Emily Barr - The Sleeper

I memorised the address and remembered to ask about the baby.

Olivia hesitated.

‘I think everything’s OK. It can’t have done it any good, having this kind of shock flung at it in the womb. I’m knackered and on my own, and my parents are obviously totally fixated on my sister, and I do utterly dread presenting them with a grandchild when Lara’s missing and everyone – including, I think, my parents themselves – is assuming that she accidentally killed a man she was sleeping with. Bringing a new life into the world with a great flourish feels like such an out-of-step thing to do. You know. Typical Olivia. That kind of thing. Always awkward. And fuck knows how I’m going to pull it together to look after a baby.’

‘Is the father … I mean, are the two of you together?’

She laughed, a quick, unamused laugh. ‘No, that was never on the cards. It was a one-off. He doesn’t even know, because I decided I could do without those sorts of complications. He’d either want to play happy families – perish the thought, frankly – or he’d start accusing me of doing it on purpose. Either way, no thanks. This is a one-woman show.’

‘God, Olivia. You’re strong.’

‘Not really. You just do what you have to do.’

I sheltered in the doorway of an office building, and called Leon Campion the moment the number arrived. It was a mobile number, and he actually answered it. I assumed an imperious tone.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Is that Leon Campion?’

‘Who is this?’ His voice was deep and cultured.

‘Iris Roebuck. I’m a friend of Lara’s. Sorry to disturb you, but Olivia gave me your number …’

He cut me off. ‘Did she now? I have nothing to say.’

‘I’m a friend. I just want to …’

‘Nothing to say.’

‘But surely you …’

‘Oh, sorry – was I not being clear enough? Fuck off.’

And he hung up. I looked at the phone and laughed. When I called back, it went, inevitably, to voicemail. I left a long message anyway, despite the fact that he had not sounded like a man who would listen to it.

I was holding on by a thread. Although I thought I was walking randomly through London with no sense whatsoever of where I was going, my legs took me to the one place I had been avoiding.

They walked me directly to a set of traffic lights in central London. It was an ordinary, humdrum junction close to the Euston Road. Railings that had once been covered in flowers with heart-rending notes attached to them were bare, had been bare for five years.

A man cycled by. He was wearing Lycra and riding a racing bike. He was a professional, possibly a courier, and he did not stop for the red lights. I wanted to yell at him. I wanted to tell him.

I had stood here before. I turned and ran away, as fast as I possibly could. I sprinted through London until I had left the place far behind.

When Alex called, I was sitting in a bar near the hotel drinking vodka and tonic and thinking hard. ‘To the Brink’ made me jump. I nearly didn’t answer, but then I did, because I wanted to speak, and I had barely said a word since our conversation that morning.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Are you OK?’ His voice was immediately concerned. ‘Iris, you don’t sound like yourself.’

‘Can you tell from one word? No, I’m all right. Just a bit … assaulted by memories, maybe. It’s OK.’

‘Yes, I bet. That must be …’ He tailed off, and I was glad. ‘Look. I got lucky. I thought I’d try Heathrow, under the circumstances, and I took a chance, called their local police at the end of the day and slightly implied I was my boss. And they did the flight check without paperwork. Now, I cannot quite believe this, but it does seem to be true. Iris, according to the records, you caught a flight some hours after Guy Thomas was killed. At least, someone of your name did. From Heathrow.’

I could not take this in. I still half thought Laurie had done something to my passport, even though I knew he had not.

‘Where,’ I managed to say, ‘did I go?’

‘Bangkok. You were issued with a tourist visa, and you haven’t left Thailand yet. Look. I’m going to come to London, like I said.’

‘Have you told – I mean, I know you are the police, but have you told the ones in Penzance?’

I wanted him to say no. I wanted him to be like a policeman in a film who goes off piste and carries out his own, unofficial investigation. I wanted him to say that together he and I would track her down, under the radar. He did not.

‘Yes, of course. It got a lukewarm reception as far as ideas go. In fact the general feeling was that you were to be filed in the nutters drawer. You’re not, though. They’ll look at it, but I don’t hold out great hopes of anything much happening. I’ll carry on looking at it with you. Because you’re right. If I may.’

‘You may,’ I told him. As soon as I ended the call, I drained the glass and stood up. My sitting around drinking alone was not going to help with anything.

chapter twenty-one

I sat on a bench in St James’s Park and stared at my phone. It was so cold that my fingers hardly worked, and I had never, ever imagined I might become the sort of person who sat in a beautiful park in a huge city, with pelicans nearby, a palace to my right, Whitehall off to my left, and people doing interesting things everywhere I looked, and tried to puzzle out Twitter.

Nonetheless, I was doing it. If Lara was in Thailand, she would have to be looking at the internet. If she was looking at the internet, she might open her Twitter account. I knew, because the media had unearthed it, that she had only ever posted one tweet, that read ‘Trying to work out how to use Twitter’.

She did, however, have over 27,000 followers. All those people had sought her out and followed her, just in case it became one of those dramas that played out on social media. The world was strange.

This was one possible way of reaching her. Facebook was no good, because I was not one of her ‘friends’, and her privacy settings stopped me sending her a message.

My breath puffed out around me. The clouds were pale and low, the air lethal with the promise of snow. Other people were hurrying through the park, stamping feet in expensive boots, shivering in cheap anoraks, each heading to a destination that had walls and a heater.

I had set up a Twitter account. My picture, like Lara’s, was an egg, and I had named myself, randomly, after my poor cats: I was @desi_ophelia. This was a whole new world. It took me a while to realise, to my dismay, that I still could not send Lara a private message, even after I had followed her account, because she had to be following me for that to happen. I forced my freezing fingers to compose something that would stand up to scrutiny when viewed by any random member of the public.

Hi Lara , my first tweet said in the end. It’s Iris. I hope you’re OK and I think you are. If you see this, can you message me? I know you didn’t do it. xx

I had wanted to mention Thailand, but since my tweet was technically public (though I could not imagine anyone looking at my account, and so reading it), I didn’t. I would save it for when we were speaking in private, in the unlikely event that that ever happened.

I stood up and started walking. I was not going to leave the park, but sitting still was no good. My fingers were white and unresponsive. I strode to the middle of the bridge and looked out over the ice that was half formed across the water. I had a flash of Holden Caulfield wondering where the Central Park ducks went when their pond was frozen over. These ones were stoically using the unfrozen areas, carrying on as normal, but they must have been miserable. They were putting brave ducky faces on it.