“Not really.” It was true enough. There were no businesses, no bars or cafés in The Park. No office blocks, no shops. No obvious link that I could see between a small semi-detached house in a small town on the western side of the county, and a house in the heart of the city.
She looks up, as if struck by a new idea, a tiny flicker of hope.
“Perhaps he was a lodger, a house guest, perhaps he stayed there for a while on his way somewhere else? Perhaps… I don’t know.”
I give her a sympathetic smile. “It’s possible, I suppose.”
We lapse into silence. She picks up the collar again and holds it carefully, almost reverently, as if it’s a precious artifact that might crumble to dust at any moment.
“Can I… can I keep it? Just for a few days at least?”
“To show to the police?”
She shakes her head. “The police are long past caring what happened to my husband. Not that they ever really did in the first place. No, I’d like to show it to my son.”
“Of course.”
“He never met his dad, you see. Not even once. And it’s just uncanny how alike they are—I see my Adrian in him every day in his mannerisms, the way he smiles.”
She takes her phone from the pocket of her dungarees and taps it, holds it out to me. The screen is filled with a picture of askinny young guy in his early twenties, with a wide, toothy grin and dark-rimmed glasses. He’s wearing a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt; his hair is long and wild and he’s leaning on a metal cane.
I smile and hand the phone back. “He looks like you.”
“All I can see is Adrian.” She glances at the collar again. “Did you find anything else? Anything that might have belonged to Adrian? It would mean a lot to me, to have something else of his from back then.”
I give a brief description of what else I found in the hidden room—except for the Rolex—and she listens intently as I describe each item. Each one perhaps a link back to the past.
“But I didn’t bring them with me,” I say. “Just the collar. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve got to be at work soon but I’ll be in Nottingham later in the week. Maybe I could meet you somewhere?”
We swap phone numbers and she says she’ll let me know, then I leave Maxine in peace, in her empty house, with her memories.
I drive down the road to the park she had mentioned, the last place anyone had seen Adrian. It’s a fairly unremarkable bit of green space, long and thin, looping away from the road with a thick ribbon of trees on the north side. I walk around for ten minutes but see only a single solitary dog walker. Even now, it seemed, it was a good place to find some peace and quiet.
Where did you go, Adrian?
Who did you meet?
What happened that day?
On the little town’s main shopping street, I find a café and buy a ham salad sandwich, eating it while googling the name Adrian Parish. There are only a handful of results, the most recent alocal newspaper piece on the fifteenth anniversary of his disappearance. A brief mention of a Detective Constable Phil Goode asking for information from the public but no indication of any progress in finding out what happened to the missing man. Scanning through the few other online mentions, I’m struck by how small the digital footprint is, how limited the effort seems to have been to find him, or to find out what happened to him. As if Adrian Parish had left few ripples on the world—both when he was here and after he was gone.
There is a heaviness, a sadness, to the story that sits like a weight on my chest.
One thing seems very clear: no one really seemed to care about Adrian Parish anymore. He was all but forgotten, a missing person who had never returned. No one had given him a second thought for years.
Except for Maxine.
19
Jess texts me as I’m about to leave the café.
Where are you? x
I sit up, suppressing a twinge of guilt as I type a reply.
In town, getting a sandwich for lunch.
