by Lisa Jewell
On the first Sunday of February, Tallulah waits until Zach has left the house and then she heads down to the kitchen.
“Morning, beautiful,” says her mum, taking her head in her hands and kissing her on the crown.
“Morning,” she says, hugging her mum briefly and then leaning down to kiss Noah, who sits in his high chair. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, sweetie. How are you?”
She nods. “Good,” she says, but even she can hear the doubt in her own voice.
“You look tired,” says her mum. “Bad night?”
“No,” she says. “No. He slept well. Only one little wake-up and Zach did his baby whisperer on him, got him back to sleep.”
She sees her mum smile indulgently. She knows that her mum sees Zach living here as kind of an experiment and that she’s watching it with optimistic interest from the sidelines.
Tallulah feels a sudden longing to open her mouth and talk, to say everything that she’s been keeping locked up inside these past few weeks. She wants to tell her mum that she’s feeling suffocated, controlled, that Zach has suggested she switches to home learning, that Zach always gives her a strange look when she gets home: his head cocks slightly to one side; he narrows his eyes, as though he suspects her of something, as though there’s something he wants to ask her but he can’t. She wants to tell her mum that Zach doesn’t like her locking the bathroom door when she’s having a bath, that he sits on the toilet by her side sometimes, playing with his phone, tapping his foot impatiently as though she’s taking too long. She wants to tell her mum that sometimes she feels like she can’t breathe, she simply cannot breathe.
But if she starts telling her mum these things, then what happens next? Her mum will take her side, the atmosphere in the house will curdle, the experiment will be a failure, Noah will grow up not living with his dad. It is only her mother’s belief in the experiment that is keeping it alive.
“Why don’t you go and watch Zach playing football?” her mother asks. “It’s a nice morning. I can take care of Noah. Go on,” she says. “Think how happy it would make him if you showed up. Maybe you could even go and have a drink together after, at the Ducks?”
Tallulah smiles tightly and shakes her head. “Oh,” she says, “no. Thanks. I’m happy just hanging out here with you.”
Her mother gives her a questioning look. “Really?”
“Yeah.” She smiles. “I miss just the two of us spending time together.”
“Since Zach moved in, you mean?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“You’re not…?”
She shakes her head. “No. No, it’s fine. He’s just a bit clingy, isn’t he?”
Her mother narrows her eyes at her. She says, “I suppose he is a bit. I guess with his family situation, it must be such a change for him to be here with you two, with so much love around. Maybe he’s just getting used to it?”
“I guess,” Tallulah says again, cutting another slice off the farmhouse loaf.
“Do you need some space?” her mother asks.
“No,” she says, dropping the bread into the toaster. “No. It’s fine. Just getting used to it, like you say. And he’s amazing with Noah.” She turns to her baby and beams. “Isn’t he?” she says in a high-pitched voice. “Isn’t your daddy amazing? Isn’t he just the best daddy in the world?” And Noah smiles and bangs his hands down on the high-chair tray, and for a moment it is just the three of them, in the kitchen, smiling, as the sun shines on them through the window, and, for a moment, Tallulah feels like all is well, all is good.
* * *
Zach is there when Tallulah walks out of college the following lunchtime. He’s waiting in the shadows of the small copse opposite the main entrance. Tallulah looks briefly at him and then at the time on her phone. It’s one fifteen. Zach should be at work now. He does midday-to–8:00 p.m. shifts on Mondays at the building supplies yard just outside Manton where he works.
He stands straight when he sees Tallulah approach and gestures at her with his head. As she walks she can see him casing the environment, his eyes behind her, around her, as if he’s expecting her to be with somebody else.
“Surprise,” he says as she crosses the street.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, briefly allowing him to pull her to him and hug her.
“Pulled a sickie,” he says. “Well, being honest, I did actually feel a bit ill. Thought I was coming down with something. But now I feel fine. Thought I’d come and escort you home.” He smiles and Tallulah looks into his eyes, the same eyes she’s been looking into since she was virtually a child: the gray eyes with dark lashes, the soft skin, the small dimple just next to the left-hand corner of his mouth. He’s not the best-looking boy in the world, but he’s nice-looking, his face is good and kind. But there’s something there now, something that’s set in since they were apart last year, a hard, metallic glint in his eye. He looks like a soldier back from war, a prisoner back from solitary, as though he’s seen things he can’t talk about and they’re trapped inside his skull.
“That’s nice,” she says, “thanks.”
“Thought I might see you coming out with friends,” he says, his gaze going back to the college entrance, to the streams of students leaving for their lunch.
She shakes her head.
“What about that girl?” he says. “You know, the one in the picture with you?”
“What girl?” She knows what girl and hears her own voice catch slightly on the lie.
“The one with her arm around you. At the Christmas disco.”
“Oh, Scarlett,” she says. “Yeah. She left.”
He nods, but his eyes stay on hers, as though waiting for her to betray some kind of deceit.
A group of social science students leaves at that moment. Tallulah barely knows them, but they glance over at her curiously. One of them raises a hand tentatively. She raises a hand back.
“Who are they?”
“Just people from my course,” she says. Then she looks at her phone. “Bus comes in six minutes. We should go.”
He looks for a moment as if he’s not going to follow her, his eyes still resting on the group of students across the road.
“Come on,” she says.
He slowly takes his gaze from them and catches up with her.
“I wish you didn’t have to do this,” he says after a slightly ponderous silence.
“What?”
“College. I wish I earned enough money so that I could just take care of you and Noah, so you wouldn’t need to get a job.”
She inhales and then breathes out slowly. “I want to take care of Noah too,” she says. “I want to help pay for him. I want a career.”
“Yeah, but, Lules—a social worker. Do you know how draining that will be? How hard? The hours you’ll have to work? The stuff you’ll bring home with you? Wouldn’t you rather just get, like, a shop job or something? Something easy? Something local?”
She stops and turns and looks at him. “Zach,” she says, “I’ve got three A levels. Why would I want to get a shop job?”
“It would just be easier,” he says. “And you’d be closer to home.”
“Manton’s not exactly the other side of the world,” she says.
“No, but I hate it when we’re both so far away from Noah during the week. It’s not good for him.”
“But he’s got my mum!” she says with exasperation.
“I know. But it would be better for him to be with us. Wouldn’t it?”
“He loves my mum.”
Zach stops walking then and pulls Tallulah toward him, his hands tight around her forearms. She glances at him and sees that cold metallic look in his gray eyes. “I just…” The glint in his eyes fades. “I just want it to be us, the three of us, always. That’s all.”
She pulls her arms from his grip and starts walking faster. “Come on,” she says. “I can hear the bus coming, quick, we need to run.”
They jump on the bus j
ust as it’s about to close its doors and sit for a moment, breathing heavily. Tallulah stares from the window, rubbing the soft skin on her forearms, still smarting from Zach’s grip.
* * *
The following Sunday, when Zach goes to play football, Tallulah asks her mum if it’s OK if she goes out for a while.
“Of course, baby. Of course. Going to watch Zach play?”
“No.” She shrugs. “No, just fancy some fresh air, might pop by Chloe’s.”
She won’t pop by Chloe’s. She and Chloe have barely spoken since the night of the Christmas party, when she abandoned her to hang out with Scarlett.
“Can I borrow your bike?”
“Of course you can,” says her mum. “But be careful, won’t you? And wear a helmet.”
Tallulah kisses Noah and her mother goodbye, then lugs her mother’s bike out of the side return and onto the road. Tallulah hasn’t ridden a bike since she was about thirteen. She’s not altogether comfortable on two wheels, but she has no alternative.
After a slightly wobbly start, she sets off toward the common and then onto the road out to Manton. Just before she gets to the roundabout, she turns right, up a tiny one-track turning, toward the hamlet of Upley Fold, toward Dark Place.
21
JUNE 2017
The police search party emerges from the other side of the woods three and a half hours later. Kim jumps off the bench on the common and runs toward the small lane opposite that leads down the side of Maypole House. The detectives let themselves out of their car and Megs and Simon appear lugubriously from the other side of the common, where they’ve been sitting nursing drinks outside the Swan & Ducks.
Kim pulls back at first, letting the detectives convene with the search party. She watches, her breath held. They point behind them, they shrug, they shake their heads. She moves closer, trying to hear what’s being said, catching only parts of words she’s too scared to hear.
“What’s going on?” says Megs, appearing at her side, breathing wine all over her. “Any news?”
Kim shakes her head and puts her finger to her lips. “I’m trying to listen,” she whispers.
“Why don’t you just go and ask?” Megs tuts and strides toward the police. “Anything?” she asks loudly.
Kim turns and glances sideways at Simon, who looks at her from the corner of his eye. She feels a plume of discomfort pass through her and walks quickly away from him to join Megs.
“Nothing,” Megs says, almost triumphantly. “They found nothing. Literally.” She stares at Kim scathingly, as if this somehow proves that Kim is wrong to think their children have come to some harm.
Kim looks at DI McCoy. “So sorry,” he says. “Not a trace. The dogs didn’t pick up anything either.”
“But did they cover every part? What about the part that backs onto the school? There’s another entrance there. They might have come that way?”
“I promise you, Ms. Knox. Every inch has been covered and it doesn’t appear that Tallulah or Zach have been anywhere near those woods. I’m really sorry.”
Kim feels her heart drop into the pit of her stomach. “So,” she says numbly, “what now?”
“Well, we’ve still got the investigation ongoing of course. We’re going to take the dogs around the village now, for a while, across the common, even though, as we know, nothing came up on any of the CCTV. We’ve taken some evidence from around Dark Place and Upley Fold, some tire tracks that we’re following up. We’re going to talk to the kids again, the ones who were at the house on Friday night. We’re trying to get a warrant to search the Jacques place, to look at their home security footage, but I’m not sure we’ll get it. We’re looking at all the CCTV from here to the boundaries of the county for sightings of your children. And we’ll be talking to Tallulah’s teachers and Zach’s employers tomorrow. There are still dozens of avenues left to go down and lots of things to follow up on.” He gives Kim a cautiously encouraging smile. “We’re very much on the case, Ms. Knox. Just keep the faith.”
Kim smiles tightly. Her stomach clenches with anger and fear and dread. Anger that no one can tell her where her child is, fear that no one ever will, and dread of what it would feel like to find out that Zach had hurt Tallulah.
“Well,” says Megs, sighing loudly. “I guess that’s as much as we can hope for for now. So we can all just, you know, get on with our days.”
The knot in Kim’s stomach hardens and she turns to Megs and she says, “What the fuck is the matter with you? Huh? I mean, what the fuck is the fucking matter with you? Our kids have been missing for three days. Three days! And all you can do is moan and tut and sigh and act like this is all some kind of massive inconvenience. Well, I’m so sorry to drag you out of the pub, out of your back garden, so sorry to keep you from getting on with your day. And what even is your day, Megs, eh? What do you even do? Because I tell you one thing you don’t do, and that’s give a shit about any of your fucking children. Not to mention your only fucking grandchild.”
Kim reels as she feels her tirade come to an end. She closes her eyes hard and then opens them again. She feels DI McCoy’s hand on her arm and she shakes it off. “I’m fine,” she says in a dark whisper. “I’m fine. I’m going home.” She straightens up and says, “Thank you, Detective. Please keep me up-to-date with things.”
Then she strides away from the police and the dogs and the nosy neighbors, and Megs with her jaw hanging open and Simon with his creepy half stare, and she gets into her car and she drives it around the common and into her cul-de-sac and then she sits, as the engine dies, with her face flat against her steering wheel, tears rolling down her face, saying, “Tallulah, Tallulah, Tallulah,” again and again and again.
22
SEPTEMBER 2018
Sophie finds herself aimlessly circling the school grounds when she gets back from Kim Knox’s house. In theory, she is meant to be clearing her head, rebooting her thoughts, trying to get back into work mode. In reality, as her gaze alights hopefully upon each person she sees, she finds she is looking for Liam.
She justifies her search for a handsome young man in the grounds of the building where her partner works with the fact that if she can just off-load the mystery of Tallulah Murray and Zach Allister and Scarlett Jacques then she might have enough headspace left to focus on her work. But then her breath catches when she sees a figure leaving the main building who looks like Liam, and as she draws closer to him and sees that it is in fact him, her heart begins to pound and color floods her cheeks and she has to breathe consciously, properly, to bring herself back to some semblance of calm before she can greet him with a breezy “Liam! Hello! Nice to see you.”
He recognizes her immediately and says, “Sophie. Yeah?” pointing at her with a hand made into a gun.
“That’s right. How’s it going?”
“Yeah,” he says, “not bad. I’m just heading back to my room, fetching a book for a student.”
He says this as though trying to explain himself, as though she might be trying to catch him out in some way, and she suddenly remembers that she is the head teacher’s “wife” and thus might be seen as a figure of authority by some.
“Oh,” she says, waving away his explanation, “of course. Whatever. I’m just doodling about trying to avoid work.”
“Yes,” he says. “I remember you said you were struggling with focus. What is it you do, exactly?”
“I’m a novelist,” she says.
She sees his face light up.
“Oh,” he says, “wow. That’s amazing. Are you published? I mean, I guess you must be, otherwise you wouldn’t say ‘novelist,’ you’d just say ‘I’m writing a novel.’ ”
She laughs. “Well, you say that, but you’d be surprised by how many people still ask me if I’m published when I tell them I’m a novelist. But yes, I am published. And no, you won’t have heard of me, unless you’re Danish or Swedish or Norwegian. Oh, or, for some reason, Vietnamese. I sell a lot in Vietnam.”
; He shakes his head at her in awe. “That’s incredible,” he says. “Wow. That must be just amazing, thinking of your work out there in all those languages, all those people in other countries reading your work. What sort of novels are they?”
“They’re what’s called in the trade ‘cozy crime.’ ”
He nods. “Yeah,” he says. “I think I’ve heard of that. Like crimes without violence, kind of thing?”
“Yes.” She smiles. “That kind of thing.”
“Oh God,” says Liam, “I’d love to read one. Do you write under your own name?”
“No, I have a pseudonym. P. J. Fox.”
“And what’s it called? Your book?”
“It’s a series, actually, called the Little Hither Green Detective Agency. I’m not sure it would really be your—”
“Wait,” he says, pulling a phone from his trouser pocket, “wait. I want to write this down. What was it again?”
She repeats it and watches as he painstakingly types it into his phone. He jabs at the screen with one fingertip, not with two fast-moving thumbs like most people his age. She swallows down a smile.
“There,” he says. “I’m going to order myself a couple.”
She smiles and then notices that he looks as though he needs to be on his way.
“Listen,” she says, “before you go. Remember when we were talking last night? And you said that you were the world expert on Maypole House?”
Liam smiles, but then narrows his eyes and says, “Why do I feel like I’m walking into a trap?”
Sophie laughs. “No trap, I promise. But I just wondered what you knew about the woods?” She gestures toward them with a tip of her head.
“The woods?”
“Yes. I know it might sound strange, but I found something near the woods. Just behind the head teacher’s cottage. Something really interesting, to do with the missing teenagers. And I’m starting to think that maybe it had been left there on purpose, for me to find. Or for Shaun maybe. I just wondered if you had any ideas.”