by Emma Rowley
It’s as neat as a pin in here, as ever, but under the sharp whiff of bleach—Lily’s a huge believer in potent chemicals—there’s a darker current. Damp. I make a mental note to have a think about what to do about that. Lily’s vague about arrangements and utterly private about money, in that old-fashioned way.
We met my first winter here, when she drove her ancient Ford into the back of my car at the lights at this end of Park Road, as you head into the village. She blamed the ice on the roads.
“Oh dear,” she’d said, as we stood by the phone box: her bumper was hooked over mine. “I am sorry. Shall we have a nice cup of tea in the warm, and sort this out?”
I’d walked her back down the road the little distance to the main drive to our houses and followed her into her hall. She walked stiffly: a hip injury, she told me later. “Just a little sore.” She made us both Earl Grey. “I can’t drink that supermarket tea, dear, who can? Or should we have a sherry instead?”
I’m not sure that was what Mark meant when he said I should make an effort to make friends locally, not spend all my time moping around the house when Sophie was at school. I’d found the not working harder than I’d thought—the days went so slowly.
“Why are you spending so much time with that old woman?” he had asked once, crossly. “Whenever I ring you seem to be at hers. Shouldn’t social services be looking in on her?”
“I think she’s got someone who goes round. I just like to check on her. She’s fun.”
She’s nothing like my mum, really, who barely bothered to look in a mirror and would have laughed at the idea of spending time on a full face of makeup and polished pink nails, for another day of, well, a coffee afternoon at church, at most. But there’s something in Lily’s full-tilt approach to life, her heroic refusal not to have a nice time, that reminds me of Mum. Or used to, when we first met.
“Lily,” I say, once I’m upstairs. “Did you forget about the gingerbread? It’s all burnt.” I put down her tea in front of her—in a proper cup and saucer, of course.
“Don’t be silly.” She frowns. “Of course I didn’t forget. I just closed my eyes for a minute.”
“Lily, you’ve got to be careful. The oven had started to smoke. Didn’t your smoke alarm go off?” I’m sure I checked it just the other week.
“Oh, that thing,” she says. “It would not stop that awful beeping. So I switched it off.”
I get up to look in the hall. “Lily, there are wires hanging down. Did you take the batteries out?”
Her eyes look very blue, in the late sunlight. “No . . .” Almost childlike.
“OK.” I can replace the batteries the next time I’m round, and tape the cover back in place. Despite this, I already feel soothed just being here, away from my life. This? This I can deal with.
I pull the worn pack of cards from the drawer. “Anyway, what are you going to beat me at today?”
CHAPTER 8
Finally, the call comes from the police, on Monday—a voicemail left on my mobile while I’m in the shower. Could I come into the station? It’s a name I don’t know. Detective Inspector Ben something. I play it again. Is it bad news, good news? I can’t tell. Good, I decide, let it be good. It has to be.
I’m there within the hour, my hair still drying. And then I wait.
Half an hour passes in the small windowless room they’ve put me in. Definitely more than that—but then I only started counting when the clock was at three. I make up my mind. I’m out of my plastic seat, hand on the door handle, when it pushes open and I’m forced to quickly step back.
“Somewhere to go, Mrs. Harlow? I’m so sorry to have kept you. Shall we sit down?” I haven’t met this one before: dark hair, sleepy eyes, about my age, maybe. “DI Ben Nicholls,” he says, pulling out the chair opposite mine. He doesn’t hold out a hand to shake.
“I’m Kate,” I say. “We used to deal with Kirstie,” I carry on, suddenly nervous. There’s not a flicker of recognition. “Kirstie Waller? Curly blonde hair? She’d told me a few months ago that she was going on mat leave, so she was passing on her responsibilities.”
Neither of us had punctured the pretense that the investigation was going anywhere, even recently. I was grateful to her for that. “None of the officers I used to speak to are around,” I say now. “Everyone seems to have retired, or be on leave.”
He nods, unsmiling. “I’m up to speed on the case, I’ve read through the files.”
“OK.” So the small talk’s clearly over.
“And I understand you’re keen for us to get hold of some phone records from the charity where you work—”
“Yes, you’ve got to,” I say, launching in. “My daughter phoned me, she’s missing, she’s been missing for years, she phoned me, and I need to know where she is, I need to talk to her—”
“Mrs. Harlow, can I interrupt?”
I lean back.
“I want to manage your expectations,” he says. “A helpline has privacy procedures in place for a reason. And we can’t necessarily overturn them to trace the call, even if you are concerned about your daughter.”
“Well, why not?”
“Police officers have to follow rules, too. We’d have to have a very strong reason to break those protocols. The helpline’s got a commitment to protect its clients’ anonymity—”
“But I’m her mother!”
“And that’s why she might not want you tracing her, isn’t it? If it was her.” I flinch. “She could have phoned home. But she called the helpline, you say, to let you know that you shouldn’t expect contact anymore.”
I’m not used to the police being this direct. So he’s not so sleepy, after all.
“But I just know. Something’s wrong.” I’ve got to make them take this seriously. I catch myself: of course something was wrong if your daughter ran away. How can I make them understand?
“Mrs. Harlow, when someone goes missing—I know how very hard this is—”
“No, you don’t know,” I say simply.
“OK, maybe I don’t. And the fact is that yes, in certain circumstances, different things are . . . possible. But, to be blunt, there’s no immediate risk I can see here, or any other factors that would prompt us to get authorization to access the phone records, and try to trace the call in question. She’s made it very clear, since she left, that it was what she wanted—”
“All right!” I say, too loud. “I remember.” I don’t want to think about all that, not yet.
He carries on. “So, frankly, we’d be acting with very little expectation that there’d be anything to show for it, or that there was any need. You may not like this, Mrs. Harlow, but everything about Sophie’s actions so far have told one consistent story: she’s a teenager—an adult now, at eighteen—who doesn’t want to come home. But”—as I open my mouth to protest—“but, what I can say is that I’ll make inquiries. See if there are any circumstances in which the charity might help, for a start.”
“Well, OK,” I say, uncertain of what he’s promising me. “Should I ask them, too? Would that help? I work there, after all.”
“Do you think that would help?”
“Well . . . no.” I can feel my face flushing. I, more than anyone, know how much the charity prizes callers’ confidentiality, how it would never pass on information to loved ones without their consent. It’s the fundamental rule. “So, when do you think you might have something to tell me?” I can feel the situation slipping out of my control.
“I couldn’t say. But here’s my card”—he pushes it across the table to me—“there’s my mobile number on it, too. Anything particularly pressing you’ve to tell us, you can let me know that way.”
He stands up, ready to go, and for the first time there’s a hint of something other than brisk professionalism. “Mrs. Harlow—can I suggest: try not to get your hopes up too much. When someone’s been missing this long, well, the outcomes aren’t always . . . what we’d like to see. People don’t always want to come home. The lon
ger they stay away . . .” He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. “If your daughter called you, that might have to be enough for now. You might need to accept that she’s not coming home.”
“You might need to accept that she’s not coming home.” The words keep playing in my mind as I drive back, joining the beginnings of the rush-hour traffic out of town, the low sun flashing in my eyes.
So that’s what the police say. That’s what Mark said too, at the end, what my family now don’t dare to say—but I could read it in their eyes, every time we talked.
Are they right? I make myself consider the question, seriously, just for a moment. Is it time finally to let her go—at least, as my stomach convulses at the thought, for now, until she’s ready for more. I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter, anyway. Perhaps it’d be best.
At the thought, I feel a strange sort of calm, lighter almost. Acceptance?
The feeling carries me home, as I let myself in, dump my keys on the hall table. What would it be like, if I could accept it . . . as I pad up the landing I realize where I’m already going, unthinkingly. I continue up the stairs to the top of the house, my steps slower now, and push open the door to Sophie’s room. As I flick on the bright overhead light, the curtains pulled open as usual, the duvet forever untouched, the room looks oddly staged. This time I can’t pretend Sophie’s just stepped out.
Perhaps this is what Sophie was trying to give me, with that call, it occurs to me now. The chance to say goodbye, just for a while. To let her go.
Suddenly I’m overwhelmed with longing. I fight the urge to go into her wardrobe, try to catch the scent of her on her clothes. Instead I walk over to the dresser and rest my hands on the old pine. For a second I’m lost—what was I looking for? Of course, Panda. So beloved when she was little that his ears are long gone, the stuffing exposed at the seams. Only Teddy was more battered.
But Panda’s on top of the wardrobe with the rest of Sophie’s stuffed animals, tucked between the donkey and the tired-looking rabbit.
Silvia must have moved him, I think, when she was still coming here to clean, before it was just me. She must have knocked him and put him up there, forgetting where he lives. I need everything to stay the same, so I carefully pull the toy down and put him back on the dresser, as he always is.
He tips over. But I know what it is—Panda’s always propped on his blanket, Sophie’s old fuzzy pink blankie from when she was very little. It must have slipped off the dresser’s glass surface.
I slide an arm in to pat blindly between its side and the wardrobe. It’s not there. I put my hands around the top of the dresser and shuffle the heavy wood out a couple of inches, so I can look behind it.
Maybe Silvia put it in the wash, fabric can get so dusty. She was so careful about disturbing things, but she perhaps wasn’t to know.... But I’m suddenly torn up inside, blinking away tears again.
Because I’m thinking of the start, when they kept asking me what she’d taken. Sophie would never have gone without her blankie, I knew that, even when she was sixteen years old and would blush to admit it. I knew that she couldn’t sleep without it tucked under her pillow—a childhood habit that she’d yet to drop. But she had, of course, she had left it at home along with all the rest of the life she’d discarded so easily. I didn’t know her that well, after all. And now, the one time I want it, I can’t find it.
It’s such a small stupid thing. I shouldn’t even care. But the lightness has already dissipated, the familiar anxious buzz swelling up again.
No, I can’t accept that she’s gone. Nothing about this has ever felt right, has ever made sense, whatever they said to me. It still doesn’t.
“Love you, So,” I said on the phone. And then she hung up on me.
She’d never do that. It’d be “Love you, So,” “Love you, Mo.” Just one of those silly family jokes from childhood. She’d never forget that. But why would she punish me with that little snub, withhold that endearment from me? Is she that angry?
A chill goes down my spine. Have I got it wrong, so horribly wrong, that I don’t realize I wasn’t speaking to Sophie at all, just some confused, troubled caller, me hearing what I wanted to hear?
No. It can’t be, it was her. I know my daughter, I do.
Something isn’t right. Whatever they say. Whatever she told me.
And that’s when I decide. That’s when I know, with rare clarity.
I’m not going to rely on them to find her, not anymore. It didn’t work the first time, after all.
This is my last chance. My last chance to find Sophie.
CHAPTER 9
My stomach flutters as I pull into the car park in the village. I’m nervous, I realize. I was surprised to find myself feeling buoyant this morning, the sense of optimism unfamiliar. I made the effort to scramble eggs and drink two cups of milky coffee, the cat prowling around my feet. Now it’s all still churning unpleasantly inside me. But I’d decided. This time around, I’m not going to just sit tight and wait for the police to let me know what’s happening.
I’ve got a plan.
First on my list is speaking to Holly Dixon—just to ask what she thinks, if there might be any possible factor I don’t know about that’s keeping Sophie away. And then maybe she’ll have an idea, someone else I can talk to. Isn’t that how it works? Anything to stave off that old trapped feeling. I’m determined to stay active, to hold on to this new stirring of purpose. My grief coach (Lara doesn’t like the word “counselor,” she says we are partners together in this) would be proud of me. If I still saw her.
Last night I left a message on Holly’s mobile, hoping she hadn’t changed the number. We haven’t spoken in a long time. I left a long, rambling message about Sophie’s call, that I could explain properly later, but did she think we could meet? Within about twenty minutes my phone beeped.
OK. Can do 11 tmrw, coffee?
We arranged to meet in the village, as she’s still local. Not in the cutesy café, where you can buy the knickknacks that take your fancy. I know too many people in there. I’ve gone for the pizza chain one everyone disapproved of when it opened, staffed by breezily anonymous Australians. I like it.
I’m five minutes early but she’s already sitting there at a table in the corner. “You’ve changed your hair,” I say. “Blue!” Still so much makeup, I see.
“Oh, yeah,” she says, touching a mermaid strand. “Well, I got bored of the lilac. Everyone was doing it, didn’t you notice.”
I smile, looking around. Today the place is fairly empty, but there’s not a lot of purple hair around here, it’s all tasteful honey highlights, from the girls in school to their mothers.
“It’s pretty,” I say.
She quickly covers the flicker of surprise. Too late, I remember.
Holly used to stay over all the time. She and Sophie would disappear upstairs and there’d be screams of laughter into the small hours, the two of them doing God knows what in Sophie’s bathroom. One time, they’d emerged in the morning with pink hair—“It washes out, Mum, don’t worry!” Sophie reassured me, Holly looking at me sidelong, amusement in her eyes as I tried to keep my temper.
Teenagers were always looking for a reaction, I knew. But it had been an expensive trip to the hairdresser to take Sophie’s hair back to its baby blonde. She hadn’t been grateful at all. “Well, I think it looks cool, Mum. I don’t want to change it.”
Holly and I order cappuccinos. Her mum’s well, she says in answer to my questions.
I’ve seen her, since Sophie went, but after the first few encounters, we seemed to make a tacit agreement to smile and nod. I heard Holly didn’t stick around in school after her GCSEs, but she seems to have done well since then. She has started at college and plans to be a nurse. Her tutor, she tells me, “is a total b—” she catches herself. “. . . a bit difficult,” but she’s enjoyed it.
What she doesn’t need to spell out is the reason why I’ve avoided her until now. The wound Sophie left in he
r life is healing over. She’s hitting milestones Sophie hasn’t. I keep asking questions, suddenly wanting to hear the details, though it stings. But the lull’s inevitable.
“So why did you want to meet?” she says.
I take a breath. “Obviously you and Sophie were really close.” Quickly, I tell her about the call, the bare details of what I heard at the helpline. “I have a feeling . . . that she wants to come back home.” It sounds weak even as I say it, but Holly’s nodding, her face serious.
“I do too,” she says. “I knew she’d come back, one day.”
Another memory: Holly loved horoscopes, all that stuff—she even carried around a battered pack of Tarot cards that impressed Sophie deeply. I’d see them bent over the cards on the floor of Sophie’s room, their heads—Sophie’s pale blonde, Holly’s a bleached mirror version—close together, both girls giggling.
“There’s just a few things I wanted to get straight in my head,” I say now. “About why she left. If she calls again I just—I just want to understand. If something might be stopping her, even now?”
“Well, it was all said at the time, wasn’t it,” says Holly flatly. “In the papers.”
I flinch, remembering how exposed I’d felt. I’d gone along with it all—media appeals, articles in the evening newspaper, a video plea with Mark for Sophie to “Please come home. We’re not angry, we just want to know you’re OK” that they ran on the local six o’clock news.
Then we made the nationals. There were a few pieces, the longer ones mentioning Mark’s job at the firm, and making much of the fact that Sophie’s exams were approaching. Her school, the local grammar, was described as an “academic hot-house.” There was a comment from a “neighbor” that we were new here from London, “only the one child, a lot of expectation.” I’d read that article several times.
“They’re saying she was under too much pressure,” I’d said to Mark that morning. “That’s what they’re implying. From us.”