The Night She Disappeared

by Lisa Jewell

  So she nods her head against his face and says, “Yes. Let’s do that. It’ll be good. I’ll send Keziah a text now. We can stay in. We can stay in.”

  40

  SEPTEMBER 2018

  The following morning, Sophie stays in bed while Shaun gets up and ready for work. She has not slept well. She’s nervous about the children coming tonight. Shaun’s ex, Pippa, is bringing them, and there’ll be an awkward handover to deal with. She knows the twins will be fine, they are robust and uncomplicated children, mainly, she suspects, because they are twins. But she’s still stressed about having to play mother for two nights and two days, having to focus on someone else after all these days of having her head in the mysterious disappearance of Tallulah and Zach. It’s forecast to rain for the entire weekend, which means that all the lovely things she thought they might do together are not going to happen and they’ll be stuck indoors or having pub lunches across the common. But mainly she has not slept because of her chilling encounter with Liam the previous day and the revelation of the passage in her own book.

  After he’d left she spent some time on Instagram searching for him and finally found his account twenty down; his profile photo was a picture of his face and his profile name was @BoobsBailey. He had very few posts, only about twenty or thirty. But one had jumped out at Sophie. A photo taken in June 2017. It appeared to have been taken in the small courtyard garden at the back of the Swan & Ducks; Sophie recognized the big wrought-iron clock that hangs on the wall out there. The photo was of Liam and Scarlett and Lexie. They all had their arms around one another and Scarlett had her tongue out, a flash of silver piercing as it caught the sun. Underneath Liam had written the word Beauties.

  Liam and Lexie, it appeared, were friends.

  The post had seven likes and Sophie clicked it to see if any were from people she knew. One was from Kerryanne Mulligan, another from someone called @AmeliaDisparue. She clicked on this and brought up a page for a young girl with fine blond hair and an elfin face. Her bio described her as Skinny, Mini, Lost in the middle of f***ing nowhere.

  Her feed consisted of a few strangely abstract shots of landscapes and the last post was dated 16 June 2017. Sophie’s heart had skipped a beat. A dark shimmer of underlit pool water, a hint of hot-pink flamingo, a hand just out of shot cupped around a lit cigarette, the blurred outlines of figures behind huddled together under a throw. She clicked on the image and zoomed in on it, but it was impossible to tell who the people in the background were. The photo had no caption and no likes and no comments. It hung suspended there, like an empty thought bubble, without context or meaning. But it was, Sophie was sure of it, a tantalizing fragment of the night Zach and Tallulah went missing.

  She’d become distracted then by a flurry of activity in her inbox, always the way at that time of the day, as people who worked in offices tied up loose ends before leaving for home. And then Shaun had returned. That night in bed her head had spun with disparate pieces of information, dissonant feelings about the key players and unanswered questions. She dreamed about the pool, about inflatable flamingos and weird metal levers and Liam Bailey scribbling on her trainers with a pink highlighter pen and telling her that she needed to shave her legs.

  Now she sits in bed, scrolling through her phone mindlessly. She has a food delivery coming at ten, lots of good healthy stuff for the twins, some wine, some treats—which the twins will look at in awe and wonder as if they had never seen chocolate rice cakes before—and extra milk for all the cereal. Apart from that, her day is free. She should pack for Denmark. She’s leaving first thing on Monday morning; she has a car coming to take her to Gatwick at four thirty in the morning and the children will be here until early evening on Sunday. She should use the day wisely and sensibly to clear her email inbox, get ready for her trip, and be relaxed for the children’s arrival.

  But she can feel it inside her like a strange piece of music on repeat, the need to keep digging, both literally and metaphorically. She googles “Amelia Disparue.” A girl called Mimi was the only other person at Dark Place that night, apart from Liam, Lexie, and Scarlett’s mother. Like Scarlett and her family, Mimi has also erased her online presence. Disparue is French for “Disappeared,” and Mimi, thinks Sophie, could be an abbreviation of Amelia.

  The search results bring up a YouTube account for someone called Mimi Melia. She clicks on it.

  Immediately she sits bolt upright in bed.

  On-screen is the same young woman with the fine blond hair and elfin face. She appears to be in a bedroom. She adjusts the angle of the camera she’s using to record herself and then says, “Hi, guys, welcome to my channel. My name is Amelia. Or Mimi. Or anything you like, really, at this point, who really cares. I was going to talk to you all today about my struggles with celiac disease. But as some of you know, I have had another struggle in my life for the past year, fifteen months. Post-traumatic stress caused by an incident last summer that I have hitherto not spoken about in order to protect someone very close to me. But I have recently discovered that that person is not the person I thought they were and…” She pauses then and her gaze leaves the camera and hovers somewhere toward the bottom of the screen. She’s wearing a white vest top and her arms are very pale and thin.

  Her eyes come back to the camera. “Well,” she begins. “I can’t say too much. In fact, I can’t say anything. But…” She pauses for dramatic effect. “… the thing that cannot be named looks like it might finally, finally, finally”—she crosses two pairs of fingers—“be about to spill its guts. And just you wait, just you wait until it does.” She makes her hands into two fists, side by side, and then explodes them. “Pyow,” she says. “Pyow.”

  Then it ends and Sophie sits, dumbstruck, her jaw hanging slightly. She watches it again. The date on the video is yesterday’s date.

  Sophie has no idea if this is the girl called Mimi who was there the night that Zach and Tallulah disappeared. But this girl once liked a photo of Liam and Lexie and Scarlett taken at the Swan & Ducks and now she is discussing an event that happened over a year ago, that she has not been allowed to discuss but that has left her with PTSD.

  Sophie turns off her phone, jumps out of bed, and gets in the shower.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later she is outside Kim Knox’s house.

  Kim comes to the door holding a mascara tube in one hand and the wand in the other. Behind her, Sophie can hear Kim’s grandson shouting about something. Kim closes her eyes, turns her head, and sighs before opening them again and staring straight at Sophie. “Oh,” she says. “Sorry. I thought it was going to be an Amazon delivery.”

  “Sorry to disturb you so early, Kim. I can see you’re busy, but I just wanted to show you something, quickly. If you’ve got a minute?”

  “Yeah, sure. Come in. Sorry, it’s all a bit chaotic; you know, mornings. Do you have kids?”

  “No,” Sophie replies. “No. Well, stepkids. Sort of. Not technically but just about. They’re coming to stay this weekend so I guess I’ll be the one in chaos then.”

  Kim’s house is lovely, painted in soft shades of gray and teal and oyster-shell pink with splashes of mad wallpaper with birds of paradise printed on them and copper-shaded lights. But it’s a mess. The floor is littered with shoes and toys and empty cardboard boxes. The TV blares from the living room and the boy is shouting ever louder. In the kitchen he sits on an aqua-blue chair at a white Formica-topped table eating cereal with a plastic spoon.

  “Come on, Noah, you need to finish up now. We have to leave in ten minutes.”

  “No,” he shouts. “No nursery.” He throws his plastic spoon down onto the table, where it splatters milk everywhere. Kim grabs a damp cloth from the sink and wipes up the spills, before removing the boy’s cereal bowl and carrying it toward the dishwasher.

  “No!” the boy yells. “No. Give it back!”

  “OK,” says Kim. “But you have to promise to eat it up nice and fast. OK?”

  He nods solemnl
y and she replaces the bowl in front of him, whereupon he slides it slowly and deliberately across the table until it is nearly hanging off the edge. Kim grabs it just before it falls, whisks it away from him, and says, “Sorry. That’s your last chance. Now you need to finish your juice and we need to get ready to go.”

  “No,” he shouts. “Not going.”

  “I can come back later, if you’d rather,” says Sophie.

  Kim sighs. “Can you just tell me what it is?”

  “I was just looking through social media,” Sophie begins hesitantly. “For all the kids who were at Dark Place that night. And I found a YouTube channel, for a girl. She’s called Amelia, but she shortens it to Mimi. And I wondered if maybe it was her?”

  “Mimi? Mimi Rhodes?”

  “Yes. And this girl, she just posted something yesterday, something strange. I wanted you to see it so you could tell me if it’s her or not? If it’s Mimi?”

  “Tell you what,” says Kim. “Let me just corral this one and I’ll meet you on the street. We can walk to the nursery together. If you have time?”

  “Yes. Yes. I have time. I have loads of time. I’ll see you in a minute.”

  She leaves the house, the sound of Kim’s grandson’s furious tantrum still ringing in her ears. She waits by the edge of the common for a few minutes and then finally Kim appears, her hair in a haphazard bun on top of her head, black-framed glasses on and no makeup, pushing the crying boy in his buggy.

  He’s quieting down now, and Sophie glances at him and then at Kim and says, “Everything OK?”

  Kim nods. “Yes. We got there in the end. We have a reward chart. Don’t we, Noah? And what do we get if we get up to the top level of the rainbow?”

  “Legoland!”

  “Yes. We get to go to Legoland. And how far up the ladder are we?”

  “Half.”

  “Yes. We’re halfway. So we just need to keep trying to be good, particularly in the mornings, so we’re not late for nursery. Yes?”

  “Yes.” He nods. “Yes. And then… Legoland!”

  They’re halfway across the common, about to circle the duck pond. Sophie turns on her phone and sets the video to full screen, turns it on its side, and they watch it as they walk. “Is that her? Is that Mimi Rhodes?”

  “God. I’m not a hundred percent sure. I only saw her a couple of times, at the police station. And she had red hair then, I think, not blond. But yes, it does sort of look like her.”

  “Me see?” asks Noah.

  She sighs and says to Sophie, “Do you mind? He always has to see everything. Everything.”

  Sophie passes the phone to Noah. He grabs it and stares at the girl.

  “Looks sad,” says Noah, “like sad person.”

  “Yes. Probably,” says Kim. “She probably is.”

  * * *

  A moment later they are outside the tiny primary school, which sits down a small lane around the back of the Swan & Ducks. Small children in gray and blue swarm past and into the gates and Sophie feels her senses twitch with echoes of her own time as a classroom assistant. Opposite the main gates is a small prefab building surrounded by its own picket fence. This is the nursery. They see Noah through the door into the care of a young girl with a bright smile and then they turn to each other.

  “Shall we get a coffee?” asks Kim. “At the Ducks?”

  “Sure.”

  Once seated they watch the video together in its entirety.

  “Well,” says Kim. “I can’t see how this could not be her. Can you send me the link? So I can send it to the detective in charge of the case?”

  “Sure, let me have your number.”

  She sends the link to Kim via WhatsApp and they wait for it to land in her inbox before putting down their phones.

  “So, you’re interested in the case, then?” says Kim, turning her coffee cup around and around in her saucer.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, from the minute I saw that sign that said ‘Dig Here,’ my curiosity was piqued. I don’t mean to sound mercenary, but I write detective novels, so I’m kind of hardwired to pick up on things like that. You know? And then when Kerryanne told me about people going missing—”

  “Kerryanne? Kerryanne Mulligan?”

  “Yes.” She pauses, realizing that she’s just betrayed Kerryanne’s confidence. “It was probably a little indiscreet of her, but when I mentioned I wrote detective novels, she mentioned that there’d been a couple of police searches in those woods last summer. So I wondered if the sign I’d seen near the woods had anything to do with… with Tallulah. And then, well, you know the rest. But there is one thing… an odd thing.”

  Kim glances at her and stops turning her cup.

  “You know that strange implement they found? In the flower bed? Outside the accommodation block?”

  Kim nods.

  “I mean, I could be wrong, but the cardboard sign—it doesn’t look to me as if Kerryanne’s daughter would have been able to see it from the edge of her own terrace. I can’t help thinking that she was in somebody else’s room when she saw it.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like Liam Bailey? Maybe?” She shows her the photo of Liam and Lexie in the garden at the Ducks. “Look,” she says. “They’re friends. I didn’t realize. So maybe she was in his apartment, not hers, when she saw it. I just think…” She pauses, because really, she doesn’t know what she thinks. “I just thought maybe, if you were talking to the detective, maybe you could mention it to him? Just in case they haven’t thought of it themselves. Which I’m sure they have. I mean, they must have.”

  Kim nods again. Then she says, “Why is someone doing this to me?”

  Sophie flinches at the rawness of her voice.

  “Why is someone not telling me what they know? Why are they being so cruel? And this girl, this Mimi. She’s obviously been talking to someone in the village. It’s the only way she could possibly have known about what’s been happening here. So it must be the person who’s been leaving the clues. And it doesn’t make any sense. It just doesn’t make any sense that half the people who were there that night have disappeared into thin air and the other half are still here and for some unknown reason are leading us all up the fucking garden path.”

  Her voice has grown louder and the woman behind the bar looks across at them. “You OK, Kim?” she calls.

  Kim nods and sighs. “I’m fine,” she says. “I’m fine.” She takes her phone and puts it into her handbag. “I’ll talk to Dom about the video. See what else he’s got to tell me.”

  “Dom?”

  “The detective.”

  “Ah.” Sophie smiles. “The real detective.”

  Kim smiles too. “Yeah. The real detective.” Then she says, “And I’m sorry, I don’t really read. In fact I haven’t read a book since I was about nineteen. Since before Tallulah was born. Otherwise I’d ask what your books are called. But I wouldn’t have heard of them anyway.”

  Sophie thinks briefly of telling Kim about the passage in her own book that someone seems to be copycatting, the book that Liam Bailey brought into her home yesterday, tap-tapping its spine against the palm of his hand in a way that now feels vaguely sinister, but she decides against it. The revelation will take away from her impartiality, the impartiality, she feels, that is key to Kim trusting her.

  “No,” says Sophie, with a reassuring smile. “No. Probably not.”

  41

  MAY 2017

  Scarlett is heading from the art block toward Tallulah. She has a small portfolio clutched against her chest and she looks like she’s on a mission.

  Tallulah turns and jumps into a shadow, but it’s too late, Scarlett’s seen her. She strides toward her, grabs her by her arm, and pulls her gently onto a pathway behind the art block.

  “Well?” Scarlett asks, her eyes wide with desperation. “Did you do it? Did you finish it? What happened? Are you OK?”

  Tallulah lowers her gaze toward her feet. It’s dank and damp behind the block; the tarmac pa
th is green with mildew and moss.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “I’m working on it. I know what I’m doing.”

  Scarlett peers down at her in disbelief. “Oh God,” she says. “You chickened out, didn’t you? Fuck, Tallulah. What happened?”

  “I just… I don’t know. I mean, I told him I wanted to split up. I told him I didn’t want to live with him anymore, didn’t want to move in with him, didn’t want to be with him, and I thought he was going to shout, scream, you know, but he didn’t. He…” She shudders at the memory. “He just picked the baby up and held him, like this, right next to his face, and said he wasn’t going fucking anywhere. And it felt like—it felt like a threat. You know? Like he’d hurt Noah if I made him leave. And so I just left it, you know, I didn’t want to push him. And then last night…” She draws in her breath. “I was meant to be going to the pub, and he started crying, saying how scared he’d been that Noah wasn’t his and how much he loves him, and so I didn’t go to the pub, I stayed in and we just talked, all night. You know? We had some wine and we just talked, like we haven’t talked for so long. And I told him how I feel and how I don’t want to be in a couple with him anymore, but that I do want to raise Noah with him, and he seemed to take it really well.”