next option. It’s a misconception that you have to wait twenty-four hours before contacting the police about a missing person. Maybe I’ve underestimated the state you are in. Perhaps you’re more vulnerable than I realised. Perhaps the enormity of the situation only hit you when you were halfway down the road.

  I have colleagues in the Hampshire Police; guys who consult me for forensics’ analysis. I give talks for the force at training and open days and have become mates with a handful of them. They’re hardworking and reliable – I’m privileged to call them friends. DI Neil Fry lets me win at squash every now and again to keep me coming back. DS Paul Whitaker, on the other hand, is a rogue and adds three kilos to my barbell at the gym when I’m tying my shoelaces. They’re good blokes – they’ll get on to it.

  I can’t reach Neil; he’s on holiday, so I try Paul’s mobile. His wife answers and tells me he’s off work with a stomach bug and needs to sleep. I call the local police station and explain what’s happened. The desk sergeant asks your age, whether you have your phone and need medication or treatment. I explain that you had a miscarriage five days ago, but that you seemed stable and had stopped taking the sedatives. I know what he is going to say before I hear the words: Most people return within forty-eight hours. Can you do a ring-round of her friends? Have you rung her parents? He says an officer will be in touch to arrange a visit if you still haven’t returned.

  I pick up the phone again to start making more calls.

  I’ve never been unfaithful to you, Dee, or even considered it. Even now in the mornings, I prop myself up on one elbow and quietly watch your face with the sublime satisfaction of knowing you’re in my bed, inches away from me, breathing the same air. You continue to light up the room whenever you enter, even after our three years as Dr and Mrs Penn.

  Nothing about your behaviour has changed in the last few months. We’re so close I know I would have spotted something. A slight hesitation, perhaps, when I reached over to kiss you, excuses when I initiated sex, a dropping off in the number of times you made flirtatious remarks or sexual advances towards me, a distractedness about you, less available. None of that has happened.

  It’s nearly dark. I throw open the window in the kitchen and rest my elbows on the ledge taking in the grassy, dewy air, trying to slow down my breathing. I stare at the fading grey shape made by the fountain in the centre and the bird feeders idly swinging under the lilac tree. Right now, this doesn’t feel like mine. Ours. It doesn’t feel like home. Everything’s changed.

  We nearly had a baby. Just a few days ago, we were on our way to being three. And we didn’t know. Neither of us. It has totally floored me.

  I don’t want to feel like this.

  I catch my reflection in the glass, unable to recognise the person I see. In fact, everything around me seems unfamiliar as if I’m in the wrong house. I’m suddenly cold. I shut the window and scan the details of the room to make my eyes remember where I am and how I got here.

  I take myself back to October 2011. It’s all I can think of to ground myself. We bought this detached cottage in the small Hampshire village in Nettledon weeks after we married. We were both done with the hectic city and were already thinking ahead, wanting clean air and space for our children, instead of pollution and chaos.

  ‘We both need to slow down,’ you’d told me once, when I sank onto the bottom stair, frazzled, drain
ed and fractious, after another arduous commute home. ‘London’s got too manic for us. Let’s leave.’ It was all the encouragement I needed.

  Rosamund Cottage is certainly what you’d call a ‘bijou’ property – we’d both been renting in London and knew we wouldn’t get a palace for our savings anywhere. But it’s terribly cute and cosy with low beams, small chunky windows and sunlight that slices across the sitting room. The scattering of cottages at our end of the village are separated by trees and large magnolias and rhododendrons – so we are not overlooked and have plenty of privacy. We both fell in love with the place at first sight.

  You’ve always wanted to live by water, Dee, and there’s a river running past the end of our garden. Sometimes I find you down there sitting on the bank gazing into the ripples. You also wanted to learn to ride a horse and last summer we adopted Rupert from the local stables.

  ‘You can come home from University to a real fire in the hearth,’ you’d suggested, ‘and try your hand at keeping bees. Or chickens – there’s a ready-made coop at the far end of the garden.’ I remember being touched that you’d listened and had held onto my dreams for me.

  As it happens, my plans are as yet unrealised; other basic jobs have had to come first, like sorting out the guttering and the ongoing problems with the chimney.

  It’s late. The kettle boils without me realising I’d even switched it on. I must get a grip. You’re going to need me to be robust and supportive when you return. You’ll be home any minute with a heartfelt apology, no doubt, about meeting someone while you were out. I’m so sorry I made you worry, Dibs. I tried to get away, but she needed to talk.

  I leave the hot water – I don’t want a drink. I reach into the packet of biscuits for a digestive, then put it back. I won’t go to bed; I’ll lie on the sofa and wait for you.

  The baby has gone. Cremated by now. The DNA results come through at the end of the week. Then I’ll know for certain.

  Chapter 6

  Marion

  13 July – 8am

  ‘We’ve found her!’ comes a voice from the far side of the castle grounds. ‘She’s in the pit.’

  ‘Thank God,’ Marion cries, squeezing the damp tissue in her hand into a pulp. She allows the police constable to guide her along the narrow path in the grass towards the woman in a high-visibility waistcoat who is waving. Rose, she thinks her name is. They stop at a low collapsed wall and Marion gets down on her knees, even though the ground is knobbly with stones. ‘You okay, honey?’ she shouts down into the hollow below.

  Clara stares up through the railings of the pit, her fingers in her mouth, looking bemused, but unhurt.

  ‘Mummy’s here, darling. They’re going to get you out.’

  Marion fights back the urge to break into relief-driven tears. How did she get down there?

  The official from Portchester Castle wipes a bead of sweat from his lip. He’s holding the keys and has told us twice that he’s made a special trip from Bournemouth on a Sunday to open up.

  ‘It’s not a pit, PC Felton,’ he calls out unnecessarily. ‘It’s an oubliette. It means “place of forgetting”; a dungeon where prisoners were left abandoned, never to be released.’

  Marion doesn’t want to know that. She turns to the constable by her side. ‘Thank you – thank you so much.’ She hangs onto his sleeve. ‘I was really panicking. We were here yesterday and when we got back home I felt so rough, I had to go straight to bed, but I was certain my mother had arranged to collect Clara for the night, so I knew she’d be looked after.’ Her mother had started popping in with her own spare key and didn’t disturb her if she was asleep. ‘Staying over with people is second nature to Clara. She’s so smart and independent for her age – she’s only seven.’

  Marion is worried about what the constable will think of her and is speaking too fast. She knows she should have called her mother that evening to check she’d collected Clara, but the pain in her back had been so bad, she’d been forced to take morphine and was out for the count. As it happened, Marion had got her days mixed up and her mother wasn’t expecting Clara after all. It wasn’t until her mother rang the following morning to ask if Clara might want to stay over that night, that Marion knew her daughter wasn’t with her.

  ‘She must have come back to the castle before it closed and sneaked back in,’ Marion tells the officer. ‘I called the police straight away.’

  ‘At least the temperature didn’t drop too low last night,’ says the constable. He’s trying to make her feel better. He’s given her his name twice, but in her frenzy, she hasn’t hung on to it. She’s been thinking how terrifying it must have been for her daughter, no matter what the temperature was, to have spent all night trapped down there in the damp with no pillow, no blanket, no food or water. She thinks of the word oubliette and shivers. She tries to imagine Clara finding her way inside then being unable to get out. She thinks of a wasp trapped in a jam jar; the frantic buzzing as it bats against the glass. She presses a palm against her chest to ward off a spasm of nausea. What a dreadful mother she is for letting this happen.

  Rose appears through a gap in the rubble below and squats down in front of Clara. ‘There are a lot of loose rocks down here,’ she calls out. ‘Part of the wall must have disintegrated after Clara got inside.’ The seven year old looks up again to check if it’s the right thing to do, to go with her.

  ‘It’s okay, sweetheart. The lady will bring you out to me. Take her hand. Be careful.’

  ‘We’ll disappear for a while,’ Rose calls up from the pit. ‘The only way to get out is over that way.’ She points towards the other side of the site, where the remains of a tower stand at ground level.

  Clara gives her mother a jolly wave as the pair scramble through a hole and vanish.

  Marion had been promising Clara they’d go to Portchester’s medieval castle for weeks and days when she felt well enough to go out were getting few and far between. She turns again to the constable by her side. ‘She’s such a daredevil. Always crawling into small spaces. She sleeps under her bed, she clambers under cars, climbs into trees. She thinks a “Keep Out” sign means “Come right in and make yourself at home.” One of these days she going to do herself serious harm. I can’t watch her all the time.’

  Marion knows she’s rattling on again. Her mouth keeps opening, her words filling in the hollow where fear and dread have been lurking.

  The constable flicks away a fly that has landed on his thumb. ‘It must be hard…especially with…’ Marion sees the way he pretends not to notice the headscarf that covers every inch of her scalp, her missing eyebrows, her fragile white skin.

  ‘I have good days and bad days,’ she tells him, the emotional release making her reveal things she wouldn’t normally tell strangers. ‘I used to work part-time in the post office, but I can’t even do that anymore. I often have to spend the day in bed with the pain and fatigue. Then there’s the side effects from the chemo; the nausea and vomiting, the diarrhoea. The sore throat and the hair loss.’ She laughs and fiddles with the knot on her headscarf. ‘Sorry…’

  ‘Don’t apologise, Mrs Delderfield. You have a lot to cope with – that’s for certain.’ He rubs his chin and stares at the grass. ‘I knew Morris. He did some training for us once. Remarkable chap. Very professional.’

  Marion’s husband was a skydiving instructor with over a thousand jumps under his belt when she waved him goodbye four years ago as he set out for a routine stunt display in France. He was coupled with a cameraman, Henri Clem, who claimed he was experienced, but had, in fact, only done four jumps in his life. On the way down, Henri’s chute got tangled up with his camera. Morris tried to save him, but they both ran out of time.

  Marion fingers her wedding band. ‘The company who hired Morris that day should never have let the other guy jump,’ she told the officer. ‘I’m still fighting for compensation. During the periods of remission, I write letters and get on the phone – but it never seems to go anywhere.’

  They
watch as Clara and the female officer approach from the far end of the ruins, hand in hand.

  ‘Do you get help with Clara?’ the constable asks as they stride towards them. Marion is always on high alert about this kind of question, convinced others have got social services in mind.

  ‘We had to move to a smaller place last year, so I had to leave a lot of good friends behind, but I have a solid network of helpers. Plenty of reliable babysitters and neighbours. My mother helps when she can.’ She doesn’t add that her mother hasn’t been well herself and is fast becoming unreliable.

  The constable is kind and doesn’t look as though he’s about to turn her in. There’s a lame silence between them before Clara breaks away from PC Felton and comes running round the side of the moat. She buries her face in her mother’s skirt and Marion wishes she had the strength to pick her up. She crouches down instead and takes a good look at her.

  ‘Did you hurt yourself?’ Marion takes in the milky smell of Clara’s long mousy-brown hair and pulls her close to see if she’s been crying. Clara shakes her head. She’s a pretty, smiley child and looks remarkably unshaken. ‘Are you hungry?’

  Her daughter nods with a frown. Marion hands her a chewy raisin bar from her handbag and she takes it politely.

  Wafts of the rescuing officer’s floral perfume temporarily mask the stale dank air reaching her from another dungeon below. ‘There was a small gap under the stone stairwell – you can’t see it from here,’ Rose explains. ‘A few stones have toppled down from the floor above.’ She pats Clara on the head. ‘Once she got inside, more of the rubble must have come down and sealed off the opening.’ She brushes white dust from her sleeves. ‘She looks fine, but we’ll need to get Clara to the hospital for a check-up, just to be sure.’

  ‘Of course,’ Marion replies. ‘I have to go home first. In the panic, I didn’t bring my medication—’