Instinct (2010) Read online

  Miss Halliday, sweetly plump and middle-aged, dressed in a twin-set of muted earth tones, with spectacles that lay on the soft shelf created by her large, low bosom, looked confused.

  ‘That’s odd. I definitely saw him leave around home time. I had to remind him not to run in the hall, so the moment did rather stick with me.’

  Laura and Miss Halliday both let the same thought blunder into their minds while simultaneously trying to keep it at bay.

  ‘Well, I’m sure he’s around somewhere, but just to be certain I’ll alert the other members of staff who are still here and we’ll search the premises. He’s probably in the loo, somewhere like that.’

  Laura smiled. It was too soon to be worried. ‘Yes, probably.’

  They began to search: Laura, Miss Halliday and several other teachers who broke off from their marking to help. The school was small, so everyone bumped into each other as they checked the same classrooms, toilets, cupboards and outside buildings. When they passed Laura she gave them each a smile of awkward gratitude before continuing down the corridor. The encounters felt like increasing constrictions around her. She looked forward to each one, hoping it would bring the final good news of Andrew’s discovery, but as it failed to do so she found those smiles shrinking.

  The situation perturbed her, but rather than expecting the worst, which she would have done if Andrew had been several years younger, she tried to think of a convincing explanation for what had happened. He was too old to be taken in by a stranger with a bag of sweets, and too bright to be unaware of the consequences of failing to meet his mum when he was supposed to. If something unexpected had come up which meant he couldn’t be there, he had an emergency fifty-pence piece and her mobile number.

  Now that twenty minutes had elapsed, Miss Halliday stood by the assembly hall and stopped each member of the search party as they came past. Laura was last to return. From the looks she saw on the teachers’ faces, she decided not to ask the question for fear of having to hear the answer.

  ‘OK, what do we do now?’ she asked quickly.

  ‘First, there’s no need to panic,’ said Miss Halliday.

  ‘I’m not panicking. I just want to know what we need to do to make sure Andrew is OK.’ The tension in Laura’s voice was unmissable, accelerating each word as it crossed her lips.

  ‘Right, well, we call the police and explain what has happened,’ said Miss Halliday, trying to combine calmness with drive, and kindness with efficient detachment. ‘We have a recent picture of Andrew from the class photos, which we will email to them. You should go home so we, or the police, know where to contact you. You can also telephone his friends from there.’

  ‘Right. Yes, thank you.’

  Miss Halliday looked gentle but serious as she took Laura’s hand. ‘Something similar to this happens about once a month and we’ve yet to have a significant problem.’ She looked at the other teachers, who helpfully nodded their confirmation.

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Laura, distracted by the brightness of the powder-blue veins on the hand holding hers. ‘I’m sorry, I just …’ She said a single thank you to all of them, then hurried out of the study and back through the worsening rain to her car.

  Driving home, she refused to let herself indulge in morbid speculation or self-pity. To keep her mind clear, she said her driving actions aloud. ‘Change to second gear … slow down approaching junction … indicate right …’ However, when she pulled up at the traffic lights three streets away from her home, she stopped speaking and covered her face with her hands. Even when the lights changed and two cars behind started blaring their horns, she took a little while to stare straight ahead through the formless shapes made by the rain falling on the windscreen, then continued her journey as if nothing had happened.

  She concentrated on remembering that Andrew was a clever, confident boy who knew that his absence could cause trouble. There had been that time five years ago when she thought she’d lost him at the boat show in London, but he’d managed to find his way to the people at the PA desk and got them to call for her within a few minutes. Then again, he was not thoughtless enough to miss her at the school gates and just go home on his own without telling her. The one time she turned up half an hour late and was unable to call the school because the credits in her phone had run out, he had known to go back inside and wait for her there.

  There was definitely something wrong, but she couldn’t work out what, partly because the solution refused to present itself and partly because she refused to look for it. Every outcome appeared too improbable, so the possibilities kept pulling her back to a centre of incomprehension which, in some ways, was the best place to be.

  She parked right outside the house and found that she couldn’t move. In her peripheral vision she saw that none of the lights was on and the sight shrunk her stomach like a drawstring bag. In the end it took the thought that any minute now the police might be calling with news to get her to snap open her car door. On the path she had to force herself to cover the twenty feet to her house; she felt as if she were approaching the edge of a cliff. She found her keys disappointingly quickly and stuffed them into their locks. The front door whined open before her – she had spent far too long nagging Michael to oil the hinges; now she couldn’t bear the idea of it opening in silence.

  Inside, Laura was greeted by Crumble, her middle-aged tabby. He rubbed up against his owner’s legs and wrapped his tail around her ankles, oblivious to her feelings. Laura barely noticed the soft pressure and firm purring as she looked up the stairs and called Andrew’s name.

  There was no reply.

  She went to look in his room. He was not there. She called several more times and checked the other five rooms, but they were empty, and without her shouts the house was deeply silent and colder still. Now she was feeling the onset of dread, curling its fingers around her thoughts.

  She called his friends. The seven possibles became definite nos, and with each one she could feel another dim light switching off in the growing darkness. She remembered how alone she had felt when Michael’s boss had called her with the news of the loose scaffolding that had caused his death. That had emptied her from the heart outwards, and she always felt that the part of her that went missing that day would never return.

  The phone rang. It was Miss Halliday wanting to know if Laura had heard anything. The answer was no, and it was met with a bruising silence that made it clear nothing could be said to improve things. She told Laura she’d be in touch if she had any news and asked her to do the same before hanging up and allowing that low hum of emptiness to rush back into the house.

  Ten minutes later, Laura heard a knock at the front door. It had to be news of Andrew; nobody else would call at this time of day. Laura bounced to her feet and began thinking of how she would lovingly tick him off. At the same time another part of her recognized that the knock was sharper and more insistent than Andrew’s. When she saw the size of the figure through the opaque glass, she knew it was not her son, and any elation she had felt disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

  ‘Hello, Carol,’ said Laura quietly, looking at the damp indentations her mother-in-law’s feet made on the doormat.

  ‘Laura.’

  There was a long pause when Laura did not know what to say.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to invite me in?’

  ‘Andrew’s not here, Carol. He wasn’t at school when I went to collect him. Nobody knows where he is.’

  ‘Goodness. Are you sure? Yes, of course you are. Well, I shall make you a cup of tea and we’ll both wait for him. He’s bound to have just got into some mischief and …’

  ‘You have to go home.’ Carol looked wounded. ‘In case he tries to go there or call you,’ Laura continued.

  ‘Yes, of course. What was I thinking? We’ll keep in touch.’ She was already halfway down the path. ‘And don’t worry. He’ll turn up any minute, just you see if he doesn’t.’
She attempted a cheery wave, but Laura didn’t see it because she had already closed the door and was on her way back to the living room to sit beside the phone and allow her imagination to taunt her.

  The next sound to break the silence was a call from a policewoman who sounded like she was at the end of her shift.

  ‘Hello, is that Dr Lorna Trent?’

  ‘Yes, Laura.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s Laura Trent.’

  ‘Oh. I’ve got Lorna here.’

  ‘Well, I assume that if you’re trying to reach a Lorna Trent at this number but instead of a Lorna Trent there’s a Laura Trent then maybe you’ve got slightly the wrong name.’

  ‘So you’re Laura Trent?’

  ‘That’s right. How can I help you?’

  ‘It’s Constable Watts of Lock Road police station here. I understand we’ve had a report of your son Andrew as a missing person, is that right?’

  ‘Yes it is,’ she said quickly, sitting up in anticipation.

  ‘Right, well, we’ve no news yet. Obviously there’s only so much we can do, but we have a photo of the young lad and we’ve got several officers assigned to the …’

  Laura stopped listening, the voice growing ever fainter as she wrapped herself in the darkness again.

  The policewoman wanted to know if Andrew had been found, because apparently that was the usual outcome at this stage. That made it harder for Laura to explain that he was still missing. She had the additional pain of feeling like a failure, one of the pitiful minority who could not easily find their child minutes after they had disappeared. She gave Andrew’s details and the places he might be. Constable Watts told her they would take a look, do what they could, keep her informed, and it all made her feel one tenth of one per cent better.

  ‘… So we’ll give you a call if we hear anything.’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’ Laura thought about asking a few questions, just to keep her on the line and hold the silence back, but she was just too crushed to do something so active and pointless, and a small, rational part of her knew she should keep the line clear for Andrew to call.

  By the time nine o’clock arrived with no sign or word of her beloved son, Laura began to weep. The possibilities of what lay before her finally made their way in and spread through enough of her to provoke a reaction. All the simple explanations had evaporated one by one and all that was left was a punishing feeling of inevitability. Laura sat on the stairs, looking at a photo of Andrew, smiling, in his football kit and let the tears fall.

  Then there was another knock at the door.

  4

  Within three hours they had finished the loading. The spacious interior of the plane had become cramped as the crates were lined up at one end, halving the amount of room allocated to the soldiers. For now they were enjoying the freedom of the grass outside, lying across it in vests and trousers now a darker shade of the khaki they had been earlier.

  ‘OK,’ Van Arenn called. ‘Now y’all take a shower. We could be forty-eight hours in that thing, with some hard work at the other end, so wash your stink off. We fly at … 2200.’

  As the soldiers picked up their gear and ambled back to the white building, he went over to talk to Garrett. The others took this as their usual cue to whisper amongst themselves about how those two were definitely doing it, and how dirty she must be. The truth was a little different.

  Sadie Garrett grew up in a trailer park outside Barwick, Louisiana. Prettier than most, with a dark sheet of shiny hair and a pert, fleshy body, she attracted the kind of bad-boy attention that got her drinking too young. By thirteen she was getting through a bottle of Cisco and forty Newport Menthol a day. By sixteen she had moved on to Oxycontin and the petty crime that surrounds it. After she was caught cramming herself backwards through the bathroom window of a trailer she was burgling, her daddy cut a deal with the local sheriff to keep her out of the county jail: he agreed to drive her to army recruitment and not come back until she’d signed up. In the end it worked out for everybody, as she found she liked discipline, routine, firing guns and, to an extent she hadn’t really been aware of, showering with other women.

  Van Arenn was from Fountain Hill, Arkansas, a town of a couple of hundred people and twice as many cows. At fourteen, too bored to take any more, he left his pop blind drunk on the porch, yet again, and never came back. He spent a couple of years hitching across the South, picking up odd jobs, easy to come by as his thick blond hair and arrogant eyes made him good-looking enough for middle-aged men of a certain leaning to pay ten dollars an hour just to have him in sight. He knew what was going on and didn’t see the harm in it, and if he was ever hard up he’d go back to some of those places, top up the cash, steal a few things and head off again.

  At sixteen he found himself drinking like his pop in a Mississippi roadhouse when a fat man decided to take him to task for looking shabby and steaming the place up with the smell of ‘barbecued shit’. Van Arenn was stubborn enough to give a little back, but just as it might have turned violent, a small, quiet figure walked up from his table in the shadows and told the fat man to lay off picking fights with people half his size. When he was told to go fuck himself, the quiet man broke the fat man’s nose and wrist, leaving him screaming on his knees, then calmly returned to his table. He was wearing a Marine’s uniform, and that made a hell of an impression on David Van Arenn. Three days later, he had some good fake papers and a uniform of his own.

  So he and Garrett knew each other before they’d even met. They belonged to a not-very-exclusive club of teenage wasters who had fallen into the army, but they were both from the South so they liked hearing each other’s lilting drawl. When they found out they had both been dishonourably discharged for the same thing, well that just about sealed it.

  They had both gone AWOL to see their fathers one last time before they passed away. After years of rotgut whiskey, Tyler Van Arenn had at last beaten his liver into submission. His son was supposed to be preparing for an inspection before the arrival of the Australian Ambassador, but he wasn’t going to let that keep him from saying goodbye.

  Garrett’s daddy spent four days in a coma after his car was hit by the 4x4 of some drugged-up frat boys. She went AWOL from Camp Pendleton while delivering a printer to the admin block. She just drove right out of there, stopped twice for gas, and got to the hospital just in time to tell her daddy how much she loved him.

  Ordinarily, they would not have been discharged for what they had done. The US Marine Corps prefers to resort to the stockade before spending all that time training two excellent soldiers, only to see them leave. However, in this case the Pentagon needed candidates for MEROS and these two young orphans with otherwise spotless service records fit their needs like air fits a balloon.

  By 2159 hours the five soldiers were tucked into their seats, preparing their time killers and trying to find a position they could catch some sleep in. Exactly one minute later Madison closed the cargo doors and checked his instruments for take-off. He couldn’t tell what hurt more: his balls or the ant bites that covered his buttocks since he’d slumped to the ground right on top of their nest. He’d spent most of the last few hours scratching himself crazy and looking ahead to a very long and uncomfortable flight.

  The Spartan had been chosen for its load capacity and its ability to take off quickly and steeply from shorter runways, but it had also been modified in several ways to suit the needs of MEROS missions: temperature-controlled cargo bays had been installed to enable the transportation of live specimens; the engine had been overhauled to increase the top flying speed from 583 km/h to 792 km/h; and the fuel tank had been expanded so that the airplane had a range of over 8,000 miles.

  The turbines roared into life and soon became the deafening assault that made this everyone’s least favourite part of any mission. Once they were moving properly they could tune it out, and once they reached their destination they could get to work. Unti
l then, it was a case of holding on tight while Madison tried to work the controls with one hand and scratch himself with the other.

  5

  ‘Hello?’ Laura asked through her closed front door. She moved a few feet back; all she could see were two large figures, almost entirely blocking the light coming through the glass.

  Surprisingly, an American accent answered. ‘Dr Trent? Dr Laura Trent?’

  ‘Yes?’ Laura responded tentatively.

  ‘We need to speak to you. It’s about Andrew.’

  Laura immediately opened the door. Two men in wet black raincoats and army boots loomed over her.

  ‘Do you have any identification?’

  The men fished a pair of matching fat black wallets from their inside pockets and flipped them out. They showed plastic cards with pictures of themselves beside an official-looking seal dominated by a pair of eagle’s wings. Above that were words that plunged Laura into troubled confusion: Armed Forces of the United States.

  ‘The American Army? What do you have to do with my son?’

  ‘It would be easier for us to explain everything if we could just come inside.’

  Unease crept through Laura like a spider, but she knew she had to find out more. Stepping back, she pulled the door open and gestured towards the living room. She felt uncomfortable, but the magic words had been uttered: It’s about Andrew – and right now she would have let just about anyone in if they could back that sentence up.

  The older man looked as if he’d been carved from teak. In his early forties, but looking good on it, he had warm, brown eyes that sat on his face like a cartoon bear’s. His hair was dark, but flecked with enough ticks of white to give him an air of hard-won experience.

  The other was in his late twenties, tall and broad, with smooth, wide features and light black skin. His head was a brown dome, shaved bald, and it made him seem unnervingly faultless, like a scaled-up toy soldier rather than the real thing.