What he couldn't know was whether she'd been in the room when they were doing it. There was still the possibility that she was out and about, aiming to get back for their meeting at six and she'd been delayed. Or gone shopping or whatever else women do that makes them late every time. The other alternative was whoever searched the room had taken her away with them. All he could do was wait to see if she turned up.
The only other furniture in the room was a threadbare armchair with a couple of suspicious looking stains on the upholstery. It was that or the bed so he settled into it to wait. Six thirty came and went, and by seven he knew she wasn't coming. He'd had a vague, nagging suspicion ever since he'd spoken to her on the phone. There had been something not right about the call. She'd sounded panicky when he said he was coming straight over and he was getting the feeling now that she just agreed to meet him to get him off the phone.
If it hadn't been for what she said about Sarah he'd have dropped the whole thing right there. He'd almost got beaten up and now she'd gone missing—it was more trouble than it was worth. But—and it was a big but—she had mentioned Sarah and he knew he had to follow it up.
He pushed himself up out of the armchair and crossed to the bed and picked up the suitcase. It was a regular, small carry-on suitcase with wheels and a telescopic handle. The sort of thing that would be big enough for a week away for a man, or an overnight stay for a woman. On the outside there was a small, zippered pocket with enough room for your travel documents and a book to read.
He unzipped it and felt inside and pulled out a slim diary. Did anyone still use a diary? Did anyone under twenty-five even know what one was? It was strange that whoever had searched the room had missed it. Maybe they hadn't but it wasn't what they were after.
He looked at the date—2007—and was on the verge of putting it back when a sudden thought blind-sided him. He felt his stomach flip, felt his legs go weak. The room was way too hot; he needed some air. He crossed to the window and opened it and stuck his head out. He breathed deeply, couldn't get enough of it, sucking traffic fumes and all the rest down into his lungs.
He looked at the diary shaking slightly in his hand, an up-yours buzz of anticipation taking his breath away. Maybe he didn't need Ellie's help after all. He remembered back to when he'd kept a diary, back in the day, before everybody lived their whole life through their phone. At the back there'd always been a removable section for names and addresses and phone numbers. Removable, so that you didn't have to write them out all over again every year. You could keep on transferring them for ten or twenty years, amending people's details as they moved and changed phones until the whole thing was a mess of crossed-out entries and new ones squeezed into every available gap until you finally bit the bullet and got a new one and cleaned it all up.
He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and opened it up at the back. Sure enough, there it was. A couple of loose pieces of paper fell out onto the floor. He ignored them and pulled the address section free. He could see from the number of amendments that it had been regularly updated over the years. He flicked through to the B's and there it was—Sarah Buckley. His hands were shaking harder now, but not so hard that he couldn't see, right there next to her name, the address of the house they'd lived in together and a number for the house phone and a number for her cell phone—a number he knew had stopped working the day she disappeared. There were no crossings-out, no amendments, no new number or address squeezed into the margins.
He took a couple of paces backwards and dropped into the armchair. He flicked through the pages until he got to the S's but he knew it was no use. Ellie was a surname person, not a first name person. Sarah had been under the B's, she wouldn't be in the S's as well. He felt numb. For one stupid moment he'd really believed that he would find some new address or phone number for Sarah, neatly written under their old details.
He felt so stupid. As if Sarah, having successfully disappeared off the face of the earth, would have given her best friend her new address and made sure she wrote it down in her diary for the whole world to find.
He let the address book drop from his fingers onto the floor and leaned back in the chair and stared up at the ceiling. He closed his eyes and rested his arm across them shutting everything out. Or keeping it all in. He sat upright and opened his eyes to try to stop the images that he didn't want to think about crowding into his mind. He got up and walked over to the bed. The two pieces of paper that had fallen out of the diary were lying on the floor and he bent down and picked them up.
One of them was a photograph cut in half. It was of Ellie and he immediately knew what it was. He pulled the photo that Ellie had given him of Dixie out of his pocket. The two halves were a perfect match, but it was no big deal. He'd been pretty sure at the time that the person who'd been cut out of the photo was Ellie. He had no idea why she'd cut it in half—it was the most natural thing in the world that a person searching for somebody might have a picture of the two of them together.
It looked like they'd been on vacation somewhere. Somewhere hot anyway and they were smiling like they were having a great time. Then something else caught his eye and another nagging thought crossed his mind—a nasty idea about why Ellie might have cut the photo in half. It wasn't about her at all.
There was another woman standing next to Ellie on the other side to Dixie. All you could see was her arm round Ellie's shoulders. But the photo hadn't been cut on that side—whoever had taken the picture had either been totally inept with a camera or had deliberately framed the shot so that only Ellie and Dixie were in it. He couldn't stop looking at that extra arm. The way it was casually draped round Ellie's shoulders. The slim hand wasn't gripping her shoulder so that you'd only really see the fingertips. No, it was more like the arm was around her neck and the hand was hanging down the front of Ellie's shoulder so you could see the whole hand. And the wrist. And the bracelet on the wrist.
He felt fear spread down through his intestines and up into his throat; fear of having what he'd searched for these last five years suddenly in front of him; fear of finally knowing the truth however ugly it might be. It flooded his brain until he couldn't think straight, couldn't form a single, clear thought that wasn't distorted by what he wanted to see.
There must be thousands of bracelets just like it, but that didn't stop his legs buckling for the second time in less than five minutes. Maybe hundreds of thousands of them, but that didn't change the fact that he'd bought one just like it for Sarah's twenty-fifth birthday and to the best of his knowledge she'd worn it every day since.
Was that her hand? Was that her wrist? Her arm? Surely it had to be. Now, more than ever he had to find Ellie. Before he'd walked into this room the odds had been on Ellie stringing him along to get him to help her, with the slimmest chance that she was telling the truth. Now those odds were shifting and he knew he'd never be able to tell her to take her story and stick it up her ass.
Something else crossed his mind. There were three people in the photo, so who was the fourth person taking it? Another girl friend? Another man? Two happy couples on vacation together? His brain was exploding. He wanted to be sick. This wasn't how things were meant to turn out. He didn't want to find Sarah to learn she'd left him for another man. No mystery, no disappearance, just an everyday tale of finding a guy with a bigger johnson. Or a bigger pay check. Or a smaller johnson. Or anything that wasn't him.