by Nicci French
‘But what do we do now?’
‘I’d like you to sit in your car. I’ve got to secure the scene.’
‘We’re all right where we are,’ I said.
‘Then I must ask you to stand back.’
‘Stand back from where?’
‘It’s important that nothing is disturbed.’
It was crazy but in the midst of all that I had the memory of once when I was a small child and we were going to a fair that had come to a nearby park. I had seen the ferris wheel, the roundabouts and the stalls being constructed on my way to and from school all that week. I was desperate to go, but before we left my mother suddenly announced that she needed to get changed and couldn’t decide on the right clothes, and she made me a sandwich to bring and she had to clear up, and I stood by the door hopping from one foot to the other, thinking of all the time that was being used up, all the fun that was being had, while my mother found things to potter about with.
That was the thing with Mahoney. When it hadn’t been important, when he was sure that nothing had happened to Charlie, he could take notes, give bits of advice and tell me not to worry. But now that we were facing the sickening possibility that something had happened, it made him feel safe to fall back on a narrow form of procedure that would use up precious time.
He opened the boot of his police car and returned with a pile of traffic cones, stacked one on the other like paper cups for a children’s party. With a great show of solemnity he arranged them in a half-oval shape on the road adjacent to the gap in the hedge. Then he went back to the car and returned with what looked like a bundle of canes and a giant roll of tape. He stepped through the cones and the gap in the hedge. He detached the canes, one by one, and stuck them into the ground at intervals, then disappeared from sight. When he emerged into view we saw he was unwinding the tape and connecting the cones to form a symbolic barrier round the area where the bike and the bag were lying.
I walked over to Alix. ‘Do you think this is necessary?’ I hissed. ‘It’s not as if there’s a crowd of people likely to disturb the crime scene. Have we seen a single car all the time we’ve been here?’
She looked across at Mahoney, who was now sitting on the driving seat of his car with the door open and his feet resting on the road. He seemed to be filling in a form. ‘I’m sure it’s required,’ she said. ‘It shows how seriously they’re taking matters. The important thing is that people are coming who know how to deal with things like this. They’ll sort it out quickly, I’m sure of it.’
I didn’t share Alix’s faith in the authorities. I walked over to the car. He was scribbling busily in large, almost childlike handwriting and didn’t notice me at first. When he saw me, he became self-conscious. Perhaps he was worried that I might be reading what he had written.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but nothing seems to be happening. Nothing!’ And I waved at the empty road and the empty sky. My voice was cracked.
‘I told you, Ms Landry, officers are on their way.’
‘But look at what we’ve found. Not only is my daughter gone but her bike had been hidden behind a hedge. Which suggests that somebody put it there. Which suggests that she is with someone against her will. In which case, the situation is terribly, terribly urgent. Do you agree with that?’
‘Ms Landry, if there was anything I could do, this moment, that would help find your daughter, I would do it. What we have to do is wait for the officers to arrive. It’s their job now.’
‘You should have called them at once.’
‘Ms Landry –’ he began, but I interrupted him.
‘Don’t say it. Don’t say anything. How long will they be?’
‘Not long. No more than half an hour.’
I looked at the time on my mobile. It was twenty minutes to two. How long is not long? Oh, they were a long time. Each second was a long time, an agony of trying not to think and thinking all the time, of trying not to see her face and seeing it all the time, hearing her voice call out for me and I couldn’t help her, couldn’t go to her. I could feel the seconds ticking by, turning into minutes. I felt I was burning up with the need to act and the impossibility of doing so.
A quarter to two. I clenched my fists, dug my nails into my palms until they hurt, walked up and down the road, the icy wind raw on my skin, like being rubbed with sandpaper. I tried to think over everything that had happened, get it all in order so I could be ready for the police: not the order of things as I had experienced them, moments of scrappy revelations, but the order of things as they must have happened. Charlie had gone to a sleepover. She had had her drink spiked, by girls who’d previously bullied her, and got horribly drunk; she’d left for her paper round at about nine but only got as far as this lonely spot.
And then there was the fact, incontrovertible but inexplicable, that her things had gone missing, but must have been taken around the time of the party, a full two hours or so later than the time that she was here. What did that mean? What could it mean?
I phoned home and talked to Renata, who told me what I already knew: that there was nothing to report. I talked to Jackson and tried to sound reassuring, but half-way through he started weeping and there was nothing I could say to comfort him. I told him he had to write down anything he could think of that Charlie had said to him recently, or that he had overheard, that might provide a clue. I had no hope he would come up with anything, but I knew I had to give him a task, a purpose.
I called Jay, noting as I did so that the battery on my phone was running low. I said that I very much needed to meet him and that as soon as I was free I would call. He sounded jumpy, but agreed to stay on the island and wait for my call. I rang Ashleigh and said I needed her to help me by calling all of her and Charlie’s friends and mobilizing them. I wanted them to contact other people, who should in turn get involved in the search for Charlie. I wanted to cast the net as wide as possible. Perhaps someone had seen her that morning, or heard something about her, or could offer a lead that I didn’t know about.
Ten to two. I went over to Alix in the car and asked if her phone charger was compatible with my phone, and if so would she charge it a bit for me now. Every minute of extra power would help. She turned on the engine and plugged it in, then said something comforting and platitudinous but I couldn’t reply; I literally could not bring myself to speak the words. Stones in my throat. I just stared at her through my stinging eyes and turned away. What should I do now? I had no phone, nothing to busy myself with, and the horizon was empty. My gloveless hands were freezing, my fingers numb.
A tractor passed, the driver sitting up high in the cab, staring down out of his meaty red face. A woman on her bike, her hair tied back in a scarf and her coat billowing around her. She seemed to take ages to cycle by. Mahoney sat stolidly in his car. I scoured the landscape for signs of the police who were arriving from the mainland, but they didn’t come. They couldn’t get here that quickly. It was five to two.
My mobile rang in the car and Alix called me over, but it was just Christian again, his voice breaking up. He was still stuck. I cut him off after a few words. I pictured Charlie lying in a ditch somewhere; I pictured her in a van, screaming for help. I tried to stop the nightmare images that were bombarding me. Maybe she was standing on a road on the mainland in her characteristic, hip-jutting slouch, thumb out for a lift, or sitting in a warm café with a stranger, someone else she hadn’t told me about.
A sailing-boat appeared out of the estuary from inland and began to make its way round the point. The large white and blue sail billowed out in the wind like a puffed cheek. I’d thought all the leisure boats had been safely tucked up on shore for the winter and this boat almost had the sea to itself, except for a small lumpy fishing-smack further down the coast, and far away, dim on the horizon, a container ship making its way to Harwich or Felixstowe. From where? China, probably. The dentist I had started going to on the island had holiday postcards pasted on to his ceiling, so that you stared up at them as you la
y back in the chair and perhaps thought of something other than what was going on in your mouth. The last time I went there a profusion of things had been happening in mine – sounds, smells and sudden sensations, even through the anaesthetic – and I had looked at the postcards carefully, one by one, as if I was interested, as if that would fool the pain. I had gazed at the hackneyed scenes of Hong Kong harbour, the Sydney Opera House, a temple on a lake in Thailand, New York City with no Twin Towers, the Eiffel Tower, a beach somewhere.
Now I did the same with that sailing-boat. I scrutinized it as carefully as I could, counting the sails (there were three), trying to identify the ropes and how they fastened the sails and what their purpose was. I looked at the two people on board, one in yellow, the other in blue. There were numbers on the side and a name, but the boat was too far away to make them out. If I could concentrate enough and make myself see as many details as possible, the person in blue holding the large silver steering-wheel, the one in yellow doing something with a rope, maybe I could stop myself thinking about what didn’t bear thinking about and maybe this dead time would pass more quickly. So I looked at the little green pennant fluttering at the top of the mast and the portholes and wondered if you could sleep on board. I felt as if I were holding my breath, and then I couldn’t hold it any more. I turned to Alix.
‘Have you got the time?’ I said.
She looked at her watch. ‘Just gone two,’ she said.
‘You should go now,’ I said.
She looked awkward. ‘You know, I’m sorry…’
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘It’s just that there are things…’
‘Absolutely,’ I said.
‘You’ve got my number?’
‘Yes.’
‘If there’s anything at all I can do…’
‘You’ve done a lot already,’ I said.
‘I’m sure Charlie will…’ Alix began, and stopped, because what could she possibly be sure about? What possible comfort could she offer? She gave a helpless shrug and handed over my barely charged phone.
‘Can I borrow the charger?’ I asked.
‘All right.’
She passed it out of the window, then turned and drove away. I watched the car dwindle, then disappear.
I walked across to Mahoney with the phone and the charger and asked him to plug it in for me. He asked if I would like to sit in his car, to keep out of the cold, but I thanked him and said I preferred to stay outside. I turned my back on him and stared at the empty road. Out of a distant past came a fragment of poetry I hadn’t known I remembered, and I hung on to it and recited it in my head, over and over: ‘Build me a willow cabin at thy gate, and call upon my soul within the house…’ I tried to concentrate on the syllables. ‘Let the babbling gossips of the air cry out.’ Inky fingers and the sun shining in thick, dissolving shafts through the windows. Surely they must come now. Surely. I walked back and forth, back and forth. The cold burned in my eyes, the horizon wavered and warped in the winter light. The sun was dipping towards the sea on its shallow arc. The waters rose and swelled as I watched, beads of spray riffling off the grey surface.
Like a dot, a car appeared, driving towards us on the road from the mainland. I held my breath as it came closer. It wasn’t a marked police car. There were no flashing blue lights or sirens. And now I could make out two people inside it.
It pulled up behind Mahoney’s. He stood up awkwardly, blowing on his fingers to warm them. A youngish woman and an older man got out and I watched them intently: these were the people who were supposed to find Charlie. The man was tall and stringy. He had a balding, shiny head and a neat grey beard thickly fringing his chin, so that for a moment his head looked upside-down.
‘Ms Landry?’ he said, as he came towards me, holding out his hand and giving me a firmly vigorous shake. Grey eyes, with deep wrinkles radiating out from them as if he’d smiled a lot through his life; corrugated wrinkles on his high forehead, as if he’d frowned a lot; brackets round his mouth that gave him a lugubrious air. But his lived-in, furrowed face gave me a feeling of hope.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Nina Landry. My daughter –’
‘I’m Detective Inspector Hammill. This is Detective Constable Andrea Beck.’
The woman was shorter than me, and boxy. She had thick, light-brown hair in a high ponytail, with a fringe that fell below her eyebrows, making her blink continuously, which irritated me. She, too, shook my hand, smiling sympathetically at me as she pressed my fingers.
‘Thank God you’re here,’ I said, pulling away my hand and stepping back. ‘Something terrible’s happened to my daughter.’
‘In a minute a constable will arrive to secure the site,’ said DI Hammill. ‘Then we will go with you to the police station and you can tell us everything you know.’
‘I’ve told everything already. Everything. Twice. It’s all written down. But that’s her bike over there. Look. Lying there with the newspapers. She’s in danger and you’ve got to find her now. What about sniffer dogs or helicopters or something? Not just more words, for Christ’s sake.’
‘We’re here to help, Ms Landry. I know how very anxious you must be. Here’s Constable Fenton now.’
Obviously there was a proper way to do everything; there were rules and appropriate procedures. The detective inspector talked to Mahoney and the detective constable talked to the constable, who had cropped hair and a blunt face and looked hardly older than Charlie. They walked over to the bike and studied it. And I stamped my feet and rubbed my hands together and damped down the great howl rising in my chest.
‘Right, Ms Landry. Forensics will be arriving in a few minutes, but Kevin’s staying here to wait for them and we’ll go to the station now. You haven’t got your car with you, have you?’
‘My car? No. It’s –’ What did it matter where it was? ‘I came with a friend who’s gone home.’
DC Beck drove slowly and blinkingly, as if minding the speed limits. DI Hammill sat beside her, not speaking but frowning in deep thought. Every so often he tapped a rhythm on his knee with his large, bony fingers. I hunched forward in my seat, eyes flickering over the landscape.
‘Will you send lots of people out looking?’ I asked, at one point. I was thinking of those pictures seen on television documentaries, police in a long line, each one at arm’s length from the next, heads down, inching carefully forward, searching for clues.
‘Well, now, Ms Landry, or can I call you Nina? Nina, first we have to assess –’ began DC Beck.
‘Assess? Assess? What do you mean “assess”? What’s there to assess? Don’t you get it? You don’t need to assess anything, you need to do something. Charlie’s disappeared. She’s not run away, she’s not at a friend’s house, she’s not in a hospital. Her bike’s lying in a field half-way along her newspaper route. We were supposed to be going on holiday today, do you hear me? She was excited. She arranged a birthday party for me. Assess?’
DC Beck slid a worried glance to DI Hammill, who continued to stare imperturbably out of the window. ‘Nina…’ she began.
‘Don’t speak to me like a child. I know my daughter and I know something terrible is happening to her right now. Now. At this very minute – while you’re talking about assessing the situation and minding the speed limits and the ruts in the road.’
‘First of all, we need to have all the information that will enable us to…’ She was speaking as if by rote and I sensed she was waiting for her boss’s approval. He, however, remained silent.
‘I know something else too. I’ve read enough newspapers and I’ve watched enough television. It’s the first few minutes that count, isn’t it?’
‘Every situation is different. Your daughter isn’t a young child.’
‘I’m right, aren’t I? If you don’t find the missing person quickly then the chances of a favourable outcome decrease dramatically, don’t they?’
‘Yes, they do,’ said DI Hammill, suddenly.
‘Thank you.’
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‘We’ll do everything we can to find Charlie,’ he said. ‘First, we have to ask for your help. All right?’
‘All right. Just get her to drive a bit faster, will you?’
At the station, I was shown into the room I’d been in with Mahoney before. The same tinsel, the same smiling photo of him and his wife, of his teenage daughter who was the same age as my teenage daughter. But on the desk there was another photograph as well: the one I’d given him earlier, of Charlie and Jackson standing together and smiling. I stared at it for a few seconds, then turned away.
It was stale and warm in the room, and my numbed hands started to throb as the feeling returned to them. DI Hammill asked me questions, and DC Beck took notes, and sometimes asked me to repeat or clarify what I’d said. They were insistent on exact times. Mahoney sat at the side of the desk in a chair that was too small for him. Perspiration ran down his face. I could hear the scratch of the pen on paper, the rustle as the pages were turned over, the hum of the radiator and, outside, the creak of the trees.
I had said these words too many times before. They were starting to sound unreal, with the tinny resonance of a performance. I was an actor repeating lines, listening to my voice as I spoke, noting the effect of my words on the faces opposite me. Even my anguish and dread were second-hand emotions. I knew that I was feeling them but could no longer feel that I was feeling them. The events of the day had become a story I was telling to a captive audience: the empty house, the untidy room, the surprise party, the missing belongings, the sleepover that had sent Charlie stumbling, wretchedly hung-over, out of the house of her so-called friend to do her paper round, the stranded bike, the way the times didn’t add up, yet couldn’t be argued with. I spoke quickly, clearly, and I watched them as I did so, and I thought I could see on their impassive faces what they were really thinking.
I described everything: not just the chronology of the day, but the context surrounding it. I knew everything they wanted to ask me before they framed the questions. I told them about Charlie’s father, about my affair with Christian and Charlie’s initial disapproval of it, about her hard time at school. I described my relationship with my daughter as honestly as I could. I heard myself say that my daughter was recalcitrant, volatile, emotional, romantic and intense. I saw the way they exchanged glances when I told them about Jay, about Rory. I wanted to make them realize this story was different from all the other stories like it that they must have heard in their jobs.
