Pulse

but could tell from her body that her mind wasn’t on things. Afterwards, they lay on their backs, and he said some stuff, but she didn’t pick up on anything. Oh well, work tomorrow, thought Vernon. He went to sleep.
    When he dropped by The Right Plaice the next evening to pick Andrea up, Mrs Ridgewell said she’d called in sick. He rang her mobile but she didn’t answer, so he texted her.Then he went round to the house and tried her bell. He left it a couple of hours, phoned again, rang the bell, then let himself in.
    Her room was quite neat, and quite empty. No clothes on the picture rail, no photos on the little dressing table. Something made him open the microwave and look inside; all he saw was the circular plate. On the bed were two envelopes, one for the landlord, with keys and money inside by the feel of it, the other for Mrs Ridgewell. Nothing for him.
    Mrs Ridgewell asked if they’d had a quarrel. No, he said, they never quarrelled.
    ‘She was a nice girl,’ said the manageress. ‘Very reliable.’
    ‘Like a Polish builder.’
    ‘I hope you didn’t say that to her. It’s not a nice remark. And I don’t think she was Polish.’
    ‘No, she wasn’t.’ He looked out to sea. ‘ Oorals ,’ he found himself saying.
    ‘Pardon?’
    You went to the station and showed a photograph of the missing woman to the booking clerk, who remembered her face and told you where she’d bought a ticket to. That’s what they did in films. But the nearest station was twelve miles away, and it didn’t have a ticket office, just a machine you put money or plastic into. And he didn’t even have a picture of her. They’d never done that thing couples do, crowding into a booth together, the girl sitting on the man’s lap, both half silly and out of focus. They were probably too old for that anyway.
    At home he googled Andrea Morgen and got 497,000 results. Then he refined the question and cut the results down to 393. Did he want to search for ‘Andrea Morgan’? No, he didn’t want to search for someone else. Most of the stuff was in German, and he scrolled through it helplessly. He’d never done languages at school, never needed them since. Then hehad a thought. He looked up an online dictionary and found the German for swimmer. It was a different word if you were a man or a woman. He typed in ‘Andrea Morgen’, ‘1967’, ‘Halle’, and ‘Schwimmerin’.
    Eight results, all in German. Two seemed to be from newspapers, one from an official report. And there was a picture of her. The same one he’d found in the drawer: there she was, second from the left, arms around her teammates, big wrinkles in her white swimming cap. He paused, then hit ‘Translate this page’. Later, he found links to other pages, this time in English.
    How could he have known, he asked himself. He could barely understand the science and wasn’t interested in the politics. But he could understand, and was interested in, things he wished afterwards he’d never read about, things which, even as he looked out at the sea from a window table in The Right Plaice, were already beginning to change his memory of her.
    Halle was in what used to be East Germany. There had been a state recruiting scheme. Girls were picked out when they were as young as eleven. Vernon tried to put together the probable life of that chubby little blonde girl. Her parents signing a consent form and a secrecy form. Andrea enrolled in the Child and Youth Sports School, then in the Dynamo Sports Club in East Berlin. She had school lessons, but was mostly trained to swim and swim. It was a great honour to be a member of the Dynamo: that was why she’d had to leave home. Blood was taken from her earlobe to test how fit she was. There were pink pills and blue pills – vitamins, she was told. Later, there were injections – just more vitamins. Except that they were anabolic steroids and testosterone. It was forbidden to refuse. The training motto was ‘You eat the pills or you die’. The coaches made sure she swallowed them.
    She didn’t die. Other things happened instead. Muscles grew but tendons didn’t, so tendons snapped. There weresudden bursts of acne, a deepening of the voice, an increase of hair on the face and body; sometimes the pubic hair grew up over the stomach, even above the navel. There was retarded growth and problems with fertility. Vernon had to look up terms like ‘virilisation’ and ‘clitoral hypertrophy’, then wished he hadn’t. He