'Aye, go on then. But you can arrange the bloody transport yourself.'
I remembered an Internet cafe somewhere near George Square; I walked through the Saturday-afternoon shoppers until I found it, waited in the long queue to buy a coffee, keeping my head down, hoping I wouldn’t meet anyone I knew, then rented time on a computer.
The author of The Friday the Thirteenth Vanishing, the book devoted to Gloria’s disappearance, was a man called Drew Manson. He’d written three other books, all of them following the demise of unfortunate women, all of them out of print. I punched the title and author’s name into a search engine and let out a low Yes when the hits appeared on the screen. I smiled a silent apology at the studious girl on the next computer and clicked on Manson’s website. It had a clumsy homemade feel, but I was its thousand-and-fifth visitor.
The most recent postings wavered between hurt and outrage. All of them lamented the lack of new editions of Manson’s books, in the same faintly florid style. At the bottom of the page were an email address and an invitation to contact Manson with any new information relating to the crimes in his books. I might be a cynical bachelor who’d forfeited all hope of romance, but I was growing to love the Internet.
I set up a new email account, [email protected], and sent Manson an invitation to meet and discuss the possibility of a new edition of his book in the light of Bill Noon’s tragic death. Then I looked at the links from Manson’s site. There were reviews of his books, some long-past festivals Manson had read at and the address for the website of the National Missing Persons Helpline. I clicked on the link and started to scroll through the images of the disappeared.
They were random faces, more young than old, though the old were there too, looking out from their photographs or hiding behind the faces of their younger selves in pictures taken decades ago. Long hippy hair, seventies mullets, eighties flat-tops, photographs so dated they’d make you smile, if they’d not been turned tragic by circumstance. The same skewed aspect clung to all of the images. The lost mothers and brothers, sisters, aunts, daughters, sons and uncles generally had a carefree air, caught at a family celebration or a party or maybe just the last photograph in the spool.
There were two photographs of Gloria Noon. The familiar image I’d come to know from the newspaper reports and a second, digitally aged one. The page flashed from one to the other: young Gloria, aged Gloria, young Gloria, aged Gloria. The images were imperfectly aligned and her shoulders moved up and down between the two, making it look like Gloria was shrugging as she smiled out from the screen of lost faces. Her resume summarised the time and known circumstances of her vanishing. It said nothing about possible murder.
Even at my lowest I’d never totally vanished. I wondered how many of the disappeared were dead, how many had been coerced into leaving. I wondered if they even knew that they were missing, that there were people who loved them, desperate to forgive whatever they had done. But then who was I to jump to conclusions? Maybe some of them had committed acts too awful to be absolved.
I clicked to the next page and a warning that the following images might disturb me; I clicked again and the screen threw forth photographs of some of the found. There were only three of them. A woman washed up in the Thames, a youth discovered dead in Petersham Woods and an elderly man who had lain in the bushes in Richmond Park for a very long time before his skeletal remains were uncovered. All of them had lost their features to decay and the images on this page showed reconstructions of how they might have looked in life. The technicians who rebuilt these faces were more magician than I’d ever be. They crafted an illusion of flesh onto bare bone, dragging back the lost features of the dead. The technicians’ skill was painstaking and exact, but the images were ghastly. The smiles of the missing people that had shone carelessly from the previous page were all gone. There was no glimmer of expression here, the skin was too smooth, the eyes too blank, the lips too set, no living face ever held such deathness. The missing may yet be alive, but one look at the remoulded faces of these three showed what their fate might be.
I closed the site. The dead and the missing weren’t going to tell me anything, my search had to be through the living. I logged onto yell.com and started to search for Gloria’s sister, Sheila Bowen.
There were several Bowens in the telephone listings but only one Bowen’s & Sons Gents Outfitters. I jotted down the number then checked my new Veritable Crime email account.
There was a welcome to the server and an offer to enlarge my penis and supply me with Viagra. Maybe my enlarged penis would be too big to keep up without help. There was no message from Mr Manson.
The Internet cafe resembled a large open-plan office where the dress code ranged from casual to scruffy-as- youlike. I sat for a second listening to the sounds around me, the clatter of computer keys and occasional exchange of muted conversation, the kind of ambience a busy newsroom might generate. I collected a fresh coffee then took out my new mobile, dialled Bowen’s outfitters and asked to speak to Mrs Sheila Bowen. I expected the woman on the other end to say she was retired, dead, or too busy to come to the phone, but instead her voice became guarded.
It said, 'This is Sheila Bowen. Is it about Gloria?'
London
FOR A WOMAN whose sister had disappeared without trace from her own home in the middle of the day, Sheila Bowen was remarkably lax about security. I gave her a big smile and one of the business cards that I’d had made in a machine at the railway station, identifying me as Will Gray, freelance journalist. She glanced at it casually then invited me in.
Sheila lived in one of a row of semi-detached houses built in the fifties to accommodate lower-middle-class commuters. Today it was probably worth a small fortune. She greeted me at the door, and then led me through to a lounge decorated in pale parchment shades.
Her white blouse and cream slacks blended with the room. Maybe her sister had taken the coordinating colour scheme too far and simply faded into the wallpaper.
I had hoped she’d leave me alone to get my bearings while she made a pot of tea, but Sheila had obviously had faith in my punctuality, or maybe she’d simply wanted to occupy her nerves in a domestic task. A tray holding a teapot, two matching cups and what looked like homemade cake was already waiting on the blond wood coffee table.
If we’d met socially I would have supposed Sheila Bowen a well-preserved, middle-class housewife whose only concern was finding the right shade of white for her hall carpet or keeping her husband’s cholesterol down. The slim woman sitting on the ivory-coloured couch opposite me was surprisingly unchanged from the photographs in the thirty-year-old newspapers I’d found in the Mitchell. Her hair was ash-gold, styled in soft fronds around a pale face that was remarkably unlined considering all the troubles she’d encountered. It seemed that I wasn’t the only one who could create an illusion.
She started to pour the tea and I noticed that her hands were steady. There was a wedding band and a diamond eternity ring on her left hand, and a slim silver ring that looked cheap against her other jewellery on her
