by Lisa Jewell
Tallulah stands, watching it disappear as though it might carry some clue as to its final destination. Then she remembers something. Her mum had mentioned a few days ago that she’d seen Keziah, one of Tallulah’s best friends from primary school, working at the co-op. Tallulah hasn’t seen Keziah for months; last time was when she was just starting to show in her pregnancy and Keziah had put her hand to Tallulah’s bump and made a sound as if she were about to faint because she was so overawed by it.
Keziah’s behind one of the tills when Tallulah walks in a moment later. Her face lights up when she sees her. “Lula!” she says. “Where’ve you been hiding?”
Tallulah smiles and shrugs. “Tend to do big shops now,” she says, “with the car. Easier with all the nappies and formula, you know.”
Keziah smiles warmly at her. “How’s the bubba?”
“Oh. He’s amazing,” she replies.
“Into everything, I bet.”
“Not yet. He’s too young for that. But he’s mellow anyway, you know. He’s a little Buddha.”
“At home with your mum?”
“Well, yeah, my mum. And Zach.”
“Oh,” says Keziah. “I thought you two had…?”
“Yeah, we did. And then we got back together again. Around New Year.”
Keziah beams at her. “Oh,” she says, “that’s amazing! I’m so pleased. You two were made for each other.”
Tallulah smiles tightly. “It’s nice,” she says, “nice for Noah. And nice to have another pair of hands. You know.”
“You look really different,” says Keziah.
“Do I?”
“Yeah, you look, kind of, I dunno, really grown up. Really pretty.”
“Oh,” says Tallulah. “Thank you.”
“You should come out one night. With me and the girls.”
“Yes. I’d like that.” She’s not sure she would like it. She’s always thought there was a reason why she hadn’t stayed in touch with her friends from primary school but has never been quite sure what that reason might be—something deep-seated and subconscious, something that even now makes her feel strange when contemplating the idea of a reunion.
“That girl,” she says, “who just came in wearing pajamas? Do you know who she is?”
“The skanky one, you mean?”
Tallulah shakes her head slightly, trying to align the way she sees Scarlett with the way someone else might see her, and then she says, “Yeah. The one with the furry coat.”
“Yeah. That’s the girl who lives in Dark Place.”
“Dark Place?”
“Yeah, you know, that big old house in Upley Fold?”
She shakes her head.
“You must know it,” Keziah says. “It’s like the biggest house in the area.”
Tallulah shakes her head again and then says, “What did she buy?”
Keziah scoffs a little. “Why d’you want to know that?”
“I dunno. She’s just… I kind of know her from college and she left really mysteriously, no one knows why, and I’m just being nosy, I guess.”
“She bought rum, rolling tobacco, and tampons.” Keziah rolls her eyes. “Such a skank,” she says.
“Did she say anything?”
“You’re kidding me, right? As if someone like her would make conversation with the checkout girl at the co-op.” She tuts and then her eyes drift across Tallulah’s shoulder to a customer waiting to be served. “Better go,” she says. “Love to the bubba. Bring him in next time, so I can see him. Yeah?”
Tallulah smiles. “I will. Promise.”
* * *
She walks home slowly, googling Dark Place on her phone with one thumb as she goes. A Wiki page comes up for what looks like a house out of a fairy tale or a ghost story; her eyes scan the text and she catches fragments of a story about coffee plantations and Spanish flu and assassination attempts and people having their eyes pecked out by crows. She wonders why the house isn’t famous or open to the public, how a place like that could just be a family home, the place that Scarlett lives, where she is headed right now with her tobacco and her rum and her packet of tampons.
Curiosity suddenly swamps her and she crouches down to feel through her rucksack for her college planner. She flicks it open to the back page and scans the contacts listed there until her finger hits Scarlett’s name. Before she can change her mind she words an email:
Hi, Scarlett, this is Tallulah from the bus, just checking in, hope you’re OK. See you around, luv T.
She presses send before she changes her mind, puts her planner back in her bag, and heads home to her baby.
18
JUNE 2017
Kim calls DI McCoy at eight o’clock on Monday morning. He answers within a few rings.
“DI McCoy.”
“Oh. Hi. Sorry to call so early. It’s Kim Knox. From Upfield Common? I wondered if you had an update about my daughter, Tallulah Murray?”
“Ah, yes, hi, Kim.” She can hear him flipping through papers in the background. “Sorry. We’ve not got anything to report right now, I’m afraid. We’ve been over to the house in Upley Fold; we’ve spoken to the family there. But there were no leads as a result of that. We’re heading into the village right now, a couple of my officers are going into the pub, the, er”—more paperwork being flipped—“Swan and Ducks, to talk to the manager there, see if they can shed any light.”
“But the woods,” says Kim, “are you going to send anyone into the woods, because, you know, it’s still possible they’re in there somewhere. That they decided to walk back when they couldn’t get a taxi, and that something… they might have fallen into an old well or something or…” She draws in her breath. She can hardly bear to bring herself to say what she’s about to say, but she has to, because it’s relevant, it’s important. “Maybe they had a fight,” she says. The words all tumble out on top of one another. “Scarlett’s friend Mimi, she told me she saw them having an argument, at Scarlett’s house. Apparently, Zach was being a bit physical with Tallulah. Had her by the—by the wrists.”
She hears DI McCoy fall still. The papers stop ruffling. “Right,” he says. “And that sort of physical aspect? Was there a lot of evidence of that between them? From what you could see at home? I got the impression from our chat on Sunday that they were quite lovey-dovey.”
There it is again. Lovey-dovey. The same expression Nick at the pub had used yesterday to describe them.
She sighs. “Well, the thing is, he is. Zach is lovey-dovey. He’s the romantic one. Tallulah, I often felt, was just putting up with it. That she’d rather be left alone. But no, I never saw anything physical between them.”
“Never heard anything behind closed doors?”
“Nope. Nothing like that. I mean, Zach has a quick temper sometimes. But never with Tallulah. Never with the baby.”
“So what…” DI McCoy begins, and Kim can hear the creak of a chair as he moves position, “what do you think might have brought about the row Tallulah’s friend said she saw them having on Friday night?”
Kim’s mind goes back to the engagement ring in Zach’s jacket pocket, the conversation Ryan recalls having with Zach about the idea of him proposing to Tallulah. It feels like such an intimate thing to share with a stranger, as though she’s giving away a bit of Zach’s heart. But she has to tell the detective—it might, as she can’t stop thinking, be the key to everything.
“On Friday morning,” she begins hesitatingly, “I found something in Zach’s jacket pocket. A ring. Looked like an engagement ring. A diamond in a gold band. And my son, Ryan, says that Zach had mentioned something vague about proposing to Tallulah. And yesterday I was talking to the barman at the Swan and Ducks and he said that Zach and Tallulah had been drinking champagne that night before they hooked up with Scarlett and her gang. And it’s possible, you know, that he asked her. And she might have…” She swallows. “She might have said no.”
There’s a slight pause and then DI McCoy says, “And you thin
k Zach might have responded negatively to this?”
“I don’t…” Kim draws in her breath. “I don’t know what I think. But it is just possible,” she says, “that they got into a row on their way home from Scarlett’s house and Zach lost his temper and… something happened and now he’s hiding somewhere. It’s possible, that’s all.”
But even as the words leave her mouth she knows it’s not just possible, it’s likely. What’s the aphorism? It’s always the husband.
“Right,” says DI McCoy, “well, I think we now have enough to go on to launch a search party. Leave it with me, Mrs. Knox.”
“Ms.”
“Sorry. Ms. Leave it with me. And I will be in touch with exact timings. Et cetera.”
“We searched a bit already,” she says. “On Saturday. A few of us. In the woods.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, we didn’t find anything, we didn’t, at least I think we didn’t touch anything or disturb anything. I think it’s—”
“It’s fine,” he cuts in. “I’m sure it’s fine. Anyway. I’ll be in touch with details as soon as I have them. And, just before I go, I’d like to talk to Zach’s family? Do you happen to have a phone number or an address?”
“Yes, of course.” She reels off Megs’s address and then says, “You won’t say anything to them, will you? About what I said, about Zach? I mean, we have a grandchild in common, I can’t have something like that between us. It would be incredibly difficult. It would—”
He cuts in again. “Absolutely not,” he says. “Please don’t worry about that. We’ll be very discreet.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much.”
She looks at Noah as she ends the call. He’s in his high chair eating dry Cheerios off the tray top. He looks back at her and he smiles.
“Seeyos,” he says, his eyes blazing with pride, his finger pointing at the cereal hoops. “Seeyos.”
Kim closes her eyes.
“Yes!” she says, mustering some spirit. “Yes! Cheerios! Well done! Clever boy! You are such a clever boy!”
Her voices catches and she turns away.
Noah’s second word. And Tallulah has missed them both.
* * *
The search of the woods begins in Upley Fold that lunchtime. It’s what Kim wanted but it’s also terrifying. The sudden burst of energy and people, when for so many hours it’s just been her alone, rattles her.
She sees Megs and Simon standing at the edge of the woods as she approaches. Megs turns and looks at her and Kim sees something like fear pass across her implacable face. She says something to Simon and Simon glances up.
“This is mad,” Megs says to Kim as she nears her. “I mean, I know it’s odd that they’ve not been home, I get that, but still, this…” She spreads her hand out in an arc to describe the squad of police officers in high-vis attire, the sniffer dogs. “It’s all a bit OTT, isn’t it?”
Kim doesn’t reply immediately; she’s not sure what to say.
“Did they come and talk to you?” she asks finally. “The police?”
“Yeah. Bloody ridiculous. They were there for ages. Asking all these questions about Zach, about what sort of boy he was, about how he got on at school, about his job. I was just, like, what on earth are you asking me all this for? It’s almost like they think he’s done something wrong.”
She says this glibly, but Kim catches a glint of something hard in her eye as she glances up at her.
Ryan is at home with Noah and the police have asked family not to join in the search yet. So for now it is just Kim, Megs, and Simon standing together, while the detectives loiter together in a huddle a few meters away and the search team and their dogs arrange themselves to head into the woods.
It’s warm again today and Kim feels clammy and anxious.
“How long do you think this will take?” Megs calls out starkly to the group of plainclothes detectives. DI McCoy turns at the question, gives his colleagues a look before walking over to join them.
“Well,” he says, “there’s no way of knowing. Luckily at this time of year we have daylight on our side, so we can just keep going until it gets dark. And then it depends on what we find. We’re sending one party through from the back of the Jacques property, assuming that’s the way they went, and another party through from this entrance”—he gestures toward the wooden stile that forms the public entrance to the woods—“in case they’d already left the Jacques property before deciding to head back through the woods. So we’ll have two teams in there and they’ll splinter as they get deeper into the woods to cover as much territory as possible.”
“And what are you looking for exactly?” Megs asks chippily.
“Your children, Mrs. Allister. We’re looking for your children.”
“There’s no way they’re in there. Kim’s already looked, and if there was anything, she’d have found it.”
“Well then, we’re looking for proof that your children were there. That they were there and that something befell them and then we’ll use that evidence to try and put together a picture of what happened on Friday night and where your children might now be.”
“You’d be better off talking to those cab companies again. I bet half the time they don’t even write things down. The woman who runs the one in Manton is asleep half the time, literally facedown on the desk, fast asleep. I’ve seen her. I reckon she runs so many jobs that she never actually goes to bed. You should talk to her again. She’ll have sent them a taxi but forgotten to write it down.”
DCI McCoy smiles patiently at Megs. “I think you mean Carole Dodds? At Taxis First? Yes, we’ve spoken to her twice. She wasn’t working on Friday night, she was unwell, so her husband took her shift and he told us that every booking goes straight into the computer system, that they can’t actually send a car without it going through their system.”
“Oh, well, you know computers. You can’t trust them as far as you can throw them.”
“So you still think they did get a taxi, Mrs. Allister?”
“They must have.”
“And where did that taxi take them?”
“They’re kids,” she replies loudly. “Who knows?”
DI McCoy stifles a sigh. “Anyway,” he says, “we’re about ready to go in, I’d say. You’re welcome to stay here and wait for developments, or we could meet you back at the village? Whichever you’d prefer.”
Kim glances at Megs. Megs shrugs. Kim says, “Well, I’d like to stay here while you’re at this end, and then head into the village when the search teams are getting closer. If that’s OK?”
“Absolutely.”
Megs and Simon exchange a look. Megs says, “Yeah, I think we’ll just head back to Upfield and wait at that end. Maybe at the Ducks.” She touches Kim’s arm, making her jump slightly. “See you there,” she says, and then they all head back to the road where their car is parked in a passing place, just in front of Kim’s.
From her car Kim watches Megs and Simon’s car doing a slow eight-point turn in the narrow lane, before heading back toward Upfield. Megs issues a slow wave from the passenger window as they pass by and Kim returns the gesture.
She is chilled by Megs’s response to this crisis. It makes no sense to her whatsoever. She knows that boys are less terrifying to parent than girls—she’s done both and she knows that she feels less anxious when Ryan is out after dark than Tallulah. But still, it’s been nearly three days. The disappearance of anyone for that amount of time is just fundamentally worrying. Yet Megs is not worried in the least. For a moment, it crosses Kim’s mind that maybe Megs is not worried because she knows something, because she knows her son is safe but she cannot, for whatever reason, tell anyone. But no, she immediately corrects this train of thought. If Megs was lying to protect her son or the person responsible for her son’s disappearance, she would surely at least pretend to be worried. But her reaction to this is too authentic, too real, too Megs.
Kim turns and watches the high-vis-clad police officers an
d their dogs as they finally head into the woods. The plainclothes detectives stay where they are for a while before heading back to their vehicles.
It’s strangely quiet. A car drives past after a few moments; the elderly couple inside look curiously at the lineup of police vehicles parked on the verge and then slow down.
“What’s going on?” the old man asks an officer.
“Just a local police investigation,” the officer replies.
“Another break-in?” asks the lady.
“No,” he replies. “We’re just looking for a missing person.”
“From Upley Fold?” says the man.
“No, from Upfield Common.”
“Oh,” says the woman. “Well, good luck. Hope you find them,” and they drive on.
Kim looks at her phone. It’s one forty-five. She texts Ryan.
Everything all right?
All good, he replies. You?
So far so good, she replies, adding a smiley face and a heart to reassure him.
The minutes pass horrifically slowly. Every time she sees one of the detectives put a phone to their ear, her blood turns to ice. Her imagination fabricates a dozen scenarios, all involving Zach somehow snuffing the life from her beautiful baby girl in the woods; she sees him throttling her on the ground, pinning down her limbs with his. She sees him producing a knife from somewhere, who knows where, maybe he picked one up in Scarlett’s kitchen, a premeditated move, approaching her from behind and slicing through the soft white of her throat, her blood turning black and sticky on the dry earth. Or just beating her, beating her and beating her until there was nothing left to beat, her beautiful face mashed into a pulp, he staggering breathlessly through the woods afterward with bruised, bloodied fists.