The Night She Disappeared

by Lisa Jewell

  31

  SEPTEMBER 2018

  The following morning, Sophie calls her hairdresser in Deptford and makes an appointment for later that day.

  “I’m going into London today,” she tells Shaun, “to get my hair done for the Denmark trip.”

  “Denmark trip?”

  “Yes. I told you. Remember? Next Monday? It’s only for one night.”

  He nods distractedly. “Can you not use the hairdresser in the village?”

  “No,” she says, “definitely not. And besides, I’d like to go to London. I might meet someone for lunch. Make a day of it.”

  He nods again. “That’s nice.”

  She suspects that if she asks him again in thirty minutes to tell her what she just told him, he will have no idea.

  “What’s going on with the police today?” she asks, watching him thread his tie through the back of his shirt collar. “Are they coming back?”

  “No idea. I guess I’ll find out once I get to my desk.”

  He flattens his collar down against the loop of his tie and straightens it in the mirror. It had thrilled her at first, the sight of Shaun in a suit and tie, the flecks of gray in his chest hair, the smart leather shoes, small people calling him Daddy. She’d go for drinks with her friends and say, “It’s so nice to finally be with a grown-up, you know, a real man.” And they’d nod enthusiastically and tell her how lucky she was. But now that reassuring maturity has started to solidify into something else; into a kind of rigidness. The tie seems to sit straighter and tighter. His jawline is harder. His hugs are briefer, almost abrupt.

  She approaches him and kisses him on the cheek. He looks at her in surprise.

  “We’ll have a lovely weekend,” she says. “With the kids. Yes?”

  “I hope so,” he says, “I really hope so.”

  * * *

  Jacinta Croft, the previous head teacher at Maypole House, had been easy to find. She’s now the head of a large private girls’ school in Pimlico. Her face smiled out at Sophie from the screen of her laptop, at the top of a press release about her new position. An ageless blonde in a cream blouse with a gold chain around her neck.

  Sophie leaves her hair appointment at midday, takes the train from Deptford to London Bridge, and then gets on the tube.

  The warm thrum of the London Underground envelops her, the familiar smell of oiled metal and recycled breath, the copies of Metro strewn over the seats, the gentle rocking back and forth. She closes her eyes and breathes it in.

  At Pimlico she follows the directions on Google Maps to Jacinta’s school. It’s housed in a Jacobean building with curved mirror-image steps that meet up at the front door.

  She hasn’t written to Jacinta. She knows that an email would have gone through an assistant or secretary and she’d have received a polite response suggesting that it might be best to leave the case in the hands of the police. Instead, she rings the bell and tells the young woman on the desk inside that she wants to pick up a prospectus.

  Inside she engages the young woman in a very detailed conversation about her stepdaughter, Pixie, who’s coming to London next month from New York to live with her and her father. Pixie is very bright, very creative, excellent at languages, wants to be a lawyer. She asks the young woman lots of questions about the school and then she asks her about the new head teacher and the young woman’s face lights up and she says that Jacinta is an incredible woman, she’s totally transformed the place, all the girls love her, she’s inspiring and nurturing, and Sophie says, “Gosh, she sounds amazing. I don’t suppose there’s any chance I could meet her, is there?”

  “Oh,” she says. “No, I’m afraid not. She’s in meetings all afternoon.”

  “I understand. My brother’s a head teacher too, at a school out in Upfield Common. He’s always so busy.”

  “Upfield Common?” says the young woman.

  “Yes. Surrey Hills. Do you know it?”

  “Well, no, not really, but I’m pretty sure that’s where Jacinta used to be, before she came here. What’s the name of the school?”

  “It’s called Maypole House. I think.”

  The young woman claps her hands together and says, “Yes! Maypole House. That’s where she used to teach. Well, what a coincidence. And you said your brother works there?”

  “Yes, he just started there. Wow, well, that really is a coincidence.”

  Sophie has no idea where she is going with her subterfuge, but at the very moment that her unplanned narrative starts to unravel in her head, the young woman glances keenly over her shoulder, gets halfway to her feet, and calls out, “Oh! Jacinta!”

  Sophie turns and sees a tiny woman striding across the entrance hall behind her in a black polo-neck jumper and red tartan trousers. Her blond hair is tied into a sculpted bunch at the base of her neck and she’s wearing incredibly high heels, in an obvious attempt to add height to her build. She smiles questioningly at the woman behind the desk. “Alice!” she says. “What can I do for you?”

  “Sorry, I can see you’re busy, but this lady was in asking for a prospectus for her stepdaughter and we were chatting and it turns out that her brother is the head teacher at your old place.”

  Jacinta’s eyes narrow and she glances curiously at Sophie. She touches the chain around her neck and says, “Old place…? Sorry, what was your name? I’m afraid I didn’t catch it.”

  “Susie,” Sophie replies hastily. “Susie Beets.”

  “Jacinta Croft.” She offers her a tiny porcelain hand. “Lovely to meet you, Susie. And your brother’s at Maypole House, you say?”

  “Yes, he just started this term, but oh my goodness, he’s gone in at the deep end. Only a couple of days into term and the police are already all over the school, apparently.”

  She watches Jacinta’s reaction closely and sees her eyelids twitch, a muscle spasm slightly under her cheekbone. “Really,” she says, guiding Sophie gently away from the desk and into an alcove lined with wooden panels carved with the names of former head girls.

  “Yes,” Sophie continues disingenuously. “Apparently, some children went missing near the school last year and now it looks like they’ve found some new evidence, in the grounds. I mean, actually, if you were there last year, maybe you know about it?”

  She drops this last humdinger of a question with wide eyes. She is channeling Susie Beets so entirely that there is barely an iota of Sophie left.

  Jacinta’s small-boned face twitches again. “The teenage couple, you mean?”

  “Yes,” Sophie replies. “I think that’s right. My brother didn’t really tell me that much.”

  “They were very young. They had a baby. It was horrible.” She shakes her head. “They never found a trace of them, as far as I’m aware. But, God, the rumors afterward.” She shakes her head again and puts a hand to her neck. “So much gossip, so many conspiracy theories. Because, unfortunately, and I don’t know if your brother is aware of this, but the girl whose house the couple had been at before they went missing was a former pupil at Maypole House. And they were with another former pupil of the school, plus a teaching assistant and the matron’s daughter. So it all got very messy for a while, from the school’s point of view, even though none of those children was under our care at the time. It was one of the things that made me want to leave.” She sighs. “Your poor brother, having it all raked up all over again. What was it they found, exactly?”

  “Oh,” Sophie says. “Something in the woods, just behind the cottage, he said? A ring?”

  “A ring?” Jacinta arches an eyebrow. “How strange. I thought you were going to say—” She stops.

  Sophie looks at her questioningly.

  “Nothing,” she continues. “I’m just not sure why a ring would bring the whole case back up to the surface.” Her eyes go to the clock on the wall behind Sophie. “I’m really sorry,” she says. “I do have to go. But please wish your brother all the luck in the world with the new job.”

  Sophie smiles and thank
s Jacinta again.

  Then she turns to leave and waves at the girl called Alice at the desk.

  As she heads toward the sliding glass door, Alice calls out, “Mrs. Beets. Don’t forget your prospectus. For Pixie.”

  Sophie turns back and takes the shiny brochure from the woman’s hand. “Thank you,” she says brightly. “I can’t believe I nearly forgot!”

  * * *

  Sophie breathes out hard as she turns the corner back onto Vauxhall Bridge Road. She finds a recycling bin and tosses the prospectus into it. Then she looks at the time and realizes it is still early and that she is in no hurry whatsoever to head back to Upfield Common, so she texts her friend Molly, who works in Victoria, and asks if she’s free for lunch. Molly replies immediately that she is.

  As she slides into the soft leather banquette of the buzzy, pistachio-hued brasserie a few minutes later, she feels it all start to fall away from her: the remoteness of her existence, the silence at night under the sloped ceiling of their bedroom in the cottage by the woods, the little rosebush behind the bus stop, the sad face of Kim Knox polishing glasses behind the bar of the Swan & Ducks, Shaun’s brittleness, the preciseness of his necktie, the smile she hasn’t seen for days. Suddenly it is as if she never left, as if none of it exists; it is just her and Molly and a glass of wine and the three businessmen across the way eyeing them, hungrily, and it almost comes as a shock to Sophie when the lunch comes to an end that she is not to return to her flat in Deptford, that she is instead to get on a lumbering, creaking train out of Victoria and sit on it for forty-five minutes watching London fade into the distance.

  “You know,” she says to Molly as they pull on their jackets and prepare to leave, “I miss London so much.”

  “The grass is always greener,” says Molly. “I’d give anything to go and live in the country. With a handsome head teacher. And no rent.”

  Sophie smiles a tight smile. “I know,” she says. “I know. I just… I feel a bit lost.”

  “You’ll find your way,” says Molly. “It’s not even been two weeks. You’ll find your feet. You’re such a flexible person, Soph. You always have been.”

  * * *

  It’s nearly two thirty by the time Sophie and Molly part ways outside the restaurant. For a moment, Sophie stands on the spot, her feet strangely glued in place. She looks across the street at the dark shape of Victoria Station. She doesn’t feel ready to head back. Not yet. She takes a tube to Oxford Circus and spends an hour trawling up and down its infuriating pavements full of people walking either too slowly or too fast. She wanders blindly around a branch of Zara, a branch of Gap; she goes in one side of Selfridges and out the other without really looking at anything. Her head churns with everything and nothing. She doesn’t want to go back to Upfield Common and the thought chills her.

  She keeps walking and she keeps walking. She sits in a Starbucks and drinks strong tea from a paper cup. She looks at books in a bookshop, checks the spines in the Fiction D–F section, finds only one copy of one P. J. Fox book, and sighs. No wonder she doesn’t sell if the shops don’t stock any. She spirals through the huge Primark at Marble Arch and comes out with three pairs of lacy underpants for seven pounds.

  It’s four thirty. She still doesn’t want to go home.

  Her thoughts go back to Jacinta Croft as she threads through Mayfair backstreets and on to Park Lane. She’d stopped, hadn’t she, at one point during their conversation. Stopped at the moment that Sophie had told her about the ring. What was it she’d said? Something to do with expecting there to be something else dug up in the woods?

  Sophie finds the number for Jacinta’s school on Google and calls it. To her surprise she is put straight through and a moment later Jacinta’s warm but professional voice is greeting her.

  “I had a feeling I’d be hearing from you again,” she says.

  32

  SEPTEMBER 2018

  Kim’s phone rings. She picks it up from where it was balanced on the edge of the kitchen sink and sees the name Megs. At first she thinks, Why on earth is Megs calling me? And then she remembers.

  She hits the answer button and says hello.

  “Kim. It’s Megs.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I assume you’ve spoken to Dom?”

  “Yes, he called yesterday. What’s going on?”

  “He told you about the ring?”

  “Yes. He told me about the ring. He told me they’ve searched those blessed woods, yet again. And that’s about it. Any more developments?”

  Kim sighs. “Nothing. They talked to Liam again, they’ve talked to Kerryanne’s girl. And they’ve got a handwriting analyst looking at the writing on the sign that was next to the ring.”

  “Fingerprints?” says Megs. “On the ring? Have they found any?”

  “The police have it. I’m sure they’ll be looking for prints. But the woman who found it, she had to clean the box to find the name of the jeweler so it’s unlikely any prints will still be on it.”

  Megs murmurs down the phone. Then she says, “Anyway, how are you?”

  Kim starts slightly. She was not expecting any small talk. “I’m OK. You know, a bit freaked-out.”

  “Yeah,” says Megs. “It is a bit weird, isn’t it?”

  There’s a pause that Kim leaves empty, deliberately, to give Megs the opportunity to ask after her grandson. But she doesn’t.

  “Anyway,” Megs says instead. “Keep me posted. I can’t quite believe that we might finally find out what actually happened.”

  “Me neither,” says Kim. Then, sensing a hint of softness in Megs’s tone, she says, “How are you doing? Are you coping OK?”

  She hears Megs draw in her breath. “No,” she says eventually. “No. Not really. But it is what it is, isn’t it? You just have to pull on your big-girl pants and get on with it.”

  “Have you had any thoughts,” asks Kim, “any theories? About what happened? Because you always thought they’d just run away together. Didn’t you?”

  She asks this question gently, as if it is a tiny egg that she doesn’t want to crack.

  “Well, yes. I did think that. And, to be honest, a part of me still does. It’s the only thing that makes any sense, really.”

  “I can see that,” Kim continues carefully. “I can see that some people might think that a mother and father would just abandon their son in order to walk off into the sunset together, and yes, I agree it could happen. Some people might do that. But Tallulah wouldn’t. And neither would Zach. He worshipped Noah. He was going to propose to Tallulah. He was saving up for a deposit on a flat for the three of them. So I know, Megs, that it’s easier to think of them living somewhere happily together, not wanting to be found, but that doesn’t mean it makes any sense. Because it really doesn’t.”

  “I do sometimes wonder…” Megs begins, then stops. “I don’t know,” she says. “Did you ever wonder if the baby was really Zach’s?”

  Kim feels something crash inside her head. She says nothing because she can’t find any words.

  “I mean, it’s just a theory. But it might explain it.”

  “Explain what?”

  “You know, whatever it was that happened that night. Maybe Zach found out he wasn’t the father and there was a fight. Maybe he was just so humiliated that he stormed off, too ashamed to come home. And maybe something happened to Tallulah out there in the dark. Or maybe she couldn’t face the shame of it either. You know.”

  Kim opens her mouth to say something and then closes it again.

  Megs continues: “Because I never really thought that Noah looked much like Zach and usually babies look just like their dads, don’t they? And Noah, he just never did. I never felt that sense of connection with him, like I have my other grandbabies. I—”

  Kim stabs the screen of her phone with her finger to end the call and drops it onto the kitchen counter as though it is burning her. She rocks backward slightly against the edge of the kitchen counter.

  There, she thinks, there
it is. Finally. Megs doesn’t believe Noah is Zach’s son. She thinks that Tallulah slept with another boy and got pregnant and then pretended to Zach that the baby was his so that he would look after them. Even though Zach virtually had to beg for six months to be allowed to be part of the family. And not only that, but Megs thinks that somehow Zach’s disappearance and Tallulah’s were separate events. That poor, emasculated, cuckolded Zach walked off, leaving Tallulah either to be murdered in the dark or to run away from her child in shame.

  Kim looks around her kitchen. She sees the ghosts of the moments that have now passed into unimaginable history. Tiny Noah in his high chair, his cheeks high with color, thumping his fist against the tray with the joy of discovering that he could blow a raspberry. Tallulah filming him on her phone and laughing so hard her eyes streamed. The pure white-hot love that connected the three of them. The way it filled Kim’s tiny kitchen to the farthest corners of the room. And now Tallulah is gone and Noah is a trying, screen-obsessed two-year-old who spends his days either away from home at nursery or here pushing Kim’s buttons as hard as he possibly can, who blows raspberries not because he can but because he wants to express his disgust with the world that Kim has carved for him out of what was left over when his mother disappeared in the night. And Kim is so alone and her world feels so small. And she wants it all back, all of it.

  She drops her head into her chest and she weeps until she runs out of tears.

  33

  MARCH 2017

  Scarlett returns to Manton College at the beginning of March. Tallulah watches her mother dropping her off in a black Tesla, sees the suggestion in the driver’s seat of black sunglasses on top of dark shiny hair, gems glinting on clawed fingers gripping a leather steering wheel, and then the unmistakable outline of Scarlett emerging from the passenger seat, her hood up, her shoulders slumped. The door slams, the Tesla pulls away, and Scarlett’s eyes meet Tallulah’s.