The Missing One

by Lucy Atkins

Genres: Suspense; Amateur Sleuth; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Clearing out her mother Elena's art studio, after her death, Kal finds a drawer packed with postcards all from one woman, Susannah Gillespie. On impulse, Kal sets off with her toddler, Finn, in tow, desperate to find out more. Once she arrives at Susannah's isolated home, Kal quickly realizes she has made a big mistake. Susannah refuses to talk about her friendship with Elena and her behaviour grows more and more erratic.
Most worryingly of all, Susannah is becoming increasingly preoccupied with little Finn...

Release date: January 16, 2014

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 480

Sample

She knew she was walking because she was definitely upright, moving down a row of seated passengers, with the baby howling on her shoulder. She could hardly hear the cries, though she was aware on a primitive level that the sound was urgent. But everything was blurred and muted, as if she were deep under water and the world shimmering somewhere on the surface. It didn’t matter that people stared, or the baby yowled and writhed. Nothing really mattered.

He gave her instructions and she followed them. He issued his conditions, itineraries and tickets, and she accepted them all. He would be waiting at the other end for her. This was the start of a new year and a new life. He would put them into his car and take them to the house he had bought in some English village, with an apple tree in the garden. ‘You belong with me,’ he had told her, before he got on his plane. ‘You always did – I love you, I’ve always loved you. And – where else could you go?’ He was right. So she did the only rational thing: she followed his instructions.

She couldn’t feel the baby’s mouth tugging at her breast, and when she looked down she was startled to find that it had come away and was open-mouthed, red and wailing, the poor little face screwed up and purple with fury. And there was a smear of blood coming from her nipple, trickling over her white skin, and a rub of it on the baby’s chin, too. The nipple was raw and glaring, as if articulating everything she couldn’t feel. Gently, with the edge of her shirt, she wiped the blood off her baby’s stretched-out mouth. Two white teeth glimmered in the redness.

As the plane taxied along the runway and Elena latched the baby on again, she knew she would never go back. But this was not an escape. She could never escape because nothing would change what had happened – not Graham’s kindness, not a new English life, not even this needy, upset baby, who should have been weaned months ago.

As the plane lurched into the sky she felt the physical fact of everything she was leaving behind, and the loss was as solid and loud and squalling as the ten-month-old on her lap.

Then, because she couldn’t think about what was down there any more, she closed her eyes, and as the plane nosed through the clouds she took herself back to their very first journey north. She travelled it again in her mind, because maybe once she got there she’d be able to rewrite the ending and something – anything – other than this could happen instead.

The plane banked, and the baby yawled and writhed and fought, but she was in the camper van with the windows wound down and the two of them singing James Taylor songs, warm Californian air on their skin. There was twelve hundred miles of highway ahead of them, and his hands were wide and strong on the wheel.

They crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in a fog, talking about whales, and then headed onwards, skirting the wild beaches of northern California, into Oregon. A night on Cannon Beach, with their sleeping bags laid on the sand under improbably bright stars; he twisted a strand of sea-grass round her ring finger. The next day, they drove on, further north, into Washington State, and then they saw the sudden towers of downtown Seattle, the glittering arc of Puget Sound, Bainbridge Island and Whidbey hunched to the west. Rain closing in now, they chugged on, with the Olympic Peninsula rising on one side, the Cascades crimped on the other.

Windows up, they found sweaters and blankets; coffee and cigarettes by the roadside waiting for the tow truck; a shared diner meal in the rain; a night in a garage forecourt, then – starter motor fixed – they drove onwards, crossing the Canadian border in a hailstorm. They arrived at the port just as the sky cleared. Lining up by the water with dive-bombing seagulls, and freighters unloading, they clanked on to the ferry and away across the water, bouncing off islands like a pinball, passing between cedar-dense mountains that rose straight from the sea like fins; skirting the shorelines – a white flash of a deer’s tail, a lumbering brown bear – rows of crowded pine, cedar and hemlock; a slithering sea otter glimpsed; harbour seals basking on grey rocks.

Then there was Dean – Jonas suddenly more boyish – and Dean’s big boat; hours more through a hushed sea mist, talking about the research and the summer ahead of them. The big belching boat shuddering to a halt; the men rolling up their sleeves, disappearing, coming back oil-smeared with puffed-up chests. As they chuntered towards the island, the mist cleared to reveal a towering totem pole on the headland – the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe, the men explained – and there, on the very top, Max’inux, the sea wolf. It is fitting that a killer whale should mark the spot where her life began – and where it ended.

*

On that flight to England, with her breasts bleeding into her baby’s mouth, she felt the totem of sorrow lodge itself inside her heart, stopping the blood flow and messing up the beat. She could not change what had happened, but a part of her would always be there – out on the water, listening, watching, making notes, moving through storms and sunsets and defying the facts of her life.

The Sea Park whales performed their show twice a day in an above-ground tank with steep glass walls and bleachers stretching up on all sides. The male, Orpheus, had been captured in the North Atlantic by Icelandic fishermen when he was five or six years old; now he had a chest the size of a tanker and his dorsal fin was taller than a man. The female, Bella, was three years older. She’d been taken from the Pacific Northwest in the sixties, when orcas became big business. The two whales had been trained together and the Sea Park guys said they were docile: there was no threatening behaviour and they did their job placidly. The public loved them. Since the orcas arrived, park revenues had gone up by a third – all across America the crowds were going wild for killer whales.

Elena had only watched one show, early on when she first got access to the dolphins. She stood in the wings with her backpack on one day and a hat pulled down to block the glare. In one routine, Bella had to open her jaws to allow the trainer to brush her teeth with a giant toothbrush. The crowd whooped and yelled. Some schoolkids threw popcorn. The male had been trained to drink what seemed to be the contents of a giant can of gasoline, then swim the perimeter making the sound of an outboard motor. After that Elena stayed away when the whales were performing.

Between shows, the two whales would move in slow circles around their cramped tank. Sometimes when she passed she’d find them just floating there, completely motionless, staring at the glass sides. The head trainer, Dan, said they were sleeping, but maybe he was just trying to make himself feel better because they both knew that orcas in the wild swim for miles while they sleep. They shut down half their brain at a time. They don’t hang in the water.

She’d seen sleeping killer whales in the wild once – a few summers ago, up in Puget Sound, she was on a field trip with some other students, monitoring Chinook levels, when they spotted a pod out to sea. Twenty or more whales were lined up in sleeping formation, moving eerily across the horizon, surfacing to breathe – a tiny pause – then submerging for a long time.

In the wild, an orca will swim up to a hundred miles a day; here at Sea Park they could only move in tight circles. Out in the ocean, they’d dive hundreds of feet to the sea bed; here, they’d hit the bottom at thirty feet. They lived, essentially, in a bathtub.

She noticed one day that the male’s dorsal fin was beginning to collapse. Dan said it was nothing to worry about – it happened to captive males, he said, it definitely wasn’t a sign of ill health.

She had somehow managed to get past all this when it came to the Bottlenose family. They seemed active and healthy and she couldn’t spend her time feeling bad for them. She’d had to shove these thoughts out of her head because she had work to do, and she knew she was lucky to have unfettered access. As she monitored their play patterns and the language of their play, she’d grown used to their environment – mostly she managed not to think about the life they could have had outside it. The dolphins seemed to have adapted to captivity. It was possible that they didn’t remember the wild or what it felt like to skim through the waves like the pods she sometimes saw down on the beach. She felt attached to the Bottlenose family, but distanced from them at the same time. They were what they should be: research subjects of whom she’d grown fond.

But the killer whales were different. They sat like capital letters in black and white, quietly making their point.

Perhaps because she wasn’t studying them, she didn’t manage the same scientific detachment. She couldn’t avoid them either – she had to pass their tank every night to get out of the park. Sometimes, she would catch the eye of the big female, and she had an uncomfortable feeling that the whale knew all about her. She dismissed this as tiredness – the hollow feeling you get at the end of a long day, when you are alone in a public place that has emptied out for the night.

One day she noticed that the male had scabs across his back, and the skin, which should be glossy black, was peeling and mottled. His dorsal had collapsed fully now, and hung limp, like the tail of a dejected dog.

Each night, as she passed their tank to let herself out of the lush tropical park, she would feel their silent longing settle on her like a cloak. She felt as if they were asking her for something, quietly and insistently. She could not shake off the guilt.

She let herself into the condo and put her bags down. There was a smell of sizzling butter; someone was moving around in the kitchen. She should go say hello. She could see the archway to the kitchen, just across the living room. She’d met the guys, but not the third roommate, Susannah. Maybe she could just slip into her room, without being noticed.

‘Hello?’ A summons.

She forced herself to walk across the living room.

The kitchen was a mass of greenery, with plants cascading from tall shelves. The woman standing at the cooker was barefoot, in faded jeans. She was tall, but not willowy. Blonde hair rippled down her back. She turned her head, and the first impression was of extraordinary pale-blue eyes with pinpoint pupils.

‘Hey.’ There was a studied lack of interest in the flat tone, but it didn’t quite go with the intensity of the eyes.

‘Hi – I’m Elena. I’m your new roommate – I’m just moving the last of my things in.’

‘Uh-huh?’ The woman looked at her for a moment, then turned back to her eggs.

It didn’t matter. Elena had no desire to be part of some pseudo family – she didn’t want new friends or roommates. All she wanted to do was finish her research. Having to move off campus was bad enough at this point – she’d been fine there, with her routines all worked out and the recordings and notes piled high around the tiny space, a complex system that worked. Now she’d been forced to unpick all that, and everything was in boxes. It would take for ever to sort it back into a system. That alone had set her back weeks. Being here was bad enough without some prickly blonde roommate to contend with.

The move had made her realize just how set in her routines she had become over the past few years – since meeting Graham, really. The time they spent together had settled into an orderly and manageable pattern and she really didn’t need anyone else. Graham planned breaks in their work schedules where they’d eat together, or see a movie. They sometimes crammed into a single bed for a night – his or hers – but not always. They didn’t crowd each other. Theirs was a gently sustaining relationship: they were rooted and shaped differently, but had become quietly linked and harmonious, two plants sharing an ecosystem. The dolphin research took up the rest of her time and energy.

‘So, I probably won’t be here much,’ she said, quite loudly, to the back of Susannah’s head. ‘I’m mainly just going to sleep here, my research is – I’m trying to finish—’

‘You’re a marine biologist, right?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’ She was surprised that Susannah should know this. ‘What about you?’

‘Oh.’ Susannah turned, and this time she smiled. She was striking, with high cheekbones, long hair middle-parted and those unnatural eyes. Under her white cheesecloth tunic she was braless. Elena could see the shadows of her nipples. She shifted her gaze to the plants behind Susannah. ‘Well, I guess I’m at the other end of the spectrum,’ Susannah was saying. ‘I’m on a teaching sabbatical in the art department. Ceramics.’ She turned away and reached behind a ficus to get two plates. She divided scrambled eggs onto both, then put a hunk of sourdough on each. Elena glanced around, in case there was someone else in the kitchen whom she hadn’t noticed.

‘Here.’ Susannah held a plate out, across the breakfast bar. ‘You look half starved.’

Elena hesitated and then perched on a stool. Susannah poured two coffees from the espresso pot on the stove, sat down opposite and, without speaking, began to eat. She ate with her head down, putting food rapidly into her mouth, chewing fast, and washing mouthfuls down with coffee. She ate like someone from a big family, Elena thought, someone near the bottom of the food chain. Every time she leaned forwards for another mouthful, the Indian necklaces around her neck clanked between her loose breasts. Elena bit into the sourdough. Susannah was right: she was starving.

Susannah swallowed her last mouthful, wiped around the edge of the plate with one thumb and sucked the eggy mixture off it. There was a thick silver ring on the thumb, and a line of clay under the nail.

‘So,’ she said. ‘I’m kinda with Greg – the good-looking one – you met him, I think, when you came round before? But he was quite taken with you, so he’s all yours if … ’

‘No, God. No.’ Elena swallowed. ‘Seriously? No. I mean … I’m really not … I’m with someone already, and the last thing I want right now is—’

‘Huh?’ Susannah pushed her hair back off her shoulders and then leaned forward again. ‘He wears odd socks on purpose. He thinks people notice other people’s socks. He told me odd socks make a guy seem intriguing. Odd socks and Birkenstocks.’

Their eyes met and she caught something in Susannah’s – a hint of wildness, or of not caring. This weird, disjointed talk felt like a challenge.

‘I had a boyfriend once,’ Elena said, chewing her mouthful of sourdough, ‘who folded up wedges of paper and wore them in the heels of his shoes to make him look taller.’

There was silence for a second then Susannah lifted her chin. Her laugh was loud, quite startling – almost a howl – and it filled the small kitchen, bouncing off the wood-panelled walls, the plants, and out into the small patio, making birds flutter out of the tree, and sweep up into the sky.

*

By the time she carried her bags to her room, Elena had agreed to go swimming with Susannah, who knew the very best place, just down from the condo and round into a deserted cove where you weren’t supposed to swim. The tides were dangerous, but it was fine if you knew what you were doing.

The friendship, from the start, seemed to be out of Elena’s hands.

Lately, Elena had taken to pausing at the tank on her way home to spend a few minutes with the whales. It didn’t feel right to just walk by every night. No one was ever around at that time, so she’d sit with them for a bit. The male always kept his distance, but the female, Bella, recognized her and would swim slowly over. Once, sitting on the edge of the tank, Elena leaned her head right down so that her hair trailed into the water. The whale came up and nosed the strands, curiously, and very gently. She knew that each tooth in the whale’s mouth was the size of a man’s thumb, but there was no sense of threat; Elena could feel the whale’s curiosity. There was something tender about it.

But today Bella wasn’t paying any attention to humans. Elena could picture the massive heart pumping inside her chest as she circled the tank. She felt as if the sound of that heart should be audible through the headphones but all she could hear was the rushing noise of the colossal body pushing through the water as Bella circled. Then the contraction passed, and she sank again, obviously exhausted.

Elena yanked off one side of the earphones and addressed the backs of the men’s heads. ‘Do you think it’s getting close?’

None of them looked round, or answered.

She leaned through them, and poked Dan’s arm. ‘Dan? It feels close. Doesn’t it?’

The head trainer turned to her. His face was pallid. Like her, he’d been up most of the night before, and this had been a long day. Still no sign of a baby. He shrugged and turned back, hands in the pockets of his shorts.

The truth was, none of them had a clue how this would pan out, not even the vet with his Yankees cap drawn down, and a beaten-up jacket always on, despite the warmth of the evening, a toothpick perpetually twirling at the corner of his mouth. None of them knew if this was how a killer whale birth was supposed to go. They were all impotent, standing there like spectators at a show that is somehow going wrong.

She flipped the headphones back on and glanced at the sound dials on the tape recorder. She peered, again, through the glass tank wall at the hydrophone, down behind the ladder. The whales had ignored the black wire at first, when she dropped it into the tank. Finally Orpheus had come over to inspect it: he stared at it, carefully, for twenty minutes. Then he swam away. Neither orca had looked at it since.

The whale was silent during her contractions, but between them she spoke to Orpheus in low chirrups. He didn’t make any sound during the contractions either, but he replied as she spoke to him, and moved across the tank to her. Elena wondered what the exchange meant. Their sounds were so much deeper, and slower than those of the dolphins. They had an almost spiritual effect on her as if they were tapping into a hidden rhythm in her subconscious. Every time they stopped, she felt a wrench.

Orpheus seemed calm, coming close but not too close, and even when he was out of Bella’s way, he kept his eye on her all the time. Elena wondered if both of them understood, instinctively, what was happening. Perhaps he knew, through echolocation, that there was a baby inside her. Then again, how could they know the true implications of this? Neither of them would surely remember the births they might have witnessed in the wild. She wondered if they were afraid. Were these sounds reassurance? She had to be careful. It was far too easy to anthropomorphize. But they did seem to be talking to one another.

There were more contractions, each one coming a few minutes after the last. She had to remind herself that the baby was likely to come out just fine. She knew from anatomy that orcas are better adapted to birth than humans: their babies don’t have to navigate a narrow pelvis and they emerge through soft tissue, not bone. But still, this seemed like an awfully long and hard process. The baby could be stuck, or in the wrong position – or dead – but none of them would know, or be able to help even if they did know. There was something brutal and experimental about just standing there, watching. She looked at the men’s backs, and wanted, suddenly, to shove them between their broad shoulder blades and shout, ‘Do something!’

Another hour passed.

And then, suddenly, the whale pulled away from her partner. She began to swim fast and then to corkscrew just below the surface, moving round the rim, as if she was rehearsing a new trick, swirling in tight spirals, astonishingly quick.

The guys pressed closer to the glass.

Elena slid off one headphone again and heard their voices – ‘What?’ ‘This is it!’ ‘What’s this?’ ‘Come on!’ They were a crowd, heckling at a sport’s game. She pressed the headphones to her ears to block out their voices and she heard the rush of water as the whale spiralled – no vocalizations – she glanced at the sound levels again and made a couple of small adjustments.

Suddenly, there was a collective gasp. A pair of folded flukes appeared from Bella’s underbelly.

A little tail flipped like a torn flap of skin. Bella whisked onwards, round and round, twisting even faster now, her body arched in pain or effort, or both. She was silent – no cries or whistles – and then, in a bloom of blood and fluids, her baby was born – her perfect, miniature replica, flukes still folded, dorsal flattened.

It floated, motionless. And then it sank.

‘Oh fuck!’ shouted Dan. ‘Jesus shit!’

The baby didn’t move. It was dead.

The men stood, aghast, faces pressed against the glass. In the headphones a terrible watery silence filled Elena’s ears. The only sound was the thud of her own heart.

And then Bella turned and prodded her limp baby with her nose. And at her touch life flooded through its body; it flipped a couple of times as if orientating itself then floated towards her. She eased it to the surface, tenderly, with her flippers, four hundred pounds of slippery perfection.

The men cheered as if the victory was theirs. Dan even punched the air.

The baby took its first breath, blowing out at exactly the same time as Bella. And after that, mother and baby moved together, breathing in synchrony, swimming slowly round the tank, side by side. Bella’s breaths were far more frequent than usual: she knew, instinctively, that she had to breathe with her baby.

Dan was running alongside the pool now, following them with a great grin on his face, the blond hairs on his thighs glistening in the late evening sun. One of the new guys had a cine camera and was loping alongside too, slightly slower, trying to keep the camera steady. The vet’s assistant, a skinny guy with acne, snapped pictures with a zoom. The vet chewed his toothpick and watched.

The blush-pink baby orca – it was too early to tell the sex – was a tiny match for its mother’s belly and dorsal patches. It nosed steadily alongside her. Then Orpheus, who had been floating to one side, slowly swam over and joined his family. There were no vocalizations, but the three whales lapped the tank together – the baby slotted between its parents.

The guys were slapping each other on the back, like they had pushed the baby whale out themselves. Even the vet grinned, abruptly, showing crumbling teeth, his face splitting oddly, lopsidedly, beneath the rim of his Yankees cap.

Elena took off one headphone and their voices boomed. She looked back at the whale family.

It was the perfect birth.

She bent and switched off the tape recorder, flipping the switches one by one. She knew this was insane: she should keep it running and continue to collect the data; these were groundbreaking, unique, once in a lifetime sounds. But she couldn’t listen as the family circled its cramped glass prison.

There was a deep thudding in her ears. She felt sick. She couldn’t look at the men any more, or the new family. Without a word she let herself out of the park, and walked away through palm tree-lined streets towards the ocean.

It wasn’t long after the birth and its aftermath that Elena saw the documentary about the whale captures.

There was a screening on campus in the central auditorium, and she would have missed it entirely, because she never bothered to read campus newsletters, but today there was another anti-war demo outside the food hall, so she took a detour on the way to Graham’s room. She almost bumped into the billboard.

*

It was just about to start – there was no time to run all the way across campus to Gray’s room, tell him and get back for the start of the film. So she went inside.

It was about orca captures, from the first in 1961, a female called Wanda, who threw herself against the tank walls all night and then died in the morning. Then there was Moby Doll, who survived being harpooned for an art project in 1964, and was kept, wounded, in Vancouver Aquarium, refusing food for fifty-five days. The capture stories went on like this, grim and depressing tales of human greed and ignorance. But the climax of the film was the Penn Cove round-ups.

Elena knew about these. She remembered the public outcry when the three drowned orca carcasses washed up near Seattle. Their bellies had been cut open and stones put inside – because the hunters thought they’d sink to the bottom and then no one would ever know. At least six live whales were taken to theme parks across North America that day.

One scene, in particular, was almost unwatchable. After chasing down the pod with planes and speedboats and seal bombs, the hunters dropped nets and herded the frightened animals against the Puget Sound shoreline. The whales were panicking. You could clearly hear parents calling out to their children; babies screeching back. The hunters singled out a baby orca, and a scuba diver attempted to net him. The diver, along with ten or so other men, drove the baby away from his mother. She thrashed around in the water, distraught, making haunting, high-pitched cries. The whole family stuck their noses above the surface perhaps to try and hear what was happening or to search for a way out. Meanwhile, the hunters tethered the baby tightly, nose and tail. He lay trapped and immobile, but his family didn’t stop calling out to him. The men hauled him into a cradle and hoiked him with a cherry-picker up into the air.

The baby’s terrified cries, as he dangled above his family, seemed human. And from the water beneath him, his mother’s screams echoed out, louder than the others.

The camera panned back to the original scuba diver as he clambered out. He pulled off his mask and bent double, hands on knees, and as he raised his head for one last look at the captured infant, his mouth distorted. Tears streamed down his face.

When the film came to an end, Elena sat in the muggy darkness with her hands on her knees, churning with rage and guilt and shame. There weren’t many people in the audience, but no one spoke or moved. The film whirred and flickered to a halt. Someone, somewhere near the front, was crying. The lights came on.

Afterwards, there was a talk. She wanted to get out. She badly needed air. But she didn’t trust her legs to stand.

A bearded researcher – he’d been involved in the documentary in some way, though she wasn’t sure how – stood on the stage in front of the dead screen. He said that legislation had been passed to outlaw orca captures in Washington State. It was a direct result of this footage. Finally people were noticing what was happening just off their beaches, and they were objecting to it. After more than ten years of this, people were beginning to understand that ripping young animals from their mothers, and taking them to die in concrete fish bowls, was not such a great idea.

And that was it. Her instinct had been telling her that this was wrong – every time she passed the orca tank. The birth had confirmed it. But she still hadn’t worked out what to do – how she fitted into this. One thing was clear: there was no going back. Everything she had worked for had just disintegrated. Her time at Sea Park was over.

She forgot that she was meant to meet Graham that night. Instead of going across campus to his room she turned and walked back to the condo. As she walked down the long path out of campus, crickets rasped and the antiseptic smell of the eucalyptus trees coated the insides of her nostrils, but she could still hear the sound that mother orca made as her baby was hoisted out of the water above her. This must have happened to Bella – whether at Penn Cove or somewhere else in Puget Sound. She would have been through a similar bloodbath – ripped from her distraught mother and her screaming family. And her family must still be up there – however many of them had survived the captures. Somewhere out there, in the Pacific Ocean, was Bella’s mother.

Back at the condo Elena found a scrawled message on the kitchen countertop. Graham had called four times. She picked up the scrap of paper and went to her room, but she didn’t phone him back. He wouldn’t understand. To him they were just animals; it didn’t matter if they were in a sea or a tank.

She was going to have to find the orca guy and get more information – he had talked about a project going on up in the Pacific Northwest to photo-identify all the region’s remaining killer whales. They were assessing how much damage the captures had done to the orca population. They needed to find ways to protect these animals and to rebuild the decimated pods. He said estimates, so far, put the damage from sea park whale hunters at up to 30 per cent of the region’s killer whale population. She shouldn’t have left so fast; she should have waited and found him, because she had so many questions.

That night, the researcher’s voice seemed to play through her mind long after she was asleep – not his words, but the tone of his voice – the deep echo and rumble. The sounds wove their way through her head all night, so that when she woke up with the sun streaming through the open blinds onto her bed, she was