The Daughter

by Jane Shemilt

  Ed’s words come quicker as he tells me he goes running with Jake now.

  I remembered the boy who let us into the center and his sweet smile. “Jake’s still there?”

  “Thought I told you. We share a room. His sister brings in cakes and stuff.”

  “That’s great, Ed.”

  “She plays the accordion and lives on this boat.”

  Friends. A girl. I won’t ask questions, but my heart lifts.

  “Can I bring anything next week?”

  “Pens, maybe a notebook.” He pauses, and then continues, speaking slowly: “I’ve been writing this . . . diary. Dr. Hagan suggested it months ago. I’ve read a bit to Jake and Soph.”

  “Be careful. Only tell those things you want to.”

  “Well, obviously. But it has to be real. Naomi kept that diary, didn’t she?”

  Jesus. “Yes.”

  “I think it might’ve helped her. It helped you, didn’t it?”

  After we say good-­bye I sit next to Bertie on the floor. He pushes his wet nose into my face and I stroke his warm ears. I have no idea if it helped her to write that diary. They weren’t really her thoughts. She kept those to herself. I suppose it helped; it led us to James. I get up to take the sketchbook and pencil from the dresser, and find myself studying the pictures as though they have been drawn by someone else and there may be something there that will surprise me.

  The warm kitchen is home now, with the chipped Formica table, faded brick floor, and the tiny, noisy fridge in the corner. It feels safe. The Bristol kitchen had begun to feel alien by the third day; I was pacing around it when Michael phoned to tell me what he had learned from rereading Naomi’s diary. I can hear his words as I take the sketch pad to the windowsill and begin to sketch the magpie now strutting on the gate, one for sorrow.

  BRISTOL, 2009

  FOUR DAYS AFTER

  “. . . so I made a lucky guess that J might stand for her friend James.”

  “What? Sorry, Michael. Could you say all that again, slowly?”

  I was pressing the phone so tightly to my ear that it hurt. It was getting more difficult all the time. I saw everything through a shifting kaleidoscope of her: she was smiling and laughing at first, then the picture would change, her mouth would open, screaming my name. I walked about the house, my hand pushing so hard over my own mouth I could taste blood. Nowhere in the familiar spaces felt like home.

  Ted and I had spent Sunday listening and waiting, watching the clock, pacing, silently praying for news. Hour after empty hour passed by relentlessly; no one seemed to be doing anything to find Naomi and bring her back. In intervals of exhausted calm we had talked over what the boys should do. We all agreed it would be easier for them to cope if they had the normal structure of a day around them. I wanted to escape from the torture of waiting and go back to work, but Ted said I would be caught out if I did and break down. Frank agreed. When he came around in the evening he told me he had found a temporary doctor for the duration.

  At least the boys slept; they went to school as usual. Ted had gone to work; he said he didn’t have a choice. As I’d watched him from the upstairs window, I’d seen him straighten once he left the house and become his work self, his face changing as he thought of his day ahead. It would have been hard for ­people to have known that anything was wrong; he’d walked in his usual way to the car, his dark suit fitting smoothly over his shoulders, blond hair brushed. I’d looked through the glass, knowing my hair hung in strands, my feet were bare, and my face was haggard. There’d been two white vans parked beyond Ted’s car, with satellite dishes on top. Seeing two men leaning against the side of one, paper cups in hand, cameras strung around their necks, I had moved quickly out of sight.

  Michael’s voice grew louder, bringing me back to the moment. “James was J in Naomi’s diary. I’ve interviewed him and Nikita again. I’m coming over.”

  I heard the phone click and a few seconds later the doorbell rang.

  My sense of time had stretched or shrunk, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Michael standing there, but it was a tall flame-­haired boy in a school uniform. His tie was knotted low, his shirt was untucked, and there were the grainy tracks of tears on his freckled cheeks. His eyes were so swollen it took a few moments to recognize him.

  “James?”

  “Hi, Dr. Malcolm.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “She’s not here, James. We haven’t seen her since Thursday evening.”

  Four days. Even though I had suffered every minute of that time, the facts still struck afresh as I said them.

  “I know. ’Course I know.” He looked angry. “I’ve been at the police station all night.”

  I took in his red eyes, the dark stains under them, and the faint stubble.

  “Why?”

  “I needed to tell someone. It’s my fault.”

  His fault? What was his fault? What had he done? He read my face.

  “No, I . . . Look, I don’t know where she is, I mean, I wish . . . I just wanted to see you, to explain—­”

  He swayed on his feet and I grabbed his arm and pulled him in. He half sat, half collapsed on a chair in the kitchen and put his head in his hands. I made a cup of sweet tea and put it in front of him. The bell rang again. Michael this time. He looked serious, but his mouth relaxed into a smile when he saw me. As I stood back to let him in, I realized I knew his smell already, a calm male scent of clean ironed shirts and toothpaste. He felt close but that was an illusion; he was in a completely different place from me. Normal life was running on for him like it was for everyone. I could see it and smell it but I wasn’t part of it anymore. The transparent skin of disaster separated me from his world. I couldn’t touch that world; I couldn’t even remember how it felt now.

  James looked up with surprise at Michael, who smiled and touched him briefly on the shoulder.

  “James has come to tell me . . . something,” I said, sitting down, so I didn’t loom over him.

  “Good. We talked a lot last night.”

  Michael pulled out a chair and sat next to James. His movements were slow and I realized he probably hadn’t slept either. The boy’s face was very pale.

  “I love her.” James’s words spilled out suddenly. “She loves me. I think she does anyway . . . She . . . we . . . We’ve been together for months.”

  Together? They’d both been in the play. Together for the rehearsals? I glanced quickly at Michael.

  He said quietly, “They had been sleeping together for the last six months.”

  The room felt cold. I should turn up the radiator. Ted’s economies were ridiculous in November. It wasn’t possible. I would have known if she’d been sleeping with this boy. Naomi would have told me. Even if she hadn’t, I would have known. I was her mother.

  Perhaps James read my thoughts because he carried on: “She was going to tell you. Well, she knew you’d find out anyway.”

  “How was it possible? Naomi was here, or at school. I knew what she was doing . . .”

  “After school. On weekends.”

  He spoke almost in a whisper; I leaned closer to catch his words. He went on quietly, “She told you she was with Nikita, but we actually went home. My home.”

  “Did your parents know?”

  I remembered his mother. I used to meet her at medical events, a startlingly pretty redheaded nurse. His father was a pediatrician, a lot older.

  “Dad works late. Mum left a year ago. Anyway the real thing is—­”

  So he hadn’t told me the real thing yet.

  “She’d started being sick sometimes.”

  Had she? I hadn’t noticed.

  “In the mornings.”

  I wouldn’t have heard her vomiting upstairs in her bathroom, not from the kitchen, but I remember she’d stopped having breakfast. She had looked disgusted when I�
��d mentioned it, but she always ate supper so I didn’t worry.

  “She fell asleep in class.”

  The rehearsals were exhausting. I’d noticed she’d stopped running everywhere.

  “So she did a test . . .”

  There was a silence. How had I never put it all together? Not eating in the morning, the tiredness, the emotional ups and downs. It was so obvious. Michael was watching me with concern; I got up and walked to the window. Naomi, pregnant. I couldn’t make it feel remotely real. I turned to James.

  “Do you know for certain?” My voice sounded hard.

  “She did three tests altogether.”

  “How many weeks?”

  “We didn’t know.” His white face turned away from my stare. “She thought she’d missed two periods, but she wasn’t sure. Ten maybe?”

  Cottage tomorrow. J. 10 weeks.

  “Wait. What about the blood on the mattress?” I looked at Michael, then back at James. “In the cottage, the weekend before the play began. When she went there with . . . the man. We thought she’d bled because it was her first time, but it can’t have been her first time, she was already pregnant.”

  “What man?” James looked puzzled. “It was me. Us. I thought Naomi told you that we went to the cottage. After we . . . afterward . . . she bled, but she did another pregnancy test three days later, last Tuesday actually, and she was still pregnant. Bleeding a bit but pregnant.”

  So it wasn’t the man who had made her bleed after all, the man from the theater, the bastard who had taken her. This made it worse. The man who had taken her now hadn’t been the one to buy the wine; they hadn’t shared anything. Not love, of course not that. He didn’t care. And suppose she was still bleeding, miscarrying and bleeding, or . . . an ectopic.

  I looked at the tear-­stained boy sitting at the table and felt a blazing fury.

  “What about you, James? What thoughts did you have about the pregnancy? What exactly was your plan?”

  “I wanted whatever she wanted. I love her. I didn’t really know what to do about the pregnancy.”

  I wanted to hit him; I wanted to kill him for making it more dangerous for Naomi.

  “If you didn’t know what to do about a pregnancy, why the fuck didn’t you use a condom?”

  He winced. Michael turned to me.

  “She was on the pill,” he said quietly. “But she sometimes forgot.”

  More secrets. How the hell was she on the pill? Did one of my friends prescribe it for her?

  “You should bloody well have used a condom anyway,” I shouted. “You should have understood what you were doing. You’ve made it far worse.” I took a deep shuddering breath. “What about the man she was seeing, then? Did you know anything about him?”

  James lowered his head. There were tears in his voice. “I knew something had changed. It was soon after rehearsals began. I always used to walk her back home, but sometimes she didn’t want me to; she said she wanted to practice on her own in the theater. Stuff like that. She wasn’t the same. She stopped telling me everything.”

  “Go on.” I hardly recognized my voice, it was so expressionless. I imagined it was like the voice that the blank-­faced policewoman in the corridor must use when she talked to criminals.

  “I saw a man once. I was walking out of the changing room at the theater and I saw her talking to someone. I only saw him from behind. He was leaning against the wall, bending toward her; he had long dark hair, messy. I took it in because she was so kind of focused on him. She didn’t see me, though I called out that I would wait outside. I waited for ages. Everyone left and she still didn’t come out. So I gave up.”

  He started crying, deep, heaving sobs. “I should’ve gone back in. I should’ve looked at his face.”

  Michael got up. “It’s all right, James. You must be exhausted. I’ll drive you home.”

  “Wait.” I felt a pang of remorse and put my hand on the boy’s arm to stop him getting up. “She had stopped telling me everything as well. Look, James. You were careless. Stupidly careless, but you loved her. I realize that. I saw the ring you gave her and—­”

  “You gave her that ring.” He looked at me blankly. “She said it had belonged to her granny. It was a family heirloom.”

  I stared at him. So she had lied to both of us. That man must have given it to her; perhaps even when he was leaning up against the wall that time. He might have chosen that very moment to slip the ring on her finger and that was why she was focused; she would have thought she meant something to him, and all the time it was a trick.

  James got to his feet. He was going to say sorry. I didn’t want to hear that; I didn’t want to feel pity for this boy, this child, who may have tipped the balance of Naomi’s life. Wherever she was, pregnant, perhaps still bleeding, she was in even more danger than I had thought.

  “Tell me . . .” It was hard to ask what Naomi thought about being pregnant when I should have known. It’s the kind of thing a daughter whispers to her mother, keeping it secret from everyone else. “What were her plans about the baby?”

  He looked at me. Though his eyes were puffy, it was obvious that the question puzzled him. “She didn’t want a baby.” His laugh was strained. “That’s why she wanted us to do it again, in the cottage. She wanted a miscarriage and she read somewhere that if we . . . if we made love, that might make it happen. She was really pleased when she started bleeding.”

  After he left with Michael, I sat down, my legs trembling. It was strange he should use those words. Make love. They hadn’t been making anything; it had been the opposite. And the torn piece of yellow paper from a tampon I saw on the floor the night she went missing? She must have still been bleeding from the threatened miscarriage, not menstruating. Had she been in pain?

  By the time Michael returned, my mind was spinning with possibilities. He sat close to me at the table. My thoughts rushed into words: “How do we know if anything James says is true? Perhaps he did give her the ring, as she said. How do we know if Naomi was pregnant, or even if she slept with him? Perhaps he never went to the cottage. He could be making this whole thing up.” My hands were clenched on the table in front of us. I couldn’t stop: “Perhaps the other guy took her to the cottage, but James might be the one who’s got her now. Think about it. He was jealous about Naomi talking to this man, so he’s hurt her or hidden her somewhere . . .”

  Michael briefly put his hand on mine; his fingers were blunt-­ended and warm. “He was at the police station all night, Jenny. He’s telling the truth.” His voice was very certain. “James and Naomi did go to the cottage that Saturday. A man walking by with his dog saw a red Volvo outside. It turns out they borrowed the car from James’s father.”

  I closed my eyes. Michael’s voice continued, listing all the evidence. I made myself listen.

  “James said they stopped at the highway ser­vice station outside Taunton, so we are going through the CCTV tapes. We fingerprinted him last night so they can see if the prints match ones on the bottle and glasses.” He paused; I opened my eyes and looked at him as he continued quietly: “I’ve also spoken to Nikita. She knew Naomi was pregnant.”

  They haven’t got secrets. They’re not little kids . . . Shan’s voice had sounded angrily certain, but did she really believe what she had told me?

  “What else?” I got up and walked around the kitchen again. “What else does she know? Did Nikita say if she knew Naomi had planned to leave?” The questions tumbled out randomly. “What was she going to do about the pregnancy?”

  “She knew Naomi had met someone else she liked, and that she was due to meet him the night she disappeared, but Naomi hadn’t told her anything about him. Nikita doesn’t think she planned to go for good. She thinks she would have said something to her, some kind of good-­bye.” Michael looked at me briefly. “She knew Naomi wanted to end the pregnancy, that she was worried. Of course
there was the diary; and the reference at the end to ten weeks.”

  She would have told herself a ten-­week pregnancy wasn’t far enough advanced to matter. She wouldn’t know that tiny nails were forming on the fingers and toes; that’s the kind of information no one wants if they have to do what Naomi was planning.

  “All right.” I put my hands to my head, as if to hold the racing thoughts still. “Let’s say it happened exactly as James said, and they went to the cottage. How do we know he didn’t take her himself that night? Perhaps he waited secretly for everyone to leave after the play, and then took her somewhere.”

  “His father was there that night to watch him in the play. James was Chino, remember? They went out for a meal at Hôtel du Vin afterward. We checked there last night and the staff remembered them. They showed me the copy of the bill.”

  Michael had been thorough. I was silent. I had wanted it to be James, hiding Naomi because he was jealous, because he loved her and he wanted to keep her safely his.

  “Will it make a difference to how he treats her, whoever he is? Will he treat her better if he knows she’s pregnant?”

  Michael didn’t answer, but I knew anyway. She would be a nuisance with the vomiting and the bleeding. In time, if he gave her time and if she didn’t miscarry, she would become conspicuous.

  “Let’s deal with what we have.” Michael’s calm voice stops my train of thought. “We have a better photofit for the prime suspect from what Mrs. Mears, Nikita, and James have said, and that’s going on all the lampposts in the area, along with a photo of Naomi’s face. We are continuing to watch ports and airports, and we are starting a house-­to-­house inquiry today.”

  “Why? He probably doesn’t live anywhere near here.”

  It seemed so random, so useless. She could be miles away. A tiny hut in Scotland, a garage in Wales. We didn’t even know what he looked like, though my mind played with the new information. He was older, he had long messy hair, he was different from the boys she knew—­was he attractive just because he was so different?