Woman Last Seen(17)

“We ended up sleeping separately. Look, is this relevant?” Mark runs his hands through his hair, scratches hard at his scalp. It is a habit he’s had since he was a kid; when he is stressed, he scratches his head. There was a time, just after Frances died, when he scratched his head so hard and frequently that he ripped at the skin; his scalp actually bled.

“We’re just trying to establish your wife’s state of mind.”

“Her state of mind?” Mark doesn’t know. “Leigh is not easy to read. She is usually very calm.” Almost cool. It’s one of the things that attracted him to her in the first place, to be frank. She’s not hysterical in any way. Not overly emotional. Well, not usually. When they met, Mark had had enough going on, enough emotions to handle—his and the boys’—he wouldn’t have been able to cope with a sensitive, overly excitable woman. He needed a clear-sighted, dry-eyed, composed wife. “That’s why the row was so unusual. It wasn’t like her to overreact the way she had. Yelling at me, at the boys.”

Then at bedtime she wouldn’t just climb into bed and let the matter drop.

“I can’t. I just can’t,” she muttered as she dug out the spare duvet from the airing cupboard. “I can’t sleep in the same room as you.”

Mark didn’t offer to take the sofa. Fuck her. She was being a cow.

They hardly spoke a word at breakfast. Just enough to convince Seb that everything was all right. You can still do that with twelve-year-olds, trick them into thinking you are the adult and you are steering the ship. Oli was less convinced; he has worked out that adults are just as lost as everyone else. She made Mark toast as usual; he didn’t eat it. He was being a twat, making a point, rejecting her in a tiny pathetic way. He hadn’t slept well. He kept thinking she would come upstairs and gently slip between the sheets. That they’d smudge into one another, no need for words—they’d both know it had been a daft row, blown out of all proportion. But she didn’t.

At three in the morning, he got fed up of staring at the ceiling. He threw back the duvet and sneaked downstairs to her. Ready to swallow his pride, make the first move. He fully expected her to be wide-awake, perhaps reading, perhaps just staring into the darkness as he had been. She was asleep. Her breathing deep and steady. He didn’t know why, but her ability to sleep after everything that had been said annoyed him more than if he’d found her crying.

A wave of guilt sloshes into the room. It nearly drags him under. He takes a deep breath. “She’s missing. You should be looking for her, not wasting time sitting here with me.”

“In most cases, after a domestic, there’s a cooling-off period and then the wife comes home,” says the policeman. He sounds almost bored by this fact.

“It wasn’t a domestic.” Mark doesn’t like the choice of word, doesn’t like where Tanner’s mind has gone. You read it in the papers, don’t you? Police called to a domestic disturbance. “I didn’t hit her or anything,” Mark insists.

“Have you? Ever?” This sharper question comes from the woman officer.

“No!” Mark realizes he ought to stop talking. He’s conscious that he may very well be making things worse. He’s not thinking clearly. He feels like he’s thirty seconds behind reality, like when you watch someone Skype on a news report and there’s a time delay; they don’t seem quite present, quite real. What they say isn’t believable.

Mark can’t catch up. He can’t react quickly enough to save anything. His thoughts are disjointed, severed. It is to be expected considering the trauma and lack of sleep over the past few days. He feels as though he’s dragging his body through someone else’s life. Thank God he didn’t say that out loud. No one should be talking about dragging bodies. He doesn’t feel fully conscious, but it isn’t like dreaming or even having a night terror; the comfort of those is—however weird or disturbing—you know eventually you wake up. Mark knows he is not going to suddenly wake up and have his old life back. “It was just a matter of hurt feelings,” he mutters defensively.

“I presume you’ve tried to call your wife? Sent her messages?”

“Yes, I called her on Tuesday.”

“Not Monday?”

“No.” The policeman holds his pen over his notebook. Poised, ready to write down whatever Mark says. Mark has to be careful. Exact. “I called, she didn’t pick up, so I left her a voice message, apologizing. When she didn’t get back to me, I just thought she was being overly sensitive. A bit, you know, difficult. Making a point. I’ve sent a couple of WhatsApp messages since, but she hasn’t read them. Again, I thought she was making a point.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m worried.”

They ask more questions, quick-fire, alternating between them. Mark’s head swivels left to right as he responds and tries to keep up. Tries to be clear. Careful.

“Is anything missing?”

“Like what?”

“Anything. Clothes, shoes, bag, her passport.”

“No, nothing. I don’t think. I haven’t checked everything. How would I know? She has a lot of clothes.”

“Have you contacted any of her friends?”

“I called her best friend, Fiona. She saw her on Monday morning. Sometimes if Leigh is getting the later train up to Scotland, they meet up for a quick coffee before she sets off. Fiona says that happened, but she hasn’t seen or heard from Leigh since.”