I anxiously tapped my pen on my thigh as receptionists trawled though admittance forms in search of his name, but there was nothing. I left them with his description, just in case he turned up later, unable to speak for himself.
My last resort was to phone his dad and his stepmum, Shirley. When she confirmed he wasn’t there either, I made up another excuse and told her I must have mixed my days up, as I thought he was popping over. Of course, she didn’t believe me. Simon wasn’t the ‘popping over’ type, at least where they were concerned.
I was so desperate I even contemplated trying to contact . . . him. But it had been three years since his name was last mentioned in our house, and I wasn’t even sure how to find him, anyway.
My fears were interrupted by the phone’s ring. I banged my elbow on the sideboard and swore as I raced to pick up the receiver, and then let out a disappointed sigh when Steven’s wife, Baishali, spoke.
‘Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to come round?’ she asked.
I said no, and she told me she’d call in later. But it was my husband I wanted to hear from, not my friend. All I could think about was that Simon had been gone for the whole day and nobody knew where he was. I was angry with myself for not being alarmed when Steven had first called in the morning.
What kind of wife was I? I hoped Simon would forgive me when we found him.
9.00 p.m.
By the time Roger and Paula arrived soon after my call, the day had suddenly caught up with me. My body and brain were frazzled.
The first thing they saw when the front door opened was me bursting into tears. Paula hugged me and walked me back into the living room, where I’d spent most of the evening waiting by the phone. Roger had known Simon since infant school but had switched hats from family friend to his job as a detective sergeant in the police force. Even so, it was Paula, who’d always been the bossy type, who led the way as we tried to piece together how he might have spent his final moments in the house.
‘Right, let’s start at the beginning and work out where that bloody idiot’s been all day,’ she ordered. ‘When I see him again I’m going to give him hell for what he’s putting you through.’
We exhausted every possible scenario as to where he could have gone and who with. But when it came down to it, none of us had the first clue. Reluctantly, we resigned ourselves to the fact he’d vanished.
Thinking that on my own was hard; hearing his friend echo my thoughts was harder. And making it official made it all the worse. Police protocol meant we had to wait twenty-four hours before we could report Simon missing, but Roger was willing to bend the rules and called his station to explain.
‘God, Paula, what’s happened to him?’ I asked, my voice trembling.
She couldn’t give me an answer, so she did what she always did when I needed a best friend, and told me what I wanted to hear. ‘They’ll find him, Catherine, I promise,’ she whispered, and hugged me again.
I was trapped in a horrible nightmare that happened to other people, not to me. Not to my family and not to my husband.
SIMON
Northampton, twenty-five years earlier
4 June, 5.30 a.m.
I rolled onto my side and glanced at the pearly white face of the alarm clock on the bedside table. Half past five, it read. It had been fifteen months since I’d last managed to sleep any later than that.
Our backs were connected by barely an inch of flesh but I still felt the delicate rise and fall of her spine as she slept. I pushed myself away from her. I watched as a fragile sliver of creamy orange light gently illuminated the bedroom through a curtain crack.
I pulled the cotton sheet from my chest and gazed at the sun as it rose over the cornfields, enshrouding the bleakness of our cottage with a golden blanket. I dressed in clothes thrown over a chair and opened the wardrobe, careful to ensure the creak of its hinges didn’t wake her.
I fumbled for the watch that had spent most of its life hidden in a green box on a dusty shelf, and fastened it to my wrist. It pinched, but I’d become familiar with discomfort. I left the box where it was.
I moved carefully across the floorboards and closed the door with little more than a whisper. I paused outside the bedroom door that always remained closed. I turned the handle and began to open it before stopping myself. I couldn’t do it. It would do me no favours to go back to that day.
The staircase groaned under my footsteps and startled the slumbering dog. Oscar’s amber eyes opened wide and he struggled to coordinate his sleepy limbs as he lolloped towards me.
‘Not today, boy,’ I told him, offering an apologetic smile. His head tilted to one side, confused then disappointed at being deprived of his daily walk. He let out a deflated sigh and returned to his bed in a huff, burying his head under his tartan blanket.
I unlocked the front door and gently closed it behind me. I chose the quiet of the lawn over the crunch of the gravel pathway, opened the rusty metal gate and began to walk. There was no final stroke of a child’s hair, no delicate kiss planted on my wife’s forehead or a last glance at the home we’d built together. There was only one direction for me to go. Their world was still in sleep but I had woken up.
And by the time they roused, there would be one less tortured soul amongst them hanging on by his fingertips.
6.10 a.m.
The house behind me had already faded into my past by the time I reached the dirt-track lane that would carry me into Harpole Woods.
My thoughts were blank but my legs were preprogrammed to take me to where I needed to be. They led me beyond the perimeter of the horse chestnut trees, through the stubbly bracken that tried to tear the legs of my jeans and into the woodland’s belly, to where the faded blue rope had lain for years as a marker on the ground’s sunken basin. There had been a pond there once, and the rope had been tied to a tree for the local children to swing over it. But the water had long since evaporated, leaving the rope without a use.
I picked it up from the ground and repeated the familiar process of tugging it until it was taut. The elements hadn’t eroded its strength and I wished I had remained that tough.
Then I sat on a long felled oak trunk and looked above, earmarking the strongest branch in the canopy.
7.15 a.m.
I couldn’t remember when I’d last been engulfed in such beautiful silence.
Almost two hours had passed since I’d removed myself from the chaos of my life. No children clattered around my feet. No radio blared pop songs from the kitchen windowsill. There was no constant spin of the washing machine drum on another endless cycle. Nothing to distract me from my thoughts – just the gentle hum of motorway traffic in the distance.