Then She Vanishes(3)

I take a deep breath. I really need a fag.

Ted makes a smacking sound as he chews gum in my ear, reminding me he’s still standing beside me. ‘You better get your butt down to Tilby,’ he says, in his Essex accent. He’s lived in Bristol for years but has never managed to pick up the West Country twang. Although, when he’s had a few, he likes to rib me about mine. ‘And take Jack with you. See if it’s the Heather you knew at school. She’s unconscious so the police can’t charge her yet.’

The subtext being that we can print what we want until they do.

Ted doesn’t often show excitement or happiness or any other emotion apart from grumpiness. Unless he’s had a few beers, when his humour shows through like a slice of sunlight beneath a grey cloud. Most of the time he wears a harassed expression and, when he’s not smoking or drinking coffee, he frantically chews gum, his jaw going nineteen to the dozen. But now his small blue eyes shine with rare delight, as though he’s a pitbull about to be given a slab of raw meat.

‘I was about to look on the electoral roll – see if she still lives with Leo or Margot.’

‘Don’t worry about that now. Even if it isn’t the Heather you knew, you still need to be there. Interview whoever she was living with. Describe where she shot herself for colour. You know the drill.’

I do indeed. I could do it in my sleep. Yet before, when I worked in London, I never knew the people involved. Now, if it’s my old friend Heather … I shake my head, not allowing my thoughts to go there. I have to treat it as any other job.

I stand up and pull my sheepskin coat from the back of the chair. It’s heavy and warm (it’s always so cold in here – the heating rarely works properly) and I wrap it around myself gratefully. I got it in the charity shop on Park Street, where I buy most of my clothes, and it’s the colour of toffee with a shaggy cream collar and cuffs. Jack’s still on the phone so I scrawl a quick note, saying I’ll meet him outside.

‘Nice coat, Jess,’ calls our receptionist, Sue, as I scurry past, shoving my notebook into my bag. She’s in her late fifties with a crop of silver hair and twinkly eyes that crinkle when she laughs. She’s like a lovely cuddly aunt who always refers to me as ‘a girl’, asking me about my life and my boyfriend, as though living vicariously through ‘my youth’ even though, at thirty-one, I’m not particularly young. Some days I feel very, very old. And very, very jaded. Like today.

‘Thanks,’ I call back, taking the cigarettes from my pocket as I head out of the reception area. ‘Got it for a bargain in BS8.’

‘And I’m liking the new fringe,’ she adds. I touch it self-consciously, although I know it frames my face, softens my blunt bob, and the platinum blonde contrasts with my chocolate-brown eyes. ‘Very Debbie Harry.’

I laugh off her compliment – although I’m secretly delighted – promising to bring her back a coffee (the machine stuff in the office tastes of plastic), then shoulder my way through the door, down the stairs and onto Park Street.

Our offices are in a red-brick building directly above a newsagent’s. There are only six of us who work out of here – two snappers, two reporters, including myself and a trainee called Ellie, Ted and Sue. Our headquarters are on a trading estate a few miles out of town. We type up our copy, then send it down the line to the subs at HQ. Jack and I often joke that our office is where the dregs are sent. The staff they don’t want to get rid of, but don’t want hanging about the main newsroom. I can’t understand what Jack’s done to warrant such a situation. How could anyone dislike him? I tell him that he’s only here because he was the last in. As soon as a snapper leaves HQ (and it’s amazing how high the turnover of staff is there, how quickly they jump ship to a daily like the Bristol Daily News), Jack will have left before he can say ‘digital camera’. I doubt the other photographer, Seth, will ever go anywhere else. He’s long past retirement.

I can’t allow myself to wonder how I’d cope without Jack if he left. I know it will happen eventually. Jack pretends otherwise, but underneath his easy-going persona he’s ambitious. It’s only a matter of time before he moves on. I, on the other hand, am happier here in our little office, away from prying eyes and ears. And Ted is a good boss. Despite his grumpiness, he trusts us and leaves us to make our own decisions (and most afternoons he leaves early to slope off to the local pub). I don’t want to be stuck out on some soulless industrial estate. I like being able to walk out onto Park Street. I love the hustle and bustle, the shops, the cafés, the buskers. It reminds me of London. Not to mention that I can walk to work from where I live.

I’ve been given a second chance and I’ll always be grateful to Ted for that. He took me on when nobody else would.

We have our own entrance: a single blue door set into the brick wall. There’s no sign, nothing to suggest that a newspaper operates behind it. Sometimes a homeless man huddles under a dirty blanket in the doorway. He’s called Stan. I often bring him a coffee when I’m getting one for Sue. Today he’s not here, just an empty can of Foster’s scrunched up in the corner and the faint whiff of urine. I shelter in the doorway and light a cigarette, inhaling it deeply.

The rain is still coming down. It’s fine and drizzly. I like the rain. I always have, the heavier the better; the way it smells, the sound it makes as it clatters into drains, the whoosh of it as tyres part puddles. Even nicer if it’s accompanied by thunder and lightning. Most people think it odd, but Heather felt the same as me. I remember the sound of it drumming on the aluminium roof of the barn at her family’s caravan park. We loved that barn, with its mezzanine level where they kept the hay for the horses. They had so much land, acres of it. It had been her uncle Leo’s idea to set up one of the fields as a caravan park. We used to escape to that barn with our art pads, tartan blankets embedded with yellow hairs from the family’s ancient Labrador, Goldie, pulled over our knees as we tried to sketch the pond or the fountain in her garden, or the caravans in the field beyond, a ribbon of sea glistening enticingly in the distance. Her house was amazing: five bedrooms and a room they called the Den. So much grander than the cramped cottage with the low ceilings that Mum and I shared. Although Heather’s house wasn’t posh: it was lived-in, with old-fashioned furniture, sanded original floorboards and checked blankets thrown over the back of well-worn sofas, very different from the pristine yet sparsely furnished two-up-two-down we had.