by Lisa Hall
‘On the PC?’ Fran finally looks up at DS Wright, her mouth a grim slash cut into her pale face. ‘What kind of images? Pictures of Laurel?’ She raises her hand to her mouth, pressing hard against her lips. Swallowing, I close my eyes, fighting back the nausea that scorches the back of my throat.
‘The only pictures of Laurel were family photos, thankfully, but obviously we did do a thorough search as part of the investigation and we did take a further look into the files on the computer. We found several images depicting children.’
‘Oh, God.’ Fran gets to her feet, rushing from the room, and a few moments later we hear the sound of retching coming from the downstairs bathroom.
‘I’ll go,’ Kelly says, leaving DS Wright and I alone together, the overpowering scent of lilies coming from the plug-in air freshener making me feel even sicker.
‘I can’t quite believe this is happening,’ I say, shaking my head. A lock of hair flops over my forehead and I shove it back, impatiently. ‘I mean . . . God, Dominic.’ I let out a long breath. ‘I mentioned it to DC Bishop in my interview but . . . I should probably tell you that there was a hair on his jacket, the morning after Laurel disappeared. A long, blonde hair. I thought maybe it belonged to a woman, that maybe that’s where he’d gone that night . . . I didn’t say anything. I should have though, shouldn’t I?’ Hot tears sting my eyes and I have to blink rapidly to try and quench them.
‘You probably should have done – but it may not have made the slightest bit of difference. If the hair is Laurel’s it could have been left there at any time. And Laurel was already gone by then.’
‘You definitely believe Dominic took her?’ Fran’s voice makes me jump, and I turn to see her in the doorway, her face pale with a sickly sheen, one hand pressed against her belly. ‘But he won’t say where she is?’
‘That’s right,’ DS Wright says, ‘there’s something I’d like to show you, Fran, if that’s OK? It is potentially quite distressing to both of you, I should warn you.’
‘OK.’ Fran nods. ‘Whatever it is, I just want to know.’ Her voice breaks on the last word, and impulsively I reach over and take her hand, her fingers cold in mine.
DS Wright reaches into the satchel style bag she has at her feet and pulls out an A4-sized photograph, protected by a plastic wallet. ‘I need to know if either of you recognises this.’
It’s a sock. A tiny, pale lemon sock with a white lace frill around the ankle. I hear Fran inhale, and then she whimpers slightly. ‘It’s Laurel’s. That’s Laurel’s sock, isn’t it, Anna?’ She turns to me with wide eyes and I nod in agreement.
‘Yes. That’s Laurel’s sock . . . there’s blood on it.’ I raise my eyes from the photograph to meet DS Wright’s eyes, my skin itching as though there are a thousand tiny ants marching over it. A dark crimson stain mars the perfect lemon yellow wool, a thick, ugly stain that tells of a deep, angry gush of hurt. I close my eyes as the room seems to swim about me for a moment, and I feel Fran’s fingers grip my hand tightly, so tightly it hurts.
‘So, you both can confirm that this is definitely Laurel’s sock?’
‘Yes,’ Fran whispers, ‘I put those socks on her that night before we left the house. She wanted to wear sandals because she loved showing off these socks, but I made her wear wellies instead.’
‘But what about the blood,’ I say, ‘and where did you find the sock?’
‘We found the sock in Dominic’s car,’ Wright says, and although she speaks with no trace of emotion in her voice, she blinks hard, telling me that she’s finding this just as difficult as we are. ‘It was tucked away underneath the passenger seat.’
‘Hidden,’ Fran says, ‘he hid it there. He must have done, no one else drove that precious car of his. What has he done to my daughter? Where did the blood come from?’ She is weirdly calm, not at all like the fiery, angry Fran that I’ve been used to dealing with for the past three years. It’s as though all the life has drained out of her since Laurel has been gone, and now the news that Dominic is responsible has just pushed her over the edge.
‘Dominic says that he has no idea where the sock came from, and that it could have been there from a previous journey that he took with Laurel in the car a few weeks ago. Although, obviously, Fran you contest that, saying that Laurel was wearing those socks on the evening that she went missing. Dominic also says that Laurel was prone to nosebleeds and that the blood could have been from a nosebleed. Did Laurel have any nosebleeds that day, or recently at all?’
I think hard for a moment. Fran looks away, waiting for me to answer, the ghost of my words asking her why she wasn’t there for Laurel hanging in the air. She had been so busy with auditions and meetings that Laurel had seen fairly little of her in the weeks leading up to her disappearance. It had been me that had had practically sole care of Laurel in those last few weeks. ‘No, not that night. Definitely not that night,’ I say, ‘in fact, I don’t think she’d had one recently at all. Not since the summer. She tends to suffer dreadfully from hay fever from May until around the end of July, and that’s when she seems to get the nosebleeds. She certainly hasn’t had one recently.’ There is silence as the full implication of my words sinks in. DS Wright gets to her feet, and starts to make her goodbyes, but Fran lays a hand on her arm.
‘Wait. What happens now?’
‘We will continue to press Dominic on where we can find Laurel, but I will be brutally honest with you, we’re not sure that we will find her alive. You need to prepare yourself for the worst-case scenario.’ She pauses at the doorstep, turning back to Fran. ‘In light of the information you’ve given us today, we will be formally charging Dominic Jessop with the abduction of Laurel. I’m so sorry, Fran.’
We watch in silence as she walks away to her car, Kelly scurrying off to the kitchen to make more tea, no doubt.
‘Will you excuse me, Anna?’ Fran turns away, heading back up the stairs towards what was her and Dominic’s room, and now I suppose is only hers. Slowly I close the door, leaning my back against it and feeling at least something is solid around me. I feel as though I’m walking through a flood, unsteady and unsure of everything around me. Dominic. It’s hard to believe, and yet all the evidence stacks up. So why can’t I shake off the feeling that something still isn’t right?
CHAPTER 24
The next few days pass in some kind of weird, twisted blur, where nothing is right, and everything feels dirty and squalid. I think of all the time Dominic spent holed up in his office in the evenings, until well past midnight, after he finished his list at the hospital. Times that Fran and I both assumed that he was working. Was he really looking at images of children on his computer? The thought makes me feel sick, and I have developed an unnerving habit of washing my hands frequently throughout the day, so now they are chapped and sore, the skin so dry it has cracked across my knuckles. As I wander past Laurel’s closed bedroom door, I think of all the times Dominic would go and tuck her in, on the rare nights that he was home in time to do so, and the laughter that would pour out from under the door as he read her Dr Seuss stories. I’m finding it tough to match up the man who would read story after story after a long day in the operating theatre, with the picture that the press is painting of a monster who abducted, and possibly murdered, his own daughter.
The press is another matter altogether. They have been back with a vengeance since the police turned up that morning to search the house, returning to the doorstep to call out and snap photographs the minute the front door is opened. It is a constant invasion of privacy and we’ve taken to using the back gate as an attempt to fool them, not that it’s worked. The front page every morning has some take on Laurel’s abduction. I made the front pages very briefly, once the story broke that I wasn’t really Anna Cox – I’ve never been so thankful that I’d already confessed, to my family and to Fran.
Dominic’s face has been splashed across every tabloid and broadsheet, dominating the online news and flashing across the screen every time we turn on the tel
evision, so now we don’t bother at all. MONSTER and PERVERT are the words that have been used most commonly to describe him, and I’ve deleted the BBC news app off my phone in an attempt to avoid the news as much as I can. Fran has said very little over the past few days, and seems reluctant to discuss anything, although Kelly says we should try to keep her talking, as it’s not good to bottle things up. I know Fran, I know she’ll talk when she’s ready.
The smell of bonfire smoke wakes me early one morning, and for one stomach-lurching moment I am back in the field, mud and straw beneath my feet, fireworks bursting above my head as I scream Laurel’s name into the inky darkness, desperate to see her sparkly silver bobble hat heading towards me. I sit bolt upright, my hair sticking to my forehead and a prickling under my armpits as I realise I’m at home, and Laurel is still gone, and Dominic is still not talking on where we might have a hope in finding her.
I push myself to get out of bed, wandering downstairs in a thick hoody and a pair of jogging bottoms. It’s the week before Christmas, and the sky is full of thick, heavy grey clouds that look as though they’re bursting to dump a ton of snow over the country. Shivering, I step out of the back door to where the source of the bonfire smoke reveals itself. Fran stands in front of a roaring fire, methodically feeding scraps of fabric into it. She wears only a thin T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, and her feet are shoved into an old pair of flip-flops.
‘Jesus, Fran, aren’t you freezing?’ I come and stand next to her, holding my hands to the warmth of the flames.
‘I hadn’t really noticed,’ she says, pushing what looks like a pair of trousers into the bonfire, poking at it with a broken tree branch she’s grabbed from the dead apple tree at the bottom of the garden. ‘I suppose it is quite cold.’ She looks around, as if noticing for the first time the thick clouds above and the brisk wind that bites at her bare skin.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask, softly. She looks so fragile, her thin arms bare, standing there in what must the clothes she slept in. She looks nothing like the Fran I knew from before – the fierce, demanding Fran, always perfectly made up, always too busy living in a fantasy world made up of adoring audiences, dashing leading men and thick pan stick make-up to pay much attention to what was going on in her own family, under her own roof.
‘Burning his things. Dominic’s things.’ His name is like bitter poison on her tongue and she almost spits it at me. She throws a pair of leather brogues into the fire, shoes that must have cost Dominic a fortune, and they disappear into the flames in a cloud of ash and smoke. ‘I don’t want anything of his in the house.’
‘What about the police? What if they need his things and you’ve burned them?’
‘They’ve taken everything they need.’ She pokes viciously at the flames again, her face hard. ‘I can’t sleep with his things in my house, Anna. I just want rid of him, to forget I ever met him.’
I wish that Kelly was here to help me manage Fran in this frame of mind, but Kelly no longer comes every day. Now that Dominic has been formally charged and is awaiting trial, Kelly has other families to deal with, and although she said she is only at the end of the phone, Fran hasn’t contacted her once. She says she’s relieved to see the back of her, that Kelly never helped anyway, she was merely there to spy on the family. I privately think that perhaps that was a good thing, if Dominic really is guilty of Laurel’s abduction. ‘Is he still not talking?’
‘No,’ she sniffs, and swipes at her face with the back of her hand, leaving a smear of sooty ash on the bridge of her nose. ‘He still says he didn’t take Laurel. Still refuses to admit to it and tell us where she is. I hope he rots in hell.’ She jabs at the fire ferociously, and I step back as sparks shower the ground by my feet.
‘And there’s still nothing to show where he was that night?’ I don’t know why I’m poking the bear, so to speak, only I suppose I feel like maybe Fran will be less unstable if she would only talk about things.
‘He says he was only driving around. He was thinking of leaving me, apparently.’ She lets out a bitter huff of laughter. ‘What utter bullshit. We had our ups and downs, of course we did, and I know now that he was cheating on me with Pamela – I’m not stupid. Maybe he would have left me eventually, but not that night. He’s just covering his arse, trying to justify why he didn’t come and meet us. Making up an excuse.’
‘Fran, I—’
‘Do you think he was planning on leaving?’ Fran talks over me. ‘I mean, really? Would he have left Laurel with nothing? I’ve been there, growing up with nothing, when my own father left. Maybe he thought that leaving me with no financial security wasn’t enough. He had to take Laurel too, and make sure I really did lose it all. He probably thought he’d never get caught.’ A strange light fills her eyes, and for a moment I feel desperately unnerved, convinced that she is a woman on the edge, close to losing it completely, and then it is gone, and she looks like the same old Fran again.
‘I don’t know, Fran. I feel like neither of us knew him at all.’ I bat away that nagging feeling that arises whenever I try to marry up the Dominic I knew with the man portrayed in the media.
Fran throws the last of the pile of clothing into the flames, and I see Dominic’s favourite golfing jumper, a pair of pyjama bottoms and his thick winter ski jacket go up in a plume of flames as the synthetic fibres catch alight. ‘I’m going to go away for a while, Anna. It’s time for you to move on, too.’
‘Wait—’ I process what she’s saying. ‘What do you mean you’re going away for a while . . . you’re leaving? What about Laurel?’
‘That’s why I’m leaving. For Laurel. She’s lost to me, Anna, and I can’t bear to sit in this house on my own, waiting for her to come home. Even if by some great chance they find her and she and I were reunited, do you honestly think that I could bring her up here? In a place full of the most hideous memories of the kind of man her father turned out to be?’
‘But . . . no, I suppose not,’ I say quietly. I suppose I had thought that I would move on eventually, but it still comes as a shock to hear Fran say the words. ‘I simply thought maybe . . .’
‘Maybe?’ she prompts, frowning at me.
‘Maybe you’d wait to see if Dominic did talk. But I can understand how you feel, of course. I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’ A hot flush creeps up my neck and I feel my ears start to burn. How embarrassing, to be so thoughtless, of course Fran wouldn’t want Laurel to return to this house once she comes home. If she ever comes home.
Fran pauses for a moment, staring into the flames of the bonfire, and I wonder if the scent of the smoke has the same effect on her as it does on me. She takes a deep breath, holding it for a moment before she speaks. ‘I’ve been in contact with Polly.’
‘Polly, your sister?’ Surprise makes my eyebrows shoot up into my hairline. ‘That’s . . . brilliant. How did she take the news about Laurel?’
‘Not well, obviously.’ Fran meets my eyes. ‘I think you need to go home and be with your family for Christmas, Anna. I know we haven’t really properly discussed the circumstances under which you came to work for us, but I do know you’ve spent every Christmas here with us, instead of with your family. Now they know you’re back here – now we all know the truth about things – I think it might be best for you to go home for a while.’
‘But you’ll be here on your own,’ I say hastily, not entirely sure that I do want to go home for Christmas. Although my mother says none of this matters, it will still be hard to go home and face her.
‘I won’t be here. I already told you I’m going to go away for a little while,’ Fran says, shortly. ‘I’m going to stay with Polly. She’s renting a cottage in Norfolk, it’s tucked out of the way and the press won’t be able to find me there. I’m going to go and spend Christmas there, and then I think once Dominic goes to trial I’ll sell the house and start afresh somewhere else.’
‘Right.’ I feel wrongfooted, off balance, and I snatch up the stick and start poking at the fire in an attempt t
o hide my feelings. Even though Fran and I were never the best of friends, not friends at all really, I suppose I assumed that I would stay on for a while, just to support her through the trial, but it seems she doesn’t need me. ‘I’ll speak to my mother and let you know when I’m leaving.’
‘Perfect.’ Fran smiles at me, a quick, relieved smile, before she strides away towards the house, her arms wrapped around her body in an attempt to keep warm, leaving me alone, outside in the bitter winter chill.
I avoid Fran for the rest of the day, instead calling my mother and telling her I’ll be home on Christmas Eve. She sounds pleased to hear from me, and I feel the burden of returning home lessen slightly. Perhaps it won’t be as bad as I first thought it would, although the idea of Christmas without Laurel is difficult to imagine. I decide to only pack the bare essentials, at least giving me an excuse to come back to the house under the guise of collecting the rest of my things before Fran sells and I have to leave completely. I don’t know why I feel so reluctant to let go, especially when not so long ago I was thinking about leaving. Now, when I think about never coming back, I think about how my memories of Laurel will fade and there’ll be nothing left of her, merely the same old photos recycled on the front pages of the newspapers every year on the anniversary of her disappearance.
Shoving jeans and sweaters into a backpack, my phone buzzes and I grab it as a reason to stop packing for a moment. It’s a text from Pamela. I pause with my finger over the delete button, wondering whether to simply trash it without even reading it. She’s been interviewed by one of the red tops, giving her side of the story regarding Dominic, and I was witness to Fran cutting the paper into tiny shreds on reading it. Curiosity gets the better of me, and I stab at the phone screen, opening up the message.
