Could you leave the one you love?

Mack was that guy, the one who had it all. The looks, the charm and that twinkle in his clear blue eyes. Yet, after those first few moments of meeting him, Simone just knew he was the one. Four days ago, Mack told Simone he loved her – and then disappeared without a trace.

Now Simone is forced to question everything she ever knew about Mack – and whether it was all a lie. Determined to find him before the trail goes cold, she’ll do anything to uncover the truth. But how do you find someone who doesn’t want to be found?

And what if his secret is best left buried…

Then You Were Gone

Claire Moss

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2015

Copyright © Claire Moss 2015

Claire Moss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9781474036474

Version date: 2018-09-20

Claire Moss was born in Darlington, north-east England, in 1977.

She has worked with books and the written word all her adult life as a bookseller, librarian and novelist. Having always been an avid reader of popular fiction, she struggled to find women’s fiction set in the north and containing characters concerned with issues other than beauty and credit cards. Eventually she decided she would have to write it herself. Then You Were Gone is her third such novel.

Claire Moss is married and lives in North Yorkshire with her husband and two young children.

Many people have helped this book become what it is. I would particularly like to thank Victoria Oundjian, Charlotte Mursell and all at HQ Digital for superb editorial feedback and an excellent cover. Also Eve White, all at Thirsk Write Now and everyone else I have bothered. Lastly to all of my lovely family and friends for their support.

For Andrew

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Acknowledgement

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Excerpt

Endpages

About the Publisher

Chapter One

Sane people do not call the police because their boyfriend has not texted them for four days. And Simone was pretty certain she was still sane. She also knew that it was probably best not to call the police even if the boyfriend was not answering your phone calls or emails. She did not know if he would answer the door to her as she had not gone as far as calling round to his flat to test him out.

She knew what a sane person would say, if a less-than-sane friend asked their opinion on this situation. She knew what she would say if anyone, sane or otherwise, asked her opinion. She would tell them that people sometimes avoid other people because that is easier than telling them the truth. People sometimes avoid other people even when they are in a relationship with that person, because they are in too deep, or they get scared, or they change their mind, or get a better offer. Grown adults, particularly ones who live alone and often work alone, sometimes need time to themselves and they should not have to justify that need to anyone. Even their girlfriend, if they have one, and if both parties are one hundred percent agreed that she is definitely his girlfriend.

So it was possible Mack was avoiding her. It was likely, from a dispassionate point of view, that he was avoiding her; that was what any other sane person would tell her was happening if she had been feeling sane enough to ask them their opinion.

But this was Mack. This was her and Mack. He would not play games with her, any more than she would with him. Simone was sure of it. But she was sure in such a way that she still did not feel able to go round to his flat, just in case she did find him peering round the curtains with his back pressed to the wall trying to pretend to be at the newsagents. Or, worse, she might find him there with someone else, someone younger and prettier, someone with perfectly plucked eyebrows and highlighted hair, someone more his usual type.

Simone tapped her nails against the back of her phone. It was Saturday morning and she had not seen Mack since Monday evening. He had met her from work and they had gone to see a band at Scala. Mack had been quiet, drinking a bit more than usual, talking a lot less than usual and once the band had finished he had rushed off home without inviting Simone to come back with him. She had known the band would not be his sort of thing – fiddles and foot stamping and clear-voiced, shaggy-haired female singers – but she had dragged him along to many similar gigs in the past and he had always put on some kind of pretence that he was finding the experience tolerable. She could have invited him back to her place, but she did not. A man in a mood is best left to come out of it in his own way. She had learned that, if nothing else, over the years.

And then on Tuesday he had texted her to cancel their planned meal out on Friday. He was away for work until Thursday, which she knew to be true, but now the tone of his absence had shifted away from ‘miss you’ and ‘can’t wait to see you again’ towards ‘not sure when I’ll get back, might be too tired to come over’. He would cancel the restaurant, the text said, and be in touch before the weekend. And then, at the end of the message, there it was. The thunderbolt. The reason Simone was seriously considering calling the police – or at least seriously considering the possibility of seriously considering calling the police. For at the end of the message, Mack had written, I love you x.

It was the first time either of them had said anything like that to each other. And a man like Mack – Simone was fairly sure she knew what kind of a man Mack was – would not have said that, or anything like that, as a throwaway line, a place-holder to keep her on-side until he returned from whatever tryst he was headed off to. And she was sure – nearly sure – that he would not have said that and then immediately disappeared from her life. At least not on purpose.

Because after that, after the thunderbolt, there had been – nothing. No text, no phone call, no email, no reply to any of the messages she had left for him. His mobile went straight to voicemail and there was no answer when she called the phone in his flat. So Simone concluded that she had reached the point where she either bit the bullet and crossed the line into stalker territory or sat back and waited for Mack, like the caged bird of inspirational fridge magnet fame, to prove his love by returning to her after being set free.

Simone pulled her fingers through her hair. She had taken some extra care over her appearance this morning, much as she might deny it to herself. She had not yet left the flat, but she was wearing tinted moisturiser and mascara as well as her newest, cleanest pair of jeans. The look was slightly ruined by the huge mohair cowl-neck she was wearing in an attempt to keep warm, but after last winter’s monumental gas bill she had made a promise to herself to keep the heating off until November. Now, with two weeks to go, she could feel her will beginning to weaken and had cracked out the winter woollies in an attempt to stave off the inevitable.

She knew what the best jeans and the modest make-up were in aid of, of course. It was in case Mack did come back unannounced and call round to surprise her. She wanted to look like someone he would tell that he loved.

The flat’s chilly, clinging air, along with the constant nail-tapping worry and the checking her phone and her emails every forty seconds were finally becoming too much though, and she stood up to get her coat and bag. She could step out for an hour or so, go and get a decent cup of coffee at the cafe round the corner, read the papers, act normal. If Mack came round while she was out, then he could just wait for her, like she had been doing for him. Eyeing her phone on the coffee table she considered for a split second leaving it in the flat in the hope it might buy her an hour of sanity, but she knew she would not do it.

As she picked up the phone and put it in her bag, there was a knock on the flat’s front door. Through the mottled glass of the door panels she could see the outline of someone tall, slim, unmistakably male. Simone let out an involuntary noise, halfway between a sigh of relief and a grunt of annoyance. That bastard. Where had he been? When she answered the door, her face must have betrayed her disappointment.

‘Hi. What’s wrong?’ It was a man, but it was the wrong man. It was Jazzy. Not Mack.

‘Oh, hi.’ Simone felt the sag in the middle of her body as the adrenaline shot ebbed away and the realisation sank in that it still was not him. ‘What’s up?’

Jazzy looked puzzled. ‘I just asked you that.’

‘Nothing’s wrong, I’m fine. I was just on my way out.’

‘Can I come in?’ Jazzy appeared not to have heard her. Or not to care. In Jazzy’s head the fact that the two of them had spent three years in university sharing a house seemed to mean that for ever more Jazzy would have constant unfettered access to wherever Simone was currently living.

He came in, past Simone and through the kitchenette, and sat down heavily on the sofa. He looked tired. He always looked tired now.

Jazzy turned down Simone’s offer of a cup of tea and looked round the flat. He cleared his throat and said in what she recognised as a forcedly casual tone, ‘Is – erm, is Mack here?’

Simone felt it like a punch to the guts. ‘No. No, he’s not.’ She stared at Jazzy for a moment to see if he was going to break into a grin and say I know he’s not, that’s because he’s out in the corridor waiting to surprise you! but he continued to wait, wide-eyed, for her to go on. ‘I haven’t seen him since Monday night,’ she said slowly. ‘I thought you might… I mean, I was going to ring you and ask you if you’d seen him, but I didn’t want to…’

‘Look mental?’ Jazzy was smiling and Simone relaxed enough to smile back.

‘Well, yeah.’

Jazzy’s mouth was closed but Simone could tell by the pouty shape of his lips that he was biting the tip of his tongue with his front teeth. It was something he always did when he was considering what to say next. ‘Well, the thing is, I haven’t seen him for a week either,’ he said. ‘He didn’t come back into the office yesterday when he’d said he would, and I can’t get hold of him on the phone. He usually emails me while he’s away, just for an update or whatever, but he hasn’t done that either.’

‘Right.’ Simone was unsure what to think. That Mack might be avoiding her began to seem less likely and there was a moment where, to her shame, she felt what was undoubtedly relief. But, a second look at Jazzy’s stubbly, drawn face reminded her that that option being removed only rendered what remained even more worrying. ‘I had a text from him on Tuesday,’ she added.

‘How did he sound?’

‘Fine.’ She nodded, then smiled shyly. ‘Actually,’ she blurted, unable to contain herself, ‘he said he loved me.’

Jazzy raised his eyebrows in an impressed gesture. ‘Really? Nice one.’

‘No need to sound so fucking surprised, thank you very much.’

He laughed. ‘Sorry,’ and he gave her a fond smile that made her want to cry.

‘Because at first I thought…’ If it had been anyone else, anyone other than Jazzy, she would have kept this to herself. Simone knew how most of her friends thought of her. The porcelain doll with the porcelain heart; smooth, cool, impenetrable and invulnerable to the pain the rest of them felt at their imperfect relationships. And it was a persona Simone had always been happy to play along with. So much easier than to have to open up the painful sores for inspection and discussion; better for everyone to pretend they were not there at all. But with Jazzy there had never been much point pretending; Jazzy would know everything anyway, just from the way she was breathing, from the colour in her cheeks, from the way she spoke Mack’s name. When she first met Jazzy, over a decade ago, her reserves of energy had been so depleted that she had never bothered even trying to build up the usual defensive wall around herself. No point starting now, she supposed.

‘I was a bit worried,’ she continued, ‘you know, maybe him not being in touch or anything, maybe it was because he, I don’t know, regretted it or something. But if you haven’t heard from him either, and he’s not come back…’

Jazzy winced. ‘Yes, I know. I know what you mean.’

There was a pause while the two of them looked at each other. Simone realised, to her embarrassment, that Jazzy’s breath was visible in thin clouds in the flat’s dim air.

‘Are we supposed to be worried about him?’ Jazzy asked. His voice sounded light, but as though he were consciously trying to keep it that way.

Simone looked at him. The feeling of wanting to cry threatened to overwhelm her again, but she fought it down. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be.’

With every previous boyfriend Simone had always been able to play it cool with little or no effort. She was cool. But with Mack that had all, to her unending surprise, changed. At first, in the first few tentative weeks of their courtship, there had been the usual hesitation and denial and one step forward followed by four steps sideways, the two of them circling round each other, unsure whether something so seemingly perfect could really be trusted. But in the last few months, something had grown between them – what her grandmother’s generation might have called ‘an understanding’. They were together, and being together was seriously important to them both, and it was for real this time. And for the first time since… well, for the first time in a very long time, Simone had allowed some of the frost inside her to thaw, had allowed herself to believe that this man, that the life she might have with this man, might be worth laying herself open to pain and heartbreak for.

And now he loved her, and he was gone.

Simone swallowed and looked at Jazzy. ‘I was thinking about… about the police.’

Jazzy’s jaw was set. ‘Right. What, you mean like a missing person?’

She nodded. ‘What do you think? I mean, he’s a grown man, he’s allowed to go off by himself for a few days isn’t he? I just don’t want to…’

‘Look mental?’ Jazzy said again.

‘Well, yeah.’ Neither of them laughed this time and they both sat for a moment in silence. Simone watched as the wisps of their breath appeared and disappeared on the air.

Jazzy shook his head. ‘You’re not being mental,’ he said with confidence, as though consciously bringing himself back to the moment. ‘But I don’t think we need to call the police yet either. Have you got his mum’s number?’

‘No. And even if I did, there’s no way I’d ring her. I’ve only met her once, that really would make me look mental.’ Only a few weeks ago Simone had met Mack’s mother for the first time, in an Ethiopian restaurant in Lewisham with a BYO licence and Dolly Parton on the sound system. Mack had been his usual easy-going, ebullient self, at least on the outside, but Simone flattered herself that she already knew him well enough to detect something else in his demeanour, a stiffness and reserve that she had rarely seen him display. It could be that he had just been nervous, perhaps that he felt, as she did, that there could be a lot riding on this evening, that he really, really wanted to make sure his mother liked her. Or it could have been something else, something that Simone hoped she might find out about in due course. Family dynamics are a fraught and emotional thing for all but the best-adjusted, Simone knew that better than anyone, and if there was something difficult in his relationship with his mother, he may be waiting until he and Simone had known each other a little longer before he let her in on it. She had decided not to push him on it, and he had not mentioned the evening since. His mother had been pleasant and polite but not especially interested in Simone, who had come away wondering if his mother had seen her merely as another amongst many attractive young women who had skirted round the edges of her son’s life over the years.

Jazzy held Simone’s gaze for a few moments. Only someone who knew him as well as she did would have been able to see the worry behind his eyes. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK. I tell you what, why don’t we just wait until Monday? If he’s still not come to the office and we still haven’t heard from him then we’ll – well, we’ll talk again and decide what to do. But don’t worry, I’m sure it won’t come to that.’

‘No,’ Simone agreed. ‘I’m sure it won’t.’ Her words sounded firm and confident to her ears, so she wondered why she felt the panic rising again as she once more fought down the overwhelming urge to cry.

Chapter Two

Jazzy, Petra and Rory lived round the corner from the post office. Living so close to the main road was the only way they could afford to live in Winchmore Hill, but it did bring certain benefits; such as actually having the post delivered before they set off for work.

‘Letter,’ Petra said, handing Jazzy the plain white envelope without looking at him. She was holding a slice of dry toast between her front teeth as she tried to tie her hair back. Jazzy grabbed the letter from her with one hand as he used the other to try and prevent Rory from wiping his slobbery face all over Jazzy’s good work trousers.

‘Thanks. I’ll open it on my way, I’ve got to go if I want a seat on the bus. Come here, big guy,’ he said to Rory, picking the baby up and kissing him on the top of his head, the only visible part of him that was clean and dry. ‘Love you lots, have a good day at nursery. Bye darling.’ He kissed Petra’s cheek, and she nodded at him in good-natured acknowledgement.

‘Let me know about Mack, won’t you?’ she said through the dry toast.

‘Sure.’

Jazzy forgot about the letter until he was nearly at work, so preoccupied was he with thinking about Mack. When he had texted Simone last thing the previous night: ‘Anything?’ the reply had come simply: ‘Not yet.’ The hope embodied in those three letters ‘yet’ was what made him angry; angry at what Mack might be doing, angrier still at the thought that Mack might be in the process of proving Petra right.

Petra had warned Jazzy all along about allowing things to go so far with Mack and Simone.

‘You know what’s going to happen,’ she had said. ‘He’ll do what he always does, he’ll get bored, he’ll ditch her and where will that leave you? Whose side are you going to take then?’ They both knew whose side he would take – his loyalties lay with Simone and always would – but it was left unsaid.

‘No,’ Jazzy had protested, ‘I really don’t think he will, not this time. I think he really likes her.’

‘Of course he bloody likes her. She’s beautiful, she’s cool, she’s got awesome hair – and then she also goes and has the cheek to be a really nice person. Of course he likes her. But Mack likes a lot of people, if you know what I mean.’

Jazzy had smiled. It made him happy that Petra liked Simone. ‘Yes but you’re forgetting, Simone’s so low maintenance that she barely classes as a girlfriend at all. If anything, Mack’ll be the needy one and Simone’ll get bored and ditch him.’

Petra had rolled her eyes. ‘Have you ever known a woman get bored of Mack before he got bored of her?’ The question did not require an answer. ‘Just…’ Petra had thrown her hands up, ‘if they’re going to get together, then fine. I just don’t think you should encourage it. Because when it all goes wrong, it’s you she’s going to blame for it.’

And now it was looking as though it was going wrong, and Jazzy wondered if Simone would blame him for it. Jazzy would be surprised – shocked, even – if Mack had gone AWOL from everything, from London, from the business, from Jazzy, just to get rid of Simone. But, loath as he was to admit it, it was not entirely unthinkable. He and Mack had met ten years ago when they were teaching English in a high school in rural Japan, the only westerners in a fifty-mile radius, apart from a tall, outdoorsy Canadian girl who worked in the elementary school next door. She had fallen for Mack, swiftly and entirely, and he had seemed pretty smitten with her too, but when Mack went back to England among promises of undying devotion and vows to keep in touch, he had deliberately given the girl an email address and mobile number that bore no relation to his real ones. That Canadian girl had not deserved it any more than Simone would. And Petra was right; if Mack was taking a massive shit all over Simone’s feelings, then it was, at least partly, Jazzy’s fault.

He thought back to the conversation he had had with Simone in his local pub to try and persuade her to give Mack a chance on a second date.

‘He really likes you. He told me. Honestly.’ This was true.

Simone had looked unconvinced. ‘Yes, he likes me so much that he’s waited a month before getting in touch again.’

‘He’s been away a lot with work. He didn’t want to arrange something he might have to cancel at the last minute.’ This was only partly true. Mack had been away for three out of the preceding four weeks, but it was only when he had returned to London a few days ago that he had mentioned Simone.

‘I keep thinking about her,’ he had confided. ‘If I ask her out again, do you think she’ll say yes?’

‘I guarantee it,’ Jazzy had told him with a wink.

And he had been determined to do so. Simone’s misgivings did not seem that serious to him, certainly nothing that could not be talked round.

‘Why are you so keen for me to go out with him again?’ she had asked.

He had shrugged. ‘I think you’d be good together. You’re both quite similar if you ask me, even though it might not look like it at first glance. Free spirits, if you will.’

Simone had raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Right, OK. But I have to say that in my experience “free spirit” is a phrase people use to describe someone they think will probably sleep with them without asking too many questions first.’

‘You know what I mean. Not needy or desperate or looking for someone to spend every minute of every day with. That’s what you’re both like. I just – I can see you two together. Plus,’ he had leaned forward, ‘he assures me he’s hung like a farmyard animal.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Simone had said, downing the rest of her drink, and he knew then that he had won her round. And neither of them had said what they both knew; that the real reason he was so keen to set her up with Mack was that he just wanted to see her happy, like he was with Petra. That he wanted her to have someone, like he did.

The bus was nearly at his stop before Jazzy remembered the letter. It had barely occurred to him that it could contain anything interesting, let alone anything personal. Letters never did any more.

Even after he opened the envelope, it took him a few moments to recognise the handwriting, so rarely had he seen Mack handwrite anything. But it was unmistakably from him. The words he used, the confident, stylised penmanship, could not have come from anyone else.

Dear J

I know you’ll be wondering where I am by now, and I’m sorry.

This is the most ridiculous letter I’ve ever written. (And I know, a letter? A fucking letter? Hey, Mack, 1993 called, they want their method of communication back! But the point is, you can’t hack into a letter. And I know that sounds mental, but it’s true, and that’s important).

The thing is, and I swear, I swear on Rory’s life I’m not making this up, I’ve had to go away for a very good reason. I really, really wish I could tell you why, but I can’t, even in an unhackable letter. Just believe me when I say that you’ll be safer, and so will Petra and Rory and everyone else around you if you don’t know (again, I know that sounds like the rantings of a paranoid psychiatric patient but please, please bear with me). Believe me, if I could tell you then you know I would. But it’s a good reason.

And the reason I’m writing to you is because I think – really, really, really – that you could be in danger too, and Petra and Rory if anyone comes looking for me. If anything happened to any of you, I couldn’t live with it. Please listen. Please, please take me seriously. If anyone comes looking for me, you have to say that you don’t know where I am. Which will be true, of course. But you have to make it sound true too, you have to make sure they believe you. And if anyone does come looking, then I think you should take Petra and Rory away for a few days, doesn’t matter where, just don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Not even Simone or Keith.

I’ve written to Simone too, saying the same thing. If you see her, tell her I’m sorry. And, fuck it, tell her that I love her. I do.

One last thing. If you don’t pay attention to anything else in this letter, then please, please pay attention to this. DO NOT TRY AND FIND ME. DO NOT TELL ANYONE I’VE GONE. If anyone comes looking for me you need to LIE. You need to say that I’ve gone on holiday, or quit my job to go travelling, or gone back to Japan or something. Don’t say you’ve heard from me, don’t try and guess where I am. DON’T COME LOOKING FOR ME. And I know that the first thing you’re going to do is ask Keith. Please don’t go to Keith. I mean it. It could put you in danger.

I promise, I haven’t gone round the bend. I know this all sounds nuts but part of the trouble is that you can’t delete stuff once you’ve written it in pen. Please take me seriously.

I wish I could say when I’d be back. I wish I could say that I’m coming back. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I want to come back, and I will if I can. I’m going to try to find a way.

Love you, mate.

Mack.

Jazzy held the letter open in his hand for a few moments, then in a burst of what his rational side told him was absurd paranoia, he folded it over so the text was hidden, casting a surreptitious glance over his shoulder. Everybody else on the bus was looking at a phone or a tablet; nobody was paying him the slightest attention. His first thought was almost certainly the one Mack had been so keen to steer him away from. His friend had surely lost the plot. It happened. It had happened to one of Jazzy’s housemates in his final year of university – too much weed, too much stress over his finals and then one day, boom, he refused to come out of his room and was convinced that the landlord had installed a covert surveillance system inside the airing cupboard.

Jazzy jumped to his feet just in time, realising that the bus was about to pull away from his stop. He hopped down to the pavement and as he walked the few hundred metres to the office, he thought about Mack’s behaviour over the previous few weeks, trying to pinpoint anything that might explain such a sudden descent into extreme paranoia. All he could think, though, was that Mack was just Mack. He was always just Mack. Mack was the kind of guy where someone would say, ‘Well, that’s Mack for you,’ and everybody would know what they meant. And for the last few weeks – for as long as Jazzy could remember in fact – Mack had been behaving entirely as he always did. He had been in and out of the office a lot, but no more than usual, and had seemed quite excited about a number of new leads that he was confident he could turn into regular clients. He had lent Petra a paperback he had just finished reading, raving about it to Jazzy first, and had asked them if they wanted to accompany him and Simone to a gig next month. When Jazzy’s housemate had lost it, although it was a huge and traumatic shock, it had not been a total surprise to Jazzy. The guy had been acting oddly for a long time, perhaps as long as a year – in fact, if he was honest Jazzy would say he had always been a little odd. But the same could not be said of Mack. Mack never acted oddly, he always knew exactly what to say and how to say it, fine-tuning his patter effortlessly depending on the company he was in. It was what made him such a fantastic salesman.

And that stuff about Keith? That was the strangest thing. Jazzy had always thought that Mack may not have exactly liked Keith, but that he at least trusted him. Keith scared Jazzy, he would freely confess it, and he had no idea how to talk to him, knowing as he did nothing about cars, golf or how to objectify women. Keith was like an uncle to Mack; that was what Mack had told him when he first introduced him to Jazzy. What could have gone so wrong that Mack could believe he needed to keep it secret from Keith? A slow, solid feeling of foreboding grew in Jazzy’s stomach, his footsteps slowing as he continued his trudge to the office, as he mulled over that question. He had never thought it was a good idea to let themselves fall into Keith’s orbit as much as they already had. Should he have trusted his instincts? Did Mack mean that the reason he had gone away was somehow Keith’s fault?

They had both been working for Keith for nearly two years now, Mack throwing himself into the enterprise wholeheartedly, Jazzy still insisting to himself, and anyone else, should they ask, that his job there was only a temporary measure until he found something that suited him better.

On New Year’s Eve nearly three years ago, Mack had been drunk and a little maudlin, depressed about his dull but lucrative job as an anti-static flooring salesman, for which, let’s face it, Jazzy could hardly blame him. When Mack had first landed the job, Jazzy had had to laugh. It sounded so much like a parody of the kind of job people settle for when they have given up on life that Jazzy could scarcely believe someone as dynamic, as zestful and trendy as Mack could really have agreed to spend the majority of his waking hours doing such a thing. That New Year Mack was harping on, as he often did, about his ‘plastic business card moment’. Kind of the opposite of a light bulb moment, that was how he described it. The moment when everything went dark.

‘I can’t do it, Jazz,’ Mack was saying for at least the fourth time. ‘I just can’t. I could be looking at thirty-five more years of this shit. Well, I won’t because it’ll kill me long before that. I’ll drink myself into an early grave or deliberately crash my car into the central reservation or something. But I’ve got to get out. And I mean soon.’

‘Hmm, bit melodramatic, maybe? Even for you? Even for 11.47 p.m. on New Year’s Eve?’ Jazzy loved Mack like a brother (actually he preferred him to his actual brothers) but, Jesus, sometimes.

‘Mate, I’m never melodramatic. My life’s just very, very interesting.’

‘Yes, you’re right. You’re the most interesting anti-static flooring salesman I think I’ve ever met.’

‘Ha fucking ha. Do you know what, though?’ Mack took a too-large gulp of champagne and winced as he tried to swallow it in one and the bubbles went up his nose. ‘I go to these godawful “networking” things they make me do, and I eat the rancid food and I act like I give a shit, and I come away thinking, yes, I am the most interesting person in this room, and I don’t care if that makes me sound like a dick, because I am a dick, and anyway it’s true.’

‘I’m sure it is.’

‘No, honestly. Do you know, I was at one the other week in fucking, I don’t know, Kendal or somewhere in the arse end of nowhere, and it was a BREAKFAST one, which are just the WORST because you either have to stay overnight in the sub-Crossroads shithole that’s hosting it or you have to get up at five a.m. and drive there, and either way you feel like Alan Partridge, and the only way not to feel like Alan Partridge is not to talk to anyone, but you’re not allowed to do that because talking to people is the only reason you’re there in the first place.’

‘Plus, you never stop talking, even at seven in the morning.’ Jazzy was only half-listening, looking round the kitchen to make sure Petra wasn’t going to be within kissing distance of any of Mack’s handsome hipster beardos when Big Ben struck midnight.

‘That as well. But anyway, we’d all finished our flabby bacon and rock-hard eggs and we were taking it in turns to do our spiel, and the last guy up was some poor downtrodden bastard from a plastics company in Barrow in Furness, and when he’d finished talking he whipped his business card out and – ta fucking dah – the guy’s business card is made. Of. PLASTIC. Here, I’ve still got it. Check that out.’

It was a small one, the size of a credit card with the same rounded edges. Neil Stannah, it said, Head of Sales and Business Development, Northern Region. ‘Hmm, yeah. Wow. That’s… that’s quite something.’ Jazzy handed Mack the card back and stood up, the better to survey the crowded room.

‘Isn’t it just? But that’s not the worst bit. That’s nowhere NEAR the worst bit. After he whipped it out, everyone else round the table started pissing themselves laughing.’ Mack himself let out a humourless bark of laughter and shook his head. ‘And not at what a loser this guy was. They genuinely thought it was funny, like, “Hey, this guy works for a plastics company and even his business card is made of plastic! Can you believe this shit? Are we having fun here or what?” I genuinely thought I might pass out, or puke up my hash browns. I saw it then, forty years of this, up and down the M6, in and out of Premier Lodges, talking the talk and eating the swill and it was like someone had flicked a switch in my head. I’ve got to get out, Jazz. I’m drowning.’

They had had conversations along these lines many times before, even prior to the plastic business card incident, but this time there was something different. The panic in Mack’s eyes was real, there was genuine desperation in his tone. ‘I’m quitting,’ he said. It was something he had said before, and Jazzy half-ignored him. He was drunk, he was tired, it was three minutes to midnight and he had misplaced his fiancée. Plus Jazzy had his own work problems on his mind. The small, private investment bank he had been a software developer for since he returned from Japan, had put him and the whole of the IT department on notice of redundancy three weeks before Christmas. He did not particularly want to listen to someone threatening to put themselves out of work through choice.

‘No, really,’ Mack went on. ‘I really am this time. I’ve spoken to Keith about it.’

Jazzy had instantly become alert. This was something he had always worried about, that Mack would somehow allow himself to fall into Keith’s hands. Jazzy did not know anything for definite about Keith, did not even know that how he made his money was illegal, but he could not believe that anyone could become as wealthy as Keith purely from selling second hand cars and cheap imported electrical goods. And he knew that becoming part of Keith’s world was emphatically not something that Mack wanted. He had hinted as much several times, had told Jazzy that the reason he had gone into sales was so that he could make enough money to never have to go asking his mum or Keith for anything (Jazzy had known that really Mack was only talking about Keith. Mack’s mother had no money to speak of, and nothing other than a bottle of aftershave at Christmas that Mack might need). It had seemed like a point of pride, but also of self-protection. ‘Keith?’ Jazzy said, unable to keep the shock or disapproval out of his tone.

‘Don’t worry,’ Mack shook his head, his words smooth and fluid after all the champagne. ‘It’s legit. He’s got a new arm to the business, he thinks I’d be ideal to head up the sales section. Well, I say head up, I think to be honest I’d be it.’

‘What is it then? This new “arm”?’ Jazzy hoped he sounded less suspicious than he felt.

Mack smiled. ‘Wedding dresses.’

‘Wedding dresses? Keith?’

Mack laughed. ‘I know. Sounds pretty unlikely, doesn’t it? But he’s got this contact over in Russia or somewhere – some guy he used to play golf with I think, who’s gone back to the motherland. Anyway, he makes these really high-end wedding dresses – they’d retail for a few grand here – and Keith can get them at a good price. He’s been flogging a few on eBay recently and they’ve gone pretty well, but he wants to start bringing them in wholesale, selling them on to retail places. That’s where I come in.’ He flashed a grin. ‘Now, go on, admit it. Am I not the perfect guy to do that job? These shops are all run by nice ladies of a certain age. I don’t think I’m flattering myself to suggest I do have a certain way with nice ladies of a certain age. I think I’ll be able to turn their heads in the direction of Keith’s bridal gown range pretty successfully.’

Jazzy had to laugh. ‘I suppose you’re right. I can’t think of a better person to do that job. Is that going to be the name of the company then? “Keith’s Bridal Gown Range”?’

Mack laughed too. ‘No. It’s not really called anything at the moment, but I think he’s going to call it “Anastasia”. Can’t really call it “Russian Brides”, can he? Might give off the wrong impression.’

Jazzy had tried gently to nudge Mack away from the idea of working for Keith. Although the wedding dress thing did not sound screamingly, actively illegal, it could surely not be entirely above board either. But Mack would not be moved. He gave his notice at the anti-static flooring company and, a few weeks into the new year, he became the regional sales rep, national sales rep, director of sales and deputy director of sales for Anastasia Ltd. ‘I’m desperate,’ he confessed to Jazzy on the only occasion when he had expressed anything approaching doubts. ‘I know it’s a cop out, taking a job from an old family friend.’ (That was how Mack always referred to his and Keith’s relationship if anyone asked.) ‘And I know Keith’s not exactly man of the year at the Inland Revenue or anything. But he’s promised me this is legit, and I believe him. Anyway, I’ve got to get out. And this ought to be a laugh. Come on, women’s clothing? I was born to do it.’ His laugh had been a little too hearty, Jazzy thought, his enthusiasm a little too full, and when Jazzy looked into his friend’s eyes, behind the chilly blue he could see absolutely nothing.

A few weeks after that, Jazzy’s redundancy was confirmed. He had started looking round for something else as soon as the redundancy was mooted as a possibility, but the task seemed overwhelming. His job at the bank had been the only proper, grown-up job he had ever had. He had liked working there and he had been good at his job, but nevertheless that did not leave him with much confidence that he would be equally successful anywhere else. He and Petra could live pretty comfortably on her salary for the foreseeable future, and she was keen that he didn’t rush into anything. ‘Wait,’ she kept telling him, ‘find something that really feels right.’ But after a few months, the novelty of being at home all day, of getting up when he wanted, going to the pub or the shops or the library in the middle of the day, cooking elaborate meals for Petra that they would eat together when she finally got home, usually well after seven in the evening, began to wear off. The longer Jazzy was out of work, the more impossible seemed the task of not only finding another job, but actually doing the job once he had found it. He was beginning to doubt himself, to suspect that the strengths and abilities he had taken for granted in his old job may have deserted him altogether. Petra noticed it, of course, and Simone noticed it too, the pair of them fussing over him, encouraging and cajoling and transparently leaving print-outs of job ads all over the house. But Mack noticed it too, and he was the only one who offered any kind of concrete solution.

‘We could do with someone at Anastasia,’ he had said, ‘to look after the IT side of things. We need a decent website, we might start selling direct online too if we can make it pay. All the files need computerising too. Nothing too taxing, but we’d pay pretty well and you’d be as good as your own boss.’ Jazzy knew a charity hand-out when it was shoved under his nose, but by this time Petra was pregnant with Rory. They were due to get married in the summer. Petra taking anything more than the minimum maternity leave was out of the question, financially speaking, but even so the fact that they would need an extra income was now unarguable.

He had agreed to take on all of Anastasia’s IT-related work on a temporary basis until he found something more suited to his strengths, or at least that was what he told himself. In fact, once he had started working there, he had realised that he might find the light workload, flexible hours and pretty reasonable hourly rate hard to let go of. This was particularly true once Rory was born; the perks of earning a full-time wage, albeit a pretty modest one, for what was very much a part-time job, suited him and Petra very well. The thought of both of them leading the long-hours corporate lifestyle that her job forced her into was enough to keep him from browsing the job ads in too much depth.

Jazzy shivered in the morning chill and pulled his scarf up to his chin as he fumbled with the office building’s keypad, hastily shoving the crumpled letter into his pocket. Could it be that Mack was paying a heavy price for his keenness to take the easy option when Keith proffered it? And could it be that he, Jazzy, may have to do the same?

Jazzy had not expected anybody else to be in the office yet. If the place was fully staffed, there was only ever him, Mack and Keith, and Mack was away on sales calls more than half the time, while Keith tended to leave the office side of things to the other two. Keith took care of the import/export part of the business, wheeling and dealing with Russian tailors and Latvian freight companies, and the unspoken deal was that as long as the goods and the money kept flowing, neither side of the business would ask too many questions of the other. But as Jazzy approached the office from the communal stairwell, he noticed a light in the office Jazzy and Mack shared.

‘Hello?’ he called out as he unlocked the door and turned on the lights in what they called, in a rather grandiose manner, the reception area.

‘In here.’ It was Keith.

Keith was rising from Mack’s desk as Jazzy entered the room. He could tell from the whirring of the computer’s fan that it had only just been switched off.

‘Everything OK?’ Jazzy asked.

‘Yeah, yeah, fine.’ Keith was dressed like an archetypal middle-aged businessman on his day off – perfectly ironed slacks, a V-necked mint green jumper over a checked shirt, and beige loafers. ‘Just called in to catch up on a few emails. Our internet at home’s on the blink.’

‘Right. Bit of a way to come isn’t it?’

Keith held Jazzy’s gaze for quite a lot longer than normal people found comfortable, then drew his neck back in such a way that Jazzy could not help but construe it as a gesture of aggression. ‘Had some other stuff to do up this way, didn’t I? My brother-in-law wants me to look at a car with him over at Palmers Green, thought I may as well pop in here first. Not a problem is it?’

Jazzy shook his head. No matter how many times he swore to himself not to allow Keith to intimidate him, the guy always somehow managed it. ‘No, course not.’ He could hear himself estuarising his accent, blunting the cultured vowels. He hated himself for doing it, but he could not stop himself.

‘Anyway, I’m off now, soon be out of your hair. Young Joe not here today?’ Keith always called Mack by his first name, even though to Jazzy’s knowledge no one else outside his immediate family did so.

‘Er, no. Actually…’ Jazzy thought about what Mack had said in his letter. He was reluctant to disobey his friend’s wishes, but if something was wrong with Mack, then Keith was probably his best hope of getting to the bottom of it. He decided to hedge around the subject as best he could. ‘I was actually expecting him back by now. You’ve not heard from him have you?’

Keith’s face was expressionless, his mouth narrow. ‘No. Not a sausage.’ Keith picked up his phone in its leather case and put it in his trouser pocket. He winked at Jazzy. ‘Probably found himself some young lovely while he was away, taking a little bit of French leave, you know our Joe. Got to go. See you.’

As Keith walked out of the office, Jazzy looked at the bulge in the man’s pocket where his phone was. It was a smart phone, about as smart as phones got. Surely he must be able to check his emails on that?

He was surprised to find himself shaky after seeing Keith, his heart hammering as he switched on the coffee machine. Was Mack’s paranoia contagious? And what exactly had Mack meant when he had asked Jazzy not to talk to Keith? Was it because Mack was afraid of Keith? Or because Mack had done something that he did not want Keith to find out about?

Not knowing where else to start, Jazzy sat at Mack’s computer and booted it up. The chair was still warm from where Keith had been sitting in it, and, knowing he was being ridiculous but doing it anyway, Jazzy got up and swapped it for his own cool and unsullied chair. Once the machine was running, he clicked around until he got to a list of which programs had most recently been accessed. There was, he soon realised, nothing to find. All the recent file history, all the internet browsing history, all the cookies, all the temporary files were all gone. All the basic software the machine had come with was still there, but other than that there was no sign that anyone had ever used this machine. Apart from Keith, just now.

Jazzy looked at his watch. He was in earlier than usual this morning; he had been eager to get to the office and check for any sign of Mack. Could it be that Keith came in to the office every morning and sat at Mack’s computer doing… What exactly had he been doing? Something that he then immediately deleted all trace of.

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.

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?

As she attempted to place everything back in the drawer at the precise angle it had previously been she saw a corner of beige paper, a grid marked on it in red ink. There was only one kind of official document that looked like that. She slipped it swiftly out of the pile. Afterwards she would ask herself what she was hoping to find. What, after all, can really be gleaned from a person’s birth certificate? Maybe she was conscious on some level of what Ayanna had told them, conscious that Mack leaving his birth certificate behind might be significant purely because he no longer needed it; because that person on the certificate was no longer him.

But she gazed at it for several moments and still the letters and numbers on it made no sense. This was not Mack’s birth certificate. It was not even the birth certificate of another man, one Mack might have been pretending to be. This was a woman’s birth certificate. A woman called Jessica Maria Novak. But then, as Simone continued to look at the letters, the numbers, the dates, she realised this was not even the birth certificate of a woman. It was a girl, a seventeen-year-old girl.

Chapter Seven

Keith had not been back to the office for three days. Of course not. Not when Jazzy wanted to speak to him. The man had a sixth sense about where he was least wanted, then made sure to be there whenever possible.

In fact, it was not even that Jazzy wanted to speak to Keith. He never wanted to speak to Keith. He knew he ought to, knew that Keith, if anyone, would be able to shed light on Mack’s past. But he had tried and tried to imagine how the conversation might go, and he just couldn’t. If Keith genuinely did not know where Mack was, then he would be worried by now – worried enough to say something to Jazzy or come into the office again or send out a bunch of his loaf-headed henchmen as a search party. And the fact that he had done none of those things surely meant that he knew where Mack had gone, or at least had some idea as to why. And if he wanted Jazzy or Simone to know these things, Keith would have told them. But he hadn’t.

When Simone had come to Jazzy and Petra’s house three nights ago with Mack’s exam certificates and that inexplicable birth certificate, it was the first time that Jazzy had felt genuinely afraid of what Mack might be running from. He had looked at the two certificates, one marking the pinnacle of a young man’s academic career, one marking the birth of a baby girl, daughter of Maria Novak, ‘father unknown’, at a hospital in Lewisham seventeen years ago and tried, without success, to connect the two, all the while Petra’s words echoing in his head. How well do you really know this guy?

Simone had asked him what he thought. ‘I don’t think anything,’ was the only truthful answer he had been able to give. He had, for the first time, truly understood what people meant when they said their mind had gone blank. It had been as though he was staring into a very bright light, blinding him to everything and wiping any coherent thought from his brain.

The exam certificate thing was probably nothing. It could just be inverse snobbery, be Mack pretending to be more street than he really was. Jazzy possessed just about enough self-awareness to realise that Mack, with his flawless sense of social infrastructure, knew that if he was trying to impress someone like Jazzy, then better to be a comprehensive school boy made good than a scholarship boy desperately trying to ingratiate himself with the boarders. The birth certificate thing though was weird, and scary. Jazzy had seen enough films and read enough airport thrillers to know that you could fake someone’s identity by using a stolen birth certificate – usually a dead person’s. Ayanna had told him that Mack had asked for a fake birth certificate. He wanted one for himself, Jazzy supposed, but he had not said anything about one for someone else. Maybe he hadn’t needed to, because he had already managed to get that person one.

Jazzy cleared his throat and gagged on the acid reflux that came up. He took a swig from the bottle of Gaviscon that was open on his desk. It was one thing for Mack to disappear; it was one thing for him to buy a fake identity before doing so. It was another thing altogether to be dealing in fake identities for seventeen-year-old girls with eastern European names.

Jazzy had let the last few days go by in the hope that something would happen to make all this go away; that Mack would walk back through the door as though nothing had happened and nobody would ever mention it again. That would suit Jazzy just fine. But now it was after eleven-thirty in the morning, and Mack had been gone for over a week. Jazzy had spent most of the day so far ignoring the work that had been piling up, and staring instead at the office door. He wanted Mack to breeze in and tell him he had been having a prolonged dirty weekend with a ladyboy he met on the internet, or that he had had a vivid and delusional nervous breakdown, but that he was all better now. He wanted Ayanna to come in and tell him that, oh yes, she forgot to mention, here was that forwarding address Mack had asked her to give him, and that by the way her brother had accidentally left one of the fake birth certificates for Latvian prostitutes that he dealt with in amongst Mack’s fake papers and could he have it back please? He wanted Keith to come in and shoot Jazzy through the head with a stolen gun and then he wouldn’t have to worry about anything any more. He wanted to SLEEP, for Christ’s sake!

Ayanna had not been in to work since she had told him about Mack asking her to help him hide. Nobody had been to clean the office at all for the first couple of days, but today when there had still been no sign of a cleaner by ten o’clock Jazzy had rung the cleaning company, to be told that ‘somebody’ would be round within the hour. ‘Somebody’ had been, but it had not been Ayanna, rather a man in his late twenties or early thirties of indeterminate nationality who either did not speak or understand English or was unbelievably rude, or both. Jazzy had asked the woman at the agency whether Ayanna might be coming back, and she had laughed a throaty smoker’s cackle and said, ‘Dear me, love, I wouldn’t have a clue. You don’t expect them to tell me, do you? I’m just their employer.’

Jazzy had rarely felt so old – or so conspicuous – as he did standing in this semi-circle of paved ground dotted with benches and water features. It was the feature entrance plaza of the spanking new sixth form centre of Ayanna’s college, built only months before the economy went tits up. He had been sitting on one of the benches for a few minutes, believing that his six foot four frame and receding hairline would stand out less if he was seated, and in that time he had realised that he needed to get inside the building.

Jazzy was reminded of the time he first took a girl out. She had been a new pupil at his school’s sixth form, the stage at which girls and boys were allowed to mix, and she had, miraculously, agreed to meet him in a pub in town well known for serving under-age with no questions asked. But when Jazzy had arrived to meet her, he had left her sitting alone at a table for a full five minutes; he had not recognised her out of her school uniform. And he now found he was having the same problem placing Ayanna without her green tabard and hoody.

He had already seen at least four girls who could have been her – all tall, all slim, all black with long, straightened hair, all wearing skinny jeans and carrying cheap cotton shopping bags over their shoulders. To his utter mortification, he had jumped up and run after one of them, getting halfway across the plaza before he realised it wasn’t her. For God’s sake, he was lucky the police hadn’t already turned up to question him on suspicion of grooming. He forced in a deep breath and tried to calm himself; after all, he could easily be a lecturer taking a break between classes. Or, a much more disturbing thought occurred to him, he could be the father of one of these kids. He paused and did the maths; yes, it was a stretch but it was just about possible that he could be the dad of one of these heavily made-up young girls or skinny-jeaned young lads, all strutting around looking as though they were posing for a prospectus photo. He shook his head. That thought did not make him feel any better.

It was hopeless sitting here, he realised. So many students were constantly bustling in and out of the plate glass and chrome entrance hall that he could easily have already missed Ayanna. He needed to get inside and find his particular needle in this seething haystack of adolescent hormones.

The building was huge, and, as he stood gormlessly in the entrance lobby looking at the signs pointing to Rooms L8 – M22 and Floor G, every corridor that led away from the atrium looking identical, Jazzy saw at once that his only chance was to brazen it out. Not for the first time, he thanked whatever force of creation it was that had endowed him with such a trustworthy, unthreatening demeanour. OK, maybe he would never be CEO of his own multi-million-pound company, but he did come across as a nice guy, and sometimes that could be worth a lot.

He put a hand in his pocket and strode, smiling towards the central reception booth. ‘Hi.’ He leaned forward onto the counter and broadened the smile still further. If he acted as though he and the young man behind the desk had met before, he felt sure the guy would feel obliged to play along. ‘How’s it going?’

The young man smiled, only the smallest amount of wariness behind his eyes. ‘How can I help you?’

‘I’m just here to see Ayanna. Ayanna Abukar? I’m supposed to be meeting her outside her class but I’ve left my diary in the office so I don’t have a note of which room she’s in just now.’

The man blinked. He did not look much older than twenty. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude but… who are you?’ He flashed Jazzy an apologetic grin.

Jazzy laughed, as though acknowledging the absurdity of his having to ask. ‘I’m Sam, I’m her case worker.’ It was the vaguest job title he could think of that also sounded sufficiently important to allow him access to a student. Petra always told him that the main thing that prevented people achieving what they wanted in life was not knowing their limitations. Jazzy knew he was never going to be able to pass himself off as a nurse or a lawyer or a probation officer. He would be laughed out of the place in seconds. But he hoped he was both scruffy enough and middle class enough to pass muster as some kind of generic pastoral worker.

That, or maybe just the smile, seemed to work. The man typed something into his computer. ‘She’s in Chemistry right now,’ he said. He turned to look at the clock behind him. ‘She’ll be finished in about five minutes.’

Jazzy nodded. ‘OK. Thanks. And, erm, where exactly is…’

The man regarded him for a moment. ‘The labs,’ he said, gesturing behind him. ‘In the science block. If you just wait in the main corridor you should see her as she comes out.’

‘Brilliant, thanks a lot, mate.’ He turned and walked the way he had indicated. Shit. The whole point of making up those stupid lies was so he would not have to loiter in the corridor like a deviant or a dead-beat dad.

He found the science block and followed a long corridor with classrooms either side. Most of them were occupied and he peered through the doors’ glass panels trying to work out which one might be A-level Chemistry.

Jazzy had done Chemistry himself at sixth form and, scanning the white board in the first room he looked in, he was able to dismiss that class immediately. A cross-section of a spinal column. Biology. The next one was also Biology, the one after it was empty, then one with a class of fourteen teenage boys copying the longest mathematical formula he had ever seen. Physics, surely. The one after that, though, was more promising. The slide on the screen was titled: The electron configuration of an element. Jazzy felt his eyelids growing heavy with boredom at the mere memory. Bingo. Doing a quick scan of the corridor, he ascertained that the remaining two labs were empty. The electron configuration group must be Ayanna’s. Jesus, poor kid.

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