the headlines were rounded up. After this, the newsreader addressed the camera: The family of Elise Fox, who disappeared almost four years ago after a party in Gloucestershire, have today relaunched an appeal for information which might help to find her.
Nathan watched as, on screen, three people filed into a flashing room and took seats behind a desk. A trim, refined man. A woman in a wine-red suit. And a younger woman - a little older than Elise would have been, had she lived.
She was Elise's older sister.
They sat before a blown-up snapshot of Elise. She looked young and beautiful and careless. Nathan wouldn't have recognized her. His Elise was a flickering series of snapshots: the white-faced bundle by the tennis courts; her white breasts in the darkness of Bob's car; the shocking warmth inside her; the way her dead foot twitched on Bob's naked lap. A naked shape, face down in a scooped-out grave.
As the cameras flashed, the man spoke from a prepared statement.
'If somebody out there, anybody out there, knows what happened to Elise, or if someone out there knows where Elise might be, we beg you to please, please, get in contact.'
His voice broke on the word 'please' and his daughter reached up and touched his elbow, squeezing gently.
'We beg you,' she said. Elise's sister.
She was staring into the camera and through it.
Nathan jumped out of bed and turned on all the lights - the ceiling lights, the standard lamps, the bedside reading lights; the lights in the bathroom and in the wardrobe. Then he removed a miniature bottle of whisky from the minibar. His hands were shaking too badly to break the seal - he opened it with his teeth and tipped the bottle into his gullet.
The phone rang. Nathan snatched it up, not thinking.
'Hello?'
'Hello, mate,' said Justin, who was Nathan's boss. Justin thought himself an old school salesman: at conference dinners he drank whisky and loosened his tie and rolled his sleeves and smoked cigars into the early morning.
Justin and Nathan didn't trust one another. Because of this, they pretended to everyone -- including each other -- to be very close friends.
Justin said, 'Where are you?'
Nathan looked at his watch, then glanced at the TV. They'd moved on to another story now. Global warming or something.
'Sorry, mate. I must have fallen asleep.'
'You'd better get down here. The drinks have started.'
'When's dinner?'
'In forty minutes. But I need you down here, soon as poss.'
Nathan realized that he'd broken an arcane rule -- that the sales reps should never be left to mingle and speak freely. Instead they should be vexed by someone from head office whom they did not like, and who had nothing to say to them.
Nathan hurried to the shower. He stood under the water and tested his fingers, to see if he could feel them. He shampooed his hair and washed himself with the expensive soap he'd brought along. He put on fresh boxer shorts and socks and shirt and a fresh suit, and shoes and cufflinks. Today's suit he hung from the shower rail, where the shower steam would ease the creases from it.
He saw himself in the mirrored wall of the elevator. Smart suit and perfect hair. Bloodless lips.
He went to the formal dinner.
Two weeks before, Nathan had argued with Amrita about the cost effectiveness of an advert she'd placed in the Oldie magazine -- Amrita had called him a pompous wanker. So Nathan's long-term favoured status had taken a setback. He didn't get to sit with the marketing department.
The Foxes were on television again that night, and in the morning they were in the newspapers.
Over the next two weeks, he became almost accustomed to seeing them on the news, or in magazines and newspapers: the father's fine boned face, the mother's air of bewildered efficiency. And the clear-eyed directness of Elise's sister, who featured in many of the print interviews.
Her name was Holly.
Nathan read and reread these interviews until he'd memorized them.
He didn't know why he did this; familiarity with Elise's name in print didn't relieve the dread of seeing it again - or make it possible to sleep with the lights off.
But he connected with something in Holly Fox's clear-eyed gaze, and was greatly moved. It felt like a kind of love, forged in the same smithy.
He wished that things could be better for her - that Holly Fox could be happy.
Nathan wished that he could be happy, too.
Eventually, he wondered if their possible happiness, like the fact of their unhappiness, might not somehow be linked.
That's when he decided to find her.
13
He had to wait until after Christmas.
It was the worst time of year. Even when he came home drunk following some work-related function - work- related functions amounted to the whole of Nathan's social life - it was necessary to drink a bottle of wine and double-check all the lights before attempting to sleep. It was also necessary to check the spare long-life bulbs were stacked in a pyramid in the kitchen, next to the kettle.
Over the utilitarian mirror in the bathroom, he nightly secured a thick blue towel - hanging it firmly from nails hammered into the wall for the purpose, such that it was impossible for the towel to work its way loose during the night and fall. If it had -- if Nathan heard that sudden, slithering noise behind the closed door in the empty flat -- he would simply and immediately lose his mind. The second mirror, full length, he kept inside the wardrobe door -- and he secured the wardrobe door with two simple sliding bolts, one at the top and one at the bottom. He would not risk it swinging open during the dark hours.
In each room he kept a 12-inch, aluminium-cased Maglite torch.
Although these torches had never been used, he changed their batteries on the first Monday of every month, in addition to which he kept one pack of spares per torch secreted in each room. This unopened pack too was replaced, unopened, every six months. He sometimes woke, having dreamed of a power cut, reaching for the cool metal tube beneath his pillow. Sometimes he slept cupping a Maglite like a teddy bear.
At the foot of the bed he left folded a pile of emergency clothing: a sweater, jeans, slip-on trainers. This was in case he was required to dress and be gone from the flat in a hurry - if the towel in the bathroom should fall, say, or the wardrobe door should creak open. For the same reason he left his keys hanging inside the front-door lock.
Gradually, he'd learned to sleep with softer, indirect lighting which made the possibility of a single blown bulb less catastrophic.
There was a standard lamp in each corner of the bedroom, banishing troubling shadows, and a desktop lamp on the bedside table -- to reach for, should the four standard lamps for any reason blow simultaneously.
He'd
left the main light fitting empty because to accidentally switch on the overhead light, then to correct himself and switch it off again, would make the room appear, momentarily, to be a little darker - even with all four standard lamps on. No degree of darkness was permissible.
He'd experimented with an eye-mask, but it had proved impractical; if Nathan heard a noise -- a click or a creak or a sigh -- it was necessary to fumble inefficiently with the mask's edges and flip the whole thing inside out on his forehead. Instead, he slept on his back with a light pillow placed over his eyes.
In December the dawn was late and the night was long.
Although Christmas was Hermes' busiest retail period, there wasn't much for Nathan and his head office
