.
I can feel the rigidity in my neck, in my back, under my skin. Like those pieces of plastic they insert under shirt collars, keeping the thing in shape, invisible until you open the packet and lift the material up to remove it.
I’m back at the police station. Tom is late. Late for his own funeral. This trait is not amusing, if it ever was, or endearing. I apologize to DI Dooley, who asks me if I’d like to make a start or if I’d prefer to wait.
It’s a simple enough question but I gasp and stutter, not knowing what the right answer is. She puts me out of my misery: ‘Let’s give him another five minutes.’ She checks her watch. The bulky black dial looks too big for her wrist. She leaves me waiting in Reception.
I check my phone again for messages, though I would have heard the notification sound if Tom had texted me.
Last night, after Tom had gone, I looked up the Missing Overseas website, a salutary litany of British people who have disappeared, all ages, in places all over the globe. One had been missing for twenty years. Good God. I closed that page and went instead to their guidelines. Where Do I Start? What Can Missing Overseas Do? I read them. We were doing the right thing in going to the police here. The website also recommended speaking to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office straight away. I checked and found that they were open only during office hours.
Missing Overseas had a contact form to fill in and a phone number to use in an emergency. Is this an emergency? I wondered. Would I be sitting here with the kids asleep in bed, methodically gathering names and numbers, if it was a real emergency? ‘Should we fill this in?’ I asked Nick. We decided to wait. The list of how they could help was both reassuring but also unnerving because each bullet point – Handling All Media; Providing 24-hour Hotlines – forced me to think that further down the line we might need them to do that. And I didn’t want that. I didn’t want Lori to be one of those pictures.
Just a mix-up, I keep praying, false alarm, crossed wires.
Now Tom is here, striding up the path, unshaven and rumpled. ‘Sorry,’ he says, as he comes in, ‘traffic.’
There is always traffic. Any normal person would’ve allowed for that.
‘She’ll be down again in a minute,’ I say.
‘Shit!’ He turns to go. ‘Laptop.’
‘For God’s sake!’ If he has to drive across town and back…
‘In the car.’
When DI Dooley returns she takes the list I’ve made and works through it. Lori’s passport and national insurance numbers, bank account details. The names and numbers of all the friends I can find. Also an outline of the emails, texts, Skype calls we made in date order.
