The Stranger In My Home: I thought she was my daughter. I was wrong.

by Parks, Adele

‘Any news?’ It’s Tom. I have never been more disappointed to hear a voice in my life.

  ‘No. Nothing.’

  ‘Where have you looked?’

  ‘We’ve called just about all her year group, we’ve visited her close friends, we’ve phoned the school, and Jeff’s been out looking all afternoon.’

  ‘Have you tried the local A&E?’

  ‘Yes. Nothing. I hoped you’d be her.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I take it you haven’t heard anything,’ I ask, without much hope. I know it would have been the first thing he’d mention. He knows I’m out of my mind with worry.

  ‘No. I talked to the kids about Katherine. They know to let me know the moment they hear anything, if they hear anything.’ I think of them, Amy in particular, wide-eyed with worry.

  ‘I have to go, Tom. Jeff and I have decided to call the police.’

  ‘Really?’ He sounds surprised.

  ‘What else can we do?’ I demand crossly, resenting the fact that his tone implies I’m over-reacting, perhaps being a bit hysterical.

  ‘Sure. You must do anything you can to put your mind at rest. Although my bet is that she’ll be home by teatime.’ Earlier, he said he expected she’d get home before I did. I know he wants to help and comfort, but they are empty, inaccurate words. ‘Will you tell the police everything?’ he asks.

  About the baby swap? The mutated gene? ‘Yes, I will. We can’t pretend it’s not relevant. She might have – she might have—’ I don’t want to say it.

  ‘Run away because of all the stress,’ he finishes for me.

  ‘Exactly.’ My chest hurts. I’ve been carefully guarding the secret. I wanted to protect Katherine and all the Truby children from the inevitable media interest, but Katherine is missing and all that matters is getting her home. I’ll tell the world about my changeling if it helps bring her back to me.

  Tom sighs. ‘I think you should tell them everything else as well.’

  ‘Everything else?’

  ‘About her issues with food, and that time when she mentioned cutting.’

  ‘What? Cutting? What are you saying? She’s never mentioned cutting.’ I have no idea what Tom is talking about. My blood slows. Part of my brain is already telling the rest of my brain to stay calm, that it’s OK, that whatever this is we can deal with it. The rest of my brain doesn’t believe; it is yelling back, Fuck! Fuck. Fuck. What now? What more?!

  ‘She has to me, Alison.’ He sounds embarrassed. For me. ‘And, well, I’m just wondering—’ He breaks off, clearly not wanting to offend me or upset me further. Eventually, reluctantly, he murmurs, ‘You see, maybe you’re right, she might have run away, but not necessarily from you. From us. I mean, there are other things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘She’s under such pressure at school. The expectations you have—’ He quickly corrects himself: ‘She has in terms of the grades she wants to achieve. Things are more serious once they are studying for their GCSEs. Then there’s this Dolly Bridge character.’

  ‘I thought that had all blown over.’

  ‘No, no. Not at all.’ He sounds apologetic. No doubt apologising for knowing more about my daughter than I do. Olivia’s words ring in my ears: What do you know? Nothing. You are an idiot, Alison. An idiot. ‘Things have got really nasty. I’m surprised she hasn’t mentioned it to you. She told me going to school was unbearable.’

  ‘“Unbearable”?’ I stutter out the word.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alison. I should have said something.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’ It’s not his responsibility. It’s mine.

  ‘You had better mention that to the police. Look, if you need me, I’ll come right over.’

  ‘Oh, no, I’m sure you all have plans of your own,’ I mutter politely. I don’t want to be a nuisance. I exhale and accept that I might need to be a bit of a bother. I might need Tom. ‘Thanks, Tom. I’ll bear that in mind. I’ll be in touch.’

  The minute Jeff gets home we make the call. I do it, not even waiting for him to take off his coat and boots. The policewoman on the end of the phone at our local station is calm and thoughtful. I’ve never had a need to visit a police station in my life. My only contact with the law has been when I’ve stopped a policeman in London to ask directions to some tourist attraction or other. I have an enormous respect for the profession but I also have an enormous fear of the world, so I’m not even surprised when the policewoman doesn’t give me categorical assurances that everything is going to be fine. I suppose I wouldn’t have believed her anyway.

  She compiles a report, asking almost the same things I asked Jeff. When did she go missing? Have we called all her friends? They also want to know if this is out of character.

  ‘Yes, very.’

  ‘Inexplicable to you?’

  Sighing, I say, ‘No, not really.’ Then I tell her everything I can. All about the swap, the threat of the mutated gene, Dolly Bridges. Jeff’s eyes go wide when I report that she has mentioned cutting. The policewoman says they’ll send someone around straight away.

  ‘Will it be you?’

  ‘No.’ This somehow upsets me; I feel a little bit more lost. I’d liked this woman’s voice. I’d thought she was going to be by my side. Now someone else will be by my side and, although that person is likely to be just as efficient, serious and committed, it makes me think no one is by my side. Not really.

  I hang up and the silence sits about us like a storm cloud, dense and heavy. Menacing. Foreboding.

  Jeff rubs his eyes with the heel of his palm. His action is aggressive; it’s as though he wants to gouge them out, like a patriarch in a Greek tragedy who has failed to see what’s in front of him. ‘I didn’t know she was still being bullied. I thought that had died out over the summer holidays. I thought things had been OK recently. How could you keep this from me?’

  ‘I didn’t know either.’ He looks confused. ‘Until Tom mentioned it today.’

  ‘She told him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that thing he said about her talking about harming herself?’ I shrug in despair. I do not know what to say to him. He looks like he wants to punch a wall; he shakes his head.

  ‘She’s been crying out for help.’

  ‘It appears so.’ But not to us.

  ‘How could we have thought she was handling it all so well? Why did we accept that?’ he asks.

  ‘Because she’s always exceeded our expectations. I think we just assumed she was doing that again.’

  ‘We weren’t careful enough.’ Jeff seems to have lost all his colour in the last few hours. I know that can’t be true, but he looks so much older than he did this morning. His salt-and-pepper hair is now simply greying hair, his skin is almost transparent. There are deep lines of panic engraved into his forehead. He’s shrunk inches since the start of the day. I imagine I look equally rough but I don’t have the will to put myself in front of a mirror. How I look is unimportant. Only one thing is important.

  We hear car tyres roll across the gravel of our drive and both dash to the door, but it’s not some parent returning a sheepish Katherine, it’s a police car and another unmarked car behind. I already know there will be someone from some body or other: a social worker, a bureau of missing persons. I hold open the door. It seems an army marches in. Jeff offers tea.

  There’s a policewoman, about ten years younger than I am, who seems to be in charge. She tells me her name: Inspector Miriam Davis. Like me, she carries a few extra pounds, but her weight makes her look robust, reliable, rather than undisciplined. Her eyes flick over me, around the hall, over Jeff. She appears swift and shrewd. I forget I wanted the other police officer, the one I had spoken to on the phone; now I cling to Inspector Davis as if she were a life raft. This woman must find Katherine for me. This woman must save me. I look at her ring finger and see she’s married. I want to ask her if she has children. It’s important to me but, even if she does, they’re likely to be tiny. Toddlers. Infants. She�
��ll think that’s hard. She won’t be able to imagine what it’s like to have a teen. An independent being who you love so ferociously, but somehow it’s difficult. You can’t show that love so easily any more because you can no longer tickle your child so much she swears she’s going to throw up, you can no longer smother her with kisses: her face, her neck, her chubby belly. She no longer has a chubby belly.

  Inspector Davis jumps into action by asking questions that are a mix of common sense and ugly surprise; the questions suggest there is a procedure. I am in a system. This has happened to people before me. This will happen to people after me. But it doesn’t feel like that right now. I feel hopelessly picked out. Separated. I have to repeat many of the same facts. The inspector wants to be clear, make her own checks. Once again, I explain about the unimaginable strain Katherine has been under. Miriam Davis is good: she doesn’t show any shock or judgement as I try to unfurl our complicated life.

  ‘So you can see why a teenager might run away, can’t you?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. That is a possible scenario. At this stage, we need to keep an open mind.’ I search her face and try to understand what other options she could be considering. Clearly, it’s not an abduction: Katherine showed a fake text to Maddie’s mother; she planned this. What alternative is there to running away? Then I understand: the issue is what next? If she has run away, is she alone or is there some other child involved? How confused and stressed is she? If she’s talked to Tom about self-harm, how far might that go? Is she the sort to do anything really serious to herself? Is there a ‘sort’? How can you tell?

  In the past, I’ve picked out the kids who are going to use their ambition and focus to achieve academically, the kids who will use their drive and physical advantages to excel on the pitch, the kids who will channel their confidence and love of the limelight to appear on stage. How do you pick out the kid who might hurt herself? Might want to end things prematurely? What are the attributes then? I feel dizzy. Faint.

  ‘We were thinking she might simply be lost. She might have planned to meet someone in the hours between leaving her friend’s house and coming home,’ Jeff suggests hopefully. ‘A boyfriend.’

  Inspector Davis turns to him. ‘Is there one?’

  ‘Not that we’re aware of. But—’ He looks confused. What do we know?

  ‘Why won’t she answer her phone?’ I ask.

  ‘Lots of reasons. She might be out of charge. She might have lost it,’ offers Jeff. I’m not sure who he is trying to convince, me or himself.

  I am aware that there’s a great deal of activity going on around us while the inspector interviews us. Other people are looking at and for things. They asked us if this was OK, and of course we said yes; anything that’s necessary. I try to concentrate very hard on what Inspector Davis is saying, because it’s vital, but her words wash over me, through me. I think of the times I have sat in front of experts and absorbed important information about Katherine. Doctors have explained the MMR vaccination, chiropractors and physiotherapists have talked to me about her spine, balance and sports injuries, teachers have given me facts on her exam results or told me about impending school trips. I’ve always listened as though my life depended on it, gleaning every little morsel of info I could. Although nothing has ever been more vital than this conversation, I find that, somehow, my body is failing me. My head feels mushy and can’t hold facts. My tongue seems furry and swollen; I can’t articulate the questions I want to ask. There’s a droning sound, like a loud vacuum cleaner, rushing through my ears; how can I concentrate on what Inspector Davis has to say?

  I think of cases that were high profile and police operations to find the child were extensive. They are nearly always cases concerning missing young girls. It seemed to me that their faces were to be found splashed across every newspaper and TV report in the country. Will that be us? I hope it is, because I want everyone to stop and look for Katherine. I couldn’t care less about the scandal, the raised eyebrows at the school gate. Yet I doubt this will happen, because she planned to leave us.

  ‘How many people go missing each year?’ Miriam Davis eyes me warily. I know the number is on the tip of her tongue; she’s trying to evaluate what I can bear to hear, what she should tell me. ‘How many?’ I ask again firmly.

  ‘Last year, over 300,000 people were reported missing.’ I visualise the number. All those noughts on the end. So big. I then try to imagine a crowd that size. I can’t.

  ‘And how many of them were children?’

  She sighs but can see I’m a dog with a bone. She might as well tell me because, otherwise, I’ll resort to the internet; there’s information enough out there to terrify the entire human race. ‘Approximately two thirds of them were under eighteen.’

  ‘You’d have to spend every minute of your working day to find that many.’

  ‘Well, yes. We would.’

  ‘But you don’t.’ I can hear the panic in my voice. They are not going to do that. They will not spend every minute of every working day looking for Katherine. They should be looking for her now. Don’t they know how precious she is? I’m almost floored, knowing that 300,000 families have the same thought each year.

  ‘No, we don’t. The first thing we do is establish the level of risk to the person who is missing. As people rarely go missing without a reason, being missing is often treated as an indicator of a problem in someone’s life rather than an event in itself.’

  I think this is so ridiculously obvious I want to slap her. I can almost imagine the red mark on her cheek. It’s insane. Assaulting a police officer is insane. Why would I ever think of doing such a thing? I clasp my hands together on my lap so the wildness doesn’t become a reality. But hasn’t she been listening? I don’t understand why there are people searching our house. She’s not here, is she? Why might they need her toothbrush? No, it’s not in the bathroom: she was on a sleepover last night. They pick up the formal school portrait that was taken at the end of last year. ‘This her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can we keep this?’

  ‘She’s changed her hair since then. She has a fringe.’

  ‘This will do for now.’ I promise to look out something more recent later; now, they need me to answer questions. Someone has just asked me whether they can have a look at my phone. They take screen grabs of the WhatsApp messages and texts Katherine has sent me. It’s painful to see them on the screen. Happy little plans and exciting news, drenched with smiley-faced emoji: ‘I scored two goals! Let’s go out for [picture of a slice of cake]’; ‘Can you bring my maths book to the gate, forgot to hand it in today! [blushing face]’. They asked me if Katherine uses any social media. Well, of course she does; she lives in this century. They ask to look at her laptop, explaining that there might be some clues as to where she likes to go or, if she had been planning to meet someone, who that might be. They ask me if I know her Facebook, Instagram and Twitter passwords. I don’t, but we start to make a stab at them. Jeff suggests her birthdate or the name of her deceased pet rabbit.

  ‘Try 12OctJH.’ Josh Hutcherson’s birthday. It seems an age since she’s mentioned him. Crushes are a thing of the past, so what’s taken over? I feel hopeless that, once, I knew the birthdate of her crush, I knew everything. Now I know nothing. These past few months have been swollen with silence and secrets.

  Shame and exasperation flood through me. If I wasn’t sitting down I might have been knocked off my feet with the force of it. Why do they keep asking me questions? I don’t have the answers. I don’t know where Katherine is. I want them to go and start looking for her. I want to start looking for her. I stare out of the window and imagine chasing up and down the streets, knocking on every door, stopping every passer-by and asking if they’ve seen her. That’s what we should be doing. Not sitting here talking and watching cups of tea go cold and glassy.

  Jeff is asking questions now. I know because I can see his mouth moving and I catch some of Inspector Davis’s responses. ‘Review known haza
rds … look at other factors related to the person’s ethnicity, religious beliefs, gender, sexuality.’ I feel I’m being read a handbook. Katherine hasn’t upped and offed to join a terror group, she’s my baby. My lost, scared, confused baby. ‘Everyone missing is divided into low, medium and high risk. The speed and scale of the initial police response is thus decided.’

  ‘What is Katherine?’ asks Jeff.

  ‘I’d say low to medium at this stage.’ I’m not sure what that tells me. The inspector closes her notebook and stands up.

  ‘And you’ve deduced this because?’

  ‘Low because she has been missing only since this morning. Medium because she’s young, vulnerable, clearly troubled. You said it was out of character. We have already deployed two police officers to make inquiries, they are talking to her friend—’ She checks her notes. ‘Maddie, to see if she knows anything more. We’ll be following up with all her friends. The year list you provided is very useful.’

  ‘We’ve already called everyone,’ I bark.

  She nods sympathetically, humouring me like you would a child. ‘The officers will be visiting her school. Although it’s a Saturday, there are games she might have gone along to watch, she might be in the sports hall or the locker room. I understand she’s very sporty. We’ll be looking at the local leisure park, other schools where she’s recently competed. Can you give me a list of any relatives she might visit? Including the details of her biological family.’ I nod but I can’t imagine Katherine getting on a train to visit Jeff’s family, let alone mine. I must look the picture of despair, because Inspector Davis smiles briefly. ‘Look, bearing in mind there is evidence that she pre-planned this disappearance, if I was a betting sort, I’d say she’ll be home before bedtime.’

  I notice that the deadlines keep getting pushed back. ‘Are you?’ I ask.

  ‘Am I what?’

  ‘Do you gamble?’

  The inspector looks taken aback. ‘Well, no, not really.’

  I scowl at her. People should be careful what they say.

  Jeff cuts in. ‘What would propel her to a high-risk case?’ I wonder as he asks this if he, like me, is undecided as to whether he wants the case to be high risk or not. As such, it would demand more manpower, more publicity, more noise, which would surely lead to finding her faster. It would also mean we were in much murkier waters.