Half the World Away - страница 51

Tom clears his throat.

I find the rota and pull it out, put it on the table. ‘If anyone can help us leaflet at any time, please put your name down. I know you’ve all got jobs but even an hour or so – we’d really appreciate it. We hope to arrange a press conference soon. Spreading the word is the most important thing. And we want to make sure we’ve got everyone’s numbers so we can keep in touch. Our numbers are here.’ I point to where I’ve copied them onto the paper. My hand is shaking.

‘Sure thing,’ Bradley says. He does a late shift, he explains, starts at 2 p.m. so at the end of his day he’s able to liaise with the company’s American wing, who are just arriving at work. And he has other appointments this coming week, but he can come around with us tomorrow night and Thursday morning.

The others consult their schedules on their phones. Dawn’s time is most restricted – she’s doing extra hours – and she begins to fret, apologizing. I do my best to reassure her: ‘You’ve already been a great help.’

Oliver can join us on Monday morning. And Rosemary all day Wednesday and Thursday.

‘We’d like to talk to you all individually,’ Tom says, ‘to try to find out as much as we can about what was happening around the time Lori went missing.’

Oliver asks if we can see him first – he has an English lesson to get to. Unlike Rosemary’s English, his is hard to follow, heavily accented.

Shona arrives. She’s painfully thin, very tall with light blonde hair cut short. She wears a vest top under denim dungaree-shorts. The bones of her clavicle jut out amid strings of beads, all in different materials, sizes and colours. Despite the fair hair, her skin is tanned and she has surprising grass-green eyes. She stoops slightly as she greets us. Her wrists are ringed with bracelets, which clink when she shakes hands.

Dawn goes to buy her a drink and Shona sits down, folding herself into a chair and propping her feet on the crossbar of the table so her knees almost touch her chin.

Tom gives her an update and explains about the rota. She rolls a cigarette, pin thin.

Given we still have the bar to ourselves, I suggest to Tom that we talk to people individually at the spare table opposite, and the friends can have a catch-up while they wait.

‘Or we could just do it all together,’ Tom says quietly. ‘It’s only five of them.’

I disagree. ‘There may be stuff they don’t want to share – like the bust-up with Dawn.’

He shrugs, gathers together the file, and we move over. I fetch fresh drinks and we begin with Oliver. He tells us he missed the party on the Friday. It was his cousin’s wedding that weekend so he was busy with that. Oliver does that classic thing of leaving out tenses and pronouns, which aren’t used as much in Chinese so when I say, ‘When did you last see Lori?’ he says, ‘See March twenty-eight. Good, happy.’

‘Did she talk to you about going away, about holidays?’ I say.

‘No holidays,’ he says. He seems serious, taciturn, and I wonder how he got on with Lori, whether he was a good mate or just hung around the edge of the circle of friends. I can’t imagine him having a laugh with her but perhaps the situation, the fact that we’re strangers and parents and Lori is missing, is making him stiff and reserved.

We talk to Rosemary next. We don’t have much to establish, only whether Lori shared any plans with her when they last spoke and how she seemed then. Rosemary had been at the party on the Friday. She says Lori was a bit quiet early on but she cheered up later. ‘I didn’t hear from her after that,’ Rosemary says.

‘Did she talk to you about travelling?’ I say.

Rosemary shakes her head. ‘No, but the others said she was thinking about it.’

‘Can you think of anything else we should do to try to find her?’ I say.

She considers this, then says, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Are you from Chengdu?’ Tom says.

‘No, a village between here and Leshan,’ Rosemary says.

‘That must be a big change,’ I say.

‘Yes, but my father, he works in the city at a factory so I have been here before to visit him.’

‘Do you like living here better than the village?’ I say.