by Darren Young
There was silence, and Laura thought she’d put the phone down. ‘Hello?’
‘I’ll have to call you back,’ the manager said.
‘OK.’
Laura ended the call and waited. The manager had promised she’d get back to her within the hour but she called back much sooner, barely fifteen minutes later.
‘Normally I wouldn’t do this without a risk assessment,’ she said, raising Laura’s hopes, ‘but I’ve spoken to Sandra and she has agreed to see you tomorrow at two.’
‘Tomorrow?’
Laura realised she had not been prepared for that answer. She’d expected to be refused or, at best, to have to try to convince the manager to agree to her having a telephone conversation.
‘Is that OK?’
Laura sat looking at Sandra’s picture.
‘Hello.’
‘Yes, sorry, just checking my diary.’
Laura pretended to press a few keys, and made a humming noise as if she was running her finger down against a busy schedule. ‘Yes, I can do two o’clock,’ she said after a few seconds.
‘So we’ll see you then,’ the manager said.
‘You will.’
Laura deleted what little she had managed to type of her article and typed a new working title: WHAT IS IT LIKE TO LOSE A CHILD? It wasn’t going to make David’s deadline, but she was pretty sure that this would be something that the editor would want to print, so she closed the laptop and ran from the coffee shop to the shopping centre to update Kelly on the developments. Then she collected her car and drove home.
She had an interview to prepare for.
20 | Danni
‘That’s another one!’
Danni removed the headset she always wore in the early part of her morning shift at the dental practice. Between half-past eight and ten o’clock she would spend most of her time fielding calls from patients trying to book or cancel appointments. Today it had only been the latter; three already and it was only twenty past nine. The second dentist at the practice was sitting in the reception with her; her latest appointment was one of the ones that had been cancelled. She shook her head.
‘One of those days.’
‘Looks like it.’
Another call came through and they looked at each other. ‘Surely not,’ said Danni, and put the headset back on. ‘Madeley’s Dental Practice – good morning, how—’
‘Danni?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Carol.’
It took a few seconds for Danni to register that it was Euan’s mother. Her voice sounded different through the headset.
‘Hi.’
‘I had to ring you there. Your mobile kept saying it was unobtainable.’
‘Oh, right. I changed my number.’
‘That explains it. I was worried about you.’
Danni asked how she was and answered Carol’s questions about the funeral and how she was coping. Despite their previous friendship, it felt difficult now: strained, and too much like hard work.
‘Have you heard from Euan?’
Danni made an involuntary snorting sound, and hoped Carol hadn’t heard. ‘Sort of,’ she said quickly, trying to cover it.
‘What?’
There was a pause. The dentist had gone back to her treatment room, and when Danni checked the appointment diary there was at least twenty minutes until the next patient was due.
‘That’s why I changed my number.’
Now Carol paused. Danni waited for her to work it out.
‘He hasn’t!’
Danni told her about the calls and text messages: how they had peaked a fortnight after they split up, and then dropped off around the funeral but then started again. Euan’s mother was silent, taking the information in.
‘I’ll speak to him,’ she said softly. ‘He mustn’t do this to you, especially now.’
Danni took a deep breath. If she didn’t tell Carol the whole story, and she found out from Euan, it would look as if she’d deliberately held it back.
‘I’m partly to blame, Carol. I I spent time with him after the funeral. I never wanted to get back together or anything. I was just in a bad place.’
There was another awkward pause.
‘Well, I’ll still talk to him.’
‘Listen, I have to go, a patient has just come in.’ There was no patient, but Danni didn’t want to talk about it any longer.
‘OK, sorry love, keep in touch.’
‘I will, bye.’
Even before there was a click on the line to indicate the call had ended, Danni knew that she wouldn’t keep in touch with Carol Corbett. It was a chapter of her life she wanted to put behind her.
She sat, her pen dangling from her mouth, as the practice fell silent. It was unusual for there to be no drilling or sound of voices from the treatment rooms, and she took advantage of the calm to think about what to do next about her father. He hadn’t spoken to her much in the last few days and she had continually put off asking him any questions, so they had reached an impasse, one that was difficult to move on from.
As her shift ended that evening, after one of the quietest days she’d ever known at the practice, she left promptly and stopped off at the nearby shop and picked up a bottle of wine. Then she parked her car at her house and walked to Sam’s, timing it perfectly to coincide with her friend getting back from her own job. It was something they had done a lot, before boyfriends had got in the way.
‘You read my mind,’ Sam said when she opened the door, still wearing her coat.
Within minutes they were sitting in the living room with a glass each. Sam had rustled up a plate of nibbles and they were taking it in turns to complain about their day. The television was on but Sam had turned the volume right down. A reporter from the BBC was standing in the light rain, giving a live update. Behind them was a shopping centre, almost in darkness.
‘Terrible, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’ asked Danni.
‘A little girl’s gone missing.’
‘From round here?’
‘No. Up north somewhere, I think they said. She was with her mother and just … disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’
‘That’s what they said. I only switched it on a minute before you knocked on the door.’
The TV began to show repeat footage of a press conference. Sam turned the volume up.
‘What about the CCTV?’ Danni wondered aloud as the police detective on the screen answered questions from a room of reporters – including one about the cameras, which it turned out had been switched off because of some faulty wiring within the ageing shopping centre.
The detective explained that the case was being treated as abduction. Then a picture of the missing girl’s father was put on the screen, along with a hotline number and a request for information on his whereabouts. In the picture the man was smiling happily; it looked like a photograph taken at a family Christmas dinner.
‘They think he’s taken her.’
‘That girl’s poor mother must be going through hell,’ said Danni.
‘Especially as she was taken from right under her nose,’ said Sam. ‘Do you want to keep watching?’
Danni shrugged.
‘I’ll leave the picture on.’
Danni nodded and Sam muted it and put the remote control on the arm of the chair; but both found it hard not to keep looking at the screen for updates.
‘So,’ said Sam, offering Danni a crisp, ‘what has your dad done now?’
Danni had told Sam, in an exchange of text messages earlier in the day, that their talk at the restaurant hadn’t gone well. Now, face to face, she told her about her mother in the bath, the overheard discussion, and her father’s reluctance to talk about anything. She noted her friend’s silent disappointment. ‘Sorry for not telling you before.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Half of me thought I was blowing it out of proportion, and half of me was…embarrassed, I guess.’
&
nbsp; ‘About what?’
‘My parents. I always thought they were this great couple.’
‘They were.’
‘I don’t know what to think any more.’
‘Maybe you’re reading too much into it. If there were anything bigger, you’d have noticed it in other ways.’
Danni nodded. On the television screen a woman with bloodshot eyes was talking to the camera and her name appeared in a box below her face. She was the missing girl’s mother. Sam grabbed the remote and turned the volume up and they heard the final part of the plea, where the woman spoke with a broken voice and appealed for anyone who had her daughter to come forward.
‘How long as she been missing?’ asked Danni.
‘Since this afternoon.’
‘I can’t imagine how she feels.’
‘She should feel terrible,’ said Sam, and Danni winced at the coldness in her tone. ‘I mean, how does your child just go missing like that?’
Danni looked at the woman on the screen, her red eyes surrounded by dark circles and the streaks where she’d been crying. She didn’t share her friend’s haste in apportioning blame. ‘It probably happens more than we think.’
Sam didn’t reply. The reporter came back on and then they went back to the interview room and a police detective named Jenkinson repeated the mother’s appeal for people to come forward with information.
‘The girl wouldn’t have left with a stranger, surely?’ Danni wondered out loud.
Sam shook her head. ‘It’ll be the dad. It’s always someone they know.’
Danni looked at her. Sam shook her head. ‘You’ve got to question what kind of family that kid’s got.’
Danni said nothing. She knew how it felt to have no idea what your parents might be capable of.
21 | Danni
Despite Danni’s protests, Sam had opened a second bottle of wine as their conversation had turned to work, then back to Danni’s parents, and then the unfolding events on the news.
‘Sounds like this is more than just a domestic.’
They watched as the story came back on the news channel roughly every thirty minutes; all evening it had been the leading item on the headline bulletin.
‘I hope she’s OK.’
Sam nodded, and Danni felt her eyes becoming heavy. She needed to walk home, but she sensed her friend was in the mood to go on much longer. She waved her away when she tried to refill her glass. ‘I need my bed.’
‘Lightweight.’ Sam grinned. ‘Shall I call you a cab?’
Danni was looking forward to the sobering walk and clearing her head a little with the fresh coastal breeze on her face, so she politely declined and put her coat on, giving her friend a warm hug. ‘Thanks for listening. It was good to talk.’
‘That’s not talking, it’s slurring,’ laughed Sam.
‘Well, thank you, anyway,’ Danni laughed back as she opened the door and the sharpness of the cold night air hit her cheeks immediately; she pulled her collar up as high as it would go.
‘I’m sure it’s all going to be fine with your dad,’ Sam shouted from the doorway as she walked down the path.
Danni smiled and walked into the headwind. It was only a mile to her house but she decided to take a slightly longer but better-lit route because it was so late. She turned and waved one last time. ‘Shut the door!’ she called into the whistling wind. ‘You’ll freeze.’
Sam lived with her mother but Danni rarely saw her. After a protracted divorce, Mrs Newbold had taken on three part-time jobs to be able to afford to stay in the house and sometimes it was after midnight before she got home, so determined was she that Sam’s life wouldn’t be disrupted. Sam had left school and got a job with her uncle’s firm as soon as she was able, in order to help pay the bills and reduce the burden on her mother – not that Danni had ever heard Mrs Newbold complain about her lot. As a result, they’d always had a house to go to, rather than hanging about on the streets like other teenagers, and, when they got a little older, it was somewhere they could spend time and talk after a day at work. And now, Danni was again grateful to have a place to go that got her away from the house and from treading on eggshells around her father. But she knew she had to go back some time.
In the summer, when it was lighter and drier, Danni would cut across the Rec, a large, square patch of grassy land that was edged with trees and had a football pitch on one side and a children’s playground in the centre. It cut the journey distance and time significantly, but it got quite boggy when it was wet and, because the trees blocked out the street-lighting, no one tended to go on it after dark, in case a dog-walker hadn’t cleaned up after their pet properly. The alternative, longer route was to walk around the edge of the square, past a row of shops that included a post office, a hairdresser’s and a fish and chip shop that stayed open until midnight to catch the custom from the pub on the other corner of the Rec.
As Danni approached, the owner of the fish shop, a Cypriot man whom Danni’s family had got to know quite well and who’d been at her mother’s funeral, was just seeing out the last customers of the night and closing up. He waved, then turned the OPEN sign on the door to CLOSED and switched off one of the lights. The customers were three teenage boys, now shouting and jostling over a bag of chips, outside the hairdresser’s. When they saw Danni on the opposite side, one whistled and the other shouted drunkenly, ‘Get ‘em out for us, darlin’.’
Danni quickened her pace a fraction and didn’t look at them. The village was quiet and usually trouble-free; it always had been, but at a certain time of night, like a lot of towns and villages, it had one or two problems with groups of young people hanging around in the street, often drinking, smoking and sometimes causing a nuisance.
‘Fuckin’ snob,’ another of the group shouted, and she instinctively glanced over at them. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘I’m talkin’ to you.’
She carried on walking, even faster now, and could hear them talking loudly to each other as they walked in the opposite direction. When she was far enough away that their voices had become muffled and distant, she turned to look, but could only see two of them heading around the corner in the direction she had come from. As she turned, the third boy appeared alongside her from out of the trees.
‘Sorry ‘bout them.’
Danni jumped, startled. The lad, a skinny six-footer with basketball shoes and a black, shiny coat that resembled a pile of car tyres, had cut across the corner of the Rec. She smiled politely and carried on walking, each step a little longer. Her house was no more than six hundred yards away.
‘They’re pissed.’
Danni smiled.
‘I don’t think you’re a snob.’
Danni felt torn. If she ignored him, she would be exactly what he didn’t think she was; but she didn’t want to encourage further conversation, and she definitely didn’t want him to know where she lived.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘And no need to apologise for them.’
‘What’s your name?’
She didn’t want him to know that either. She carried on walking quickly, but his long bandy legs had no trouble covering the ground, although his little stumble as they crossed the road told her that he had, like his friends, drunk too much.
‘Look, I just want to get home,’ she said, and hoped he would just get the message and leave her alone, but he seemed to take her brush-off as a challenge instead.
‘I’m not stopping you. I only asked your—’
A car came up behind them and slowed quite deliberately, so that the skinny boy looked around and blinked in the glare of the headlights and had to shield his eyes. Danni carried on walking and heard the car edge slowly forward, until it pulled alongside her, and she heard the whirr of the electric window as it came down. She tensed.
‘Danni.’
She looked, but already knew from the voice that it was her father, leaning across towards the passenger side so she could see his face. The lad stopped walking and watched them.
Danni opened the car door and climbed inside, looking at the six-footer as she did. ‘Night, Danni,’ he said sarcastically. She smiled and slammed the door.
‘Everything OK?’ her father said. She nodded, and pressed the button to close the window.
‘Let’s go home.’
Her father glared at the youth for a second or two and then pulled away as Danni stared forward, relieved but also embarrassed. ‘Have you been drinking?’ she heard her father say, but she ignored the question. He didn’t drink alcohol himself and, as with most things he didn’t approve of, he didn’t approve of anyone else enjoying it either. But she had wanted him to get back to how he used to be, so she didn’t answer, just shook her head and hoped he couldn’t smell the wine on her breath.
She’d told Sam that she wanted her father back in her life.
And she was really glad he had shown up when he did.
22 | Laura
‘Your destination is on a restricted access route.’
The female voice was sharp and to the point. Laura watched the portable satellite navigation unit she’d borrowed from her father as it calculated the journey to the destination, and came back with one that was a few minutes over four hours. That was fine: with some potential motorway bottlenecks to negotiate, she’d allowed herself more than five hours to get there.
She rechecked the items in her bag again, and then waved to her mother standing in the doorway. Helen waved back, her face beaming with pride. Both her parents had been so pleased for her when the story had broken, and when she’d asked the question at the press conference, that she hadn’t told them that Kelly had replaced her as the main reporter on the story. She decided that she would get the interview completed and surprise them with it when it went live on the home page of the website that night, because that would remind everyone that she was still key to the Gazette’s reporting of the case. Besides, she thought, her mother would be worried sick if she knew she was driving so far on her own, so she’d told her she was doing a number of local interviews with the family of Becky Holden, and needed the SatNav to find their addresses. Only David, his PA and Kelly knew where she was really going. The editor had been very impressed with what she had done so far, and securing the interview must have been the icing on the cake, because she had rarely seen such enthusiasm from him. Sue had given her an expenses form and petty cash for the trip.
