‘We need to find her,’ Brian says. ‘And, now, there’s too much at stake. Everyone will go down for it. She can’t be silenced. We need to kill her.’
65
Poppy
Battersea, London
Tomorrow
It is December the twentieth.
It is finally here. The day it all ends.
The Find Girl A group is meeting this evening, according to her dad’s texts. And – so far – nothing has happened. Poppy feels that curdled combination of nervous and hopeful. Please, please, please, just go well, she is thinking. Let the meet go ahead. Let the arrests happen. And let her family come home to her. She squirms with the anticipation of it.
Emily has gone to the cinema after school with a few of their friends, but Poppy can’t bear to. She wants to be at home, near a phone, for when it happens. She wants to hear it ring, and see that it’s her dad, and know that this will all be over.
She brings up the Uber app on her phone as she waits outside the school gates. She’s later than she wanted to be – she got carried away chatting, she felt so light and hopeful and free.
The sky is still a pale blue-grey, but the sun has set, and the school has emptied. She calls for an Uber and watches it crawl towards her on the silent street. She inches back inside the school gates as she waits. The breeze is cold against her legs.
By tomorrow, Zara will be here with her. They could camp out in the garden come summer. They could go shopping in Camden together. Cook a three-course meal for their parents, bickering over who’s making the most mess, Bill eating scraps of food off the floor …
Your ride has had to cancel, Uber says, and Poppy dismisses the alert and searches for another.
She looks around her. There are people dotted here and there. It’s not yet completely dark. And it’s ten minutes. Down a high street. Totally safe, really.
And besides. Poppy wants to live her life. To walk down a street in Battersea, London, the capital of the UK and of the world, and feel the winter wind against her face and see the Christmas lights of the shops spilling on to the pavements, and smell the roasted chestnuts, and arrive at home, pink-cheeked and full of optimism.
Poppy decides, on the day that almost everything is going to be sorted, to take the risk. She cancels her Uber request, closes the app, and begins to walk.
66
Zara
York, Yorkshire
Seven weeks gone
Zara has fallen in love. She used to idly wonder how you would know. She would google what it would feel like, rationalizing that ‘being in love’ was just thoughts and hormones. She’d asked her mother, once, who had said, ‘Oh, believe me, you’ll know,’ but Zara hadn’t thought she would.
But she does.
And it isn’t just thoughts, or hormones, or pure biology.
She stands now, waiting at the school gates, and thinks about what love is rather than what it isn’t. It is smiling so hard at a text message that even her ears hurt. It is replaying and replaying each moment spent together, each kiss, the pass of his hand over hers. It is time running heavy without him. It is two people who combine to form a reaction, something that simmers and bubbles beyond themselves. It is chemistry. Zara doesn’t care about homework. She doesn’t care about reading or making friends. Zara doesn’t even care about witness protection.
She is about to see him now, and time feels like lightning. So quick and hot and full of tension. He rounds the corner, and there he is. Hair that’s longer on top, shorter on the sides. Dimples. Guitar case.
She stares at her feet on the bleak December grass, beaded with dew that’s already begun to freeze white. Two weeks ago, she was afraid she would never go home again. And, now, she is afraid that she will.
But then what, after the trial? Zara doesn’t know. She was prepared to go it alone, let her mother go back to London … but, now, Zara has somebody she must keep with her, no matter what.
He raises his hand in a wave that looks so casual she wonders if he could really feel the same as she does, but she knows he does: he tells her so.
‘I’m so late – I got talking,’ he says. His expression is sunny and untroubled.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says, smiling up at him.
‘Thought you might have gone,’ he says, kissing her. Cold skin. Woodsmoke. Warm lips.
She prolongs the kiss, another thing she once would have been afraid to do, scared to give too much of herself too quickly. But now, the anxiety, the insecurity are small parts of her brain, and Zara, true Zara, is the rest.
‘I’d never go without you,’ she says back, intending it to sound light-hearted, but it comes out so seriously he stops and looks at her. And she can’t possibly mean these words she has spoken to him, but she does. And that’s another thing that love is. Love is lies, sometimes, but she means them. She wants to mean them.
‘Good,’ he says, one end of his mouth lifting, the other turning downwards.
Inside, privately, Zara calls it his ironic smile. She has all sorts of words for the things that he does, because they elicit such strong feelings in her that she feels they ought to be named.
‘Good,’ he says again, softer this time. He goes to say something more, but he stops himself.
And she’s glad he does. She can’t tell him. She will just be, just be here, instead, suspended in time with him, the rest of the world not really seeming to matter at all.
He kisses her again and she surrenders to it.
If I die tonight, Zara is thinking, as their bodies press together, I will die happy.
67
Poppy
Battersea, London
Tomorrow
Poppy’s on her road when it happens.
It’s dark. Windows are illuminating, one by one, as people get home. Street lamps are reflected in the bonnets of shiny cars.
And then.
And then.
His hot breath at her neck.
The brush of wool. A balaclava. A word in her ear: Poppy.
And then.
And then.
The thing she knew would happen. The thing she’s been waiting for, all this time, convincing herself it wasn’t going to happen. A cold knife at her throat. She can feel its sharpness even though it hasn’t yet sliced into her. The pressure of it makes her skin yield, the muscles and tendons parting, hiding behind each other like hostages.
‘Your daddy’s a liar,’ the man says.
Poppy can’t turn around to look at him.
She can’t turn around. The knife feels like a great pressure on her throat, disproportionately heavy because of the damage it could do.
‘He said he wasn’t in touch – and you know what? He is.’
‘No, I …’
‘So you know what I think, Poppy? He knows where they are, and I think you do, too. How can we trust a word he says if he sends us to Truro when they aren’t there? But, Poppy, we can trust you. You said they weren’t at Truro.’
‘He wasn’t lying.’
‘You liar,’ the balaclava man screams in Poppy’s ear.
Her whole body responds in shock, arms jerking out to the side like a starfish. The man’s body is so tense against Poppy’s back and the knife digs further into her neck and she closes her eyes and thinks: please, just kill me. Let it be over.
‘I’ve been patient but I’m going to ask you one time, Poppy. And you’re going to tell me. And you know what’s going to happen if you don’t?’
‘No,’ Poppy whispers.
Think. Think. How can she get away?
‘I’m going to slash this knife across your throat. Unless you tell me. Right now. Where they are.’
Poppy opens her eyes, looking at the rows of houses, wondering if she could scream. Wondering what would happen. But this man with the balaclava over his face and his gloved hands would pull the knife tight across her throat, run away and let her bleed to death. She knows it.
What time is it? Just after five. The meeting wi
ll happen in just a couple of hours. And this guy will go to it, with the information she gives him now.
It will happen before they can get to Lauren and Zara. The group will be arrested before they even set out.
‘Okay?’ he says.
Poppy’s entire body is trembling. It feels like there are a thousand birds in her ribcage. Her arms and legs are swarms of moths. She is not a solid human being but a shaking, frightened animal. If she doesn’t say, he will slit her throat. She can tell because of all sorts of things she didn’t even know she had radar for. The confident way he holds the knife. The force of his arm around her upper body. Even his tone of voice.
She could lie again. She blinks, looking up at the black sky.
Her entire body chills as she thinks it through: he might already know where they are. He might know the general area. And so, if she lies, he will kill her. He’s a millimetre away from doing so.
‘Okay, Poppy?’
‘Okay.’
She’s going to have to tell him. She’s worked it all through, the way her father would. The knife tightens against her throat. Poppy feels fear sweep across her. Her face is sweating. Her trousers are wet. She closes her eyes. Oh, God. She has wet herself. She has wet herself in terror.
‘On three. One …’
Poppy thinks of all the things she loves about her stepsister. Her careful attention to detail. Her chronic shyness.
‘Two …’
The way she handed these boys over to the police so ruthlessly, so correctly, it turns out. Because they are criminals.
‘Three …’
The way, when her dad and Lauren first got together, they sat up late at night playing Candy Crush on their phones and not speaking, not knowing what to say to these new family members. But they got to know each other. Even through those silences. They merged, like spices slowly cooking together. They adopted each other. Skipped over deep talks and straight into family life: Zara telling Poppy that flower crowns made her look mad. Poppy telling Zara that if she was going to pluck her eyebrows she needed to do it more evenly, the middle was too thin.
‘Okay?’ the man in the balaclava says.
‘York,’ Poppy says, sacrificing that beautiful stepsister of hers to save herself. ‘Their address is 2 Sunshine Drive. York.’
68
Aidan
Shepherd’s Bush, London
Tomorrow
Zara is going to testify.
Lottie doesn’t know. Does she? She can’t. Why would she be helping him, if there was an official investigation?
So it must be covert, Aidan thinks. A secret even within the police, save for a small team, because the more people who know, the more chance it would be leaked to somebody before the evidence can be gathered. Aidan watched a show on it once. A Chinese wall was set up within the police, but even then, there was a leak, and a load of drug dealers got rid of every last shred of evidence, and no arrests were made.
He sits and tries to think. His brain feels like sludge these days. He’s not eating enough.
If he tells her what he knows, she will call off the meeting. His only shot. She wouldn’t jeopardize a covert op. Not even Lottie breaks that many rules.
And then he would be left with – what? Hiding from the group, if he left it. And waiting. Waiting for the slow wheels of the justice system to turn.
No. The Find Girl A meeting must go ahead. He’ll tell them he has more results from his scrapers. Maybe even a lead. To make them come.
And then he will tell Lottie afterwards. His entrapment evidence can be added into the covert op.
Once he’s made his mind up, he decides to try and eat. He cooks chips with nothing else and reads the Telegram app, standing by the light of the oven.
Confirmed sighting in Edinburgh, a woman called Sacha wrote in there very late last night.
And, just now, Kevin said: Firm lead on York. If the leads amounted to nothing, he said, they would regroup at the meeting tomorrow and come up with a new plan.
Aidan looks out of the window. Lauren and Zara are in the Lake District. Safe. Undiscovered.
Everything is coming together.
Aidan sits on the sofa in his wife’s old flat, puts his socked feet up on the table, and considers what to do. He stares at the December sky. The people in the flat exactly opposite have already got their tree up, a family affair, no colour scheme, too much tinsel and chaos and ornaments made by children. He likes to look at it.
He thinks about what his own tree will look like in Islington when everybody is back together. It’ll be a top-of-the-range Douglas fir, lugged home by Lauren, smiling manically as she pulls it through the door after her. ‘I’ve travelled long and far with this,’ she will say, gesturing grandly to it.
There is nothing more he can do, he decides. He is prepared enough.
Instead, he does what he often does in these moments, these idle moments in the spaces between life. He calls his most favourite person in the world, his daughter, Poppy, to chat.
She answers on the first ring, which makes him laugh.
‘How are you?’ he says, but he is not prepared for the answer. Not at all.
69
Poppy
Battersea, London
Tomorrow
It has taken all of Poppy’s strength not to call her father. She arrived home, limbs still shaking, and was sick in the downstairs toilet. She heard her mother shouting hello from upstairs, but she ignored her, wiping her mouth with toilet roll and looking at herself in the mirror that’s always hung crooked above the sink. She reached out to straighten it.
If she called him, he wouldn’t attend the meeting. And then, the group would go to York. So she has instead changed her jeans, washing them in the sink in the bathroom in secret, and then paced her bedroom, biting the skin around her fingernails, even though she swore she’d stop doing that.
And now. The call comes exactly when Poppy expects it. Just after seven. Something pleasurable moves up her body. Heat. Nerves. Happiness. Fear. All mixed together.
She escapes outside into their tiny garden. Her mum is having another good day today. Poppy thought she wouldn’t be, when she called down from upstairs to her, but she is. She’s cleaning, capitalizing on good health in the frantic way the chronically ill do: she is cleaning out their wardrobes. Bin bags line the hallway. It smells of polish and open windows up there.
‘How are you?’ her dad says.
He sounds relaxed. The air around him is completely silent. She expected him to be out, the city winds in the speaker of his phone. She expected him to be stressed, harassed, excited. Nervous.
‘Okay. Pretty quiet. What news have you?’ she says.
He laughs softly. ‘News?’
‘Well, do you … has anything happened?’
‘No?’
Poppy’s heart speeds up. She starts to pace around the paving slabs. ‘I thought … I thought you were busy tonight.’
‘Busy?’
She stares at the wall of the house. She can still feel the knife against her skin. Cold and sharp.
‘I thought you were meeting the Find Girl A group tonight,’ she says.
There’s a stunned pause that seems to throb down the line like a bass beat, a sound wave.
‘What?’ he says eventually.
‘I saw on your phone.’
‘My phone?’
‘Your second phone,’ she says softly. But there is no time for explanations. There is no time for self-preservation. Poppy looks up at her house, her lovely old Victorian home, and feels white-hot panic rush up through her again. What if she’s condemned them to death? She should have lied. Sacrificed herself. She’s so selfish, so fucking selfish.
‘What? It’s tomorrow,’ her dad says faintly, eventually.
The edges of Poppy’s vision go black, like a solar eclipse. Spidery tendrils seem to come off the blackness. She blinks, trying to make it go back to normal. Shock, it’s just shock. How could she get the wrong day?
They will be going to York. They will be heading to their exact address, and all because of Poppy. She stares up at the light of her mum’s bedroom, watches her shadowy form moving to and fro, bending over, sorting out jeans and jumpers, and her eyes fill with tears. Her life as she knows it is ending, here, tonight.
‘You looked at my phone?’ he adds, but he says it mildly, gently.
‘Dad …’ she says.
God, why won’t her vision go back to normal? She sits on a garden chair that is freezing against the backs of her thighs, her eyes closed.
‘Something very bad has happened,’ she says. Saliva fills her mouth. She is going to be sick again.
‘What?’ her dad says.
She starts to whimper. A great Catherine wheel of fear has started up in her chest. She can’t think straight.
‘Pops?’ he says.
‘They’re going to die,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘I got threatened again. They said they knew you were in touch with Lauren.’
‘When?’ her dad says sharply.
‘Just now. The man in the balaclava again. But I thought you were going to get them arrested tonight …’
‘What did you tell them?’ her dad says, and he doesn’t sound angry. His voice is so soft and still and quiet, like this conversation they are having is the most important of his life.
‘I saw you were arranging a meeting. I thought it was safe.’ The shock has worn off and Poppy feels tears in her throat. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Poppy.’
‘They put a knife to my throat. Dad,’ she says. ‘They would have killed me. I told them they’re in York two hours ago.’
‘But they’re not in York,’ he says, his voice a warm caramel gloop of relief. He laughs. ‘It’s fine, Pops!’
Poppy’s eyes flash open, and the blackness has gone, and she can see completely clearly now. ‘No?’
How to Disappear Page 32