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‘What about in there?’ Neil gestures towards the hoardings of a building site between the Oasis and the pubs: two- and three-bedroomed luxury riverside flats, advertised for sale off plan.
‘The police searched it,’ Matt says.
‘This morning they did.’
Matt breathes away the insinuation, shakes his head against the words that will not leave him: his daughter. A body.
Neil hoists himself up, hooks one work boot over the top of the plywood sheet. A grunt and he has heaved himself over.
‘OK?’ Matt calls.
‘Yep. Throw us the lights.’
Matt throws the flashlights one by one. The board rattles against its fixings as he clambers awkwardly over. He drops down, chafes at the splinters in his hands. Together they move into the skeleton structures, their flashlights catching the glittering rain.
It is so fucking dark.
‘Abi? Abi? Abi!’
Matt’s light bounces off a pair of staring eyes.
‘Jesus!’ He almost drops the torch. But it is only a fox, which stares at him a moment before sauntering away like arrogance itself.
Further in, there is some shelter. The torturous drip-drip-drip of water falling from the steel poles above their heads. They shine their beams into the scaffolding, the half-built walls, the shallow puddles shuddering in the dug-out trenches.
‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ Neil says, drops budding on his eyelashes. ‘I don’t have words, mate.’
Matt stares into Neil’s wet blue eyes, sees all the love and loyalty of the past two decades. If there is one person on this earth he can tell, it is this man. And he has to tell someone.
Nine
Ava
Midnight. My husband and his best friend on the doorstep, their clothes saturated and filthy, raspberry pinpricks up their arms, darker red slashes. Their hands are empty. They are crying, their sobs muscular, visceral. We are not sufficiently evolved that the sight fails to shock. And it does, it shocks, especially in a man like Neil – his physical stature making up in strength what it lacks in height. He is a robust square of a man, built to lift things, to take punches, to withstand. Matt, the more effete of the two, his tall frame sagging in the middle, his dark hair slick with rain, his wretched, rectangular mouth.
‘I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’
The wooden floor of the hall hits my knees; the welcome mat needles the palms of my hands.
Afterwards, once Lorraine has left, Matt and I take showers. We change into jogging bottoms and T-shirts. We want to be dressed should a call come. I suppose we must fall asleep in the small hours. I remember weeping against his back. Please let her be found, I remember whispering. Please. Please. Please.
September. Almost a year ago and yesterday at once. My daughter, gone. That not knowing, that hanging chord. The rupture of selves: me there, me here. Then, the certainty somewhere not in my head but in my heart that I will search for her until the end of time; now, searching for her, still searching, until the end of time.
It isn’t until the next morning that Abi’s coat is found.
I wake up in my jogging bottoms next to Matt. For a split second everything is normal. And then it isn’t.
Lorraine comes to the house early, around 8.30 a.m. She makes toast and marmalade and we eat it. We drink coffee made the way she knows we take it. Matt goes out on his bike, but not for long, I think. At around 9.30 a.m., a woman I recognise arrives. DI Sharon Farnham.
‘Mrs Atkins,’ she says.
I let her in. The tape is gone from the front door. That’s right – they took it down last night.
‘Did they find the BMW?’ I ask her.
‘Can we go and sit down?’ The look on her face makes me think she must have something of importance to tell us. The boulder of dread in my gut hardens.
‘Sure.’
