The Night She Disappeared

by Lisa Jewell

  70

  THE TIMES

  14 September 2018

  MISSING MOTHER FOUND CAPTIVE ON BOAT IN ATLANTIC

  A young mother, Tallulah Murray, 20, who has been missing from home since attending a pool party with her boyfriend in June last year, has been found alive a hundred miles from land in the Atlantic on board a privately chartered yacht, where it is believed she was being held captive by Jocelyn Jacques, the 48-year-old wife of hedge-fund manager Martin Jacques, and her 23-year-old son, Rex Jacques, and 20-year-old daughter, Scarlett.

  The family was traced after the remains of Murray’s boyfriend, Zach Allister, were found in a tunnel that runs beneath the family’s home in Upley Fold, near Manton in Surrey. It is believed that the boat was traced using identifying features from photographs posted by Scarlett Jacques onto an Instagram account. All three members of the Jacques family have been taken into custody, while Tallulah Murray is in a military hospital in Bermuda being treated for symptoms of severe dehydration and drug dependency.

  Murray’s family has been notified and it is believed she will be discharged later today from hospital and will be flown back to the UK immediately to be reunited with her family, including her two-year-old son, Noah.

  No motive for either the killing of Zach Allister or for the abduction of Tallulah Murray has yet been provided.

  71

  SEPTEMBER 2018

  Kim uses her expensive hair conditioner, the one that she has to scoop out of a pot with her fingertips. She smooths it down the length of her hair and she leaves it on for two minutes, as per the instructions, before rinsing it off.

  Afterward she picks an outfit, leafing through clothes that she hasn’t worn for months, clothes from another time that have looked so alien to her these past fifteen months: another woman’s wardrobe of positive colors, optimistic prints. She pulls out a tea dress that buttons down the front. It’s the same dress she wore at Tallulah’s candlelight vigil on the anniversary of her disappearance. She teams it with a rose-pink cardigan and her army boots. She blow-dries her hair into a shiny sheet and she paints liquid wings onto her eyelids.

  It’s still five hours until Tallulah is flown into the army base. Five long hours. But five hours is nothing compared to the fifteen months she has lived without her.

  Her ex is flying down. He’ll be here any minute. Ryan is going to meet them there. Noah is at nursery, for the routine, for the normality, to give Kim this time to make herself ready. She’ll collect him in a couple of hours.

  “Mummy,” he’s been saying for days. “Mummy comin’ home.”

  She wishes, in a selfish way, that it could just be her. Just her, on the tarmac, waiting with held breath, with flowers, with her heart pounding and her pulse racing, for those doors to open, for her girl to be there, on the steps, to take her in her arms. But she knows it can’t be just her. She sits in the kitchen and waits for Jim to text that he’s on his way.

  * * *

  Megs. She cannot think of Megs. She cannot talk to Megs or see Megs or even say her name. She keeps expecting her to call or text or appear on her doorstep. But there’s been no word from her. Kim feels the pain of Zach’s death like a corset, tight around her gut; it stops her breathing sometimes when she thinks about it. That poor boy. Left down there. It was the girl. It was Scarlett. The mother had first told police that she had no idea where Zach was, that she and her children and Tallulah had just been enjoying an impromptu gap year together, “keeping a low profile.” Kim had smashed her fist into her wall when Dom had relayed this nugget to her. When the police told Joss Jacques that they’d found Zach’s body in a tunnel beneath her house she changed tack and told the police that actually it was Tallulah who’d killed Zach, that she’d hit him on the back of the head with a bronze statue and that they’d been trying to protect her. At first Scarlett had gone along with her mother’s story, and for an endless day and a half Kim had felt nauseous at the prospect of her daughter spending the rest of her life in prison.

  But then yesterday Scarlett had confessed, quite unexpectedly, quickly, as though the whole thing were a suit of armor that she wanted to rip off. She told police that Zach was a bully, that he’d controlled Tallulah, that he’d hurt her. She told them that she’d heard Zach threatening to take Tallulah’s baby away, that she’d reacted instinctively to protect her, without aforethought. She told police that it was all because of her love for Tallulah. And Kim is sure that that is true and somewhere deep inside feels certain that she too would kill someone who threatened to take Noah away from Tallulah.

  That is what she said happened. Who knows if it is true. And who knows what will become of Scarlett Jacques, this girl who has Kim’s daughter’s initials inked into her flesh. Kim doesn’t know Scarlett Jacques. She has seen her only once, floating across a pool in a pink flamingo, dripping water in a black towel, answering questions about her missing daughter in a sulky, condescending tone. She doesn’t know Scarlett Jacques. She doesn’t need to know Scarlett Jacques. Kim cannot feel sorry for her or care about her fate, as young as she is, as much as Scarlett may claim to love her daughter. She simply cannot.

  * * *

  Tallulah was found to be in the grip of a profound opioid addiction when she was taken to hospital and Kim has been told that she will need to spend time in rehab to recover. She’s been warned that Tallulah will not look like the fresh-faced girl she said goodbye to on that June night all those months and months ago. But she’s also been told that Tallulah is desperate to get well and come home and be a mother to her son again.

  And now they stand in a row on the gray tarmac. Kim, Ryan, Jim, Noah in his best shirt and trousers in Kim’s arms. A warm wind whips around them and across them. It messes up Kim’s shiny, flattened hair and she tucks it behind her ears repeatedly. A wheeled staircase is put into place below the door of the airplane. The door opens. A man appears, then another man. Kim sucks in her breath and breathes it out again into Noah’s hair. She sucks in her stomach, tucks her hair behind her ear one last time, and then, there, with a huge brown dog standing at her side, is Tallulah.

  Kim runs.

  EPILOGUE

  AUGUST 2018

  Liam takes off his sunglasses and puts them in the pocket of his shirt. He looks upward at the house where the sun shines blackly off the curtained windows, before crouching down to lift the edge of a large blue planter; a wood louse scuttles out of its hiding place. He grabs the object hidden there and takes it to the front door.

  Inside, the house is cool and echoey. Everything is as the Jacqueses left it last summer, but there is the stillness, the held breath of an unlived-in home. He feels the echoes of the moments he has spent in this home: the ricochet of privileged laughter off the white walls, the anticipatory clank of a wine bottle being taken out of the fridge in the kitchen, the slap of the dog’s heavy paws across stone flooring, the smell of Scarlett’s perfume, the strange old-lady scent she always wears. It’s all still here, but muted, dreamlike, a small ghost of a lost, enchanted world.

  But there is also blood in the still air of the house: a heady, noxious undercurrent of death. As Liam passes from room to room, scenes flash through his head. Chilling memories of that night last year, at the end of January, when Scarlett had called him. The desperation in her voice.

  “Boobs, I need you. Something’s happened. Please come.”

  He left immediately, of course. He never wasted a beat when it came to Scarlett. She was his life force, his meaning. He was nothing before Scarlett and he would return to nothing after her. When she needed him, he came to life, like a marionette taken out of a box.

  He found her on a lounger by the pool, her arms wrapped tight around her body, rocking gently.

  “I think,” she said, “I think I’ve been raped.”

  She wouldn’t tell him who, when, how, where. Just that.

  I think I’ve been raped.

  Liam had felt his soft core go hard. Every element of his physical being had b
een primed to kill. With his bare hands if necessary.

  He stayed that night, and the next and the next, waiting and waiting for Scarlett to tell him. His father called him constantly, demanding that he come back to the farm, that they needed him. But Scarlett needed him more, and nothing, not even the threat of familial excommunication, could make him leave her side. For weeks he stared at every man he crossed paths with, every student, every teacher, the man in the co-op, the vicar from the parish church. Who was it, he desperately needed to know, who did this to my girl? Which one of you dared hurt her, tried to break her. He lived those weeks inside a tightly furled paroxysm of violence, ready to burst.

  In late February he took the job at Maypole House offered to him by Jacinta Croft and he moved into his room with its balcony and its views across the woods. And it was from there that he saw him, six weeks later: an old man from a distance, but on further inspection a forty-something man with a bald head.

  Guy Croft, Jacinta’s husband.

  He’d moved away some time previously, amid talk of adultery, of them having split up. Once a familiar sight walking the grounds of the school with his Labrador, Guy Croft had not been seen for a while, but now he was back, walking from the rear of his cottage and into the woods with an urgency, almost an insanity, in his pace.

  Liam immediately left his room and followed him through the woods. At the other side of the woods he saw him unlatch the back gate into the grounds of Dark Place, and then from a hiding place out of sight, he heard him talking to Scarlett.

  “Let me in. Please, let me in. I’ve left her. OK? I’ve left her. For you.”

  “I didn’t ask you to leave her. I told you. It’s over.”

  “No. No. You said, you said you didn’t want to be with a married man. Well, I’m not married anymore. OK? I’m free.”

  “Oh my God, Guy. Please, just fuck off.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Scarlett. I’ve given up everything for you.”

  And then Liam saw Guy Croft lay his hands against Scarlett’s shoulders, saw him push her, neither hard nor gently, but firmly, back into the house. “Everything,” he said again. And then he took a step forward, his arms out again. Liam heard Scarlett say, “Get off me, Guy. Just fucking get your fucking hands off me.”

  Liam moved, fast enough to leave skid marks in the ground where he’d been standing, three, four, five bounds and into the door, his hands on Guy’s arms, yanking him back, away from Scarlett, throwing him backward onto the ground, and then straddling him where he lay; then an awareness of his fist against the skin of Guy’s head, his jaw, the rasp of his stubble against his knuckles, and then the hot stickiness of fresh blood, the slackness of flesh surrendering to trauma, the flop of a head no longer held proud by a neck, the realization that he was pounding away at something that held no resistance, like pounding at a pile of mince. And then, and only then, the awareness of a voice above his head, saying, “Nonono, Liam, STOP,” and hands against his clothing, tugging at the fabric of his shirt. A flock of swifts in a lazy formation passing through the cool blue of the sky overhead. His blood pumping through his ears. His breath hard in his chest. A dead body between his legs.

  * * *

  There was a time when Liam would have done anything Scarlett asked him to do. But that was before she abandoned him here, alone, estranged from his family, his plans in tatters because of all the sacrifices he’d made for her; before she left him without even saying goodbye.

  Until a frantic phone call two days ago, over a terrible echoey line, Scarlett’s voice in his ear for the first time in over a year.

  “Boobs, the thing that happened at the pool party last summer, the thing. It was real. It happened and it was a bad thing. And Mimi knows about it and she’s told Lex. Lex will tell Kerryanne. Kerryanne will tell Tallulah’s mum. Everyone will know soon. I need you to sort it out. It’s in the same place. The thing. The same place as the thing that you did. The lever is under the big blue pot by the front door. Please, Boobs. Get rid of both the things. Get rid of them. Completely. And then lock it and get rid of the lever. Take it into London or something, throw it in the Thames, put it in a bin, just get it away. Don’t leave any trace of anything, Boobs. Please. I’m out here, in the middle of nowhere. Mum’s losing the plot. She’s gone mad and she’s drugging me and I’m scared I’m going to die out here. I just want to come home. Please make it safe for me to come home. Please.”

  Now he wends his way through the kitchen, to the back hallway, and into the old wing of the house. He goes to the tiny anteroom outside the turret and pauses, just for a moment, before twisting the latch and entering. It is cold and dank in the turret. It does not feel like August. He pulls the ancient lever from his back pocket, the same one they used to open the tunnel that shocking day in April, and he prizes off the cover.

  He steps over the body and then, using his phone as a flashlight, he walks down the tunnel for almost a mile, until it ends and there is no farther to go. Overhead a slab of stone in the ceiling lets in a trickle of gray light from whatever is above. He takes the bottle of petrol from his shoulder bag and he pours it over the shrunken form of Guy Croft’s remains and then drops a match onto them. He watches the flames begin to lick around Guy Croft’s crumbling bones and steps away when the heat starts to overwhelm him. As the flames subside he pokes at the ashes with the metal lever. He sees finger bones, still intact, a jawbone, large lumps of old rag and charred leather, and he pours another slug of petrol onto the pile, drops another match onto it.

  He feels nothing for Guy Croft as he watches him turn to powder. All his feelings are held inside him like a fist and they are all for Scarlett. All of them. Scarlett, who uses people as mirrors, to better see herself. Scarlett, who picks people up and drops people as and when it suits her. Scarlett, who waited until Liam was over her, finally over her, ready to go home and get on with his life, before reeling him back in and using him again, as a comfort blanket, a lap to sit on, a person to see her as she wishes to be seen and not as what she really is. And what Scarlett Jacques really is, he now knows, is a vessel.

  He’d allowed himself to be used by her as a plaything, a pet, no different from her precious dog. He’d even let her give him that terrible nickname—Boobs. He hated being called Boobs, but he’d let it happen. He’d allowed Scarlett and her hideous mother to use him as a handyman, a plumber, a chauffeur. He feels red-hot anger pass through him at the memory of Scarlett’s mother passing him a spade and a plastic bag one hot summer’s morning and asking him if he wouldn’t mind clearing the dog’s shit off the lawn because the gardener was off sick and it was starting to stink.

  After he killed Guy Croft for her, they went to bed and had sex that was so raw and pure that he’d cried afterward.

  “I love you, Boobs,” she’d said, her body wrapped around his. “You know I’m going to love you forever, don’t you?”

  And then the doorbell had rung the next morning and she’d said, “Fuck, Boobs, quick, you have to go, you have to go now. It’s Tallulah. She’s early. Get dressed. Quickly!” And, being an obedient puppet, he’d done as she said, thrown on his clothes, and left. He’d killed a man for her and she’d thrown him out the next morning without even saying goodbye, then given herself over immediately and entirely to her pursuit of Tallulah. And now this. A year of radio silence and suddenly she needs him again.

  Please, Boobs, please.

  Angrily, he pokes again at the remains of Guy Croft. The lumps have burned down now to rubble and dust and he sweeps them with the small brush he’d brought down with him, onto sheets of tinfoil, which he wraps into warm parcels and puts into his shoulder bag. He will take them to the shady pond on the edge of the common when the sun has set tonight and empty them into the stagnant waters there for the ducks to pick over.

  He passes the light of the phone across the floor of the tunnel, stooping to pick up what looks like a molar, which he slips quickly into his trouser pocket.

  And then, as h
e turns to leave, he hears what sound like footsteps overhead, and then voices, thin, muted through the gap around the stone slab in the ceiling.

  “So, what do you think, Sophie? Can you imagine it? Coming to live here with me? Being the head teacher’s wife?”

  Then a woman’s voice in reply. “Yes, yes, I really can. I think it’ll be an adventure.”

  Liam turns and heads back down the tunnel. As he nears the exit he glances down at Zach Allister’s body, the body Scarlett thinks he’s going to get rid of for her, and he steps over it.

  Then he climbs the stone steps back to Dark Place, pulls the slab over the hole, and slides the lever back into his pocket, the lever that he won’t be throwing in the Thames for Scarlett or disposing of in a far-flung bin, the lever he’ll be keeping safe in his home until he decides exactly what he’s going to do with it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This was my “lockdown novel.” All annually published writers will have one of these in their list now. I started writing it in February 2020. I then got sidetracked by other things (signing six and a half thousand tip-in pages for the US being one of them!) and put it to one side for a while. By the time I came back to it, lockdown had started, I’d had COVID, and my children were at home all day. I typically write my books either at my kitchen table or in a coffee shop. Suddenly coffee shops were shut and my kitchen table was covered in my elder daughter’s college work. The kitchen itself was used by my family as some kind of informal staff room, a place to hang out and take a breather from work and learning. Complex meals were prepared and cooked here at all hours of the day. People seemed to be milling about constantly and there were no coffee shops to escape to, and for eight long weeks I mooched about disconsolately saying that I COULD NOT WRITE. Not only were there people all over my work space but my book was set in 2018 and I couldn’t get my head around the concept of writing about a world before COVID, a world of naive people going to pubs, sending their kids to school, and hugging one another. I spoke to my editor at intervals over this period and each time she would say, “Are you writing?” and each time I would explain that no, I wasn’t, I couldn’t, it was impossible, of course not. The first few times she was understanding, sympathetic. The fifth time she said, “You know you really do have to write this book, don’t you?”