by Darren Young
She reached down and took her phone from the pocket of her hooded top, switching the torch on. When she lifted her arm into the loft opening, it illuminated the cavernous space, and it looked empty and untouched.
But someone had opened the hatch and placed a cardboard box inside, just a few inches from the hatch door. She held the torch up a little and saw it in the brightness: a box slightly taller and wider than a shoebox and full of files and paperwork; exactly as she remembered it.
Danni slid her other hand into the space and pulled the corner of the box to her, toppling a fraction and having to drop her phone on to the carpet below so she could use her other hand to regain her balance by gripping the edge of the opening. Then she carefully slid the box forward and, using both hands, lifted it out through the hatch.
It was heavier than she’d expected.
She held the box with both hands and lowered herself to the ground, and then put it down on the carpet and began search ing through the files and papers, quickly skim-reading each one to ascertain its relevance to her and then moving on, making sure to keep them in the same order as she found them.
The exercise began to eat up time, and the majority of the contents were of no real interest, mainly documents from the old house and some solicitors’ and estate agency letters about the apartment. By the time she was three-quarters of the way through it, she checked her phone and saw it was getting close to ten o’clock. This still gave her plenty of time, but she quickened her search all the same and began to listen out for any sounds outside, just in case.
As she reached the last file in the box she began to get disheartened. She had seen nothing that told her anything useful, and there was certainly no birth certificate or important documents; she couldn’t understand why her father had made such an effort to put the box out of sight. She thumbed through the pages of the file – the results of a conveyancing survey done on the family house and a list of items that came with the apartment – and then slid it back into the bottom of the box.
Except it wasn’t the bottom. There was a piece of cardboard – it looked as though it was made from the box lid – at what looked like the bottom, but a fraction higher than it should be, and balanced on something. Danni carefully lifted the corner and, as she moved it upwards, so she saw an envelope underneath.
Her heart began to thump.
The envelope was brown and had her father’s handwriting on the front. P. Edwards – Hospital.
Her fingers were trembling a little as she opened the already broken seal of the envelope and slipped out the contents: five folded pieces of paper. They were letters, all addressed to her mother.
She began to read them.
As Danni finished each one she placed it back on to the pile. There was nothing of particular interest on the first two pages, just medical notes and key information on blood group and allergies. The third page was a photocopy of a letter from her own GP. The fourth was a prescription for some tablets.
She picked up the final letter and skim-read it, already resigned to its containing similar information. But then she got to the second paragraph and everything changed in an instant.
Her stomach felt as if it had tied itself into a knot, and she had to swallow hard to stop herself being sick.
She read it again and it said the same thing; she hadn’t misread it. Her heart beat so quickly, she felt as if she needed to press on her chest to stop it jumping from out from her body.
Then she was aware of noise – voices, she thought, coming from outside – and she put the letters back the way she had found them and crawled on her knees to the window. Her father’s car was on the road outside the gates and he was engaged in a conversation with an elderly woman who lived opposite.
Danni gasped. Another hour had passed, and he was back early too. She quickly pushed the envelope back into its hiding place, gathered the rest of the files and papers into a pile, and put them back into the box as quickly as she could.
She looked again through the bottom corner of the window and they were still talking.
She climbed on the stool, holding the box carefully and lifted it above her head, straining until it reached the mouth of the opening and she was able to rest it on the edge, gather her strength and then push it inside fully. She didn’t have time to reset it exactly where it had been; it would just have to be close enough.
Her father was still talking as she pulled the loft cover back across the hatch and positioned it correctly. The join might be slightly more prominent now – she couldn’t say for sure – but again there was no time to worry about it. She jumped down from the stool and hurriedly carried it back into the kitchen.
She heard the clanking of iron gates and looked out again to see her father opening them so she scanned the room for leftover clues. There were four faint indentations in the carpet where the stool had been below the loft hatch, and she quickly ran her hands over them to make them go away as best she could.
There was a loud crunch of tyres moving across gravel.
Danni tiptoed to the alarm and took a final look around. Everything looked as it was when she got there. She entered the code into the alarm box and it began to beep at the same time as she heard the gates on the drive close.
As the alarm set itself, she stepped out of the door, closed it and carefully locked it with the key. There were footsteps on the gravel, getting louder and closer, so she picked up her running shoes, quietly skipped down the steps and hid to the side of the property, out of sight. A few seconds later, her father came around the corner and walked up the same steps to his front door, but thankfully not before the alarm had set and stopped beeping.
Danni took in oxygen for what felt like the first time in minutes and bent over, her hands on her thighs, as she caught her breath. She heard her father’s keys rattle as he took them from his blazer pocket and opened the door.
‘Damn!’ she heard him curse. He was coming back down the steps.
Danni stayed where she was but held her breath and waited. He walked back to the car; he must have forgotten something, she thought, so she took the opportunity to run up the steps at the back, on to the decking area and put on her shoes, quickly sweeping the sand off the wood with her hand. She put the key back into the plant pot, placed the stone on top and skipped down the steps two at a time until she was back on the beach; and then she pulled her hood up and began jogging: just another fitness fanatic out for their morning run on a beach that, at that time of year, only they and dog walkers used.
She stepped up her pace a little until she was out of sight of the apartment and then slowed back to a jog. She kept going, her breathing shallow and uneven, until she reached the rocks at the far end of the sand, and stood leaning against them to rest, one hand on her hips and sweat running down her face.
She took a huge deep lungful of cold air.
Then she threw up.
Part Six
Fifteen years after she was taken…
Where did those years go?
Back then, when they called off the search, I knew that we were as good as in the clear. As far as 99.9 per cent of people were concerned, the missing girl was a drowned girl, just one they couldn’t find a body for. And people, especially police forces with their resources cut to the bone, don’t keep on looking for dead people.
The only problem I foresaw was when that girl reached adult hood. That was when we would have no control; when someone might say something that sparked off curiosity, and we wouldn’t know until it was too late.
But it seemed such a long way off. I thought we’d cross that bridge when we got to it.
It’s hard to say exactly when we stopped feeling like abductors and turned into parents, but it was around the time that they officially stopped searching for her.
We watched. Watched as her mother was put into that place, watched as her father drank himself to death. Watched as the world forgot all about the missing child and let us breathe normally again.
&nbs
p; Years passed. We just didn’t notice.
And she grew. In every way possible. She became tall, confident and clever. She became her own person right before our eyes and we watched, as proud as any parent would be.
Then one day, you wake up and it’s her eighteenth birthday and she’s not that little girl any more.
She’s not anyone’s little girl any more.
When she walked in on that scorching hot August morning, hiding behind my wife’s legs, and sat eating her ice-cream on the rug, she had her whole childhood ahead of her. This day seemed so far away then.
But time passes. You can’t hold it back. So, of course, the day had to come. She was a grown woman now. Her child hood was just cherished memories, for her and us. She’d lived it and left it behind. No more piggybacks, no more reading her stories or having her read them to me. No more picking her up when she fell and putting a plaster on her knee. No school, no homework, parents’ evenings. No more Daddy. Which, bizarrely, in the circumstances, was the one thing I missed more than the others.
No more watching for her to arrive home safely, or waiting for a phone call to say she had got to where she was going. No school discos, ballet classes or just ferrying her around.
All of that was behind us now.
She was all grown up, and we’d more or less done our job in helping to shape a young woman who was ready to venture into the world on her own.
My wife had always wanted that unbreakable bond with a daughter, and she had got one, but suddenly it was different. Our child didn’t need us any more. Now she had a choice whether we were in her life or not. She would make her own decisions now. She would continue to grow and learn and ask questions and one day, we knew, she might just ask a question that set off a chain of events that we wouldn’t be able to stop.
After fifteen years, as we stood and watched her blow out the candles on her eighteenth birthday cake and make a silent wish, we knew it would never quite be the same again. We’d got to that bridge.
And it felt as though we had gone back to being abductors.
Unless you’ve had a child taken, you can’t possibly know how it feels.
It’s a crushing, numbing, slow walk along a path that has no obvious start and end, but it’s a path you know you will have to walk until death releases you from your pain.
When it comes, finally, it will be a death by at least a thousand cuts.
Cuts that, on their own, you might withstand and learn to build a defence against, but when they hit you, relentlessly, one after the other like waves, there is no respite.
The newspaper columns, the mentions on the radio, the report of another missing child – they are hard enough. But the people who stop you in the street, with their dumb sympathetic faces and even dumber sympathetic questions … they are harder to bear.
How are you feeling?
I’m not, seeing as you ask. I haven’t felt in a long time.
But you smile and say it gets easier – not because it does, but because it’s simpler.
The real cuts are on those significant days of the year that carry only painful reminders of what you no longer have.
Christmas is bad. I stopped celebrating it the year Stuart was taken into care and I’ve never so much as eaten turkey in December since. When we had Jess, Todd worried how we’d afford to buy presents for both kids. When she’d gone, I’d have given anything to have to worry about that again.
But, compared to Christmas, birthdays are much, much worse. They don’t just remind you of what you’ve lost, they slap you across the face with it.
The first two or three years I tried to use her birthday as a positive: a way of reminding people about her, raising public awareness and trying to drum up more support for the campaigns.
But one day I realised I was the only one who still believed she was alive.
The next few years, I blotted them out altogether with anything I could find to take the hurt away. Alcohol, although it never did it for me the way it did for Todd; and sometimes pills. Some of those birthdays I slept right through. When I was put in this place, it helped; it’s easier to lose days in here. Maybe it’s the absence of clocks and calendars that makes time and dates seem less important.
From her eleventh birthday, I tried something new. I allowed myself to spend that one special day with her. I pictured what she looked like, what she was doing with her life. I created a little story in my head and kept it there for the whole day, imagining what the last twelve months had thrown her way and how she’d handled it.
A year in the life of Jessica Preston.
It became a slightly happier day after that.
But then, as one particular birthday approached, I realised she was going to be eighteen and it knocked me for six. I couldn’t bring myself to picture her, or think about what she was doing that day. I just stayed in my room and cried and cried and cried some more.
My little girl. My Jessica. She’s not my little girl any more.
She’s no one’s little girl any more.
And, that day, it slowly occurred to me that I would never see her as a child again.
Wherever she is and whatever she is doing in her life, she’ll be doing it as a woman from now on.
My missing child will forever be a missing child.
That day, it was all I could do to stop myself taking that slow journey to death a little sooner.
55 | Laura
‘Are you sure?’
It was the kind of question people would ask when they heard something they couldn’t quite believe, even though they knew there was no possibility of any doubt.
Not with something so important.
Laura was standing outside the Gazette‘s offices listening to Danni talk as best she could between heavy breaths.
‘There was a letter from the hospital.’
More gasps for air.
‘It said she had a hysterectomy in 1989 … ’
Breathe.
‘ … which was three years before I was born.’
Laura blew out her cheeks. She’d never taken any interest in her father’s occupation, in the medical world – but she knew what this meant.
‘Where are you now?’
‘Still by the beach,’ Danni gasped. ‘I rang you straight away.’
‘And there’s no way your father will know you were there?’
‘I don’t think so, but I had to get out fast.’
‘OK.’ Laura thought quickly. ‘Can you get back to Sam’s?’ she asked.
Laura could hear Danni coughing. ‘Danni?’
‘I think I’m gonna—’
There was the sound of the phone being put down and Danni retching. Laura waited until she came back on the line.
‘Sorry.’
Laura knew Danni was in shock. ‘You knew they were hiding something,’ she said.
‘Not this! I thought Sam might be right in the end.’
‘Sam?’
‘She reckoned you might be full of shit. No offence.’
Laura sniffed.
‘But it looks like it’s you that’s right.’
Laura cautioned her on getting too far ahead of herself. The letter confirmed there was a big secret but they still had a long way to go. ‘It explains your dad’s behaviour, though, and what you overheard.’
‘I knew he was lying,’ said Danni, not even trying to hide the bitterness.
‘And what your mum said. It explains some of that too.’
‘I don’t think I can call her Mum any more.’
‘At least you know. If nothing else, you don’t have to listen to any more lies.’
Two of the Gazette‘s staff came through the revolving doors, and she lowered her voice and smiled at them as they walked past her.
‘I want to confront him.’
Laura checked the time. She needed to get back inside before David missed her, if he hadn’t already.
‘Listen, Danni, you’ve had a huge shock and I know you want answers. I wou
ld too. But please give me a couple of days to get you to Sandra.’
‘Days?’
Laura explained that she needed to make arrangements with High Cliffs and find a way of getting yet another day off. Danni was reluctant but she managed to convince her. ‘OK. You’ve got me this far.’
‘Thank you. And not a word to anyone. Not even Sam.’
Laura knew it was selfish, and a lot to ask, but she was so close now to a story that would not only make her career but probably define it, and it would only take one loose word to the wrong person to ruin everything for her.
They said their goodbyes and she ran inside and back up the stairs. David was sitting in his office and looked over as she reached her desk. She been handed an article to write about the town’s rugby team, who had managed, after a twenty-year battle with the council, to install floodlights on their pitch, only to find themselves in another dispute with locals about how often they could use them; depending on the original planning consent, there was a danger of the club’s being forced to tear them down.
She had already made calls to both the club secretary and the man challenging the consent and quickly established that both were unpleasant people who thought they were right and had no intention of ever backing down. She also knew she didn’t want to spend any time with either of them if at all possible, so she wrote as balanced a piece as she could, given that her research was limited and her mind completely focused on Danni. She even had to check the internet to make sure she had the club’s name right, and correct a dozen other spelling errors, so when she emailed it to David late in the afternoon she knew it was unlikely to make that week’s edition, or even the website, without significant amendments and improvement.
Therefore, it was no surprise that she was called into the editor’s office at the end of the day. What did surprise her was that it was Sue who gave her the tap on the shoulder a minute or so before five o’clock. That kind of summons was usually reserved for people in real trouble, not for a poor article.