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This insinuation that I am a marriage wrecker makes me recall one of the tabloid headlines from soon after your disappearance. It enraged our father, a man who is not given to rages.
Missing Nurse Spotted on Caribbean Yacht with Married Drug Lord Lover.
It seems a good idea to say, ‘I would never go near a married man, or a man who has a girlfriend.’
Sadie tells Brian, ‘Ella and Ted had a big fight because Ted was frustrated just being Ella’s friend. So he started seeing this other woman, some police photographer. Then he married her. Ella cried for months.’ She tears her attention from Brian and shoots it at me. ‘But spare me the little fairy tale that you had nothing to do with him while he was with his wife.’
Ted and I saw each other or spoke every day from the time we were four years old until we were twenty-seven. Then nothing until we were thirty.
‘There were three full years of absolute radio silence,’ I say.
‘Sadie tells me you’re talking to him again now,’ Brian says.
‘Only recently. Ted came to my dad’s seventieth birthday party this summer.’
‘What made that happen?’ Is it natural that this man should be so curious? Perhaps Sadie has reason to distrust him.
‘My nephew invited him. I didn’t know Ted was coming until he walked through the door.’
Ted and his wife were apart by then, but Ted never stopped checking up on Luke, even during his marriage. Luke has always idolised him.
Sadie cannot decide where to aim her surveillance. Her eyes dart to Brian’s phone, then to me, then to Brian, then back to the phone, which seems to be pulsing with the contraband text. ‘Who is she?’ Sadie asks him.
‘Someone I work with. A nurse. It’s nothing, Sadie.’ He kisses the tip of her nose. ‘X is a letter of the alphabet. It doesn’t mean anything.’
Sadie’s hands are in fists. ‘That’s really unprofessional. To put a kiss on a message to anyone other than your true love is a betrayal.’
This makes me fantasise about emailing Brian with a string of kisses. xxxxxxxxx. It’s the kind of thing you would do. But of course I won’t.
‘You are not going to answer her,’ Sadie says. ‘That is the only message she deserves.’ Sadie puts out a hand. ‘No secrets,’ Sadie says.
Brian hesitates, then silently hands over his phone. The first thing Sadie does is to check his contacts and his call log. ‘You’re not there,’ she says to me.
‘Of course I’m not.’
Brian shakes his head. ‘Sadie. Can you stop.’
Sadie holds his phone out and makes a show of deleting the text. Her passion-induced craziness evokes another of the many headlines you inspired.
‘She was in love with love.’ Missing Miranda’s Romantic Obsessions.
‘I need some water,’ I say.
‘What are you doing, Ella? Seriously. What is with you?’
‘Nothing.’ I sound clipped and cool.
‘Literally digging out your sister’s dress?’
‘Really, Sadie. I am just thirsty.’ I sound dangerous.
‘The crap you are. Are you opening up that stuff with Miranda again? After all this time? Why would you do that?’
‘It doesn’t affect you.’ I sound like you practising icy dismissal. And like Mum.
‘Is it the attention? Are you missing it? Is that what this is about, now that the fuss about her has properly died down? Is that why you gave that stupid interview about the charity, and let them run your photograph?’
‘That doesn’t deserve a response.’ The sofa squelches embarrassingly when I stand up. Luke would make a joke about this.
‘Don’t you dare leave.’ Sadie catches my wrist. ‘You’re always doing that when you don’t like my questions.’
‘She needs a drink.’ Brian peels her fingers from my skin. ‘Let her go.’
The Three Suitors (#ulink_11601e63-f7d0-5095-adc2-b99db4807385)
I head straight for the front door. I get as far as the entry hall when a man approaches me, standing too close. The alcohol fumes are coming off his skin so thickly I can practically see them, mixing with his sweat.
I step back and he steps forward. I step back again and stick my arm out, visibly warding him off.
His hair is silver, to the middle of his neck, and slick. ‘Let me get you a drink,’ he says.
I cannot believe this surreal nightmare of a party is actually getting worse. ‘No thank you.’
‘You sure, sweetheart?’ Indiana Jones would get away with calling me sweetheart. This man cannot. His shirt is silk and purple and has way too many buttons undone.
‘Completely certain.’
He doesn’t even try to disguise the fact that his eyes are moving up and down my body, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, lingering at my breasts. ‘I’ll go get us some mineral water. We need to keep hydrated. Trust me. I’m a doctor.’
I am all too aware of the verbal manoeuvre – this attempt to encroach upon me by speaking as if he and I are a team, followed by his bad joke. I begin to walk away but the man puts a hand on my waist.
‘Take your hand off me now.’ Anyone who knows me would hear the dead seriousness of my voice.
But this man does not know me. When he tightens his grip on my waist and starts to move the front of his body towards mine I unbalance him with exactly enough force to leave him two choices. Let go of me, or fall over. He takes option one.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ The man shakes his head and squeezes his eyes and moves his mouth from side to side. Then he lurches upstairs.
I brush off my hands. Once. Twice. Firmly and completely done.
But there are two consequences of these mild physical exertions. The first is that a lock of hair has escaped the low knot at the nape of my neck. The second is that your stupid dress flew open without my noticing because when I look down I see that my skimpy black underwear is showing and I remember why I hate this wrap style that you love.
This is when I realise that another man has come into the hall. He has been watching the entire show, so unmoving in the shadow cast by the stairway I haven’t noticed him. He must have seen the spectacle of the gaping dress before I readjusted it.
The man’s black eyes are creased at the corners, I think in amusement. Beyond that, his expression is neutral. My guess is that he is ten years older than I am. The age you would be. Maybe, just maybe, the age you are. Though his face is young, his hair is grey. It’s peppered a little with black. He is one of those model-beautiful grey-haired men.
‘I’d like to offer you a drink,’ he says, ‘but I can see that might be dangerous.’
‘Well you would be correct,’ I say. I double-check that there isn’t even the slightest visible tremble in my fingers. There is not.
‘I’m Adam,’ he says.
I manage to incline my head slightly in response. It is not that I am trying to be rude to him, even though that is probably what he will think. It is that I need a few more seconds to collect myself before I can speak properly.
‘And you, clearly, are the woman with no name. I’ll call you the Kickboxer.’
‘That wasn’t remotely like kickboxing. That was gentle dissuasion.’
He actually smiles. ‘And you’ve gently avoided telling me your name.’
‘Ella.’
He repeats the word as if it were a question, as if he has decided he likes it.
I squint at him. ‘Have I seen you somewhere before?’
‘If I’d seen you before, I’d remember,’ he says.
‘Good one.’ I start to walk away, only to be stopped by Brian, who has somehow extricated himself from Sadie to come in search of me.
‘I wanted to check you’re okay,’ he says.
‘Fine. Thank you.’
Brian looks uncertain, but he nods. ‘Glad to see you’ve met Adam.’ His frown is at odds with his words. ‘I’ll leave you two to talk.’ He looks over his shoulder, then disappears upstairs, taking them two at a time.
‘Brian seems …’ Adam falters.
‘Throwing a party can be stressful,’ I say.
‘You’re right. And I owe you an apology.’
‘For what?’
‘That line about how I’d remember you if I’d seen you before. It was cheesy.’ He waits a beat. ‘But true.’
For so long, I haven’t properly grasped why you adored male attention. Your need for it bordered on mental illness. But this man’s admiration makes me warm, which isn’t something that happens to me very often.
‘Let me guess,’ I say. ‘You’re a doctor?’
He smiles again. ‘You have the gift of mind reading.’
‘My sister used to say that.’ There really is something familiar about him. All at once, I see what it is. It is that he is a type. He is your type. The tall, dark and handsome type. This man is commanding, but he is restraining his power, a tension you always found irresistible. I am discovering that I like it too.
‘I need to be somewhere,’ I say. Somewhere as in, not this new love nest of Sadie and Brian’s. Somewhere as in home, where there are no doctors to interrogate me. And where there is no supposed-friend to shoot barbs at me.
‘Somewhere interesting, I hope,’ he says.
Is he like this with patients, too? Does he make anybody he talks to feel as if they are the most fascinating person he has ever met? A lot of men couldn’t do this without being sleazy, but this man is gentlemanly, urbane-seeming. The type of man Ted would hate and you would adore. But Ted, as I am all too aware, is not here.
‘Lovely to meet you,’ I say.
‘Can I see you again? I have a fondness for the martial arts.’
‘I am not in the habit of seeing strange men. Especially not strange men who tease me.’
‘I’m not strange. But yes, I couldn’t stop myself from teasing you. I’m sorry about that.’
‘That was not a sincere apology.’
‘Perhaps not.’ He takes out a business card and offers it to me. I don’t take the card and he lets his arm fall back to his side. ‘We can meet at my place of work. Between clinics, so you wouldn’t have to put up with me for too long if I bore you.’ He raises his arm to offer the card again. ‘It’s not often that I invite women there.’
‘How often is not often?’
‘Not often as in never before. You’ll see why if you look.’
Fuck you, Ted, I think. Fuck your games and fuck your remoteness and fuck your impatience.
I squint at Adam for a few seconds. To my surprise, my own arm rises and somehow the card is in my hand. I glance at it. Dr Adam Holderness, Consultant Psychiatrist. He is based in the secure mental hospital outside of town, where Jason Thorne is indefinitely confined. He probably thinks I ought to be an inmate. I suppose it’s inevitable that in a house stuffed with doctors, at least one of them would work there.
‘It’s a great place to meet for coffee,’ he says.
I am making silent fun of myself in a bad bleak way. I decided in the woods this morning that I would write a letter to one of the most horrifying serial killers in recent decades, asking if I can visit him. What normal woman thinks it is good news that she may have improved her chances of getting access to such a man?
I don’t need Adam Holderness for that access, but having him behind me might help. It occurs to me that he probably knows who I am, but is being too polite to say. It is all too likely that Brian or Sadie told him. If so, he must guess that I will be drawn to his hospital by a more powerful force than a love of caffeine or a wish to date him.
I say, ‘Do you find that your acquaintance with Jason Thorne is much of an inducement?’
‘Only to an extremely select crowd. I tend to keep that one quiet.’
I fantasise a picture of Luke, proud of me, and happy, finding you at last, running into your arms, smiling at me over your shoulder. But I cannot stop a vision of what his response will be if the truth I discover is a dark one. And I cannot help but consider that if by some miracle we do find you alive, you will take Luke away from me.
The unexpected thing, though, since I made my promise to Luke this morning, is that the terrible visions of what Thorne might have done to you have stopped. Before that promise, nothing I tried would block them – last week’s headlines brought them on with a relentlessness that I couldn’t figure out how to fight.
‘You know what I do,’ Adam says. ‘How about you? Or is your job classified?’
‘Hardly mysterious. I’m a personal safety advisor and trainer. Mostly I work with victims, but also sometimes with family members of victims.’
‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘I remember Brian mentioning that. For a private charity your family founded?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sounds like important work. And difficult.’
‘I get a lot of support from my mother. She does most of the admin, usually the helpline messages.’
‘She must be very organised.’
‘She has on occasion been described that way.’ You would say, If organised means control freak bossy, then yes. But I have already confided more to this man than I do to most. ‘Please excuse me. I need to go, Dr Holderness.’ I use his title and surname to impose formality and distance, but it comes out like a flirtatious tease.
