by Paula Daly
He shakes his head, looks away. His palms begin to itch.
‘Can I take a look at that?’ He motions to the literature she’s brought with her about the house.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘you don’t have one of these? Sorry, I thought you’d already seen this.’
She moves towards him and lays the brochure open on the worktop. As she gets in close he catches a whiff of her, and his stomach heaves.
The room is warm and, as she leans forward, her jacket is pulled open a little, filling the air with a pungent smell of oniony sweat, fake tan and stale old fag breath.
What the fuck does she think she’s doing getting this near to him?
He shifts slightly. His palms are itching furiously now. It’s a deep, crawling sensation beneath his skin. He tries to step away from her, but she’s oblivious. She’s running her fat index finger, the one with the fleck of polish near the cuticle, along the text. Suddenly she’s talking at break-neck speed about freehold leases and mains water and private drainage. His head is scrambled and he can barely breathe because this disgusting woman is taking up all the oxygen.
He swallows. ‘Please move away from me.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Move away.’
Affronted, she does as he asks.
‘Is something wrong? I can assure you this house is priced very competitively, if you look at other lakeshore properties you’ll find very little difference between—’
He’s holding up his hand, signalling for her to stop. He closes his eyes and takes one long, slow breath. ‘Thank you,’ he says, ‘but I’m finished here,’ and begins making for the door. Before he reaches it, though, she speaks, and what she says makes him pause.
‘You can’t afford this house.’
He turns, tries to make sense of what she’s saying.
She continues: ‘You’ve wasted my time. Jesus! It’s not like I’ve not got enough to do.’ She clenches her jaw and looks him up and down, disdainfully.
Which sadly leaves him no alternative.
He walks towards her and, pulling back his arm, he forms a fist. It gives him no pleasure at all to do this; he’s not a natural when it comes to violence, but when he hits her square in the face, the force knocks her to the floor three feet away from where she was standing. She comes to rest by the American fridge.
She’s too stunned to make a sound and perhaps she couldn’t even if she wanted to, because her nose has exploded across her face. Her grotesque mouth is now so full of blood it’s possible she’ll drown in her own juices.
She lifts her hands to her face in horror, gagging on the secretions in her throat.
He shakes his head. ‘You are not the right person for this job,’ he says resignedly, and walks out, his bloodied hand thrust deep inside his jacket pocket.
10
I LOOK AT MY WATCH. It’s only twelve twenty. I feel like I’ve lived five lifetimes already this morning. Joe has gone to join the search. Local residents have arranged three different parties. One in Troutbeck, covering the fields between the school and Kate’s house. This is a few square miles, but they’re using quad bikes, the ones the shepherds use for dealing with sheep high up on the fells. The next search party is covering the school grounds, playing fields and the wooded area that runs down from the school to the shores of Lake Windermere. The last is covering the area between the school and Windermere village itself. Plenty of students walk back to Windermere village after school, calling at Greggs, the Co-op, the library (if they’ve not got Broadband at home). It’s just over a mile, and the thinking is that Lucinda could have headed this way if she had in fact decided to run away.
But I know it’s all fruitless.
Lucinda didn’t bunk off and go into Windermere. Lucinda has been taken to a place and raped. Just like Molly Rigg.
I think of Lucinda, and my insides coil tight. She would never run away and put her parents through this. Not in a million years. Sally often complains that Lucinda can be such a goody-goody. It upsets her, the fact that Lucinda never gets told off, that she never comes to lessons unprepared, that she always wins the prize for neatest uniform.
Lucinda would never leave of her own accord. Never.
Suddenly, I’m filled with a blind panic and a deep need to have my own children right where I can see them. I run downstairs, my heart pounding, frantically searching for my car keys. I need to get my children and have them at home with me. Safe where no one can touch them. Screw school; they should be here.
I toss papers, gloves and hats and unpaid bills from the cabinet by the front door. Eventually I find them in my coat pocket and it’s only when I get outside and see the car’s not there that I realize it’s still outside Sam’s school. From when Joe picked me up earlier this morning.
Temporarily, I’m powerless. I go back inside and call my mother. It’s the only thing I can think to do.
It’s ringing, and she picks up.
There’s a pause as she takes a long deep drag of her cigarette before speaking. ‘Hello?’ she says, then coughs.
‘It’s me.’ As expected, my voice cracks.
She knows what’s happened. It’s a small place, and news travels fast. My mother cleans the NatWest Bank in the morning before it opens and, from there, she goes straight to one of her cash-in-hand jobs. She could clean three houses fewer a week if she didn’t smoke forty fags a day. Her answer to that is that they’re her only pleasure, and without them she can’t open her bowels. So I don’t get on at her too much about it.
I tell my mother about needing to bring the kids home, about being scared someone will steal them and, ‘Lisa,’ she says firmly, ‘leave them children at school. It will do them no good whatsoever being home with you. Not with you in this state. No one’s going to steal them today, anyhow. Not when everyone’s on high alert.’
She’s always been good in a crisis. I suppose because she’s had to, being that we were my dad’s second family, his other family. He lived in Wigton, in the north of the county, and we saw him once every three or four weeks. We lived pretty much in poverty, my mother doing scraps of jobs to make ends meet, my dad providing what little money he had spare. But he had another four kids to support back in Wigton, and there wasn’t much to go around.
The winter was a harsh one, and a group of us kids on the estate had made a sledging run on the pavement outside our house. No one had sledges then, just tea trays and black bags. I can remember one kid bringing a swimming-pool lilo.
We were lining up for our turn on the sledging run when a car crept around the corner. It was a taxi, one of those huge Rovers – a three and a half litre, built like a tank. It pulled up beside us, and a woman got out.
She was well-dressed. Posh. She wore a woollen, camel-coloured coat with a cameo brooch on the lapel, and her hair was pulled neatly into a bun on the top of her head. She carried a patent-leather handbag, a trapezium-shaped thing, the type favoured by Maggie Thatcher and the Queen, and as she cast her eyes over the ragtag and bobtail group in front of her, she shocked us all by saying, ‘Which one of you lot is Harold’s little bastard?’
A few of the older boys sniggered at her use of language. She meant me, of course. I wasn’t exactly sure what ‘bastard’ meant, but I’d been referred to as it before, and knew it wasn’t a good thing.
When no one spoke, she moved among us, picking her way through the snow towards our front door. My mother opened it, and the woman disappeared inside.
Then it started to snow. Big clumps of snow the size of small oranges and, because I was dressed in just a thin anorak, something you’d dress a child in on a rainy day in June, I went in.
The woman was perched on the edge of the sofa in the lounge – the only room besides the bathroom that had any heat – and as I entered she jumped up, clapping her hands together. ‘Lisa! I’m so glad to meet you,’ she sang happily. I looked to my mother for direction but she seemed as baffled by this woman as I was.
‘I’m your daddy’s wife,’ she said,
still smiling. Then, to my mother, ‘We should have some tea, Marion. How about some tea while I give the child her gifts?’
My mother obliged and went out to the kitchen. A moment later I remember hearing the back door slam as she nipped next door to get milk, or sugar, or tea, or cups … whatever it was that we were short of that day. My dad’s wife reached into her handbag and produced two packs of Opal Fruits and a large Mint Aero.
Then, as I sat chewing happily in front of the fire, she reached back into that bag of hers and she whipped out a Stanley knife. She waved it around a couple of times with a flourish, saying, ‘Lisa, I want you to make sure you tell your daddy all about this,’ and I nodded seriously – assuming she meant the sweets, not knowing what the Stanley was for.
Then she did the unthinkable. Carefully, she pushed up each sleeve of her camel coat to the elbow, revealing her milky-skinned arms, and began cutting deep, deep gashes into her wrists.
I was too frightened to move, and by the time my mother came back in to ask how she liked her tea, my father’s wife was slumped on the sofa, her blood pooling upon her knee like a blanket.
‘Go next door,’ was all my mother said, calmly, succinctly. Then she added, as if to no one in particular, ‘I told him this would happen. I knew it would come to this.’
We never saw my father again. Any crisis that came our way, my mother dealt with alone. And she did it in the same way she’s handling me now, in a straightforward manner, no fuss, no drama.
‘What should I do?’ I ask her, my voice hysterical, my head throbbing.
‘About what? I’ve told you to keep the kids at school.’
‘About Kate. I have to do something. I can’t just stay here going crazy.’
‘Joe’s out there searching,’ she says. ‘What else can you do?’
‘I told her I’d find her.’
She takes another long drag. ‘Well, that was a bloody stupid thing to say. What on earth made you promise that?’
‘Because Kate said, “Find her.” What was I supposed to do? Say no?’
‘You’d better make a start, then.’
‘I’ve got no car.’
‘You’ve got legs, haven’t you?’ she says. ‘Use those.’
I set out with the rough notion of heading over to Kate’s side of the valley to do my own search. It’s a bit vague and I’m not holding much hope of finding anything. But like I told my mother, I can’t just sit and do nothing.
It should take around twenty-five minutes to walk across the valley to Kate’s. I’ve got my hiking boots on, because there’s no grip left on my wellies, and I’m wrapped up as thickly as possible while still maintaining the ability to move. If I weren’t feeling totally overwhelmed by what’s facing me at the moment, it would feel strange heading out without the three dogs. As if I were cheating them by going for a walk alone.
I slide a couple of times when I get to the main road. The asphalt is glassy and shining. The sun, so low in the sky, is hitting the ice crystals on the pavement surface, making it glisten. My shadow stretches out before me. I’m around twenty feet tall and my head is the size of a tennis ball.
It was around this time yesterday that Lucinda disappeared, and I find myself wondering if she was dressed for this weather. Most days I have a battle on my hands getting Sally and James to wear coats for school. ‘Nobody wears coats,’ they chime, in the same way James now refuses to wear anything from Gap. ‘Gay and Proud, Mum, that’s what it stands for.’
‘That’s not what it stands for,’ I argue, but by then he’s backing out of the room, my opinion not relevant.
He’s twelve now, but I can fast see the teenager he is about to become. He’s taken to sneaking around the house to avoid conversation. I walk into the kitchen, and I hear his footsteps creep off upstairs. I remember the fear I felt just before his birth, the paralysing certainty that there was no way I could possibly love this second child like I loved Sally. How on earth could I generate that level of love twice? But then there he was. And then there the love was. I didn’t even have to try. Now I endeavour to lay that love on him, but he writhes away. He doesn’t need it right now. Doesn’t need me.
My mind volleys to Lucinda again and I wonder if she left without a coat yesterday. You could not survive a night at these temperatures. Typical Lake District weather is mild, and unless you do something particularly stupid, like go up Great Gable or Scafell wearing flip-flops, you could probably survive a night in the open. You wouldn’t die of exposure.
Not in this weather, though. Not last night.
Suddenly I have an image of Lucinda lying dead against a dry-stone wall, dumped and discarded. Stripped to the waist like that other girl.
But, unlike Molly Rigg, Lucinda is dead. This girl he decided to kill before chucking her out of the car and driving off.
I’m in the shadow of the valley now, making my way up the other side towards Kate and Guy’s house, trying to shake the images from my brain. It’s colder, and even though the day is crisp and bright, it’s dark on this side. Eerie.
My mind’s playing tricks. I keep seeing flashes of colour amid the white. Keep jolting my head around at the sound of the jackdaws in the trees, expecting to see Lucinda up there, smiling and waving.
At the top of the road I turn left and all at once I can hear noise. Commotion, voices. Quickly, I make my way along the road and after the next bend I see what’s causing it.
There are vans. Cars. Newspeople. There are cameras and satellite dishes on the tops of vehicles. The road around Kate’s house is almost blocked.
Jesus Christ, I think, they’ve found her! And I break into a run.
But they’ve not.
They’ve found nothing. Kate and Guy are doing a press conference at the front of the house by the big red door.
Guy is speaking; he’s doing the talking. He’s the one giving out the information, and Kate stands by him, silent. She has that look on her face. Haunted. As if she’s gone missing, too. There’s no life left behind the eyes, no movement, not even a twitch in the muscles of her face. It’s empty.
I hang back so as not to draw attention to myself. Alexa sees me and glares, furious that I’m here.
Guy is talking and talking, but I can’t hear his words. His mouth is moving fast, like he’s giving a running commentary, and he’s gesticulating and pointing down the valley. As if this will somehow give the watching public an idea of where his daughter might be. Then he looks at his wife’s face, and he stops, unable to go on.
It’s the worst thing I’ve ever had to watch.
Worse than watching the vet euthanize an abused dog, because it’s kinder to kill the thing than to keep it alive. Worse than watching my father’s wife slitting her wrists right there in front of me.
There’s nothing as bad as a missing child. Nothing at all.
He drifts along the aisles trying to look as though he’s browsing, like everyone else in here. Killing time in the DIY store. He can’t decide if he would be less conspicuous buying the supplies he needs now, or if he should chance using the hardware shop in Windermere.
Both have drawbacks. Here, it’s the cameras. There, it’s the nosey, chatty staff.
He wouldn’t have this problem in a city. No one gives a shit what you need rolls of polythene for if you live in Newcastle or Liverpool.
He takes a detour outside and makes like he’s comparing the sizes of the bags of ornamental gravel while he decides. He doesn’t want to hang around for too long in one place, because people notice.
And he’s got an admirer.
A sad-looking redhead in a denim jacket and spike-heeled boots keeps following him. So far she’s put caustic soda, mildew remover and a four-pack of decorator’s dust sheets in her trolley. He suspects she needs none of these items and he’s tempted to stay by the gravel a bit longer. Just to see how she fares hauling a 30 kilogram bag of aggregate.
Back inside, he makes the decision to split his shopping trip between two stores. The c
leaning products he’ll get from here, the protective sheeting he’ll get from the builders’ supply yard. He’s just remembered that the staff there couldn’t be less interested in what you’re purchasing.
He runs through the list in his head. Bleach. Cloths. Black bags. Might as well get a mop and bucket to make the job faster.
His wife likes those Vileda mops. Says the floor dries quicker than with the old cloth types, so he’s probably best to pick up one of those.
11
KATE SEES ME hanging over by the road and stares back at me blankly. I’m about to turn and go back the way I’ve come, because it’s immediately obvious I’ve made a mistake. It was stupid to show up here.
I think I had some half-baked notion that if they could see me searching, if they could see just how much I want to put things right, it might go some way towards helping them to forgive.
Stupid. Stupid and self-centred. I’m embarrassed I came.
I turn to go, take a few steps, and hear, ‘Excuse me?’
A woman is making her way towards me. At first I start in her direction but then I see she’s a reporter. She’s immaculate, clearly not local press – she has to be national news to be dressed in this way: navy cashmere coat, flawless hair and make-up. ‘Do you know the family?’ she asks.
‘I’m a friend.’
‘What can you tell us about the missing girl? What kind of girl was she?’
I stare at her. ‘Is she’, I correct. ‘You mean to say, what kind of girl is she.’
‘Of course. Apologies,’ she says briskly. ‘Do you know the Riverty family well?’
I nod, but I’m feeling hugely uncomfortable. I shouldn’t be speaking to this woman, and I glance to the house to see that Kate and Guy have retreated back inside. ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her, trying to walk away, ‘but I really must go.’
‘Please, just one moment, it won’t take long.’ Her eyes are full of kindness. Is it fake? I can’t tell. ‘I won’t take up any more of your time than I have to, but the media plays a crucial role in finding missing children. We can get information to the public in an instant. It can really mean the difference between the child being found alive … and—’