Clara’s voice rose in frustration. “Then why the hell didn’t he tell me? I can’t believe he kept them from me. They’re so nasty—some of them are fucking sick.”
“Yeah,” Mac said. “He, um, he didn’t want you to worry. . . .”
“Oh for God’s sake!”
“I know, I know. I think he was embarrassed they’re from a woman.”
“Are you kidding me? Whoever this nutcase is broke into my flat! She’s been threatening my boyfriend. What the hell was Luke playing at not telling me about it?” She looked at him sharply. “Does he know who she is?”
Emphatically Mac shook his head. “No. Honestly, Clara, I don’t think he’s got a clue.”
She went to the screen and read the last e-mail aloud. “‘I’m coming for you.’ I mean, what the fuck?” She looked around for her phone. “I’m going to call the police.”
Mac got up. “I’m pretty sure they won’t do anything until he’s been missing twenty-four hours. Look, Clara, I think these e-mails are from some weirdo who wants to rattle Luke—an ex maybe—but I really doubt they have anything to do with him not coming home last night.”
“Well, where the bloody hell is he, then?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps he’s just gone away for a wee while to clear his head.”
“Clear his head? Why on earth would he need to clear his head?”
But Mac’s eyes slid away from hers and instead of replying, he said, “I’ve called all his friends, but I guess he could be at his parents’ place. Have you tried there?”
The question made Clara pause. “No, not yet.”
“Maybe you should check with them. It’s the first thing the police will do.”
She thought for a moment. Mac was right. His mum and dad’s house in Suffolk was the obvious place Luke would go—in fact, she was surprised it hadn’t occurred to her before. Luke was closer to his parents than anyone she’d ever known. Perhaps the e-mails had rattled him enough to make him want to get out of London for a few days. But in that case, why hadn’t he told her?
Looking down at her phone, she hesitated. “What if he’s not there, though? You know what his mum and dad are like—they’ll be beside themselves.”
“Aye, you’re not wrong there.”
She and Mac stared at each other, both thinking the same thing: Emily.
—
Luke never talked about his elder sister, and Clara knew only the bare facts: that when she was eighteen, Emily had walked out of the family home and was never heard from again. He’d been ten years old at the time, his brother Tom, fifteen. He had told Clara a few months after they’d started dating, one night at his old place in Peckham, a shared flat off Queens Road in a dilapidated Victorian terrace, where at night they would lie in bed and listen to the music and voices carrying from the bars and restaurants squeezed into the railway arches across the street, trains thundering over the elevated tracks above.
“And you’ve no idea what happened to her?” she’d asked, astonished by his story.
Luke had shrugged, and when he’d spoken again, there was a heaviness to his voice she’d not heard before. “No, none of us had a clue. She just walked out one day. Left a note saying she was leaving home, and we never heard from her again. It totally destroyed my family; my parents never got over it. Mum had a nervous breakdown and in the end it was better to never mention her. All the pictures of her got put away. Everyone just stopped talking about her.”
Clara had sat up, appalled. “But that’s awful! You were only ten—you must have wanted to talk about her. It must have devastated you and your brother too.”
The hand that had been stroking her leg paused. “We learned it was better not to, I suppose.”
“But . . . was there—I mean, weren’t the police involved?”
He shook his head. “She went of her own free will. I think that was the hardest part for my mum and dad—she left a note saying she was going, but no explanation as to why or where. My dad told me they hired a private detective to try to find her, but it didn’t come to anything.” He shrugged. “She just completely vanished.”
And in that moment she’d understood something about Luke that had always puzzled her. Something she’d glimpsed hovering behind the laughter and the jokes, his need to be the life and soul of every party, a sorrow flickering barely there at the edges of him she hadn’t quite been able to put her finger on before.
“What was she like?” she’d asked softly.
He smiled. “She was ace. She was funny and sweet but kind of . . . fierce, you know? I was only ten, and I guess I’m biased, but I don’t think you meet many people like her. She was so passionate about stuff. She’d go off on all these rallies and marches: save the whales, women’s rights—you name it. Drove Mum and Dad mad because she’d never stay still and get on with her schoolwork. I was just a kid, but even then I admired her for it, how principled she was, how sure she was about what was right and wrong. And she was a free spirit, you know?” He sighed and rubbed his face. “Maybe our house was too restrictive for her and she wanted her freedom. Who knows? Maybe that’s why she went.”
“I’m so sorry,” Clara had said quietly. “I can’t imagine how hard that must have been for you all.”
He got up then, crossing the room to pull a book down from its shelf, then handed it to her. It was a thin volume of children’s poems. T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. “She gave me this a few months before she left,” he told her. “She used to read it to me when I was a kid. It was . . .” He stopped. “Well, anyway. That’s kind of
