The Missing

by Jane Casey

  ‘Andy,’ Vickers said, with a nod in Blake’s direction, ‘will be having a word with interested parties in due course. We can’t go waking them up in the middle of the night without any evidence, but it’s worth a chat, don’t you think?’

  I could see how it fitted together neatly, but I was still sceptical. I would never, ever believe that Geoff was capable of abusing a child, and not just because he had been so single-minded about pursuing me. It just didn’t fit in with what I knew of him, his enthusiastic interest in women, not girls. I found it hard to conceive that he could have abused her and it was impossible to accept that he might have killed her. Then again, I had seen him agitated a few hours before, and I couldn’t shake the doubt that made me feel. I didn’t know for certain what Geoff was capable of. I had to assume that he was guilty of something, or else why would he have ended up getting his head bashed in?

  I was also feeling guilty on my own account. I suspected that Vickers would have liked to know about another violent incident, the attack on me. I didn’t have his faith in the power of coincidence, but it would be another part of the picture he was creating. But as I opened my mouth to tell him about it, the words died unspoken. First and foremost, my reasons for not reporting it were still valid. Secondly, he might not understand those reasons. And thirdly, I still didn’t think it was relevant. If I had been right all along and Geoff was the one who attacked me, well, he was now well and truly out of the picture. I wouldn’t need to worry about him while he was in hospital.

  But the main reason why I didn’t say anything to Vickers was more fundamental: I didn’t trust him. And I was pretty sure that he didn’t trust me. Whether it was that he was picking up on the confusion I was feeling about Geoff, or whether he had ideas of his own, there was, for the first time, an edge in what he was saying to me. And with that in mind, it behoved me to be wary. With an effort I dragged myself back to the present, to the reality of cold feet and a terrible urge to yawn, and prepared to match wits with the policeman.

  Vickers had wound down to silence, but now he turned to me again with a gleam in his shrewd eyes. ‘If you knew anything that might be relevant, given what I’ve been saying – if you knew there were connections that I should know about, is what I mean – you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Well, you’re leaving out the obvious one,’ I said stiffly, knowing that Vickers had nudged me in this direction, knowing that to avoid mentioning it would arouse more suspicion than it would allay. ‘I knew Jenny too. I taught her. I found her body. And all of this –’ I waved towards the car, not wanting to think about what it signified. ‘– has happened right on my doorstep. So I’m right in the middle of your coincidences, wouldn’t you say?’

  Vickers smiled thinly and I saw with sadness that I had been right to be suspicious. But I liked you … I gathered together all of the logic I could muster. ‘However, I think there’s a flaw in your reasoning.’

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘This has nothing to do with me. I don’t know anything about what happened to either of them.’ There was a thin, thready quality to my voice that spoke of exhaustion. ‘Sometimes coincidences are just that. Why does there have to be a connection between the two?’ Or even three? More than ever, I was sure I had been right not to give Vickers that little piece of ammunition.

  ‘There doesn’t have to be a connection, but for now I’m going to assume there is. Just because you aren’t willing or able to see it doesn’t mean you don’t know something that would be of interest to me. Two crimes like this – two violent assaults – and of course I’m going to see a link.’

  ‘I think you’re looking for patterns that don’t exist because you don’t have the first idea what happened to Jenny. Add that into your equation.’

  ‘We have various lines of enquiry. We’re not at liberty to discuss them with members of the public at present, but this is an active investigation.’

  ‘Well, that’s not what it sounds like,’ I said waspishly. ‘It sounds like you’ve got no ideas and no proof, and you’re trying to make this fit some hypothesis that you’ve been working on since Jenny’s body was discovered. I know what you police do. If you don’t have evidence, you start getting creative.’ The face of my poor father, interviewed time and time again, came into my head. The cloud of suspicion that had surrounded our family, that could have been dispelled by the investigating officer if he had only cared to. I spoke again, my voice low and passionate. ‘You can forget about me implicating myself. I’m not involved in this, and I don’t know why circumstances are conspiring to make you think that I am. All I know is that I’ve done my best to cooperate from the start. I don’t know why this has happened to Geoff, or why Jenny was murdered, and if I did I would have told you long ago.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Vickers said, his eyes cold. ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Are you finished with me?’

  ‘For now. But you can expect us to be in touch.’ Vickers started to stroll towards Blake’s car. ‘Don’t go on any long holidays, OK?’

  I stalked back to the house. In the hall mirror, my eyes were bright with anger and my hair was wild. My lips were compressed into a hard line, and it was with an effort that I relaxed them. I knew Vickers had intended to rattle me, and it had worked. But I also felt that I didn’t know anything that could be of use to him. The mugging was a red herring, but I couldn’t tell him about it now – I’d had every opportunity to mention it, after all. So now I was hiding something from the police, feeling guilty about it, and looking guilty too. If I wasn’t careful, this was all going to go very wrong indeed.

  The one thing that I didn’t want to think about was Geoff, but as soon as I acknowledged that to myself, I couldn’t think about anything else. I checked the clock in the kitchen – almost five – and gave up on the idea of going back to bed. As I made a mug of tea, I slowly worked through the facts one by one. Geoff was in hospital. That was bad. Very bad. He had head injuries. My stomach squeezed at the thought. He could die. He could survive, but barely. He could be permanently compromised. He could recover fully. I wanted to believe that the last outcome was the most likely, but I just didn’t know. Blake and Vickers had looked grim when they talked about him. I stirred the milk in, no longer sure that I wanted to drink the tea but committed to making it. Were they trying to make me feel guilty so I would tell them everything I knew?

  I sat down at the kitchen table and watched the steam curling up from the mug. The ironic thing was, in spite of my shouting at Vickers, I was inclined to agree with him. I did feel guilty. If I had just been a bit nicer to Geoff – if I had acted on the feeling that someone was watching me – if I had got them to investigate who attacked me – then everything might have been different. Although I hadn’t tried to put myself there, somehow I was at the centre of everything. It would have been nice to understand why.

  1993

  Ten months missing

  A blackbird is digging in the lawn on a sunny evening in April. I sit on the doorstep and wriggle my toes inside my shoes. The rules are very clear: I have permission to sit there, but not to leave the front garden. If anyone speaks to me, I am to go indoors and call for Mum. Warned away from people, I have become very shy.

  The blackbird is beautiful, a glossy bird with round, amber-red eyes that stare at me unblinkingly as he bounces around the lawn, working at the grass to pull up clumps of moss. He is building a nest in the holly bush next door, hauling as much as he can carry to where his brown-feathered mate is organising the construction. She keeps up a steady stream of encouraging song. I am shading my eyes, trying to see her in the branches, when a voice says hello. The blackbird shoots up from the lawn in a whirr of startled wings. I jump to my feet, on the point of running indoors, but the man standing at the end of the drive looks friendly. He’s holding a dog on a lead, a red setter, and the dog is prancing about excitedly, tail wagging.

  ‘Nice evening, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, almost w
ithout making a sound.

  ‘Is this your house?’

  I nod.

  ‘We’ve just moved in down the road. Number seventeen.’ He nods towards it. ‘I’ve got a little girl around your age – Emma. She’s nine. How old are you?’

  ‘I’m nine too,’ I say.

  ‘Great. Well, maybe you can come around and play with her sometime. She’s looking for a new friend.’

  I nod, beaming. A new friend. Already I am imagining a girl as dark as I am fair, a girl who isn’t afraid of heights or spiders, a girl who likes animal stories and ballet and dressing up in old clothes to act out scenes from books.

  Behind me, the front door opens so violently that it crashes back against the wall inside the house.

  ‘Get out of here!’ My mother’s face is contorted, almost unrecognisable. ‘Leave my daughter alone!’

  The man takes a step back, pulling the dog behind him, stiff with shock. ‘I’m sorry – I – I should have thought. It’s just – we’ve just moved in down the street and—’

  ‘He has a daughter,’ I say to Mum, wanting her to understand, wanting her to stop looking at him like that.

  ‘Don’t you teach her not to talk to strangers? Don’t you care about her safety?’ Her voice is too loud.

  The man apologises quickly and walks away. He doesn’t say goodbye. I hope that he will come back with his daughter, that we can still be friends once I’ve explained about my mother and Charlie and the rule.

  Mum waits until the man is out of sight, then grabs my arm, hard. ‘Go inside and go to your room! I told you not to talk to anyone.’

  ‘But—’ I begin, anxious to defend myself.

  ‘Inside!’ She pulls me through the door and flings me towards the stairs, letting go of my arm when I am off balance so I fall, knocking my head against the banister. I begin to cry, wailing for my father, for my mother, for comfort of some kind.

  Mum is standing with her back to the front door, leaning against it with her hands to her mouth. Her eyes are round and I can see her skirt vibrating as she shakes. There’s a movement to my left. My father is standing in the living-room doorway, eyes not on me but on Mum. I stop screaming, but keep up a steady whimpering to remind Dad that I am there, on the floor, hurt.

  ‘Laura,’ he says, in a voice that doesn’t sound like his, ‘this can’t go on. You are hurting people. Hurting Sarah. You’ve got to stop.’

  Mum slides down the door, crumpling into a ball, shoulders shaking. She whispers, so softly I can hardly hear her, ‘I can’t …’

  Dad raises his hands to grip his head. ‘This can’t go on,’ he says again. ‘I can’t live like this.’ Then he turns around and slams the living-room door behind him, walking away from both of us.

  I pick myself up and go upstairs, leaving Mum in the hall. I go to my parents’ bedroom, where my face is red and distraught in the mirror. My eyes are big, glazed with tears. There is a bump already, swelling above my right eye, and five red marks ring my arm, topped with five scarlet half-moons where my mother’s nails dug into my flesh. Lodged in my throat, all sharp corners, is the knowledge that she doesn’t love me, that I have failed her again. I swallow it down so that it sits, a solid mass, in my stomach. I’m not sure what has happened between my parents, but I know it was my fault. I disobeyed Mum, and let her down. From now on, I’ll be good. I’ll be better than good. I’ll be perfect. And I’ll never disappoint her again.

  Chapter 11

  EVEN THOUGH HOSPITALS never close, it was after eight when I rang St Martin’s, where the police had told me Geoff had been taken. The largest hospital in the area, it had been a Victorian foundation, redeveloped in the best brutalist style during the 1960s. It occupied a vast site near a dual carriageway, with a substantial accident and emergency department and countless sprawling buildings housing specialist units. Geoff would have a chance there, however bad his injuries were. I sat at the kitchen table and watched the hands sweep around the face of the kitchen clock, wanting to call and yet somehow afraid to, in case there was bad news, in case he was gone. It wasn’t hypocrisy to hope that he lived. I’d never wanted Geoff to die, just to leave me alone.

  Whatever the standard of the medical facilities, the switchboard at St Martin’s was far from state-of-the-art. By the time I got through to A&E, I was shaking. A woman with a swooping South African accent told me that yes, Geoff Turnbull was a patient and no, he wasn’t awake yet. She couldn’t tell me anything else about his condition at the moment.

  ‘Oh, please …’ I said, strung out on too much caffeine and tension.

  ‘I can’t because I’ve just come on shift, hey,’ she said, sounding irritated. ‘I’ve told you everything I know myself.’

  ‘OK,’ I said meekly. ‘Can I come and visit him?’

  There was a tiny pause. ‘If you like,’ the voice said, sounding as if that was the most bizarre request she had ever heard. Her accent dragged out the ‘i’ of ‘like’, giving the word a full two syllables of incredulity. If you la-ak.

  I thanked her and hung up, feeling stupidly relieved. As long as Geoff wasn’t dead, there was hope. And going to sit beside his bed, even if he didn’t wake up straightaway, would give me something to do. It might even make me feel less guilty.

  St Martin’s was too far away for me to be able to walk there. Rather than getting a taxi or trying to work out the bus routes, I called Jules. It was quicker. Besides, she owed me. On a few occasions, I had picked her up from nights out that had gone wrong. The least she could do was return the favour.

  I could tell at once that she wasn’t in a good mood as she pulled up outside the house. She didn’t smile as I hurried out to the car. No make-up. Matted hair pulled back in a ponytail. Hoodie and tracksuit bottoms. This was off-duty Jules, straight out of bed.

  ‘I really appreciate this,’ I said, getting into the passenger seat. She drove a Toyota that had seen better days. Boxes of tissues and loose CDs littered the back seat. The felt above her head was streaked with mascara from her habit of putting on her make-up while stopped at traffic lights; the brush always dragged on the ceiling when she lifted the wand away to separate out her lashes with a fingernail. It looked like she’d been squashing spiders up there.

  ‘You’d better appreciate it. I couldn’t believe it when I looked at the time.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, only half meaning it.

  ‘So what time is your appointment, anyway?’

  ‘Er – nine thirty.’ I had told her I had a hospital appointment and my car was in the garage. It had seemed easier than trying to explain why I was going to see Geoff when she knew how I felt about him. At the thought of the conversation that would have ensued, my stress levels had gone up another notch. A lie had seemed like the only viable option. Now that I was with her, though, I found myself wondering if I should confide in Jules. She was my friend, after all. The only trouble was that I couldn’t think where to start. I’d never trusted her enough to tell her the truth about my family – the things that had made me who I was – and now was not the time.

  ‘That car of yours is a heap of shit,’ Jules said, grinding her gears and swearing. ‘You need a new one.’

  I needed the spare keys, but Aunt Lucy hadn’t posted them yet. She had promised me they would be with me by Monday. In the meantime, I presumed my car was still parked near the Shepherds’ house. I didn’t feel like going to check.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ Jules was looking at me with real if belated concern. I realised that I’d been chewing my lip.

  ‘Not really – it’s just a check-up for my back.’

  ‘I had no idea you had back trouble. It’s usually the tall ones, you know? I did notice you were limping a bit when you came out of your house just now. How long has it been bothering you?’

  ‘A while,’ I said vaguely, looking out the window. We weren’t far from the hospital now. Traffic was heavy; people out and about on a bright Saturday morning, heading for the shops. Jules joined the end of a que
ue of cars and checked the clock on the dashboard.

  ‘Loads of time.’

  ‘Er, yes.’

  I didn’t say anything else and Jules flicked the radio on, crooning along to a pop song I didn’t know. ‘Oh, because you lied to me … Don’t try to deny me …’

  Eventually we inched forward far enough so she could edge out of the line of cars and into the dedicated turning lane for the hospital. We swung through the gates and ground to a halt facing a signboard with directions to about twenty departments.

  ‘Which way?’

  I looked blankly at the signs, reading desperately. Accident and Emergency was to the left.

  ‘Left, please.’

  The car didn’t move. ‘Are you sure?’ Jules was frowning. ‘I’d have thought it would be out-patient care.’

  The sign for out-patient care featured an arrow that hooked round like a question mark and looked as if it would take us a long way from where I needed to go.

  ‘Um, no. The specialist I’m seeing has rooms near A&E,’ I said awkwardly. ‘In fact, that’s where I’m supposed to go.’

  ‘Really? That’s so weird. Usually they keep them totally separate, don’t they?’

  I nodded, hoping she would stop asking questions and just drive me there.

  She looked at me and sighed. ‘OK, for you, I’m going to give up the rest of the morning.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll come in with you. You look like hell, Sarah. I don’t know if it’s nerves or what, but you look like you didn’t sleep at all, and you’re so quiet.’ She patted me on the knee. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t mind. I’ll just park the car and we can go in together.’

  ‘No!’ I said, starting to panic. ‘Please, Jules. I just want to go by myself.’

  ‘Sorry for suggesting it. I thought it would help.’ She pulled up at the drop-off point before the ambulance bay, her face thunderous. ‘I suppose you’ll be OK to get home yourself after your consultation.’