Read Online Then You Were Gone by Claire Moss - Free Book Online Page A

letter containing his certificates, smelled of money. Was it a fee-paying place? Jazzy would know. Simone tended to assume that if a topic was anything that she associated with the lives of people richer than most, from pheasant shooting to collecting air miles, then Jazzy would be the person to ask. It was, so far, an assumption that had yet to be proven incorrect. Jazzy not being with her, she decided to look it up. Simone took out her phone and swore under her breath. Bloody thing. Mack’s flat was always a black spot for getting online, but her phone normally connected automatically to his wifi. She looked around for the router so she could re-enter the password, but it wasn’t in its usual spot. That was odd. Sighing, she flicked the hair out of her eyes and looked again at the certificates, as though, now technology had let her down, good old-fashioned ink and paper might miraculously provide her with the answer.
    His A-level results were testament to his ability – might he not have won some kind of scholarship to this Chignall place? But if that were the case, why never mention it – especially to Jazzy? Simone had been to Exeter University – in fact that was where she had met Jazzy – and it had provided her with an education in, amongst other things, how posh people worked. Before the end of freshers’ week it had become apparent that for people who had attended private school, simply to mention the name of one’s alma mater was to instantly be allowed access to a kind of nameless, shapeless club whose members spoke a special language and whose rules were utterly impregnable to outsiders. Would not Mack have wanted to flash his credentials around when he met a fellow member like Jazzy? It was true that Mack was proud of his working class roots, had in fact made them a central part of his persona. And it was true that he called himself left-wing, had, he proudly declared, voted Labour all his life regardless of Clause 4, tuition fees, Iraq or the bright but short-burning flame of Nick Clegg that had swayed some towards the Lib Dems. But Jazzy similarly liked to think of himself as a lefty, liberal type regardless of his own privileged background as the son of a wealthy Cornish farmer. If Jazzy did not think having been to private school prevented him from having a social conscience, then nor did he think it was anything to be ashamed of. So why should Mack have felt it was something he needed to hide?
    Simone looked at the wall clock. It was after nine, and she was unsure how frequent the buses were round here in the evenings. She did not relish the prospect of spending too many minutes on this street by herself, and the spookiness of an abandoned flat was beginning to get to her. She had come across no sign or pointer, no secret code or private byword that he had left for her, and the exam certificates seemed to be the most enlightening thing this bottom drawer contained. For a moment, she was tempted to take the pile of papers with her, but she decided against it. After all, Mack might return at any time. How would it look if she had trusted him so little that she had helped herself to all his personal stuff?
    As she attempted to place everything back in the drawer at the precise angle it had previously been she saw a corner of beige paper, a grid marked on it in red ink. There was only one kind of official document that looked like that. She slipped it swiftly out of the pile. Afterwards she would ask herself what she was hoping to find. What, after all, can really be gleaned from a person’s birth certificate? Maybe she was conscious on some level of what Ayanna had told them, conscious that Mack leaving his birth certificate behind might be significant purely because he no longer needed it; because that person on the certificate was no longer him.
    But she gazed at it for several moments and still the letters and numbers on it made no sense. This was not Mack’s birth certificate. It was not even the