Isla Holderness never saw Ana’s ring again. Her laptop, having been sold in a grimy pub on the outskirts of town, was eventually recovered by the police.
Its thief was seventeen-year-old Ben Collings, who was picked up not two weeks later while attempting to prise open the back door of the Co-op at 4 a.m., in the mindset of exuberant criminal incompetence that a gram and a half of his brother’s home-made amphetamine sulphate and a litre of white cider could be relied upon to produce. His fingerprints matched the ones he had left on the door of Isla’s fridge, and his teeth – as the Cambridgeshire Constabulary’s equivalent of the CSI lab was proud to report – precisely matched the profile of the two-thirds of a miniature Melton Mowbray pork pie that he had not stolen from inside it.
Mr Collings, as the PC who returned Isla’s laptop to her explained, was ‘a worthless little toerag’ of precisely the sort who formed the cop shop’s most loyal client base.
Collings had offloaded most of Isla’s possessions onto his big brother – a toerag of some seniority – who had in turn dispersed them among the pawn shops and market stalls of the town. Ana’s ring had ended up in an antique shop the quality of whose merchandise was belied by the tweeness of its name. Herbert Owse’s Antiquarian Omnium Gatherum stood on Burleigh Street, and was manned by a rubicund numismatist with a wild beard and a liking for checked shirts and moleskin waistcoats. His socks, though this is of scant relevance here, were held up with suspenders. His name was not Herbert Owse.
It was into this shop, however, that Alex Smart ducked while cutting down Burleigh Street one afternoon on his way from the cinema – where he had been spending the afternoon not working on his PhD and not thinking about the fact that he wasn’t working on his PhD – to the pub where he was meeting a friend in order to continue doing same.
Alex, who was not in the habit of browsing in antique shops and would not have been able to afford antiques even if he had, had gone in to escape a sudden shower of rain. The shower of rain proving unusually persistent, he was obliged to make a furious pretence at interest in the shop’s contents. Away he browsed, under the jovial eye of the proprietor, occasionally asking questions.
‘This piece,’ he said. ‘Eighteenth century, is it?’
‘Art deco,’ the proprietor replied.
‘Hm,’ said Alex, opening and closing a cabinet door. ‘Very good… hinges, it’s got. Are they original?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very good. I was thinking of something like that for my mum. Likes hinges, she does. How much is it?’
‘Eight hundred and seventy-five pounds.’
‘Oh. Oh my. Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well – bit more, you know. Embarrassing, but a bit more than I was actually thinking of, you know. Spending.’
The supposed Owse made brisk play of returning his attention to the notes he was making in a ledger with a stubby pencil. Alex walked the shop’s narrow aisles, keeping one eye on the rain through the bow window. The shop exuded a considerable aura of brownness: wooden floorboards, patches of curly-cornered carpet, brown cabinets and brown bookshelves and brown leather books.
Alex inspected an umbrella stand in which a number of pawky specimens shuffled their spokes. He read the spines of some of the old books, most of which were the sorts of things you might expect to be bought and sold by the yard rather than for their titles – volumes 4 to 8 of something called The Cyclopedia of Practical Agronomy; the second volume of a Victorian translation of Don Quixote, with illustrated plates.
Then, peering into a glass display cabinet at a selection of silver-black necklaces and brooches with topaz and coral in dented settings, he saw the ring. As he looked at it he thought – in a way that felt light and easy – that perhaps he would ask Carey to marry him, and that this was the ring that he would present to her.
It was sitting upright in a cheap jewellery box. He liked the design, the antique look, the silvery sheen. The ring set his chain of thought in motion, there, while he waited for the rain to stop. But once he had thought it, it seemed right and natural. It was a thought that had been waiting for a thought-shaped slot in his head to occupy, and there it was. They would get married. He would get a cheap flight to the States, and he would go to San Francisco and surprise her with a ring.
The ring was two hundred pounds. Alex could find that. Just. He’d be eating pasta with butter for a bit, but he could find it. He asked the supposed Owse to put the ring aside for him. Wrote his name and mobile phone number, promised to come back the following day. And by the time he stepped out of the shop into the lane, the bell above the door dinging sweetly, shaking a few drops of rain onto Alex’s head, the sun was just breaking through the clouds.
And so to Jones, and to Bree – our two supernatural detectives – hot on the heels of this fugitive device. Jones was driving, and Bree was eating.
Bree had worried about Jones driving. The worry started not long after they had gone over a large and tricky interchange through a just-red light that Bree wouldn’t have risked. She had read the cross traffic – three lanes of impatient metal, a terminal moraine of shining chrome, pregnant with the intention of surging over their carriageway at the first click of their light to green. They had seemed to heave. Jones had piloted their car serenely through.
‘Jones,’ she had said, her thigh cramping with the effort of pumping an imaginary brake, ‘with your condition…’
‘Uh-huh,’ Jones had said.
‘How good are you at anticipating things?’
‘Not very,’ Jones had said. The speedo had been nudging eighty.
‘Things like cars pulling out suddenly, or appearing from dips in the road while you’re overtaking…’
‘Uh-huh,’ Jones had said. He had appeared to have no idea of the drift that the conversation was taking.
‘Are you good at anticipating those?’
‘I don’t know,’ Jones had said. ‘I don’t think so. Which cars are you talking about?’ He had looked around, scanning the road, meerkatted into the rear-view mirror, peered ahead down the road, as if to see what Bree was referring to.
‘Not actual cars here,’ Bree had said. ‘I mean, any cars. Cars you might anticipate. Cars that might pull out or appear from nowhere.’
‘Cars that don’t exist?’
Bree had realised the problem, and fallen silent. Jones’s relationship with time was not, she remembered, the easiest thing to navigate. Nor his relationship with notional cars.
‘Jones, your head is a strange thing.’
‘It is the only head I have,’ Jones had said. ‘I have nothing to compare it with.’
Bree had thought of a better way of putting it. She had asked: ‘Have you ever crashed a car?’
‘I have fast reactions,’ Jones had said.
‘That’s not answering the question,’ Bree had said.
‘Yes,’ Jones had said.
Bree had shrugged. She had let it go. Someone believed Jones could drive. Someone had given him a licence. They hadn’t crashed. And Bree hated to drive.
So here they were. Jones driving – slowly, at Bree’s insistence – and Bree eating an egg-salad sandwich and a big bag of Doritos. It was a beautiful morning. Everything felt light and good. It was one of those mornings when Bree felt a lightness. The weird thing with the crying had shifted Jones in the way she thought about him. She had thought, at first, that he was handsome. But Bree reckoned she thought everyone was handsome. She hadn’t been with anyone for a long time. Then she had thought he was freaky, which he was. But now she felt maternal towards him – and she was surprised to find that feeling warmed her.
‘Look at that,’ she said, holding up a Dorito. ‘That orange. Nothing in nature is that orange.’
Jones looked at her Dorito.
‘An orange is that orange,’ he said.
Bree ignored him. She put her feet on the dashboard. ‘Damn,’ she said, munching happily. ‘What did they do before Doritos?’
Bree and Jones continued west, stopping to use landlines, where they could, to contact Red Queen. Data points came back: here, a probable sighting; there, a CCTV image of the Smart boy in a gas station forecourt. They were going in the right direction, feeling their way half blind after their quarry. They discovered, only twelve hours afterwards, that he’d been in the same motel in Tupelo.
Bree did most of the talking. Jones almost never originated conversation, but Bree poked and prodded. Bree had become curious about Jones. She asked him what he did when he wasn’t doing what they were doing.
‘I’m not usually a field agent,’ said Jones. ‘I work in a small department in Washington. I go through data.’
Bree raised an eyebrow. ‘Most of the Directorate’s desk work is in New York,’ she said.
‘I work for different agencies,’ said Jones. ‘I work in a small department. My condition is useful to agencies looking at data. I can find inconsistencies. I don’t suffer confirmation bias.’
‘What’s confirmation bias?’ Bree asked. Bree was smart, but Bree couldn’t fill out a tax return. When she’d been at school, statistics and math had swum before her on the page. They’d role-played a business class when she’d been a teenager, and when presented with a pretend balance sheet she had gone red and found herself giggling with fright and embarrassment.
‘People see patterns that aren’t there,’ said Jones. ‘They see what they want to see. I don’t. I see only what’s there.’
‘Is that rare?’
‘They say so. Much of the work I do is with tax. But also climate data. I check the algorithms used to identify terror suspects.’
‘Sounds interesting,’ said Bree, thinking otherwise. Sifting data. Jeezus. ‘You get bored?’
‘No,’ said Jones. ‘Never.’ Bree had lost the ability to be surprised by this.
His tone was light and his eyebrows remained in position.
‘What do you do to relax?’ Bree said.
‘I smoke. I do Sudoku. I cook.’
‘You cook?’ Bree said. Her interest was piqued. She couldn’t imagine Jones cooking. Bree loved to cook. She cooked a lot. It was one of the things she did to pass the time when otherwise she would have been drinking.
‘I was told I needed a hobby,’ Jones replied. ‘ “Take your mind off things.” I cook every evening and on weekends I cook twice a day. I like food.’
‘What you can taste of it through all those cigarettes…’ Bree interjected.
Jones didn’t sound in the slightest defensive. ‘I have a good sense of taste.’
‘What do you like to cook, then?’
‘I’ve cooked all of Julia Child and Larousse Gastronomique and Robert Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World and Delia Smith’s Summer Collection. I am on number 467 of Marguerite Patten’s Cookery in Colour.’
Bree had an image of Jones, solemn and methodical, dressed in an apron and a chef’s hat, in the kitchenette of some anonymous and undecorated apartment in which he would be entirely at home. She imagined him holding a burger flipper. He would look like an illustration.
‘Black Cap Pudding,’ said Jones. ‘Put a good layer of stoned prunes or blackcurrant jam at the bottom of the basin.’
Bree burst out laughing. ‘What?’
‘That is one of “More Steamed Puddings”. After that I will cook “Castle Puddings”.’ Jones looked almost happy.
‘Castle puddings, eh? Whatever floats your boat, I guess. You a good cook, then?’
‘No. My food is not always good. The instructions have to be exact. I am not good at guessing. I know a “lug” and a “pinch”. But what is a “good layer”?’ Bree resisted cracking wise. ‘I have been finding Marguerite Patten difficult. Delia Smith is very good. I like Delia Smith.’
‘My favourite food,’ said Bree, apropos of nothing, ‘is…’
And then she started to think about what her favourite food was. Once again it had eluded her. Every time she played this game – usually imagining herself on Death Row – it changed, but never that much. She had once looked online at a list of actual last-meal requests, and she realised that she had all the same favourite foods as most prisoners on Death Row. Gray’s Papaya hot dogs. White Castle sliders. Fried chicken. Pancakes with bacon. A pint of vanilla ice cream with cookie dough. Cold toast thickly spread with salted butter. Banana cake.
She let her sentence trail off. Time and landscape passed.
‘You cook for friends, then, Jones?’ Bree said a little later. Picking up a conversation with Jones was easy. It was as if you could put him on pause, like a VHS. ‘Throw parties?’
‘No. I cook for myself. I don’t socialise,’ Jones said matter-of-factly. ‘People find me unnerving. I have assessments with a specialist, Dr Albert, and a socialisation worker called Herman Coldfield. Herman works for the government. He tells me to think of him as a friend.’
‘Do you?’
‘No.’
She almost said: ‘Got a girlfriend?’ but then had second thoughts. Of course he didn’t. But did he have sex? Even thinking about Jones’s sexual needs, if he had any, creeped her out. She had started to think of him as a child, almost. The idea of him as a sexual being repulsed her. But presumably he did – well… something. Everybody did. But sex without imagination; without fantasy; without thinking about what the other person was thinking…
Bree pushed that aside, and pictured Jones’s life, and felt a little sad. His half-life. That unfurnished apartment – clean, drab, anonymous – in which he would be at home. The bedroom in which he would do his crying, the kitchenette in which he would do his cooking, the shoes by the door each morning waiting for him to step into them and go out into the world without fear or expectation.
That was how it had felt to her, the first months sober. I’ll be your friend, Jones, she thought.
And so, across country, the three cars proceeded. There were Bree and Jones, making shift with each other. There was Alex, making lonely time – thinking, driving, enjoying the pleasurable melancholy of the road, listening to the Pixies and Talking Heads over and over again, wondering how he would remember this journey, how he would describe it to his children.
And there were Sherman and Davidoff, making no progress, wondering why their iPods didn’t work.
‘My name is Bree, and -’
Bree had liked drinking. She had been a good drunk. A happy drunk. When she took the first beer of the afternoon – never before noon; never, at least not till towards the end – and felt its coldness scald her throat, its warmth blossom in her chest, she had been suffused with… what? A sense of generosity, of well-being, of peace with the universe.
That was the best bit. Of course, she’d smoked then too, just the odd one. So the cigarette, the first hit. That was good. But the drink was where the action was. A six of Michelob, pearled with frost in the top of the refrigerator. Crack and sigh as the cap came off. The bottle sighed too. Then a big pull from the neck and it was like the lights came up.
Bree had been sociable. She and Al had gone out in the evenings, taken Cass when she was tiny. They couldn’t afford a sitter in those days. Nobody was buying Al’s paintings, and though he got a bit of work here and there hanging other people’s stuff it wasn’t enough. Bree had stopped being a cop and was pulling down one quarter of jackshit working part-time at the Pentagon.
That first beer, yes. That had been the kicker. Bree tended to make a point of not thinking about it too much. It had been a long, long time and the craving was weaker. But sometimes it still surprised her, like an old ache. And when she did turn and think about it, the taste of that first mouthful was still fresh in her memory as if it was just gone midday.
Level and confront. My ass. What would you give for just – just once more – the taste? Just once more. No such thing as just once. We know where that leads. But before you die, don’t you want to feel that again? The cold filling the mouth, the eyes closing, the eyes opening to an easier world?
It was only later that it got harder. Al got less fun. Bree still maintained this. She knew – she fucking knew, OK, by the end of it – that things had got out from under her, but that didn’t mean that she was necessarily wrong about Al getting less fun. She’d started staying out when he’d gone home, and they started to row about Cass.
That always hit a nerve with her. That was when it got vicious.
‘You dare say that, you fucking piece of shit. I love that girl. I love her more than anything. I’d kill for her. Kill. I do everything for her.’
‘Who got her up for school this morning?’
‘I was sick!’
‘Bree, you’re drinking too -’
‘My drinking has nothing to do with -’
‘You were sick because -’
‘I got day flu.’
‘You got -’
‘I got her up yesterday, and the day before and the day before, and, ’cause one time -’
‘It’s not just the one time, love.’
‘Love’ stung her. The softness of it.
‘Al, do you even think, ever just think, just once what it’s like to be me?’ She’d hear herself slur on ‘ever’, losing the second vowel, but she’d plough on. The thought of what it was like to be her made her eyes prickle but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction, and the emotion was redirected into anger. ‘I’m holding this damn family together while you try to sell your piece-of-shit paintings.’ That would wound him, and she’d see him suck it down. Looking back now, it still made her hurt somewhere remembering moments like that when she’d see how hard he was trying. Turning the other cheek. That holier-than-thou stuff enraged her.
‘I work, and I cook, and I come home and I look after our damn kid, and if one morning I get sick I’m what, I’m a bad mother? I get a drink – yes, maybe I have a couple drinks because I damn well need to unwind and now you’re going to sit in judgement over me?’
‘I’m not sitting in judgement.’ He looked miserable, utterly defeated. Bree had always been strong, always stronger than him. ‘I love -’
Doors would slam, tears come. ‘Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.’ And Bree would show him what was fucking what by going out and necking a couple.
‘I love her more than anything.’ Bree wondered. You had to say it. You had to feel it. What if it wasn’t true?
Bree could look back on all this now and know she was wrong. She didn’t like to think too clearly about how wrong – she’d been through that, and you’d go crazy if you spent the whole rest of your life fifth-stepping, Bree reckoned; you’d get addicted to shame.
But what was odd was that as she accessed the memories she didn’t feel wrong. She remembered not just what she did and said, but what she felt. And as she inhabited the memory she felt it again. She felt indignant. She wasn’t that bad then. Nothing worse than millions of normal people who bring their kids up fine, and whose husbands didn’t get their panties in a twist if they had one bourbon over the line most nights. She was dealing with it.
That was what she thought of as her double vision. That indignation was still a part of her. But so was the part that saw something else. And even back then, the part that saw things as they were was there. It simply didn’t seem urgent. I’ll keep an eye on that, she’d thought.
She knew that her morning routine wasn’t great; wasn’t how it had always been. She’d make sure she was in the bathroom alone, Al out of the house preferably. Then she’d run the shower and before she got in it she stood over the sink with her hands gripping the sides and she arched over it and retched. She had learned to do this silently, for the most part, feeling her diaphragm spasm. She had to do this for somewhere between thirty seconds and a minute. Most days, a few tablespoons of bitter yellow bile slicked onto the white porcelain. She’d ride it out. That, too, passed, and the nausea left with the bile.
Then she’d breathe in and breathe out. And she’d stand up straight. The shuddering and the retching gone, she would feel a lightness, as if she’d been purged. She’d swill her mouth and the sink with water, and step into the shower, almost bright, ready to face the day.
And even though her work at the Pentagon was paper-shovelling, she kept at it. She arrived on time and she left on time and she worked damn well. Until Al left she was keeping it going. She thought of Al’s mousy, too-long hair. The yellow tint to his sunglasses and the brown leather jacket he loved and always wore. The speed and anger of his going.
Bree looked out of the car window. America was passing. It was warm, but the air was thick and the sky was the colour of ash. A couple drops of rain fell on the windshield.
Al was still there when she’d started to lose time. They’d had so much time back then, when they were young and new-married, that Bree barely noticed it going missing. When it did, it had been funny – Al shaking his head at how Bree couldn’t remember getting home from parties and feigning theatrical outrage when Bree would ask: ‘Did we…?’
‘You’ve forgotten?’
Later, though, she lost time more easily, more unexpectedly, more disconcertingly. Time started to vanish in the way that dollars would vanish from her purse – just a tentative five minutes here or there, surreptitiously, calculated so she wouldn’t miss it but not calculated well enough. She’d find herself in a different room than she had been, tips of her fingers grazing the door jambs, mouth open to deliver a sentence she had no idea of. She would frown and withdraw. That, at least, early on.
The thefts became more blatant. Money from the purse was not an analogy. Money really had been going missing from her purse. And it was hard to be sure, at first, how much and when. But it was clear Cass was stealing from her. Finally, she confronted her about it and Cass reacted as she always did when cornered: with the sort of indignation only an eleven-year-old can muster. Her whole face shone red as she screamed back. Bree slapped her – not on the face but on the legs.
Al had gone by this time. Had he? Bree couldn’t always remember the sequence of events. But that would explain why she was so angry – he’d left them both in the shit, the way he walked out. She was under such pressure then. She couldn’t afford childcare. And her money was going missing. And Cassie was bed-wetting and Bree was exhausted and her good-for-nothing husband had meanwhile lit out for the territories with an armload of his own paintings. It was the first time she’d hit her daughter.
‘Never steal. Never steal from your mommy, never. You hear me?’ Blood thumping in her ears, rage misting everything. Cass’s yell, as the blows landed – suddenly turning the corner into a shriek, even shriller and even louder.
It was about this time that the sneak-thief started to get bolder. Money started disappearing from the bedside table. And drinks – the emergency half-jack in the wardrobe; the old miniatures of vodka in the ice compartment. And time – great chunks of time would have been pocketed, spirited away. It was very confusing.
Was the same person who was taking the money taking the time? That’s all money was, Bree had once heard someone say: frozen time. It became impossible to keep track of things.
The thief was eventually apprehended.
Bree never felt that the Bree who had been doing that stuff was another person, one who had died at those meetings to make way for the shiny new person who was now sitting in the car with Jones. That Bree had continued. In another life, one where Bree had spent a lot less time sitting in smoky, talky rooms on jittering plastic chairs comparing war stories, she was living on, still drinking. She’d be deathbound by now, living through blank, real spaces, passing hours and days into her blackouts like someone patiently feeding a furnace: there, but not there.
And she was here, but not here. She followed this Bree around with the tenacity of a shadow. She was long when the sun was low; almost invisible in the bright of the day. Bree could lose touch with her for just a second, by jumping – but then gravity intervened and Bree wasn’t a great one for jumping up and down these days, in any case.
Stupid analogy, Bree thought. Raindrops, an unexpected shower, gathered and ran on the windshield. They felt like another analogy, and she wondered what it was like to be Jones, who had shown no signs of making conversation since lunch, and for whom the slick of water running down the windshield would never be anything other than rain.
Bree thought about not-Bree, drinking Bree. It was as if she had acquired a twin. In that life, this Bree would be shadowing her. Sober Bree, in that world, would be not-Bree: would be just there, hanging around, waiting. The thing that was your deepest, darkest terror: the thing you longed for.
Snap. Cheers, sister.
Except in both these worlds, they had taken Cass away, and Bree wondered momentarily in which of these worlds she was living and why.