‘How well do you know Lily Dixon?’
‘She’s my daughter’s friend, and we’ve been rehearsing the school play for the last few weeks, but I’ve never taught her.’
‘So, you’d say you knew her well?’
‘Quite well, yes.’ Rachel could feel the tendons of her neck throb. They’d forgotten how to relax.
‘Okay, thank you.’ He wrote something down in his notebook, tongue between his teeth, transcribing her dull response, even though she was being recorded.
‘And what is Lily like? What sort of girl would you say she was?’ He read the questions so carefully from his printout that the intonation patterns were all wrong. It gave everything a false note.
‘She’s a very sweet girl, always very polite and pleasant. Not too grown up for her age.’ There was no sign of DCs Scott or Redpath this time, no sense of their mature composure, just a man so young and skinny he was scarcely formed; all elbows and Adam’s apple. He tapped his pen against the page in front of him as he thought, or perhaps mimed the act of thinking. He could only have been in the force for months.
‘What do you mean by that?’
They were in the airless, wood-panelled office of the deputy head. The room was as bare as a stage set; nothing to make it distinct, just a desk with a blank computer and an empty pinboard. Rachel knew the time to speak had arrived. She’d held onto the near-knowledge all night. It already felt too long. The facts sat heavily within her. This was the chance she needed to let them all come out, to say what she suspected. It was now. But she couldn’t. There was so little to base it on; she’d look ridiculous. I saw some lyrics from the seventies, and now I’m convinced I know who took her. She’d be laughed at. No, she could say nothing. Not yet, anyway; she’d think about it more, fathom how to explain it, call it in as an anonymous tip-off. Not there, in the deputy head’s office with this eager young man. His neck was prickled with red where he’d shaved too harshly. It looked painful. He wasn’t expecting anything. It was just a routine chat, no different to the ones he was having with scores of other staff members.
‘She’s sweet, like I said, none of the brittleness of some girls. She always seems happy, and not afraid to show it. There’s no posing with Lily, no front.’ Rachel could hear the words, but wasn’t sure how she was forming them. She had slipped into her work persona: the automation that was necessary in those endless afternoons, when her true energy had long drained, but she had to keep up the performance. So much of it was a performance.
The young man turned the page of his notebook to track down his next question. He was resting one ankle on the opposite knee in a stance of nonchalance, but his foot was jogging constantly. It hit Rachel. They knew nothing. They had no idea who Lily was with. No clue. How could they have missed it? Mark had been away, due to attend a STEM training course on Monday and Tuesday. He’d messaged to say he was ill both days and again on that Wednesday morning. The timing was glaring. But then, Rachel hadn’t made the connection. She’d been distracted. They all had, with the toxic combination of heat and exams.
‘Did she seem upset or in any distress to you?’ He’d hit upon his next set question. There was no need to deviate.
‘No, she actually always seems like a very upbeat girl, very smiley. She’s not one of the ones you worry about.’
‘How do you mean?’ He was quicker now. Rachel’s neck remained clenched.
‘You keep a bit of an eye out for the quiet ones, you know, the ones with the black nail varnish and the tippexed band names on their bags, but Lily’s always so sunny.’ It was exactly what a teacher would say.
He nodded as he jotted something else down. Rachel had wiped her eyeliner off, combed her hair straight to create a note-perfect impression of a pleasant, middle-aged teacher. No one who had anything interesting to say.
‘She’s such a lovely girl.’
‘Are Lily and your daughter close?’
‘They hang around in a little group, I think they are all very close to each other.’
‘Do you think your daughter knows where Lily might be?’
‘I’ve asked her repeatedly, as have your colleagues, and she maintains that she knows nothing. I am therefore inclined to believe her.’ It was exactly what a mother would say.
‘Does Lily have a boyfriend?’
Rachel made herself pause. ‘Not that I know of, and not that my daughter knows of.’ It fell so simply from her lips.
‘Do you have any thoughts at all, no matter how vague, as to where Lily might be, or who she might be with?’
‘Absolutely not, I’m afraid.’
Rachel sat in her Corsa in the school car park that lunchtime. It was a windowed box, and every move she made would be visible, but it was the only place she could be alone. She was safe from any semblance of conversation. Rachel felt stuck between exhaustion and frenzy; she’d clocked up no more than three hours sleep, but her blood was frantic.
She sat back in the mock-leather of the driving seat and aimed the fan right at her face. The thrum of the engine blanked everything out. Mark. Lily was with Mark Webb. He had taken her away. They were on the other side of an ocean. Rachel was the only one who knew. Her thoughts were jammed, unable to do more than repeat the fact over and over. Her eyes were too dry to do anything but stare, and she didn’t dare close them.
‘Rachel!’
A knock on the window made her yelp – a scream that immediately seemed melodramatic. Cressida’s face was only inches from her own. Rachel pressed the button that lowered the window and let in the outside heat.
‘Sorry, Rachel, I saw you alone . . .’ She was wearing a dress that could only be described as a frock: pale blue cotton with watercolour scenes of a windmill repeated across it, tied at the waist with a white belt. Her face grew stiff as the silence stretched.
‘God, sorry, Cressida, I just needed a moment, you know.’
Cressida was instantly tearful, her eyes damp and red in seconds. ‘I do know, I do. It’s all just so awful. Every time I check my phone I say a little wish that there’ll be a message telling me she’s come home, but it’s never there. And seeing it all on the news is so ghoulish, so ugly. She’s fifteen. Fifteen.’
Cressida’s emotions clearly sat just below the surface, just a scratch under her skin. Rachel only nodded. There was nothing said that she didn’t agree with.
‘I just don’t know what to do with myself, Rachel.’
The way Cressida looked at her sometimes threw Rachel. Cressida saw her as an adult, a grown woman who viewed the world through clear eyes and approached every situation with certainty. ‘I understand. I think all we can do is stay strong.’
Her words were meaningless, but the younger woman’s hand was firm on her wrist. ‘Thank you, Rachel. You’re right. We need to stay strong for Lily.’
He’d clinked the two keys together. One for the gate and one for the door. He’d let the key ring dangle from his pinkie. He’d flicked a single switch, and the tinny pops of the lights waking up had reverberated around the enormous space. They’d been joined by the thwack and thrum of whatever machinery made the place function. Only one set of lights had come on. The deep end of the pool had remained eerie with shadow.
Mark’s shoes were off before he turned to her. She’d never looked at his feet before. They were as pale and narrow as she’d expected. She folded her clothes neatly on a wooden bench like she was in a PE lesson, her eyes and nose already stinging with the bleach in the air. At the dark end of the pool, she could make use of the false dusk to undress. He dove in without making a splash. Surfacing, suddenly entirely wet, entirely naked and whispering. Come in, come in. The water was as warm as a bath, as warm as the air around it. It was the first time he’d seen her naked.
Every noise they made, every word uttered, echoed once, twice, three times, up to the vaulted metal ceiling and back down to the ename
l tiles of the changing rooms. It had felt renegade. Trespassing in the school was an odd kind of daring. Breaking into a place they knew so well. They were inside a building they both walked by every day, with leather shoes and bags full of books, but every piece of their clothing was folded away. All it would have taken was a vigilant caretaker, or someone else with a key, and they’d have been caught, shivering and dripping.
Nothing about the place felt familiar. Mundane details became magical. The triangular flags suspended over the water fluttered slightly as they swam.
‘You’re like a mermaid. A siren. You’ll make me dash myself to pieces on the rocks.’ His voice was a whisper, but resounded to feel epic.
The blue-and-white lane dividers she’d seen so many times were now holding her weight, her tiny water-buoyed weight, as he swam, eyes straight, towards her. Their skin was lit to bright white above the waterline. Below it, a blur, just wobbling lines and streaks of colour. Her body was nimble in the water, nakedness making her lithe, turning somersaults, discovering the ways she could propel herself with just flicks of her feet, holding upside down for long seconds, completing a length of wide, perfect strokes without taking a breath. Duck-diving to the very bottom, letting her hands run through the smattering of silt that had gathered there, the silt of the hundreds of other bodies who’d also danced in that water. Hundreds of wet teenagers. She left the traces of her touch in the deepest part, eyes open against the chlorine.
His hands had slid easily over her there. Come here. She was wriggling and silky as an otter – you minx – twisting in and out of his grip.
Rachel couldn’t tell Debbie. She couldn’t be the person to lob that grenade. She wouldn’t be able to keep her face calm as she formed the words. She’d tell the police; tell the police and let them explain to everyone else.
The number was everywhere. Posters had appeared around school, full pages in the local, free papers. They were urged to dial it if they recalled the slightest detail that might help the investigation. Rachel had to tap the eleven digits in carefully. Typing numbers felt odd; everyone she usually called was already locked away in her phone’s memory. She checked them three times. Her finger rested on the phone’s casing, no more than an inch from the green icon on the screen that would trigger the dial, that skeuomorph of the kind of cradled telephone Mia had never used, that Rachel herself could hardly remember.
She sat on the edge of her bed, leaning against the plump cushions she repositioned in a carefully haphazard pile every morning, though no one so much as peeped their head around the door. The phone suddenly weighed nothing. It was crystalline; it could shatter in a second. Rachel passed it from hand to hand. She wet her lips, and stroked the screen awake again. She didn’t even need to tell them her name; she could just share her knowledge as a hunch, a tip-off. If they asked anything more, she could just end the call. Lily would be returned home, and no one would ever know her involvement, but Rachel would be able to carry the knowledge with her, hugging that little glow of satisfaction close; she’d have done the right thing. Mark would be punished. He’d be imprisoned. He’d be vilified. Everyone would know his name. But it was nothing worse than he deserved. Her mobile felt like hollow tin. It couldn’t contain anything. There could be no working mechanism inside it that could possibly maintain a line.
Rachel exhaled slowly, and placed her phone on the bedside table, face down.
Rachel could no longer bear the idea of sweetness. She wanted to taste salt, something deeper than salt, something darker. Anything that could cut through the cloying sugar that seemed to make up her own saliva. She craved something ancient and savoury. Something so adult that no young tongue could ever stand it. At the back of the drink’s cupboard, behind the gin they shared out when visitors gathered, behind the dusty Christmas Baileys, was a bottle of Tim’s. It sat there like a relic, some present he had never opened. It wasn’t just whisky, but peaty whisky. Islay. Laphroaig.
Rachel sat at the kitchen table and took a mouthful straight from the bottle, holding it there, letting it sit on her tongue, soaking in, stinging her eyes, easing through the roof of her mouth and creeping into her bloodstream. The dark, difficult flavour filled her before she’d even swallowed. It sluiced her mouth clean, stripped the day’s saccharine residue away. There was nothing naïve there now, just the tang of smoke and sweat.
She missed salt. When she’d followed Tim inland, she hadn’t realised how being so far from the coast would feel. She’d never been so landlocked before they married. Even at university, she could take her housemate’s car, park in a coastal layby and stand, breathing, until her hair was stiff. Their house was well over an hour of driving, over a day of walking from the nearest shore. The sea wouldn’t enter her thoughts for months, then the ache would slam into her. The heat made it worse. The prow of every hill seemed to promise that glimmer of ocean. If you could just see over the top, just keep walking, the beach would appear and fill your vision, right to the very edges. It was a nagging, constant mirage. Rachel felt suffocated by the neat rows of buildings that inevitably spread out over every hill’s real prow.
The whisky was nearly enough. Rachel had poured an inch more into a coffee mug before she saw Mia in the doorway. Rachel nodded towards one of the empty chairs and Mia sat without speaking. They’d eaten so many meals around that table. Rachel had chosen it just after Mia was born, when she and Tim had kitted out the entire home. Almost everything had been flat-packed, or off the department store shelf, but the kitchen table was different. Rachel had found it at a reclamation yard, and convinced Tim it would be clean enough, safe enough. He’d teased her bohemian tendencies, grabbed her around the waist, kissed the neck beneath her hair as she’d stroked the table’s grained wood. It was rough, with corroded metal legs. It looked ridiculous in their clean, right-angled kitchen with its matching pale ash features and built-in fridge freezer, but she loved it.
Rachel walked to the cupboard, found a glass tumbler, and poured Mia her own inch of whisky. She pushed it across the table to her daughter. It was an invitation, but also a challenge. Mia reached for the glass and wrapped her thin fingers around it. Rachel let the moment hang before she spoke. What was Mia squirrelling away? What had Lily blurted out, too excited to hide? Did Mia know that Lily’s stolen lingerie was to impress their physics teacher?
‘Mia. Who is she seeing?’
Mia’s response was immediate. ‘I don’t know why you think I know.’
Mia held the glass up and let the liquid touch her lips; she barely took a sip, but it still must have burned. She didn’t wrinkle her nose, didn’t grimace, just took another tiny taste and swallowed firmly. Rachel knew she was concealing her reaction. Even if she’d tried some sweeter, weaker cousin of this drink, mixed with cola in red plastic cups, she couldn’t possibly be immune to the shock.
‘She won’t even answer my calls.’ The phone those calls reached was probably languishing at the bottom of whichever stretch of water the ferry had crossed. Mia sipped again, face impassive. ‘She doesn’t really talk about boys. She sometimes mentions Seth in Year 12.’ She held her glass with both hands, like an infant with a Tommee Tippee full of milk. ‘But I don’t know if he even knows who she is.’
Rachel needed more. ‘How do you know she likes him? What does she say about him?’
‘She thinks he’s cute.’
‘Does she use the word “cute”? What does that even mean? Does that mean he seems young? Do you want to squeeze someone who’s cute, or kiss them?’
Mia rolled the glass on its base, forming a wide arc across the table. ‘I don’t know. Both.’
‘Does she kiss him?’
‘No. They don’t really speak. She just mentions him. She just nudges us if he walks by.’
‘Does she kiss other boys?’
‘I don’t know, I suppose so, at parties and stuff.’
‘Do you see her kiss them?’
‘So, you’ve never seen her kiss any boys?’
‘That’s a totally creepy question.’
‘The rest of you must. Is she the odd one out?’
Mia didn’t answer.
‘Does she talk about kissing them? Does she talk about having sex with them?’
‘That’s gross. That’s really gross.’
‘Do you talk to her about you and Aaron?’
A pause. ‘It’s really not any of your business.’
Rachel pushed harder. ‘Does she talk about other boys, older ones?’
Mia sighed. ‘She likes Ross, in your play, I think. But I don’t know if she likes him like that. She just tells us funny things he’s said.’
‘But she doesn’t confide in you? She doesn’t tell you who she likes, or what she’s done with them?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I thought you were friends.’
Mia still stared at the table. ‘We are friends.’
‘Mia. You have to tell me absolutely anything else you know.’
Mia didn’t look up. ‘I already told the police everything.’
When Rachel spoke again, she could hear that her voice was harder. ‘Mia, look at me. Look at me.’
Mia moved her head as if it weighed too much. Rachel waited until she sat straight, until she pushed the hair back from her face. She met her daughter’s eyes, brown where her own were blue. Mia didn’t look away, but she still couldn’t get to her, couldn’t unpick what was hiding there.
‘Mum. Don’t. Please’
The crease between Mia’s eyes deepened. Rachel could see where it would one day etch itself permanently. She saw a flash of her daughter’s grown-up face. Eyes tense, mouth firm. ‘Mia, I have to. Do you have any idea how serious this is?’
‘Of course I do.’
Heatstroke: an intoxicating story of obsession over one hot summer Page 7