The Missing Girl

by Jenny Quintana

  I clenched my fists, reminding myself why I’d come. Just because the police had scaled back the investigation, it didn’t mean I was going to give up too. I’d gone back to my book of suspects and made more lists: friends, family, neighbours, shopkeepers – everyone Gabriella had ever spoken to. I’d interview them, take advantage of my status as victim. I was the missing girl’s sister and people had to listen.

  Mrs Ellis came back with a cup of orange squash and a garibaldi biscuit. She sat, unmoving, on the edge of an armchair. I counted to five. ‘I’m trying to find Gabriella,’ I said. And now my heart was beating so hard I thought she must be able to hear. Speaking in a rush, words spilling out into the room, I asked her to describe what she’d seen the day my sister disappeared.

  She sniffed. ‘I’ve already told the police.’ She glanced at her husband. ‘But I suppose I can say it again.’ And she repeated what I knew – how she’d been waiting for Martha and she’d seen first Gabriella and then Tom pushing his cart and mumbling to himself. ‘In that mad way of his,’ she added maliciously.

  ‘What about Gabriella?’ I prompted. ‘Did she seem . . . scared?’

  She gave me a sharp look. ‘Scared?’ She shook her head. ‘Oh no, oh no. Not scared.’ She gnawed her lip. Mr Ellis turned the page of his newspaper. ‘She was quite the opposite. Quite bold.’

  Bold? What did she mean? My legs were weak. If I wasn’t sitting, I’d crumple. I looked down to steady myself. The carpet was dirty and stained. It couldn’t have been vacuumed for months.

  There was a sound in the hall, a sigh, a brush against the wall. Was Martha there, listening to what we said?

  ‘Why was Martha late?’ I said.

  ‘Martha?’ Mrs Ellis seemed wrong-footed. She frowned as if trying to remember. Her face cleared. ‘Art.’ She rolled her eyes and glanced at her husband. ‘Extra lessons. What a waste of time.’

  Mr Ellis turned another page.

  The second person I interviewed was Mr Sullivan, Tom’s next-door neighbour and the witness who’d come forward. He was an elderly, never-been-married, childless type of man who might have fitted the dark, fallen angel profile of my imaginings except he had silver hair and a shiny pink face. Not only that, but he had been married. His wife had died after a year. ‘We were childhood sweethearts,’ he told me mournfully. ‘I’ve never looked at anyone since.’

  Mr Sullivan provided milk and custard creams. When I asked him about Tom, he declared that the people who had accused him of the crime were short-sighted and looking for a scapegoat. ‘Your parents excepted,’ he hastened to add.

  As for the teenagers who had persecuted Tom, he described them as mindless thugs, wicked young people with no morals like so many other young people these days. ‘Yourself excepted,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think Tom will come back?’ I asked, dunking a biscuit in my milk.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. The last thing I heard, he and his mother had gone off to Colchester permanently. You can’t blame them, can you? After what those hooligans did to their house. All those nasty words and implications.’

  Nodding, I tried to look wise and asked politely if he thought Tom had got another job.

  ‘I doubt that very much, don’t you? Mud sticks. Probably on social security by now. Queuing at the dole office with the rest. Taxpayers paying. Thanks to them.’ He used his thumb to indicate the direction of Tom’s house so I assumed he meant the hooligans. ‘Let’s hope they find them and cart them off to borstal.’ Again I assumed he meant the hooligans, not Tom and his mother.

  I saved my most important question for last. ‘What do you think happened to my sister, Mr Sullivan?’

  He stopped and scratched his head. ‘Young people do unpredictable things,’ he said, blinking hard. By that, I assumed he favoured the idea that Gabriella had run away.

  Tom’s neighbour on the other side – a pepper-pot-sized woman, with a sick husband and an absent son – confirmed and agreed with everything Mr Sullivan had said. She gave me home-made currant buns and a strawberry flavoured Sodastream and, after answering my questions, kept me for another hour talking about her sick husband and absent son.

  After that round of interviews, I was none the wiser. I didn’t spot a new suspect amongst the pepper-pot family and Mr Sullivan seemed unlikely – though that night the swooping demon in my imagination metamorphosed at the point of entry into the earth’s atmosphere and became a slender, gliding figure, rather aged, with pale eyes that flickered, a fuzz of silver hair and a packet of custard creams. He glided on past Gabriella as she walked home from school. Neither of them saw the darker shadow creeping against a wall. It wasn’t Mr Sullivan. The next morning I scored a line through his name.

  I worked my way through the neighbours. One day as I was coming out of a house a few doors down from us Dad appeared. We stood facing each other, either side of the garden gate. ‘What are you doing?’ he said as his glance slid to the notebook I was clutching.

  Pushing my glasses back to the bridge of my nose, I said, ‘I was asking questions.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Gabriella.’

  His face paled. ‘What kind of questions?’

  I held my notebook defiantly. ‘I’ve been asking everybody. I’ve been making lists of suspects and ticking them off.’

  ‘That’s not for you to do, Anna. That’s for the police.’

  ‘Well, the police have given up,’ I said roughly. ‘They aren’t looking for her. Nobody’s looking for her now.’

  ‘Even so, you shouldn’t go knocking on people’s doors. Not after everything that’s happened.’

  The pulse on his temple was throbbing, but still I couldn’t stop. ‘Somebody’s got to do something,’ I snapped. ‘The police do nothing, you and Mum do nothing. The neighbours talk about it. They think she’s run away, or been murdered, or been kidnapped, but they don’t care. I’m the only one who cares.’

  There was silence. A front door opened and closed quickly. Was it Mrs Henderson interfering? Or stupid Brian spying again?

  ‘Even so,’ Dad repeated, his voice deathly calm. ‘You need to stop.’

  I stared at him. Rage firing inside my mind. I opened my mouth to tell him he couldn’t prevent me from doing what was right for my sister, but he held up his hand, halting my words.

  ‘Go home, Anna,’ he said. ‘And don’t do this again.’

  I wanted to reply, but one glance at his stony eyes made me think better of it. Slipping through the gate, I led the way back to our house.

  It was the day after my falling-out with Dad and we were having tea. Mum was ladling Campbell’s tomato soup into bowls. She sat with us, although I knew she wouldn’t eat more than a few spoonfuls. I hadn’t seen her eat much in weeks. She’d taken to playing with her food, pushing it around her plate, lifting a forkful to her lips and putting it back down. Her face had become gaunt, and she tied her hair in a tight band that pulled at the skin on her face.

  Now she was stirring the soup, faster and faster. ‘Mrs Henderson paid me a visit,’ she said at last. ‘She heard you two arguing in the street.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Dad, placing his hands flat on the table.

  ‘It can’t be nothing otherwise she wouldn’t have come.’

  ‘Leave it.’

  ‘How can I? The whole street knows by now.’

  ‘Madre mia.’ He thumped the table. ‘Who cares what people think?’

  ‘I care,’ said Mum. ‘I don’t want them talking about us and Gabriella, and . . .’

  He swept his arm across the table and a bowl smashed onto the floor, red splashing across the stone.

  Mum stood up. ‘You need to keep yourself together.’

  ‘Why?’ He slammed his chair backwards and grabbed the side of the table with his strong, thin fingers as though he wanted to upturn it. ‘What’s the point?’

  There was silence. Mum looked at me. ‘Leave the room,’ she said. And I did. I crept out and stood in the
hallway listening.

  ‘What’s the point?’ Dad said again.

  ‘Because Gabriella will need us.’ There was a pause. ‘When she comes home.’

  ‘She won’t come home.’

  Silence. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. Dad had always said that Gabriella hadn’t run away, that she’d be back if only the police tried harder to find her. Why had he stopped believing that? It was my fault. I was the one who had put bad ideas into his head. And now I wanted to go to him, to lay my hand on his arm and say I was sorry. Gabriella hadn’t been murdered. Her absence was temporary. She would come back if only we could find her. If only we could persuade her.

  But Mum was speaking, her voice low and urgent, telling him not to give up hope, to take back control, that the police wouldn’t look for Gabriella if he stopped telling them to try. Mum was the one in charge now. Not Dad. And while I yearned for him to fix us, to build a time machine, to reverse events, to bring Gabriella back, I knew now that he never would. He’d lost his power to make things right.

  It was the last time Dad raised his voice. After that, he stayed in the shop for long hours. He came home to plates of cold food left on the table. I sat with him, but he didn’t look at me. He chewed until he’d had enough and scraped the rest into the bin.

  Towards the end of January, it had been snowing lightly and Dad had lit a fire. He was reading the newspaper; at least, he had it open. In reality his gaze was fixed on the far corner of the room. Mum was knitting. A ball of blue wool lay on the floor beside her armchair; it jerked as it caught, and she yanked it with impatience.

  Lying on the rug, I was reading ‘Leda and the Swan’. A sudden blow: the great wings beating still. I was repeating the lines inside my head, not understanding, but trying to memorise them anyway. Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed; By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill. I closed my eyes, conjured the patterns of the letters and the words; repeated the same line again and again. I checked to see if my memory was right, and when I finished, moved on. He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

  There was a low moaning sound. At first I thought it was the wind in the chimney, or the keening of an animal outside.

  The knitting stopped. ‘Albert,’ whispered Mum.

  Dad had dropped the paper. He was holding his head in his hands and staring straight at me as if horrified by something I’d done. And I realised, I’d been saying the words of the poem out loud. And in an instant, their meaning clicked and I understood what my dad was imagining. My sister, held down and savaged by an animal. Not a swan, but a man. The same man I’d imagined as the Devil.

  27

  The kitchen smelled of bleach. Curtains closed, it was shadowy and quiet. I walked across the floor, footsteps tapping, seeing how old-fashioned the room was, stuck in its original time: green-painted cupboards, pull-down tabletop with a single chair. There was a vase on the window ledge, with a rose, but its petals were soft and drooping; one had already fallen.

  The place was pristine with the sides scrubbed and the old sink chipped but gleaming. No clutter. The strands on Martha’s new mop were already wearing and when I bent to open the fridge, there was nothing inside but the scent of antiseptic, a carton of milk and a piece of ham.

  How sad Martha was. My eyes rested on a plate laid out on the table with a knife and fork ready alongside; a solitary cup and saucer, a single teaspoon. Worse than sad. It was humiliating. I shouldn’t be in her house. And yet, as I stood in the room staring about me, I couldn’t leave either. It was Mr Ellis I was here for now.

  I stepped out into the hall. It seemed strangely large in comparison to how I remembered it. Before, there’d been boxes piled up at the front door narrowing the corridor to the living room. We’d had to squeeze past them as we’d followed Mrs Ellis. Now there were no boxes, no furniture, no piles of shoes or coats.

  In the living room there was an old TV set, a clock on the mantelpiece. A sofa. An armchair. The pictures had gone from the walls. The sideboard had been emptied and cleaned. Where were the things this family had collected over the years? Where were their memories?

  Going to the foot of the stairs, I hesitated. No movement or sound. I made my way up, the sound of my footsteps deadened by the thread-worn carpet.

  My heart quickened as I opened a door. It was dark. The curtains were drawn. I fumbled for the light switch and gasped. I’d expected the room to be as empty as the living room. Instead it was a perverse kind of shrine. Filthy, cobwebbed and thick with grime with clothes littering the floor. The bed was unmade, the sheets twisted and yellowed. A pile of cardboard boxes, spotted with age, slumped against the wall. And the place stank of mildew and damp, so strong I had to stop myself from retching. Covering my nose, I walked across the dirty carpet. An empty beer bottle lay on its side covered with dust. A belt snaked on the floor as if it had been whipped off and thrown down a moment before. There was a pile of magazines. I bent to look at the top one and straightened quickly. Pornography. I turned away, revolted. I shouldn’t be surprised. A man like that.

  Stepping away, careful not to touch anything, I opened the lid of one of the boxes. Inside were reams of yellowed paper, dusty boxes of pencils and pens. Why did Mr Ellis have them? A hangover from his job, whatever that had been, or stolen property? That wouldn’t surprise me either.

  This place was disgusting. I should leave, go back home and come again when Martha was here. Stepping out the door, I closed the room up and stood on the landing, breathing hard, trying to shake away the smell.

  Martha’s door was open. Guiltily, I went inside. The room was like a child’s: the single bed, the dressing table. And it reeked of paint. One wall was whiter than the rest. I looked at it closely. It wasn’t a wall, it was a cupboard. Martha had painted it shut; thick, uneven layers, still tacky to the touch. Why would she do that? It didn’t make any sense.

  I pulled open drawers. Her clothes were folded neatly, her underwear rolled into balls. Unable to stem my curiosity I poked and pried with shaking hands in every corner. I found nothing that told me anything I didn’t already know. Martha was obsessed with order and cleanliness. A stark contrast to the neglect in her parents’ room.

  I stood for a moment listening. No sound. The house was silent. I moved towards the wardrobe. It was old, with scratched surfaces and doors that creaked. Martha had few clothes to hang in there: plain dresses and skirts. Beneath them was a single suitcase: an old-fashioned, brown box. Kneeling, I pulled it out and slowly unclasped the buckles.

  Inside were piles of paper and card. Drawings and paintings. Martha’s artwork. I dragged out a sheaf of them, my heart beating hard. There were sketches and sketches of Gabriella. I shuffled through them frantically, held them close to my face, one after the other, gazing horrified for several moments, trying to understand. In each picture, Martha had captured my sister exactly: each mood, each expression I’d known.

  I searched through with trembling hands. Martha had been good at art. She’d won the school competition, hadn’t she? What had she drawn? A portrait of a man. So talented. An amazing artist. And these portraits were incredible too. How closely she must have observed Gabriella to get the detail right.

  And now the smell of paint filled my nostrils. The scent was overpowering. Why had Martha painted the cupboard door shut? What was she trying to hide? I ran downstairs, stumbling on the way. In the kitchen I grabbed a knife. Back in the bedroom I slid the blade into the crack of the door, slicing again and again until the paint flaked. I prised it open. My body shaking with the fear of what I’d find.

  There was nothing. Nothing but cobwebs and dust. And an old bowl. Cracked in two. I turned away, my heart still speeding.

  Martha stood in the doorway with her fists clenched and her eyes wide, watching me.

  28

  1982

  One cold February morning, when I’d been awake for most of the night, I took out my notebook and scanned through the lists of suspects. Time and ag
ain, my eyes returned to the top of the list. Edward Lily. What if I interviewed him?

  Dressing quickly, I grabbed a few biscuits for my breakfast and hurried out the house, cutting through the green and the woods to get to Lemon Tree Cottage. When I arrived, the windows of the cottage were open and a vacuum cleaner droned from inside. Dare I knock on the door? Walking past and down the lane, I ate ginger nuts as I considered what to do.

  The roof of the cottage next door seemed worse than ever. Great gashes had been ripped into the thatch. It gave the house a creepy feel as if it had been under attack. The woman who lived there was by the washing line, a peg in her mouth as she stretched to hang up a sheet while her little boy sat on the ground batting his fists on the cloth.

  I didn’t think about what I was going to say until I clicked the gate open and stepped onto their path. The woman turned at the sound and, taking the peg from her mouth, studied me suspiciously. ‘You’re not selling anything, are you?’ she said. I shook my head. Of course not. ‘Or wanting something for the church?’ More likely, but I shook my head again and added a resounding ‘No’ to be sure she understood.

  She nodded gravely. ‘So how can I help you?’

  Putting on my most adult voice, words came out unplanned. ‘I was visiting your neighbour, but there’s so much noise, vacuuming and suchlike’ – I sounded like Grandma Grace – ‘they didn’t hear the doorbell.’

  ‘Doorbell?’

  Oh God. Please say they had a doorbell. I hadn’t thought of that.

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t work. Have you tried knocking?’

  I nodded firmly. ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘Well,’ said the woman, using the peg and fishing out a couple more from the pocket of her apron. ‘In that case you’d better wait until the noise dies down.’ As if to demonstrate the opposite, the child yelled.

  I stayed where I was, trying to think of a question to ask. Failure, together with the appearance of the woman’s dungaree-clad husband wielding an axe, made me leave. Mumbling thanks, I headed back to the gate as the man crossed the lawn in the direction of a wood shed.