What She Left

by Rosie Fiore

  ‘Hey, baby,’ I said warmly. ‘I was just thinking about you.’

  ‘Miranda’s being horrible to me.’ Her voice hit a particularly high-pitched whine and I felt a sharp needle of pain in my left eye socket.

  ‘I’m sure she doesn’t mean to be, poppet,’ I said gently. ‘Look, give me five minutes to get dressed and I’ll come down and talk to her.’

  Marguerite ignored my words and stomped over to climb on the bed. She launched into a garbled litany of tragic complaints about her sister. She flopped down on the pillow, and I noticed she had her shoes on, which were pressing into Lara’s pale blue duvet cover, and that her upper lip was positively dripping. I reached over her to Lara’s bedside table and grabbed a tissue, but when I tried to wipe her nose, she batted my hand away and kept talking. I lost it.

  ‘Off the bed!’ I roared. ‘Your filthy shoes. . .’ She jumped at the sound of my shout and instantly began to cry. I could hear it all go quiet downstairs and I could imagine Lara looking up at the ceiling, hearing me shout and Marguerite cry. What a bastard she must think me.

  ‘I’m sorry, poppet, so sorry I yelled,’ I said gruffly, and I put my arms around my sobbing little girl. ‘Listen, Daddy’s been a grumpy old bear. What do you say I take you to Claire’s Accessories when Miranda and Frances are dancing?’

  The tears switched off like a tap and she beamed at me widely. ‘Really, Daddy? Yes, please!’

  And she hopped off the bed and disappeared downstairs, no doubt to gloat at her sister.

  I swung my legs out of the bed and stood up. My head pounded fiercely. I wasn’t sure I could take the shopping mall and hundreds of screaming children. Maybe I could put off the trip to Claire’s Accessories till tomorrow? But as soon as I thought it, I knew I couldn’t. Not unless I wanted Force 10 whining from Marguerite for forty-eight hours. A pee, a big drink of water, whatever painkillers were in Lara’s bathroom cabinet, and a scorching shower, followed by coffee and bacon and eggs. That’d do the trick.

  When I came out of the bathroom twenty minutes later, I felt immeasurably better – almost human.

  And bless Lara, a steaming cup of coffee was sitting on the bedside table. I sat on the edge of the bed to enjoy the first few life-giving sips and noticed that the light on my mobile was flashing. A message? No, a missed call, from a long, international number I didn’t recognize. +61? Where was that? I did a quick web search. Australia? Brisbane? How odd. The person hadn’t left a message though. Could it be one of those spam callers, where you ring back and they charge you hundreds of pounds? Australia seemed an unlikely country of origin for something like that. I was contemplating calling the number to see, when my phone lit up in my hand and began to ring again. The same number. I answered.

  ‘Is that Sam Cooper?’ said a woman’s voice, her Aussie twang unmistakeable.

  ‘Yes, who is this?’

  ‘The Sam Cooper who posted the message on Facebook about his missing wife?’

  I paused for a second. That bloody post. I’d taken my original version down the day after Helen was reported found, but there was nothing I could do about the thousands of times it had been shared. It still periodically cropped up – some people never check the dates on those things – but then someone would post ‘She’s been found’ and it would disappear again. Obviously this fruitcake hadn’t got the message.

  ‘Yes, that’s me,’ I said wearily. ‘Thank you for your concern, but Helen isn’t missing anymore, she’s. . .’

  ‘Is she back with you?’ said the woman, and I could hear the surprise in her voice.

  ‘Well, no, but. . . Listen, who is this?’

  ‘This is Judy,’ said the voice, as if this should mean something to me. When I didn’t reply or show any sign of recognition, she said, ‘Judy Knight? Helen’s sister?’

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Helen

  She checked and rechecked the contents of her big blue handbag. Once she walked out of the door, that was it. Anything she didn’t have now, she would not be able to come back and retrieve. She checked the doors and windows, made sure everything was exactly in its place as usual, and took a deep breath. It was time.

  She stood by the living-room window and waited until she saw Mrs Goode come out of her house, clearly on her way to Sainsbury’s. She always went at around this time. Mrs Goode stood on her driveway, fiddling with her shopping bags. Helen stepped out of her own front door. She gave Mrs Goode a cheery wave and called hello, making sure Mrs Goode noticed her and got a good look at what she was wearing. She locked the door – she had had a copy made of the mortice-lock key for the front door, but her own complete bunch of keys was in the satchel wedged behind the desk. She dropped the key into her handbag and set off, walking briskly down the street. If Mrs Goode had been paying attention, she might have noticed that Helen wore her hair in a low plait down her back rather than in her trademark jaunty, high ponytail. But why would Mrs Goode notice? And even if she mentioned it, who would think it meant anything? Helen got to the end of the road and glanced back to see if Mrs Goode was paying attention. She wasn’t. She had gone back into her house, presumably having forgotten something.

  Helen looked both ways. There was no one in sight. She took a right turn and walked into the park. Half past nine was a good time – the early-morning runners and commuters were gone, along with the dog walkers. Most mums who brought their babies and toddlers out for a morning walk had already gone home for their naps and snacks. The park was largely deserted and, anyway, Helen had already pinpointed her spot – a patch of dense woodland. Even though it wasn’t far from the path, once you were inside it, you weren’t visible. She was sure there was no one around, but she double-checked to be certain. This was the real point of no return. She hesitated for only a second, then stepped off the path and bent almost double to get past the overhanging trees and grasping shrubs.

  Once she had pushed her way into the little clearing, she paused again, making sure there was no noise – no curious dogs or hidden walkers. Satisfied she was alone, she began. She pulled the floral dress off over her head in a single motion. Under the dress, she was already wearing calf-length black leggings. She took a plain black T-shirt from her bag and put it on, slipping off her pumps and replacing them with trainers. All of the black clothes were brand new – Sam had never seen them and so would not be able to identify them as missing from her wardrobe. She rolled up the dress and put it with the pumps into her bag. Then she took out the pair of sharp hairdresser’s scissors which she’d bought some weeks before, and after a moment’s hesitation, cut off her plait. She wrapped it in the plastic bag she had ready and placed it with the scissors in her handbag. She put on a pair of heavy-rimmed spectacles and checked her reflection. The haircut was brutal, but it would do for the next half an hour. She checked around her carefully, to make sure she hadn’t left any traces of her presence, and prepared to move on.

  Three minutes earlier, a pretty woman with long hair and a blue floral dress had walked confidently into the park. Now, a shy, hunched, bespectacled woman with cropped hair and wearing a baggy-T-shirt and leggings re-emerged on to the path. She looked at her watch.

  Her biggest fear had been running into someone she knew on this first part of the journey, and it was realized. She saw Sarah Westwood, one of the mothers from school, jogging along the path towards her. Helen dropped her head and kept walking. Sarah was red in the face and puffing, and obviously lost in the music playing in her earphones. She barely gave Helen a glance as she passed. Helen gave a ragged sigh of relief. It didn’t mean she was safe, just that she had passed that particular test.

  She’d planned the route to her next destination carefully, avoiding any main arterials or roads where someone she knew lived. It took some brisk walking to get there at the appointed time of eleven o’clock. The small, neighbourhood hair salon, narrow and nondescript, was called The Cut Above. She’d found it some weeks before and had made an appointment there b
y phone, in the name of Ellen.

  The women in the salon were occupied with chatting to one another and their regular customers, a row of formidable old birds who were there for their weekly set appointments. They paid barely any attention to the frumpy younger woman who had come in for a trim and highlights.

  ‘Terrible cut you have there,’ commented the woman who was looking after her. ‘Looks like someone hacked your hair with a pair of nail scissors.’

  Helen didn’t reply, just gave a nervous smile.

  ‘Colour first, then I’ll cut and sort this mess out,’ said the woman. Together, she and Helen selected some bright honey highlights, then she applied the colour and wrapped strands of Helen’s hair in foil.

  Once the colour was done, the woman moved around her hair snipping and tidying until Helen had a short, attractive pixie cut. She blow-dried it efficiently, if a little more stiffly than Helen would have done herself. Helen put her glasses on and looked at her reflection in the mirror. To all but the most observant onlooker, she would be unrecognizable. She paid with cash, shouldered her bag and left.

  Her route into town was carefully planned and winding, again avoiding any main roads, or roads with petrol stations, cashpoints, bus routes or stations. She walked as much as she could through the parks – first Hampstead Heath, then Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park. It took her more than two hours to walk into central London. Now she was in town, it would be impossible to avoid being seen by CCTV cameras, but, she reasoned, it was unlikely they’d be looking for her this far from home, and with the grainy quality of all but the most sophisticated CCTV cameras, no one would know they were looking at her anyway. Helen Cooper, with her long auburn hair and girly dresses, had vanished from the face of the earth.

  She got on the Tube at Baker Street, using the new, unregistered Oyster travelcard she had bought some weeks before. As she sat down on the Jubilee Line train, she glanced at her watch. It was 3.20. On any other day, she would have been at the school gate, ready to pick up Miranda and Marguerite. She felt a lurch of nausea and panic, and she half lifted herself from the seat, ready to bolt from the train and run up the stairs of the station. But at that moment the doors slid closed and the train gave the high-pitched whine that signalled it was about to move. She was on her way.

  Sam

  ‘What do you mean, Helen’s sister?’ I said stupidly. ‘Helen doesn’t have a sister.’

  ‘Is that what she told you?’ said the woman. What was the name she had given? Judy? She laughed sadly. ‘She probably told you she didn’t have parents either. Well, she does. They’re my parents too. They live in Brisbane, as Helen did for most of her life. And they’re desperate for news of her.’

  She left a pause, as if expecting me to say something, but I had no words to respond. What fresh hell was this? Just when I was starting to put my life back together again, some fruitcake pretending to be Helen’s long-lost sister rings me from Australia. If she was ringing me from Australia. Maybe you could get software that rerouted your call?

  She realized I wasn’t about to respond, so she carried on. ‘They’re both quite frail these days. My dad had a stroke a year or so ago, and my mum—’

  I felt a wave of anger so strong, it was like hot nausea. ‘Listen, I don’t know who you are, but to ring someone up out of the blue with some scam—’

  ‘I’m not. . .’ she began.

  ‘I lost my wife. Do you get that? My wife. My life partner. And you think you can call up out of the blue and try and extort. . . God knows what from me? I haven’t got any money, if that’s what you were hoping for. Or maybe you like to torture people. . .?’ I was aware that I was yelling, and also not making a lot of sense, but I was incandescent with fury. Who was this woman to crawl out of the woodwork, eight months after Helen disappeared, pretending to be her family?

  If I thought I had frightened her and that she would hang up, I was wrong. Judy, or whatever her real name was, was made of sterner stuff. ‘I can understand that it must be strange to get a call out of the blue from someone you had no idea existed. And I’m sure there are people who want to extort money from grieving families, but that isn’t what this is about.’

  ‘I—’ I said, but she wouldn’t let me interrupt.

  ‘I’m going to say goodbye now,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m going to send you something, and if you believe me, you can Skype me. That way you’ll see me face to face, and you can decide if I’m a bad lot.’ Again she paused. Again I didn’t answer. ‘Okay, Sam,’ she said calmly, ‘I’m signing off now.’ And she cut off the call.

  I sat staring at the blank screen of my phone. What the hell was that? I couldn’t believe that there were people out there who would prey on people like us, and so blatantly. I could imagine how it would have played out if I had believed her. At first she’d have worked hard to win my trust, making up loads of stories about Helen as a child; it wouldn’t be difficult to convince someone vulnerable, as she clearly assumed I was. It was like those fake psychics who exploited the weaknesses of the bereaved and persuaded them there were messages from the other side. What did she think she could send me that would persuade me? A ‘message’ she had been asked to pass on by Helen? Well, she’d picked the wrong guy.

  The bedroom door opened and Lara cautiously stuck her head around. ‘Everything okay?’ she said. ‘I heard you yelling.’

  I considered telling her about the phone call, but I could imagine her reaction – surprise followed by a million questions. I was sure Lara, in her naivety, would think it entirely possible that this Judy woman was genuine. I couldn’t face the debate.

  ‘Bloody cold-callers,’ I said, standing up briskly. ‘Trying to tell me I’d been in a car accident and I could claim compensation. It’s the third time this week. I may have lost it a bit.’

  Lara didn’t look convinced and for a moment I wondered how much she had overheard, but she didn’t press the point.

  ‘There’s bacon and eggs downstairs,’ she said. ‘Come down before it gets cold. And I made a pot of that rocket-fuel coffee you like.’

  I admired Lara’s slim form and pert behind in her jeans as she descended the stairs ahead of me. I was a lucky guy. And when I got to the kitchen and saw the plate heaped with scrambled eggs, and the bottle of Tabasco right beside my plate, I felt even more vindicated. I let all thoughts of the Australian scam artist on the phone fly out of my head.

  But as I sat back in my chair, replete, and reached for my second cup of coffee, my phone buzzed with an email. I saw that the sender was ‘Judy Knight’. I tapped to open it. ‘Your email address is in the Facebook post. I’ve attached some photos of Helen and me as children and a few from more recently, along with some old papers of hers – certificates and so on.’ She finished the message with a simple ‘J’, and her Skype name. There were eight attachments. She was persistent, I’d give her that. I checked, and all the attachments were jpegs. I have good antivirus software on my phone and I ran a scan, which came back clean.

  Reluctantly, I clicked on the first image and opened it. It had the slightly grainy quality of a scanned snapshot, and it showed two girls on a beach. The older, taller girl looked to be around sixteen, the younger one about ten. They both had long, light-brown hair and were unmistakeably sisters. The older one I didn’t recognize. The younger one did, I had to admit, have something of Helen about her, but then I had never seen a picture of Helen at that age.

  I clicked on the next image, and this one made me pause. It had been taken in the same high-school athletics arena as the photo I’d found of Helen online in my own searches, but it wasn’t from the same batch. The one I’d found on the school website was of a sports day, but this one showed Helen training, aged around thirteen, younger than in the other photo. It was, however, unmistakeably Helen. I had seen her finish enough races to know her running style – the look of sheer determination that overtook her face, her tall, braced posture and long stride. She had run the same way at thirteen as she ran at thirty-t
hree.

  I looked up. Lara was upstairs. All the kids were in the living room, squabbling but in a low-key way. My work bag was in the hallway and I got up and retrieved my iPad, opening Judy’s email so I could look at the pictures in a larger format. I took the iPad back to the kitchen and opened the other pictures. Here was a past for Helen I had never known existed – Helen with her parents standing outside a long, low, brick house (Helen looked like her mum; her dad was tall, stooped and kind-looking). Helen at a school dance on the arm of a tall, broad-shouldered boy, whose hair was too long at the collar. He had a protective arm around her shoulders. Helen at university, again with the older sister I now assumed must be Judy. The other attachments were a copy of Helen’s birth certificate and her degree certificate. I’d seen the birth certificate before – a certified copy had been neatly filed with all of our other papers at home.

  I opened the final picture. Helen didn’t feature in this one – it was a portrait photograph of a woman of about forty, with jaw-length, mousy-brown hair. She had lines around her eyes, whether from stress, smoking or sun damage it was hard to say. I stared at the picture and was so lost in thought, I didn’t hear Marguerite come into the kitchen behind me. She stood at my shoulder, looking at the picture.

  ‘That lady looks like Mummy,’ she said.

  I waited for Lara to come back down, then took my iPad upstairs. I shut the bedroom door, opened the Skype app and hesitantly typed in Judy’s user name. She answered instantly, and the same face, so utterly like Helen’s, popped up on my screen.

  ‘Sam,’ she said, and for a long moment we looked at one another in silence.

  Then we both spoke simultaneously. ‘I didn’t know. . .’ we chorused. We both laughed; a sad, bitter laugh from me, embarrassed from her.

  ‘You first,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t know Helen had got married,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I would have loved to have known. To have known you. And your. . . kids? To have come to the wedding.’ She smiled sadly.