by Lisa Jewell
“A ring?”
“Yes. An engagement ring. Did Zach say anything to you about proposing to Tallulah?”
Megs laughs. “God,” she says, “no!”
Kim narrows her eyes at her. She has no idea why Megs should find this concept funny.
“Is there anyone else who Zach might have talked it through with? A friend? His dad?”
“His friends, I suppose, but I’ve already spoken to all of them and none of them knows anything about what happened last night. And no, he wouldn’t talk to his dad about it. His dad’s not that sort of man. Not much emotional intelligence, you know.”
Kim stifles a wry smile. She’s rarely met anyone with less emotional intelligence than Megs. She sighs. “Fine,” she says, “OK, well, I’d better get this little man home and try and persuade him to wake up and then try and persuade him to go back to sleep again.”
Megs smiles at her blankly. She has no clue.
“Please, let me know if you hear anything, won’t you?” Kim asks. “I’m going to call the police about Tallulah if she’s not back by the time Noah’s asleep. You might want to do the same.”
Megs shrugs. “Still reckon the two of them have run away somewhere for a break from it all. But yes. Maybe I should be worried. You might be right.”
Kim turns then and heads to her car, shaking her head almost imperceptibly as she walks, her eyes closing against the impossibility of understanding how a mother and a grandmother could have so little engagement with their roles.
* * *
The first half of the evening passes quickly as she goes through the process of readying a year-old child for bed. Noah, as she predicted, won’t settle and it’s almost 9:00 p.m. by the time he finally drops off.
Kim craves wine but she needs to remain clear-headed and sober because her evening is far from over. She sits in the living room. There’s something on the TV; she doesn’t really know what: some loud Saturday-night fare. Ryan sits in the armchair scrolling through his phone, his foot bouncing up and down the only thing betraying his anxiety.
She calls Tallulah’s number yet again. It goes through to voicemail, yet again.
She looks at Ryan. “Did Zach say anything to you?” she says. “About proposing to Tallulah?”
She immediately knows that he has by the slight jerk of Ryan’s head, the immediate cessation of the foot bouncing. “Why?” he says.
“I just wondered. I found a ring in his coat pocket yesterday. I thought maybe he’d been planning to propose last night. It made sense, you know, given he was taking her out for the night.”
“Well, yeah, he did kind of say he was thinking about it. But he didn’t say when he was planning on doing it.”
“What did he say exactly?”
“Just asked me what I thought. Said, did I think she’d say yes if he asked her.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said I didn’t have a clue. Because I didn’t.”
She nods.
Then she looks at the time. It’s nine o’clock. It’s enough, she thinks, enough. It’s time.
With a racing heart and a sickening swirl in the pit of her stomach, she calls the police and she files a missing persons case.
* * *
A very attractive man is at her door the following morning. He wears a gray suit and a cream open-necked shirt, ID on a lanyard.
He pulls a badge from his jacket pocket and flashes it at her. “Detective Inspector Dominic McCoy,” he says. “You called about some missing persons last night?”
Kim nods, hard. “Yes, yes. God, yes. Please, come in.”
She has barely slept. She brought Noah into her bed eventually because he wouldn’t settle in his cot after his nighttime wake-up and the two of them had lain there, in the dark, blinking up at the ceiling.
At one point he’d turned to her, grabbed her cheek with one hot hand, and said “umma.” He said it three more times before she realized that he was trying to say Mumma. That he was trying to speak his first full word.
“Come through,” Kim says now, leading Dominic McCoy into her living room. “Can I get you anything?”
“No. I’ve just had a coffee so I’m good. Thank you.”
They sit facing each other across the coffee table and Kim passes Noah a packet of rice cakes to keep him quiet for a while.
“So, my colleague tells me that your daughter failed to come home on Friday night? Is that correct?”
Kim nods. “My daughter, and her boyfriend—he lives with us. They both failed to come home.”
“And they’re how old?”
“They’re both nineteen. They turned nineteen in March.”
DI McCoy looks at her strangely, as if she shouldn’t be worried about a couple of nineteen-year-olds.
“But they’re parents,” she continues. “Noah—he’s their son. So it’s not as if they’re likely to just take off on a whim. They’re good parents. Responsible.”
He nods thoughtfully. “I see.”
She wonders what it is that he thinks he sees. But then she answers his questions about the events of Friday and of Saturday. She gives him Scarlett’s address, Lexie’s address, Megs’s address. She almost mentions the engagement ring, but then decides against it at the last minute; she’s not sure why.
Half an hour later he stands to leave.
“So, what do you think, then?” Kim asks. “What do you think might have happened to them?”
“Well, there’s no real reason to believe that anything has happened to them. Two youngsters, a lot of responsibility, their first night out in a long time, maybe they just made a break for freedom.”
“No,” she replies immediately. “Absolutely not. They’re devoted to their son. Both of them. Particularly my daughter. Absolutely devoted to him.”
He nods thoughtfully. “And the boyfriend, Zach? Was he in any way controlling? Would you say? Were there any signs of abuse going on?”
“No,” she replies again, almost too fast, as she tries to override the uncomfortable little doubts she’s starting to have. “He adores Tallulah. Dotes on her. Almost too much.”
“Too much?”
She realizes what she’s said and retreats. “No. Not too much. But, you know, it gets on her nerves sometimes, I guess.”
“I wouldn’t mind being doted on like that,” he says with a smile.
Kim closes her eyes and nods. Men don’t know, she thinks, they don’t know how having a baby makes you protective of your skin, your body, your space. When you spend all day giving yourself to a baby in every way that it’s possible to give yourself to another human being, the last thing you want at the end of the day is a grown man wanting you to give him things too. Men don’t know how the touch of a hand against the back of your neck can feel like a request, not a gesture of love, how emotional issues become too cumbersome to deal with, how their love for you is too much sometimes, just too much. Kim sometimes thinks that women practice being mothers on men until they become actual mothers, leaving behind a kind of vacancy.
DI McCoy leaves a minute later. He promises that he will open an investigation. He doesn’t say when or how. Kim watches him from her front window, climbing into his unmarked vehicle, adjusting his rearview mirror, adjusting his lanyard and his suit jacket and his hair, turning on the engine, and leaving.
She turns to Noah, who is in his bouncy chair, a mushed-up rice cake in the palm of his hand, and she forces a sad smile designed to distract him from the tears running down the sides of her nose and says, “Where’s Umma, Noah? Where is she?”
13
AUGUST 2018
Sophie leans down to read the inscription on a small wooden plaque beneath the rosebush behind the bus stop. It says: “Tallulah Rose, until we meet again.”
She stands straight again and glances around herself, looking for the window at which poor Tallulah’s mum might have stood, watching her girl waiting for her bus to school. There are no houses directly opposite the bus stop, but
there is a small cul-de-sac just off the other side of the common, very close to Maypole House. From here Sophie can see the glint of sunlight off windows.
She crosses the common again and heads toward the cul-de-sac. It consists of about six houses, set in a half-moon around a small patch of green, cars parked half up on the pavements to make room for other cars to squeeze past. The houses themselves are small postwar dwellings, with rendered fronts and wooden porches. She turns and looks back across the common, trying to ascertain which of the houses might have a view of the bus stop. Two of them appear to. One of them seems quite run-down; the other looks bright and modern, with cacti in copper pots in the window and a brown leather sofa covered in brightly colored cushions just visible against the back wall.
The article said that the night they went missing Tallulah and her boyfriend had been drinking at the Swan & Ducks, the local gastropub that had been recommended to Sophie and Shaun by Peter Doody the day they arrived. Sophie carries on circling the common until she finds herself outside the pub. It’s very attractive, freshly painted in heritage shades of gray; there’s a graveled front area with round wooden tables and chairs, huge cream parasols, and chalkboard signs advertising the menu and the beer selection.
She pushes open the door. It’s classic gastropub: tongue and groove, funky abstract art on the walls, designer wallpaper, reconditioned floorboards, and halogen spots. The woman behind the bar is forty-something, attractive in an unconventional way. She’s wearing a fitted black cap-sleeved T-shirt with black trousers and a bartender’s apron tied tight around her waist. Her dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail. As she approaches Sophie she rests her hands against the bar, fixes a smile, and says, “What can I get you?”
“Oh, just a cappuccino, please. Thank you.”
“Coming right up.”
She turns toward the big chrome coffee machine and Sophie notices the tattoos on the undersides of her arms. At first she thinks they might be burns or scars, then she sees that they are baby footprints.
“Your tattoos are really cute,” she says. “The baby feet.”
The woman turns and Sophie sees her smile fade a little. She glances down at one of her arms and touches the image of the foot gently with her other hand. “Oh,” she says. “Thanks.”
She carries on making the coffee; the hiss and splutter of the machine is deafeningly loud and Sophie doesn’t attempt to continue the conversation. Her gaze drops to the woman’s feet while she waits. She’s delicately built but wearing somewhat incongruous scuffed leather army boots. Something twitches in Sophie’s memory. She’s seen those army boots before, recently, really recently.
And then she remembers: the pictures in the village newsletter of Tallulah’s memorial procession—the mother had been wearing army boots, with the pretty floral dress.
The woman turns, with Sophie’s cappuccino in her hand. “Chocolate on top?” she asks, holding aloft the canister.
And Sophie sees that it is her. It’s Tallulah’s mother. Kim Knox.
For a moment she is silent.
“Yes? No?” says the woman, waving the canister.
“Sorry, yes. Please. Thank you.”
The woman sprinkles the chocolate powder over the coffee and slides it to her. Sophie feels inside her handbag for her purse, barely able to make eye contact with Kim Knox, feeling as though she’s about to be caught out in her snooping around. She pays using her contactless card and takes the coffee to a small purple velvet armchair set next to a low brass coffee table. From here she watches Kim Knox restocking the shelves with Fever-Tree tonic waters. She has an odd energy about her; she looks as if she weighs no more than one hundred twenty-five pounds, but her movements are those of someone heavier. A young man walks into the pub and heads toward the gap in the bar. “Hi, Nick,” she calls after him as he passes through.
He calls out, “Morning, Kim,” before disappearing through a door at the back of the bar.
So it’s definitely her. Kim Knox.
The man reappears a minute later tying an apron around his waist and then rolling up his shirtsleeves. “Want a hand?” he asks her.
“Sure,” she says, scooting along a little to give him space.
Sophie drops her gaze and pretends to be looking at her phone.
She wonders how long Kim’s worked here. She wonders if she was working here the night her daughter disappeared. There’s so much she wants to know, wants to ask. She feels the tendrils of her fictional South London detective duo, Susie Beets and Tiger Yu, start to thread their way through her psyche.
When she’s writing, her brain comes up with mysteries and Susie and Tiger have to solve them for her; that’s how it works. And Susie and Tiger would have no qualms about approaching this sad, pretty woman and asking her questions about what happened to her daughter; they would just do it, because it was their job. But it’s not Sophie’s job. She’s not a detective. She’s a novelist and she has no right to invade this woman’s privacy.
When she leaves a few minutes later, Kim Knox smiles. “Have a good day,” she calls out, leaning to collect Sophie’s empty coffee cup from the bar where she left it.
“Yes,” says Sophie. “You too.”
* * *
Sophie hauls an old bike out of the shed attached to their cottage, rids it of cobwebs and dead leaves, and cycles out toward Upley Fold.
After a hazy morning the sun is now starting to break through the cloud. The hedgerow smells of cow parsley and dead straw and the air is heavy and warm. She dismounts the bike outside the house and crunches across the gravel driveway toward the front door, where she cups her hands to the glass and peers into the hallway. There’s a small fan of mail spread across the front-door mat and a gap under the front door with a brush strip attached to the underside. She delves into her rucksack, her hands searching for the wire coat hanger she’d put in there earlier for this very eventuality. She gets down onto her knees and slides it through the brush strips. It hits something. She gets lower to the floor and manipulates the hanger and the object until she thinks it might be close enough for her finger to locate it and then tugs it gently and there it is: an envelope.
It’s a letter addressed to Mr. Martin J. Jacques. She breathes a sigh of relief. Jacques. An unusual name. A good name to put into Google. She takes a photograph of the letter and then gently pushes it back under the door.
The time is approaching eleven o’clock. She has another few minutes, she reckons, to snoop about, before heading back to the village for her lunch with Shaun. She circles the house, heading through the pretty wrought-iron gate with the arched top that leads to the back garden and the swimming pool. She peers through windows. She goes into a greenhouse and lifts up featherlight plant pots, watches spiders scuttling into corners. There’s a small rusty trowel on the wooden bench and she slips it into the outside pocket of her rucksack. She has an idea.
* * *
The arrow on the piece of cardboard nailed to the fence points down and slightly to the left. She has no idea if “Dig Here” is a precise instruction or a general suggestion, but she starts digging as close to the tip of the arrow as she can. She has butterflies as she digs; her blood is filled with the adrenaline of dread.
Fourteen months ago two teenagers went missing somewhere between Dark Place and the village, possibly somewhere in these woods. The sign that appeared so innocuous two days ago, the sign she’d thought a leftover part of a team-building exercise or a treasure trail, the sign that she still feels so strongly she has seen somewhere else, at some other juncture of her life, now carries a shadow of potential horror. Might it be a shred of torn clothing? A tiny shard of bone? A hank of hair tied in faded satin ribbon? She holds her breath as the trowel goes deeper and deeper into the summer-dry earth. Every time it hits a stone she inhales again.
Nine minutes later the tip of her trowel dislodges something small and hard. A dark cube. She pulls it out of the ground with her fingertips and dusts it down. There’s a gold logo
stamped onto it, impossible to ascertain what it is exactly, and as her fingers feel around it she realizes that it is a ring box.
She pulls it apart with her thumbs.
Inside is a perfect, gleaming, golden engagement ring.
14
JANUARY 2017
College restarts and Tallulah is glad.
Christmas Day was nice, Noah’s first.
Her dad, whose name is Jim, came down on Boxing Day, only the second time he’d seen Noah since he was born. He stayed in a room above the Swan & Ducks for two nights, and even paid for them all to have dinner there on the twenty-seventh. He was hugely taken with Noah and sat him on his knee and stared at him in wonder and called him the bonniest baby he’d ever seen. Tallulah’s father was normally very self-centered and distant, but becoming a grandfather seemed to have removed a layer of protection from around his heart.
But the Christmas magic soon dissipated and the novelty of seeing Noah in his Christmas elf outfit wore off, and on New Year’s Eve she was to stay home alone while her mum went to the pub with a group of friends and Ryan went to a party. It was one of the first moments that Tallulah felt stifled by the responsibilities and limitations of motherhood.
So when Zach offered to come and sit in with her that night, as much as she didn’t want him to get the wrong idea and think that they were on again, she also didn’t want to spend the night alone with a seven-month-old baby. So she said yes.
He arrived at 9:00 p.m., fresh from a friend’s house, smelling slightly of beer and cigarettes, his hood up against a cold wind, his hands stuffed inside his pockets with an off-license carrier bag looped over his wrist.
She held the door ajar so he could come in and he leaned toward her for a quick peck on her cheek. “Happy New Year,” he said.