by Fiona Barton
So when she’d found Rosie waiting for her outside school the day after Mags’s bombshell, Alex hadn’t come close to guessing what was coming.
“I hear you’ve been let down, Alex,” Rosie had blurted without preamble. “Everyone was talking about it at lunch. I’m really sorry.”
“Thanks, Rosie,” Alex had said, genuinely touched. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do, really. My mum doesn’t want me to go on my own . . .”
“Well, can I come instead? Please? Thailand sounds fantastic,” Rosie had said, slipping her arm through Alex’s.
“You? You want to come?”
“Yes. It’d be brilliant.”
“It’s really lovely of you to offer,” Alex had said carefully, too stunned to trust her answers. “I thought you were going straight to uni . . .”
“I was, but I’ve changed my mind.”
“Oh, I didn’t know.”
“No one does. You’re the first person I’ve told.”
“Okay . . . Well, can we talk about it in the morning? I’ve got a student council meeting now.”
“’Course. Not sure I’ll be able to sleep, though.”
Rosie had walked away, singing.
* * *
• • •
Alex hadn’t slept much either as she wrestled with the idea of three months with Rosie. She’d had misgivings. Of course she had. What would they talk about on twelve-hour bus journeys? Would Rosie get homesick as soon as they arrived? Would she leave her stranded? But she’d bundled up her worries and closed a door on them at three a.m.
The truth was she would have grabbed at any lifeline to save her beloved trip. Later that morning when she saw Rosie waiting at the end of the road, she’d shouted, “Yes!” and run to hug her.
Rosie had hugged her back, trembling with excitement, and said, “Thank you. You’ve saved my life.”
Alex had had no idea what that was about but stuffed it in the misgivings cupboard. She didn’t want anything to spoil the moment and Rosie didn’t mention it again. She talked at hyperspeed all the way to school about what they were going to do. What should she pack? Would they see elephants?
The euphoria had carried them through the squally days that followed. Alex had tried to tell herself they were minor hiccups, but there’d been a couple of terrible rows. More than a couple, if Alex was honest. The main problem was that Rosie hadn’t told her mum about taking a year off and there’d been screaming matches between them that had spilled into a very difficult meeting with Alex’s parents; it emerged that Rosie couldn’t afford to pay for the flights and had no money for the trip. There’d been a desperate forty-eight hours when the trip was off until Rosie suddenly announced she’d come up with the cash. Her dad had given her money.
“He didn’t have much of a choice, really.” She’d laughed.
“What do you mean?” Alex asked.
“I told him he owed me something for the way he’s behaved. He does.”
Alex was too relieved to ask further questions. “That’s great, Rosie,” she’d said.
But news of her dad’s “interference” had caused a new round of rows between Rosie and her mum. The constant highs and lows had been exhausting.
However, getting her own way with her parents seemed to have given Rosie new confidence. She had sat and nodded her little blond head when Alex first outlined the plans she had spent months making with Mags. “It all sounds magical,” she’d said.
Now she had her own ideas.
“Bloody hell, not another temple,” she’d said, laughing, when she reviewed her copy of the neatly typed “A & R’s Final Itinerary” as they waited to board the plane. “Have you got a thing about monks?” Alex had laughed, but Rosie hadn’t let it go; she’d pressed her case, wheedling and chipping away at Alex’s cultural agenda. Rosie no longer wanted a magical experience. She wanted to party.
They’d worked it out. Most of it, anyway.
EIGHT
The Reporter
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 2014
I’m late and I see them sitting at a table outside the restaurant. Henry’s looking at his watch. Sod him.
I wave to them and mime an apology, lifting my hands in defeat. It’ll have to do.
The men stand when I march up, and I kiss everyone.
“Have you ordered?”
“We were waiting for you, Katie,” Steve says meaningfully.
“Right, sorry. I’m not that late, am I?”
“No. What do you want to drink?”
I’m in trouble.
I look to see what the others are having. The boys are sharing a bottle of red and Deepika picks up her glass of fizzy water. “Having an alcohol-free week,” she explains righteously.
“Glass of white wine, please,” I say. “Make it a large one. I’ve had quite a day.”
Deepika smiles sympathetically. “Big news story, Kate?”
“Biggish. Two missing girls in Thailand. I’ve been interviewing the parents down in Winchester.”
“Isn’t Jake in Thailand?” she asks, dipping her breadstick in some tapenade.
“Yes, that’s right,” I say and turn to see where my wine is.
Henry and Steve are talking shop, moaning about the latest cuts at the hospital, and I try to steer Deepika away from my boy.
“This is nice, isn’t it?” I say, and even I can hear the insincerity in my voice. “We haven’t seen you for ages. What have you been up to?”
I tune out as she tells me about a complicated corporate case and problems with noisy neighbors, and I think about Lesley and Jenny, sitting in their separate houses, dealing with the fear that their girls may be in danger.
I’ve written the story as hard as I can, packing official comments and previous missing backpacker stories around the families’ emotional quotes, but it’s the selfie of the girls laughing in a tuk-tuk under the headline “The Lost Girls” that will clutch at other parents’ hearts and stomachs.
I crumble my breadstick between my fingers and fight the ache in my own stomach.
Henry has moved on to politics when the waiter finally brings my glass. I try not to throw it down my throat, but Henry notices my first big gulp.
“Thirsty, Kate?” He laughs his rugger-bugger laugh and Steve puts his hand on my knee under the table to still me.
“A bit,” I say. “What are we eating?”
Later, when we’ve grazed through plates of prawns, chicken lollipops, and squid, Henry turns his wine-glazed eyes on me.
“See more of your lot have been arrested for hacking,” he says, picking a shred of lettuce out of his teeth.
“Hmm,” I say, pretending to chew. Steve’s hand is back on my knee and I move my leg away from him.
“Don’t know why they bothered to hack into answerphones,” Henry continues. “All reporters just make it up anyway. Don’t they?”
“Henry!” Deepika chides, but she’s smiling. Complicit. And something shifts in me.
“I’m a reporter, Henry,” I say, and Steve lifts his finger to signal to the waiter for the bill.
“Yes, you are,” Henry slurs and laughs.
“And I have never made anything up.”
“Right,” he says and raises an eyebrow at his wife.
“Are you calling me a liar?” I say, my voice getting quieter so he has to lean forward to hear me.
“Come on, Katie,” Steve says. “Henry’s just teasing. Here’s the bill.”
“Only teasing, Katie.” Henry giggles as Steve thrusts his credit card into the machine and punches in his code.
“She’s feisty, isn’t she? I like that in a woman,” he tells Steve and is suddenly wearing Deepika’s fizzy water, a slice of lime sliding down his face.
Steve hustles me away from the table, miming to the dripping Henry that I’ve had
too much to drink.
When we get to the taxi rank, I start laughing. He tries hard not to, but in the end, we are both holding each other up.
“His face,” I say. And we’re off again.
“I’ll ring him later to apologize. I’ll say you were drunk,” he says in the taxi home.
“You will not!” I say.
“I’ve got to work with the man, Kate.”
“Oh, do what you have to do, but I’m never going for dinner with them again.”
“I doubt they’d risk it.”
“Well, he said he liked feisty girls. He might fancy a return match.”
BANGKOK DAY 2
(MONDAY, JULY 28, 2014)
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
SUBJECT: ARRIVED!!!
Hi, Mags,
Well we’re here!
It is HOT! But it’s great. I went out with Rosie and two lads from the hostel to celebrate our first night. One’s English and the other is an Aussie. Shaun. He wanted to show us the sights before he headed off to Ko Tao. We were giggling like little kids getting into our first tuk-tuk, posting loads of selfies and clinging onto the chrome rails and screaming. It was MAD driving—like a computer game and no safety belts. A x
“I’m in the dorm room with four others,” Shaun had said when he appeared, barely awake. “Bunks are half the usual rate. D’you want a look?”
He opened the door to show them. The grilles on the windows were patched with T-shirts and boxer shorts tucked into the holes. “Instead of curtains,” he explained.
The room was lined with metal-frame bunks, and a sea of everyone’s belongings had washed into the corners. There was another lad asleep on one of the thin mattresses, lying on his stomach with a pillow over his head.
“This is cozy. A boy nest . . .” Rosie had said, the beer making her lighter and louder.
Shaun had laughed with her. “Only one more night. Then the beach.”
He was going to Ko Tao on the bus and ferry. “Nine hours, so I can catch up on sleep.”
“Have you booked a hostel?” Alex had asked, the disaster over finding a bed for the night still hovering over her.
“No. Maybe I’ll kip on the beach. If you’re in paradise, you don’t care where you sleep.”
“Yeah,” Rosie had said, as if she knew.
You’ve only been in the country for five hours, Alex had thought. And this is supposed to be paradise. She looked up at the guesthouse sign, nestling in a clot of thick power cables. More like Bates Motel.
* * *
• • •
She’d scream-laughed along with Rosie when they’d got into their first tuk-tuk, but it kind of went downhill after that. It turned into a bar crawl with plastic buckets of vodka and Red Bull and straws. It tasted disgusting and Alex ordered a Coke.
By the time they pulled up outside Nana Plaza at one in the morning, Alex had had enough. The sign on the towering building screamed, “The World’s Largest Adult Playground,” and Shaun had grinned and shouted, “Ready for this?”
“Ready for anything,” Rosie had yelled back.
Alex had hesitated. “I’m a bit jet-lagged. I might go back to the guesthouse,” she’d muttered. But the others didn’t hear her over the music. So she’d followed.
Try everything once, Mum always says, she told herself. But I think she meant sprouts, not ladyboys.
It was a bit sleazy and sad inside. There were girls their age banging their pelvises against each other, touching tongues, and smearing themselves in foam, while tourists and leering men watched.
“I thought we were going to a club,” Alex had hissed to Rosie, who was pawing at Shaun as she tried not to fall over.
“We are. Shaun says there are thirty of them here. It’s mega, isn’t it?”
“Are they all like this?” Alex had said, waving a vague hand at a bar called Spanky’s with its promises of “girl shower action.”
“Probably.” She’d laughed, her ankles buckling. “Can you imagine what my mum would say if she could see us?”
“No,” Alex had said. But she could.
Perhaps I should have had more to drink, she’d thought. So I wouldn’t have to care what Jenny Shaw would say. Let alone my mum.
“Well, I’m not going to stay long. It’s all a bit sleazy, isn’t it?” she’d said.
Rosie had turned away from her.
An hour of topless twerking later, Alex had announced loudly that she was going back to the guesthouse. The clincher had been when Shaun drunkenly tried to snog her.
“Come back with me, Rosie,” she had shouted above the music for the third time.
“I’m not going home, Alex. I’m having a great time. Shaun’s lovely, isn’t he?” Rosie had slurred up close, hot vodka breath making her face wet. “See you in paradise . . .”
* * *
• • •
In the tuk-tuk back to Mama’s, Alex wrestled with the guilt of leaving Rosie. She’d failed the mum test on the first night.
What sort of a friend am I?
NINE
The Mother
SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 2014
She’d got a photo of Alex from the shelving unit and put her on the table while she drank her first cup of coffee of the day. “Hello, my lovely,” she’d said, like she’d said every morning of her child’s life.
Malcolm had gone out to get the newspaper. They’d both told work they wouldn’t be in. They’d seen Kate Waters’s story online, on their son Dan’s laptop, but they wanted it in their hands. They needed something solid they could hold and keep. Everything else was shifting under their feet or happening in cyberspace, wherever that was.
When he got back, they sat with Alex’s photo and read the story again. “It’s like it’s happening to someone else,” she said.
“I know, love. But this should help, shouldn’t it? Kate’s done it really well. People will really start looking, won’t they?”
“Danny says there are loads more messages on the Facebook page. People getting in touch.”
“But what are they saying?”
“That they are sorry for us, mainly. I want the police, not kids in swimsuits, to look for them.”
“I know, love, but they say there’s nothing to indicate the girls are in trouble.”
“Then why haven’t they fucking well been in touch?” Lesley screamed, the F word ricocheting off the units of their neat little kitchen. She wanted to shake someone. Wanted to hear their teeth rattle.
Malcolm stood up quickly, almost knocking over his chair, and backed away from her.
“Lesley, for God’s sake, calm down,” he shouted back. “Danny will hear you.”
He was frightened of her; she could see it in his eyes. She was frightened, too. She didn’t recognize this woman who was screaming like a fishwife and banging the table with her fists. She couldn’t imagine what her colleagues at St. John’s Primary School would say. She was the one who always calmed everything down when things got heated, the one who everyone expected to talk sense. But she couldn’t help herself.
She burst into noisy sobs. “I just want someone to do something. To find her,” she howled.
“We both do, Lesley,” Malcolm said but didn’t move from the safety of his side of the table. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
“I don’t want a fucking cup of tea,” she shouted as she ran from the room.
TEN
The Reporter
SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 2014
The Herald has splashed on an exclusive interview with Rosie’s dad and I can hear the sound of Terry grinding his teeth somewhere in Surbiton as I scroll through our rival’s story on my phone.
As if summoned by my thought, he rings.
“Why didn’t we have this?”
I mime to Steve that it’s a work call and go into the kitchen so I don’t disturb his Saturday morning ritual of newspapers and coffee. I also don’t want him to hear. He takes it very personally if the desk is difficult with me. As if it’s him being bollocked.
“I hate seeing you upset by them,” he always says.
“Water off a duck’s back,” I say, but he stays grumpy—much longer than I do—and I end up having to soothe his hurt feelings. So I try to keep any trouble away from him.
I prefer a public slanging match in front of the whole newsroom.
“This is very much second best, Terry,” I say, switching on the kettle. “We’ve got a fantastic in with the mothers. If we’d run this, we’d have lost Jenny Shaw. She’s a difficult woman, very prickly, but I’m starting to get past that. And she hates her ex—he left her and gave Rosie the money to go—and don’t get her started on Imogen, his new partner. If we’d done this interview, she would never speak to me again. It was a no-brainer.”
There is a pause at the other end of the line.
“And that picture . . .” I say, letting Terry look at the photo of Mike Shaw with his arm round his new wife, holding a picture of his missing daughter.
“She’s had her hair and makeup done,” I say. “Not exactly the grieving stepmother. And there are no new lines in what the dad says. He knows nothing. He’s been off the scene for five years. We’ve got tons more. The mothers are the main event.”
“Okay, okay. But make sure Rosie’s mother knows we made the choice to stick with her. We need her to ourselves.”
“Will do. Are you off to wheel a trolley round Sainsbury’s now?”
“Bugger off. Speak later.”
Job done.
I phone Jenny and she starts shouting immediately.
“Have you seen the Herald? Have you? It’s a disgrace.”
I can’t get a word in so let her vent her years of fury on the saintly looking Imogen.