The Night She Disappeared

by Lisa Jewell

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry. How horrible. You must be so worried.”

  Kim nods and takes the tissue from Kerryanne, holds it to her cheeks.

  “I mean,” she says, “I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m sure they just, you know, kids, they just…” But she peters off because she’s not sure of any such thing. The only thing she’s sure of is that Tallulah would never leave Noah deliberately and that something terrible must have happened to her.

  Kerryanne leads Kim and Ryan to the large sofa and invites them to sit down.

  “Honestly,” Lexie begins, “I wish there was something I could tell you. But there really isn’t. I was at the pub, the Swan and Ducks, with an old school friend. There was this group in there, a young group, late teens, early twenties, and they were being quite rowdy. I recognized one of them, Scarlett. She used to be a student here. We’ve always been quite friendly. So I went to say hello and before I knew it I was being dragged into their little group and it felt a bit weird because obviously I’m quite a bit older than them. Plus I was sober. And they were not.”

  “And was Tallulah there then?”

  “Yes, she was there. She was sitting with a boy—her boyfriend, I think?”

  Kim nods.

  “They seemed a bit quiet at first. I noticed that. And then Scarlett got a load of shots for the table and then another and everyone got even noisier and noisier and then it was closing time and they were all talking about walking back to Scarlett’s house through the woods, and I thought that was just an accident waiting to happen. So I offered to drive them there.”

  “All of them?”

  “No, not all of them, just five of them. It was a bit of a squeeze and not entirely legal, but I still thought it was safer than them all walking through the woods off their heads.”

  “And what happened when you got back there?”

  “Well, it was so warm last night, as you know, and the lights were all on in their pool, and they all just stripped off and jumped in.”

  “Including Tallulah?”

  “Yeah. She jumped in in her top and pants. She looked kind of self-conscious.”

  “Well, yes, she’s carrying a little baby weight still.”

  “She has a baby?” Lexie looks surprised.

  “Yes. Noah; he’s one.”

  “Gosh, she looks so young.”

  “She is.” Kim holds down another burst of tears and forces a smile. “So, they all jumped in the pool. And then what?”

  “Well, I kind of—at this point I felt like I needed to supervise. I mean, Scarlett’s mum was somewhere indoors, sleeping, I think, and I realized I was the only sober person at the party so I needed to keep an eye on everyone. I ended up staying until about one. By that time everyone was out of the pool and there was a bit of”—she looks at Kim quickly from the corner of her eye—“weed. A bit of vodka. Music. But it had calmed down a bit. Tallulah and her boyfriend went indoors. Then Mimi went indoors. So I decided to head back. This guy Liam cadged a lift back with me, because he works here at the school. And that was that.”

  “Liam?” Kim asks cagily. “Who is Liam?”

  “He’s a teaching assistant here. He lives in the apartment above us. He used to go out with Scarlett but they’re still friends.”

  “Is he, I mean, is he…” Kim can’t find the words.

  Lexie shakes her head. “Oh,” she says, “no. God, no, you don’t need to worry about Liam. He’s the nicest guy in the world. Honestly.”

  Kim nods, circumspectly. Then she says, “And was there anything, last night—beneath the surface? Did you get the feeling that there was anything untoward going on?”

  Lexie turns out her bottom lip and shakes her head slowly. “No.”

  “And when you left, who was still there?”

  “Tallulah. Her boyfriend. Scarlett and Mimi.”

  “Well,” says Kim, already starting to get to her feet. “Thank you so much, Lexie. I really appreciate your time, and thank you so much for going back with them all last night, for keeping them safe. Drunk kids in swimming pools. Doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “No,” says Lexie. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Well, thank you. And this Liam. Do you think it’d be worth talking to him? Might he have any idea?”

  “I doubt it,” Lexie replies apologetically. “He wouldn’t have seen much more than I did.”

  Kim looks at the time on her phone. It’s nearly six o’clock. She turns to Kerryanne. “Do you think I should call the police?” she asks softly. “It’s been fifteen hours. What would you do?”

  Kerryanne sighs. “Well, it’s different for me, in loco parentis and all that, I’d move quite quickly if someone went missing from school. And in fact they have and I called out search and rescue within a few hours. But as a mother?” She pauses. “I don’t know. I mean, Tallulah and Zach are technically adults. They’d been drinking, taking drugs; sounds like they’ve got responsibilities beyond those of normal teenagers. I’d be tempted to look at the bigger picture. I mean, is it possible they’ve just run away? In a mad moment of spontaneity?”

  Kim closes her eyes and measures her response. “No,” she says. “No. Definitely not.”

  “And between them, as a couple? I mean, was there anything afoot? Maybe they had a row? Maybe something happened?”

  And there it is, the thing that’s been gnawing away inside Kim’s head all day long: the little box she’d found in Zach’s jacket pocket the day before when she was looking for the spare door keys she’d lent him. The box with the ring in it with the small but very clear diamond set on a golden band. She’d been expecting them to come back from the pub last night engaged. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it; they were so young and she wasn’t convinced that Tallulah was entirely committed to Zach. But she’d been ready for it, ready to look amazed and delighted and to hug them both to her and tell them she was thrilled and to take a photo and text it to Tallulah’s dad and put it on Facebook and all of that. She’d been ready for it. Even if she thought it was wrong. Because that’s what you did. Wasn’t it? When you had a baby. When you had a man who loved you. You got married.

  But then Kim thinks of how long it had taken Tallulah to agree to get back together with Zach after Noah was born. She thinks of how Tallulah shrugs Zach’s touch from her shoulder, from her arm, the roll of her eyes behind his back sometimes. She’s been meaning to start a conversation with Tallulah for a few weeks, just to check in, to make sure she’s still happy that she took Zach back. But she hasn’t. And then they’d planned this night out together and Kim saw it as a sign that things were getting better between them. And then she’d found the ring.

  So what, she wonders, if Zach had asked Tallulah to marry him and Tallulah had said no? Because Zach is a good boy, but he has a temper. She’s seen it flare from time to time when he’s watching sports on the TV or when he drops something and hurts himself or someone cuts him up when he’s driving.

  How might a rejection of his marriage proposal have triggered that temper? How might he have responded?

  10

  AUGUST 2018

  Sophie and Shaun arrive at Kerryanne’s apartment at eight o’clock that evening, clutching a cold bottle of wine. The apartment has glass sliding doors almost the full width of her living room facing directly toward the setting sun. It’s hot and stuffy; a large chrome fan plugged into the wall provides a little relief.

  “Sorry,” she says to Sophie and Shaun, “it gets so hot in here on a sunny day, the heat gets trapped. Come, we can sit on the terrace.”

  There’s a wickerwork sofa on her terrace and a table set with crisps in bowls and wineglasses and a candle in a jar.

  Sophie sits down first, followed by Shaun. The view across the woods is beautiful; the sky is turquoise, streaked with coral, and a half-moon is just emerging from the shadows.

  “This is lovely,” says Sophie. “Like a different world to the cottage.”

  “Yes, the cottage is lovely,
but you don’t get the views. But then again, you don’t get the heat either.” She pours wine into the three glasses and raises hers to Shaun. “Cheers,” she says. “To my fifth head teacher! And to you too, Sophie, my first head teacher’s significant other!”

  “Are we the first unmarried couple?” Sophie asks.

  “You are, yes.”

  “Is it a scandal?” asks Sophie.

  “Oh God, no. Maybe twenty years ago eyebrows would have been raised. But not now. I don’t think anyone cares about these things anymore, do they? And actually, Jacinta Croft—your predecessor, Shaun—she arrived married, but left single. Her husband did a runner. One of those ‘popping out for a pint of milk’ scenarios. No one ever found out why. That’s pretty much why she left, because of the scandal of it. So no, you two will not cause any wagging tongues, I can promise you that.”

  They chat for a while about Shaun’s first day at work, about the school he used to teach at in Lewisham, about the differences between the two areas, the two schools. Then Kerryanne turns to Sophie and says, “Peter Doody tells me that you’re a writer, Sophie? Detective novels, he said.”

  “Yes.” Sophie smiles. “Though I doubt you’d have read them. They’re quite niche. I’m big in Scandinavia.” She laughs the laugh she always laughs when she has to explain to people why they’ve probably never heard of her.

  “I told my daughter about you,” Kerryanne says. “She’s the reader in the family. Not me. I think she might even have ordered one of your books. What are they called again?”

  “The series is called the Little Hither Green Detective Agency. I write under the name P. J. Fox.”

  “I tell you what,” Kerryanne says, “if you want any inspiration for your books, I could tell you some stories about this place. I mean, I could tell you some really, really hair-raising stuff. We had the police here twice last year alone, trawling those woods for missing people.”

  Sophie thinks of the abandoned mansion beyond the woods. “Wow,” she says. “What happened?”

  Kerryanne glances across at Shaun and says, “Hm. Probably a bit indiscreet. Maybe not.”

  But she throws Sophie a sideways glance that tells her there’ll be another time.

  * * *

  The following day, Sophie gets up with Shaun at 6:00 a.m. and they breakfast outdoors together, the golden rays of another beautiful late-August day strobing through the trees and across the tablecloth.

  “What will you do today?” asks Shaun, collecting the plates and cutlery and piling them together. “Will you go for another epic walk?”

  “No,” she says. “Not today. I thought I might explore the village today. Maybe get some lunch at the infamous Swan and Ducks.”

  “I’ll try and join you,” says Shaun.

  “That would be very nice indeed.”

  After Shaun leaves, Sophie spends some time unpacking boxes in the cottage. Then she makes herself another cup of coffee and takes her laptop to the kitchen table and replies to some emails. She is flying to Denmark in just over a week’s time, to attend a crime festival as P. J. Fox, and there are some last-minute additions to her itinerary, including an interview with a TV station, which means she’ll want to do something about her hair before she goes. She thinks maybe she’ll take a day trip into London, visit her stylist there, maybe have lunch with someone, see if her publishers would like her to visit. She feels herself get quite excited at the prospect.

  After a while she switches screens to her latest manuscript. She hasn’t looked at it for days. Life has been nothing but packing and unpacking and saying goodbye and saying hello. She hasn’t been in the right headspace to get any work done. But now she has no excuse.

  The tail end of her last paragraph stares at her blankly, something she wrote in another world when she was a Londoner, when she had a boyfriend who taught at a sprawling Lewisham secondary school, when moving to Surrey was a date in her diary, rather than her reality. She stares back at it for a moment, then scrolls upward through the rest of the chapter, trying to slot herself back into “London Sophie,” but just can’t do it.

  Instead, she flicks screens to her browser and types in “Maypole House” and “missing person.” She sets the filter to news and clicks on the first link in the results:

  Local Teen Parents Remain Missing After Night Out

  Upfield Common resident Kim Knox, 39, has reported the disappearance of her daughter, 19-year-old Tallulah Murray, and her boyfriend, Zach Allister, also 19, who have not been seen since the early hours of Saturday morning. Murray and Allister, who have a one-year-old son together, spent the previous evening at the Swan & Ducks pub, before taking a lift with a local friend to a private home near Upley Fold, where they partied with friends, former students at Maypole House, until three o’clock in the morning. According to the same friends, they left to catch a taxi home but never returned. If anyone has any information about their whereabouts, please contact detectives at Manton Police Station.

  Sophie feels a small chill of something ripple up and down her spine. She clicks through the rest of the links, looking for an update, but can’t find anything, just varying versions of the same report that the local paper carried.

  She then googles “Kim Knox, Upfield Common” and a few hits come up, including a couple of links to a village newsletter called the Upfield Gazetteer. One article in the newsletter is about a vigil held in June, marking the one-year anniversary of Tallulah and Zach’s disappearance. There is a photograph attached to the article: an attractive woman with dark mid-length hair, wearing a long floral dress with buttons down the front and a pair of black army boots, holding the hand of a very small boy, also dark-haired, clutching a single pink rose. A teenage boy in a dark shirt and cargo trousers stands close to the woman; he bears a strong resemblance to her. Behind them is a sea of faces, a lot of young people.

  Kim Knox, 40, of Gable Close, Upfield Common, led a candlelit procession through the village on Saturday night to mark the first anniversary of the disappearance of her daughter, Tallulah Murray, who would have been 20 in March. Also commemorated during the ceremony was Zach Allister, Tallulah’s partner and father of her son, who would also have turned 20 in March. The procession began on the common and concluded at St. Bride’s Chapel, where songs of hope and remembrance were sung by a choir from Tallulah’s old school, Upfield High, where she was a student until 2016. Tallulah was studying social care at Manton College of Further Education when she disappeared in June of last year after a night at a friend’s house.

  The other link takes Sophie to an article from three months before that, a rose-tree burial ceremony on the date of Tallulah’s twentieth birthday in March.

  The rose tree, an Australian shrub rose called “Tallulah,” has been planted behind the bus stop on the common, where Kim Knox used to watch her daughter as she waited for the bus to take her to college.

  Sophie turns away from the screen. She feels a chill of raw emotion pass through her at the thought of a woman holding back a curtain, peering across the street, looking for the shadow of her missing child, and seeing roses instead.

  11

  DECEMBER 2016

  Tallulah sits at her mother’s dressing table. Her mother has a magnifying mirror here, plus things like cotton-wool balls and makeup brushes that Tallulah doesn’t own because Tallulah has never really enjoyed wearing makeup. She puts on mascara for special occasions and uses cover-up on her under-eye bags and any breakouts but doesn’t bother with the rest of it. The front sections of her dark hair are currently a kind of washed-out navy blue; she’d been hoping for the electric blue of the model on the packaging, but like everything in her life, it didn’t turn out how she expected.

  She opens up her mother’s makeup bag and searches through it for liquid eyeliner, then sweeps the liner across her eyelids, trying to emulate the perfect wings the girls at college always seem to have. It’s a disaster. She wipes them away and starts again. Eventually she picks up her phone and texts h
er mum:

  Can you come upstairs and help me with my makeup?

  She feels a bit bad. Her mum does enough for her these days. Noah’s napping and her mum is enjoying a rare moment of peace on her own.

  But a few seconds later her mum replies with a thumbs-up emoji and then she is there, her warmth filling the room immediately. “Right then, what do you need doing?”

  “The wings,” Tallulah replies, passing the liquid liner to her mother. “I keep mucking them up.”

  Her mother pulls a stool across the room and straddles it so that she is a few inches from Tallulah’s face. Tallulah can smell the perfume on her neck: it’s from the Body Shop and has musk in it. Her mum says that musk makes men want to have sex with you. Which strikes Tallulah as unlikely; why would anyone bother doing all the other things you’re supposed to do to make men want to have sex with you if you could just wear a particular perfume and be done with it?

  The outline of one of her mum’s tattoos is just visible over the neckline of her top: the tip of a feather that farther down forms part of a bird. Her mother has six tattoos; she had one done before Tallulah was born, and the rest after she was born. She has Tallulah’s baby footprints tattooed in pale pink on the underside of her arm, three inches long, with her initials in a flourish underneath. On the underside of the other arm she has Ryan’s baby feet tattooed. On her back she has a Japanese-style fish, on her ankle she has a flock of swallows, and on her ring finger she has a diamond. She says the diamond is to symbolize her marriage to herself; after she split up with Tallulah and Ryan’s dad she vowed never to marry again and the tattooed engagement ring would mean she was already taken.