The Night She Disappeared

by Lisa Jewell

  So she looks at Scarlett with tear-filled eyes and says, “No. I’m going home. Forget it. Forget this. I’m worth more.”

  She slams Scarlett’s door behind her and mounts her bike, cycles hard all the way home, her eyes blinded with tears, thinking of her last words to Scarlett and wondering if they were even true.

  34

  SEPTEMBER 2018

  Sophie meets Jacinta Croft in a small wine bar around the corner from Victoria Station at 6:00 p.m. She has messages from Shaun on her phone, asking where she is. She’s about to reply to them when she looks up and sees Jacinta approaching.

  “I can’t stay long,” Jacinta says, detaching a huge leather bag from her shoulder and resting it on the table in front of her.

  “Me neither,” says Sophie. “My train goes in thirty minutes.”

  “Good, well, then, let’s get some wine, pronto.”

  She calls over a waitress and orders two small glasses of something French without asking Sophie if that’s what she’d like and then she turns to face her and says, “So, Susie Beets, I googled you after you left. Something about you didn’t quite stack up.”

  “Oh.”

  “I take it you’re not really a fictional detective in a popular series of books written by someone called P. J. Fox. I assume you are in fact P. J. Fox herself, otherwise known as Sophie Beck, born in Hither Green in southeast London in 1984.” She says this with a wry smile.

  “Yes. Sorry. I—”

  “Look. I work in private education. There’s nothing I haven’t seen or encountered. But why did you lie?”

  “I didn’t want to cause any more ripples, I suppose,” Sophie says. “It’s actually my boyfriend who’s the new head teacher, not my brother. And it was me who found the ring in the grounds.”

  Their wine arrives and Jacinta picks it up immediately and takes a large sip, eyeing Sophie curiously over the rim. “Well, listen, I don’t get to chat with detective novelists turned amateur sleuths every day and sadly I can’t tell you much you don’t already know, but when you said they’d found something in the woods behind the college, I did assume that you were going to say something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “Apparently, there’s a tunnel,” Jacinta continues, “that runs from the big house where Scarlett Jacques used to live.”

  “I read something about that. It was dug out during the civil war?”

  “Correct,” says Jacinta. “And I always wondered, when this was all going on, I wondered about that tunnel. I told the police about it and they looked into it, but Scarlett’s family had never found the entrance and neither had the family who lived there before them and before that the house had lain empty for quite some time. They even got a house historian in to search for it, but nothing. And that was that. But I still think, to this day… I mean, that family, the Jacqueses, they were, I don’t know, they were quite the gang of narcissists. All of them.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, the girl, Scarlett, she wasn’t a student at the Maypole at the time of the disappearance, but she was there for the two years before that and she was such a pretty girl. But such a damaged girl, I always thought. She had this way of managing people, by making them think that she needed them, making them think she was a hopeless mess and that only they could keep her together. But underneath it all I always felt she knew exactly what she was doing. And the mother—awful woman. All image, no substance. The father I only met once, at Scarlett’s initial interview. He disappeared halfway through the interview to take a call. He was very distant. Cold. The whole family felt like this group of ice floes, just sort of drifting about, never touching. And so, when this couple went missing, and I heard they’d last been seen at the Jacques house, I suppose I wasn’t surprised at all.”

  “But there was no connection, was there? I mean, according to what I’ve read, the couple only met the Maypole kids that night.”

  “Well, not quite. Remember, Scarlett and the girl were at Manton College together.”

  “Yes, but according to the other kids, they didn’t know each other all that well.”

  “Well, that’s not entirely true. There was a girl called Ruby, also a former Maypole girl. She wasn’t at the pool party that night but she told the police that she thought there might have been something more going on between the girl—I can’t remember her name?”

  “Tallulah.”

  “Yes, of course. Tallulah. She thought there was something going on between Scarlett and Tallulah. Apparently, Scarlett was bisexual and she and Ruby had had a bit of a thing themselves when they were younger. The owner of a cake shop in Manton not far from the college said she’d seen Tallulah in there a few times earlier that year with a girl who matched Scarlett’s description. But Scarlett denied it, said there were loads of girls who looked like her at the college.” Jacinta rolls her eyes and lifts her glass to her mouth, putting it down again before having taken a sip to say, “And Scarlett’s boyfriend. Liam. Have you met him?”

  “Yes. Yes, I have.” Sophie feels herself flush slightly at the mention of his name.

  “Well, he was there that night and he claims that he’d never met Tallulah before then but…” She sighs. “I’m not so sure. I always thought he was holding something back. I always thought maybe he was protecting Scarlett, somehow, because he was so in love with that girl, so madly, crazily in love with her. And he had his heart well and truly broken when she ended things with him. Even as teachers at the school, we were all aware of it, and concerned—you know?”

  “Oh,” says Sophie. “When Liam told me about it, he said he was fine about it ending.”

  “Well, he was lying to you. I was there. We all saw him wandering around the college looking like a broken man.”

  Jacinta runs her finger around the base of her wineglass. “You know,” she says, “that was probably the worst year of my life. So much stress. I found out my husband had been having an affair that year, we separated, and then he went for a walk one afternoon and never came back. To be fair, we were in utter crisis at the time. We were in the process of divorcing. He was only there at the weekends. So, when he didn’t come back, at first I wasn’t too worried. I assumed he’d just gone back to his flat without saying goodbye. But then when he didn’t phone to speak to our son that night, or the night after, when he didn’t reply to any of my son’s text messages or ask about the dog, I reported him missing to the police. They sent dogs into the woods but they found nothing. And I had to accept, eventually, that he just didn’t want to be part of our lives anymore. That he wanted to be gone. To this other woman. Exclusively.” She sighs heavily, and then continues. “And then those teenagers went missing and it was all too much. My annus horribilis. The worst year of my life. I knew I had to leave.”

  * * *

  Sophie gets back to the cottage a few minutes before eight. Shaun has only just returned from work and looks drained as he searches the still unfamiliar kitchen cupboards for a water glass. She comes up behind him and encircles his waist with her arm, burying a kiss into the creased cotton beneath his shoulder blade. “I’m back,” she says.

  “I can tell,” he says, not turning to complete the hug. “How was town?”

  “It was nice.” She pulls away from him and says, “Look at my lovely hair.”

  He turns and touches the ends of it where it still kicks outward after her blow-dry. “Very pretty,” he says distractedly. “I’m glad you had a nice day.”

  Sophie hasn’t told him about the real content of her day. She wishes she could share it all with him, but feels very keenly that he will not approve.

  “I did,” she says. “It was lovely to get out and about.”

  He peers at her curiously. “Are you OK?” he asks.

  “Yes. I’m fine.”

  “I mean, with this? With us? With the move? Are you getting on OK?”

  “Yeah, I mean. It’s not… I don’t know. It’s not—”

  He cuts in. “Are you regretting
it? Coming out here with me?”

  “No,” she says forcefully. “No. I’m not regretting it.”

  She sees his face soften with relief. “Good,” he says.

  “I knew what I was signing up for,” she says. “I knew everything. And it’s fine. Honestly. I just want you to concentrate on your job and not worry about me. Please.”

  He exhales and smiles and pulls her toward him in an embrace laced with regret and guilt and fear, because, despite the words that have just passed between them, they both know, deep down, that this is not going to work; that what brought them together in London, with the romance of separate homes and separate friends and jobs that they both knew how to do without thinking too hard about them, is not here anymore; that they rushed into this in a flurry of sex and summer and the romantic notion of the English countryside and manicured grounds and foreign princesses and now they are floundering.

  Shaun’s phone chirrups on the counter behind him and he goes to look at it. He never ignores his phone because he doesn’t live with his children and Sophie entirely understands this. “It’s Kerryanne,” he says. “She wants me to come to her apartment. She says it’s urgent.”

  “Shall I come too?”

  She sees indecision pass across his features. He should say no. But in the light of the conversation they’ve just had, he nods and says, “Sure. Of course.”

  * * *

  The sky is just growing dark as they crunch across the graveled path toward the accommodation block. It’s the first cold evening of the autumn and Sophie shivers slightly in a thin cardigan and bare legs.

  Kerryanne is waiting outside the door of her block, her arms folded across her chest. She looks relieved when she sees Shaun and Sophie approaching and says, “I’m so sorry to disturb you in your free time. I really am. But you need to see this.”

  She leads them around to the front of the block, where the balconies overlook the woods beyond and where her own large terrace overhangs the spot where they stand, and she points across the flower beds. “I didn’t see it. It was Lexie. She just got back from Florida at lunchtime, she was vaping on the terrace, and there it was. She hasn’t touched it. Thank goodness I’d already filled her in on all the shenanigans so she knew what it meant.”

  Behind the flower beds is a small straggly area of lawn, then a wide graveled pathway, and beyond that a second gateway into the woodlands. But there, tucked away but apparently visible from the balconies overhead, is a piece of cardboard nailed to the bottom of a tree, with the words “Dig Here” written on it in black marker pen and an arrow pointing to the soil underneath.

  35

  SEPTEMBER 2018

  Noah falls asleep as soon as Kim puts him to bed. He’d been tetchy all evening. Kim can’t quite remember what her two were like at this age. Her memory has recalibrated the detail. She knows that one of them used to have tantrums in the supermarket and she suspects it was Tallulah, but that suspicion has been subverted over the past fifteen months because Kim cannot remember anything bad about Tallulah. She cannot remember beyond Tallulah’s upturned face in her bedroom as she painted black liquid wings onto her eyes before the Christmas party at college: the pale luminescence of her skin, the perfect upward slope of her nose, the pink of her rosebud lips, the fragile, barely noticeable beauty that had always felt like a secret just between the two of them. She can’t square that calm, glorious girl with the two-year-old girl screaming in supermarkets. They cannot be the same person; therefore she tends to imagine that these things hadn’t really happened or that it had been Ryan, in fact, or maybe somebody else’s child. Not hers. Not Tallulah.

  But she has no such ghostly veils across her opinion of her grandson. She loves him, but oh, she finds him so very, very difficult to live with. She had not wanted a third child. She had been offered the opportunity; there’d been a man a year or so after she and Jim split up, a man who said he’d give her a baby and she’d been in her early thirties and Ryan had been about to leave primary school and it had felt, for a moment, like the right time to do it. But she hadn’t been able to face the prospect of the sleepless nights and the worry and the adding of another eighteen years onto the journey of motherhood. She’d imagined herself the age she is now, just forty, with two grown-up children, and she’d liked the idea of it. So she’d said no to the nice man who’d offered her a baby and they’d gone the distance as lovers, and then he’d left when he realized he wanted more and that was that. She had specifically chosen not to have a third child and now she has one and he is dark and angry and she is tired all the time. All the time.

  But for now he is asleep and they have crossed the bridge of another day together and her love for him is as complete as the love she has for the two children she gave birth to, especially now, when he is close but not awake, when she has twelve hours to be herself.

  She opens a bottle of wine and pours herself a small glass. The cold kiss of it as it hits the bottom of her stomach is immediate and pleasurable. She takes another sip and picks up her phone, about to spend some time mindlessly scrolling through her Facebook feed. But just as her thumb hits the blue icon on her screen, it is obliterated by an incoming phone call.

  Dom McCoy.

  She clears her throat and presses answer.

  “Kim. It’s me. Dom. We’ve had a development. At Maypole House. Are you able to come over?”

  Kim’s breath catches. “Erm. I just put the baby down. I’m alone. I don’t have anyone to ask to sit with him. Can you just tell me?”

  There’s a beat of silence; then he says, “OK, Kim, give me five. Ten minutes. I’ll come over. Just stay put.”

  * * *

  The ten minutes turn to eighteen minutes before Dom’s shadow finally passes across the panes of glass in Kim’s front door. She opens the door before he’s rung the bell and leads him into the living room. While she’s been waiting, she’s tipped her wine back into the bottle and put it in the fridge. She’s plumped her cushions and put away some of Noah’s toys. She’s tied her hair back and put some socks on so that Dom won’t see her unpolished toenails.

  “How are you?” Dom begins, taking the blue denim armchair he always takes when he comes to see Kim with updates.

  “I’m OK,” she says. “Tired. You know.”

  “Yes,” says Dom, “I completely empathize with that.”

  He doesn’t wear a wedding ring anymore. Kim had first noticed this about six months ago. And he’s lost weight. She stares at him eagerly, willing him to say something good.

  “Kerryanne Mulligan called us about an hour ago. Her daughter saw something in the grounds of the college, from her balcony. She went to investigate and found this.” He turns his phone toward her and shows her a photo of what looks like exactly the same cardboard sign that the head teacher’s girlfriend had found nailed to her fence the week before.

  “What?” she asks hoarsely. “What was it?”

  He turns his phone back to himself and swipes left on the screen before turning it back to her. She stares at the image for a moment. It’s a lumpy object in a clear bag with writing on it. It doesn’t make any sense.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “Well,” says Dom, “I was hoping you might be able to tell us that.”

  She places her fingertips against the screen and pulls the image open. It’s a strange metal tool, with a bent end with a U-shape cut out of it, almost like a very small garden spade. “I don’t know what that is. I have no idea.”

  She sees a flash of disappointment pass across Dom’s face. “Well,” he says, “it’s gone to forensics, so hopefully they might have some kind of idea what it is. And in the meantime, we’re still waiting to hear back from the prints guys about the ring and the ring box, but I have to be honest, Kim, it’s not looking very optimistic there. And the handwriting analysis is back, apparently, so I’ll be having a look at that first thing tomorrow. So, still lots to chew over.”

  He smiles at her and she knows he’s trying to s
ound upbeat but she also knows that this isn’t panning out as he’d hoped it might because as much as it’s Kim whose daughter is missing, she also knows that not being able to solve this case has been deeply upsetting for Dom as well.

  She musters a smile and says, “Thanks, Dom. Thank you for everything.”

  “I wish there was more for me to do,” he replies. “There never seems to be enough for me to do. But this,” he says, tucking his phone into his pocket, “is better than nothing. Someone knows something and someone wants us to know what they know. So keep your ear to the ground, Kim. Keep your wits about you. If you hear anything from anyone, if anyone tells you they’ve seen something strange, let me know immediately. OK?”

  He glances at her seriously and she smiles and says, “Sure,” and for a moment she feels as though she might just open her mouth and add, I have wine. Do you have time? but realizes immediately that of course he doesn’t have time, that he’s in the middle of doing a job, that he has a car to drive home and a life to live, children to put to bed, and that he has done what he came here to do, and of course he doesn’t want to stay and drink wine with a tired, sad woman. So she gets to her feet and sees him to the door.

  “I’ll be in touch again, first thing tomorrow. Take care, Kim.”

  “Yes,” she says, clutching the edge of the door, feeling the urgent pull of wanting to be close to another human being, wanting something more than just her and Noah and this house and all these unanswered questions, before closing the door behind him and immediately forcing her fist into her mouth to hold back her tears.