Missing Molly

by Natalie Barelli

  “Vivian,” I say softly. She hears me, I know, but it’s as if I hadn't spoken.

  I stand quietly and walk over to her. I rest my fingertips on the edge of her desk.

  “Can we talk?”

  “It’s a bit late now, don’t you think?” she says without looking up. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s just that… it’s complicated.”

  She shrugs. “You know what, Rachel? I don’t feel like talking. Let me get back to work.”

  Not long after that she shuts down her computer, noisily, banging her mouse. She puts her coat on, the lovely black suede one she picked up at the vintage store on the way to my place, then without a glance my way, and without her usual “Bye, everyone! See you tomorrow, everyone!” she’s gone.

  I finish my own work quickly, and then I leave too.

  Seventeen

  Vivian lives in a lovely flat in Kensington. She told me once she has some kind of trust fund set up. Not by her parents mind you, but by her grandmother. They were really close. I figured her grandmother must have wanted to protect Vivian from her own parents’ neglect.

  It’s raining when I get there, and I don’t have an umbrella. My hair is wet, rain dripping down my neck and down my back.

  I ring the flat, and she asks who it is.

  “It’s me.”

  Nothing happens. I can picture her upstairs, finger on the button. I hold my breath but then the door opens.

  When I get upstairs, she’s standing in the doorway.

  “Don’t be angry with me, Viv.”

  “I’m not angry, Rachel, but I’m pretty fucking disappointed.”

  I wince. “Listen to me please, I'll try and explain.”

  She opens the door wider and lets me in. I follow her into the kitchen. There’s a steaming cup of tea on the worktop. She doesn’t offer me one. She stands there, sipping her tea, waits for me to say something.

  “The thing is—” I begin, without any clue of what I’m going to say, but she interrupts me immediately.

  “How long have we known each other?”

  “Vivian, listen—”

  “How do you think it feels, to hear that you’ve gone behind my back, and essentially wiggled your way into my job.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You have never said that you wanted to do anything other than what you were doing, i.e. the accounts. But now I find out that you’re going to be a co-producer of the podcast, that I have to run any editorial decision past you.” She shakes her head in disbelief. “It would have been nice if you’d told me.”

  “I wanted to.”

  “I feel pretty betrayed here, you know? And I’ve been wracking my brain to figure out what I’ve done to deserve this, and you know what? I’ve been nothing but a friend to you. A true friend.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “So why would you fuck me over like this? You didn’t even want this podcast to happen for fuck’s sake. So what is it?”

  “I didn’t fuck you over—”

  “You know I want to be a reporter. It’s my dream job. An investigative reporter, Rachel. Then this opportunity comes up and it’s fucking perfect! I love podcasts! It’s the future of investigative reporting! And by some stroke of luck, it’s been given to me!” Her arms are open wide, in wonder at the incredible fortune that came her way. Part of it had been luck, the part I played, in exposing Jacob and having him gone, sure, but the rest was all her. Vivian is great at what she does. This lead producer’s job was a promotion, and she’d earned it.

  “You wouldn’t even have this job if it wasn’t for me,” she says now.

  “Cut it out. You know that’s not true. You told me the position was available, but I got the job, not you. I’m branching out. You told me I should be more ambitious often enough, well here I am.”

  “You should have told me,” she says. “If you’d told me, we could have gone to Chris together, and—” then she cocks her head at me, the way she does, and says, “Chris says you have access to info, somehow. You have an in, a source, I think he said. Is that true?”

  I flick my head in a ‘maybe’ kind of way.

  “And you’re not going to share that with me? You’re keeping it to yourself?”

  I blink. “For now.”

  She shakes her head in disgust, and I see the tears well up in her eyes. I’m betraying our friendship and she doesn’t understand why. Her face collapses in misery. Suddenly I want to stop. I want to take her in my arms and tell her I didn’t mean a word of it. I’m just trying to protect her.

  “You know, I’d never say this normally, Rachel, never. But I feel I have to.” She takes a deep breath and I know exactly what’s coming.

  “I was there for you.”

  And now it’s too late. I cross my arms over my chest, holding back my own tears.

  “Don’t you dare,” I say.

  “When you went crazy,” she continues, “I was there for you. Your postnatal depression episode, you have no idea what it did to us. Me. Matt. Gracie. What it took out of us. And I. Was. There.”

  I turn around for the door.

  “I stood up for you,” she says louder, “When they could have taken your daughter away from you, because of what you did? I vouched for you.”

  I’m crying now, I can’t help it. Even if I wanted to speak, I couldn’t get it out through the tears.

  “I told the cops you were going to be okay. That your daughter was safe with you. I told the doctors the same thing. I told social services the same thing. I was there for you, Rachel. I was your friend! And now you’re doing this?”

  “I’m not listening to this anymore,” I say, opening the door. I close it just as she says,

  “I’m worried about you. I think you might be going crazy again.”

  Eighteen

  Matt is working late today and won’t be back for at least an hour. I give Gracie some hot chocolate and she settles in with her pencils and paper. That’s one thing she gets from Matt, she can draw remarkably well for her age.

  Like most people our age, we rent our flat. It’s an older flat. When the central heating comes on in winter, the pipes make a hell of a racket. But it’s home for us. It’s the only place Matt and I have lived in together. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most wonderful home in the world.

  In the kitchen, under the sink, there’s a cupboard where we keep cleaning products. Behind the down pipe, on the wall, there’s a small panel made of old tin that’s been painted over with the same colour as the wall. It looks like something that was put there to fix a big hole. It’s affixed by four screws except they’re not screws exactly. I don’t know what they’re called, and I didn’t want to ask Matt, because he would wonder why I was interested. I described them to the man at the hardware store, and he sold me a tool that was shaped like a Tee.

  Behind the panel there’s a wall cavity and an old rusted pipe. The whole thing must have been sealed years ago. Whatever use it once had, it was no longer required.

  That hole has become my hiding spot. It’s the perfect size for my memory book. My sister Grace came up with the name, a memory book. It’s a scrapbook, essentially. We both had one, Grace and I. Mine is filled with a bunch of clippings I collected over the years for one reason or another, along with a few meagre souvenirs that I feel should be kept hidden. Things that are important to me, to have and to keep.

  Grace and I used to play in the old disused train station not far from our house. The doors and windows were boarded up, except for that one small window at the back. It was hard to get to it because of all the ivy that had grown over it, and the tall nettles against it. But Grace had found a path, and that window had never closed properly. It was just big enough for her to pass through. Then she would put her hands out and help me up.

  I would line up my dolls against the wall, where the paint had cracked and peeled almost comp
letely, and the wall had a soft, pale surface that left a chalky powder on my hands. They would become my pupils and while I taught them maths, my sister would write in her memory book, glue a picture of a famous pop star that she’d cut out of some magazine, or make a drawing. I’d stick stars in the margins for her, where she’d put something really special, or where she mentioned something about me.

  I tell Gracie that I’m doing some cleaning. She doesn’t pay attention. She’s sitting in her chair, engrossed in her drawings, humming to herself.

  I remove the bit of tin and pull the memory book out of its hiding spot. Back at the kitchen table, I unwrap it from the plastic bag I store it in and a few pieces of paper fall out. Among them is a snapshot, the only photo I have of the man who helped me survive, and who was killed in a car accident.

  When I turned fifteen I decided I had to get out of living on the streets. I was seeing too many kids like me ending up with lethal drug addictions, or dead. I fantasised about being a maths teacher, but I found out it wasn’t going to work. I had missed too much school.

  I had a job then, I washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant. The people who ran it were always nice to me, but I wasn’t earning much. Not enough to put myself through school. A counsellor at the Youth Centre said I might look into an apprenticeship, that there was loads of options for someone like me. I started looking into it, and one thing became clear: I needed some kind of verifiable identification. I figured there had to be a way to get a fake ID, people did it all the time. There are various underground networks that help you do that, none of them that advertise on Facebook, but when you live on the streets for long enough, you become very good at finding out information, especially of the illegal kind.

  That’s how I met Gabriel. I suspect that wasn’t his birth name, and he never told me one way or the other. And anyway, I wasn’t going to give him mine.

  He was considerably older than me, mid-twenties at least. Maybe because I was so young, and so vulnerable, but Gabriel helped me. I wanted a completely fake ID, but he explained to me why I’d get caught and told me to find a name of someone around my age, someone who had died, and he’d do the rest.

  There was a girl, back in Whitbrook, called Susan Bishop. We weren’t friends exactly, but we knew each other from the neighbourhood. She died when she was about seven years old. Meningitis. It was a tragedy in our town. I didn’t go to the funeral, but I went to her grave a few times. She’d been the first person I’d known who had died.

  I told Gabriel about her, and he gold hold of her birth certificate, then he explained how to get an ID in her name. “You have the birth certificate, now you get the next thing. You might get yourself a library card. You build up slowly, bit by bit, a collection of identifying things. You start small, but the more evidence you have with your new name on it, the easier it becomes. You’ll have a full ID in no time.” He also told me never to get arrested, probably not to get married and always to pay my taxes on time. Other than that, it would do for most things, he said. He also taught me how to hide in plain sight and he taught me how to disappear.

  I became Susan Bishop and I went back to school. Then when I was seventeen, I ran into Gabriel again and we started dating.

  Most people who became adept at creating false identities started out running away from their own, and Gabriel was no different. I never knew what had happened in his life that made him hide, and he never asked about my past.

  We went to Spain together because he had a job there, in Barcelona. You didn’t need a passport to go to Spain, not then anyway.

  We settled there, we were happy, but around a year later he became concerned about some activity he was picking up on his networks. He got scared that his past was catching up with him. I thought he was being paranoid.

  We had plans to visit some friends in Sitges for the weekend, about 25 miles down the coast. At the last minute I fell ill, and I couldn’t go, so Gabriel went on his own, just for the day.

  He must have been halfway there when he called me. I couldn’t hear him properly, but it sounded urgent. He sounded scared. I could only catch a few words, but it sounded like “They found me.” He was shouting. Repeating the same words over and over again. There was too much noise, too much wind, and I couldn’t make out the words.

  Then he came through, Go!

  I thought he wanted me to meet him somewhere. I thought we had to run away.

  Go! Now!

  Where?

  It was a miracle they were able to retrieve the car from the bottom of the cliff. I thought he’d been murdered by whatever had caught up with him. It was our nightmare come true. The police said he didn’t have his phone with him. That phone had been thrown out of the car a few miles back.

  I returned to England, and I ditched Susan Bishop and became Rachel Holloway. I always assumed it was him they were after because he was always looking over his shoulder. But after reading the comment from that detective I think that it was never the case. I think what Gabriel had been trying to say was, “They found you.”

  He was warning me.

  Go!

  Run, Molly, run.

  I hear the key in the door and I shove all my memories back into the book. Gracie is already chanting daddydaddydaddy and by the time Matt appears in the kitchen I’ve only had time to pull a bit of newspaper over the book. It’s a copy of the local paper.

  Missing Molly, a new podcast delivered to you by the South Hackney Herald.

  “You’re home early?” I don’t know why I make it sound like a question.

  Without answering, he goes to the fridge and pulls out a beer. He offers me one, but I decline. I notice he’s wearing his tracksuit bottoms and an old hooded sweatshirt. When he removes it, his T-shirt is damp with sweat.

  “Daddy!!!”

  He picks up Gracie with one arm and she hugs him tightly, her face flush with happiness. Matt finally smiles.

  “You went running?”

  He nuzzles Grace, blows raspberries into her neck while she giggles and wriggles with joy.

  “Yeah, we had a cancellation at work, so I got out early,” he says at last. He sits down at the kitchen table with Gracie on his lap as she toys with the cord dangling from his hood. I turn a page of the paper, pretending to read. My heart is beating so fast it’s making my mouth dry.

  Please go away, just for a minute. I look at my watch and take a gamble.

  “Do you want to give Gracie her bath? Or do you want me to?”

  “I’ll do it,” he says.

  He stands, throws her in the air a couple of times and she screams and squeals. They coo at each other and he takes her to the bathroom to run the bath. I let out a long breath of relief, quickly fold the paper and turn on the kitchen tap. Should he return too quickly, I am ready to make a show of cleaning. But there’s no need, I can hear them chatting and laughing and pretty soon I can hear Gracie splash into the water too.

  I secure the tin sheeting back in place.

  Nineteen

  When I walk in the following morning, she’s already here, sitting at her desk, typing at a million miles an hour. Tip dancing, she called typing sometimes. It made me laugh. We’d start speaking with a New Zealand accent, sending each other into hoots of laughter.

  But not today. You can tell the atmosphere in the room has shifted. It’s like we don’t know what to say to each other.

  At first, she pretends not to notice me. Which is silly. She knows I’ve arrived, I am standing a few feet away from her. Then she raises her head and says hi with a pretend cheerfulness. I reply with the same awkwardness. Mike looks up and though normally he would have said something, now he’s mute.

  I hook my bag on the back of my chair and take my jacket to the coatrack in the corner of the room, with its curly tentacles pointing up and a space at the bottom for umbrellas.

  “Rachel, in here please.” Chris is standing at the entrance of his office only a few feet away, but by the time I reach the door he’s already gone back i
n. I don’t sit down. Somehow, I don’t feel invited to do so.

  “It’s not bad.” He hands me the script of the new episode that I emailed him last night. He has printed it and made some corrections. “Give it to Vivian and see what she thinks.”

  I take the sheets of paper and notice the paragraph that he has crossed out. It’s the part about Dennis Dawson’s arrest. I point out that the only reason he got arrested was because he happened to go to the house. But the cricket bat was wiped clean, so it didn’t have his fingerprints, or anyone else’s for that matter. I explained that, in the script. It was the cricket bat used in the killing because it still had traces of blood, especially on the handle, where some of it had seeped under the leather. But why would he wipe the cricket bat clean and then stick around screaming for the neighbours to find him?

  “What’s wrong with any of it?” I ask.

  “It’s irrelevant. I appreciate that you’ve looked into it, and it’s interesting, but it’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re looking for Molly, not challenging the facts of the case. Okay?”

  “Even if I’m the producer?”

  “Even if you’re one of the producers.”

  I take the script to Vivian and put it on her desk. She doesn’t look at me, but she just picks it up and reads it.

  “What do you think?” I ask.

  “It reads like shit. It’s like a twelve-year-old wrote it.”

  “So rewrite it then. Here.” I hand her a red pen. “Rewrite it so it doesn’t read like I wrote it.”

  “Call for you, Rach,” Jenny yells out, holding out the phone.

  “I’ll take it over at my desk,” I tell her.

  There’s one call I’ve been waiting for and I’ve been dreading at the same time. I did leave a private message on Reddit for the user who calls himself anonymousfornow, asking him to call Rachel Holloway, producer, at The South Hackney Herald.