Then You Were Gone

Jazzy sat back for a moment and rubbed his eyes. He knew that Mack’s PC was full of stuff – every contact with every client, every letter, email, logs of every telephone call. He used the machine for Twitter, Facebook, buying his metrosexual over-priced clothes. And now all that had vanished too. Someone had erased it all – either Mack or Keith. He thought back to the last time Mack had been in the office, at the beginning of the previous week. He had left in a hurry, slightly before his usual clocking-off time, and he had only been at his desk a few minutes before he left. He would barely have had time to log on, never mind delete every last trace of himself. Which left Keith. And Keith was old. Old, and also the type of person who withdrew all his cash at the beginning of the week because he didn’t like spending money via a little plastic card. Keith could send an email or a text and seemed to manage to use his phone to get the football results, but he didn’t seem like he would be confident enough to wipe out Mack’s digital footprint all by himself. But Jazzy had spent his adult life worshipping computers the way others worshipped a deity. And he knew that computers did not lie. Somebody had done it, and it was almost certainly Keith.

‘Shit,’ he said, so loudly he made himself jump. For reasons many and complex, Jazzy really, really did not want this whole thing with Mack to be something to do with Keith. If it was to do with Keith then it was likely to be scary, likely to be wrong, and likely to belong to a world Jazzy did not understand and wanted no part of. He screwed up his face and rubbed his eyes. Rory had been up twice in the night, the second time for over an hour, and he was finding it hard to think straight. ‘Gaaahh.’ He let out a half-yawn, half-groan and tilted his head slowly from side to side, his neck protesting audibly.

‘Erm, excuse me. Are you OK?’

Jazzy jerked his eyes open. A tall, slim black girl wearing a green tabard over skin-tight jeans and a hooded top stood in the doorway. It was the girl Mack liked flirting with, the one who usually cleaned the offices. Jazzy did not recall her having said more than hello to him in the past, but Mack, in his trademark way, had struck up a bantering, easy-going friendship whereby he and this girl would conduct long, light-hearted conversations in a manner that suggested they had known each other for decades.

‘Oh, hi, erm…’ Shit. Jazzy realised he had no idea of her name.

‘Ayanna,’ she said without smiling. ‘Or Anna. Everyone mostly calls me Anna.’

‘Sorry, Anna. I knew that really, I’m just a bit tired.’

‘OK.’ She looked as though she knew he was lying about knowing her name. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt, I just thought you looked really – I don’t know, really stressed.’

‘No, I’m all right.’

‘Well then. Sorry to have bothered you.’ She turned to go, trailing the flex from the vacuum cleaner in one hand. As she was about to pull the door closed behind her, she leaned her head back into the office. ‘So, is Mack still not back then?’ Her voice was studiedly casual, her demeanour a little coy.

Jazzy stifled a world-weary sigh. He longed for the day when he no longer needed to act as Mack’s intermediary between him and the vast number of women he caused to fall in love with him. ‘No, not yet.’ He looked back at the screen, hoping to indicate that the conversation was over, but then a thought struck him. This woman – or girl really, she surely could not be much older than sixteen – was on quite intimate chatting terms with Mack from what he had observed. He had heard Mack asking after members of her family by name and caught snatches of conversation that sounded as though they involved boyfriends or potential boyfriends of hers. She was probably as good a person to ask as any.

‘Sorry, Anna, just before you go,’ he began.

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you… did Mack say anything to you last week about having to go away, or…’ Jazzy hunted for the right way to phrase this in order to maintain his professional discretion and, more importantly, to save Mack’s blushes once his sanity was restored. ‘Or that he was worried about anything?’

The girl’s eyes shot down to her hands, then back to rest on Jazzy’s face. ‘Like what?’

Jazzy paused. She had not asked why he wanted to know, or why he did not seem to have a clue where Mack might have gone. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. ‘Like anything.’

Anna took a breath and swallowed. ‘If I tell you something, right,’ she said, her voice quiet, ‘you can’t tell Mack I told you. And, whatever you do, don’t tell him.’ She gestured behind her to the stairwell.

‘Tell who?’ Jazzy asked, although the lurch in his stomach had told him who she meant.

‘That old guy.’

‘Keith?’

Anna nodded. ‘That’s right. That’s what Mack said. “Don’t tell Keith”.’

Jazzy switched off the computer’s monitor. ‘I think you’d better tell me what’s been going on.’

Chapter Three

Simone could not afford to live in Winchmore Hill, and her post did not arrive before she set off for work, so in fact she saw Mack’s letter to Jazzy before she saw the one he had sent her.

She had been working on a complicated project that morning, a restoration of a series of seventeenth century maps involving a lot of fine, detailed work which normally would have absorbed her to the point where she forgot to eat or go to the toilet. That morning though, she had been unable to switch off the rest of the world in the way she usually did and, most worryingly, had found her mind wandering even as she was using her tiniest, sharpest scalpel to lift away layers of the paper. Scared that her inability to think of anything other than Mack might cause irreversible damage to priceless ancient manuscripts, she took an unaccustomed break and went to the canteen for a coffee.

It was then that she checked her phone and saw four missed calls and a voicemail message. She puffed out a heavy breath and closed her eyes, half-laughing at the thought of how worried she had been. It would be something quite simple, she felt sure. Mack had been unavoidably detained. His phone had been stolen. He had temporarily lost his memory. He had had a minor accident in which his belongings had been mislaid. Whatever it was, the problem was clearly now solved and Mack had been ringing her to let her know he definitely did love her and he was coming home. Only when she pressed the screen to list the missed calls, they were all from Jazzy. And when she listened to her voicemail message, that was from Jazzy as well. He wanted to meet her for lunch, he said. And he did not sound as though he would be bringing her good news.

Simone loved her job. She did not think she was quite insane enough to say she would still come to work even if she won the lottery, but certainly she felt lucky that this, of all the things it could have been, was the thing she did to pay the bills and buy food. Whenever she told people she worked in book preservation and restoration at the British Library, they would always use the word ‘fascinating’. ‘Oh, how fascinating’, ‘Oh wow, that must be fascinating’. But the word Simone would have used was ‘soothing’. The first time she walked into the building where she worked she had felt everything that she carried around with her in the course of her everyday life fall away. The room where she did her work was entirely white – the walls, the floor, the ceiling – and the light was carefully controlled to allow them to do their fine work without exposing precious treasures to too much damaging sunlight. The air was cool, kept at a constant temperature with no breeze, no disturbance, no noise. People often commented about Simone that she had a certain quality, a certain stillness, that they found calming – although she had sometimes suspected that when they said ‘calming’ they actually meant something else. Something more along the lines of ‘unnerving’. But the truth was, you spend a lot of your life at work. And Simone needed her work to be somewhere that was perfectly and entirely safe. She needed to be able to walk into her place of business and know that the outside world could not reach her, that nobody could hear her or see her, that nobody could come barging in off the street and start shouting and throwing things and grabbing the shift supervisor by her hair and pushing her out of the way because she had allowed one of the customers to ‘flirt with’ (speak to) Simone. This was not something that Simone had ever explicitly articulated, to anyone else or indeed to herself, but anyone who really knew her, that small collection of people who understood, never questioned why she loved to spend her days in the cool white light of this room.

The only downside – really, the only downside Simone could think of – to her place of work was that, since all the poshing up had been done, there were too many choices of places to eat near St Pancras. Jazzy wanted sushi – Jazzy always wanted sushi. ‘OK, we know, you used to live in Japan; it was ten years ago, stop going on about it!’ Simone always wanted to say. But she understood that, even back in England, to Jazzy eating sushi meant something else. It meant you lived in London, you were young and surrounded by other young people, and you weren’t scared of a little bit of raw salmon. You could not buy sushi in Redruth – or at least you had not been able to when Jazzy was growing up round there. Simone did not care for sushi. She wanted pasta or, failing that, something that came with chips. She had barely eaten over the weekend, her stomach acidic with worry, and she needed some heavy, refined carbohydrates to settle it. Eventually they settled on a Greek place down a side street where Simone ordered moussaka and chips and Jazzy ordered deep-fried baby octopus with a side of taramasalata.

‘You do know you’re going to stink?’ she said to him as the food arrived.

He shrugged, batting a baby octopus from one hand to the other as he waited for it to cool down. ‘Doesn’t matter, got no one I need to impress after this.’

‘So,’ Simone said, unable to wait any longer. ‘Why did you want to meet?’

Jazzy pulled an envelope from his laptop case and handed it to Simone. ‘It’s from Mack. He says he’s sent one to you too.’

Simone took it from him and read it, wishing she had wiped the aubergine grease from her fingers first.

‘What do you think?’ Jazzy asked when she had finished.

Simone swallowed. ‘I think… Shit!’ she said, more loudly than she had intended, slapping the greasy paper back down on the table, her hands shaking. ‘Oh, shit is what I think. This is crazy, this is bullshit…’ She pointed at the letter. ‘I mean either he’s…’

‘Lost it?’

‘Well, yeah. Or he’s actually telling the truth and something really bad’s happening to him. What the fuck, Jazz?’ she said angrily. ‘What’s been going on with you guys that I don’t know about?’ She felt hot and sick and was sincerely regretting the slimy moussaka.

‘Nothing,’ Jazzy said, and he sounded so plaintive, so boyish and frightened that she believed him. ‘This is as much a bolt from the blue for me as it is for you. Listen, do you know someone called Ayanna?’ he asked. ‘Have you ever heard Mack mention her?’

‘No,’ Simone said, her voice incredulous. This was just like Jazzy, being cryptic, ignoring her, asking stupid questions rather than getting to the point. ‘No, I don’t know anyone called Ayanna.’

‘Or Anna?’

‘My sister’s daughter is called Anna.’ Simone tried her best to sound sarcastic. ‘Does that count?’

Jazzy ignored her. ‘She’s the cleaner at Anastasia Ltd. – well, the cleaner for the whole office building. Mack was – is – pretty pally with her I think.’

Simone closed her eyes. ‘Are you going to tell me he’s been having an affair with the cleaning lady and that’s why he’s run off?’

Jazzy snorted a bleak laugh. ‘No. And she’s not the cleaning lady, she’s just a girl – seventeen. No, what it is, she told me this morning that Mack had been to see her at her sixth form college one day last week. He was waiting outside for her when she finished.’

‘What?’ Simone and Jazzy were the only diners in the restaurant and at Simone’s loud protestation all three of the waiting staff looked over. One of them, the only woman, suppressed a smirk as she looked away. She clearly thought the two of them were having a lovers’ tiff.

A hundred thoughts shot through Simone’s brain. Hanging around outside the school gates? Surely that was what perverts did. Perverts or parents denied access to their children. Mack did not look like a pervert. He did not seem like a pervert. But… a cold, sick shiver rose from her stomach… when she thought about it, until her most of Mack’s girlfriends had been considerably younger than him. And was there a point where liking them young crossed over into something more sinister? She wiped her mouth with a wax-coated paper napkin. Her hand was shaking. Was she really questioning whether or not Mack was a paedophile? The sick feeling washed higher into her throat. Nothing she knew about him seemed stable any more, everything was lurching and tilting in her mind so that the things she thought she had understood about him had flipped around until they looked as though they could mean something else. Christ, she thought, she was losing her grip here. Mack needed to come back, and fast. Clearly she couldn’t keep her mind together without him.

‘So why had he gone there?’ she said lamely, at a loss for anything more pertinent to say.

Jazzy took a deep breath. ‘Well, apparently Mack was in a right state, pale, fidgety, didn’t look like he’d slept. And then, he asked her…’

‘Hang on a minute,’ Simone interrupted. ‘Did she not wonder what the fuck he was doing there? Or how he’d found her there in the first place?’

Jazzy shrugged and looked sheepish. ‘I think to be honest she might have had a little crush on our Mr Mack – you know the effect he has on young girls. And I guess she must have told him which college she goes to – maybe because she was hoping he’d turn up there one day looking for her.’

‘Which he did.’

‘Well, yes, but not for the reason she’d hoped. Like I said, Mack wasn’t himself – from what she said he was barely even making sense – but apparently he was asking her for help.’

‘Help for what?’

Jazzy winced. ‘This sounds weird – well, it sounds worse than weird. Just remember that this girl has absolutely no reason to lie to us.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Jazzy!’ Simone wanted to reach across the table and slap him, put her hands around his throat, throttle him. Just tell me! she wanted to scream, but the waitress was looking sidelong at them and smirking again.

‘OK. Well… What it was… He wanted Anna to get him a credit card and passport in a false name, and to see if she could get him access to a car.’ He blurted out the last sentence in a rush, as though once he expelled the words from his mouth, they were no longer his responsibility.

Simone did not say anything for a minute. She knew she was pulling the kind of face that was expected of her, wide-mouthed, wide-eyed, a parody of shock. She did not know what other kind of face to pull. ‘But Mack’s got a car,’ she said eventually.

Jazzy shrugged. ‘That’s the thing. He needed another one, one that – well, I suppose one that couldn’t be traced.’

‘Traced by who?’

‘Simone, stop shouting at me! I’m not saying all this to you because I get a kick out of it, I’m just telling you what this girl told me!’

‘OK,’ she said, making a conscious effort to moderate her tone. ‘Sorry. Go on.’

‘He didn’t tell Anna who. He just said he needed a fake credit card, a car and a passport – I mean, for fuck’s sake. A false passport? Who, outside of the bloody Bourne Identity, needs a false passport?’

Simone could not process what Jazzy was saying. He was right, it was something from a pumped-up, macho, mindless work of fiction, not from the life of a thirty-one-year-old book restorer quietly minding her own business in north London. ‘But… why Ayanna? If he needed help, then why did he go to her? Some kid he hardly knows? Of all the dodgy people Mack knows, surely one of them would have been able to help him out?’

Jazzy nodded. ‘I know, I thought that too. But Anna told me –’ Simone sighed heavily. It was getting on her nerves, this ‘Anna’ business, as though Jazzy was best mates with this girl, on pet name terms with her. Jazzy ignored her. ‘Anna said that he made her promise not to tell Keith about any of it. He made her promise not to tell anyone, but he was particularly firm on Keith. Don’t tell Keith. She kept making me promise too. So I think that’s why he went to Anna, instead of one of his dodgy cousins, or even Keith himself, I guess. I mean, if I ever wanted to go underground I think I’d go straight to Keith, he knows half the crims in London. But this Anna, she’s no link to anyone else in his life. Whoever’s looking for him, they probably won’t think to start with her.’

Simone closed her eyes. Too many questions were popping into her mind. ‘And how come she could help him, then? Is she some sort of people-smuggler on the side, between cleaning your office and doing her A-levels?’

Jazzy looked pained. ‘Well, she wasn’t very forthcoming about it really. Apparently she’s got a brother who – well, I don’t think he’s a gangster or anything, but he does… From what she said, he helps people out when they first come to London, or that’s how she put it. The family are Somalian, at least by background, but Anna was actually born here and her brothers have been here since they were little kids. Reading between the lines, I think this brother helps out people coming over from Somalia to join their families, gets them fixed up with papers and stuff if they’re not entirely legit when they first get here. You know the sort of thing.’

‘No,’ Simone said, aware her voice was becoming shrill. ‘No, I do not know the sort of thing. And neither do you.’ We’re way out of our depth here, she wanted to scream at him, and we both know it. You pretending you know what’s going on is no comfort to me!

‘Simone, I …’ Jazzy looked as though he wanted to apologise but was unsure for what. ‘Look, do you want to know what she said or not?’

‘Of course I bloody do.’

‘Right, well… She didn’t get him the car. She seemed a bit pissed off about that actually. Said she said to Mack, “What, you think just because I’m Somali I’ll be able to get a car nicked for you?” She told him a fake ID was one thing but if he wanted a car he could go and nick it himself, her brother wasn’t going to risk prison for some flash wanker he’d never met.’

Simone could not suppress a shocked giggle. ‘She actually called him a flash wanker?’

Jazzy shrugged. ‘I don’t reckon she did to his face, I just reckon she wishes she had.’

‘But she got him the credit card and passport?’

Jazzy nodded. ‘She got him them. Or her brother did. And a driving licence. And that’s the last she saw of him.’

They looked at each other. Simone’s moussaka was cold and congealed, only one mouthful having made it from the plate. ‘Oh, Christ.’ Simone put her face in her hands. ‘But all that – false passport, false credit card. That’s what people do if they want to disappear. Like, properly disappear. For ever.’

Jazzy was biting the corner of his thumbnail. It made him look, despite the receding hair line and the incipient paunch, like a little boy. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I know.’

Simone did not go back to work after lunch. For the first time in the six years she had worked there, she phoned in sick and went home.

When she got to her flat, Mack’s letter was on the table in the communal hall. She waited until she was behind her own front door until she read it though. She barely knew her neighbours and did not want one of their few impressions of her to be formed by them seeing her crouched, weeping by the post table. In tone, the letter was similar to the one Jazzy had shown her, full of pleas for her to take him seriously and guarantees that he had not in fact lost his mind, but all the while implicitly suggesting that he had done just that.

The last paragraph, however, was different, and it was that that finally provoked the tears.

Simone, I meant what I said in that text. I do love you, really, more than anyone I’ve ever met, more than I ever thought I could. I’m just so sorry that I was too chicken to say it to your face and that I’ve waited until now. I love you, I love you, I love you, and please believe me that everything I’m doing right now is because I want to make sure that you’ll be safe and stay safe for ever. I want to come back for you, and I will try to, but in the end it might be better if I don’t. And if that happens, please know that it isn’t because I don’t love you. Please, please, please be careful, do not let anything bad happen to you. I love you.

M

Chapter Four

Jessica didn’t know what time it was, only that it was dark. It was often dark here. They were a long way north for one thing – further north than she had ever been before – and it was winter, but also there were so many shadows in these forests. She had gone outside yesterday at midday just to get some air, and she had barely been able to see the rutted mud track beneath her feet. The trees, uniform in their silence and solidity, gave nothing away, standing aloof and impenetrable, the low clouds getting trapped in their highest branches. They let in no light and would let out no sound. If she screamed and cried, begging for help or rescue, if a gun was fired, if the cabin blew up, these trees would hold the sound in, and nobody would ever know what had happened to her.

The baby shifted inside her and pushed its feet up behind her ribs; she sighed and got out of the damp-smelling fold-out bed. This was why she could never sleep. This was why she never knew what time of day it was, whether it was morning or midnight, whether she was hungry because she’d missed breakfast or because she’d missed dinner or because this little creature was sapping her of every ounce of nourishment and she was simply starving bloody hungry all the bloody time.

She stood up and, feeling her feet shrink from the grainy, ice-cold lino, wished for the four-hundredth time that she’d brought her slippers. She wished she’d brought a lot of things. Like a phone, for God’s sake, or her iPad – not that he would have let her use them even if she had. He wouldn’t even switch his own phone on. ‘That’s how people get caught,’ he kept saying.

She waddled to the small hold-all in the corner of the little room and took the small crocheted blanket from the bag she had packed ready to go to the hospital when the baby came. She put the blanket round her shoulders and crept back to bed, tucking her feet under her to try and warm them up.

He had made her bring the bag with the baby things in it, even though he’d kept saying she shouldn’t bring too much stuff. ‘We don’t know how long we might have to be away,’ he had said. She had thought he was mental. Well, obviously she had thought he was mental anyway; what other explanation could there be for what he was doing? But she still had nine weeks to go before her due date. He really was crazy if he thought she would still be in this shack in the woods with him by then.

But now days had passed – maybe a week? She couldn’t tell. All those grey misty mornings that never materialised into a real day, those long, black, wakeful nights wheezing and coughing and trying to get comfortable. All those hours had passed and she was still here.

She could hear sounds now. He was starting to move around in the other room, coughing and shuffling and being conspicuously quiet, as though if he tried not to disturb her in the mornings then that would make up for everything else. For it must be morning, if he was up. Another day, more long hours where nothing happened and still she could not go home. Jessica pulled the baby’s blanket tighter around her shoulders, lay back down and closed her eyes.