Have You Seen Her

by Lisa Hall

  Fran enters, leading a woman in behind her. ‘Everyone. This is Margaret.’ When I catch a glimpse of the woman, I almost have to hold in a snort of laughter. The psychic is definitely not what I was expecting. I thought she would be colourful, adorned with scarves – if I’m honest, I pictured the tiny psychic woman from the Poltergeist movie – but this woman is the opposite. Pale, mousy, in her late fifties, and so completely nondescript she could almost be related to Ruth. They have that same aura of appearing invisible unless they want to be noticed.

  ‘Hello.’ Margaret nods to everyone, before Fran guides her over to the sofa. Dominic says nothing, just nods back, his face devoid of any emotion. I perch on the edge of Kelly’s armchair, in the furthest corner of the room. I’m still not sure how I feel about all of this and want to fade into the background a little.

  ‘Before we begin,’ Margaret’s voice is soft and low, almost soothing, ‘do you have something of Laurel’s? Something that is special to her, that I could just hold on to? It would give me a better sense of her, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll go.’ Dominic leaves the room, returning a few moments later with Bom, Laurel’s stuffed tiger teddy in his hands. I notice his fingers shake as he passes it to Margaret. Margaret takes it from him, bringing it briefly to her nose before she holds it tight against her chest. Fran is seated on the edge of the Chesterfield armchair opposite the sofa, and now Dominic comes to stand behind it, one hand on Fran’s shoulder. Margaret closes her eyes and exhales slowly, and I feel the air around us thicken with something I can’t quite put my finger on. Anticipation, maybe?

  ‘Oh, she’s pretty,’ Margaret says, her eyes still closed, Bom tight to her chest. I glance at Kelly, who gives a tiny shrug and I realise we are both thinking the same thing. Laurel’s face has been all over the news – everyone has seen her, of course you know she’s pretty.

  ‘She’s a little monkey,’ Margaret smiles a little, and Fran twists round to look at Dominic.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Fran says, her voice thick with tears. ‘A proper little madam.’

  ‘She loves it outside . . . playing. She likes the woods, the trees. Getting mucky.’

  I find myself nodding along with Dominic and Fran, despite my scepticism. She does love getting dirty – Lord knows the amount of times I’ve had to throw her clothes in the machine before Fran sees them and freaks out.

  ‘There are woods where she is now.’ Margaret’s voice has taken on a different tone, but still her eyes are closed, her breathing coming slightly faster in her chest. Fran’s face has paled, and I look at Kelly, but her eyes are fixed on the psychic. ‘There are woods, and stone. It’s not close by. There are lots of fields around. Very flat.’

  Kelly reaches for the notebook on the mantelpiece and starts to scribble things down and I find my heart is beating faster in my chest. Maybe there is something in this? Dominic’s forehead shines and he wipes the sweat with the back of his hand.

  ‘Is she OK?’ Fran is leaning so far forward on her chair it looks as though she might fall at any minute.

  ‘She’s not hurt.’ Margaret frowns. ‘Someone close to you is lying. Someone isn’t who they say they are.’

  I pinch the back of my hand, to keep myself in the here and now, ignoring Kelly’s curious glance in my direction.

  ‘She’s . . . she knows the person who did this. Who took her.’ Margaret squeezes the tiger once more before she drops it to the floor, her eyes springing open and fixing on Dominic, where he stands behind Fran. ‘You know where she is.’

  Fran gasps, tears spilling over as she presses one hand to her mouth. Dominic, however, springs into action.

  ‘Right, that’s it. Out.’ He grabs Margaret by her arm and hauls her to her feet, marching her towards the front door.

  ‘Dominic, wait!’ Kelly runs after him, presumably to stop him from physically throwing Margaret out on to the pavement. Fran sits, stock still, tears running down her cheeks.

  ‘Fran?’ I approach her tentatively, like you would a wild animal that has been hurt, unsure of the response I will get. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I didn’t think it would work,’ Fran says, ‘I didn’t think she would be able . . . Oh.’ She rubs a hand across her eyes. ‘She knows who did this to her . . . and we know where she is?’ She raises her red-rimmed eyes to mine. A pulse beats in her temple, a twitch under her pale skin. ‘Why would she say that? Oh, Anna, I feel sick.’ She holds her hand tight against her flat stomach.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I feel helpless, like I should know the right things to say, but I don’t. I didn’t last time either and look how that turned out. ‘Maybe she means you know the area where she is being kept? I’m sorry, Fran, I simply have no idea.’

  Dominic comes crashing in then, his face a white mask of rage.

  ‘Are you happy, Fran? Now you’ve let some . . . charlatan in? She’ll probably go straight to the papers, telling them how we know something we’re not letting on.’ He shoves his hand through his hair, pacing the floor, anger coming off him in hot waves.

  ‘She’s not a charlatan, Dom, she could be telling the truth! Maybe . . .’ Fran’s voice breaks and she starts to sob, hiding her face in her hands as her shoulders hitch up and down dramatically.

  ‘And if she’s not? If she’s just used it to get inside the house so that she can sell a story to the papers? How is that going to help Laurel then? Turning the focus on to us instead of the person who really took Laurel? I can’t believe you did this.’ He keeps pacing, his footsteps heavy on the oak flooring. ‘Where did you even get her from?’

  ‘She called the house.’ It is almost a whisper, coming from behind Fran’s hands. She lowers them to her lap, her cheeks blazing red as she gets to her feet to stand in front of Dominic. The fire in her eyes is back. ‘She called here, and she said she could help. I just wanted to see what she said. Surely that’s better than doing nothing?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Dominic scrubs his hands over his face, ‘how could you be so stupid, Fran? She was probably from the fucking Daily Mail! I have to get out of here.’ He snatches up his car keys from the coffee table and slams his way out of the house. I hear the sound of his engine revving, and then a squeal as he peels out of the driveway. Fran rushes from the room with a sob, and I step forward to go after her, but Kelly lays a hand on my arm.

  ‘Leave her for a second,’ she says, ‘let her go upstairs and cry for a bit. She’s hurting.’

  I nod, in two minds about things. Half of me wants to go and comfort Fran, the other half is relieved that I don’t have to.

  ‘What do you make of all this?’ Kelly asks, looking down at the squiggles she’s made in her notebook. ‘All that, “you know where she is” business.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I am reluctant to say anything much in case I accidentally incriminate myself. ‘Maybe that wherever Laurel is, when we find her, it’ll be somewhere that is familiar to one of them? I’ve never really believed in this sort of stuff if I’m honest.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Kelly doodles in the corner of the notepad, an intricate swirl that fills one section. ‘You can talk to me you know, Anna. As a friend. Not a police officer. If you wanted to, I mean.’

  ‘Thanks. But I really don’t know what that could have meant.’

  ‘You don’t think it was weird? Her saying that Laurel knows who took her, and that they know where she is?’

  ‘That’s if she was even telling the truth. You know half the time these people make things up, just to extort money from desperate people.’ Kelly’s words give my skin a tight, itchy feel as if they have burrowed into my bones. I push the thought of the shiny blonde hair, still wrapped in a tissue and hidden in my drawer, to the back of my mind. ‘Dominic is probably right.’ Someone isn’t who they say they are. I shake the thought away and get to my feet. ‘She probably was from the Daily Mail. I hope you people are prepared to deal with the fallout if she is.’

  Drawing a line firmly between us and them, between me and Kelly, I lea
ve the room, not waiting to hear her response.

  As I reach the landing, I hear the buzz of a mobile phone on silent. Pausing, I listen for a moment trying to figure out where it is coming from. Laurel’s room. Quietly, so as not to disturb Fran, I push open the door to see a silver iPhone X lying on Laurel’s bed. Dominic’s phone. He must have been in here earlier. We all seem to have found our way into Laurel’s room at one point or another since she went missing, although I felt I didn’t really have the right to be there, sneaking in when Fran and Dominic were elsewhere, trying to soak up a little bit of Laurel’s aura, to find a little bit of comfort. There isn’t any though, not without her here.

  The buzzing stops, and it’s almost eerily silent in here. I’m used to Laurel filling the room with chatter and laughter, not this dead, thick silence. I stoop to pick up some Lego bricks that lie tumbled in a corner, left in a half-constructed version of a square house that Laurel was building on Saturday afternoon. Pausing, my hand hovering over the jumble of bright plastic, I don’t know whether to pack them away or not, before deciding that Lego will be the last thing on Laurel’s mind when – if – she comes home, and I throw them gently into the plastic tub they live in.

  Turning my attention to the pile of clean laundry that sits on the rocking chair, still waiting to be put away from that fateful Saturday two weeks ago, I open drawers and start to pack away her clothes, pausing at her favourite sweatshirt. I lift it surreptitiously to my nose, hoping to inhale some small fragment of her scent, but all I can smell is soap powder and fabric softener, tears thickening at the back of my throat. There is nothing left of Laurel in her clothes, it has all been washed away.

  The buzzing of the iPhone starts up again, making me jump. I shove the sweatshirt into the drawer and hurry across the bedroom to answer it before Fran hears it. The screen shows a number not stored in Dominic’s phone, so I pick it up and answer it, thinking that maybe it’s something to do with a patient, an emergency perhaps.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Dominic?’ The voice on the other end of the line is breathy and low, but unmistakably female. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘No. Dominic isn’t here at the moment. Can I take a message for him?’ I ask, my mind already starting to work over time.

  ‘Ah . . . no. Thank you.’ The phone beeps three times in my ear and the line goes dead.

  Not a work-related emergency then. Not work-related at all by the sounds of it, her voice had that flirty, throaty tone to it. I frown, turning the phone over in my hand. Is Fran right after all? Is Dominic seeing someone else, or have I just got caught up in Fran’s paranoia? And does that mean Dominic had something to do with Laurel disappearing that night? After all, he wasn’t where he said he would be, and although he told me he’d told the police where he was I don’t know for definite that he did. And he asked me not to tell Fran. And what about the hair on the jacket? Does it belong to this mystery woman, or is it Laurel’s? And does that mean the psychic isn’t a fraud – Dominic really does know something?

  I lay the phone back down on Laurel’s bed where Dominic can find it and pull the door to Laurel’s room gently closed. All this time, all these days have passed and all I have are questions, and yet more questions. No answers.

  CHAPTER 15

  The following day, I text Jessika and arrange to meet her and Daisy at the park, needing a bit of space to clear my head after the psychic’s visit. I slip quietly out of the back gate and along the alley behind the houses – there are still a few press lurking at the bottom of the cul-de-sac, having moved on slightly after Kelly threatened to arrest them, but they won’t leave completely, not until something breaks.

  ‘Hey.’ Jess smiles at me, bundled up against the cold in a thick puffa jacket and bobble hat. ‘How are things?’ She pushes Daisy on the swing, the little girl squealing and laughing as her feet fly over the soft, spongy safety mat underneath.

  ‘Well, she’s still not home.’ Aware that I am snippy, I try and smile. ‘It’s awful. The atmosphere is just . . .’ I puff my fringe away from my face. ‘Fran got a psychic in, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Jess slows the swing to a stop and Daisy jumps off, running towards the slide. ‘Everyone has been talking about it.’

  ‘Really?’ I frown in confusion. ‘How did they know? I mean, I expected everyone to be talking about George Snow, that was in the paper. But not this. Who told you?’

  ‘It was in the paper, though,’ Jess says, quietly. ‘Front page of The Oxbury Echo. “PARENTS CALL IN ACCLAIMED PSYCHIC.” That kind of thing.’

  ‘Shit.’ I sink down on to the damp, mossy bench on the edge of the playground. ‘Dominic will go crazy. He didn’t want her to come in in the first place. What did the article say?’

  ‘Just that the Jessops called in Margaret Lawler. She’s well-known, you know. Me and my mum went to see some stage show thing she did years ago. I suppose in psychic terms you could call her quite famous. She’s written books and stuff.’

  ‘I had no idea.’ I wonder whether Fran knew all of this when she took the phone call from Margaret Lawler. I’m certain Dominic didn’t – he never would have agreed to her visit in the first place and certainly not if he knew she was well-known.

  ‘People are starting to talk,’ Jess says suddenly, her cheeks flushing scarlet as she toes the mulchy leaves that surround the bench.

  ‘What do you mean, people are starting to talk?’ I feel my pulse flutter in my throat, heat making the back of my neck prickle.

  ‘Just . . . you know. Gossip.’ Jess looks over to where Daisy spins on the roundabout, making sure her charge is safe and in her eye line. ‘It’s like the McCanns . . . Fran and Dominic are successful, wealthy . . . they’re going to be judged. Dominic wasn’t where he said he would be that night . . . things like that. People like to have someone to blame, someone to pin things on. It makes life feel safer for themselves . . . like, if they have someone to blame, then bad things can’t happen to them.’

  ‘I’m not sure that Fran and Dominic would see it that way.’ I get to my feet, pushing away the thoughts that jostle at the back of my mind. Dominic, not where he promised to be, with no explanation. Dominic, violent and aggressive, not the man I thought I knew. ‘I should probably head back.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to upset you – I just thought you should know. About the psychic. And, you know . . .’ Jess gives a little shrug, her brow creasing in distress.

  ‘It’s fine. I guess we should have expected it, but I think we all thought Laurel would be home by now, or that someone would have been arrested and charged for it at the very least.’ I don’t want to think about what would happen if someone was arrested and charged but Laurel didn’t come home safely. ‘It’s been over two weeks.’ My throat closes over, and I swallow back the painful lump that rises. ‘I really do have to go.’

  I hurry away from the park without looking back. Three weeks ago, I would have been meeting Jess with Laurel by my side, giving Fran a precious few hours to go over her lines. It feels strange to be here without her. I mull over Jess’s words as I walk along the damp streets, stepping over puddles left by yesterday’s rain, so lost in my own thoughts that I don’t even realise there is anyone else nearby until I crash into them.

  ‘Oh, gosh . . . I’m so sorry!’ I reach out a hand to steady the man I have walked into, lowering it as I realise who it is. ‘Oh.’

  ‘My apologies, too. It seems neither of us were watching where we were going.’ Mr Snow stands in front of me, a hat pulled low over his head, which explains why he also didn’t see me. ‘How are you, Anna?’

  ‘Um . . . OK.’ I feel flustered, not sure what to say to him. I know it’s not my fault he was brought in over Laurel’s disappearance, but what do you say? ‘You?’

  He gives only a ghost of a smile. ‘Not bad. I hear you met my daughter.’

  ‘Yes. I . . . yes, I did. She was very helpful.’ I pause for a moment, feeling the heat of a blush rising up my cheeks. ‘I’m very
sorry, Mr Snow. For what happened to you, for jumping to conclusions. You didn’t deserve it.’

  ‘Thank you, Anna.’ He is far more calm than I would be in this situation, if I’d been arrested for something I hadn’t done – I know that from experience. ‘Please tell the Jessops that I understand. And if they need to talk, well, you know where I am. I’m sure it won’t be long before the speculation turns toward them, unfortunately.’

  ‘Right.’ There is an awkward silence and I know that even if Laurel comes home today, things between us will never go back to how they were before. No more easy chats in the afternoons on the way home, no more lollies for Laurel. ‘I’ll let them know. I’m really sorry but . . . I must go.’

  Eager to put some distance between us, I don’t wait for him to reply, I just head in the opposite direction towards home, his words ricocheting around my brain.

  I thought that maybe before too long, some people would take a dim view of the Jessops – I heard that woman at the school comment on Fran’s make-up the day of the appeal, and there was that message left on the Facebook page – but I thought the Jessops were well-liked in Oxbury, and that they would have most people’s support. If anything, in the beginning, there was a constant stream of people all wanting to help, all wanting to be involved with this terrible tragedy that had befallen the glamorous Jessop family, but from what Jess says, things may be starting to change.