Where the Missing Go

by Emma Rowley

  I can’t believe this. “I’m not imagining it. She said my name and Mark’s down the phone. She did, she said my name.” I can hear how I sound, my voice getting higher.

  “OK.” He sounds sad. “But even so. I just don’t want you to . . . to get too carried away, even if it was her. It’s been a long time, since Sophie left, and now Mark’s gone too. You’re all alone, in that house. I don’t know whether you’re looking after yourself.”

  I don’t like it when he gets like this. It’s better when he’s telling me about what he’s just picked up from B&Q or bits of gossip from the bridge club. Dad’s done so well since Mum died, and he was left suddenly unmoored by the loss of his laughing, exuberant wife. I suspect, from careful references to his “new friend Trish” at the club, that he’s recently taken another step forward, and I’m happy that he’s building a new life. The only problem is, he wants me to do the same.

  “So what’s Clive been up to now, any news from the club?” I say, changing the subject.

  “He’s been busy showing off his new car. Walnut dash, very nice.” Clive, kicking off with some rather orange hair dye, sounds to be well into the throes of a late-life crisis, and enjoying every moment.

  But Dad won’t be distracted. “Well, try not to worry, if you can. That’s promising, it really is. Let me know as soon as you hear from the police.” He pauses. “Have you spoken to your sister?”

  I try to keep my voice light. “No, I haven’t caught her yet.”

  “I’ll be going round there today for Sunday lunch. You’re welcome of course, you know. The boys would love to see you too, they’re growing up so fast.”

  “Please don’t guilt-trip me about my nephews, Dad, not just now.”

  “Just give her a ring, perhaps. When you can.”

  “I’ll try. But you can tell her about Sophie’s phone call, when you see her. I’ve got to go anyway, I’m just pulling in.” Another lie. “See you soon.”

  “Bye, sweetie.”

  Don’t get too carried away. My thoughts are whirling, as I walk through the car park, the hot tarmac filling the air with that pitchy smell—Sophie loved it. If only Dad knew where my mind could go. I know what happens to girls on the streets, I am all too aware of the stories. Drugs, men, bad decisions. And then the decisions get worse, to get money, to survive.

  But not my Sophie. I won’t think about that, I’ve trained myself not to spiral down that dark hole of possibilities. If she’s talking, lucid, phoning home, it could be worse, I tell myself. Much worse.

  She’s alive. She called me. She’s reaching out. That’s all I need to think about, for now.

  I will buy a chicken and cook a proper roast for myself. I used to make lovely, careful meals all the time for the three of us, thumbing through my sticky-fingerprinted Jamies and Nigellas.

  But I haven’t made it halfway down the vegetable aisle when I spot the highlighted head. This is why I stopped coming here at weekends. I turn smartly on my heel to head toward the doors.

  “Kate! Kate! Is that you?”

  Too late. I lift my eyebrows, paste on a smile, and turn round to her. “Ellen, hi. How are you?” I hope my emphasis can pass as enthusiasm.

  “Oh, you know, busy, busy, as always. I haven’t seen you for ages. How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks. How’s the family, your . . .” I grasp fruitlessly for the names “. . . boys?”

  “They’re great, Neil’s just had more exams, so we’re holding our breath and hoping, he has worked very hard. But he’s loved having his own patients.” I nod, smiling. I cannot picture him at all. She tilts her head, her face more uncertain. “And you?”

  “Everything’s fine, thanks. I’m keeping busy.” I wish I’d put on makeup today, that I hadn’t just pulled my hair back in its usual ponytail.

  “Oh really?”

  “Mm, I’m still at the charity, I work on the helpline there, you know.” It’s not an outright lie. I didn’t say I was full-time. Or paid.

  “You know,” she says carefully. “I’m doing a lot with the tennis club now, the social side and a bit of charity fund-raising. You should come along. Actually, what are you doing Thursday night?”

  I know that crowd, and I had quite enough of them in the months afterward. “Thanks so much,” I say brightly. “I’ll have to have a look at my diary.”

  Not brightly enough. Ellen’s mouth hardens into a little straight line. “Well, you do that.” She gives her trolley a push, more for show than for the sign she’s going anywhere. “I’m only trying to help. It’s just . . . you out there in that big house. Lisa’s very worried, you know,” she adds, tucking in her chin and looking up at me meaningfully.

  I can’t help it, I laugh out loud. “Lisa? I’m sure she is.” I’m remembering Lisa Brookland, all bleached teeth and tight bright sportswear, in the weeks when I was still trying to carry on as normal. She cornered me at the post office once.

  “And you’ve really no idea where she could have gone? There was no sign she was so . . . unhappy?” The sharp interest in her face betrayed her thoughts: this doesn’t happen to people like us. Not if you’re doing it right. I never liked Lisa, even before.

  And then one day I’d realized, when we’d gone to summer drinks at the tennis club, Mark saying it would be good for us. I’d stepped outside, just for a break from the questioning, the burden of other people’s concern and curiosity. When I’d come back in I saw them in a corner of the hall. It was something about the way they stood, heads close together.

  So now I knew: it was her.

  I hadn’t asked outright who he’d been with the night Sophie went missing. Because then I’d have to do something about it, and I didn’t have the energy, yet. I suppose I assumed it was some impressed girl in his office. Wasn’t that how it happened, when a husband worked such long hours? But no, he’d made time for the blonde divorcee from his tennis club. What a flipping cliché.

  “Well, of course she worries,” Ellen says now. “Wouldn’t you expect her to?” Ellen, with her keen appreciation of social niceties, was always hovering around the local queen bee.

  I’m lost. “Not really,” I say.

  Ellen opens her mouth, shuts it. “Well I must get on,” she says, briskly. “I’ve people coming to dinner, and it’s rammed in here, isn’t it. Why I leave things to the last minute I don’t know!” Her neck’s going pink. “I’ll let you go. But do think about Thursday—” She’s flustered, trying to steer the wheels away.

  “Ellen,” I say. I put a hand on her trolley. “Why would I expect Lisa to worry about me?”

  I think I know what she’s going to say before she does. But I want to make her say it.

  Her shoulders sag, her hand goes to her mouth. She always had a sense of the dramatic.

  “Oh, Katie,” she says. “I thought you knew, honestly. She and Mark—well, you’re separated now, aren’t you, have been for quite a while.” She glances up at me through her lashes, slyly. “It’s only natural that he . . . He’s moved in with her.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I keep it together long enough to get out of the supermarket. I can’t remember exactly what I’d said to Ellen, enough to get her to stop talking—“Don’t worry at all, it’s fine, I’ll see you”—then I’d dumped my basket, marched straight back through the entrance doors and into the car park.

  I’d assumed their relationship would fade out in time, that he’d move on. But here he is, moving from his rented flat in town back into a family home. Lisa’s got her kids most of the time, but then he’s always liked family life. My face is wet, I realize.

  This is what happens when you try to be normal again. The past lays traps.

  Looking back, it’s hard to remember those first days. I could answer questions and make tea for the police and Dad and Charlotte, who seemed to be here all the time, and do what was required. Then another great wave of terror would roll over me, flushing my body with panic: where was she?

  The police talked to te
achers and pupils at school. Sophie had signed in for registration on the Friday, that they could agree on. But this close to exams, the timetable was pretty much abandoned, much of the students’ time supposed to be spent in the library.

  Then Jennifer Silver said she’d seen her heading to the changing rooms straight after registration, her big bag on her shoulder. Jennie Silver, I remembered Sophie telling me, laughing, was a total busybody. I held onto these nuggets of information. She’d got so protective of them.

  They found Sophie’s navy skirt and jumper in the changing room, hung neatly on a peg. She’d just walked straight out of the school’s front door, as the older pupils were allowed to do, in her own clothes. In a letter to parents I heard the embarrassed head promised to review the sign-out procedure.

  The upshot was the same: she’d been gone since Friday morning.

  It didn’t take the police long to get hold of the video footage. The bus station in Amberton had been full of people, but they’d freeze-framed a shot, where she’d swung round in the direction of the camera, and zoomed in on her, a grainy black-and-white figure on their computer.

  “Mrs. Harlow . . . ?” the officer with me had prompted. “Is that your daughter?”

  I’d had to clear my throat. “Yes, that’s her.”

  I still couldn’t believe it, that she’d actually done this. But there she was, in jeans and her winter jacket, too hot for the weather—at least she’ll be warm, I’d thought—stepping onto a coach. I couldn’t read her expression, as I tried to decipher the dots on the screen.

  The coach was one of those on interminable routes that students love for their cheapness, winding south. They tracked down the driver; he thought he remembered her buying a ticket to London, but he couldn’t be sure, and nor could the police. They weren’t even sure where she’d got off.

  “It’s easier to disappear in a big city,” said Kirstie, the officer assigned to us as “family liaison”—to hold our hand through the worst. She was Scottish, in her thirties, I guessed, and didn’t shrink from telling me the truth, despite her warm manner. But there wasn’t that much to report, in the end.

  They went through her phone, email, her Facebook—nothing out of the ordinary. Her internet searches though, on the laptop she used for homework and watching films, were another matter.

  “Budget work”

  “Casual work”

  “Cash in hand”

  “Travel work student”

  Pages and pages, almost laying out her thought process for us.

  “You’d know if she’d gone abroad, wouldn’t you?” I said, my panic mounting. “She’s taken her passport but it’s all electronic now, isn’t it, they must be able to track it. Right?”

  “The records are thorough,” said Kirstie, “especially flights.”

  “Of course, no border system’s infallible,” said the officer with her that day, a younger guy. “It’s not impossible.”

  Sometimes my frustration spilled over: I wanted them to do even more.

  “This is a—a child. She’s still at school.”

  “She’s sixteen,” Kirstie said once. “And she’s a clever girl, you say. Lots of teenagers leave home at sixteen.” I think she was trying to reassure me.

  “Not girls like Sophie,” I’d replied.

  I read her reaction in the swift glance around our spacious living room. She knew: bad things happen to people in nice houses, too. I knew what I meant though: I just couldn’t see why Sophie’d gone.

  Yes, we’d had rows; she wanted to go out more; she’d moaned about her revision workload. She loved art, and would happily spend hours hunched over her coursework, but she didn’t understand why I cared so much about maths and science and the rest.

  “Surely that’s not enough for her to do—this?” I protested.

  Kirstie didn’t need to contradict me: Sophie’s absence was its own rebuke.

  At least there’d been no sign of . . . well, anything else. I could picture, all too easily, how it could have unfolded: long grass by a canal, a dog walker out early one morning, following their excited pet off the path: “Easy boy, hold on, what’s that . . . Oh God.”

  I had to shut out the images that threatened to overwhelm me, that drove away sleep while Mark was snoring gently in the bed next to me. So I stayed busy. I started off local, driving around the streets at night, just to see. Then I went further, into the city, parking up behind derelict warehouses and near the railway arches, to show them my photos: Sophie, in her school uniform; Sophie, at the dinner to mark her sixteenth that April; Sophie, in a raincoat on a school trip to the Lakes.

  Mark said it was dangerous. “We need to let the professionals do their jobs.” But I knew they wouldn’t hurt me, these tired people handling my photos so carefully under the streetlights. “I’ll keep an eye out for you,” they’d tell me. “I’ll ask around.” I said Mark should come with me, then, if he was so worried for me. He kept it up for a bit, and, later, at the weekends, after he went back to work.

  The police had questions for us, too. Was there anywhere she could have gone? Anyone that she might have been in contact with? Anyone we could think of, at all?

  Dad, Charlotte and Mark, we talked endlessly, racking our brains at the kitchen table, late into the night. Back to London? She hadn’t lived there since she was, what, twelve—everyone she knew was up here. Some pretty seaside resort we’d once visited? We didn’t think Sophie would even remember the time we used to holiday closer to home, before Mark started doing so well. Still, we dutifully wrote all our ideas down and passed them on to Kirstie.

  And then there were the other types of questions, more personal. How was Sophie feeling about her GCSEs? How important is academic success in your family? Did Sophie go out with her friends? Was she allowed to? Could you run through again, just so we understand, what exactly you were rowing about, in that last argument you mentioned? And, once: you lost your mother in recent years, Mrs. Harlow, in distressing circumstances, we understand?

  I’d drawn in my breath. I didn’t know Mark would have told them about that. The driver had been heading home the morning after a wedding, after catching a few hours’ sleep to sober up. Except he hadn’t sobered up, he was still well over the limit when he’d ploughed his four-wheeler into the car in front. Mum had been on her way to the garden center. It had been quick, at least.

  “That—that was a shock, yes, but I don’t think it changed the way I treated Sophie in any way. . . .” I trailed off. Maybe it had, just as she hit the age when she needed more freedom.

  And, underneath it all, I heard the questions left unspoken but sounding just as loud: Is this your fault? Did you do this? Did you push your daughter away?

  Sophie, I’m so sorry, I’ve failed you. I’m so sorry.

  In the end it had been Charlotte, always such a mum, who told me I needed to go to my GP, that I should get some pills. And Dr. Heath was very understanding, writing a prescription that finally let me sleep; more for the daytime “if I needed them.” I’d been grateful for that.

  CHAPTER 7

  Home safe from the supermarket, I pour a cup of water from the tap and drain it, twice. I’m hot and flustered—and I’m getting bogged down again. I need to stick to my routine, not get thrown off by changes. That’s why Ellen bloody Fraser’s slipped under my guard. I feel the old restlessness rise up in me, the electric buzz of anxiety. I want to soothe it. I know how I could. But I have to be careful, these days.

  I just need to keep playing the game of distracting myself: I will go and see Lily.

  Outside again, the afternoon sun is still strong enough to turn my pale skin pink. As I cut through the copse of overgrown bushes that separates our homes, heading up the slight incline, I tilt my head up to admire Parklands through the leaves overhead. Even for Park Road, it’s a beauty under its torn plastic sheets and the plywood on the windows—it’s all towering chimneys and carved stonework, that over-the-top detail the Victorians loved.

&nbs
p; Lily’s little redbrick cottage, once the mansion’s carriage house, sits in its own small garden on the side of the drive that continues on to the big house, set far back from the road.

  She was the house manager for Parklands, she explained once; it was rented out as rooms. I got the impression the residence had got increasingly shabby with the years. She’d stayed on with her late husband, after it was shuttered up for redevelopment: at least her rent can’t be much.

  I’ve got my own key, now, so she doesn’t have to get up. That’s what I said, anyway. I worry about her; I had visions of her falling and me assuming she wasn’t answering because she was asleep or at a coffee afternoon.

  As I let myself in, the smell of gingerbread slaps me. I sniff the air. There’s a smoky edge to it. “Lily? It’s me.” I find her in her sunny sitting room, in her chair. Her eyes are closed. “Lily,” I say loudly.

  She raises her head and fumbles for her reading glasses. It takes her a moment to place me, then her face breaks into a smile. “Oh hello, darling, you look lovely.”

  I can’t help but laugh—she always says I look lovely. “Lily, have you been baking again?”

  “What? Goodness, you do mumble.” I don’t think she likes to admit her hearing’s not as good as it was.

  I repeat myself, and add: “I’m just going down to make us both a nice cup of tea.”

  “Oh yes, dear, and let’s have something to nibble,” she calls after me.

  “Sounds lovely.”

  Down the steps, in her little kitchen built half underground, I crack open the small, high-up windows as far as they will go and open the oven, fanning the smoke away. The gingerbread men are black, welded to the tray. There’s no saving them, or it. I’ll chuck it later, when the thing’s cooled.

  I pull out the tin of biscuits I bought her and arrange a few on a plate. I know she’ll only pick at one, still conscious of her “figure” even these days.