Half the World Away - страница 27

Eager to distract them from the fact that there was no happy reunion with Poncho, I say, ‘But Poncho couldn’t ask anyone the way home. He couldn’t talk, only make noises. What noises do hamsters make?’

Isaac says hamsters don’t make any noises – Sebastian has one and it never says anything. Finn says they squeak. They bicker about that for a while and I clear the table.

I stick the ‘Missing’ sheet up on the cork board. It’s as if I’m waiting for it to hit me, as though we’ve unlocked the floodgates and the water is rushing towards us but we can’t hear the roar, can’t see the torrent racing our way. There is just the caught breath of a pause, a frozen heartbeat, the unnatural stillness, pinning me in place.

‘Mummy, phone!’ Finn stands at the kitchen door, waving the handset. I’m fetching the washing in. I dump the clothes in the basket and take it from him. ‘Hello?’

‘Mrs Maddox?’

‘Yes?’

‘My name’s Dawn Jeffreys. I’m Lori’s friend, in Chengdu.’

‘Dawn, yes.’ My pulse speeds up – there’s drumming up my spine. I move to sit on the bench, willing her to say, Don’t worry, she’s here, I just spoke to her, everything’s OK.

‘I heard about Lori, that she’s missing. I’m so sorry.’ The line is clear but her Australian twang is unfamiliar so I have to concentrate hard to follow.

‘You haven’t seen her? Or heard anything? You don’t know where she is?’

The sparrows are fighting over the bird-feeder, jostling for purchase.

‘No, I’m sorry.’ There’s a slight delay between one of us speaking and the other person hearing it.

‘When did you see her last?’ I say.

‘Thursday, the third of April.’

After the blog. Suddenly that seems good. We thought that the Wednesday was her last contact. But Dawn saw her on Thursday. I feel giddy. So it’s not twenty-one days now, it’s twenty.

‘Didn’t you think it was odd,’ I say, ‘that there was no word from her?’

There’s a pause and I hear a muffled sound, gulping. Dawn is crying. ‘We broke up,’ she says, her voice choked, ‘that Thursday. I thought she needed some space… I…’

Oh, God. The racket from the sparrows drowns her out, forcing me inside through the kitchen to the stairway, far enough from the kids’ television to hear her.

‘Everybody here is doing what they can,’ she says. ‘The police have been talking to us.’

‘Was she OK about the break-up?’ Could this be the reason for Lori’s silence? A broken heart triggering a crisis? I’m shaken, then feel a flicker of anger that Dawn rejected her.

‘It was her decision,’ Dawn says.

Lori ended the relationship. Why? I struggle to reorient myself. ‘Right,’ I say.

‘And she was around on the Friday – there was a party,’ Dawn says.

The Friday. Nineteen days. ‘Do you think she might have gone away somewhere?’

‘I don’t know,’ Dawn says. ‘No one here has heard anything from her.’ She gulps again.

I can’t think what else to say, still trying to process the new information. ‘Dawn, can I take your number so we can talk again?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll just get a pen.’

She reads it out and gives me her email address as well. Our goodbyes are clumsy, speaking over each other, my timing disrupted by all the new questions crowding behind me. And at the core of them, like a heartbeat, driven and relentless: Where are you, where are you, where are you, Lori?

‘How long do we give them?’ Tom is on the phone to Jeremy Chadwick at the Foreign Office, badgering him. ‘It’s been a week since the Chinese police started work,’ he says, ‘and we have to hear second-hand from a mate of Lori’s, who had the decency to get in touch, that Lori was seen on Friday, the fourth, two days later than we thought. Why are the police not keeping us updated?’

‘They may wish to complete their enquiries-’

‘No, that’s not right,’ Tom says. ‘We’re being kept in the dark. And that means that the information we’re using for the appeal is inaccurate. That’s not helping anybody. A week, and they’ve given us nothing. Nothing.’

I can hear the voice, tinny through the handset. ‘It isn’t very long in the scheme of things. A missing-person inquiry can take many months.’