The Night They Vanished, page 2
I pick it up and try to calm myself down. Of course it’s not the same card. This isn’t Harry Potter with dozens of cards about to fly down the chimney until I open one. I rip open the new envelope and immediately wish I hadn’t. It’s a sympathy card. Sorry for your loss, it says on the front in swirly text above a picture of some lilies. I open the card with a shaking hand, but there’s nothing written inside. It’s not coincidental or accidental, the arrival of this card. Someone knows the significance of today’s date. And the only person I can think of who knows the date Jacob died, and would send this card to me, is my father. But would he really be so breathtakingly cruel?
Of course he would. I blink tears from my eyes. It’s stupid, so bloody stupid. Dee is right—I’ve let that Christmas card sit unopened on the shelf for over two months, allowing it to torture me daily, and in the end, it didn’t matter—my father got in a sneak attack, swept aside all my defenses with this new card.
I rip up the sympathy card, tear it into tiny pieces, crumple the envelope up into a ball. I reach for the Christmas card to do the same, but hesitate. My dad isn’t in that envelope—it’s just me, punishing myself, exactly as Dee said, but I’m not ready to open that one, or tear it up. I grab the card, open a drawer in the dresser, and shove it inside, right to the back. I won’t give it another thought, even if I’m too cowardly to actually either open or bin the bloody thing.
I double-check all the doors and windows are locked before heading up to take a bath, still twitchy about my poor car. Now that I’m calm, I really don’t think Liam had anything to do with it. Furtive tire slashing is not his style, but the thought that my ex is enough of a shit that my mind immediately turned to him is depressing.
Before I switch off the light to go to bed, I send a text to Dee, typing quickly and pressing send before I can start prevaricating: Okay—set me up with a nice solvent non-cheating non-toxic man.
Chapter 2
thedarktourist.com
2019-02-17 login failed: incorrect authentication data—6 attempts
2019-02-18 login failed: incorrect authentication data—24 attempts
2019-02-19 login failed: incorrect authentication data—9 attempts
2019-02-20 login failed: incorrect authentication data—35 attempts
2019-02-21 login failed: incorrect authentication data—38 attempts
2019-02-22 login failed: incorrect authentication data—12 attempts
…
2019-02-23 login successful: access granted
Friday 7 p.m.
Jeans or a dress? I hover in front of the mirror, a pair of skinny jeans in one hand, a patterned wrap dress in the other. Oh, for God’s sake, we’re only going to the pub. I chuck the dress onto the bed and pull on the jeans. Only the pub, but maybe a nicer top than the plain black jumper I’m currently wearing—it is a date after all.
“Oh, for God’s sake.” I mutter it out loud this time and sink on to the bed, shoving aside the pile of clothes I dumped there as I dithered over what to wear. A date. And not just a date—a blind date. I pick up my phone and call Dee.
“Remind me why I’m doing this again?” I put her on speaker while I take off the black jumper and replace it with the dark green velvet-edged top Dee bought me for Christmas.
“Because you haven’t been out with anyone since Liam the loser and I’m fed up with seeing your miserable face and hearing you moan about it?”
“Not making me feel any better.” I go over to my dressing table and hook in my silver earrings.
“Okay—because Adam is nice, and I think you two will really hit it off?”
“Nice—is there a worse word to describe someone than nice?” I hesitate as I reach for my makeup bag. Will the red lipstick be wasted on someone so nice?
“There’s nothing wrong with nice. It doesn’t mean boring. It means decent. It means he won’t be shagging two other women at the same time as you and always accidentally forget his wallet every time you go out.”
I wince. Ah, yes, Liam. Maybe I’ll stop regretting my meltdown at him on the phone—he might not have slashed my tire, but he was still a shit. I put the red lipstick away. I wore it on my first date with Liam and he ended up wearing more of it than me after a teen-style kissing marathon outside the pub. I go with a berry lip-stain instead. More durable. Although Mr. Blind Date doesn’t sound likely to ruin my makeup. Too nice.
“But a blind date, Dee? It’s just so… desperate.”
“It’s not really a blind date, though. You two have actually been in the same room together although you didn’t technically meet.”
I have vague memories of Dee pointing out a tall bloke with black hair at one of her parties. But as he had his back to us at the time and was on his way out of the door, that’s all I have. Tall, black hair.
That’s Adam, she’d said. He was Seb’s best mate at uni.
So now Dee is trying to set up her best mate from school with her boyfriend’s best mate from university so we could be a cozy foursome, having cozy dinner parties forever more and living happily ever after, blah blah blah.
The thought makes my throat go tight. However many warm cardigans and hot drinks Dee wraps me in, I am never going to be the cozy dinner party type. Never ever.
I wonder how Seb pitched me to Adam—did he describe me as nice?
Ha. Doubt it. I love Seb because Dee does, but our relationship has always been a bit… wary? Is that the word? Of course, he met me at my rock-bottom worst—when I was more feral monster than best friend to Dee—so it’s understandable a hint of that original wariness is still there. To be fair, if it wasn’t, I’d think less of him.
I sigh and glance down at my phone to check the time.
“I’d better go if I’m going.” I pick up my bag, check for keys, money.
I pull a face at myself in the mirror. It’s my dad’s face in feminine form that looks back at me. I hate that I got none of my mum, that I look so much like him. It’s why I tried so hard as a teenager to change how I looked—bleaching my hair, plastering on the makeup, piercing my nose. Bonus points for me how insane it made him. I’ve stopped doing that now, but maybe I should start again. Blue hair could be nice to match my eyes.
“Do you think I’d look good with blue hair?” I ask Dee.
“Hell, yes, I think you’d look shit hot with blue hair.” She pauses. “Please, Hanna, let yourself enjoy tonight. Remember you are worth it. You are worthy of a nice man, a good man. You have to stop hating yourself.”
They’re the words she’s been saying to me for nearly a decade. I look down at the tattoo on my wrist. “Thank you, Dee, but I’m okay, I’m good—I don’t need another intervention. Save the motivational speak for your clients. I’ll call you tomorrow, let you know how it went.”
He’s late. Only five minutes, but as I ended up being fifteen minutes early, I’ve now had twenty minutes of jumping every time the door opened, every time I saw someone tall or someone with black hair. He’s late and now I’m pissed off and self-consciously aware that everyone in the pub—with their sideway glances at the table I’m hogging, the spare chair I’ve refused to give up five times now—thinks I’ve been stood up.
I’m extra antsy because this bar reminds me of the one where I met Liam, where he “accidentally” spilled my drink and flirted as he bought me another one. Three months in and I caught him “accidentally” spilling another woman’s drink in another bar like this one when he didn’t realize I was there. The fact that I carried on seeing him for another three months after that doesn’t make me feel any better about being here.
It means when Adam finally appears, six minutes and twelve seconds late, I greet him with a scowl instead of a smile and am already wondering how long before I can make my escape. My shoulders are hunched, and I can almost feel the hostile prickles becoming real all over my skin. I’m like a curled-up, scowling porcupine. A curled-up, scowling porcupine nan wishing she’d stuck with the Netflix and pizza plan.
“Hanna?” He raises his eyebrows as he speaks and despite the scowl on my face, I grudgingly acknowledge he has a good smile. He looks nice, like Dee said. I force myself to smile and stand up to greet him.
“Hi, Adam.”
“Sorry I’m late,” he says. “Can I get you a drink?”
“Um—just a Coke, please.”
“You’re driving?”
I shake my head. “I don’t drink.”
There’s a short, awkward silence and I wonder if he’s evaluating the situation, wondering how much fun a date in a pub with a non-drinker could possibly be.
The awkward silence gets longer when he returns from the bar with my Coke and a pint for himself and even though I hate myself for it, I find myself again comparing it to my first date with Liam, the one that ended with a lipstick-sharing kiss that invited catcalls from passing strangers.
Dee’s plea to give this a chance echoes in my head. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Dee didn’t actually tell me much about you other than how nice you were.”
“Nice?” Adam winces. “Thanks, Dee. She couldn’t have said sexy or funny or… dangerously brooding? Anything but nice?”
I laugh. “So that’s the real you, is it? Sexily funny yet dangerously brooding?”
He grins. “Or dangerously funny?”
There’s another silence but it’s a warmer one, and I remember that although there were no silences on that first date with Liam, it was purely because he didn’t let me get a word in. He monopolized the conversation for the entire six months I knew him. And Adam maintains eye contact the whole time we’re talking. Liam was always looking away, looking to see who’d walked in, who’d walked out. Adam looks at me like we’re the only people in the bar. The attention makes my cheeks burn and something—only a tiny something, but something—flutters in my stomach.
“I’m almost scared to ask what Dee said about me to get you to agree to this,” I say.
He smiles. “All good things, I promise. She said you were smart and pretty. Quiet but only until you got to know someone.”
“But not nice?”
“Oh, definitely not nice, she said.”
I laugh and raise my glass. “To Dee and her terrible match-making sales pitch. We must both be desperate if we agreed after that.”
He hesitates, opens his mouth, closes it, clears his throat before speaking. “Actually, I asked about you first. A while ago now—I saw you at a party, so I already knew about the pretty part of her pitch. I talked to Seb about you, but he said you were seeing someone.”
I’m flustered, wrong-footed. I didn’t, I don’t… I’m not the girl someone notices across a crowded room. Men tend to come across me by accident, surprised to find me in a quiet corner. He asked about me? When? Why didn’t Dee mention it?
I lean back in my seat. I need to get this back on standard first-date track. “So, dangerously nice Adam—you work with Seb?”
It’s an awkward segue but other than a slight hesitation before he answers, he goes with it. “Yeah—I’m freelance, but I do a fair bit of work for his company.”
“You’re a web developer?”
He nods. “I know—it sounds pretty boring. Code and PHP and WordPress. But I design as well. What about you?”
I shrug one shoulder. “Nothing exciting. I work in admin.”
“But at a magazine, right? Seb told me.”
“Yeah… and I do some writing. Freelance as well, but I’ve sold a few articles.”
“So, is that what you’d like to do full time?”
I hesitate. “Not really—I mean, yes, I’d like to write full time, but not in a nine-to-five. I’d have to move to London to get a decent writing job. I’d rather stay here and freelance. The joys of a city, but I like being able to get to the sea in under an hour.”
He smiles. “Yeah, me too. I’m originally from some suburban commuter town no one’s ever heard of a million miles from the coast. I came here for college and although I’ve done my stint in London, it was like coming home when I moved back here.”
“When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was leave Wales. I wanted to move away, deny my roots, drop the Welsh accent. London was the intoxicating dream destination I spent my teen years yearning for…” I pause, shrug, write off five or six years in that one shrug, before continuing. “Then after a while, I worked out I didn’t have to run that far. I stopped, took a breath, and realized I like living in Wales. It was the small-town life I needed to get away from, not the country itself.”
I make the decision as I get up to buy another round of drinks that this will be the last one. He is nice, as Dee said, and funny, but with no hint of any sexy or brooding, it’s fairly obvious there’s no spark. I’ll drink my second Coke, make sure it’s been an hour, and come up with some polite excuse.
He’s rolled up his shirtsleeves by the time I get back to the table and he runs his hand through his hair, leaving it a bit messed-up. It makes me pause—I’ve got a thing for a good forearm, I can’t lie, and the sexy bed-head thing is a definite improvement on the Mr. Clean Cut who walked through the door. Okay, so possibly some sexy to add to the nice and funny.
He’s leaning back in his chair, looking more relaxed as he starts his second pint, and as I sit opposite him, still stiff and awkward, I wish, for the millionth time since I stopped, that I still drank. I used to like it—not getting drunk necessarily, but the slow mellowing, the warm fuzziness. I was never very good at stopping at the warm fuzzy stage, that was the problem.
“So, Seb said you and Dee grew up together?” he asks, back to the first-date script, but distracting me by leaning forward and resting his delicious forearms on the table, one of his hands brushing mine.
“That’s right, in some minute village you definitely won’t have heard of. Littledean—a diminutive of the almost as small West Dean, about forty minutes down the coast.” I pause and smile. “West Dean has pubs, a few shops, and a school. Littledean is tucked on the end, about twenty houses, one village shop, and a bus stop. Oh, and a holiday park. Me and Dee were the only kids of the same age who lived there permanently—we had to end up as either best friends or mortal enemies. But it is near the sea. We pretty much grew up on the beach.”
“It sounds idyllic.”
I snort. “Hardly. I spent all my time on the beach to get away from my house.”
“Ah, sorry. I didn’t mean…”
“It’s okay. Ignore me. I didn’t get on so well with my dad growing up—I spent more time with Dee than I did at home. She’s my real family.”
He runs his hand through his hair again and I get a definite surge of the warm and fuzzies. Maybe the barman sneaked vodka into my Coke. Then Adam leans forward and smiles and I’m—Woah. Really good smile. Maybe I’ll stay for one more Coke after all.
“West Dean… Littledean… Actually, I have heard of it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I stayed with Seb’s family a couple of times when we were at university, and we visited a few places I was interested in…”
“In Littledean and West Dean? Seriously?”
He opens his mouth, closes it again, then laughs. “Okay—I promised Seb I wouldn’t mention this on a first date…”
“You’re married? A serial killer? A priest? Is this where the dangerous you mentioned comes in?”
“I built this website… it makes me a bit of extra cash. It’s called The Dark Tourist.”
I look back at him blankly.
“Dark tourism—you know, where people do tours of notorious historic crime scenes?”
“What—like the Jack the Ripper tour?”
“Something like that—but my website specializes in under-the-radar sites. People pay a subscription and get access to the stories and locations. I got interested in it back in uni when I stayed with Seb and his family. Such a small, close-knit community and there are all these places with such sad histories that no one from outside knows about.” He pauses and shoots a glance at me, his cheeks looking a little red. Is this where he tells me he’s got a voyeuristic kink for old murder scenes?
I pull a face. “That sounds… really creepy. Who would be interested in that? What about the poor people who still live there?”
“You’d be surprised—it’s a genuine thing. There are loads of other websites dedicated to it. But what mine offers is like… say if you went to London to do the Jack the Ripper tour, you could go on my website and get a list of another ten crime sites you might not have heard of.”
The wannabe journalist in me feels a little tug of curiosity—it would actually make a pretty good story to find some of the people who do this for fun. “So is that what you’re into, then?” I ask. “Lurking round murder sites on your day off?”
He smiles again. “Not exactly. I did a lot of photography at uni as part of my course and I got into urban exploring—you know, where you explore abandoned buildings? I found it fascinating. Some of the places I went to—whole lives just abandoned. The whole Dark Tourist thing started from there. One of the abandoned houses I checked out… I looked into the history of it and it was pretty gruesome, not a serial-killer house or anything—nothing that would make the nationals, but for people into dark tourism…” He stops. “It does all sound pretty creepy, doesn’t it? Now I get why Seb suggested I don’t mention it on a first date.”
“And it might explain why Dee went no further than nice in her description of you—nice but with creepy, ghoulish hobbies?”
“Mmm, maybe rewind and pretend I never mentioned it?” He pauses. “Maybe save it for the second date?”
It’s an invitation of sorts—we’ve both finished our drinks and it feels like this date is over. I’m surprised to see we’ve been here over an hour and a half. Longer than I’d planned. And I’m not sure anymore that I want the date to be over. His hobbies might be a bit off, but he’s actually… I like him. I like his hair and his smile and his arms. Oh, his arms…
