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‘Mr Murphy? Hello, it’s Stephen here. Stephen. No, it’s not about the television. It’s Stephen – Ruth’s brother.’

  He rubbed at the inflamed pore on his nostril, which had budded into a tiny yellow point.

  ‘That’s right, Stephen, Beth’s friend. I’m very well, but listen; I don’t want you to worry, but is Beth there with you?’

  A pause ensued which was long enough to make me want to grab the receiver and shout down the phone at Beth’s decrepit father: ‘We’re all going out of our minds here! For God’s sake: is your daughter with you or not?’

  But Stephen was nodding patiently into the receiver, and raising an eyebrow in our direction.

  ‘Your daughter Beth. That’s right … OK. OK, but will you call me if she turns up? We think she was worried about you, Mr Murphy, and that she may be on her way to see you. I’m sure it’s all fine, but please just tell her to call me as soon as she arrives.’

  Sinking back down on to his stool Stephen put his head in his hands and laughed with relief, eventually looking up at our expectant faces.

  ‘Right. Thank God we caught him at a lucid moment. Everything seems to be fine. Apparently he was asking her to come and see him when they spoke on the phone earlier in the week, so that’s obviously what she’s done. But God knows how she’s planning on getting there.’

  Christian and I stared at him, uncomprehending.

  ‘I don’t think you two get just how far Skibbereen is from anywhere,’ he laughed. ‘She’d have to fly to Dublin, get a train halfway there and then a bus. It would easily take her a day and a half from Paris – and that’s if the connections are good. She’s probably asleep on some coach right now. God, I need a drink, I’m going to go down to the shop and get a bottle of wine. Do you two need anything?’

  As we both shook our heads I was calculating exactly how long it would take him to get there and back. By the time the front door slammed shut Christian’s tongue was already in my mouth, still warm from the gulp of coffee he had just taken, his knee forcing my knees apart. I took a special delight in keeping my eyes open, surprised that far from deadening sensations it gave them an edge. I could see myself in his pupils, framed by the delicate fringe of his lashes, each dark hair thinning and lightening towards its tip.

  By the time Stephen returned, we were seated on opposite sofas in the sitting room. Christian was smoking, a bored expression on his face. I was flicking nonchalantly through the TV guide. Only the most meticulous observer would have noticed that the vein in my neck was still beating fast.

  Our concern temporarily appeased by Stephen’s conversation with Beth’s father, and subsequently with Ruth, the three of us talked out our conclusion that she had, in a moment of panic, decided to leave Paris immediately and make her way to Skibbereen, until our worries were entirely dispelled. But we were all pretending to each other, using any excuse to sneak out of the room and try Beth on her mobile phone, only to be greeted with the same increasingly irritating sing-song answerphone message. I had even begun to imagine that there was a hint of mockery in the upward lilt of ‘and I’ll get straight back to you’, as though Beth were enjoying our concerted efforts to track her down. I texted her continuously, without telling the others, thinking that she might be in some kind of trouble she could only tell me about.

  It was too late to go home, and when I suggested spending the night at the flat, Christian instantly concurred, adding that I could have Beth’s bed, and he would sleep on the sofa. After watching the end of a badly dubbed American thriller on television, Stephen got up, stretched, and looked at his watch.

  ‘It’s past one. She’ll be nearly there by now, unless she’s had to stop off in a hotel overnight.’

  Something in the overconfident way he was mapping her steps revived the trepidation I had felt earlier that day. What if Beth was not on her way back to Ireland?

  ‘Stephen,’ I cleared my throat. ‘When would we know if she’s, well, not heading back home?’

  ‘It would take her a good day and a half, Anna, like I said, and Ruth said she would spend the whole of tomorrow at the farm with her father, so whatever happens she’ll call us when she gets there. But we’ve been through this, and it all makes sense now. I mean, why else would she have taken her passport with her?’

  He bit off a piece of dry skin from the side of his thumb and stood uneasily in the centre of the room like a comedian who’d forgotten his lines.

  ‘So why the hell is her phone switched off?’ Christian said without looking up.

  ‘She’s always forgetting to charge it.’

  I could only remember a single instance when she had, yet I was making it a character trait.

  ‘She obviously left in a real rush, so I really don’t think that means anything. Added to which, we have to accept that none of us are exactly her first priority at the moment.’

  ‘Still …’ There was a note of concern in Christian’s voice.

  ‘I think she was going mad with worry,’ Stephen continued, ‘and knowing her, she was probably sick of discussing it with us too. I bet she thought she was boring us with it all.’

  ‘I’m going to bed.’

  Stephen and Christian looked at me with surprise.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll all be fine,’ I added in a softer tone. ‘She’d probably laugh if she knew how much we were worrying. And I think we should all try to get some sleep.’

  Wrapping myself in Beth’s sheets, I was dismayed to find them freshly washed, without even the subtlest hint of her. Climbing back out of bed, I tiptoed over to her dressing table, pulled out the ground-glass stopper of her perfume and inhaled it deeply before dabbing it on my temples, wrists and neck. Her face cream caught my eye, and I gazed in wonderment at the mysterious and expensive-looking tubes and phials that I still had to try. With my fingers tightly wrapped around my mobile phone and the harmony of her scents surrounding me, I succumbed to the dulling effects of sleep.

  ‘Anna! Anna, wake up.’

  It was Christian, his face distorted with shadows, standing over me, holding something in his right hand.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s Beth’s phone.’

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes, trying to fathom what this meant, and why I was lying in Beth’s bed.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep – that boiler’s too noisy – so I tried to shift one of the sofa pillows and found this down the back of it.’

  I was finding it hard to care about the sofa or Beth’s phone, but I moved across the bed to allow Christian to sit down.

  ‘So what does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. It certainly explains why there’s been no reply. But why wouldn’t she take her phone?’ I shrugged.

  ‘Maybe she just forgot. Or she looked for it and couldn’t find it because it had fallen down the back of the sofa. It doesn’t explain a whole lot.’

  Christian switched it on and we both waited impatiently for the pointless swivelling motif to fill the screen and disappear. Forty-two messages. Scrolling down I saw my own name a dozen times, interspersed with Ruth’s, Stephen’s, a woman from Beth’s work and Christian’s. Noting with distaste that one of his messages began ‘My darling …’ I looked up at him and wondered whether all this concern for Beth could be eradicated, temporarily at least, by a different impulse. At first allowing himself to be pulled in towards me, he sprang away sharply with the look of someone who has bitten into something impossibly sour.

  ‘What the …? Are you wearing her perfume?’

  A few feet away Stephen slept on, and somewhere in Ireland, Beth was, no doubt, finally nearing home.

  I awoke confused and ashamed, with the relevance of Christian’s nocturnal visit beginning to dawn on me, in all its confused significance. I looked at the clock, wondering if it was still too early to call Ruth. By the haunted look on Stephen’s face as I wandered into the kitchen I could see that he already had, and I knew that the news was not good.

  ‘She’s not there yet. How can she
not have got there? It shouldn’t take this long, Anna, whichever way you look at it.’

  ‘Why? Who have you spoken to?’

  ‘Ruth and Beth’s aunt. They’re at Beth’s father’s house at the moment. I hung up when they started arguing on the end of the phone. Ruth thinks the old man’s talking rubbish. Apparently he’s been asking Beth to come and visit him for ages, and she’d promised to come, but said it would have to be sometime next month because work was too busy until then. But then Beth’s aunt says she was there when he had this conversation with her on the phone – says he was perfectly compos mentis at the time.’

  I sat down sluggishly, longing for the lucidity a strong coffee would bring and reaching instinctively in my mind for Beth to sort us out.

  ‘But she might have changed her mind, Stephen. Don’t you think? I mean, that night, when I came over here – the last time I saw her – I’ve never seen her in that kind of state before. I know it always upsets her when she speaks to her father, but that night I could tell that she was really taking it hard. And anyway, it’s the only explanation.’

  ‘But it’s not, Anna, that’s what I’m saying. You know it’s not. It’s just that we don’t want to think about the others.’

  I looked up, silently imploring him not to carry on.

  ‘We can’t delay it any longer. Unless we know for sure that she’s gone back to Ireland, we’ve got to call the police.’

  ‘He’s right. We shouldn’t have waited this long.’

  Christian was standing in the doorway wearing only his jeans. I looked from him to the cup of coffee that sat tantalisingly on the table before Stephen. Reaching across for it seemed like an act of great significance. Raising it to my lips I closed my eyes and took a gulp. It was very perfumed, very strong, and when I opened them again, the weight of our two days of torpor lifted, and it was time to act.

  In films people always know exactly whom to go to, what number to call, how to explain their situation, as though all their lives they’d been lying in wait for the moment when some tragedy would prompt them to march into their local police station and announce a crime. Looking very young, and holding the receiver like an object so technologically enhanced that its exact use was questionable, Stephen turned to Christian.

  ‘Who do we call here? I’ve forgotten. I mean, it’s not 999, is it?’

  ‘We should call the local commissariat first,’ said Christian authoritatively. ‘Where do you keep the pages jaunes?’

  The gigantic tome, lying untouched in its plastic wrapping, was found on the floor of the broom cupboard.

  ‘Do we want general enquiries or emergencies?’ Stephen said.

  ‘Just call any damn number and get it over with,’ I snapped, feeling the blood pound in my ears.

  ‘Christian, you do it, you’re French and you’ll be able to explain things better than anyone else.’

  As Christian tapped out the number I watched the side of his mouth twitch. Beth wasn’t even here, and yet her absence was all-consuming. He paced in and out of the sitting room as he made the call, while Stephen and I sat facing one another, our elbows at right-angles to the table. The silence was broken only by intermittent ‘oui’s from the next room, as though Christian was being asked a series of very straightforward questions, without being allowed to go into detail. Finally he re-emerged.

  ‘Right. They’re coming over in half an hour to ask us some questions.’ And, looking with slight disgust at the coffee pot: ‘Do you have anything stronger?’

  ‘There’s some brandy up there. In that cupboard.’

  A stool shrieked across the tiled floor and Stephen left the room. Christian and I sat in silence, knees almost touching, until he reached over and ran the side of his thumb across my bottom lip. The gesture made sense to me, like the answer to a question I hadn’t realised I’d asked, and I wondered whether everything might still be all right.

  Nearly an hour later, the doorbell rang and I heard the stupid shuffle of Stephen’s Prixunic slippers against the hall carpet and his monotone: ‘Bonjour. Entrez.’ The taller of the two introduced himself as Inspector Verbier. His colleague had a face and name too bland to describe or remember. He gazed blinkingly at his partner, as if born only for the purpose of complementing another human being. Inspector Verbier made up for his colleague’s nonentity. A broad man in his forties with skin that should always be tanned but wasn’t, he emanated a kind of slovenly sexuality. His lips were soft, feminine in their perfect delineation, and when he spoke, they parted to reveal a row of tiny yellowing milk teeth – the fangs of a sadistic schoolboy.

  Declining Stephen’s offer of coffee he placed himself unpleasantly near me by the table, while his blank-faced companion surveyed the ceilings and walls of the flat, as if for clues.

  ‘So how long has …’ He flicked through pages of a notebook with a thick-ended thumb in search of a name. ‘… has Madame Murphy been missing?’

  ‘Well, we’re still not really sure she is missing,’ I began, shocked by the seriousness of his language, ‘and it’s Mademoiselle.’

  ‘Anna, can you let me deal with this, please?’ Stephen cut in. ‘We’re really worried about her. She disappeared the evening before last, and although there is a possibility that she has gone to see her sick father in Ireland, it would be very out of character for her to do so without telling us. She also left her phone behind, which is unlike her.’

  Stephen went on to explain at length the build-up to Beth’s disappearance, including her state of mind the last time he had seen her. The inspector, I noticed, was not writing anything down but leaving the blank man to take the necessary details.

  ‘And you’re the boyfriend?’ he suddenly interjected. It wasn’t a question, but a rebuke.

  ‘No. This is Beth’s boyfriend.’ Stephen pointed at Christian who was leaning against the wall with his head bowed.

  All eyes were suddenly turned so accusingly on Christian that for a moment he looked guilty, even to me. Hot panic rose in my chest like nausea.

  ‘And you work where?’

  ‘I’m the manager of L’Écume, in Bastille.’

  The inspector turned and gave his colleague a questioning look.

  ‘That the place you and I went last month?’

  The man nodded.

  ‘They do a good steak there,’ he told Christian magnanimously.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Christian’s brittle responses to the police and a smattering of anecdotes Beth had recounted told me he was no stranger to dealing with them. The questions, initially perfunctory, were becoming barbed, Christian’s answers increasingly insolent. Both men had returned to the Parisian slang that was their natural lingo, and Stephen, who had been sitting slumped in a chair across the room, looked up, his curiosity aroused by the steep gradient of their tones.

  ‘And how were you two getting along?’

  ‘Very well. We always got along very well.’

  ‘Had you had a fight, or a disagreement of any kind?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not of any kind? Think carefully.’

  ‘I think I’d remember. The answer is no,’ and then more gently, ‘I’ve been trying to think of any detail that could help.’

  The room was completely still. I could hear the other man scratching his arm with the end of his pen through his oatmeal-coloured corduroy jacket. Elsewhere in the building someone was playing one of Satie’s Gymnopédies on the piano.

  ‘So your girlfriend, who I understand is not in the habit of disappearing, just decides to vanish one day?’

  ‘No, because as we’ve just said, her father has not been well, and we think she may have gone back to Ireland to see him, only we can’t get hold of her.’

  Christian was enunciating each word with irritating precision.

  ‘Ah, yes.’

  A hastily scribbled comment in the book.

  ‘So tell me: why are we here?’

  ‘Because we thought it was the responsible thing
to do.’ Stephen’s exasperation made him sound petulant. ‘I’m beginning to wonder why we bothered,’ he added, sottovoce.

  Crushing his attitude with a lazily raised hand, Verbier continued, ‘And you say she may be in Ireland?’

  Stephen explained, again in a deliberate manner that was beginning to grate, the fact that Beth’s father suffered from Alzheimer’s, and that because of the illness he was not a reliable source of information.

  ‘So you see we have tried to get in touch with her,’ I added, ‘but we thought, now that two nights have passed, that we should really let you know so that you can make your own inquiries. Presumably you can find out for sure if she’s left the country or not. Can’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Mademoiselle, we are able to do that for you. But may I suggest something?’ He scratched a sardonic eyebrow in the manner of someone who was going to do so anyway. ‘I think you should all sit tight, and wait for your friend to call. I have no doubt that she will.’

  ‘Or,’ cut in Stephen once more, ‘she could, of course, be lying dead in a back street somewhere, which is why we’ve troubled you today.’

  For the second time that day, I felt like laughing. I could hear myself recounting the story to Beth; I knew exactly how I would mimic Stephen’s now shrill voice, and which of the policemen’s attributes I would exaggerate. I could see her now, spluttering through a hand clamped to her mouth, ashamed at having put us through all this but unable to stop those mirthful eyes from creasing up.

  ‘I tell you what. Why don’t you all keep calling her father, or anyone who lives near her father, until you find out for sure if she’s either there or on her way home. That way,’ he sighed, looking longingly down the hallway towards the front door, ‘at least we’ll know what we’re dealing with.’

  Mr Void had already snapped shut his notebook, signalling the end of their visit.

  Feeling foolish, we remained silent for some time after the door slammed.

  ‘Well, that told us,’ I attempted, embarrassed by my own false jollity.

  ‘I’ve got to get to work,’ mumbled Christian.

  ‘I guess I should go too,’ I said apologetically to Stephen, minutes after he’d left. ‘What are you going to do?’