Page 58 of The Man Made of Smoke

“Yes,” I said. “He was a policeman.”

“You look like him, you know.”

“I’m not sure that I do.”

But the man nodded slowly anyway, then looked away. The focus he had briefly gained was already drifting a little, and as the silence panned out I wondered if there was something stronger in his cup than tea or coffee.

I was about to prompt him when he finally spoke.

“My Rose is gone,” he said.

Then he sighed and eased himself carefully to his feet.

“So I suppose you’d better come inside.”

The man’s name was Brian Gill, and he was Rose Saunders’s partner.

Or at least, he had been.

There was a clock mounted to the wall of the barge, and I found myself staring at it as he spoke. The clock had stopped at 8:34, although I had no idea on what day. But the second hand was stuttering in place, and there was something mesmerizing about each little flicker.

“It was a couple of months ago,” Gill said. “That was the first time Rose disappeared.”

“What happened?” I said.

“She went out one morning, the way she always did. The library in town. The park. But she didn’t come back. Rose had always been a free spirit. She liked her space. But it had been a few years since she’d gone off on her own, and it wasn’t like her not to let me know where she was.”

“Did you talk to the police?”

“Yes, the next morning. But they didn’t take it seriously. And then she came back that evening. Except that she was… different from before.”

Droplets of white paint had congealed and dried on the edge of the table between us. I glanced down the galley. The remains of old flowers were scattered on a makeshift counter there. They had probably been fresh when Rose first gathered them, but they were dark and brittle now, like leaves blown into the corner of an abandoned garage.

I looked back at Gill.

“Where had she been?” I said.

Gill explained it falteringly. When Rose returned to him after that first disappearance, she was shaken and disturbed. She had been kidnapped the day before, she told him. She couldn’t remember the details; just that there had been a bench and a man whose face she couldn’t recall, and then everything had gone misty. The next thing she knew, she was in the woodland somewhere.

Tied down and unable to move.

Facing a makeshift animal pen.

“There was a man in there,” Gill told me. “He was chained to a post.”

“Did she describe him?”

“No.” Gill shook his head. “She couldn’t because of what happened next. And she couldn’t tell me much about that either. But the man who had taken her killed the other man. That was all she was sure of. He made her watch it, and whatever happened was so horrible that she couldn’t remember it afterward.”

I waited.

“And then,” Gill said. “He let her go.”

The next thing she recalled, he told me, she was back on a bench in the park. Disorientated and a little disheveled, but otherwise unharmed. It was as though she had blinked out of the world for thirty-six hours and then reappeared. Everything was the same as it had been apart from the visceral images—the trauma—that her abductor had left her with.

And the decision that she remembered he had given her.

“The man told her that if she kept what had happened to herself then she would never see him again,” Gill said. “Her life would continue as it always had. She’d be safe. But if she went to the police and reported whatshe’d seen, he would come for her. He would take her back to that place again. And she would be the one to die next.”

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