The Missing Girl

by Jenny Quintana

  ‘Is it? Well, to be honest, I didn’t really look. I was in a hurry to get the boxes sorted. The man with the van—’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’ I waited a few seconds before I asked my next question, gathering my breath and speaking quickly to get the sentence out. ‘What about Edward Lily? Was he an artist?’ My voice was high and strange. I gripped the phone. Had Dawn noticed?

  ‘I’d say it was more likely,’ she said. ‘All those paintings he collected, but I can’t say I ever saw him doing anything like that himself. Perhaps he bought it. What makes you think it was either of them who drew it?’ It was a good question and one I couldn’t answer. So I thanked her again and told her to come in any time if she wanted to take another look through Lydia’s things. I was going to keep them for a while in case Edward’s sister or Lydia herself came back to claim them.

  After the call, I considered more carefully the possibility of Edward Lily being the artist. I imagined him watching Gabriella so often he’d managed to capture her expression exactly; to draw her hair, her eyes, her mouth so precisely. I thought of the man in the photos, his books and his beautiful things. I thought of his wife. His daughter. If it was true, had they known what he was like?

  Crossing the room, I stood before the Modigliani. The girl’s eyes looked back. Defiant. Strange I’d never seen her like that before. I touched the glass gently with my fingertips, traced the narrow face. Gabriella. She was everywhere. In my thoughts and in my dreams, beside me now, staring outwards from this painting. And there was I, my reflection, staring back. Two sisters, trapped in one place.

  That night I stayed awake, moving through the darkness in the house. Gabriella: my first thought in the morning, my last memory at night.

  The discovery of the portrait had changed everything. The faceless shadow that had visited me in my dreams was real. Suspicion finally had a foundation. The figure had a face. And that meant something else. The police would need to know. The newspapers would dig up the story all over again. People would pick over the pieces, like crows on raw meat.

  The realisation bore down on me as I paced. I’d spent years barely speaking of Gabriella, and it struck me now: so few people I’d ever met beyond this village even knew that I’d had a sister. When friends talked about their childhoods or complained about their families I was silent and they assumed I had no one. People told me that I was lucky. I didn’t tell them otherwise. I looked at their family photos and showed them nothing in return. Now I would have no choice but to admit I’d had a sister. I would no longer be able to deal with things alone.

  The thought gripped my throat, suffocating me. I needed air. Out in the garden, I stood beneath the damson tree, staring upwards through the thin boughs at the cold moon.

  I remembered the day Gabriella disappeared. The loneliness, the desolation; how I’d made up stories in my mind to explain where she’d gone. I’d refused to believe her absence was absolute until I’d finally given in and accepted what everyone else had seen as inevitable. What choice had I had? I’d needed to get on with my future and put that other life behind me. Although I hadn’t done that, had I? I’d only hidden the grief inside myself. And now perhaps this was the closest I could ever be to Gabriella, beneath the tree where we’d gathered fruit, feeling her breath in the wind.

  20

  1982

  On Sunday, DC Sayers arrived alone. He was younger than my policeman with slick black hair, and a sharp, clean-shaven chin. ‘Start from the beginning,’ he told me, crossing his legs and leafing through a file. ‘Take your time.’

  We went over Gabriella’s movements, talking on and on until my mind was spinning. I tripped over thoughts and forgot details, until again it felt like I was supposed to know; that I held the answer to where Gabriella had gone.

  DC Sayers paused, licked his finger with the tip of his tongue and turned the pages in the file back to the start. ‘Tom,’ he said. ‘You saw Tom. Did you speak to him?’ I shook my head. ‘Nothing at all? Did you wave, or call out, anything like that?’

  I screwed up my eyes, trying to remember. ‘She smiled,’ I said at last.

  ‘Smiled?’ he said quickly. ‘Gabriella, you mean?’ I nodded. ‘And did Tom smile back?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Tom never smiles.’

  DC Sayers glanced across at my parents. ‘And when you left him . . . What did he do?’

  I tried to picture what had happened, but I couldn’t recall. Yet this policeman thought it was important what Tom had done. He was relying on me to know and I wasn’t able to tell him. If only I could say we hadn’t met Tom, maybe that would mean Gabriella would still be here.

  ‘Is there anything else you can think of?’ said DC Sayers, sighing a little now. ‘You mentioned a letter, didn’t you? To PC Atkins.’ He paused and tapped small, sharp teeth with his pencil. ‘Can you think of anything we might connect to that? Did you see your sister talking, for example, to a boy or a man you didn’t know?’

  I frowned. My mind was going backwards, ticking off each person I’d seen Gabriella with.

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t see them talking,’ he prompted. ‘Perhaps you only noticed them watching.’ He uncrossed his legs. ‘What I mean is, there might have been someone new around . . . maybe over the last few days . . . or weeks.’ I moved uncomfortably in my seat and he leaned forward. ‘Anna?’

  ‘There’s someone,’ I said quietly.

  ‘A man?’

  I nodded. ‘He lives at Lemon Tree Cottage. He stared at Gabriella, but I’m not sure . . .’ I stopped and glanced at my parents. They were stony-faced, looking back at me.

  DC Sayers squinted and re-crossed his legs. ‘And just to be sure . . . what does this man look like?’

  ‘He wears a hat.’ I looked again at my parents, but still neither of them spoke, and suddenly I wasn’t sure what they wanted me to do. I bowed my head with the despair of it all, and tried to blink away my tears, but they came anyway and rolled steadily down my cheeks. ‘His name’s Edward Lily.’

  There was a chill in the room as if the temperature had suddenly dropped. Dad stood up. ‘Enough,’ he said.

  ‘Is there something you’d like to add, Mr Flores?’ said the policeman, his eyes watchful.

  ‘Annie,’ Dad said, holding out his hand to me. ‘You don’t need to stay.’ He led me to my room. And that was what I wanted, to be alone, to lie on my bed and make Gabriella appear with the force of my imagination. But then I felt worse because Dad kissed my forehead and stroked my hair, and left me alone. And no matter how much I held her in my mind, I couldn’t bring Gabriella back.

  On Monday the search widened, spreading to the woods, but also to people’s gardens and their outhouses: sheds, greenhouses, even chicken coops.

  The men with the tripods were still there, but now they’d been joined by several others, smoking, or with hands in their pockets, talking quietly. Around them, the houses were silent, windows and doors drawn tight, curtains closed, lights off, as if the whole street had calcified like a row of Donald’s fossils.

  The reporters stayed all night – illuminated beneath the street lamp, smoking, their voices filtering through the partly opened window. Sometimes a neighbour confronted them – the man with the new baby. His wife came out once, hair loose around her shoulders, wearing her dressing gown and holding the baby wrapped up in a pink blanket. She yelled about common decency and respect, but all they did was take her photo and call after her as she retreated home.

  The house was different without Gabriella. I lay in bed at night listening to the sighs and mutterings in the pipes and behind the walls. There was an emptiness, a stillness. Gabriella had created sound. I missed her conversation, her funny comments at the breakfast table, the way she needled Mum and wheedled her way around Dad.

  I searched for the letter, but it was nowhere. Had the policemen already discovered it? Wouldn’t they have mentioned it? Asked me if it was the same one? I looked for Gabriella’s Walkman bu
t I couldn’t find that either. She must have taken it to school, hidden in her bag. She would have listened to her favourite songs as she made her way down the streets to meet me. If she’d ever set off to meet me. I lay on her bed, thinking about that, trying to fit into the dent in the mattress, in exactly the same way she’d done, and I played her records, softly, so that Mum wouldn’t hear, and tried to fill the silence Gabriella left inside my head.

  One week after Gabriella had disappeared, and the search had dwindled, I found a newspaper abandoned on the kitchen table. A picture of Gabriella appeared on the front page, a school photo taken last year. I traced her face, my breath coming in shallow leaps. There was a photo of Tom too, without his cart, and another of Mrs Ellis with a scarf wrapped around her throat.

  Mrs Ellis was a witness. She’d been in the street at five o’clock on the day Gabriella had disappeared. She’d been waiting for her daughter to come home after a late lesson at school. And while she’d been standing outside her house, she’d seen Tom and Gabriella talking. ‘I didn’t think anything of it at the time,’ she said in the interview. And now Tom was under suspicion.

  I threw down the paper. This was all wrong. I’d seen Tom push his cart onto the road to avoid a snail and cry when he scooped up a flattened hedgehog. I’d seen him stand still for ten minutes listening to a blackbird song. Tom would never hurt Gabriella. He’d never hurt anyone.

  Over the next few days, I pieced together as much information as I could. I listened outside doors as the police reported to my parents, and read the newspapers I found stuffed down the side of the sofa, or hidden inside drawers.

  Tom had admitted to seeing Gabriella on Acer Street at around five o’clock. She’d been alone at the time. He thought she’d said hello to him, but he really wasn’t sure. He thought Gabriella had been with a friend after all, a girl of the same age, or it might have been a man, he really didn’t know. He was confused. He often forgot things. Once he forgot his way home. His mother had called the police and they found him wandering in the woods. Another time he forgot his cart, left it by the side of the road. Someone stole it and took it on a joyride. It turned up in the lake. All those old stories were written in the papers.

  Things changed again. Mr Sullivan, eighty-five, a well-known resident of the village (having lived in the house next door to Tom his whole life), and a regular member of the church, came forward. Well respected, always trusted, he was only a little forgetful which was why he hadn’t been to the police before. Now he recalled that on the day Gabriella had disappeared, he’d been on his way to the chemist. He’d met Tom on the High Street soon after Mrs Ellis had seen him near her house. It meant Tom wouldn’t have had time to do anything to Gabriella (not that I’d ever believed he had). Not only that, but Mrs Ellis added to her statement too, suddenly remembering seeing Tom leaving Gabriella and continuing on his way.

  PC Atkins explained the story. He said there were too many unreliable witnesses. Too many contradictory sightings and times. And no evidence against Tom. Not a trace of human blood, or spit, or semen, or any other body fluid found anywhere near him or his cart, only a spot of rat’s piss on the bristles of his broom. That was what was said, more or less.

  And now Tom was no longer a suspect.

  Nobody was. Not even Edward Lily. And I didn’t know why. DC Sayers had been curious enough about him. Why hadn’t he been mentioned again?

  21

  I called David the next morning. ‘It’s me,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’ He spoke above the engine of his van.

  ‘Anna.’

  ‘Wait.’ He cursed in the background before his voice came back. ‘Anna. I can’t speak for long. Are you still there? What is it? What’s wrong?’

  My resolve crumbled. I’d wanted to tell David about the portrait, but I had no idea where to start.

  He was cursing again. ‘There’s a tunnel coming up. Listen. I’m on my way to Yorkshire. A one-off job. I’ll be back late tonight. Can I call you then?’ The phone went dead. I felt stupidly disappointed and then immediately relieved. It would be ridiculous to confide in a man I’d only just met.

  What should I do? Call the police? The portrait had to be grounds for suspicion. But would it be enough to open an investigation that was thirty years old? I thought of Rita. If anyone would know what to do, it would be her. She was full of ideas and advice. Yesterday, I’d been too shocked to speak to her about the portrait, but now that I was thinking more clearly, it seemed obvious that she should be the one I told.

  I took my bag with the portrait tucked inside, slipped on my jacket and DMs and opened the front door. It was cold and a fine rain was already falling. I grabbed an old-fashioned stick umbrella from the hall and stepped outside. A figure was standing opposite, on the other side of the road. Not again. Bloody Martha. What the hell was she doing here? Anyone would think she was waiting for me the way she was watching. She wore her raincoat, but she had no hood and even though the rain was coming harder, she didn’t seem to care.

  For a moment I was transported back in time. The two of us standing across from one another in the street. Martha had been crying. What had she said? Something about biscuits. That was it. It was a bizarre memory. I tried filling it in with a background, but all I saw was a crowd of people. Had it been the day of the reconstruction? I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to think about that now. I didn’t want to speak to Martha. I slipped back inside the house and closed the door behind me.

  If it hadn’t been so early, I’d have drunk a bottle of wine. Besides, I hadn’t eaten. I pulled out a frying pan and a box of eggs and set to making an omelette. While I was busy, there was a knock at the door. If it was Martha, I didn’t want to know. I carried on making my food, whisking the eggs, heating up the oil. There was another knock, louder this time. And still I ignored whoever was there.

  Sitting down to eat, I found I had no appetite. I shoved the plate to one side and made coffee instead. While it was brewing, the letter box clattered and I made my way stealthily out into the hall. No one was hovering at the door. There were only a couple of letters on the mat. Two more cards from people I didn’t know, sending their condolences.

  Taking them to the living room, I placed them on the mantelpiece. My eyes rested on the envelopes containing the certificates. I should file them before they got lost. Pulling them out, I scanned Dad’s birth and death certificates. There was nothing I didn’t know – parents’ names, place and date of birth, cause of death. I took a moment to remember the day of his funeral. Images trekked through my mind, snapshots of Uncle Thomas and Donald dressed in black, my pale-faced, fragile mother, a fraction of who she’d been. And me, twelve years old, uncertain and small, perched on a pew that smelled of polish, staring through the lattice of my fingers at the pale coffin as people around me prayed for my father’s soul and Gabriella’s words sounded again in my ears. What’s the point of praying when God doesn’t reply?

  Where were the original certificates? Taking a look around the room, cluttered still with the junk I’d pulled out from shelves and cupboards, I guessed they’d be here somewhere. Eventually they’d turn up. I’d been too impatient to wait.

  I examined the wedding certificate. Groom: Albert Flores. Bride: Esther Button. The witnesses, the name of the church, the addresses. And the date: October 1966. I paused.

  The story, the one recited over and over again by Grandma Grace. It was the romance of the year, so she’d said. The summer storm, my father summoned to clear the garden. Love at first sight. The wedding had taken place six weeks after. I’d known the story nearly off by heart, but I hadn’t known the date. Not the day or the month. Only the year. I thought about that now. Had my parents celebrated their anniversary? If they had I could hardly recall. Perhaps they’d played it down, made their celebrations private, not wanted to draw attention.

  A cold sensation began its slow ascent. Icy fingers nudging at my spine. Fact: October 1966. The date was solid, written out in front of me. Yet
Gabriella’s birthday was March 1967. I could hardly forget that. Fifteen years of birthdays: cine film of cakes and candles, piles of presents, chubby faces changing as we grew. Thirty more years of imagining how each birthday would have been – how Gabriella’s face and body would have altered; who she would have shared the celebrations with; what gifts I would have bought her.

  Clumsily I counted, my mind frozen up with thoughts. Mum must have been several months pregnant when she married. And yet she’d only known Dad six weeks. It had been a romance as wild and fast as the storm that had got them together – that was what Grandma Grace had always said. And I was sure Gabriella hadn’t been premature. Everyone had said how lovely she was, everything just right.

  My mother must have been pregnant before she met my father. The thought occurred to me before I could stop it, a jolt of an idea that I let settle inside my brain. I considered other more rational alternatives. But the only explanation was that Grandma Grace had been confused. My parents’ courtship had been longer than six weeks. Six months maybe. Perhaps the storm had been in the spring, not the summer. They’d got married because my mother was pregnant. That was it. The whirlwind was more like shotgun. Grandma Grace’s memory was wrong. Or else she’d lied. But why would she have done that? And whatever the case, whether it had been the ramblings of an old woman or deliberate deceit, surely somebody would have pointed it out. No one had ever said that the storm hadn’t been in the summer. Or that the six-week romance was wrong.

  Gripping the certificate, I climbed up the stairs, mouth dry, mind reeling as I stopped outside Gabriella’s room. I didn’t want to think about this anymore. I wanted to rewind each new theory. Yet that initial explanation remained. ‘My dad was not my sister’s father.’ I said the sentence out loud. Twice. Three times. Louder each time, listening to the ring each word made in the silence of the house, hoping to hear the hollowness of a lie, but hearing only the ring of certainty.