by Anna Wharton
She smiles as she brushes her hair slowly. ‘I haven’t done this in a long time,’ Maureen says.
Chloe realizes she must be talking about Angie.
‘No, I don’t suppose you have,’ she says.
Maureen holds Chloe’s head so tenderly with her left hand while the right hand works on the knot. Chloe doesn’t feel her head tug once.
‘Wow, you’ve really got the touch, haven’t you?’ Chloe says as with each sweep of the brush more matted hair is released.
But Maureen doesn’t stop once she’s got the knot out; instead she starts to brush the rest of Chloe’s hair, a look of deep concentration on her face. Chloe reaches for the sink to steady herself. In the clearing mirror, she watches Maureen’s reflection. Does she really need all those tablets every day? Chloe isn’t even sure what each one does, or what Maureen needs them to do.
Maureen stops brushing and sweeps her right hand down the length of Chloe’s hair.
‘Lovely,’ Maureen says, ‘almost black, just like . . .’
The two women meet each other’s eyes in the mirror. Chloe sees the hint of a puzzle appear in Maureen’s expression.
‘Well, I’d better get to work,’ Chloe says finally. She holds out her hand for the brush. It takes a second for Maureen to hand it to her.
‘Yes, of course, there you go, love.’
Maureen leaves the bathroom and when Chloe hears her bedroom door close she crosses the landing to her own bedroom to dress.
Chloe catches the bus into town, sitting among her fellow commuters as she does every day. The only difference is that they’re heading to jobs, whereas she’s leaving hers until dusk. Because that’s what her role is at the Kyles’ house, it is a job of sorts. She has to keep reminding herself of that. As they drive towards the city, she envies these commuters their desks and when the bus slows for the roundabout beside the newspaper offices, Chloe looks up at the third floor and the safety of the archive. A place that had always seemed to yield answers, whereas now all she has is questions.
She can’t face Park House today so decides to go to the library. It’s warm and quiet there, the only other place in this city where she can sit peacefully among other people’s stories.
She takes her phone from her pocket and sees that Claire Sanders has left another message for her. She doesn’t need to listen to the voicemail to know what it is – talk of power of attorney and deeds and paperwork and a tangle of all the things Chloe tries hard to avoid. The bits of black and white that threaten to pin her down. In one previous message that Chloe made the mistake of listening to yesterday, Claire Sanders even mentioned how she’d called her office phone and someone had told her she’d left. Chloe’s insides had twisted at the thought of the umbilical cord between her and the archive being cut so bluntly. Chloe curses herself again for ever giving Claire her office number. But that was at the beginning when none of this could have been foreseen. Back then there hadn’t been consequences, just the here and now, just what felt right on that particular day.
At the library, she heads straight for the research centre. It is housed inside a glass room in the middle of the main library floor and more often than not, it is empty. Just like the archive, Chloe knows, if people don’t use it, they’ll lose it. She’s never understood why people enjoy novels more than real life. The research centre houses an archive of hundreds of digital newspapers, census records, old telephone directories. It seems a strange irony – even to Chloe – that she’s more comfortable in fact than fiction.
She hangs her coat on the back of the chair and presses a key so the sleeping screen lights up. The research centre overlooks the children’s reading corner, and while she waits for the program to load, she watches a mother with a little girl of about three or four. The girl toddles around, pulling books with colourful spines from the shelves and scattering them at her feet. Her red T-bar shoes march over their hard covers with little respect for the stories inside. Her mother has black hair – like Maureen – tied up in a messy bun and she tidies in her daughter’s wake, trying her best to entice her over to some colourful cushions where they can read together.
Would Maureen have done this with Angie? Not that this particular library existed back then. Now the old red-brick library is a Chinese restaurant, although Chloe remembers it when it was fusty and full of books. She has a fuzzy memory of her own mother leaving her there once. A wall of books she can’t see over is still enough to stoke that panic in her. A librarian had found her crying in fiction. She’d lifted her onto the counter and had let her stamp the return dates into the front of borrowed books. For those few hours of her childhood Chloe can honestly say she was truly happy. So happy that she cried sad tears when her mother returned, and, assuming they were tears of relief, the librarian tore strips off her mother. Strips that her mother then tore off her all the way home. Nothing was ever her fault, after all. It was always Chloe’s. Her fault for being born.
Maureen wouldn’t have been that kind of mother, she can tell from the way she fusses, the way she brings up a cup of tea for her in the morning while she’s still in bed, how she’s happy to mix Chloe’s washing in with her own.
How different life might have been.
Back in the library, the mother has tempted her daughter onto her lap. They lie on two big red beanbags in the children’s section, reading about a hungry caterpillar whose appetite was never sated despite how much he ate. Chloe knows that feeling, that hope that the next meal might be enough to turn her into a beautiful butterfly. The little girl kicks her red shoes off and her mother strokes her leg, as if the world was meant just for the two of them. Chloe had always had to share. Nan had Stella. Hollie had Phil. All the other people had someone, and when no one was left, then Chloe competed with memories of the ones that hung around to haunt them. She thinks of the cemetery, the flowers left week in, week out. She’d often wished she was loved with the same loyalty as a dead person.
She turns back to the screen and types in a particular date. She knows most of them by heart now, all the anniversaries that were revisited.
WE’RE STILL WAITING FOR ANGIE.
She reaches out and puts a hand up to the screen. She covers the last word in the headline and whispers her own name.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Chloe spends more than two hours reading over old cuttings in the library. All the ones she’s read before, so they don’t turn up anything new, but she likes to refamiliarize herself with the case. After all, she can’t go over the facts too many times. Perhaps that’s how some detectives get lazy. One of the more recent articles she found had a sidebar on police procedure in cases of potential child abduction and how the first forty-eight hours are the most crucial. It included some terrifying statistic that if an abductor intends to kill the child, most do it within the first five hours after capture. That thought alone makes a mockery of the reminders of hope Maureen has dotted around Elm House and Chloe’s heart aches for her. She must redouble her efforts.
She opens an internet browser and types ‘missing children investigation’ into the search bar. A whole list of articles comes up and she devours each and every one in turn, writing notes in biro in her pale blue book as she goes. In one article from an American newspaper an expert from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children talks about how important it is to interview people who live near to the site where the child disappeared. Not once, but over and over in the hope that extra – even tiny – details might resurface with every interview. She writes that down in her book. Then wonders who she might be able to talk to. Ferry Meadows is a park, there are no houses nearby. Even the ones that back onto it now wouldn’t have been there twenty-five years ago. It’s strange to think that Park House was probably the nearest building to the play park where Angie was last seen, but even that was just a building site then. She reads on carefully, scouring for interview techniques, the expert saying that it’s not a case of asking witnesses if they noticed anything strange; even the
seemingly normal, even a parked car, might be a significant detail. She writes that down too.
At lunchtime she walks to Central Park to eat her sandwiches. On a bench not too far from her own sits a homeless man watching the birds hop across the grass. Twenty-five years ago, Ferry Meadows might not have been surrounded by houses, but it could have been home to vagrants. She wonders if police interviewed any of them, or would they have gone as unnoticed then as they do now, slipping through the cracks of a society they don’t choose or appear to fit into? She gets up and crosses the grass to him, offering the cheese and mayonnaise sandwich that Maureen had left out for her beside Patrick’s. He takes it in both hands and thanks her. Chloe notices as he does the dirt that has accumulated under his fingernails, his messy beard and weather-beaten skin. She understands how he would prefer to drift from place to place. Not everyone needs to cast an anchor into one house, one home, one family.
She returns to the library and spends a couple more hours scanning through articles, but when she fails to fill her notebook with anything new, she knows it’s time to go home. Only then she remembers the last thing she wanted to check. She flicks back a few pages in her book and types the name of the drugs she’d found in the bathroom cabinet into the search bar. She checks sertraline first and the results spring up. She clicks on the one at the top:
. . . often used to treat depression, and sometimes panic attacks, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) . . .
She checks the next one. The same comes up:
. . . depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety . . .
She double-checks diazepam and, as she suspected, among the answers is that it helps those with difficulty sleeping. Chloe can’t imagine Maureen has slept easily these last twenty-five years.
She notes everything down, then packs her notebook away in her bag and heads back towards the bus station. She will arrive home early, but luckily she’s already told Maureen her boss is away, so it won’t raise too many eyebrows.
On the bus home she sends Hollie a message telling her she has an interview, knowing that it will please her to read that. Then she sinks back against the window and waits for the big sky of the Fens to open up as they leave the city.
Patrick beats her home from work; he and Maureen are working in the back garden when she walks down the drive.
‘Hello, Chloe, love,’ Maureen calls to her. ‘Good day at work?’
Chloe gives her a generic response that seems to satisfy her, and Maureen turns back to supervising Patrick as he turns over earth and she bends to pick up the weeds he’s churned up.
Chloe lets herself into the kitchen, pausing to get a glass of water to take up to her room. She plans to read through the notes she’s taken today in the quiet of her room. Through the back door she watches Maureen and Patrick absorbed in their task. She walks into the hall, glancing into the front room and seeing the unopened boxes still stacked inside from their recent move. With so much to do inside the house, she’s surprised they’re working on the garden. Then, a thought occurs to her. She stops, looks back into the kitchen and down into the garden where Maureen and Patrick are still working. She puts her glass of water down by the high skirting on the parquet floor, and slowly pushes at the door to the front room.
The floorboards are exposed in here and dusty net curtains hang at the bay window. It is a dumping ground, just as Maureen had described, and along one of the walls, cardboard boxes balance on top of one another. Each is labelled with a different room, but the highest one, the lid of it sticking up, has a name on it: Patrick. Chloe pauses. From the garden she can hear Maureen giving Patrick instructions of where to dig and how deep. She takes her bag off her shoulder and places it gently on the floor, then tiptoes over towards the box. Stacked on top of two other boxes, it’s too high for her to look in without lifting it down. She reaches up and wraps her hands around the box; it’s surprisingly light, so she lifts it down onto the floor. Carefully, she opens it, and peers in at what appears to be nothing more than paperwork and other odds and ends. But at the bottom there is a shoebox, not too dissimilar to the one underneath her bed. She pulls it out, and as she does so the paperwork collapses into the space it leaves. She sees an old CV, yellowing certificates and what look like school reports. Nothing that she thinks will be significant to this investigation. But this shoebox . . . Carefully, she lifts the lid and peers inside. There is white tissue paper, and nestled within it is a pair of child’s T-bar school shoes. They are red, or once were, and scuffed at the toes. Chloe picks them up, and runs her hand along the soft leather, sliding her fingers inside and feeling indentations where each of Angie’s tiny toes once sat. But why are they here, deep in a box marked Patrick and covered over with paperwork? Does Maureen even know he has them? She lifts them up, turns them around in the light. There’s even still a little dried mud and a bit of sand on the sole. For some reason she thinks of the sandpit at the play park in Ferry Meadows.
Suddenly Chloe hears the back door open. Her heart starts thudding. She pushes the shoes back into the box as she hears Patrick cough in the kitchen, then footsteps, heading through the kitchen into the hall. She throws the shoebox back into the box, no time to cover it over with paperwork. She picks the whole thing up, quickly lifts it back into position on top of the other boxes. She’s balancing it in place when Patrick appears at the front room door.
She turns to him, her hands still on the sides of the box. He stares at her, and then up to the box.
‘Everything all right?’ he says. He’s holding the glass of water she left outside.
She follows his eyes then, up to the top of the box, the four sides of the lid still open.
She stares for a second into the blankness of the cardboard, her mind empty of excuses for why she’s in the front room. Then she realizes that the black marker writing with his name on it isn’t visible from this angle. She must have pushed it back on top the other way round. A small mercy.
‘Oh, yeah,’ she says. ‘I . . . I just heard a noise and I think maybe this box . . .’
He glances from her to the box and back again.
‘I think it might have tumbled onto the floor,’ she says. ‘Because when I looked inside . . . anyway, it’s fine now.’
She taps the side of the box. Patrick’s eyes narrow, just a little.
She picks up her bag from the floor, then goes to walk out, pausing beside him.
‘Oh, thank you,’ she says, taking the glass of water from his hand. And then, with a little bit more confidence, ‘I don’t know what would have made it fall down like that.’
‘No,’ Patrick says, quietly. ‘Neither do I.’
He stands there after she takes the glass and walks out of the room, but as she goes up the stairs – her heart still pounding – she sees him through the crack in the door, checking if anything has been disturbed inside.
When she comes downstairs later, the door is shut tight.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Chloe wakes on Saturday morning to sunshine burning through the curtains. Maureen had offered to line them with blackout material, but it had never felt necessary during the last dark mornings of winter. Now spring wakes her before her alarm.
She checks her watch and then picks up her phone. There is a text from Hollie: Hey, how are you? Sorry for late reply. We’re off to Lanzarote this weekend so I’ve been packing. How did the interview go? Let me know you’re ok xxx
She doesn’t reply but instead lies back in the warmth of the sun that stretches across her pillow. She likes waking up in Low Drove, she loves to lie back in bed and hear the noises from downstairs drift up to her room: the clattering of crockery, the scraping of a chair leg. There’s a safety in domestic sounds like these. The humdrum that other people take for granted.
She listens out for Patrick’s voice, but instead it’s the low buzz of the sewing machine that seeps up through the floorboards. She gets up, putting on the dressing gown and slipper
s she bought especially for Elm House.
Downstairs, Maureen is sitting at the kitchen table humming and sewing. She breaks her stitching to say good morning.
‘Would you like me to get you some breakfast, love?’ she asks, abandoning the floral material bunched in her hands.
‘No, no, it’s fine, thanks,’ Chloe says. ‘I’ll get it.’
Though she likes Maureen to ask.
The gentle whizz tap tap of the machine resumes as she shakes cereal into her bowl. In the sink are two mugs and two plates still covered in toast crumbs. Next to them is an eggcup with Angela written on it, and a picture of a fairy. Chloe has never seen it before.
‘Is Patrick working today?’
‘Yes,’ Maureen says, her eyes trained on the stitches. ‘On the early shift this morning.’
Chloe nods as she pours milk on her cereal and sits down on a chair opposite Maureen, her eyes still trained on the egg-cup.
‘I thought you might fancy eggs for a change?’ Maureen says.
Had she noticed Chloe staring at it? She quickly looks down at her cereal.
Life had got back to normal in the last couple of days. Whatever Maureen and Patrick had rowed about had soon blown over and Patrick had never said anything about finding her in the front room, though the door had remained shut ever since.
Maureen looks up to see Chloe clutching her bowl to her chest. ‘Set your bowl down, I can finish this after you’ve had your breakfast,’ she says.
‘It’s no problem,’ Chloe says. ‘What are you making? It’s nice material.’
Maureen smiles, pulling it out from the machine and biting off a loose thread. She flaps the fabric, the same orange pattern she’s been working with on and off for the last week or so. She smooths out the cotton and Chloe can see that it’s actually covered in mustard-yellow sunflowers.