‘Sure.’ His smile was doing me the world of good. ‘All right, wait here.’
He climbed up nimbly and headed to an older man across the little stone bridge. I could smell the canal water, deep and earthy, and I took in big lungfuls. ‘Martin says you can help to take down the hut bricks.’ Cory pointed to a structure that must have once been a little house. For the lock keeper? I headed across to them.
‘We’re preserving the bricks,’ said Martin, handing me a hi-vis jacket. ‘They can be recycled. It’s an easy enough job though to pull them down and stack them.’ His smile made sun rays in the corners of his eyes. Here I could pretend there was nothing but sunshine.
The bricks of the little hut were loose, the mortar around them crumbling, and Martin was right, I could pull them off with a quick sharp tug. Under my anorak, I could soon feel the sweat building and when the sun came out from behind the scudding clouds, it heated me from the outside too. With each brick I pulled, I seemed to gain courage, a belief that maybe I was stronger than I’d thought. Perhaps after all I could do this – return his call with no harm done. My thoughts, always so fast and so scrambled, fell into a slow order and I hid my face behind my hair, wiping my cheeks and nose on my sleeves, hiding my tears in the currents of the wind as I lowered the walls brick by brick.
I could only imagine how he, her father, would be feeling, knowing she was found, knowing she’d come home. He would have so many questions, ones the police could hardly answer: what exactly she looked like, how exactly she was, those myriad details that meant so much. Didn’t he have a right to that at least? Surely it need be only one short conversation, telling him what he’d want to know but no more. And what if I didn’t call and he simply turned up – emotional, demanding, volatile, high – wouldn’t that be so much worse for Abigail? Wouldn’t that reignite the worst in us all?
The volunteers were breaking for lunch; I straightened up and brushed the mortar dust from my hands. ‘I can’t stay,’ I said, handing the yellow jacket back to Cory. ‘Abigail’s waiting for me at home.’
‘See you soon?’ Martin said and I nodded, and they both hugged me to say goodbye.
Even so, I’d stayed longer than I meant to and I walked back quickly, already feeling a thin chill as my sweat dried. A few minutes from home, in a place where the muddied path narrowed and was hidden from the main road by a copse of trees, I pulled my phone from my anorak pocket. My sister’s voice was buzzing in my ears: don’t call him, Annie, don’t let him back in, but I ignored it. I wanted to call him, I realized now, it felt like a chance to set everything right. I could ring him, just once, and never tell anyone. I clicked the phone open.
Three missed calls from Robert, one text:
Come back.
Sick with guilt, I made myself run the rest of the way home.
When I got there, Robert met me at the front door, a finger to his lips.
‘What is it? Is she all right?’
‘DS McCarthy called. They’re showing it.’
‘What?’
‘On the news, now. They’ve released his photograph to the press.’
My legs were like lead as I kicked off my boots and the sleeves of my anorak tangled as I twisted my arms free. In the living room, the BBC news was on the TV, but Robert had muted the sound. He pointed a finger to the ceiling: to the twins’ and Abigail’s bedrooms. ‘I think it’s best right now if she doesn’t see.’
On the screen, there were shots of a house, a street, a car, nothing I recognized.
Wanted in connection…
Police are tracing…
Appeal for information…
The inevitable picture of her flashed up, our eight-year-old daughter frozen in time, but now the reporter was sounding another name out, and now came the shot of a man with blond hair and pale eyes.
‘That’s him,’ said Robert. ‘John Henry Cassingham.’
Six syllables that sounded so painful in my husband’s mouth and I took each one, turning it over and over in my mind, trying to find any answer, any clue. But it was a stranger’s name, a complete and utter stranger, and when I looked at Robert he shook his head too.
Gently, he took my hand in his. ‘DS McCarthy is on his way.’
It had come to this: DS McCarthy in our house with his shiny shoes making divots in the living-room carpet.
Abigail sat opposite him, her big frame half sunken into the cushions of the couch; Robert sat beside her, a foot of space between them, and I stood in front of the mantelpiece, filling the gap where Robert’s roses should have been.
‘Do you remember the address,’ the detective was saying to her, pushing his fingertips into the leather of our chair, ‘that you gave us at the start?’
Abigail gazed across at the detective without blinking. ‘Fifteen Martin’s Road, in Southwark, in London.’
I swallowed. She reeled it off like a schoolchild reciting by rote, as though it was her home. This address, this place in South London, so little distance, I realized now, from where she’d gone missing; just a walk through the rain from London Bridge.
‘All right, well. On Monday afternoon we sent officers to the address.’ His voice was soft, like suede, designed for gentle handling. ‘The trouble is, there was no one at home.’
Abigail continued to gaze at him, childlike, open-faced. It had come to this: the detective here, struggling for leads, looking to my daughter to give him the answers and I thought, what on earth is this like for her? What sense is she making of any of this? Here we are, all gathered round her, piling her with questions as though she has the answers when she still hardly seems to understand that she’s home.
‘We know from a neighbour,’ DS McCarthy went on, ‘that Mr Cassingham came home mid-morning. And left again, with a duffel bag, about fifteen minutes later.’
‘What are you saying?’ I said. ‘What are you trying to ask my daughter?’
His grey eyes came to rest on me and I made myself hold my own gaze steady. He said his next words to Abigail very quietly. I thought I had misheard him.
‘Do you know anything about this, Abigail?’
I stayed right where I was. I was afraid if I moved, I’d slap him. The insinuation, the accusation in his tone as though somehow we were the ones under suspicion, as though my daughter were somehow responsible for this. ‘Why should she?’
My daughter’s fingers were picking at each other as if she couldn’t keep them still, and I wanted to reach over and make her stop.
‘Abigail?’ The detective’s voice was a soft murmur.
She slowly slid her gaze up to me, then away again to the window, to outside. She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh.’
‘There was a dark blue car,’ DS McCarthy pressed on, his fingers pushing right into the arm of our chair. ‘Like the one seen near Tonia Dillon’s house. We got his details from the registration plate. We contacted the school where you said he worked. He hasn’t been there since Monday morning.’
Abigail’s shoulders hunched up to her ears, a shrug. I knew the detective was only doing his job: gathering information, piecing together clues. It was the way Abigail seemed so uncaring, so complacent, as though she couldn’t see what the fuss was about, why the police were so desperate to find him; as if she didn’t think her abductor had done a single thing wrong. For a blind moment, something slipped in me again and I had the sudden urge to grab her and drag her up from the couch, march her upstairs, and shake the answers out of her. Explain yourself! Explain yourself!
The detective looked as though he was bracing himself for what he’d say next and automatically I braced myself too. He leaned forwards.
‘Abigail. Do you know where he is?’
Then the detective was gone and we were alone again. Robert put an arm around our daughter. I stood up. ‘I’m going to check on the twins.’
As I climbed the stairs, I could hear Abigail’s voice below me in the living room. ‘I told them all this. They went over and over it in London.’ Then Robert: �
��It’s all right. If you don’t know, you don’t know.’ Even now, his simplicity allowed him to steady her: no sharp corners, no edges to get in the way. I knew it was something I should be grateful for, something that could only be good for my daughter; it was just that it brought an ache to my heart because I only wished I could be the same way.
The boys were sitting in their bedroom propped against Laurie’s bunk; they’d been so good, keeping out of the way. On the carpet beside them, an abandoned iPad game blipped, a message flashing, Restart game? ‘What’s happening?’ said Sam. ‘What’s going on?’
But I was looking at the mess on their desk: a whole pile of papers with her face on each, dozens of pictures of her: Abigail White, missing, missing, missing. All those posters that Robert had kept printing, more than he could use, the extras that had sat in boxes in her room. ‘Why have you got these? What are you doing?’
Laurie jumped to his feet. I felt the sharpness of his elbows as he pushed up beside me, his voice shrill as he pressed his hands to the pages. ‘We rescued them! When we were clearing her bedroom. We wanted to keep them.’
The computer game suddenly stopped pinging. I breathed in hard. I mustn’t shout, I mustn’t be angry. ‘She’s home now,’ I said. ‘We don’t need any of this. You were there when we put all this away.’ I scooped the accusing posters up, catching the ones that fell to the floor. I crumpled them, the paper unyielding, and crammed them into the bin by the door. When I was done I let out my breath. ‘You can come downstairs,’ I said. ‘We’re finished.’
Slowly, Sam uncurled himself from the floor. As he headed past me, I caught at him and Laurie too, hugging them to me. ‘I love you,’ I said, but their faces were sullen and as soon as I let them, they wriggled away.
I listened to their feet bang down the stairs, with something cold and hollow in my chest. I sat down on Laurie’s bunk, the rockets and spaceships so innocent and familiar, symbols of everything I should be fighting to protect. I took out my phone, scrolling through my contacts to the old profile, stored simply as ‘P’. The choice was gone; I knew I couldn’t call him now. My hands heavy, I deleted his voicemail.
After a moment I deleted his phone number too.
Chapter 8
Sunday 2nd June:
Day 7
JESS
On Sunday I made Mum let me call them. When the phone rang it was Auntie Anne who picked up. ‘And Abigail?’ I asked. ‘Can I speak to Abigail? Can she come to the phone?’
But Abigail was sleeping, Auntie Anne said, even though it was the middle of the day. ‘The detective was here yesterday and it tired her out. I’m sorry, Jess.’
‘Well, and how is she?’ said Mum. ‘Any dissociation, any nightmares?’ She had been reading up on ‘trauma symptoms’.
‘No,’ said Auntie Anne. ‘Nothing like that.’ She paused. Something hung there, unsaid. ‘But I’ll get her to call you, shall I, Jess – when she wakes up?’
But Abigail must have slept right through because come eleven that evening she still hadn’t called, and then it was Monday and I had to go to school.
I woke with a thick head, a shivery fever, like coming down with ’flu. Mum held the back of her hand against my forehead, not even checking with the thermometer, and said I’d be fine. I got her to drive me to school at least. I couldn’t face the bus. She wrote me a note too, for my teachers. Explaining everything that had happened.
When she dropped me off at the top of the road, it felt like I’d been away for years, not a week. Maybe that’s what was making me feel so ill, the flip from one world straight into another. Lena was there though, waiting for me by the high green school gates. Standing by herself, and I was properly grateful for that. Around me, pupils off the bus shoved past, eyes on me, knowing about me, knowing what had happened. I didn’t listen. I didn’t look at any of them, only Lena. Her fair hair – that used to remind me so much of Abigail’s – looked peroxided, so sun-bleached from her holiday. I stopped in front of her.
‘It’s really happened then?’ she said.
She had a new piercing high up on her ear, the skin inflamed and red. Had she got that done abroad? I didn’t know. She did all kinds of stuff on her own now, without telling me. Things she knew I wouldn’t want to do. ‘Yes,’ I said. So you see I was right – said the voice in my head – to hope, to wait, to refuse to move on.
‘Wow. Okay. And, you know – how is she?’
Her words seemed unreal, like her disbelief was rubbing off on me. I tugged at the strap on my bag, tightening it. ‘She’s fine. She’s good.’
A shadow weighted Lena’s expression. ‘Really?’ She had this thing about her these days, a skepticism I kept pulling away from. ‘But all that stuff they said on the news…’ She reached out to take my arm and I flinched back.
She stared at me. ‘What?’
I looked back at my best friend, the heavy liner round her eyes. We used to be two kids together. So what if Lena’s parents had blazing rows, so what if my aunt and uncle still cried? Forget it, I’d say, let’s play hide-and-seek. Then at thirteen, her parents separated, got divorced. And since then, she was always seeing the cracks in things, like she couldn’t just let anything be pretty any more.
But I wouldn’t let her be like that about Abigail.
‘It’s nothing.’ I slid my arm behind my back. ‘And everything is great with Abigail. You’ll see.’
In the form room, I gave Mum’s note to Mr Chalmers. He read it, then asked if I wanted him to let the class know. I said yes. Probably most of them had seen on the news, and better someone told them than they whispered behind my back. I sat down next to Lena and let him announce it. And then everybody knew for sure. Mr Chalmers told them not to trouble me with questions, but then he got called away to another classroom and then there was no one to stop them talking. I sat there with Lena, so glad she was next to me, choosing me over the other girls she got along with so easily these days. Somehow I’d never known how to fit in in groups – without Lena, I didn’t have other friends.
Their questions came in a hungry swarm.
Seven whole years?
What’s she like? Does she talk?
Bet she’s got PTSD. Does she? Does she have that?
They wanted horror stories and gory details. I had nothing like that to give them, and what did I care if they were disappointed? I rubbed my arm absently where little patches still ached under the skin. She wasn’t their cousin, Abigail was mine, and I knew her better than anyone. I answered their questions with a shrug of my shoulder, repeating, she’s fine, she’s happy, she’s glad to be home. Like a record on repeat. The man, I said, they had dozens of police looking for him, and they’d find him, arrest him and it would be done. Their questions buzzed like wasps and I flicked them away.
But behind the buzz, something else was going on, a scuffle in the background, stifled giggles, a phone passed from hand to hand. Lena slipping out from our desk, sliding her way to the knot of girls in the corner. Snatching the mobile from them, glancing at the screen, her face drawing fierce. But just as our eyes met, the bell rang – time up – and she went to her class and I went to mine.
Just before the end of school, Lena texted me: Meet me after in the usual place?
For a while, I stared at my phone, the handset hidden under the desk, a glow filling up my chest. The usual place. Not far from the school and halfway between mine and Lena’s houses, there was a play park, a sorry affair with a dented slide, peeling climbing frame and creaky swings. Little kids didn’t go there much, but for years Lena and I had met there whenever we had something important to talk about, too big to bring up at home or at school. These last couple of years, we’d hardly gone there – so much felt different and only because she had changed. But the park, our park, was still there.
When the last bell rang, I headed straight out, ahead of the swarming crowds. I got there first. I swept the grit from a swing and sat down, the ridges of the rubber pressing through my skirt. The
rest of the playground was empty, except for two small children playing in the concrete tunnels bored into the slope at the top of the park. A boy and a girl, about seven and four. Brother and sister, I guessed, but I couldn’t see their parents anywhere. It put me on edge a bit, them being out alone like that.
I rocked the swing, its rhythm a comfort. While I rocked, I thought about another play park. Until she was five, Abigail’s dad still had contact and she’d gone to see him every other Saturday. At his house, she’d sit in a room with drab brown curtains and watch repeats of some car programme, his favourite. Then he’d take her out to the park so he could have a cigarette, leave her to push herself on the swings. I’d asked her once: don’t you mind? She just shrugged, like she didn’t know any better. But after each visit there was always an argument, a tantrum, something. If not with her mum, then between Auntie Anne and him. It was my mum who’d put her foot down in the end. He lived abroad now, Spain or somewhere, and hadn’t had contact with our family for years.
The park gate clanged. Lena was coming through the railings with her pearly hair catching the sharp sunlight, the same sunlight that was making me squint. I dug my toes into the wood chip as she came up. ‘Hey.’
‘Hey.’
She sat down with a bump beside me. ‘Weird day, huh?’
I leaned back on my swing, hanging off the chains. ‘A bit.’
We didn’t say anything for a while. I was just glad she was here. I cocked the swing and lifted my feet, air rushing against my face as I swooped forwards. Times like this, we felt back to normal. Same as when we were ten, same as when we were twelve. Then Lena got hardened and it all started to change. Now, instead of swinging, she was fiddling with her bag, digging something from a zippered pocket. She pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. ‘I wanted to show you this.’ She unfolded it and held it out to me, making me bring my swing to a halt. ‘They were making stupid jokes about it, but I thought you’d want to see.’
I took the page from her and smoothed it on my lap. A printout of an old news article with a picture of a teenager, a boy, grainy and blurred, a woman next to him.
Little White Lies Page 6