Then You Were Gone (7 page)

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.