by Jane Casey
‘I don’t remember,’ he said eventually, rubbing his forehead in bewilderment.
Elaine took over the story. ‘Michael – Mr Shepherd – went to the police station in person and asked them to investigate, and they finally got started on filling out the correct forms around midnight.’
‘By which time she’d been gone for six hours,’ Shepherd interjected.
‘That’s ridiculous. Don’t they know how important it is to find missing children quickly?’ I couldn’t believe they had been so slow; I couldn’t believe they had waited to take his statement. ‘The first twenty-four hours are critical, absolutely key, and they threw away a quarter of them.’
‘I didn’t realise you were so knowledgeable, Sarah,’ Elaine said, smiling thinly, and I read the expression on her face all too easily. Shut up and listen, you stupid girl.
‘The police helicopter went up around two,’ Michael Shepherd went on. ‘They used their infrared camera to search the woods where she usually walked Archie. They said she’d glow, even in undergrowth, from her body heat, and they’d see her. But they didn’t find anything.’
So either she wasn’t there or her body was no longer emitting heat. You didn’t have to be an expert to work out where this was going.
‘They keep saying it takes time to trace a runaway. I told them, she’s not a runaway. When they didn’t find her in the woods, they started looking at CCTV from the stations around here, to see if she went to London. She wouldn’t do that; she found it scary, any time we went there with her. She wouldn’t let go of my hand the whole time when we went Christmas shopping last year. The crowds were so dense, and she was afraid she’d get lost.’ He looked from me to Elaine and back again, helplessly. ‘She’s out there somewhere and they haven’t found her, and she’s all alone.’
My heart twisted with sympathy for him and his wife and for what they were going through, but my mind was still turning over what he had said and there was a question I had to ask. ‘Why hasn’t there been an appeal? Shouldn’t they be asking people if they’ve seen her?’
‘They wanted to wait. They told us that it was best to have a look themselves first, before they had to deal with false sightings and members of the public starting their own search, getting in the way. We wanted to go out looking ourselves, but they told us to wait at home in case she came back. At this stage, I just don’t think she’s going to walk through the door under her own steam.’ He ran his hands through his hair, digging his fingers into his scalp. ‘Yesterday, they searched along the river, by the railway line near our house, the reservoir up near the A3 and the woods, and they still haven’t found her.’
I wondered if he could miss the awful significance of the places they were focusing on. Whatever her parents thought, the police seemed to have made up their minds that what they were searching for was a body.
Without noticing, I’d reached the edge of the woods. I put on a turn of speed and slipped in between two oaks, following a sketchy path that forked almost immediately. On the right side, I saw a chocolate-brown Labrador barrelling towards me, towing a slender, elderly woman in pristine slacks and full make-up. It didn’t look like the kind of dog that spooked easily, but even so, I turned to the left path, running away from where people might be. The path I took looked more challenging. It led towards the middle of the woods, where the tracks were narrow and steep and tended to peter out unexpectedly in a welter of brambles and unkempt bushes. The paths nearer the road were the dog walkers’ favourites, well worn and wide. A wide, even path wouldn’t distract me from the dark beat of tension that had been thudding monotonously in my head all day with heavy, unforgiving force. I headed uphill, thinking about Jenny’s father.
The quiet of the classroom was disturbed again, this time by scuffling outside the door, footsteps clattering up the corridor, and voices. Jenny’s classmates, 8A. There was a ripple of laughter and Michael Shepherd flinched.
I let them in, telling them to hurry to their seats. Their eyes were round with curiosity at the sight of the head teacher and a parent; this was far better than discussing Jane Eyre. Michael Shepherd squared his shoulders as if preparing for a round in the boxing ring and faced his daughter’s contemporaries. The role of victim didn’t suit him. The desire to do something had driven him to the school. He wouldn’t wait around for the police; he would do what he thought was right and deal with the consequences later.
Once they were all waiting in their places, silently attentive, Elaine began to speak.
‘Some of you will know Mr Shepherd, I’m sure, but for those of you who don’t, this is Jennifer’s father. I want you all to listen very carefully to what he has to say. If you can help him in any way, I am sure you will do so.’
Rows of heads nodded obediently. Michael Shepherd moved to stand beside Elaine at her invitation. He looked around the room, seeming slightly confused.
‘You all look so different in your uniforms,’ he said eventually. ‘I know I’ve met some of you before, but I can’t quite …’
A ripple of amusement went through the class, and I hid a smile. I’d had the same experience myself in reverse, seeing some of my students in town at the weekend. They looked so much older and more sophisticated out of uniform. It was unsettling.
He had spotted a couple of girls he recognised. ‘Hi, Anna. Rachel.’
They blushed and mumbled hello, simultaneously delighted and appalled to be singled out.
‘I know this is going to sound silly,’ he began, trying to smile, ‘but we’ve lost our daughter. We haven’t seen her for a couple of days now, and I was wondering if any of you had heard from her or if you had any idea where she is.’ He waited for a beat, but no one said anything. ‘I know it’s a lot to ask – I do understand that Jenny may have her own reasons for not coming home. But her mother is very worried, as am I, and we just want to know that she’s OK. If you haven’t seen her, I’d like to know whether anyone has spoken to her or had any contact with her since Saturday evening – a text or an email or whatever.’
There was a muted chorus of ‘no’ from around the room.
‘OK, well, I’d like to ask you to check when you last heard from Jenny, and what she said. Does anyone know if she had any plans to go somewhere over the weekend? She won’t get in trouble – we just need to know that she’s safe.’
The girls stared at him in silence. He had earned their sympathy, but no useful response. Elaine stepped in.
‘I want you all to think very carefully about what Mr Shepherd has asked you, and if you remember anything – anything at all – that you think we should know, I’d like you to tell us. You can talk to me in complete confidence, or Miss Finch, or you can ask your parents to call me if you feel more comfortable talking to them.’ Her face darkened. ‘I know you are all too sensible to keep quiet because of some misplaced sense of loyalty to Jennifer.’ She turned to me. ‘Miss Finch, we’ll leave you to get on with your class.’
I could tell that Michael Shepherd was unhappy about leaving the classroom without finding out anything from his daughter’s classmates, though he had little choice but to follow Elaine as she swept out. He nodded to me as he went, and I smiled, trying to think of something to say, but he was gone before anything remotely suitable occurred to me. He walked with his head down, like a bull being led into an abattoir, all that power and determination draining away, leaving only despair.
In the woods, the traffic noise fell away as if a soundproof curtain had dropped behind me. The birds sang and a breeze sighed through the treetops with a sound like rushing water. The rhythmic thud of my feet on the dark, firm ground punctuated the rasping of my breath and every now and then a singing note was the whiplash of a thin, reaching branch that had snagged on my sleeve for an instant. Tall, ancient trees with knotted trunks spread a canopy of bitingly green new leaves overhead. The sunlight slid through their shade in slanting beams and pinpricks of light, dizzying brilliance that glanced off a surface and was gone the next instant.
I felt, briefly, almost happy.
I kicked myself up a long, steep hill, toes digging for purchase in the leaf mould, my heart thumping as my muscles burned. The ground was as dark and rich as chocolate cake; it had just enough give in it. I had run on iron-hard, ankle-killing parched earth the previous summer, and slithered through slick mud on icy days midwinter, black splashes streaking up the backs of my legs like tar. These conditions were perfect. No excuses. I fought all the way to the top, to the pay-off downhill slope on the other side, and it felt as if I was flying.
After a while, of course, the euphoria wore off. My legs started to complain at the exertion, my thigh muscles aching. I could run through that sort of niggling discomfort, but my knees were also protesting and that was more serious. I winced as a careless step on the uneven surface jarred my left knee, sending a jolt of pain up the outside of my thigh. Checking my watch, I was surprised to see that half an hour had slid by since I left the house; I had done about three and a half miles. It was far enough to count as a decent run by the time I got home.
I made a wide loop and doubled back on myself, running parallel to the route I’d taken on the way out. There was something disheartening about running over the same ground on the way back; I hated to do it. The new route took me along a spine of higher ground that ran between two steep-sided depressions. The surface here was crumbly and knotted with roots. I slowed right down, wary of twisting an ankle, eyes glued to the ground in front of me. Even so, I came to grief, skidding on a smooth root that angled sharply downwards. With a muffled squawk I pitched forward, hands outstretched, and ended up sprawling in the dirt. I stayed in that position for a second, my breath rasping, the woods around me suddenly hushed. Slowly, painfully, I peeled my hands off the ground and sat back on my heels to inspect the damage. No broken bones, no blood. Good. I brushed the worst of the dirt off my hands and knees. Bruises, maybe a slight graze on the heel of my right hand. Nothing too remarkable. I stood up, holding on to a convenient tree trunk for support, grimacing as I stretched out my legs, glad that no one had seen me fall. I bent forward and stretched out my hamstrings, then walked around in a tight circle, gathering the motivation to carry on. I was about to set off again when I stopped, frowning. Something nagged at me, something strange that I’d half seen out of the corner of my eye, something out of context. Even then, it didn’t occur to me to worry, even though I’d been thinking of the missing girl all day.
I stood on tiptoe and looked properly, peering through the gathering shadows. Down in the hollow to my left there was a gap in the leaf canopy where an old tree had fallen, and a shaft of sunlight illuminated that patch of undergrowth like a stage set. The hollow was entirely filled with bluebells that crowded around the fallen tree. The flowers’ hazy bluish purple mirrored the clear evening sky above. All around, silvery-white birches lined the clearing, their bark streaked with definite black lines, their leaves the sour-apple green of new growth. The sunlight picked out the tiny bodies of flies and gnats, turning them to gold as they whirled in endless circles above the petals.
That wasn’t what had caught my attention, though. I frowned, hands on hips, scanning the clearing. Something was off. What was it? Trees, flowers, sunshine, so pretty – so what?
There. Something white among the bluebells. Something pale behind the tree trunk. I edged down the bank carefully, trying to get closer, straining to see. Bluebell stems crunched under my trainers, the glossy leaves squeaking as I inched forward, closer now, able to see …
A hand.
The breath rushed out of my lungs as if I had been punched. I think I knew right away what I was looking at, I knew what I had found, but something made me keep moving forward, something made me creep around the old tree trunk, stepping carefully over the splintered end that was brittle and hollow with rot. Along with the shock came a feeling of inevitability, a feeling that I had been moving towards this moment since I’d heard that Jenny was missing. As I crouched down beside the trunk, my heart was pounding faster than it had when I had run up the steepest hill earlier.
Jenny was lying in the lee of the fallen tree, almost underneath it, one hand placed carefully on the middle of her narrow chest, legs decorously together. She wore jeans, black Converse shoes and a fleece that had been pale pink, but was grey around the cuffs. The hand that I had seen was the left hand, flung out at an angle. It lay among the flowers as if it had been dropped there.
Up close, the pallor of her skin had a bluish tinge and the nails were the grey-purple of an old bruise. I didn’t have to touch her to know that she was far beyond help, but I reached out and ran the back of one finger along her cheek and the chill of her lifeless flesh made me shudder. I made myself look at her face, at her features, wanting to confirm what I knew to be true, knowing I would never forget what I saw. An ashy face, framed with tangled dirty blonde hair, matted and lank. Her eyes were closed, her lashes a dark fan on colourless cheeks. Her mouth was grey and bloodless; it had fallen open, pulled down by her slack jaw. Her lips stretched thinly over teeth that seemed more prominent than they had in life. Unmistakably, there were signs of violence on her face and neck: faint shadows of bruises that dappled her cheek and smudged across her fragile collarbones. A thin dark line showed on her lower lip where a narrow smear of blood had dried to black.
She lay where she had been dumped, where someone had arranged her body once they were finished with her as they had wanted her to be found. The pose was a grotesque parody of how an undertaker might display a corpse, a travesty of dignity. It couldn’t take away from the reality of what had been done to her. Abused, injured, abandoned, dead. Just twelve years old. All of that limitless potential brought to nothing, just an empty husk in a quiet wood.
I had been looking at Jenny’s body with a detachment that bordered on the clinical, examining every detail without really taking in what I was seeing. Now it was as if a dam burst in my brain and the full horror broke over me like a wave. Everything I had feared for Jenny had come to pass, and it was worse than I could ever have imagined. The blood roared in my ears and the ground tilted under my feet. I squeezed my water bottle tightly with both hands, the cool ridged plastic reassuringly familiar. I was drenched in sweat, but ice-cold and shivering. Waves of nausea swept over me and I shuddered, pushing my head between my knees. It was hard to think, I couldn’t move and the forest spun out of control around me. For a moment, I looked and saw myself at that age – the same hair, the same shape of face, but I hadn’t died, I was the one who had lived …
I don’t know how long it would have taken for me to recover if I hadn’t been brought back to myself abruptly. Somewhere behind me, not close, a dog whined once, urgently, then stopped dead as if cut off, and awareness roared back to me like an express train.
What if I wasn’t alone?
I stood up and looked around the little clearing, eyes wide, alert to any sudden movements near me. I was standing beside a body that had been left there by someone – presumably whoever had murdered her. And murderers sometimes went back to a body, I had read. I swallowed nervously, a knot of fear tight in my throat. The breeze swept through the trees again, drowning out all other sounds, and I jumped as a bird whirred out of its hiding place somewhere on my right and rocketed through the branches to the open air. What had disturbed it? Should I call for help? Who would hear me in the middle of the woods, where I had gone to be alone? Stupid, stupid Sarah …
Before I panicked completely, cold common sense clamped down on the rising hysteria. Stupid Sarah indeed, with her mobile phone in her pocket, just waiting to be used. I dragged it out, almost sobbing with relief, then panicked again when the screen lit up to show only one bar of reception. Not enough. I scrambled back up the steep bank, holding the phone tightly. It was hard to climb up the sharp gradient and I scrabbled to get purchase with my free hand as grass and roots pulled away from the soft earth, please please please running through my head. Two more bars appeared as soon as I reached the top of the ridge. I
stood with my back to a solid, sturdy old tree and stabbed 999 into the phone, feeling slightly unreal as I did so, my heart beating so hard that the thin material of my vest top was shaking.
‘Emergency, which service?’ asked a slightly nasal female voice.
‘Police,’ I gasped, still out of breath from the clamber up the bank and the shock I was feeling. It was as if a tight band was wrapped around my chest, constricting my ribs. Somehow, I didn’t seem to be able to get a deep enough breath.
‘Putting you through, thank you.’ She sounded bored; it almost made me laugh.
There was a click. A different voice. ‘Hello, you’re through to the police.’
I swallowed. ‘Yes, I – I’ve found a body.’
The operator sounded completely unsurprised. ‘A body. Right. Whereabouts are you at the moment?’
I did my best to describe the location, getting flustered as the operator pushed me for more details. It wasn’t exactly easy to pinpoint where I was without convenient road signs or buildings to act as points of reference, and I got completely confused when she asked if I was to the east of the main road, first saying yes, then contradicting myself. My head felt fuzzy, as if there was static interfering with my thoughts. The woman on the other end of the line was patient with me, warm even, which made me feel even worse about how useless I was being.
‘It’s all right, you’re doing fine. Can you tell me your name, please?’
‘Sarah Finch.’
‘And you’re still with the body,’ the operator checked.
‘I’m nearby,’ I said, wanting to be accurate. ‘I – I know her. Her name is Jenny Shepherd. She’s been reported missing – I saw her father this morning. She—’ I broke off, struggling not to cry.
‘Is there any sign of life? Can you check if the person is breathing for me?’
‘She’s cold to the touch – I’m sure she’s dead.’ Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.
The woods spiralled around me again, and as my eyes filled with tears I reached back to touch the tree trunk behind me. It was solidly real and reassuring.