‘Is she okay?’ Katie’s anxious voice sounded up the stairs.
‘I don’t think she’s here.’
Clare reached the bottom of the stairs and headed towards the kitchen where she could hear the clatter of cups.
‘Not here? Then where the hell is she?’ There was worry still in Katie’s voice. ‘Should we tell the police?’
Becky laughed. ‘I don’t think so. They’d think we were crackers. Clare, who were you with in the theatre? Was there a crowd of you, or only you two?’
‘We sat with Jenna, the girl in the wheelchair. She’d parked herself at the end of our row, then there was Susie in the first seat, then me. Behind us was that lad from Birmingham on our course, Danny something or other, then Dom Andrews. Also behind us were the twins, Maria and Anya.’ Clare paused. ‘I can’t remember anybody else. The ones in front of us I didn’t know.’
‘Is she likely to have gone somewhere with any of them? Did she get chatting to somebody and assumed you’d guess where she was?’
‘She’s not like that.’ Clare shook her head as if to emphasise her words. ‘I’m worried, girls.’
‘So are we, but we can’t do anything at this stage. The police would laugh at us. We’re students, prone to doing odd things like disappearing for a couple of days on a whim. Because we know how out of character this is for Susie, doesn’t mean they’ll believe us.’ Katie’s sensible voice didn’t make them feel any better.
‘O…kay,’ Becky said slowly. ‘The first thing we need to do is check she isn’t in a diabetic coma in her room. We know she’s not downstairs, but if she came home because she felt ill, she’d be in bed.’
‘Her door’s locked,’ Clare said.
‘And am I the only one who can open a Yale lock with a credit card?’ Becky said.
Clare and Katie looked at each other. ‘How did you learn that?’ Clare asked.
‘I have two older brothers, Clare.’ Becky grinned.
The credit card slid down the sliver of a gap, and all three girls held their breath. It didn’t work the first time, but it did the second time, and Becky quietly pushed open the door.
The room was tidy, the bed made. Becky crossed the floor to check out the en suite but that was also empty. She smiled at the row of rubber ducks along the bathroom shelf.
‘Nothing,’ she said as she returned to see Clare and Katie sat on the edge of the bed.
‘So what do we do?’
‘Not a lot we can do. Don’t put your phones on silent tonight in case she’s in a situation where she needs help. Other than that, I hope we go to sleep and wake up in the morning to her in a drunken stupor and lying across her bed, with a hangover from hell.’ Becky hesitated, thinking please God, let that be the scenario.
‘She doesn’t drink,’ Clare reminded them. ‘She wouldn’t have had vodka in her Coke tonight, would she? I keep thinking that maybe she got talked into going off with some of the others we were sat with in the theatre, to carry on the discussion about the play. That was why we were there, to make notes and stuff. I would never have had her down as being thoughtless. She’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, and I can’t get over that little nag that she would have let me know. She knew I was only nipping to the ladies.’
‘She didn’t go anywhere with the lads you mentioned,’ Becky said quietly.
‘She didn’t?’
‘No, they came into the pub a good twenty minutes before you did, in a big group, talking about Macbeth.’
‘Shit.’ Clare breathed out the word, almost as a hiss. ‘Then I give in. I don’t know what to think. In that five minutes I was in the ladies, she vanished. I tell you, if she’s not back by seven tomorrow morning, I’m ringing the police.’
2
Erica Cheetham considered staying in bed. For a mere second she considered it, then she put one foot out, quickly bringing it back in. Bloody cold, she thought. Why couldn’t I have been a librarian, or something else that’s a nice occupation?
‘Call-out?’ Frannie muttered, nowhere near the state that could be loosely called wakefulness.
‘Yep. Go back to sleep, I’ll ring you later and let you know what’s happening.’
Frannie didn’t respond, so Erica leaned over, brushed back her wife’s short dark hair and gave her a quick kiss on what was showing of her forehead. Frannie’s deep brown eyes opened momentarily, closed again, and Erica shook her own head to force some degree of awareness.
She swung both legs out and allowed her feet to rest on the fluffy bedside rug before letting them take her towards the bathroom. She didn’t have time to shower, so splashed her face with water, gave her teeth a perfunctory twenty-second scrub, and returned to the bedroom to twist her long blonde hair into a ponytail. Her blue eyes stared back at her and she peered closer into the mirror searching for wrinkles. She counted every day as a bonus when she didn’t see one. She quickly dressed in jeans and a top before grabbing a breakfast bar and a travel mug of coffee and leaving the house.
It was still raining, and she pulled the hood of her thick winter coat up and over her head, while she unlocked her car. She reversed down the drive and on to the road after a cursory glance to see if anything was travelling towards the rear end of her car, but it was a token nod to the possibility – who the hell was likely to be out at four o’clock on a dismal late October morning, other than her.
The rain was heavy and she switched her wipers to fast. It had been constant rain for the best part of a week, and parts of Sheffield had flooded. It always baffled
