Then You Were Gone

Chapter Five

‘You know,’ Petra said, ‘there’s one question you haven’t asked.’

Jazzy looked at her and did one long, slow blink. It was already nearly midnight and they had been sitting at the kitchen table having this conversation for four hours. In five and a half hours’ time either the alarm or Rory would wake them up – if they ever got to sleep in the first place. ‘Go on,’ he said. He genuinely hoped that Petra would provide some insight that had thus far escaped him. If anyone could, she could.

‘Well… I hesitate to say it, but how well do you really know this guy? How well do any of you know him, even Simone?’

At first Jazzy thought she must be talking about Keith; he could not shake his suspicion that Keith must be at the root of this somehow, and he had spent a large part of this evening telling Petra so. She could not mean Mack. Because he knew Mack like a brother; he knew everything about him that you could know about another person. They had lived together in Japan for two years, eaten together every evening, slept every night separated only by a wall of paper, ventured out together to karaoke and sushi bars and sento bath houses at weekends. There was nobody in the world who knew Jazzy better than Mack.

‘I mean,’ Petra continued, ‘what do you really know, other than what Mack’s told you? Like, do you even know which school he went to? Have you ever met any of his friends from school? Have you ever met his dad? Do you know what he was doing in between leaving uni and going to Japan?’

‘Of course I know all that,’ Jazzy said dismissively. But he felt a heavy weight settle at the bottom of his stomach. Because Petra had hit on something there. He had never met any of Mack’s school friends, nor even any of his mates from university, though he had at least heard him talk about them – mostly some guy called Dan who had been something of a sidekick by the sounds of him. He did know that Simone had gone with Mack to a university reunion a month or two ago but, reading between the lines he gathered that the two of them had spent most of the weekend in their hotel room shagging.

And it was also true that Jazzy did not know which school exactly Mack had been too. Because of course he had never asked; after all, there must surely be hundreds of Catholic comprehensives in south London. It was not like the world Jazzy had come from, where you mentioned which school you had been to and everyone had either heard of it or had a cousin who had boarded there at the same time as you. He had never asked about Mack’s school because he knew he would never have heard of it anyway. And, a small, embarrassed part of him conceded, because he had never really deemed it something worth knowing.

Nor had he ever met Mack’s dad – and nor had Simone, at least as far as Jazzy knew. Actually, now that he thought about it, Jazzy wasn’t sure that Mack’s father had ever been on the scene. Mack had certainly never mentioned him. Jazzy had met Mack’s mum on a few brief occasions but had done little more than pass the time of day with her, and Jazzy knew that Simone had met the woman only once.

So when it boiled down to it, what he knew about Mack was, essentially, what Mack had chosen to let him know. That he had been born and brought up in New Cross, the only child of a single mother and an absent father, who had buggered off before Mack was old enough to remember. To hear Mack tell the story, he had taken his parents’ separation very much in his stride, just as, he would insist, the Catholic education to which his mother had insisted he be subjected had been something he breezed through, untroubled by the guilt and introspection such an experience was supposed to produce in young people. Jazzy knew that Mack’s mum had never remarried and that Mack had lived with his mum until he finished school, and then… Well, Jazzy was not sure exactly what had happened. It was one of the areas of his life that, now Jazzy came to think about it, Mack could in fact be pretty vague about. He knew that after school Mack went to read English at Glasgow, then apparently came back to London and dossed around in temporary jobs for a couple of years before applying for the JET scheme for the want of anything better to do. And that was where Jazzy came in.

There were a lot of gaps there, Jazzy was forced to admit. But then really were there any more than in the background of anyone you had got to know in adulthood? Was it normal to know the name of your friend’s old school? Was it essential to have met a friend’s father or his old university flatmate or his childhood pet before you could say you really knew him? Did the fact that he could not account for all of his friend’s movements in the preceding decade mean something sinister? Jazzy could not believe so. Mack was so normal. That was why Jazzy loved him. Being normal, getting on with your life, rubbing along, fitting in, not overreacting or falling out or having strange, furtive pastimes was, in Jazzy’s experience, a rare and underrated quality. How could anybody as normal as Mack have a hidden life?

‘All I’m saying,’ Petra said, apparently aware that Jazzy was about to shut down communication, ‘is that you have to start from the assumption that Mack has been hiding something from you – at least for a couple of weeks, but possibly for – well, for as long as you’ve known each other. And you need to work out all the things that you don’t know about him, and work out if any of them might be the key to it. Honey?’ Her voice had taken on that hockey captain tone it sometimes did when she suspected she did not have his full attention. ‘Do you see what I’m saying?’

Jazzy was quiet a moment. He could not summon the energy to think, let alone articulate those thoughts. ‘I don’t know.’

Petra sighed, but in a fond, loving way, and Jazzy avoided making eye contact. Normally he enjoyed her fussing over him, but tonight it was starting to wear a little thin. ‘I think Mack’s keeping a secret from you – from all of us. And if you insist on finding out what’s happened to him, even when he’s asked you not to…’

‘How can I not look for him?’ Jazzy put in, almost incoherent with frustration and fatigue. ‘He’s my best friend, and my work colleague, and Rory’s godfather, not to mention Simone’s – whatever he is to Simone. I can’t just think, oh well, that was fun while it lasted, he’s obviously had enough of this life so we’ll all have to move on too. He could be in real trouble! If I don’t help him, then who’s going to?’

‘I know,’ she nodded. ‘I’m sorry. Look, let’s go to bed. But I just think, if you’re going to find him, you need to at least decide where to start.’

Jazzy did not have the least idea where to start, so in the morning he got up and went to work as normal. He arrived in the office slightly earlier than usual again, before Keith was likely to show up – before even Ayanna – desperate to buy himself some quiet time in which to hatch a plan to get information out of Keith. It was the only thing he could think of to do. He went into the office, switched on all the lights and the coffee machine, then went and sat down behind Mack’s computer again. He knew that he had switched it on, and he must have entered the correct password, because when he jerked awake nearly two hours later, the machine was humming away happily, Mack’s screensaver photo of Mount Fuji in spring only serving to disorientate Jazzy even further.

‘Keeping you up, are we?’ There was no humour in Keith’s tone, and Jazzy felt absurdly guilty. Keith was not his boss in any direct sense of the word, but ultimately he paid his wages, although Jazzy would probably have been terrified to be caught napping by him even if the power roles were reversed.

‘Sorry,’ Jazzy said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Bad night with Rory last night.’

Keith nodded politely but uninterestedly. Despite having fathered four children of his own, he never displayed any interest in Jazzy’s family life. ‘Still no Joe?’ He did not sound concerned.

Jazzy ran his tongue around his fur-lined mouth. ‘Um… No. Still nothing. You’re probably right, he’s probably decided to take a bit of time off. He’s owed some, you know the hours he’s been working lately.’

‘Yeah, the boy deserves a break,’ Keith said absently and he continued leafing through the pile of post he had brought into the office with him. ‘Don’t you fancy a bit of the same yourself? A bit of R&R with the wife and nipper? You can get some cheap deals this time of year, why don’t you take a bit of time off too? You look like you could do with a rest.’

This was the most fake Jazzy had ever heard Keith sound. Those words were absolutely, one hundred percent the opposite of the kind of thing Keith would normally say. Keith didn’t believe in holidays, he didn’t believe in resting, he didn’t believe in spending time with one’s family, and he certainly didn’t believe in being nice to people, especially to Jazzy. And anyway, Jazzy reiterated to himself, he’s not my boss. If I want to take some time off, I’ll bloody well take some time off, I don’t need him to tell me when to do it. ‘Nah,’ he said with studied casualness. ‘There’s too much needs doing here.’

‘OK,’ Keith looked at him with a little more interest. ‘Things been busy in the office have they? Many phone calls or anything? Any new clients? If Joe’s away, it might be as well to refer any of that stuff on to me, you know, any calls, emails, personal visitors.’

Jazzy did not recall ever having a customer show up at the Anastasia offices in person. Which was probably no bad thing, he reflected, seeing as it was essentially one room plus an entrance vestibule in a poxy serviced block in Tottenham. ‘No, not busy with customers, just… just some IT stuff that I’ve been working on.’ Keith never asked about Jazzy’s work and Jazzy never told him.

‘OK,’ Keith nodded, turning to go. ‘Well in that case then, why not take a few days off.’ When Jazzy did not respond, he said, ‘Well, it’s up to you. I just thought it might do you and the family good to get out of London for a bit.’

As Jazzy watched Keith disappear out of the office, he tried to decide, through the paranoid fog of sleep deprivation, whether or not Keith’s words had been a threat.

Chapter Six

Simone had been standing across the road from Mack’s flat for nearly eight minutes, she calculated. Granted, she was at a bus stop so she did not look overtly bizarre, but two buses had passed by without her boarding them and she was going to have to do something soon to avoid drawing attention to herself.

It was not as though she would be breaking and entering; she had a key in her bag. Mack had given her a set of his keys a month ago, a profound and unexpected gesture that had filled Simone’s head with visions of something she had not dared allow herself to believe in before. A future that contained Mack – her and Mack, together. That was before the L-bomb text, before any of this, when the furthest ahead Simone felt able to plan was maybe a weekend away together over New Year.

She had never used the keys. If she stayed at Mack’s flat she arrived with him and left with him. She did not think Mack had ever really expected that she would use them. It was not the use of the keys that he had been giving her. He had been using the keys to tell her something that he was unable to say himself.

And she had never, under any circumstances, imagined that the first time she used the keys would be to sneak into Mack’s flat to rummage surreptitiously through his past.

Jazzy had phoned her the previous night sounding exhausted and frightened. Jazzy was not strong, nor was he brave. He refused to watch 18 certificate films or walk down back streets alone after dark. But Simone did not think she had heard him sound frightened like this before. ‘It’s something to do with Keith,’ he said, his voice heavy with defeat, and described the conversation he and Keith had had in the office.

Simone had felt a rush of panic. She did not like Keith. No normal person, she felt sure, could like Keith. Even Mack did not like Keith; she could tell from the way he acted around him, the fake persona he adopted of asking about golf handicaps and pretending to care about brake horsepower, always on edge as though waiting for some terrible backlash to come his way. And he was always reluctant to share things with Keith, to tell him even seemingly mundane details of his life. Simone was not even sure if Keith knew for definite that she and Mack were an item. It was as though Mack was worried Keith might one day use this kind of information against him. Mack still referred to him, in unguarded moments, as ‘Uncle Keith’, and Simone had put Mack’s willingness to spend time with a man who certainly dealt in cars of dubious provenance and illegally imported cigarettes, and probably had fingers in numerous even less savoury pies, down to the blind loyalty people feel to members of their family. Except Keith was no actual relation of Mack’s. He had known Mack all his life and was some kind of non-specific ‘family friend’, but Simone had not yet discovered on which side – Mack’s mother or his absentee father? Finding these things out had never mattered before. She had assumed she would find out the nature of Mack’s complicated relationship with Keith over time, or perhaps never. After all, she rarely needed to see the man; it was Mack and Jazzy, not she, who had gone into business with him, prostituting themselves to someone who only usually dealt in things on the very farthest side of legality, if not over the edge. It was Mack and Jazzy who ought to have asked themselves where Keith got all his money from in the first place before they had been willing to take any of that cash for themselves.

Mack’s flat was in a purpose-built block in one of the edgier parts of Dalston, and it was starting to get dark. Deciding she would rather be alone inside a flat that was not hers than alone on the street for any longer, Simone crossed over and typed the code into the door’s keypad.

She did not pass anyone else on the communal stairway and was relieved that nobody saw her unlock Mack’s front door. She could not shake this furtive feeling of being somewhere forbidden.

The inside of the flat was tidy, but no more so than usual. Simone had never managed to catch Mack out in terms of the presentability of his flat. Whatever time of day or week she had been round, whether he had been expecting her or not, everything, from his keys and wallet to his salt cellar and spaghetti spoon, was in its habitual place. ‘Just a spot of OCD,’ he had said self-deprecatingly when she first commented on the eerie tidiness. ‘We can’t all be slovenly artistic types who can’t find their Oyster card for all the piles of beautiful, hand-crafted tat everywhere.’ It was true, of course. Her flat was a tip and her Oyster card often went missing for days at a time. It had been beginning to worry Simone, before all this, before she actually had something proper to worry about, how she and Mack would cope if they ever did end up living together.

This flat had always seemed to Simone like an embodiment of the essence of Mack. Just as her flat was essentially Simone in converted Victorian terrace form – small, nice features, beautifully if unconventionally decorated but generally a bit scruffy – so Mack’s modern, clean-edged shrine to order in a rough-ish part of east London was indicative of the tight control he kept on all parts of his life underneath the earthy, common-touch exterior.

Simone was not sure where to start looking – or indeed what it was that she should be looking for. She and Jazzy had talked on into the night in endless circles, trying to exhaust all their options of what to do next, and ultimately concluding that one thing was resoundingly clear. They could not go to the police. Mack was not technically a missing person – he had written to them both only days ago, telling them of his intention to disappear. More to the point though, before he disappeared Mack had bought himself what amounted to an entirely new fake identity. They felt sure that this information might make the police keener to look for Mack, but not in the way that Simone and Jazzy hoped.

The next step they had agreed in their plan of action, if you could call it that, was that Simone would try and see if she could find anything to help them here in Mack’s flat. It was still possible that he had left something for her, some sign or pointer that only she would understand, some clue as to what was happening to him to make him so afraid.

Simone moved towards the lounge’s plate-glass window, realising with some amusement that she was walking on tiptoes. Mack’s laptop was not in its usual spot on the sideboard, just to the left of the framed photograph of Mack and Jazzy dressed in yukatas standing outside a Japanese temple, grinning like the pair of moronic tourists that they were. The computer’s absence did not strike Simone as particularly significant. She had never known Mack take a trip anywhere without it. She wandered into the bedroom, still having consciously to remind herself that nobody was watching her, nobody knew what she was doing – and that even if they had known, she was doing nothing wrong.

Mack’s bed was made and there was nothing on his bedside table apart from his alarm clock. The wardrobe doors were shut. It occurred to Simone that she did not even know if her wardrobe doors did shut – the thing was always overflowing with clothes, shoes, discarded carrier bags, items which she did not know where else to put, so she never even attempted to get the doors closed.

She slid open the doors of Mack’s built-in cupboard and was greeted with a line of neatly ironed shirts, jumpers, jackets and trousers, all arranged according to garment type, season and whether they could be classed as ‘work’, ‘dressy’ or ‘scruffs’. The smell of Mack’s laundry detergent caught in Simone’s throat and she pushed the door shut again before she allowed her emotions to get the better of her. Sitting down on the bed and idly picking at the seam on the pillowcase as she debated what to do next, she fought an almost overwhelming urge to climb under the covers and go to sleep, reminding herself that even if she did that, even if she woke up in the morning in Mack’s bed, it did not mean that Mack would be there beside her.

The flat was small, only the lounge/dining room, a tiny (and, of course, immaculate) kitchen, Mack’s bedroom and an en suite bathroom. There was nowhere to hide anything, should a person wish to do that. She thought about her own overflowing drawers of all life’s essential paperwork – bills, certificates, instruction booklets, letters from the days when friends still wrote to each other on pieces of paper. She refused to believe that Mack did not have at least some of that stuff around here somewhere. Nobody could have reached the age of thirty-three, could have lived a proper grown-up life without bringing with them some sort of paper trail, surely?

Going back into the lounge, she went over to the chest of drawers where Mack usually left his laptop and started to look through the drawers.

The top drawer was evidently the ‘receipts and instruction manuals’ drawer, everything piled neatly. The second one was filled with utility bills and other official correspondence, all filed according to subject and date, but the bottom drawer seemed more promising. It was stuffed to the brim with papers of differing sizes, none of it apparently in any particular order.

Simone lifted out the whole pile and put it on the rug before she started to sift through, still not sure what she might be looking for. Near the bottom of the heap she spotted some pieces of thick, cream paper with a crest at the top. They looked like exam certificates or something equally irrelevant but she glanced briefly through them out of a sense of thoroughness, mindful of what Jazzy had told her. ‘We need to concentrate on the parts of his life we don’t know about,’ he had said. ‘The things that happened before we knew him.’ The top certificate was his BA, Third Class from the University of Glasgow. That, she thought, at least chimed with what Mack had told her and Jazzy. And then, she caught herself. Could she already distrust Mack this much? Had she thought, even subconsciously, that Mack would have been lying even about his degree? Nobody, surely, would pretend to have got a third in their degree. If he had got a first or a 2:1, then Mack was not the type to have kept that quiet. And if he had been lying about having a degree at all, then he would surely have lied about having a better one.

Underneath the university certificate were his GCSEs and A-levels. The GCSEs were from a St. Aidan’s RC Comprehensive in New Cross, which sounded exactly the sort of place Mack had described to her in his anecdotes about smoking behind portacabins, sneaking out to the chippy at lunchtimes and high times on the altar boys’ trip to Rome. The A-levels though were from a different school. And not even a school in London. Chignall School, Essex was all it said at the top of the sheet. Simone had never heard of this place. Mack had never told her anything about living in Essex or changing his school. As Simone scanned the rest of the page she raised an appreciative eyebrow. Four A-levels in English Literature, History, Politics and French, all awarded at grade A. Seemed like Mack had been quite the star pupil before things took a dive during his university days.

She remembered her initial, instinctive, reaction to Mack’s degree certificate, her relief (or surprise?) that he had been telling her the truth. Had she always sensed something slightly off when Mack talked about his youth, some details being fudged or held back? What was this Chignall School? Something about the elegant crest with its Latin motto underneath and the heavy-duty writing paper of the letter containing his certificates, smelled of money. Was it a fee-paying place? Jazzy would know. Simone tended to assume that if a topic was anything that she associated with the lives of people richer than most, from pheasant shooting to collecting air miles, then Jazzy would be the person to ask. It was, so far, an assumption that had yet to be proven incorrect. Jazzy not being with her, she decided to look it up. Simone took out her phone and swore under her breath. Bloody thing. Mack’s flat was always a black spot for getting online, but her phone normally connected automatically to his wifi. She looked around for the router so she could re-enter the password, but it wasn’t in its usual spot. That was odd. Sighing, she flicked the hair out of her eyes and looked again at the certificates, as though, now technology had let her down, good old-fashioned ink and paper might miraculously provide her with the answer.

His A-level results were testament to his ability – might he not have won some kind of scholarship to this Chignall place? But if that were the case, why never mention it – especially to Jazzy? Simone had been to Exeter University – in fact that was where she had met Jazzy – and it had provided her with an education in, amongst other things, how posh people worked. Before the end of freshers’ week it had become apparent that for people who had attended private school, simply to mention the name of one’s alma mater was to instantly be allowed access to a kind of nameless, shapeless club whose members spoke a special language and whose rules were utterly impregnable to outsiders. Would not Mack have wanted to flash his credentials around when he met a fellow member like Jazzy? It was true that Mack was proud of his working class roots, had in fact made them a central part of his persona. And it was true that he called himself left-wing, had, he proudly declared, voted Labour all his life regardless of Clause 4, tuition fees, Iraq or the bright but short-burning flame of Nick Clegg that had swayed some towards the Lib Dems. But Jazzy similarly liked to think of himself as a lefty, liberal type regardless of his own privileged background as the son of a wealthy Cornish farmer. If Jazzy did not think having been to private school prevented him from having a social conscience, then nor did he think it was anything to be ashamed of. So why should Mack have felt it was something he needed to hide?

Simone looked at the wall clock. It was after nine, and she was unsure how frequent the buses were round here in the evenings. She did not relish the prospect of spending too many minutes on this street by herself, and the spookiness of an abandoned flat was beginning to get to her. She had come across no sign or pointer, no secret code or private byword that he had left for her, and the exam certificates seemed to be the most enlightening thing this bottom drawer contained. For a moment, she was tempted to take the pile of papers with her, but she decided against it. After all, Mack might return at any time. How would it look if she had trusted him so little that she had helped herself to all his personal stuff?