‘Of course. Take as long as you like. We’re not too busy right now.’
It was mid-afternoon, and the place still seemed fairly full to Annie, though she and Gerry had no difficulty getting a table for four. Busyness in a place like this was all relative, she supposed.
When their waitress came by, Annie ordered a margherita pizza and side salad, and Gerry picked a Diavola. Both ordered Diet Cokes to accompany their meals. They had barely got their order in before a young woman joined them at the table. She introduced herself as Mitsuko Ogawa and sat down. Annie guessed that Mitsuko was around Marnie’s age. She was small, with shoulder-length black hair drawn tight from her forehead and fastened at the back. Her eyes shone with concern as she sat down and smoothed her dress over her knees.
‘Mr. Baldini said you wanted to talk to me about Marnie,’ she said, with a slight Geordie accent. ‘Do you know where she is? What’s happened to her?’
‘I’m afraid we don’t know where she is,’ said Gerry. ‘That’s one problem we were hoping you might help us with. I understand the two of you were close?’
‘I thought so,’ Mitsuko said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Something changed. I don’t know what it was, but she just wasn’t the same after. Did Mr. Baldini tell you what happened here?’
‘Yes. He said her work went downhill and she left in tears.’
‘That’s about right.’
‘Do you have any idea why? What was wrong with her? He said he thought she might be ill.’ They had a very good idea of what was wrong with Marnie, but they couldn’t tell Mitsuko; they were hoping she might be able to tell them more than they knew already.
‘She wasn’t eating properly,’ said Mitsuko. ‘Or sleeping very well. But I don’t think there was any illness as such. Just a sort of malaise, you know, weariness, depression. She lost interest in everything. But I don’t know why. We used to be friends. When she first moved into the house a year ago, we spent a lot of time together, you know, just talking, listening to music. We’d go out to the pub, the cinema, concerts. Marnie likes art-house movies — Bergman and Kurosawa, that sort of thing. And she likes goth rock. You know, old weird stuff like Joy Division, Nick Cave, Sisters of Mercy. All that dark stuff. My taste is a bit more mainstream and upbeat. Action thrillers and Marvel. And I prefer music you can dance to. But we liked each other.’
‘So you’d say you are close friends?’
‘Yes,’ said Mitsuko. ‘Yes, I would. I’ve been beside myself since she left. Has something happened to her? Please tell me if it has. I’ve been worried sick.’
‘Not that we know of,’ said Annie. ‘We’re just trying to find her. What’s she like?’
‘Marnie? I suppose she struck me as fairly complicated, really, serious, sensitive, deep-thinking, but she can also be pretty happy-go-lucky a lot of the time. She’s great fun. We had some laughs. She loves life, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t see the problems in the world. She’s especially serious about climate change. That Greta is a real hero of hers. Or should I say heroine? She’s generous, thoughtful, interested in people. I got the impression she was maybe a bit secretive. Like, you’d spend an evening with her and realise you’d told her your deepest darkest secrets but you hadn’t learned much about her in return. Enigmatic, I guess. But I suppose we all are, to some extent.’
‘Did she tell you about her life?’ Annie asked.
‘Not much,’ said Mitsuko. ‘Bits and pieces over the time we knew each other, I suppose. But that’s how it happens, isn’t it? I mean, you don’t usually sit down and tell your new friends your whole life story at once. You find out about people slowly, over time. Bits and pieces come out when something reminds you of a particular incident or sparks a memory. That’s what it was like. She comes from down south somewhere, but I don’t remember where, if she ever even told me. It was near the sea, I think. I know she missed the sea. But she could be annoyingly vague on details. She’d just moved up here when we first met a year or so back. Wanted a change of scene. I could relate to that.’
‘Did you make such a change?’
Mitsuko smiled. ‘Yep. All the way from Sunderland. My dad came over here to work for Nissan when they opened the plant in 1986. He and my mother liked England so much that they stayed. I was born here.’
‘Why did Marnie move to York? Was she a student here?’
‘No, she wasn’t at uni. And I don’t know why she moved — except for that change of scene I mentioned.’
‘I see. Are you sure you can’t remember where she came from? We’re really keen to find her, and anything to speed that up would help us a lot.’
‘I’m sorry. She talked about her father quite a lot, what a great guy he was, how kind and gentle. Hang on, though. She did say something once about it being Hardy country. Her dad liked Hardy. We did him at school. That’s Wessex, isn’t it?’
Annie had no idea. She shot Gerry a glance.
‘That’s right,’ Gerry said. ‘Well, Wessex isn’t a real place, but Hardy based it mostly on Dorset. Plenty of sea around there.’
Annie rolled her eyes at Mitsuko. ‘The benefits of a public-school education.’
‘We never did Hardy at school,’ Gerry protested. ‘Far too risqué. I read him off my own bat one summer holiday when I was at uni. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. You should try it.’
‘Life’s too short,’ said Annie. ‘I’ll stick with Martina Cole and Marian Keyes.’ She turned back to Mitsuko. ‘What did Marnie have to say about her childhood?’
‘She said she had been happy growing up. I got the impression it was a pretty ordinary childhood. You know. Caring parents, and all. Like mine, really. Did well at the local comp. She was all set for uni, and she said she’d done her first year at Nottingham, studying History, I think. But she soon realised she simply couldn’t afford to finish it, that she’d end up so much in debt she’d never get it paid off. I mean, History might be fun, but it’s hardly a passport to a high-paying job, is it? Not that I think that’s what uni should be about or anything. Her folks were great, she said, but they didn’t have a lot of money, and she wasn’t going to even ask them to help her out. So she dropped out.’
‘And came here to work at Pizza Express?’
‘Yes. That’s about it. I suppose you could say both of us are trying to figure out what to do with our lives, where to go next. I mean, this job isn’t meant to be permanent for either of us.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m at uni,’ Mitsuko said. ‘English Literature. Also pretty useless for the job market.’
‘Did Marnie ever tell you anything about the other job she had?’
‘You mean the posh parties?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I think she only worked a few, but she said she got paid as much for one of them as she did in a week working here, so that was a big incentive to do more. She didn’t care much about all the celebs and so on, but I think she kind of liked the job in a way. She said most of the time she was in the kitchen, or driving back and forth from base. It was like some sort of industrial kitchen on MasterChef, she told me. She did talk about a footballer she met — she knows I’m a big Sunderland fan — and what an egotistical jerk he was. And a guitarist from a band I liked who didn’t have anything much to say to anyone. Little vignettes like that. There were a lot of boring old politicians and businessmen there, too, but she didn’t have a lot of contact with them. She worked behind the scenes.’
‘Can you give us their names?’ Gerry asked. ‘The footballer and guitarist. We may have heard of them.’