Swimming in the Shadows Page 7

  By nine p.m. I was hardly able to sit still while the regular presenters worked their way steadily through the national news, the local news, the sport, the weather forecast and finally the trailer for a forthcoming costume epic. Then it began. A brief burst of unsettling music, followed by Martin Bullock saying ‘Welcome to Disappeared!’ which even in that hideous moment struck me as an odd sort of introduction – as if Disappeared! was a definite location in which you could find yourself. He was standing in a studio in front of a huge montage of photographs, all of which, so he said, were the faces of people who had vanished without trace. Then he gave some statistics, how many people went missing every day and how many never turned up again. ‘Tonight,’ he continued, ‘we’re going to look at the stories of three women who’ve vanished. Three very different women, but all of them having one thing in common: each of them was reported missing on the day she disappeared and each of them remains missing to this day.’

  The picture of Martin Bullock faded and the scene changed to a terrace in a northern town, inhabited by people in sixties-style clothes. With the aid of actors and a voiceover, the last known hour of Deirdre Lazenby was reconstructed.

  Deirdre was twenty-two and due to be married. She had come home from work as usual and begun to get ready for a night out when she realized that she had no un-laddered nylons to wear. She turned first to her younger brother and sister, but they both refused to run an errand for her, so Deirdre had set out to buy some stockings herself, heading for a local shop, which was only a couple of streets away. After leaving the house she’d spoken briefly to a neighbour and then to an acquaintance from work. None of this would have been at all memorable or remarkable if she had either arrived at the shop or returned home … but, of course, she hadn’t.

  The police were called and they organized a search – not very competently, according to Martin Bullock, whose anti-police agenda was already emerging loud and clear. To complete the item, Deirdre’s younger sister, a tearful woman to whom the years had not been kind, appealed for anyone who could throw light on what had happened to come forward.

  Shirley Wallingforth was next. A divorcee with three young children, she had arranged a babysitter for the evening in order to meet some girlfriends at a local pub. The babysitter had arrived at six thirty, enabling Shirley to set out in good time for her rendezvous, and several passing motorists had come forward to confirm that they had seen her waiting at the bus stop. The girlfriends had sportingly reassembled, complete with a table full of bottles and glasses, and sporting an abundance of eyeliner, presumably in faithful replication of the night in question. These friends had a drink waiting on the table for Shirley, but at the end of the evening it was still untouched. Throughout the scene in the pub, the camera constantly returned to linger on the glass sitting on the table – an ordinary pub glass transformed into a potent symbol of Shirley’s absence.

  Finally the spotlight turned on Jennifer Reynolds. The opening shot was the exterior of Alan’s house. An involuntary shudder ran through me – the shock, I suppose, of seeing it on TV. I sat on the sofa, clutching my knees against my chest, almost forgetting to breathe.

  ‘Jennifer Reynolds disappeared from this house in Nicholsfield in 1983. Jennifer loved the house. She and her husband Alan devoted much of their spare time to restoring it.’ This was news to me. ‘Jennifer and Alan had been married for eight years.’ The shot changed to a wedding photograph. ‘They were very happy together and there was no reason for her to leave.’

  Then came the actress. I had to grudgingly admit that it was quite a good likeness. The rest of the reconstruction was somehow rather pointless, showing the actress – who kept flicking her long blonde hair about in an affected way which I very much hoped I never had – firstly chatting to an old lady – ‘Jennifer got on well with all her neighbours’, then pushing a trolley round a supermarket, ‘Jennifer had lived in Nicholsfield all her life’, and finally chatting with colleagues ‘at the local medical centre, where she worked’. Pinpricks of horror raced up and down my arms and legs at this particular revelation. The practice manager link was definitely one I could do without.

  Then an actress playing a receptionist was shown explaining to an actor, presumably playing a doctor, that Jennifer had unexpectedly not come into work, and nor had she rung in sick.

  ‘When Jennifer’s husband, Alan, left the house that morning,’ Martin Bullock’s voice intoned while the actress-receptionist affected to look puzzled by this unaccustomed set of circumstances, ‘Jennifer was getting ready for work as usual, but for some reason Jennifer never reached work that day. A neighbour noticed her car still parked outside the house in the middle of the morning.’ The shot returned to the front of the house. ‘The car was still there when Alan Reynolds returned home that evening. There was no sign of his wife; no sign of a break-in or a struggle. Her car keys, purse and credit cards were all in her handbag on the hall table, where they had been that morning when Alan left the house.’

  The screen now filled with a picture of me. I clutched my knees still harder and felt a choking sensation rise in my throat. Surely I must look different now? Hair cut short, different clothes … and much older, too … that photograph must have been taken nearly ten years ago … but it was still me …

  After what seemed like an interminably long time, but was in reality only seconds, the image of me was replaced by Martin Bullock, who for some unfathomable reason was now striding along some cliff tops, talking direct to camera. He emphasised the impossibility of people simply losing their memory and wandering away, pointed out how difficult it would be to construct a new life without assistance and reminded viewers that none of these women were likely to have done anything of the kind. Then he began to talk about serial killers.

  From my point of view, this was a line second best to abduction by aliens. The thrust of Mr Bullock’s argument seemed to be that the police didn’t want to try too hard to discover the collective fates of these missing women because it was bad for crime figures. In its way this line of thinking seemed almost as unlikely as alien abduction to me, but at least, I thought, while Mr Bullock was pontificating on police ineptitude, the nation was not getting another chance to commit my face to memory.

  The film returned to Deirdre Lazenby’s sister. ‘I shall never be at peace wi’meself until I know what happened to her.’

  There was a still photograph of Shirley Wallingforth’s children, followed by a still of Alan at some sort of press conference, over which Martin Bullock’s voice intoned piously: ‘For the relatives, the uncertainty goes on.’

  Then the credits rolled.

  I unclenched myself from where I was perched on the sofa. A drink. A drink would help. There was a bottle of Vermouth in the cupboard and I poured a dollop into a tumbler and added some ice, trying not to notice that my hands were shaking. I badly wanted to ring Rob. I longed for the comfort of his voice, but I didn’t trust myself. Not yet. Relax. Calm down. The programme had not been so very terrible. Only two actual pictures of me. One in my wedding dress, looking about twelve years old, the big frock and showy veil far more noticeable than their wearer; the other a slightly more recent picture, but still complete with long hair and wearing a fussy, high-necked blouse. Of course, there was the dreadful clue of both women working as health centre managers, but then hundreds of people did – mostly female, lots of them blonde and in their mid-thirties. Good grief – I downed another gulp of Vermouth – coincidences happen.

  As I nursed my drink and reflected on the programme, I recalled that Alan had not appeared, nor apparently allowed any filming inside the house. That was good. It would have been extraordinarily painful to see him taking part in an appeal. Alan would not have cried, but hearing his voice would have stirred my deep-seated guilt. From the footage they had included it was apparent that Alan had taken part in some sort of appeal in the early days after I first took off, but it looked as though he had chosen not to be involved in the making of this new progra
mme.

  Alan’s absence from Disappeared! suggested that he no longer cared to participate in attempts to solve the mystery, and I took some small degree of encouragement from this, allowing myself to think that he had moved on, just as I had. Perhaps he had already found a new companion: someone much more suitable for him than I had ever been. I very much liked this new slant on things. As the alcohol warmed me, inducing a pleasant sense of impending intoxication thanks to my near-empty stomach, I began to play with the thought of a new woman in Alan’s life. The newcomer would be petite, with long hair; the kind of girl who never got nervous and dropped the china, or became side-tracked by a book so that she omitted to water the geraniums or wind the clocks when she had earlier undertaken to do so. She would be transported by all that business in the bedroom.

  If there was such a person living with Alan, then she must have been almost as annoyed as I was by the intrusion of Martin Bullock and his team, raking up the whole dreadful fandango about Alan’s long-lost wife and thereby potentially upsetting the apple cart. Then I was struck by a new idea. If Alan had found someone else, he might be quite pleased to divorce me. He could even have taken steps to do so by now. Wasn’t it possible to have someone declared officially dead after a certain number of years? Instead of being dead Susan McCarthy, I might be dead Jennifer Reynolds. Shirley Wallingworth and Deirdre Lazenby were very probably dead too. All of us dead together. The thought made me feel lightheaded, poised on a tightrope between laughter and tears.

  I gulped the last of my drink and poured another, unusually aware of the isolation of the cottage, the encircling darkness beyond the sitting-room curtains. The temptation to call Rob was still strong. I imagined him putting his arms around me, so loving, so reassuring. Saying that he had seen the programme and it did not matter. Saying that whatever happened, he would still love me.

  In reality, I knew that as he had a lot of work to catch up on, there was every chance that he would not have watched the programme – but what if I told him the truth anyway? I went through it all again in my head, but it was useless. It’s too late, I told myself. If only I’d told him sooner … But how? The opportunity had never arisen. How would it? Confiding that you are living under an assumed identity isn’t the sort of thing which tends to crop up naturally in the course of conversation. So the deception continues, grows ever more complicated, until telling is impossible.

  Suppose, just suppose, Rob had seen the programme …

  He probably hadn’t.

  What if he had?

  If he had recognized me, what would he do? Ring me? Wait for me to ring him? Ring the police?

  What would happen if not Rob but someone else had spotted me? What about my colleagues at Belsay House, or one of the regular patients, or someone who knew me from the village stores, or maybe Rob’s mother? The woman with the remarkable memory for faces – how had Miss Marple spent her evening down in Sidmouth? Presumably any third parties – Rob’s mother included – would go straight to the police. How long would it take them to investigate? How long would I have to wait before the phone rang or a knock came at my door?

  There is a limit to the amount of time you can sustain yourself at red alert. When midnight had arrived and there was still no knock at the door, no telephone call, I doused the lights and went to bed. To my surprise, I fell immediately into a deep sleep, which held me fast until the morning.

  TEN

  Martin Bullock had said that it was very difficult for anyone to simply vanish, but in some ways he was wrong. Back in the mid-eighties, so long as you had some money, it was always possible to get a room somewhere, even if it was in the seedier part of town. A woman applying for low-paid work attracted few suspicions and awkward questions could be deflected with simple answers. I learned to apply for work with small organizations that had no time for form filling and did not bother to take up references. The nation had yet to be gripped by a collective obsession for examining everyone’s photographic credentials (coupled by the ubiquitous utility bill), but even so I knew that my various National Insurance numbers would ultimately be queried because they didn’t match up with central records. That didn’t matter so long as I kept moving on, shedding one identity in favour of another, but it was a precarious existence. The biggest difficulty was in doing without a bank account. Banks turned out to be very fussy about whose money they were willing to handle. There were certain things which one needed in order to open a bank account even then, things which came under the term ‘ID’. ID – the magic key without which some spheres of life were perpetually closed, and obtaining any sort of ID seemed invariably conditional on already having some other form of ID.

  I had a vague notion that fake identities could be bought, but this avenue was not an easy one to progress along. Purveyors of fake IDs don’t advertise their services in Yellow Pages and, even supposing I managed to find someone who sold fake IDs, I had no idea how much such a thing might cost. I could vaguely remember a high-profile case of someone who had organized a fake ID for themselves by taking on the identity of someone who was dead, but I was not entirely sure how that would work. In my professional experience, people who were dead had death certificates – all their records said ‘DEAD’ in big letters. Surely anyone trying to resurrect a dead person would quickly attract the wrong sort of attention?

  What I needed was to be able to assume an identity which was still, at least technically, alive and ongoing. To pick up as it were, where someone else had left off. I thought about this idea a lot, without ever seeing how to achieve it, but in the end my salvation came about through a conversation overheard while I was laying tables in the Heather Bank Hotel in Keswick.

  It had been a quiet day and by two o’clock in the afternoon there was only one table still occupied, where two ladies were lingering over their coffee. They had talked loudly and continuously throughout their lunch, as women of a certain age and type often do. Such conversations were normally of no interest whatever to me, but on this occasion a few chance words made me prick up my ears. One lady was full of the news that the daughter of a mutual friend was going to be married abroad – not in one of those ceremonies arranged on a beach in the Caribbean, but in France – for the very good reason that she was going to marry a Frenchman, whom the loud-voiced diner referred to as ‘her foreign chap’.

  And suddenly I remembered Susan McCarthy. Poor Susan, who had never got as far as marrying her foreign chap and had died abroad. Susan had been buried with her fiancé in France, which almost certainly meant that there was no death certificate for her in England. In this lay possibilities for me, and I thought them through carefully.

  My path had crossed with Susan McCarthy’s three times. Firstly, we had been at the same secondary school, although Susan was two years younger than I. A few years after school, we had bumped into each other at a wedding. Alan and I had been invited because he was an old friend of the groom. The bride transpired to be Susan McCarthy’s cousin. She had come home from university for the weekend in order to attend the celebrations and we chatted to one another for a few minutes, as one does on bumping into any slight acquaintance in such circumstances. Susan was bright and bubbly, very full of life. I suppose I was quiet by comparison, and hovering in Alan’s shadow as usual.

  It was not very long after this that another strange quirk of fate threw us together, because when Susan graduated she took a job with a medical research agency. It was a temporary post, on a short-term contract – the sort of job graduates take while they look for something more to their liking. There was nothing technical involved – just extracting information from records – and the agency placed her at the practice in Nicholsfield where I was manager. The real Susan wasn’t particularly interested in medical research, so it was a wonder she got the job at all. Her degree was in French and business studies and her long-term plan was to work in France. She had already done a year there as part of her degree, but the real driving factor was that she had a boyfriend over there, and th
e other staff guessed that things were pretty serious when he arranged for a massive bouquet to arrive on her birthday. Susan’s birthday happened to be Halloween – another stroke of good fortune, as it made a conveniently easy date for me to remember later.

  Her assignment with the practice ended at the same time as her contract with the research agency. She went straight over to France in order to spend some time with her boyfriend, and word filtered back that they were going to be married. One of the medical secretaries lived near Susan’s parents and she heard it from them. The news that Susan had been killed in a road accident reached us a few weeks later, via the same channel.

  At first the idea of using Susan’s name repelled me. It seemed disrespectful – macabre, even – but against this I could see that it also represented a heaven-sent opportunity. Chance had given me vital information about Susan, and being able to work out her precise date of birth made it easy to apply for her birth certificate. Circumstances had also put me in possession of other vital knowledge, such as exactly when and where Susan had last paid tax and National Insurance, and the name and address of her last employer.

  Having obtained Susan’s birth certificate and rented an address in her name, I set about reconstructing Susan McCarthy in my own image. I re-sat my driving test as Susan McCarthy and passed first time, for the second time. Armed with a driving licence and birth certificate, it was now possible for me to open a legitimate bank account. Step by step I became Susan McCarthy. Eventually I embarked on the boldest part of the plan yet: concocting an artificial work history for Susan, for which I appropriated qualifications and a work record which closely paralleled my own. I wrote off for jobs as Susan McCarthy, stating that I had been living abroad. I asked the authorities to re-issue my ‘lost’ National Insurance number, claiming that I had forgotten it during my sojourn in France. I broke back in by taking a temporary post, covering for a practice manager who was ill. To these employers I offered my own qualifications: ‘I’m sorry, the certificates are packed up in storage, I’m between houses …’ And two not very recent references: ‘My partner and I have been living abroad for four years, so I haven’t got anything more up to date, I’m afraid …’ They needed someone at short notice and I was available. The medical profession can be scarily lax about taking up references.