What She Left

by Rosie Fiore

  Marc gave it a go, I’ll give him that. He was at the birth and seemed besotted. He took literally hundreds of pictures of Frances in her first days of life. But he wasn’t cut out for domesticity, or Rhyme Time at the local library. He started doing karaoke gigs again when Frances was about three months old and he was coming home later and later. I put up with it. I mean, how could I not? I wasn’t earning and I was living for free in the house for which Marc was paying the mortgage.

  But then things took a turn for the worse. His behaviour became more erratic. It took me ages to work out that the ‘hangovers’ that made his temper so foul were comedowns from all the coke he was doing. He got fewer karaoke gigs but stayed out in the evenings just as much, if not more. It was almost a relief the first time he didn’t come home at all – it gave me licence to start the shouting row that had been brewing for months.

  He left after that, but he continued paying the bills, at least for a while. And then I got a polite call from the bank to say a mortgage payment had been missed. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I took a deep breath, borrowed money from my mum, put six-month-old Frances into day care and took a job running an upmarket coffee shop, so at least I was working reasonable daytime hours. We got by. I tried my best to keep Marc in Frances’ life, making sure he saw her every weekend, but he was so unreliable. By the time she was two, whenever I said, ‘Daddy’s coming today,’ she’d go still and make her face expressionless. She’d already learned to manage her disappointment. When my mum, who’d been a teacher, retired, she moved in with Frances and me, and her pension helped with the mortgage. Having her there also meant I could go back to my old job, managing the pub, which paid better.

  Then Marc took off for Florida – ‘to get my head straight,’ he said – and disappeared from our lives completely. We had four good, peaceful years in our all-female household and our future looked assured and predictable.

  He came back one spring day, just turned up on the doorstep, hair cut short, wearing a beautiful bespoke suit. There was a tale of a stint in rehab, a start-up business that had taken off, a fortune made. He wanted to make everything all right with us. At first I did my best to keep him at arm’s length. I tried to stop him turning up every day with expensive presents for Frances. I would have stopped him paying off the mortgage if I’d known he was going to do it, but he just went to the bank and wiped out the balance. He felt it gave him the right to be in the house, and, yes, legally, it did.

  Gradually, unsurprisingly, he chipped away at my resistance too, making a huge effort with Frances and with my mum (who, by the way, was never fooled, not for an instant). And inevitably eventually I let my guard down, I let him in and before I knew it, I was up the duff again and Jonah came along. He was a colicky screamer. Ding-ding, round two: late nights, unpredictable behaviour, grumpy Marc. And then he was gone. Eight months ago now. I’m back at the old pub, working four evenings a week, while Mum looks after the kids and Marc is living in Florida. So yes, I know all about mercurial people who continually let you down and never do what they say they’ll do.

  But that was never Helen. If Helen mentioned in passing that she’d lend you a book, she’d be there at the school gate the next day with the book in a plastic bag. She was the anti-Marc – never late, always predictable in her moods, always where she said she’d be. Until now.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sam

  The day after Helen went missing, the girls and I didn’t leave the house. We stayed inside and I answered phone calls and watched the social media storm as my post was shared and reshared. None of the messages contained any real clues. I did my best to read them all, but I knew the police were watching them too. PC Shah had been snippy with me about launching my own social media campaign. ‘We prefer to partner with one of the recognized missing persons’ charities,’ she said. But when she saw how many responses there were, she nodded, and said, ‘Well, we’ll see how this plays out.’

  There were a few approaches from news organizations. The police told me to direct all enquiries to them. Nevertheless, at about 10 a.m. I answered the door to a fast-talking reporter who tried to inveigle his way into the house. I said a few polite nothings, gave them PC Shah’s name and then retreated before they could ask anything else. I registered the flash of a camera, so I knew they’d have snaps of me looking dishevelled and shocked. After that, I always checked cautiously out of the living-room window first. I did open the door to the succession of ladies from the school bearing meals and managed to get rid of all but the most persistent by saying the kids needed me. After one particularly tenacious mum kept talking, I instructed Miranda to call me loudly if I spent too much time on the doorstep. That worked well.

  I wouldn’t have answered it at all, but my parents were on their way. They had been away on holiday in Cornwall but had set off back to London as soon as I called them in the morning. My dad never exceeded the speed limit, so I knew it would take them a good seven hours, and I counted the minutes until they arrived.

  My mum and dad. There are no words for how grateful I am to them. I was a horrible teenager – sullen, rebellious, stupid and ungrateful. But through those years these two dear people, Alan and Rosamond, held steady, loved me, didn’t alienate me, and waited. They waited for me to grow into the man they hoped I’d be. And against all odds, I sort of did, largely though the patience, love and firm hand of Leonora. She’d been raised to have great respect for the older generation and she adored my parents as soon as she met them. If I was ever short-tempered with them, or rude or unreliable, her shock and disappointment in me brought me up short. When I saw myself through her eyes, acting like an immature brat, I was disappointed in myself too. And of course when Miranda and Marguerite came along and it dawned on me that the all-consuming, heart-crushing love I felt for my daughters was the same love Alan and Rosamond had, in their mild way, felt for me, I was doubly chastened. As I reached my thirties, our relationship deepened and improved. Although, to be honest, I think moving away from them and seeing them less often helped keep our relationship cordial and close.

  And then Leonora died, and they turned into a pair of bona fide saints and heroes.

  ‘Just come home,’ my mum said when I rang her, weeping with pain and fear as I realized the depths of the practical and financial horror I faced.

  ‘Come home,’ said Dad. ‘We can work it all out together.’

  And we did. They got their financial advisor to help me sort out the knotty mess of Leonora’s estate (unsurprisingly, she had died without leaving a will), and Mum looked after the girls, allowing me time to search for work and also to fall apart and grieve for my wife.

  And here they were, flying in to rescue me again. I was watching out of the window when Dad’s Vauxhall Astra pulled slowly into our road. Dad parked with his usual painstaking care, and I watched them get out of the car. I know they were stiff from the long drive from Cornwall, but it was painful to see how slowly they moved, Mum putting her hand in the crook of Dad’s arm as they walked up the path. I saw them glance at one another and take a deep breath before they rang the doorbell. How hard it must be for them, I thought. Your kids are supposed to grow up and be independent and ultimately look after you.

  By the time I opened the door, they had their kind faces plastered on.

  ‘My poor darling,’ said Mum, and gave me a hug, offering me her soft cheek to kiss. Then she slipped past me and called out for the girls. Within seconds I could hear all three of them chattering away happily in the kitchen. Marguerite and Miranda had been creeping around me in silence and I think being able to talk freely to Granny was a big relief.

  My dad was all practical. He wanted to know what I knew, what the police knew, what the police had done. ‘Are they doing their best to trace her?’ he asked. ‘Are they really? I mean, there’s stuff in the paper, I know, but what about search parties? Dogs? Have they got all the available men out looking for her?’

  ‘They’ve been good, Dad,’ I s
aid. ‘I know they’re making door-to-door enquiries, they’re checking CCTV on the high street and at all the stations, and they’re monitoring her mobile phone and banking so if she or. . . anyone. . . withdraws money from her account or uses her phone, they’ll be able to track them.’

  ‘And so far?’

  ‘So far nothing,’ I admitted. ‘But they’re working on it. They’re putting me in contact with Missing People, that’s the charity that helps people. . . people like me. And hopefully they may have other ways of tracking her.’

  ‘It makes no sense,’ said Dad. ‘Helen. I mean. . . Helen.’ He had nothing further to say. He gave me a pat on the shoulder and together we went out to the car to bring in their bags.

  Even though they live only a few miles away, we’d agreed that in the short term it would be a help if they stayed with the girls and me in the house. We were well over twenty-four hours past the last definite sighting of Helen, and while in the beginning I’d been certain, almost cocky, that there would be a simple explanation and a quick and easy resolution, the bubble of dread in me was growing into a cloud of deep blackness. I was sure that the next knock at the door would be the police and the news would be dreadful, final and life-altering.

  Dad and I went into the kitchen, where Mum had already done all the washing up and had got a pot of tea brewing. The girls were sitting at the table, doing a jigsaw puzzle I had never seen before. The picture on the box looked like some kind of Cornish fishing village, so I guessed Mum had produced it out of her capacious handbag. I sat down at the table beside Marguerite and absent-mindedly began sifting through the pieces looking for edges. Mum, passing behind me, gave my shoulder a squeeze.

  ‘I’ll remake the bed in our room,’ I said, looking up, ‘and you and Dad can be in there.’ I couldn’t imagine sleeping in that bed without Helen, so being able to give it up for Mum and Dad was a relief.

  ‘Are you sure, darling?’

  ‘Of course. I can put a futon in one of the girls’ rooms, or downstairs, for me.’

  ‘And where are you going to put Tim?’

  ‘Tim?’ I said stupidly. But I should have known.

  ‘He’s got to work lunchtime, but he’s coming up straight after,’ said Mum. ‘You didn’t think he wouldn’t come, did you?’

  My younger brother Tim is a chef, a single guy with no children. He runs the kitchen in a classy bistro in Bristol. Although we were close as kids, I hadn’t seen him much of late. This was partly because he worked such punishing hours, and lived two hours away, but also because he and Helen had never got on. I’d never understood it – it was a chemistry thing. Helen usually got on with everyone, and Tim was irresistible to almost all women. But somehow they rubbed each other up the wrong way.

  Tim would come into a room, smiling his roguish smile, dispensing charm and witty comments and winning over men and women alike, and Helen, uncharacteristically, would get thin-lipped and leave. She said he was a hipster and a dilettante. She found his piercings and tattoos and his long curly hair unbearable. I never understood why, because she wasn’t judgemental about people usually. Although Tim never said so, I think he probably thought Helen was uptight and humourless. He tried his best with her, but after a while he appeared resigned to the fact that family occasions would always be something of a strain, and he came to see us less and less. The two of them could manage to be perfectly civil for birthdays and Christmas and Easter, but that was about it. If he was in town, he’d come and meet me at my office and we’d go out for drinks and dinner, just the two of us.

  Hearing Tim was coming gave me the familiar grip of tension I got whenever he came over, knowing that it would put Helen in a bad mood. But, of course, Helen wasn’t there. And having my kid brother, whose sunny nature and easy warmth always made me feel better, would be a wonderful thing.

  In the course of the afternoon, PC Shah came by.

  ‘We’ve made contact with the people in your office,’ she said carefully, ‘and we’ve had colleagues look at the CCTV and transaction records in Manchester Piccadilly. It seems you were exactly where you said you were.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ I said, ‘I know you had to do that. I hope now you can put all your resources into finding Helen.’

  She nodded and set about filling me in on what they had discovered, which, essentially, was nothing. There had been no blip from Helen’s mobile phone and no transaction on any of her or our bank accounts. That scared me, because Helen used her contactless card for even the smallest purchases.

  I reasoned that if Helen was out there, and in control of her own life, she’d leave a trail as clear as a path of light. She usually used her debit card as a travelcard on the Tube too, so there’d be a record of her movements, of food bought and accommodation. She also used her phone constantly – texting, ringing people, searching for stuff on the net. But there was nothing. Not a blip, not a sighting on any CCTV camera between us and the station, nor in the station itself. It was now clear she had not headed for the Tube as we initially assumed.

  ‘Have you been looking for suspicious people? Anyone exhibiting odd behaviour? Strangers in the area?’ I asked PC Shah.

  ‘We’re pursuing a number of lines of enquiry,’ she said carefully.

  I wanted to scream. I knew she had to give me the official story. Even though my own alibi was watertight, the jury was still out on whether I was involved in Helen’s disappearance. The notion that I might have organized a ‘hit’, got someone to do her a mischief. . . it seemed implausible and absurd to me, but a small, rational part of my mind knew that to the police it remained the most likely explanation. Middle-class, stable, married women don’t just walk out of their houses and disappear into thin air. And the homicidal stranger is a lot rarer than people might imagine.

  After PC Shah left, promising again and again to phone me the moment ‘anything changed’ (I tried not to think about what that might mean), we all stayed holed up in the house, fielding sympathetic calls – Dad was particularly good at shielding me from those. Mum organized a series of activities for the girls, but I could see they were getting cabin fever, so I suggested she take them out to the park for a run around. It was a relief to wave them goodbye and stop having to smile and make conversation. I felt tired to my bones. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep, it was the grinding fear, the impotence, my anger at my own sheer uselessness. I lay down on the sofa and closed my eyes and within seconds fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  It seemed like minutes later that I was wrenched awake by the front door slamming. I heard feet pounding up the stairs and my mum’s voice calling Miranda’s name in a rise-and-fall song of despair. I struggled into a sitting position and glanced at the clock. It was indeed just fifteen minutes since they had left. As I rubbed my face blearily, Mum came into the living room, her shoulders slumped, with Marguerite by her side, clutching her hand. Marguerite’s eyes were wide and serious.

  ‘What happened?’ said Dad, coming into the living room, wiping his hand on a dish towel.

  ‘Oh,’ said Mum faintly. ‘Well, maybe the park wasn’t such a good idea.’

  ‘Why? What was in the park?’

  ‘Dogs,’ said Marguerite in an awed whisper. ‘Big dogs. And police.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Mum. ‘I somehow didn’t expect that.’

  The police must have come to the same conclusion that I had, that Helen had to be close to home, and had therefore redoubled their local search.

  ‘And pictures of Mummy,’ said Marguerite suddenly, brandishing something crumpled in her fist. It was an A5 leaflet, with the picture of Helen in the blue dress, a description of her disappearance and all the contact details of the Missing People organization.

  ‘Posters on every tree,’ said Mum, ‘and heaps of these leaflets everywhere.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t. How could you?’

  ‘What’s up with Miranda?’

  ‘She wa
s very upset. She ran practically all the way home. She didn’t want to talk to me at all.’ Mum looked distressed.

  ‘I’ll go up and see her,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll get dinner on,’ said Mum. ‘Marguerite, are you any good at washing potatoes? Come on.’

  Miranda had gone into my room and got my iPad and was sprawled on her bed, watching something on Netflix. She looked up defiantly, ready to challenge me if I chastised her for this flagrant flouting of the rules. I decided to let it go and sat down on the bed beside her.

  ‘Hey, Randa,’ I said quietly. ‘Not so good in the park, I believe.’

  She didn’t say anything. She continued to stare fixedly at the screen.

  ‘I know it must be hard to see,’ I said as carefully as I could, ‘but the police are doing what they can to find Helen. The posters and things might help to jog someone’s memory, if they were in the park. . .’

  ‘I know,’ she said dully and turned slightly away from me. She was clearly desperate for me to go.

  I persisted. ‘I know this is difficult, my love. I know you must be worried and scared. The police are doing everything they can to find Helen and make sure she’s safe and well. . .’

  ‘It’s embarrassing!’ she burst out.

  ‘I. . . what?’

  ‘It’s so embarrassing. All this fuss, and Helen’s face on every tree. When I go back to school, everyone’s going to stare and whisper and feel sorry for me. . .’

  It took all my strength not to explode at her. Instead, I said quietly, ‘Helen is missing, God knows where, and God knows what has happened to her, and you’re worried about being embarrassed?’

  Miranda stared at me for a long moment. She didn’t drop her gaze. She was unbowed, still defiant.

  ‘I just want things to be normal,’ she said and then turned back to her screen.

  Downstairs, Mum had begun peeling potatoes to make dinner, and Dad and Marguerite were snuggled together in front of the television. I had nothing to do, and no way to vent my fury, so I began loading the dishwasher, banging in cups and plates and jangling cutlery. Mum winced at the noise but let me get on with it.