by Karen Cole
I make my voice light, humorous even, but as I go to the window to close his blinds, and see the police car roll up outside our house, lights flashing silently, a chill grips my heart.
And I think, It’s happened. My greatest fear has come true.
Chapter 4
Two police officers are in our living room, a man and a woman. Radios are crackling on their belts, their eyes are curious and probing, questions firing from their mouths. They introduced themselves when they arrived, but they have long Greek names that I was too agitated to take in. I think the man is a detective and may be called something beginning with M, or perhaps D, and the woman is Eleni or Elena something. They sit on our sofa sipping the coffee Chris has brought them and smile in a way that I suppose is intended to be reassuring. Chris is doing most of the talking because I’m finding it hard to focus on what they’re saying. I feel sick and dizzy. The light is unbearably bright, and their voices seem to be coming from far away. The presence of the police in our house has brought it home to me. They’re taking this seriously. This is real. Grace is really gone.
‘Mrs Joanna?’
Suddenly, I realise that they’re all looking at me expectantly.
‘Sorry?’ My voice comes out hoarse and broken.
‘What time did you drop her off at school this morning?’ the detective says gently. He has grey hair and glasses and his gaze is steady and neutral.
I force myself to look into his eyes. Don’t fall apart now, Jo. You need to stay sharp – for Grace’s sake as well as your own.
‘Oh. About seven thirty, as usual.’ My hands twist in my lap. ‘I dropped her just outside the front entrance and watched her go into school.’
‘Does she sometimes stay out late without telling you where she is?’
‘Not usually, no.’
‘And has she run away before?’ Apart from the heavy emphasis on the h, which sounds as if he’s about to gob up a load of phlegm, the detective’s English is perfect.
She hasn’t run away, I want to say. But then I think, Maybe she has. Isn’t that better than the alternative?
‘No,’ says Chris decisively. ‘This is very out of character.’
The female police officer looks around the room; her blue eyes, lined with heavy black eyeliner, are sharp and suspicious. I can all too easily guess what she’s thinking. What’s wrong with the parents? What have they done to their daughter to make her so unhappy at home that she wants to run away? It’s a good question. ‘Perhaps she’s out with her friends?’ she suggests. ‘Teenagers. They can be . . . difficult sometimes.’
‘Eleni is right. Particularly the girls.’ The detective nods sagely. ‘I know. I have three.’ He holds up three fingers to emphasise the point.
Eleni rolls her eyes, stands up and picks up a photo of Grace from the top of the chest of drawers. ‘Is this your daughter?’ she asks.
It’s an old school photo, taken about six years ago. Grace in her primary school uniform. She must’ve been about ten years old. She had the same long black hair and huge blue eyes. But she was chubbier then, with round, red cheeks and a snub nose. She’s smiling at the camera with an awkward false expression. She’s never been any good at posing for photos. You have to take her unawares to capture her real personality, the flashes of sly humour, the true beauty of her smile.
‘Yes, that’s her,’ says Chris. ‘But it’s old. I can give you a more recent one. Wait a second.’ He scrolls through his phone and finds a picture of Grace on her birthday, the 2017 version – all willowy curves and sex appeal. She’s laughing confidently at the camera, her face lit up by the light from the candles on her cake. She’s perfect, I realise, and something stabs me in the heart. Perhaps I’ve never deserved anything so perfect.
Eleni cups the phone in her hands and peers at the picture. ‘Pretty girl,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘Pretty’ doesn’t really go far enough. Grace is beautiful, breathtakingly, head-turningly beautiful. People often comment on it, and then look at me thoughtfully, as if they’re surprised that such an ordinary-looking woman could give birth to such a stunning daughter. I don’t blame them. It’s true I’ve got the same colouring as Grace, blue eyes and dark hair, but that’s where the resemblance ends.
‘Here, take a look, Dino,’ Eleni says, handing the phone to the detective.
Detective Dino glances at the photo then takes a notepad and pen out of his pocket and leans forward. ‘Does she take any medications? Drugs?’
‘No . . .’ Chris says, then looks at me for confirmation.
I shake my head. ‘No, she takes hay fever pills sometimes in the spring, but she doesn’t need them at the moment.’
‘And she doesn’t take any recreational drugs?’ He smiles. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t get her into trouble if the answer is yes.’
We both shake our heads emphatically. But how would we know? According to some of the other parents at the Mediterranean Academy, drugs are rife at the school and children even take them on the school campus.
‘Not as far as we know,’ I say.
Dino directs the next question to me. He clears his throat and flushes slightly.
‘I’m sorry that I have to ask this, but do you have any reason to think she would harm herself?’
I inhale sharply. The idea is a punch in the gut. A rogue image breaks free from the place in my mind where I keep it locked – an image of my mother, lying on her bed, her arms flung out, vomit caught up in her hair. I found her when I came home from school one day, after she’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills. One of three suicide attempts. I was ten years old.
But Grace? Surely not. Grace is strong and happy. That’s what I tell myself anyway. But there’s so much I don’t know about my daughter nowadays.
I shake my head. Grace was angry, not depressed. I’m sure about that. But I think about Mum’s therapist when she visited the house once. Depression is anger turned inwards – isn’t that what she said?
‘No, I’m sure she wouldn’t do anything stupid. She’s happy, isn’t she?’ I look to Chris. Chris frowns and nods.
‘Good. That’s good.’ Dino coughs and looks down at his notes. ‘What was she wearing when you last saw her?’
I close my eyes and picture Grace, ponytail swinging, walking up the school steps. The brief backwards glance. What was the expression on her face? Defiance? Anger? Determination? The more I try to remember, the more elusive it seems to get.
‘Her school uniform,’ I say out loud. ‘The Mediterranean Academy uniform. It’s a grey skirt and a white polo shirt with the school logo on it.’
Dino beams. ‘Ah, she goes to the Mediterranean Academy? My oldest daughter goes there too. Which grade is she in?’
We’re here to talk about my daughter, not yours, I want to snap. But there’s no point in antagonising him. He may be one of the few people that can help us. ‘Year six,’ I answer politely. ‘She took her GCSEs last year.’
‘My daughter’s in year four. Her name is Anna. Maybe they know each other.’
‘Maybe,’ I murmur. This is the way things work in Cyprus. You have to establish a personal connection before business can be done – even, it seems, urgent business like this.
‘Is there any reason why she might have run away?’ Eleni asks with just a hint of impatience.
And before I can stop him, Chris nods. ‘We had a row on Saturday, didn’t we, Jo?’
I glare at him. How can he be so stupid? We need the police to take Grace’s disappearance seriously. If they think this is a simple case of a teenager running away after a family fight, they won’t make her a high priority. Surely Chris must realise that.
‘It was with me,’ I sigh. There’s no point in hiding it now. ‘But we’ve had a lot of arguments over the years. She’s never run away before.’
‘What did you argue about?’ Dino asks.
‘
It was about her boyfriend. She’s been seeing a man – an older man. An English man.’
Both police officers are all attention. ‘What’s his name, this Englishman?’ Eleni asks. She sits opposite me on the edge of the chair, leaning forward.
‘Thomas Mitchinson,’ I say after a moment’s hesitation. Despite the way I feel about him, I don’t really want to get Tom in trouble with the police. The age of consent is seventeen in Cyprus. So legally Grace is still a minor here.
Dino taps his notebook thoughtfully. ‘Is it possible she’s with him?’
I shake my head. ‘I went to his flat this afternoon, but she wasn’t there, and he said he hadn’t seen her.’ I chew my lip. ‘But I think he knows something.’
Detective Dino sips at his coffee. ‘Why do you think that?’
‘I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.’
‘Do you have his address? A telephone number?’
I give Dino Tom’s number and he taps it into his phone. Then he looks from me to Chris. ‘We’ll look into it,’ he says. ‘How about friends? Have you checked with her friends?’
‘All the friends we know about,’ I say. ‘I messaged everyone I could think of on Facebook.’
Dino nods. ‘Have you checked in her room to see if anything’s missing, like clothes or money?’
‘I had a quick look this afternoon,’ I say, ‘but I didn’t notice anything obvious.’
‘Can you show us her room?’ he asks.
I head upstairs with the detective close on my tail.
He looks around at the disarray in her room without comment. Then he picks up a couple of school books from her desk and flicks through them, a thoughtful frown on his face while I rummage in her drawer trying to find her purse without success. I tip up her piggy bank and a couple of coins spill out. No notes.
‘Has she taken any money?’ asks Dino.
‘I’m not sure, maybe.’ The truth is, we stopped giving her pocket money a while ago after she refused to stop seeing Tom, and though she probably had some birthday money left over, I can’t be certain about that. Money tends to burn a hole in Grace’s pocket until it’s spent.
The detective nods and slides open the wardrobe door. ‘What about her clothes?’
‘I don’t know.’ I rifle through the random jumble of jeans and skirts and dresses feeling hopeless and inadequate. Grace refuses to throw anything away. She has so many clothes stuffed into the back of the cupboard it’s impossible to tell if anything’s missing. ‘Her black fleece perhaps . . .’ I venture. Grace has a fleece she really loves and wears around the house all the time. ‘Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s gone, unless it’s in the wash . . .’
I’m about to close the door and look in the washing basket when I notice something. It’s not something that’s missing but rather something that isn’t missing.
‘Hold on a minute . . .’ I blurt.
‘What is it?’ asks Dino.
‘Her PE kit is still here.’ It’s neatly folded on the shelf where I left it. ‘I’m sure she was carrying her PE bag this morning,’ I tell him. ‘So, what did she have in the bag if it wasn’t her kit?’
Dino lifts up the T-shirt gingerly. ‘She doesn’t have a spare set?’ he asks.
‘No, she only has PE once a week.’
There’s something else, I realise, scanning the wardrobe. She usually keeps a sleeping bag on the top shelf. It’s not there.
‘Her sleeping bag is gone too,’ I say.
Dino nods as though satisfied. ‘Well, it looks likely that she’s run away,’ he says. ‘Where does she keep her passport? You should check it’s still there just as a precaution.’
I go to our bedroom and check the bedside drawer to see if Grace’s passport is still there, where we keep it along with the others. It isn’t.
‘It’s not there.’ I stare at the detective in dismay. ‘Jesus. You think she could’ve left the country?’
Dino frowns and shrugs. ‘Maybe. She might have gone back to England, for example. Does she have friends or family she would go to there?’
‘Not really.’ Grace has never been very close to my mother and, like me, she’s never had any time for her step-grandad, Dave. My younger brothers live in Australia now and I have very little contact with them. Chris’s parents are both dead. She gets on quite well with Chris’s sister, Katie, though.
‘I suppose she could have gone to her aunt’s,’ I say. But if she was with Katie, I think, surely Katie would have let us know by now.
‘You should check with her,’ Dino says as we head downstairs to where Chris and Eleni are sitting heads bent together, talking earnestly.
Dino nods towards Eleni.
‘Well, we’ll leave it at that for the moment.’
Eleni, taking her cue, carries the coffee cups into the kitchen and places them on the draining board.
‘Here’s my telephone number.’ Dino hands me his card as they head for the door.
Larnaca Police Department Detective Constandinos Markides, I read.
‘A bit of a mouthful, I know,’ he smiles. ‘I prefer it if you call me Dino. Please feel free to contact me anytime.’
‘And try not to worry,’ he adds as they leave. ‘In most of these cases the child turns up unharmed, usually somewhere close by. She’s probably at a friend’s house.’
Chapter 5
Try not to worry, he says.
He might as well ask the sun not to shine in Cyprus. It’s quarter past two now, Grace has been missing for exactly nineteen hours and I’m in a constant state of intense anxiety. So much can happen in nineteen hours and I’m tortured by a succession of images . . . Grace hit by a car lying injured in a ditch, Grace locked up in a cellar, Grace raped or murdered, Grace overdosed on some drug. My head feels as if it’s splitting open. How can this be happening to us? But I know that terrible things can and do happen all the time. Your world can be turned upside down in a matter of minutes.
I tell Chris about Dino’s idea that she might have left the country and while Chris rings Katie to find out if she’s heard anything, I head upstairs to Grace’s room to see if I can find her passport. After rummaging around in her chest of drawers and sifting fruitlessly through the muddle of papers and books on her desk, I finally find it on the floor where it has fallen behind the desk. Feeling relieved, I sit on her bed and run my fingers over the gold inscription on the cover we bought her. And so the journey begins, it says. When we bought it, I imagined Grace taking it with her on a gap year. I pictured her with a rucksack on her back travelling off to Thailand, Australia, India, visiting all the places and doing all the things I never could because I was stuck at home with a baby by the age of eighteen. This dream I had for Grace seemed so close and tangible at the time. Now there’s a part of me that fears it will never happen.
I open the passport to the back pages and find her photo, taken a couple of years ago. Grace stares back at me, unsmiling, with her implacable blue eyes.
‘Katie hasn’t heard from her. She has no idea where she is,’ Chris says heavily as I come back downstairs.
‘I found her passport,’ I say. ‘She’s still in the country at least.’
It’s a small consolation. Cyprus is large island – over a million people live here – and it’s not going to be easy to find her unless she wants to be found.
My headache is getting worse. Pretty soon it’ll be a full-blown migraine. I take a couple of painkillers and lie on the sofa with a cold flannel on my head while Chris tries calling Grace again. God knows how many times. He rings her over and over, getting more and more frustrated until finally he gives up, flinging his phone down on the sofa.
‘Jesus, where the hell is she?’ he spits angrily – anger being his default reaction to stress. He stands by the window and pulls back the curtain, staring out at the blackness and the empty house opposite. ‘She
was so upset on Saturday . . .’ he says quietly. ‘You don’t think you were too hard on her?’
I sit up, bristling, my headache temporarily forgotten. I should have known he would try to turn this on me. ‘So, you think this is my fault?’
‘That’s not what I said.’ He leans against the wall rubbing his forehead. ‘I just—’
‘No, but you implied it. You think I’ve driven her away.’
There’s a tense silence while I stare at him furiously. Finally, he sighs.
‘Kids her age, they need a bit of freedom. They don’t want someone breathing down their neck, telling them what to do all the time.’
‘I don’t breathe down her neck!’ I say, my voice shaking with rage. I can’t believe he’s doing this. Now, of all times. Chris, who never usually gets involved in parenting at all.
‘You do, Jo, you know,’ he says softly. ‘I know you don’t mean to, but you suffocate her. I feel as if you’ve made her life your life and it’s not healthy. You need an outside interest.’
Work, he means. It’s always been a bone of contention. Chris has wanted me to get a job for years – to pull my weight financially. But when the kids were small, I was terrified to leave them, even for a minute. I was always worried that if I left them, something bad would happen. When they were old enough to go to school, I got a job as a teaching assistant, so I could keep an eye on them and be at home when they came home. But in Cyprus teaching assistant jobs for non-Greek speakers are few and far between. Not that I’ve really tried to find one. There’s enough to do in the afternoons, ferrying Jack around to football practice and helping Grace with her revision. I like to get involved in everything they do. Is it true? Is he right? Have I been suffocating them with attention and care? I brush the thought aside angrily. It’s nonsense. I’m a good mother. How can a child have too much love and attention?
‘If you were her real father, maybe you’d feel differently,’ I snap.
This is totally unfair, and I know it. Chris has always loved Grace. Ever since our wedding when Grace was a bridesmaid, three years old, traipsing down the aisle, scattering confetti, he’s treated her like his own daughter. He’s never given any word or sign that he feels any differently about her than he does about Jack.