Ross Armstrong - The Girls Beneath

Bartu shakes his head and gives Ms Fraser an apologetic look. ‘I can’t smell anything.’

‘You wouldn’t. My sense of smell is… a little keener than most, and you can’t sense habitual smells in your own home, due to what’s called olfactory adaptation, giving you no chance at all, Ms Fraser. Also, your cat has diabetes.’

She stares at me. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have a diabetic cat.’

‘Well, the kitchen roll Tanya seems to have stashed in various places about the house, just in case of emergencies, suggests otherwise. I’m guessing her toilet habits have recently become more unpredictable, plus there’s a subtle scent of sweetness in the air, the odour of which would be consistent with diabetic cat urine. Not that your home smells of cat urine. You’ve hidden it well and you’re a kind mother. Again, I just have a keener sense than most.’

She gives me a look that suggests two things. Either this woman is dumbfounded by the diagnosis. Or she doesn’t have a cat. Either way, it’s probably best to move on from this.

‘Could you show us her room?’ I ask.

I also picture numbers as distinctly coloured.

The number one is purple.

Two yellow.

Three blue.

And I picture them circling my head whenever they come to mind.

1 is at a ten-degree angle to my forehead.

2 is at about twenty-five.

Then the rest disperse themselves in fifteen-degree intervals around me. This side effect doesn’t seem of much practical use but the brain isn’t always trying to help, sometimes it’s merely trying to exist the only way it can.

The walls appear to me vaguely orange, the carpet on the stairs is orange, the pictures in the hallway are all various shades of orange, the scent of cinnamon and pine, I imagine, subtle notes of a recent Christmas that only I can smell. The girl’s bedroom door is the same colour.

Bartu looks at me, barely disguising his discomfort at being here. Exactly where he didn’t want us to end up. But when Miss Nixon revealed that the missing girl’s mother was coming in to speak to her, I couldn’t resist asking if I could have a word, too. Nixon had agreed to do the introductions by the time Bartu caught up with us heading to her office.

When I suggested to Ms Fraser that we come over to check a couple of things, it was difficult for him to protest. He had to silently pretend this was all standard procedure, so as not to scold the semi-famous local hero with a bullet scar on his temple.

Ms Fraser said two officers had only just come to her house. I’d expected her to say this. But I hadn’t come up with an answer to it yet. I was still for a second before simply saying:

‘Nowadays we’re lucky enough to be able to double up…‘

It’s curious how far a uniform and the simplest jargon gets you.

‘… in case anything gets missed. Due diligence and that.’

This is nonsense of course. Stevens and Anderson are the officers with the day-to-day relationship with the school. They liaise with social services about everything from gang violence to sexual abuse, and when their enquiries unearth the necessary dirt, they hand it to CID. So where do we come in? Absolutely nowhere at all. But I’m a curious man.

Bartu’s body tightened as all this unfolded. He didn’t back me up but he didn’t stop me either. He let things play out, aware that I’d made my moves and there was little he could do to stop me now the wheels were in motion.

She gave us a lift back to her place. Emre didn’t look at me the whole way. But he’s going to need more tenacity if he’s going to stop me doing exactly what I want. I’m a hard act to follow. A hard book to match. A hard book of matches. One of those.

The inside of her car smelt yellow. Cheapish air freshener and hot change in her coin draw.

But the house definitely smelt orange.

Emre Bartu glares at me intermittently as we peer into Tanya Fraser’s bedroom.

• A mess of bed sheets, crinkled like storm clouds

• An abundance of small ornate mirrors scattered around.

• A childhood bear peeping out from her half-open wardrobe.

Both of us stand on the precipice, not wanting to break the barrier between us and this sacred space.

‘Was she part of any after school clubs?’ I say.

‘Tennis club. Badminton. Running club. I told the others this.’

Bartu lightly sniggers. But everything helps.

I don’t find anything about my day humorous anymore. Her room has altered me somehow, taking away any thrill of the puzzle, focusing me in on the dark import of all this.

‘Is she a messy girl? Or do you think she left in a hurry?’ I say.

‘No, she’s not messy. She’d have tidied up if she knew… she’d be mortified if she knew… she’d have guests… that there’d be people in here.’

Ms Fraser darts into the room on impulse, her voice cracking. She makes a grab for the duvet to cover up the shame of the unmade bed.

‘No. Don’t touch anything,’ I say. She stops and looks to me.

I follow her in smoothly.

‘Best not to touch anything. Just in case,’ Emre says, stepping inside tentatively, his hand brushing the clean white doorframe.

‘In case of what?’ she says.

‘In case there’s anything here that might give us a clue as to her whereabouts,’ Emre Bartu says, the word clue sticking in his throat like a bone, as if the necessary drama of his job occasionally embarrasses him.

‘The others weren’t like this. The others just asked a few basic questions,’ she says.

‘That’s why it’s best to double up,’ I say.

I scan the room. Her bed is pushed into the corner, under the window, which I imagine her opening in the summer to let the air flow in. She has a chest of drawers facing the end of the bed, up against the wall. The bottom drawer is not fully closed and instinctively I want to push it shut it to make it level with the others. To the right of her bed as we look is her wardrobe, one panel of it dusty white, the other a mirror.

I take a few steps towards it, its jaws ajar, the bear looking at me from inside.

‘When did you say she was turning seventeen?’ Emre says, behind me.

It occurs to me I hadn’t even asked her age. I hardly know a thing about her.

‘Not until September. She’s still a baby,’ she says. But she’s not. She’s old enough to go out on her own, old enough to get into trouble. Old enough to do a lot of things her mother doesn’t know about. It’s her prerogative. It’s a must. For boys and girls. Rites of passage.

‘She have a boyfriend at all?’ says Emre Bartu.

I put my hand out to open the wardrobe and feel their eyes on me.

‘No. Nothing like that.’

I stop. My hand goes back to my side.

‘Not one you know about anyway,’ I say over my shoulder.

‘No. I’d know. We tell each other everything. We’re mates.’

I draw breath, wondering how to put this, then I just say the first thing that comes into my head.

‘She may still be a little girl to you, you know, but –’

‘She lost it to a boy called Asif Akhtar in the form above about a year ago. He’s the only boyfriend she’s ever had. He cheated on her at the bowling alley. They don’t see each other anymore.’

She fires it all out with absolute conviction and a hint of triumph.

‘We’ll need to speak to him,’ I say.

Somewhere behind me Emre Bartu is rolling his eyes. He thought I just wanted to have a play around and then I’d leave it alone. He’s wondering how we ended up here and how he’ll tell Levine, if he’ll tell Levine. I open the wardrobe.

‘Hi, I’m Teddy, let’s play! Let’s play!’ The bear shouts as it hits the ground.

I stumble back, almost crashing into Emre behind me.