“Sadie was in the pub one night after work and Luke got talking to her. Her dad had recently died, I think, and she was drunk and really upset, so he comforted her, told her he was always around for a chat. You know what Luke’s like, always wants to be there for people. Anyway, he said that, after that, she used to seek him out whenever she could, they’d meet at lunch now and then, and she’d turn up at the pub after work and make a beeline for him. A few of them ended up at her flat one night, and, well, I guess one thing led to another. He told me she wouldn’t leave him alone after that, saying that she’d fallen for him, that he was the only thing keeping her going. He got in too deep, didn’t know how to get himself out of it. . . .”
“I expect it helped that she looks like a fucking supermodel,” Clara muttered, once again mentally comparing her own looks with Sadie’s and finding them humiliatingly lacking. She herself was the sort of woman others referred to as “cute.” Five foot five with a short Bettie Page bob, a slightly snubbed nose, and freckles, she’d long made peace with the fact that she wasn’t the stuff of male fantasy—until now, that was, when suddenly every long-buried adolescent insecurity seemed to be rushing back at her with the speed of an express train.
He sighed. “Look, I’m not trying to excuse him, but he made a mistake, a massive one, he totally ballsed up, and he knows it. . . . He’s truly sorry. I know he is.”
“Jesus,” she said, putting her head in her hands. “I thought he was so . . . nice.”
“He is nice,” Mac said. “He’s just a bit of a fuckup underneath it all.”
“What right has he got to be fucked-up?” she said angrily. “I mean, you’ve met his parents, seen their beautiful home. . . .”
Mac was silent for a while. “Did he ever talk to you much about when Emily went missing?” he asked.
She glanced at him. “No, not really,” she admitted.
He nodded. “I moved down to Suffolk from Glasgow right after she disappeared. I was the lanky new kid with a weird accent. The other lads made mincemeat of me, until Luke stepped in. We just hit it off, and, well, I was only a kid, but fuck me, it was a horror show round at his place for a while.”
Clara frowned. “Go on.”
“They were all totally destroyed by it. Rose went to bed for months and barely ate or spoke. His dad barricaded himself in his study and Tom went completely off the rails.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Tom did?” It was a side of Luke’s rather uptight, pompous brother she wouldn’t have guessed at.
“Yeah, it was like he’d just checked out of the family. He was sixteen by then and hanging out with a bad crowd—off getting pissed and high, that sort of thing, you know? I think Rose and Oliver felt they’d lost their grip on him. But the point is, after that, it was as though Luke became the center of their world, like they became fixated on him. With Emily gone and Tom out all the time, everything began to revolve around him—he was still only ten when she left, remember.”
“What do you mean, ‘fixated’?”
Mac shrugged. “They’d never leave him alone. He couldn’t move without them breathing down his neck. They wouldn’t even go out for the evening without him, even if Tom was around to keep an eye on him. They became obsessed with everything he said and did, his schoolwork, how he was feeling, what he was thinking, every word that came out of his mouth. . . . It was intense, like they wanted to make up for how wrong things had gone with Emily.”
Clara frowned. “Okay . . . ,” she said.
“Well, so anyway, maybe growing up like that made Luke feel responsible for his parents’ happiness, for everyone’s happiness. Or maybe the attention lavished on him made him a bit selfish, a bit entitled. But you need to hear from him how sorry he is, how much he regrets it. He told me it was over with Sadie; he said it was the worst mistake he’d ever made, that he didn’t want to lose you. I believed him. Honestly, Clara, I really think it made him realize how much he loves you.”
She put her head in her hands. “Where the hell is he? I can’t bear this . . . nothingness. There’s so much I want to say to him.” She glanced up at Mac. “Maybe he has just left me. Maybe he couldn’t find the balls to tell me to my face.”
Mac shook his head. “No. Not like this, not without his phone, without telling work, his parents . . . me.”
They were suddenly interrupted by an explosion of music from the flat above: a pounding bass so loud it made the ceiling vibrate. “For Christ’s sake,” Clara shouted, jumping to her feet. With a sudden fury she stormed from the flat and up the stairs and began hammering on her neighbor’s door. There was no response. The music blared on. “Answer the bloody door,” she yelled, giving it a kick. “Open it! Just bloody well open it right now!”
Unexpectedly it swung open. Her neighbor stared back at her, eyebrows raised in mock innocence. “What?”
“Turn the bloody music down. It’s insane. I can’t live like this!”
Slowly, and with an infuriating smile on her face, the woman turned and sauntered to her sound system, then flicked the dial down a notch. She turned back to Clara. “Happy?”
Clara stared at her. She was so very thin, her shapeless oversized T-shirt only accentuating her bony limbs and sharp angles. Her finely featured face, peeping out between curtains of long, lank dark hair, was covered by a thick, elaborate layer of makeup that was almost masklike. She was gazing back at Clara with prickly belligerence. What
