by Nicci French
‘No,’ I said, picking up the camcorder. ‘I’ve got to go to the police station.’
‘Can I come with you?’ Jackson plucked at my sleeve.
‘No.’
‘Mum – Mummy – please can I come? Please?’
‘All right, then,’ I said, abruptly changing my mind. ‘Renata, I’m on my mobile. Call me if there’s anything.’
‘I forgot – someone called Christian rang. He’s stuck on the M25, can’t move at all.’
‘Oh, well. Come on, then, Jackson.’
I took his hand in mine and we ran to the police station. It was quicker than driving. Our feet smacked against the icy surface of the road and the cold wind blew in from the east, whipping our hair on to our cheeks, making our ears ache. Jackson’s breath was coming in little sobs, but I didn’t let up. I tugged him past houses with smoke rising from their chimneys, windows strung with Christmas lights or illuminated with baubled Christmas trees. In the distance the grey sea lay beneath the grey sky. You couldn’t see the sun at all.
‘Is he here yet?’ I asked, as we clattered breathlessly into the station.
‘Excuse me?’
The woman at the desk looked at us both suspiciously.
‘PC Mahoney. Is he here? I’m Nina Landry – I called. I have to see him at once.’
‘He just got in. I gave him your message and he was going to call –’
‘In there?’
I took Jackson’s cold fingers again and marched him across to the door, knocked firmly and opened it before anyone had a chance to reply. Mahoney was standing near the window that overlooked the small car park at the back, with a polystyrene cup of coffee in his hand. He looked chilly and tired. Tinsel hung along the walls, a tiny fake Christmas tree stood on top of the metal filing cabinet in the corner, and on the desk there were several framed photographs: of him and a curly-headed woman I assumed was his wife; of a large fish at the end of a line, with glazed eye and gaping mouth; of a girl who must be the daughter he’d talked about, Charlie’s age. She wore braces and her hair was tied back in a single dark brown plait.
He looked at me in surprise.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ I said. My throat hurt when I swallowed, my glands ached. I felt clammy and my skin prickled under my jacket. ‘Jackson, go ahead.’
Jackson started fiddling with the camcorder. His hands were shaking, with cold or fear, I didn’t know. I put a hand on top of his silky head and watched as Charlie’s door swung open on the small, smeary screen in front of us.
‘We have a patrol car looking for your daughter,’ said Mahoney. He coughed awkwardly. ‘I know it’s difficult to be patient but –’
‘Quiet,’ I said. ‘Look at this. Hold it there, Jackson.’ I gestured at the miniature screen. ‘That’s her nightshirt. Her nightshirt that’s not there any more.’
‘Ms Landry –’
‘Go forward, Jackson. There. That’s her makeup bag.’
‘Yes,’ he said cautiously.
‘Don’t you see? Look, it’s eleven seventeen. Go back, Jackson, show him the clock. There. It makes everything different. Don’t you see? We’d assumed she came back after the sleepover or the newspaper round, took her stuff and then ran away. But she didn’t. She waited until I was at home and then she came back. But how didn’t I see her?’
‘Sit down, please. Would your son like to wait outside with –’
‘No.’ Jackson settled himself in my lap, as if he was six not eleven, and I wrapped my arms round his solid body and put my chin on his head.
‘Well done,’ I whispered into his ear, and he leaned more heavily against me.
‘Either she came back or someone came back for her,’ said Mahoney, slowly. He rubbed his eyes with both fists.
‘Yes, yes, that’s true. That’s possible.’
‘Now.’ He sat at the desk opposite us, picked up a pen, pulled a pad of paper towards him. He thought for a moment. ‘So, where are we? We know this film was taken at eleven seventeen.’
‘Yes.’
He wrote down the time and frowned at it. Outside the door, someone broke into a tuneless rendition of ‘God Rest You Merry Gentlemen’.
‘Charlie, or someone on her behalf, took her things away after that.’
‘Yes.’
‘But before we went into the room at, let me see, five to twelve.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you were in the house all that time?’
‘Yes. I was. I got back at about eleven with Jackson and didn’t leave again until after you left, when I visited one of Charlie’s friends, the one whose house she was at last night.’
‘Who else came to your house between eleven fifteen and just before twelve?’
‘Oh, God, a whole crowd of people. There was the party. You know about that. So, there was me and Jackson. And then there was, let me see.’ I put my fingers to my temples and tried to picture the first group at the door this morning. ‘Joel Frazer and his wife, Alix Dawes – Dr Dawes. And then Ashleigh Stevens, she’s Charlie’s best friend. And the vicar, Tom something.’
‘Reverend Drake.’
‘Right, and there was a man called Eric or Derek, I don’t know. With his wife or partner or whatever. And Carrie Lowell from the primary school, and her husband but I’ve no idea what his name is. I’d never seen him before.’
Mahoney was looking dazed. I ploughed on: ‘Rick and Karen Blythe. They left early – Karen had an accident. She was drunk. She broke her arm.’
‘Quite a party,’ he said glumly.
‘They went to the hospital, with Alix and Joel following them. Oh, and their son Eamonn, he was there. He’s in love with Charlie, I think, but I’m pretty sure she’d never look at him. Joanna or Josephine, the solicitor who lives in that grand house. And then, well, lots of people whose names I don’t know and some I probably never even saw. Other people let them in, and it was a party that kind of went on without me. I was upstairs a lot of the time. I wasn’t really in the mood – I was worrying about packing and wondering where Charlie was.’
‘I see,’ said Mahoney. He’d stopped writing and was fiddling with his pen, staring helplessly at the list of names that straggled down the page. ‘I see.’
‘And then there was Jay,’ I continued.
‘Jay?’
‘Jay Birche, but I didn’t know that then. I tracked him down a few minutes ago. Ashleigh told me his name.’
‘You have been busy,’ he said drily, but he wrote down the name, then underlined it.
‘He lives at the big farm near the marshes. I didn’t know Charlie knew him but obviously she does. He was with a load of other teenagers, and I’ve no idea who they are, although some of their faces were a bit familiar.’
I came to a halt at last. ‘What does it mean?’ I asked, in a low voice.
‘I know Mr Birche,’ said Mahoney. ‘This Jay, his son, was he Charlie’s boyfriend?’
An hour or so ago, I had been vehemently denying that Charlie had a boyfriend, insisting that I would have known. Now I stared at Mahoney across Jackson’s head. ‘Maybe.’
‘What was your daughter wearing when you last saw her?’
I could see her now, as vividly as if she was standing at the door and looking back at me. I had the strangest sensation that I could reach out to that memory and pull her back, stop her walking away from me into the gusty winter night. ‘She was wearing faded blue jeans, a leather belt with an ornate buckle, turquoise and pink. A bright pink T-shirt, scoop-necked and long-sleeved, with scribbled patterns in different colours on it. A scuffed-leather bomber jacket that had belonged to her father but that she’d taken over. It’s black, with a torn pocket. Flat suede boots with beads on them. She had a scarf thing – blue and pink and silver, with sequins; she sometimes ties it round her hair, but when she left it was round her neck. And she took a hoodie with her in case it got cold. Grey, with ragged cuffs. She always chews her cuffs. A small leather shoulder-bag. Chunky beads in all di
fferent colours…’
‘That’s probably enough,’ he said gently, and I looked away. I wasn’t going to cry; I mustn’t. I could cry later, when Charlie was safe again.
He tapped his pen on his pad, gazing down thoughtfully at the long list of names. ‘All I can say to you is what I said before. You should go home and wait by the phone. There’s a patrol car keeping an eye out for her. From what we now know, it seems possible that your daughter is not acting alone.’
‘I can’t just wait. Every minute counts, that’s what I keep thinking. We’ve got to find her now.’
‘I know it’s hard, but I’ve dealt with more cases like this than you’d believe, and they usually come home.’
‘Something’s wrong,’ I said.
‘You don’t know that.’
‘And it’s so cold outside.’
Jackson let me hold his hand again as we walked home but we didn’t talk. My mobile rang several times and each time I answered it with a terrible lurch of hope. First it was my friend Caroline, but I cut her short after three or four words and said I’d call her when I could; then Rory saying he was nearly there; then Christian, at a standstill on the M25 because of an accident – a lorry had fallen sideways and tipped its load across both carriageways. I was curt with each of them. I didn’t want to talk to anyone unless it was Charlie or someone who could tell me how to find her. Everything else was noise, an irrelevant hiss and rumble from a world to which I no longer felt connected. I looked around me constantly, thinking I might glimpse some tiny sign of Charlie if I was alert enough, if I was looking in the right place. Behind the hedge, down the alley, in the car, up in the lighted first-floor window of the gabled house, going into the shop, disappearing round the corner like that dog-walker now, in the ploughed field that in summer was golden with wheat, among the boats that stood in the yard, halliards tinkling and tarpaulins flapping. I was terrified of looking in the wrong direction, terrified that she might be just behind me or just in front and that I would miss her because I wasn’t alert enough. My eyes zigzagged along our route, until everything I saw seemed surreal, plucked out of its everyday context.
‘Mum, Mum.’ Jackson was saying something, tugging at my hand.
‘Mmm?’
‘Why’s she here?’
I looked up and saw, walking very fast and very upright towards our house from the opposite direction, Alix. Stranger still, she was gripping Tam’s upper arm, pulling her forcibly along. Tam was half stumbling; her head was down, her hair flapping in the wind. Behind them came Jenna in an ungainly jog, openly crying. I quickened my pace and we met at the gate.
‘What is it?’
‘There’s something you have to know,’ said Alix. Her face was stern and pinched. She did not release Tam’s arm. ‘Can we come in?’
I opened the door, noticing that the key shook in my hand. Sludge hurled herself at us as we entered, but I didn’t touch her, just told Jackson to throw a few sticks for her in the back garden.
Renata was on the phone, but she shook her head at me and quickly ended the call, saying we would ring if there was any news.
We went into the kitchen. I didn’t take off my jacket and didn’t offer tea or coffee, just gestured at the chairs. It was curiously silent for a moment. I could hear the sound of my own breathing, and the clock on the wall ticking. I glanced up at it and then away, although I could still hear the awful metronomic sound.
‘Tell me,’ I said.
‘Tam,’ said Alix. It was an order.
Tam looked up at last through her snarled hair. Her eyes were red. ‘We didn’t mean anything,’ she began, and beside her Jenna stifled a sob.
‘What happened?’
‘It was meant to be a bit of fun –’
‘What happened?’ I had no time for excuses, and this time Alix didn’t interrupt to defend her daughter.
‘Last night,’ said Tam, ‘about one o’clock maybe, after we’d watched the film anyway, we –’ She looked at her hands, then back at me, and finished the sentence in a rush.
‘We put vodka in Charlie’s orange juice.’
‘Without Charlie’s knowledge,’ added Alix, in a clipped voice.
‘How much?’
‘It wasn’t that much,’ said Tam, ‘but she drank it more quickly than we’d expected, all in one go.’
‘Was she drunk?’
Jenna gave a terrified giggle, then clamped a hand over her mouth.
‘Yes,’ said Tam.
‘How drunk?’
‘Kind of floppy and quiet at first.’
‘Was she sick?’
‘Yeah,’ mumbled Tam.
‘After she vomited, she passed out,’ said Alix, quietly but clearly, looking straight into my eyes. There was still enough space in my teeming brain to admire the way she was making no excuses for her daughter or herself. After all, she had been the adult in charge. ‘As far as I can tell, she was unconscious for a while, but then she came to and vomited again. Is that right?’
‘Yes,’ said Tam, tonelessly.
Jenna snuffled again and put her face into her hands. ‘We didn’t know it would be like that. It was just a laugh. But then she got ill. At first we couldn’t wake her up and when we lifted up her eyelids, her eyeballs just rolled back in the sockets and she made this groaning noise. It was horrible. We got so frightened. We didn’t know what to do about it. We thought she was dying and we’d killed her.’
‘We were asleep in bed,’ said Alix, quietly. ‘I had no idea. I should have suspected something was up when I found they’d opened the bedroom windows and washed the sheets.’
I forced myself not to imagine Charlie, wretchedly sick in the house of the girl who’d bullied her, vomiting and crying and falling unconscious and waking up again and not calling me, not asking me to come and get her and take her home where she’d be safe, and instead concentrated on the stark facts: ‘She was sick and she passed out and then she was sick again. What time was that?’
‘Three or four in the morning,’ said Tam. ‘I didn’t look at the time. But she got better,’ she added. ‘We told her how sorry we were.’
‘We made her have a shower,’ added Jenna. ‘And Tam gave her some extra-strong coffee and she drank it and I made some toast for her but she wouldn’t have that.’
‘She still left at nine to do her paper round?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Feeling like death?’
‘She wasn’t so bad,’ said Tam, defensively.
‘What did she say?’
‘You mean, in the morning? Not much. I don’t remember.’
‘She said I was weak and Tam was vicious,’ said Jenna.
‘She said she was sorry for us because we had such manky little lives that spiking someone’s drink was our idea of fun.’ That sounded like my Charlie.
‘And then she left. On her bike?’
‘I think so.’
‘You didn’t offer to help her with the paper round, given the circumstances?’
They didn’t answer.
‘I’ll take that as a no. And you haven’t seen or heard from her since?’
Jenna covered her face with her hands. Her hair streamed down on to the table. She said, in a muffled sob, ‘It’ll be all right, won’t it? We didn’t mean anything to happen, it was only a joke. We would never have done it if we’d known, Ms Landry, you have to believe that –’
‘Shut up,’ said Tam. ‘Just shut up.’
‘I thought you should know immediately,’ said Alix.
‘I’ve got to ring the hospital,’ I said. ‘She might be there.’
‘I’ll do that for you. I know people there. Is there a phone in the living room?’
‘Yes.’
‘You two can go home now,’ said Alix, to Tam and Jenna. ‘Get Joel and tell him what’s happened.’
‘But, Mum –’
‘Tell your father,’ she said. ‘And you, Jenna, you’d better tell your parents as well. If you don’t,
I will.’
The girls left, and I saw them walking down the road several yards apart, their feet dragging against the pavement.
I could hear the rise and fall of Alix’s voice from the living room although I couldn’t make out the words, then a pause while she waited. Outside in the garden, Jackson was standing wretchedly by the wall while Sludge was charging around wildly with a stout stick forcing her jaws open into an idiotic, pink-tongued grin. My hands were clenched in my lap. I opened them out and stared at my palms, my ringless fingers, the scar along the left thumb, my life line. Charlie’s hands were whiter and smoother than mine, her fingers long and elegant. She wore a glass thumb ring and round her wrist a thin leather bracelet. I hadn’t told Mahoney that.
‘Nothing,’ said Alix, coming into the room. ‘So that’s good news.’
‘Is it?’ I said. ‘The problem is – one of the problems is – that I go over things in my head repeatedly and I’ve stopped being able to tell what’s good and what’s bad and what things mean.’ I halted. It was as if I knew there was something out there in the darkness and I had to feel for it. Yes, that was it. ‘For instance, I’ve looked through Charlie’s room. She seems to have taken her washbag and her nightshirt, the things that were lying on the floor. But then I opened her drawer and there were other possessions – like her antibiotics – that were just as important.’
Alix nodded in recognition. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She was very self-conscious about her impetigo. She asked how quickly the rash would go.’
I looked at her sharply. Alix was so super-discreet about her work as a GP, about her knowledge of people’s secrets, that it was a shock to hear even so guarded a comment as that. ‘You don’t know something, do you?’ I asked. ‘Did she tell you anything? I mean, that might throw any light on why she would run away?’
Alix’s expression hardened. ‘If I did, I would tell you, or the police.’
I paused. Clearly there was no point in pressing her. ‘But do you see?’ I said. ‘Isn’t it strange?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Alix, uneasily. ‘I suppose so. But if you were running away, you wouldn’t be thinking very clearly, would you?’
