ANA'S early morning telephone call to Jonathan established that Sarah had not returned home. Mark was keen to make an official police report, so Jonathan agreed to drive Mark to the Port and meet Ana and Daniel in one of the cafés in a small square near the harbour. The Guardia Civil headquarters were two blocks back from the sea, but the best cafés were near the water, and Daniel and Jonathan could pass the time there while Mark and Ana made the official report.  

 

Feeling remote from the others in the café, Ana took little part in the conversation and looked around her at the middle-class, gently ageing expatriates for whom this area of the town was Mecca. They lived in low-rise apartment complexes and most mornings took coffee in the many local cafés, gossiping, she imagined, about their friends.

 

So many changes in the twenty years since she left. As a child, she had loved walking to the port with her family and it was here that her father had taught her to swim, and how to skim and bounce flat pebbles across the water, ten times, sometimes. Then it was a busy working port, just a fish market, a small hotel, and a few cafés and a couple of rows of fishermen’s houses. The nearby concrete church had been built with money from a Francoist politician who had holidayed in the town. Brutalist was how her father described it, along with his requisition of the site of a Roman fish farm for a holiday villa.

 

On the beach next to the harbour wall she saw a group of elderly Spanish women in the water; hats and sunglasses bobbing, practising water aerobics, as she knew they did most mornings. Daniel enjoyed walking here with her, and they often stopped for a coffee, reading the Financial Times and El Pais. 

 

Daniel had told that as they got older, many of the original expatriates found the large gardens of the villas on the hillside urbanisations difficult to maintain so they moved to apartments in the port. 
 

“Now people say the Port is God’s waiting room,” he had explained. “They move here to die, you see; it’s not an original joke, I know.” 

 

She had thought it cruel humour, and the idea sad.  Families had a duty to be around to provide support, her mother had cared for her ageing parents. She would do the same.  But then for twenty years she had lived a far away from them, and it would have been difficult to return home quickly for a family crisis. Luckily, no crisis had arisen. Maybe it was different now and not every Spanish person expected to look after ageing relatives; they would share the fate as the old expatriates, growing old alone, uncherished by their children

Looking at her watch she suggested setting off for the Guardia Civil station. The heat was already building as they left the shade of the café umbrella. On such a difficult day, the last thing Mark needed was to arrive hot and bothered for an official appointment.

 

They found Mayte waiting outside Guardia Civil headquarters, talking to a dark, very good looking Spanish man in his late 30s. He was introduced as Luis Cholbi, Mayte’s second-in-command; Ana remembered seeing him around the town when she was young although he had not gone to school with them. She thought he was a year or two older and wondered how he felt about his boss being younger than he was,  as well as female. 

 

“That’s useful,” Mayte smiled as Ana gave her a list of Sarah’s last known movements and the list of useful contacts that Holly and Lynette had prepared the previous evening, in English and Spanish. Mayte put a hand gently on Mark’s shoulder and led the way into a pleasant office at the back of the building, which had a view over the gardens of an adjacent apartment block.

 

Manuel Camps Espinoza, the local head of the Guardia Civil, greeted them.  His open, friendly manner was far from Ana’s idea of a Guardia Civil officer, based on her father’s tales of the violent repression of defeated republicans after the Spanish Civil War. Mayte made the introductions in English but Mark insisted on continuing in Spanish, saying he would consult Ana if he was at all unsure of the meaning of any words. Ana made notes which she and Mark could refer to later. His gesture of speaking in Spanish created a friendly atmosphere, and with Ana’s help gave a brief description of the events of the previous day. They would register a formal declaration of a missing person, Mayte explained, taking the photograph of Sarah from Mark. It would go to traffic police and staff at the motorway tollbooths, immediately via the internet.

 

On their way to the meeting Mark had told Ana that he was well aware he would be viewed as the most likely cause of Sarah’s disappearance. That would be the case with any police force in the world, he had said; the spouse of a missing person is always a suspect. Ana saw s no hint of this, on this visit at least, and she was relieved to see Mark treated with a calm and professional respect. A uniformed Guardia Civil officer entered with a document for him to sign. He read it through with Ana before signing, and keeping a copy. Mayte explained that Luis would act as their liaison officer and she gave them his mobile phone number, asking them to phone him with any further information. Manuel Camps concluded the meeting with praise for the way Mark had presented information, assuring him this information would make finding Sarah easier. This meeting had, Ana supposed, gone as well as it possibly could. 

 

Jonathan and Daniel were waiting outside and Ana began introductions, but Jonathan and Luis already knew each other by sight, as they sometimes drank in the same bar in the town. She saw an instant connection between the pair, perhaps Luis was also gay.  Maybe they had never had the courage to speak to each other. Good things sometimes happen when you least expect them. People whose acceptance she had craved only two days earlier now saw her as indispensable.

 

They could not refuse Mark’s invitation to go back to his house for lunch. He said Holly and Lynette had already prepared food and they would want to know what had happened, direct from Ana. Mark's face was still sad, but he was less strained than the previous evening; she wondered if completing the formal declaration had made Sarah’s disappearance seem more real.  As the police started the process of looking for her, perhaps he felt he had at last taken positive action? With little enthusiasm, she and Daniel followed Jonathan and Mark’s car back to the house, where Lynette and Holly were waiting, standing by the phone in case there was any news. 

 

This lunch would never be easy. Jeff, after a phone call from Holly, had arrived with some bread and organised a picnic lunch by the pool. Trying to make cheerful conversation seemed wrong, but so did gloomy silence. There were no guidebooks for this situation, nor how-to programmes on the television. Mark clearly found sharing his feelings difficult, and he had said nothing about contacting their families.

 

“Mark,” Holly said, “is there anyone you need to talk to about Sarah’s disappearance; a job one of us could take on for you? I know she has no immediate family now that her mother is dead, but is there a wider family, or friends you might contact? Or would you rather wait a while, until there’s more news?”

 

The group sat around the table in silence next to the blue pool, below an even bluer sky. Handsome people, not smiling; the air still, were they waiting for the shutter to click?

 

After a long moment Mark answered. He didn’t, he said, know what to do. He knew he would have to talk to people in the UK at some stage, but now, today, he couldn’t do it.  “Suppose she comes back this evening or tomorrow, and she doesn’t want people to know she was missing? I would feel terrible if I told them as if I had let her down somehow.” He told them he had wondered if she was having a nervous breakdown of some kind, and he couldn’t handle it. He looked over at Holly “You knew some of it, didn’t you? That’s why you said what you did on the beach the other night?”

Mark began talking, telling them that Sarah has been so strange, so withdrawn, and spiteful even, not like her usual self at all. He talked about the incident on the beach. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, he said, because, the morning before the party, before she went out shopping, Sarah had wanted to talk to him,  “but I cut her off; blanked her really, because I couldn’t face it. But then, in the evening, before we picked you and Holly up…” he looked at Jeff, “… we had a glass of wine together, and then I asked her what was worrying her. She wouldn’t talk then, said it was the wrong time, and we never spoke about it again. When we got home that night she went straight off to bed without speaking. I never even said goodnight to her. Not properly. How on earth will I live with that, if I never see her again?” 

 

He got up, pulled an immaculate white handkerchief from the pocket of his trousers, blew his nose, and went into the house. 

They sat in silence, embarrassed. Holly spoke first.
 

“Well, she certainly hasn’t been her usual self for a while, that’s for sure, and I guess we have all talked to each other about it. Well, probably not you and Ana, Daniel, so I don’t suppose you know much. I feel so bad that I didn’t say more to Sarah, encourage her to tell me what was wrong.”

 

Ana sat, wishing with all her heart she had talked to Sarah. Why did Sarah choose her as a confidant? What would Sarah have said? She might have been able to have offered advice, some comfort even, because she was an outsider in the group.  Now she might never know.

 

Jonathan got to his feet, knocking over his glass of water. “I feel terrible sitting around doing nothing, when Sarah is missing, I’ve got to do something.” 

 

Holly stood up. “I feel the same, Jon. What about making up a poster, a flyer or something with her picture on, asking if anyone has any information? We could put it in the windows of bars and restaurants. Someone must have seen something. She can’t have disappeared into thin air. That’s in films, it doesn’t happen in real life.” 

 

Daniel had briefly worked for Interpol, and he had told Ana a little about his work, so she knew people did in fact just disappear, although not often. And those that did were rarely white, well-off people. Neither she nor Daniel said anything. Jeff went into the house, saying he would see how Mark was doing and Ana saw a look of annoyance pass across Holly’s face. Another first impression dashed. Perhaps Holly and Jeff were not quite the strong couple they seemed. 

 

Jonathan went across to Holly, put his arm around her, “I think that’s a good idea about the flyers. Holly. Let’s go inside, and ask Mark if we can use his computer to get started.”
 

Holly thought a better idea was to go to her house, rather than bother Mark with all of it. She and Jeff had some pretty good printing facilities and she had recent photos of Sarah, taken at Ivan and Carole’s party on her laptop.

 

As Ana was thankfully moving towards their car, more than ready to go home, Carole and Ivan arrived. When Mark, who had reappeared with Jeff in the garden, said he wanted to go out and walk the cliffs himself, which he felt he should have done the day before, Jeff volunteered to go with him, an offer he accepted. Lynette said she needed to go home to get some clean knickers, feed her cats and check her mail, but would return with food from her fridge for supper. No one argued when Ivan and Carol offered to stay by the phone while the others were out.

 

Carole was very quiet and Ana thought she might have been crying, although her glasses made it impossible to be sure.  She had seen cracks in relationships open up over lunch. How on earth will we manage to keep supporting Mark, if this goes on for any length of time? How long will it be before it all starts to fall apart?