The Nurse

Prologue

The petal drifts to the cold stone floor, its landing cushioned by its brothers and sisters already discarded as the game creeps towards its climax. The ending changes with each petal. She loves me. She loves me not. She lives. She dies.

He can hear her move around in the bathroom upstairs. Can hear the floorboards creak under her step. The pipes rattle and fizz to life as she turns on the taps over the sink.

She thinks it has been a good night. He’s sure of it. He has cooked them dinner of fillet steak, served with potatoes dauphinoise, green beans and seared asparagus. He thanks God for M&S and their idiot-proof ready-prepared dishes. He’d opened a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. He doesn’t consider himself a wine connoisseur, but it had cost more than £20 so it must be a good one. It is more than she deserves, but he has to play the game properly.

The goal, he knows, is fear. And fear is always most pronounced when it comes as a surprise. When it comes at a moment when his pawn is relaxed. Happy. Hopeful.

There is no rush like seeing realisation dawn on the face of his prey. When they realise they aren’t invincible. That they aren’t as safe as they thought they were.

But it all depends on the petals. Once he sets the rules, he abides by them. He plucks one more petal, tries not to guess how many more are left. Patience, he thinks. The moment is sweeter for the wait.

A floorboard creaks overhead and his eyes glance upwards. She has been gone a while now and he’s starting to get antsy. The adrenaline is already pumping in his veins, making him jittery. The fight-or-flight reflex is primed and ready to go. He thinks, if the petals dictate it, it will be a fight this time. She strikes him as a fighter.

The pipes stop rattling and if he’s not sure, and if he listens really intently, he thinks he might hear her talk. It throws him for a moment until he looks across at the empty chair opposite him. The bag that she had hung on the back of it – the bag which contains her phone. No. No, she isn’t supposed to do that. That breaks the rules. When they are together, he expects her full attention. It’s a matter of manners. Of respect.

His hand tightens around the stem of the rose, the thorns piercing his skin. There are three petals left. He knows what way this would have fallen for her. But she broke the rules. She has brought this on herself. He has no choice.

Getting up, he walks across the room to the small wooden box on his bookshelves. He takes out a tablet, breaks it in half and pours the powder into the remains of her glass of expensive wine. He stirs it around with his finger as he hears the bathroom door open and her footsteps on the stairs, then he plasters a smile on his face.

Chapter One

Marian

Monday, November 1

Missing four days

Nell didn’t come home after work on Thursday. That was four days ago. Four days. And this is the first time I’ve heard about it.

I’m unpacking the shopping, swearing over a busted yoghurt carton, when my phone rings and my eldest daughter’s housemate – a terminally timid nurse called Clodagh – asks me if I know where Nell might be.

I look at the clock. It’s 7.15 p.m. Nell normally finishes work at 7. Sometimes she works later. Whatever, it’s a strange time for Clodagh to be expressing concern for her whereabouts.

It’s strange for Clodagh to be calling me at all. I’m not known for my helicopter parenting and Nell has been fiercely independent since she first moved out four years ago. It’s not unusual for us to go a week or more without speaking. It’s just how it is.

‘I imagine she’s working late, or just called into Tesco,’ I say, grabbing some kitchen paper and mopping up a dollop of M&S Greek yoghurt before it congeals on my worktop or Harry Styles – the very fluffy tortoiseshell cat Nell named after her teenage crush – arrives to lap it up.

I’m annoyed that I’ll have to rethink tomorrow’s breakfast. I have all those fresh berries waiting to be eaten …

I become aware of Clodagh replying, stumbling over her words. There’s something in the pitch of her voice that catches my attention. I blink, as if the act of that alone will bring her words into focus.

Did she say Nell hadn’t gone to work? I shoo Harry Styles away, put the kitchen paper down and turn my back to the worktop. Looking at the clock on the wall, I see that it’s now 7.17.

‘Is she sick?’ I ask. The last time I’d spoken to Nell, she’d told me she was afflicted with that most common of all afflictions: Tired-All-The-Time. I’d told her she really should make an appointment to go and see her doctor. Being permanently exhausted at my age was one thing, but no twenty-two-year-old should feel that way.

She’d laughed. ‘Mum,’ she’d said, ‘I see doctors every day at work. I’m fine. Just tired. It’s winter. We’re incredibly busy and there’s always someone off sick. But I’m okay, honest. Or as okay as any nurse is these days. I need a week in the sun, is all.’

‘No. No. Well, I don’t know,’ Clodagh says, cutting through my thoughts, and the urgency in her voice seems to increase. ‘So you haven’t seen her today?’

‘No,’ I reply. ‘I’ve not seen her since, maybe, this day last week? She called in to pick something up from her room. Shoes or something.’

It comes to me. It was those awful clumpy platform boots. She’ll break her ankle in those one of these days. I’m sure of it.

‘But have you spoken to her? Or heard from her even? A text or a WhatsApp?’

I shake my head as if she can see me. ‘No. Not in a few days. Why?’

‘How many days is a few days?’ Clodagh asks and I start to realise something is clearly wrong.

‘I don’t know. I can’t think. I don’t think I’ve spoken to her since she visited. What’s going on, Clodagh?’ I ask and I notice a sharpness in my voice. It’s enough to make Harry Styles arch his back and glare at me in disgust.

‘So you’ve not seen her since Thursday? Shit!’

‘Clodagh,’ I say as if I were trying to get through to a preschool child. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise up, a cold shiver creeping from the base of my spine up towards my neck.

‘She, well, she didn’t come home from work on Thursday. And I thought, well, maybe she was still with Rob.’

‘Who’s Rob?’ I ask, immediately feeling like the worst mother in the world for not knowing who this person in my daughter’s life is.

‘Rob. She met him a few weeks ago. On Tinder. It’s been going well between them. So I thought maybe she was just, you know, with him. You know what it’s like when you start seeing someone.’

It has been a long, long time since I’d started seeing someone but I know enough to know what she means. I don’t particularly enjoy thinking of my daughter in that situation. Consumed by lust. I shake the thought from my head, and shiver. I should put the heating on. The temperature is dropping quickly. It will be another frost-filled night.

Is my daughter out there in the cold somewhere?

‘So, she isn’t with this Rob?’ I say, which is a stupid question. Clodagh would hardly call me if she was.

‘No, or I assume not because Jenny in work had a date with him on Saturday night and he stayed over at hers,’ Clodagh says, and I wonder do I hear a trace of a sob in her voice. ‘I’ve called everyone I can think of and no one has seen her or heard from her. And she didn’t go to work today – or call in sick …’

My head starts to swim. I grasp the edge of the worktop to get a hold of something real. Tangible. I hope my hand will float right through it. That this is all part of a dream.

But I feel the cold granite on my skin.

This is real.

‘Since Thursday?’ I blurt, my throat tight.

‘And she hasn’t been on any of her social media,’ Clodagh says, and there is no mistaking the crying for anything else any more.

I look at my keys, my bag, thrown on the worktop. I look at the half-empty shopping bags. The discarded kitchen paper. I look at it all and, without listening to what else Clodagh is saying, I tell her to call the police and that I will be right round.

Harry Styles meows loudly as I leave without putting out his dinner. He can have the bloody Greek yoghurt. Everything else will have to wait. I curse as I wait for my phone to connect with my car’s Bluetooth system. It never normally takes so long and yet today, of course, it does.

I jab the ‘voice control’ button, order the car to call Nell. Listen to the automated voice tell me it’s calling her. I want to scream at it to shut up, because I want to hear my daughter’s voice. No. I need to hear my daughter’s voice. And there it is, the ‘hello’ I need to hear and I exhale until it’s followed immediately by ‘sorry, I can’t take your call right now’.

I stifle a sob, slam my car into reverse, my leg shaking as I release the clutch.

I call my husband. Maybe he’ll have spoken to her. He should be driving home from work. I wonder how much I should say knowing he has to drive from Belfast, in worsening conditions. I don’t want him so panicked he makes a stupid mistake.

‘Stephen,’ I say, forcing my voice to remain calm. ‘I’m just wondering if you heard from Nell today or over the weekend?’

‘Over the weekend?’ I hear the ticktock of his indicator light, the swish and thump of his windscreen wipers.

‘Yes,’ I say, trying not to be impatient even though I want to scream.

‘No. I’m not sure I did. I can’t think. I would check my phone if I wasn’t driving. Why? Is everything okay?’

I make the decision to lie to him. To my husband. To my partner of twenty-seven years. He won’t like it. He’ll hate it, in fact, but I’m thinking of him behind the wheel of his car. His eyes tired. The salt and pepper of his hair increasingly erring on the side of salt. The crinkles in the corners of his eyes. The commute is starting to take a toll on him. But he won’t admit it. Nell describes him as a stubborn old goat.

‘Yes,’ I blurt. ‘I was just wondering. Nothing urgent. I’m going to call round to hers. Just have a need to see her. Why don’t you call in on your way home?’

It’s a ridiculous lie. A cruel lie, I think, as I imagine him arriving at her house and her not being there. Maybe the police being there instead. But as bad as things are, I need him with me. She is as much a part of him as she is of me. We are tied together by her.

‘God, Marian, I’m tired and this is going to be a bastard of a drive. I just want to go home.’

‘Please,’ I say, and how I keep the wobble from my voice I don’t know.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ he sighs. ‘If it’ll get you off my back, I’ll call in. But it’ll be a flying visit.’

My stomach tightens at his tone. I can feel the pulse of a headache behind my eyes.

‘Thank you,’ I say and tell him we’ll see him soon. We. As if I’m sure Nell will be there, which of course I’m not.

To my surprise, I find that I’m tearful. I’m never tearful. It’s not the kind of person I am. I’m not the kind of mother who dabs away tears of pride at school concerts, or who weeps over baby pictures. I have an ability to remain focused and logical in my approach. I had to be that way when Nell was little.

But now? It’s as if something in my very core knows something is wrong.

The emotional umbilical cord I thought I didn’t have is connected to my child after all, and it floods me with all the emotions, all the moments that are now just memories. A feeling there may be no more memories – not good ones anyway – to be made.

I put my hand to my stomach. I don’t know why. It’s as if I hope to feel a movement. To feel a kick. To feel a sign of life. But of course, I think, shaking my head and trying to focus on the drive ahead of me, that’s absurd. It’s not going to happen. It was never going to happen.

I will my logical self to kick back in. To focus on what I can do. What I can change. Feelings won’t help me now. For now, all I need to do is get to Nell’s house as quickly as I can to talk to Clodagh and the police.

God love her, but Clodagh isn’t to be relied on to start a search on her own. She’s a lovely girl but prone to hysteria. Could this just be hysteria? Will she remember that she did in fact speak to Nell yesterday and slap her head in a ‘stupid me!’ move?

No. I’m clutching at straws. And I don’t, as a rule, clutch at straws. But this is different. This is my child. My stomach twists again.

I call Nell’s number once more. Listen to her voice tell me she’ll get back to me. Her sing-song, youthful, full-of-promise voice. I contemplate leaving a message. Pleading with her to call me. Pleading with her to pick up. Ordering her to do what she is told.

But I don’t plead or cry. I end the call and concentrate on driving, finding each change of gear, each brake and acceleration, requiring more effort than usual. This can’t be happening.

Chapter Two

Marian

Monday, November 1

Missing four days

It seems so incredibly odd when I arrive at my daughter’s three-bedroom semi-detached house and it looks just as it normally does. There is nothing different. No sense of anything being out of place. The pampas grass in the corner of her front garden is still an overgrown monster of a thing that I want her landlord to tear up. One of the panes of glass in the lantern outside her front door is still cracked.

But there are signs that this is a home she has pride in. The winter wreath on the door. The collection of glazed pots on the doorstep, plants well-tended and pruned to survive the frosty mornings. Pot plants she can do. Large pampas grass monsters she cannot.

I reach for the doorbell and startle when the door opens in front of me before I have the chance to press it. Clodagh is in her nurse’s uniform, with a thick cream cardigan wrapped tightly around her. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and she is clutching a tissue.

‘I’m really sorry, Mrs Sweeney. I just thought … I was working all weekend and you know, sometimes we’re like ships that pass in the night and then I thought it was unusual we still had milk left in the fridge. And I checked her room but it was just like it was on Thursday morning and I remember that because I sat on her bed while she was getting ready for work and she’d borrowed my black dress to try on and it was still there, where she left it, over her bed. And I called her. Like five or six times. And then I called our friends. And work. And then you.’

I walk into the house and look around, as if Nell might just appear out of the ether and surprise us both.

‘You called the police?’ I ask, while still looking around. I stick my head through the door into the living room. It’s tidy, warm. Lit by two lamps on either side of the room. Nell’s oversized knitted throw folded over the sofa. I fight the urge to lift it, to try and get a sense of her from it. The scent of her. I close my eyes and a dozen different scents come to mind. Baby powder. The smell of Vosene shampoo on her hair when she was a child. That overpowering body spray she used when she was a teenager. The soft scent of her favourite perfume now – Wood Sage and Sea Salt by Jo Malone. I’ve just ordered her a new bottle for Christmas.

‘I did,’ Clodagh says and I blink, focus on what she is saying. ‘They said they’d send someone out but, she’s an adult and …’

‘She’s an adult who hasn’t been seen or heard from since Thursday,’ I bark, then immediately regret my tone. It’s not Clodagh’s fault. She’s only the messenger.

‘I told them,’ she says, her voice meek.

‘And this Rob guy? What do you know about him?’

‘Erm, I don’t know a lot about him,’ she said. ‘She’d only been seeing him a few weeks and we’ve both been working stupid hours so we haven’t really talked.’

‘She must’ve told you something?’ I plead, finding it hard to believe that there was anything in Nell’s life that she wouldn’t have told her best friend.

‘Yes, well. He’s older. Like late twenties. He works in one of those starter businesses down at the offices at Fort George. You know, the new ones? I don’t know what he does exactly. New media or something.’

‘And do you know his surname? Or what he looks like?’

‘I’ll check her friends list to see if I can find him,’ Clodagh says, pulling her phone from her pocket and scrolling through the screen. She taps a few buttons and swears. ‘Damn it. She has her friends list set to only share mutuals.’

‘Jenny!’ I say and Clodagh looks at me as if I’ve lost the plot.

‘You said your friend Jenny from work went on a date with him. Call her. Ask her what she knows about him. I assume she’ll have his number, or his last name at least?’

Clodagh nods, scrolls through her phone and listens as the call rings out. She leaves a short message, asking Jenny to call her back as soon as possible and that it’s really, really important. When she ends the call, she looks at me as if she expects me to have the answers to everything. I suppose I’m the mother figure. I’m supposed to know what to do next. Who to talk to. She has no clue that every single solitary fibre of my body is pulsing with dread. That if I could I would run to my own mother. That it’s taking all my strength just to keep breathing in and out, never mind trying to formulate some strategy, or find it in myself to offer her some comfort.

I need some space, so I make my excuses and go to Nell’s room. Her space has a visceral effect on me. This may not be the room she grew up in. This may not be the room I nagged her to clean, or the colour scheme we clashed over. The chest of drawers isn’t the same one where I found a tobacco tin containing one perfectly rolled joint hiding in her knickers drawer. There are no grooves in the doorframe marking her age and height. But she is there all the same. It smells of her. Her perfume. Her hairspray. I see her Po doll, the fabric bobbly and threadbare, grinning down from the top of her wardrobe. A testimony to the Teletubbies obsession she had as a toddler. I can see clothes that are her size. I see those stupid bloody platform boots and my stomach twists again, so tightly that I don’t think I can bear it any more. I’d be sick if there was anything in my stomach, but there isn’t, so I bend and break and bow in the middle.

I have never been so scared in my entire life. I know I can’t give in to it. Not yet. There is much to do and maybe, just maybe, this is a big menopausal overreaction to something with a perfectly reasonable explanation.

The flashing blue lights of an arriving police car, which illuminate my daughter’s room through the open curtains, tell me my fears are justified.

A petite blonde woman in a tailored grey trouser suit extends her hand and introduces herself as Detective Sergeant Eve King. I’m unnerved by her presence. It seems strange that someone so senior would come out for a call that police don’t think is too much of a cause for concern.

I introduce myself, and Clodagh, as a tall, gangly man in an ill-fitting suit appears at the doorstep – the sight of him making me jump.

‘This is my colleague, Detective Constable Mark Black,’ DS King says. ‘You don’t mind if he comes in too?’

I shake my head, even though this is not my house and I’ve no right to allow or stop anyone coming in.

‘Of course not. Come in,’ Clodagh says, her voice shaky. ‘Can I get you a tea or a coffee or a glass of water or anything?’

‘We’re fine, thank you,’ DS King says. ‘Maybe we could have a sit-down and a chat about your housemate. Nell Sweeney?’

Clodagh nods but she seems frozen in shock, or fear, or something at the situation she is faced with. I wait for her to direct the officers to the living room but she doesn’t move, so I step in, guiding them to the sofa while Clodagh and I take an armchair each, and sit down, our backs rigid, our faces taut.

‘Okay,’ DS King begins, taking from her pocket a notebook and a biro, the lid of which had been chewed. I notice little things like that. Nell is forever telling me to chill out. ‘Clodagh, you told dispatch that Nell hasn’t been seen since Thursday. Is that right?’

Clodagh nods. I can see her bottom lip wobble and I want to shake her. She needs to keep it together, because we need as much information as possible, as quickly as possible, if we are to have any chance at all of finding Nell. Don’t they say with a missing person the first forty-eight hours are crucial?

But of course, I realise, Nell has been missing for a lot longer than forty-eight hours already. My own lip wobbles.

‘I saw her on Thursday morning before work. We’re both nurses, you see, up at Altnagelvin. But we work in different places. I work on the paeds ward, and Nell is on the surgical ward. I know she was in work that day. She had leave on Friday and over the weekend, so wasn’t expected in until today. But she didn’t show up.’

‘And you didn’t see her, or register her absence at all over the weekend?’ DS King asks.

Clodagh sniffs. ‘I was really busy. I was working nights and that always knocks me a bit stupid, and then we were short-staffed so I worked some overtime. Nell has been seeing this guy, Rob, I don’t know his surname but I’m finding out, and to be honest, I thought she was probably with him. You know, a long weekend kind of a thing.’

DS King probes a little more. Finds out about Jenny and her own Tinder date with Rob. Asks about Nell’s frame of mind.

‘She wasn’t depressed or anything,’ I say, unable to hide the defensiveness in my voice. ‘Don’t be thinking she took herself off somewhere and did herself an injury because that’s not her. Nell isn’t depressed. If she was, she’d have spoken to me about it. I’m sure of that.’

‘Are the two of you very close?’ DS King asks, her eyes, bright and blue, staring at me. She looks as if she is the kind of police officer who wouldn’t need a lie detector test to figure out if a person is telling the truth or not.

‘She’s my daughter. My only child as it happens. We don’t live in each other’s pockets, if that’s what you’re asking. But we are close. She knows I’m there for her if she needs me.’

‘Erm … Mrs Sweeney is right,’ Clodagh says, her voice small. ‘Nell isn’t depressed. Or if she is, she does a really good job of hiding it.’

‘Is she a very sociable young woman?’ DS King asks.

‘Well, I suppose. She’s twenty-two. She’s as sociable as any twenty-two-year-old to be honest with you,’ I say. DS King shifts her gaze to Clodagh as if all my answers should be taken with a pinch of salt. She clearly thinks I don’t know my daughter at all.

Clodagh shrugs. ‘Yeah. I mean she went out a couple of nights a week, maybe. But she liked to chill out here too. You know, get into her jammies and watch a movie or a boxset. We liked detective dramas.’

‘Is that her?’ the man, Mark Black, asks, his head nodding towards a framed picture on the sideboard. It’s a selfie of Nell and Clodagh – grinning at the camera. It looks like it was taken on their holiday last year. The sea is bluer than any you’d expect to see on the Donegal coast. They have that slightly red-faced, too much sun look about them. Nell looks so young. So full of life. I can’t speak.

‘Yes,’ Clodagh says. ‘That was us, in Kos during the summer.’

‘Do you mind if I take this for a moment?’ he asks, standing up and already lifting the frame. I have to hold back from telling him not to touch it. I know what he wants it for. To put it online, on posters, in the news. He is turning her into Nell the victim and I don’t want any of this to be happening. I close my eyes tight for a moment just so I don’t see him take it from the room.

I glance at my watch and wonder when on earth Stephen will get here. I’m starting to fall apart and I need him to tell me everything will be okay.

I watch, afraid to ask what is going on, as DC Black takes the frame from the room and out to their unmarked car. It’s only then I notice they didn’t arrive in the blue-lighted car. That’s still outside, and a uniformed officer is leaning against it, looking for all the world as if he would rather be somewhere else.

‘Does Nell drive?’ DS King asks.

I shake my head. ‘No. She’s taking lessons but no. I can give you the name of her instructor if you want.’

‘That might be helpful, but can I ask, if she doesn’t drive how does she normally get to work? Does she take a taxi, or the bus, or bike, or …’

‘She walks everywhere,’ I say. ‘Says it clears her mind before the day starts and then again when it ends. And with living so close to the hospital … it’s easy for her.’

DS King nods. ‘Oh, okay. And do you know what route she normally takes?’

‘Erm, not for sure. I mean I think she walks down past the big Tesco and then on down Rossdowney Road. It’s fairly well lit.’

Clodagh says, ‘Mrs Sweeney’s right. And she always takes the