the rubbish bin. An awful smell, sweet and rotting, hit me as I leant over it. But I forced myself to look into it. There were horrible things down there, mouldy, rancid, slimy, but no tin-foil containers left over from a take away meal. Which meant that the bin had been emptied at least once and then there had been enough time for more rubbish to be thrown into it. Which meant that Jo or I, or Jo and I, or someone else had been here for at least some time after the Tuesday. Unless the take away meal had been thrown directly into an outside bin. How likely was that?
My head hurt. Hadn't Robin said something about me phoning her to cancel our evening drink? I scribbled 'Wednesday' in the margin of the page and put a question mark beside it.
I began with Carol's list of telephone messages. More than anything those scrawled reminders took me back to my old life, those urgent communications, brief responses. One by one, I crossed out the ones I recognized. At the end I was left with three I couldn't remember. One with no name beside it, but a phone number. One saying, 'Pat called.' Pat? I knew about twelve people called Pat, male and female. One of them I'd been at nursery school with. She had the loudest scream I've ever heard. The other message was 'a guy called'. Thanks, Carol.
I sat down again and selected another blank sheet of paper. I wrote 'Things To Do' at the top of the page. My general motto in life was, when in doubt write a list. First I wrote, 'phone the numbers'. Under that I wrote: 'Avalanche'. Laurence had said that after I had stormed out of Jay and Joiner's I had used up my own time to go and speak to people involved in the project, and encouraged them to complain. It was one of the only real clues I had to what I'd been doing during the lost days.
I opened the Avalanche file and took out the contact sheet on top. They were all familiar names, the people I'd been dealing with during those frenetic days at the beginning of January. I flicked through the file. I wrote down names, put some in brackets and underlined others. It made me tired just to think about the work I'd done.
I came to the accounts at the back of the file. I stared at the figures until they blurred. As if shapes were sliding out of a thick fog, I remembered some of the arguments I'd had with Laurence. Or, at least, I remembered why I would have had them: the shoddy behaviour of our company towards its sub-contractors, the creative accounting that had gone on under my nose. And then I remembered Todd.
Actually, Todd was a part of my life that I'd never forgotten, just pushed to the back of my mind. I had wondered afterwards if I should have seen the signs earlier. He had been running the Avalanche project. It was a hugely complicated task that needed a mixture of finesse and banging heads together. I had learnt very quickly that everybody on a job has a grievance against someone else and everybody has an excuse for their own failings. If you step too far in one direction, you provoke a revolt. Too far in the other direction and nothing gets done. Because Todd and I were using some of the same people I started to hear that the work was going slowly. Work always goes slowly. But if the builders say it's going slowly, they mean it's going backwards. I mentioned this a couple of times to Todd and he said it was all coming along fine. I started to feel something was seriously wrong and mentioned it to Laurence.
The next I heard was that Todd had been fired and that I was in charge of the Avalanche job. Laurence told me that Todd had apparently had a breakdown without telling anybody and that part of this meant that he had done absolutely nothing and that Jay and Joiner's was facing the prospect of litigation. I was appalled and said that I hadn't meant to betray Todd. Laurence said that Todd was a psychotic, that he needed medical help, but that the immediate problem was to save the company. So I walked into Todd's office and I worked solidly for forty hours. For a week after that I never slept for more than four hours a night. So if I was partly responsible for what had happened to Todd, then Todd was partly responsible for what had happened to me.
I wrote his name on the sheet of paper. I thought, then added a question mark. I'd consider that one. I drew a square around the question mark. I added more lines to make it look as if the question mark were inside a cube. I shaded the sides of the cube. I drew lines radiating from the cube to make it look as if the cube were shining or exploding.
Another thought occurred. Oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck. Underneath Todd' I wrote 'pregnancy test' and underlined it. I had had sex with someone and I clearly hadn't taken any precautions. Who with? I started to think of writing another list of potential candidates, but I had nobody to put on it. Which men had I definitely met during my lost week? Guy. Unlikely. The person who delivered the take away was probably a man. And, of course, there was him.
Next I started to write 'What' and then stopped. I'd been thinking: What are you doing? And I'd started to write it automatically. But what was I doing? The idea of these forgotten dark days was horrible and it was somewhere in my brain tormenting me every second of the day and night. Sometimes I fantasized that that was what was causing the pain in my head. If I could fill in all the blanks, discover everything I had been doing, the pain would go. Was it worth putting myself at risk for that? And was I even at risk? Was he out there somewhere in London looking for me? He might have found me already. He might be outside Jo's flat right now, waiting for me to come out. Or I could be wrong about all this. The man might have vanished. He knew that I didn't remember how he'd first met me. I didn't know what he looked like. If he sat tight, he would be safe. He would be safe to go off and kill other women and forget about me. But could he feel sure?
I drew a large question mark around 'What'. I turned it into a three-dimensional question mark, then shaded it. If I could prove that I really had been kidnapped .. . That was the best I could hope for. If I could find some piece of evidence, then the police would believe me and they would protect me and go and find the man and I could have a life again.
But what would that evidence be like? Where would I look? I decorated my giant question mark with a filigree of baby question marks that ran down its back, round its tail, back up along its stomach then up to its head until it was entirely surrounded by a cloud of fluttering bemusement.
Ten
I woke with a start and for a moment I couldn't remember where I was. The room was dark and there was no sound at all. I lay in bed and waited for memory to return. I waited to hear something; a sound in the blackness. My heart was hammering fast and my mouth felt suddenly dry. Then I heard it, a gentle shuffling outside. Perhaps that was what had woken me. But who was there, outside my window? I turned and looked over at my radio-alarm clock on the table. It was ten minutes to five, and cold.
I heard it again, the shuffling, scraping sound. I couldn't move, but lay pressed up against my pillow. It was difficult to breathe properly and my head hammered relentlessly. I let myself remember the hood and the gag, but then I pushed away the thought. I made myself get out of bed and go over to the window. I opened the curtains a crack and looked outside, through the flowers of frost on the glass. The newly fallen snow made everything brighter, and by the light of the street lamp I could make out a dark shape beneath me. A fat tabby cat was rubbing itself against the shrub by the front door, winding its thick tail round the dead leaves. I almost laughed in relief, but then it raised its head and seemed to gaze straight at me with its unblinking yellow eyes. A feeling of dread seized me. I looked down the street, dark between its puddles of orange light. It was empty. Then a car a few yards away started up; its headlights illuminated the street and I caught the glimpse of a shape in the distance. There were footprints in the new snow.
I let the curtains drop and turned away. I was being ridiculous, I told myself sharply. Paranoid. In London someone is always awake. There are always cars and cats and figures on the street. Whatever time I woke in the night I could press my face against the window and see someone standing there.
I climbed back into bed and curled up, wrapping my arms around myself. My feet were freezing and I tried to tuck them inside the rugby shirt to warm them, but they kept slipping out. After a few minutes, I got out of bed again and went to the bathroom. I'd seen a hot-water bottle hanging on the door. I boiled the kettle, filled it, took two pills for my head, then climbed back into bed. I lay there for a while, hugging the bottle against myself and trying to go back to sleep. Thoughts whirled round in my head, like a wild snowstorm, and tasks piled up in drifts: the phone calls I had to make, the names in the file I had to go to see, and I must try to find out where Jo was, find out more about her at least, and what about the bloody morning-after pill? Someone must know what on earth I'd been up to, and was I looking for one man or was I looking for two, and what if I was pregnant? I remembered my old life and it seemed very far away, like a picture behind glass, while this new life was sinister and insistent, and shifted whenever I looked at it.
The radiator crackled and hummed, and after a few minutes the edge was gone from the cold. Outside, through the chink in the curtain, I could see the darkness was beginning to lift. It was no good. I couldn't sleep any more. While I lay there, dread squatted on my chest like a great toad. To shift it, I had to get started on sorting things out. That was the only thing to do.
I had a bath, almost too hot to bear so that when I got out my skin was pink and my fingers wrinkled. I
