Then You Were Gone. Claire Moss

phones got. Surely he must be able to check his emails on that?

      He was surprised to find himself shaky after seeing Keith, his heart hammering as he switched on the coffee machine. Was Mack’s paranoia contagious? And what exactly had Mack meant when he had asked Jazzy not to talk to Keith? Was it because Mack was afraid of Keith? Or because Mack had done something that he did not want Keith to find out about?

      Not knowing where else to start, Jazzy sat at Mack’s computer and booted it up. The chair was still warm from where Keith had been sitting in it, and, knowing he was being ridiculous but doing it anyway, Jazzy got up and swapped it for his own cool and unsullied chair. Once the machine was running, he clicked around until he got to a list of which programs had most recently been accessed. There was, he soon realised, nothing to find. All the recent file history, all the internet browsing history, all the cookies, all the temporary files were all gone. All the basic software the machine had come with was still there, but other than that there was no sign that anyone had ever used this machine. Apart from Keith, just now.

      Jazzy looked at his watch. He was in earlier than usual this morning; he had been eager to get to the office and check for any sign of Mack. Could it be that Keith came in to the office every morning and sat at Mack’s computer doing… What exactly had he been doing? Something that he then immediately deleted all trace of.

      Jazzy sat back for a moment and rubbed his eyes. He knew that Mack’s PC was full of stuff – every contact with every client, every letter, email, logs of every telephone call. He used the machine for Twitter, Facebook, buying his metrosexual over-priced clothes. And now all that had vanished too. Someone had erased it all – either Mack or Keith. He thought back to the last time Mack had been in the office, at the beginning of the previous week. He had left in a hurry, slightly before his usual clocking-off time, and he had only been at his desk a few minutes before he left. He would barely have had time to log on, never mind delete every last trace of himself. Which left Keith. And Keith was old. Old, and also the type of person who withdrew all his cash at the beginning of the week because he didn’t like spending money via a little plastic card. Keith could send an email or a text and seemed to manage to use his phone to get the football results, but he didn’t seem like he would be confident enough to wipe out Mack’s digital footprint all by himself. But Jazzy had spent his adult life worshipping computers the way others worshipped a deity. And he knew that computers did not lie. Somebody had done it, and it was almost certainly Keith.

      ‘Shit,’ he said, so loudly he made himself jump. For reasons many and complex, Jazzy really, really did not want this whole thing with Mack to be something to do with Keith. If it was to do with Keith then it was likely to be scary, likely to be wrong, and likely to belong to a world Jazzy did not understand and wanted no part of. He screwed up his face and rubbed his eyes. Rory had been up twice in the night, the second time for over an hour, and he was finding it hard to think straight. ‘Gaaahh.’ He let out a half-yawn, half-groan and tilted his head slowly from side to side, his neck protesting audibly.

      ‘Erm, excuse me. Are you OK?’

      Jazzy jerked his eyes open. A tall, slim black girl wearing a green tabard over skin-tight jeans and a hooded top stood in the doorway. It was the girl Mack liked flirting with, the one who usually cleaned the offices. Jazzy did not recall her having said more than hello to him in the past, but Mack, in his trademark way, had struck up a bantering, easy-going friendship whereby he and this girl would conduct long, light-hearted conversations in a manner that suggested they had known each other for decades.

      ‘Oh, hi, erm…’ Shit. Jazzy realised he had no idea of her name.

      ‘Ayanna,’ she said without smiling. ‘Or Anna. Everyone mostly calls me Anna.’

      ‘Sorry, Anna. I knew that really, I’m just a bit tired.’

      ‘OK.’ She looked as though she knew he was lying about knowing her name. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt, I just thought you looked really – I don’t know, really stressed.’

      ‘No, I’m all right.’

      ‘Well then. Sorry to have bothered you.’ She turned to go, trailing the flex from the vacuum cleaner in one hand. As she was about to pull the door closed behind her, she leaned her head back into the office. ‘So, is Mack still not back then?’ Her voice was studiedly casual, her demeanour a little coy.

      Jazzy stifled a world-weary sigh. He longed for the day when he no longer needed to act as Mack’s intermediary between him and the vast number of women he caused to fall in love with him. ‘No, not yet.’ He looked back at the screen, hoping to indicate that the conversation was over, but then a thought struck him. This woman – or girl really, she surely could not be much older than sixteen – was on quite intimate chatting terms with Mack from what he had observed. He had heard Mack asking after members of her family by name and caught snatches of conversation that sounded as though they involved boyfriends or potential boyfriends of hers. She was probably as good a person to ask as any.

      ‘Sorry, Anna, just before you go,’ he began.

      ‘Yeah?’

      ‘Do you… did Mack say anything to you last week about having to go away, or…’ Jazzy hunted for the right way to phrase this in order to maintain his professional discretion and, more importantly, to save Mack’s blushes once his sanity was restored. ‘Or that he was worried about anything?’

      The girl’s eyes shot down to her hands, then back to rest on Jazzy’s face. ‘Like what?’

      Jazzy paused. She had not asked why he wanted to know, or why he did not seem to have a clue where Mack might have gone. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. ‘Like anything.’

      Anna took a breath and swallowed. ‘If I tell you something, right,’ she said, her voice quiet, ‘you can’t tell Mack I told you. And, whatever you do, don’t tell him.’ She gestured behind her to the stairwell.

      ‘Tell who?’ Jazzy asked, although the lurch in his stomach had told him who she meant.

      ‘That old guy.’

      ‘Keith?’

      Anna nodded. ‘That’s right. That’s what Mack said. “Don’t tell Keith”.’

      Jazzy switched off the computer’s monitor. ‘I think you’d better tell me what’s been going on.’

       Chapter Three

      Simone could not afford to live in Winchmore Hill, and her post did not arrive before she set off for work, so in fact she saw Mack’s letter to Jazzy before she saw the one he had sent her.

      She had been working on a complicated project that morning, a restoration of a series of seventeenth century maps involving a lot of fine, detailed work which normally would have absorbed her to the point where she forgot to eat or go to the toilet. That morning though, she had been unable to switch off the rest of the world in the way she usually did and, most worryingly, had found her mind wandering even as she was using her tiniest, sharpest scalpel to lift away layers of the paper. Scared that her inability to think of anything other than Mack might cause irreversible damage to priceless ancient manuscripts, she took an unaccustomed break and went to the canteen for a coffee.

      It was then that she checked her phone and saw four missed calls and a voicemail message. She puffed out a heavy breath and closed her eyes, half-laughing at the thought of how worried she had been. It would be something quite simple, she felt sure. Mack had been unavoidably detained. His phone had been stolen. He had temporarily lost his memory. He had had a minor accident in which his belongings had been mislaid. Whatever it was, the problem was clearly now solved and Mack had been ringing her to let her know he definitely did love her and he was coming home. Only when she pressed the screen to list the missed calls, they were all from Jazzy. And when she listened to her voicemail message, that was from Jazzy as well. He wanted to meet her for lunch, he said. And he did not sound as though he would be bringing her good news.

      Simone