Liz Jensen - The Rapture

I skim through the titles of her publications, which include the riveting ‘Abiotic Forcing of Plankton Evolution in the Cenozoic’, ‘Biogeographic Sedimentology and Chemostratiagraphic Recognition of Third-Order Sequences in Resedimented Carbonate’, ‘Recovery after the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary Extinction Event’ and ‘Size Distribution of Holocene Planktic Foraminifer Assemblages’. Her interests are listed as ‘Foraminifers and their influence on the global carbon cycle, ocean acidification as a tool to investigate cryptic species, and biotic recovery after extreme events’. I don’t understand half the vocabulary, or know what I am looking for, so perhaps it is no surprise that after printing out one of Kristin Jons dottir’s contributions to Micropaleontology Today and absorbing four tightly written pages about the pitfalls of sediment assessment, I decide to take the bull by the horns.

It doesn’t take long to trace her, via a friendly man in a research laboratory in Reykjavik. He tells me that his colleague Kristin is currently on a field trip in the UK. Sure, he can give me a mobile number. And he does. I must say hi to her from him. I promise I will.

The phone rings four times before she picks up. The connection isn’t good. She says something in Icelandic which sounds like a question. Politely, I apologise for speaking English, and introduce myself as Gabrielle Fox, a friend of Frazer Melville’s. But I do not keep the upper hand for long. Her accent is lilting, her tone gently regretful.

‘I’m sorry, Gabrielle. I know exactly who you are. I have heard about you from Frazer. But I have nothing to say to you.’

‘But I need to know—’

She says bluntly, ‘Forgive me for doing this, but goodbye, Gabrielle.’ And she hangs up. The blood rushes to my face. When I call back, the phone has been switched off. I feel more humiliated than I have ever felt in my life.

But I feel other things too. Because a sick, insistent part of me is visiting a place I thought I would never visit again.

Over the next two days frustration, depression, anger, self-pity and self-loathing dominate. In the evenings I imbibe excessive quantities of alcohol and in the mornings I feel even more terrible. One night I call Lily. She recounts her love woes and I make friend-and-also-therapist suggestions but don’t talk about what is happening with me, because I am not ready, and I am not ready because I am too proud, and I am too proud because I am me. The loss is mine and I know it, and so does Frida Kahlo, at whom I throw a balled-up pair of socks and miss, which compounds my rage. The person I hate most of course is myself.

I, too, have been the other woman. Alex always said his wife didn’t suspect our affair. She was too trusting, too complacent about her role in his life, too busy with her career and the kids to spot the telltale signs: the late nights at the office, the work trips abroad where alien time-zones colluded in the alibi, the scent of fresh soap after a long day. But if she had, and she had telephoned me and introduced herself, I have no doubt about what I would have done. I too would have said, ‘I’m sorry. I know who you are. But I have nothing to say to you.’ And I too would have hung up.

Bethany remains in St Swithin’s under observation, with two psychiatric nurses with her at all times. To take my mind off what has happened, I work extra hours because five staff are off sick. The physicist does not call me, but why should he, now that he has what he really wants, and wanted all along: the information he was after, and a fellow-scientist he can fuck? I go to Oxsmith at seven in the morning and come home twelve hours later, exhausted. When I have a spare moment, I sleep. One day, slightly drunk, I call the physicist’s numbers — all three — but get no reply. His mobile is switched off. I do not leave messages. I feel abandoned.

But somehow, a tiny twist of hope remains, like a persistent virus I can’t shake off. Today never happened.

What did he mean?

I’m emptying my dishwasher when the phone rings. It’s a terse and furious Dr Sheldon-Gray. I picture him in his righteous pink shirt, the phone clamped to his ear. ‘Bethany Krall has disappeared,’ he announces. ‘From the hospital. Last night.’ Something inside me changes pressure at great speed. When I ask for details, the word he uses is abducted . ‘As in, someone got her out.’

Today never happened . I close my eyes to steady the vertigo.

‘How?’

‘Whoever took her caught the nurses off guard. Kelly was having a cigarette, Mike claimed he was using the bathroom but was in fact making a long phone call. Someone dressed as a surgeon walked in, woke her up, put her in an overall with a cap and a mask, and off they went. Two bloody doctors, one a child, strolling out to the car park cool as you please. I’ve seen the CCTV footage. Bethany even turns and gives the camera the finger. It’s a disgrace. Any clues?’

I am shocked, but there’s a curious heave of excitement too: even a kind of skewed triumph. Bethany must surely be better off with people whose motivation is altruistic, than at the end-station that is Kiddup Manor. I tell my boss that I am horrified, but that I know nothing — and nor can I imagine who might be behind it, short of somebody as demented as Bethany herself. Apparently fobbed off for now, Sheldon-Gray says he has more calls to make, and hangs up without saying goodbye.

But I have not escaped scrutiny that lightly. Ten minutes later, the doorbell rings and I open it to find a young policeman, his fiercely accessorised car parked next to mine. Mrs Zarnac is leaning out of the upper window in what might be her notion of an erotic nightdress, unable to contain her glee. ‘I heard it on the radio!’ she calls down. ‘That Oxsmith loony girl, she yours? You hear she run away?’

‘Let me give you five minutes to get ready,’ says the policeman. ‘And we’ll head down to the station for some paperwork and an interview with one of the detectives on the case. If that’s OK with you, madam.’

Somehow, the madam makes it a more serious matter.

A field trip to south-east Asia. Capable of thinking on your feet.

With the young policeman hovering in the doorway, I search in my handbag for my lipstick. It’s one thing to lie — blithely — to one’s boss, but perjury and the perversion of justice are a somewhat tougher call, given that they can you get slapped in jail for it. In the hall mirror, I apply the first coat, and check my teeth for smudges. But if I report my suspicion that Frazer Melville is involved, how would the hollow triumph of putting my ex-lover behind bars affect Bethany’s fate, and that of a world threatened by methane gas? I apply a second coat.

‘You ready there, madam?’

Five minutes is never five minutes.

And less than five minutes — I reckon two — is not a long time in which to make a very crucial decision.

But it’s long enough.

There are certain people who, despite being relatively young, convey the knowingness of a nonagenarian without ever being charmed or moved to tears by anything the world has to offer. Detective Trevor Kavanagh, thirty-something, sits with his legs spread apart, because the thickness of his thighs ordains it. I am helping the police with their enquiries in a bare room with a tiny digital tape machine which is recording our conversation for legal posterity.

The story of Bethany’s abduction has been on the local radio news all morning. Have I heard it? No: unlike my landlady, I do not listen to Sunshine FM or BBC Southern Counties from morning till night. In that case, for my benefit, Detective Kavanagh will recap. A teenage girl known publicly as Child B, a psychotic minor, was left unattended in hospital for a period of four minutes. The system failure that led to this is an issue which falls in another category and is being ‘indexed separately’. In that crucial period, CCTV footage shows a figure — probably male, age unclear — in green surgeon’s overalls and face-mask, freeing Bethany Krall. That Bethany left the hospital with this ‘individual’ without a struggle would seem attributable to either collusion or — can I comment on this? — a random symptom of her mental unbalance. Kavanagh does not add that as Bethany’s most recent therapist, I am an inherent part of this procedural shambles. But the thought hangs between us.