Little Sister

by Isabel Ashdown

  “Why is that so important?” I asked her.

  “Because people behave differently when they’ve been drinking,” she replied.

  Not me, I thought, though of course I know that’s not true. Everyone behaves differently when they’re drunk.

  It seems strange to be knocking at the front door now, rather than using my own key, but I’d been taken to the station with nothing more than my coat and gloves, my only thoughts being of Daisy and my growing panic over what might have happened to her. There’s a rushing sound of feet over gravel, and I turn to see half a dozen men and women with raised cameras and notepads coming at us, calling my name. My name. Fear surges up through me, and I want to hammer at the door and scream out to Emily and James, Let me in! Let me in! But instead I freeze, the flat of my hand against the door, staring at it mutely, waiting for what feels like forever.

  “Jess? Give us a picture?” One of the reporters is right up next to me, sweaty-faced and reeking of body odor and snapping a photograph as I bring up a concealing hand a second too late.

  “Jess! Who do you think took Daisy?” They’ve got me surrounded. I’m vaguely aware of DC Piper, who puts himself between us, holding up his palms in a “back off” gesture, trying and failing to shield me from their cameras and questions. “Jess! Is it someone you know? How’s Chloe? How are Emily and James coping? Jess!”

  As the front door is cautiously opened from the inside, DC Piper gives me a light shove in the back, and we stumble over the threshold, shutting the mob outside. But she’s only just gone, I want to scream back at them. How do you people know about it? This thought vanishes in a moment when I see Chloe, standing by the kitchen table, her hand curled beneath her chin, thumb hovering at her lower lip, her face shrouded in pain. When she raises her eyes to meet mine, I rush to her, holding on tight as she weeps against me. James stands at the closed door, talking quietly to DC Piper, and I wonder where Emily is; the house feels so quiet without her in the room. The dread weight of bereavement hangs over the house. There’s a tall, thin man I assume to be another officer on the far side of the kitchen, and he raises a hand to me in polite greeting as he stirs sugar into a cup of coffee and heads out through the back door with a packet of cigarettes.

  “That’s DC Cherry,” James tells me. “Family liaison officer.”

  So he’s the other one, I think, as the shape of him disappears beyond the frosted glass panel. A family liaison officer—until today a term I’d only ever heard used in TV and books—never in real life, never an actual person drinking coffee at your dining room table or smoking cigarettes in your backyard.

  “You poor love,” I whisper, so only Chloe can hear, and I smooth the tangled hair from her wet cheeks and hold her like a child. She stinks of stale booze, and of course I know she hasn’t been with Beth all night; she’s probably not even been to sleep yet. Fifteen, nearly sixteen. So young, but so much the person you’ll always be. So ready to make reckless mistakes for the sake of new experience and adventure. “Have you eaten?” I ask her, still holding on.

  Chloe shakes her head, and when I look beyond her, I see the dark expression on James’s face. He’s destroyed; he’s leaning back against the kitchen worktop, one hand gripping the counter behind him, the other covering his mouth, and tears stream down his cheeks as he watches Chloe wrapped in my embrace. They’re lost without Emily at the center of things, organizing them, sorting everything out, leading the way. Where is she? I wonder, knowing even in this moment that her competitive instinct would begrudge my stepping in to offer comfort in her absence. It’s true it’s not my place, but I can’t let go of Chloe, this girl who needs a mother more today than she ever has in her life. DC Piper is still standing in the doorway, and I turn my head toward him with a nod of thanks that he takes gratefully as his cue to leave. As the door clicks shut behind him, I hang on to Chloe, cradling her head against my shoulder, and silently I watch James until he finally looks up and meets my gaze. “It’s going to be all right, Chloe,” I say, but it’s James I’m looking at, James I’m trying to comfort.

  * * *

  When we were old enough, Mum and Dad bought us guinea pigs, one each. Mine was white and tufty with pink eyes, and Emily’s was a smooth patchwork of brown and tan with jet-black eyes. I decided to call mine Doctor Who, which Emily thought was stupid, and she named hers Taz, which I thought was a good name as he was made up of similar colors to the cartoon Taz.

  It had taken years to convince our parents to let us have any pets, until Emily quite rightly concluded that if we started nagging for a dog, then a cat, eventually they would give in and allow us some smaller pet. We brought them home in the springtime, and at first, we played with them all the time, letting them out of their wooden pen to run about in the open yard, while we raced ahead setting up obstacles and tunnels, luring Doctor Who and Taz through with trails of carrot pieces and kibble. Sometimes we made a competition of it—“Piggy Crufts,” Emily named it—where we would construct two identical courses in which the guinea pigs would race to complete the run in the quickest time. Doctor Who never won; he wasn’t as streamlined as Taz, and while he was just as motivated by food as his slim brother, he liked to take his time over it, nibbling each new discovery with dignified care, while Taz simply stuffed his treats down and raced on. For the Piggy Crufts grand finale, Emily invited all the neighborhood kids along to watch, and by the end of it, Taz had achieved an unblemished hundred-percent win rate. Emily was delighted, swinging her glossy ponytail as she allowed everyone to hold him, pronouncing hers the Champion Guinea Pig. She was always more competitive than I was, and while I really didn’t mind that Doctor Who wasn’t as fast as Taz, her endless bragging that afternoon started to fray my nerves, and more than anything, I felt sorry for Doctor Who.

  Everyone helped themselves to the beakers of orange squash Mum had brought out. I jumped up on the edge of the crumbling rockery and clapped my hands, feeling a flutter of nerves at drawing attention to myself so boldly. The group turned toward me, and for a moment, I was lost for words. “Now it’s time for the beauty contest!” I blurted out. It was as much of a surprise to me as it was to Emily. I guess I just wanted to give Doctor Who a chance at winning something. Emily scowled; this wasn’t part of the plan.

  The dozen or so children all gathered closer, and it was agreed that we should pass the two guinea pigs around the group so they could each take a good look at both contestants before casting their votes. When we were ready, I stood to the left of the hutch with Doctor Who, and Emily stood to the right with Taz. In order to vote, our friends simply had to walk over and stand by the guinea pig they judged to be the cutest.

  Undeterred by my improvisation, and still buzzing from Taz’s recent victory, Emily kissed her guinea pig confidently and cried out, “Cast your votes!”

  Our friends rushed forward, and to my amazement, all but one of them was standing on my side. Next to Emily and Taz was the lone figure of little Sammie Evans, Emily’s most loyal friend, but even she looked as though she might have preferred to be standing with the rest of us. Ben Christie scooped Doctor Who from my hands and held him skyward. “The winner!” he shouted dramatically, and the crowd broke up, the game having come to an end.

  * * *

  The next morning when I went to feed the guinea pigs, I found Doctor Who huddled in the corner of the hutch, his face an indigo mess where he had been trying to lick clean his darkly stained hindquarters. Lying on the floor beside the hutch were two fountain pen cartridges, both of them pierced and entirely emptied of their contents.

  6

  Emily

  Emily lies in the bath, wishing she could disappear into the steam altogether. It’s coming up to forty-eight hours now since Daisy disappeared, and the police don’t seem to be any closer to finding her, to finding out what has happened. She tries not to think about the significance of the passing of time: in the hours that followed the discovery of Daisy’s disappearance, Emily sat at her PC, robotically Goog
ling “missing children” in a bid to find something, anything that might provide clues to bringing her back home. But everything she found seemed to relate to either runaways or parental abductions, and the few statistics relating to unknown kidnappers were chillingly spare. The one message that came through loud and clear was this: the first twenty-four hours were crucial. After the first twenty-four hours, a child’s chance of being found alive plummeted dramatically. But twenty-four hours has been and gone, and now they are approaching forty-eight hours, and the odds are stacked against them. In all that time, Emily has barely slept, apart from these occasional minutes of deep slumber from which she finds herself waking with a start, as she remembers it all again.

  This afternoon, after the doctor had been called out to see her, Jess had persuaded her to take a bath, to brush her teeth and wash her hair and freshen up. “You’ll feel a lot better after a bath,” she’d said gently, sitting across the table from her, trying to coax Emily into making eye contact. But Emily was mesmerized by the glow of Jess’s hair in the window light; the blond locks of her childhood had transformed into darker, sun-kissed waves that rested untidily around her shoulders, unkempt, unadorned. It was this that Emily always envied: her carelessness.

  “Ha!” Emily had retorted, as though it was Jess’s fault she was like this, filthy and near insane with worry. She could see Chloe sitting in the corner seat of the room, her attention fixed resolutely away from the rest of the family, her thumbs scrolling up and down the screen of her smartphone. She’s barely said a word since she heard the news, and Emily wishes she could gather up some feeling of compassion toward the girl, but she can’t, not when all her thoughts must stick to Daisy. “What are we going to do, Dad?” she had heard Chloe whispering to James on the landing late last night. “We can’t just go to bed, can we? Shouldn’t we be doing something? How can we sleep?” Her voice was urgent, childish, and yet in those few words Emily was shamed by her own lack of agency, as she lay in her bed, staring helplessly at the ceiling. When they rose this morning, they had discovered that Chloe had been up all night, launching a #findDaisy campaign on Twitter and Instagram and countless other forums, and while Emily’s immediate emotion had been one of fury at the public intrusion, Jess and James had convinced her it was worth a try. She had no fight in her, and she’d sat as she was instructed and waited for the doctor to arrive.

  Though her body is inert, hands floating loosely in the hot bath water, Emily’s mind jumps from thought to thought, back and forth over the past two days. It tangles and writhes, never ceasing, even through the welcome fog of these tablets.

  “How many of these are you meant to take?” Jess had asked James, scanning the leaflet that came with Dr. Heggarty’s tablets. It seemed strange to Emily how they all carried on like this, with DC Cherry the quiet, gaunt-faced liaison officer constantly there, hearing their every word, their every breath. There was no point in asking James, Emily had wanted to say, bitterly glancing across the room where he stood at the kitchen window, staring out over the wintry yard. This man was barely recognizable, so unlike the confident, lighthearted James that she’d left at the party just days ago, mingling like a pro and topping up the glasses of the good and the beautiful. “Emily, he’s an angel,” Jan had called over to her that night, as she passed him two more bottles of champagne from behind their marble-topped drinks bar. “Marcus has buggered off somewhere, so I’ve commandeered your good man. I adore him!” James had laughed, taking the two bottles in one hand and blowing them each a kiss, one after another.

  In the absence of an answer from James, Jess had continued to read the instructions to the end of the page, before fetching her sister a glass of water and sending her off to the bathroom with a clean towel.

  “Thank you,” Emily had whispered before shutting the door behind her, but she wasn’t sure if Jess had heard her or not. She didn’t even know if she’d spoken it out loud. Thank God she’s here, Emily thinks, smarting with guilt over her earlier ill feeling; who else would talk to James and Chloe otherwise? Who else would make them eat, and ask them if they’re all right, and check if they needed anything? Who else would answer the endlessly ringing phone and chase off the reporters who have started camping out on the street and knocking at the door at all hours? It’s hard enough for Emily to listen to her own thoughts and horrors, without having to live through their tortures too. James is as broken as she is right now, and Emily can find nothing to say to him, nothing of any value. She can gather no sense of feeling for him; for Chloe; for herself even. Eighty percent, she thinks, visualizing the number in her head. That was another of the statistics she uncovered online yesterday. The number of relationships that break down after the loss of a child. Eighty percent.

  Her skin has turned pink, leaving two pale circles where her knees protrude from the hot water. She presses her toes against the hot tap, topping up the bath, sending more steam billowing out into the room. The police said they’d like to do a television appeal tonight, and they want her and James there, to speak to the cameras. To make a statement, an appeal to anyone who might know something. Emily replays these words in her mind. These aren’t the kind of sentences a parent should ever have to hear; they belong in TV dramas or the ten o’clock news—they belong to other people. If she didn’t feel so subdued by medication, Emily knows her heart would be racing now, with the fresh terror those words bring. “Will it make a difference?” she had asked DCI Jacobs. She knows how the public view these appeals; she’s not stupid. How were you meant to conduct yourself in a situation like this? In the face of such horror, how could you gather the strength to address a room full of cameras and journalists, to speak the words aloud, without publicly breaking down? And at the same time, she knows, it is impossible to appear blameless in the absence of such an open display of grief. It’s what the public want to see. They want to measure the parents, assess their emotional responses for authenticity. Every person in every household around the country will be watching them speak, and they’ll be wondering, Are they behind it? Is he guilty? Is she? She’s thought it herself, when watching some poor beggar or other imploring their missing teenager to make contact, to come home, and she realizes now, with shame, that she’s flippantly thought, Well, that’s that, she’s dead for sure.

  Is Daisy dead? She thinks of the photograph the police took away on that first night, the one of her snapped by a pop-up baby photographer in Portsmouth on a Christmas shopping trip last month. It’s this photograph that is now the official image of Daisy, the picture that every news channel and newspaper in the country has featured, heading up the daily news along with its horrible nod to modernity: Chloe’s #findDaisy hashtag. It’s not even the best picture of her, but it’s the clearest, a close-up portrait, well lit, with an ugly mottled backdrop that makes her soft baby form stand out starkly. She’s a little too pale in it, and her smile not quite full, but her blond curls and clear blue eyes are captured exactly. My Daisy, Emily thinks now. My little Daisy. “This is perfect,” DC Piper had said, and he’d smiled at the photo, adding, “She’s a bonny little thing, isn’t she?” Emily stares into the memory of that photograph. Is it conceivable that her beautiful, smiling Daisy is dead?

  “She’s not.” She hears the answer, spoken clearly into the vapor-filled room, and slowly it dawns on her that she said the words. These tablets are strong, she thinks with more clarity; she must be careful when taking them. At the same time, it feels good, the numbness she’s experiencing now, the way in which she can think it all through, dispassionately, rationally. She has a sense of profound understanding tickling beneath the surface of her conscious thoughts, as though she holds the key to Daisy’s disappearance, to her whereabouts, as though the answers lie within her alone. She draws her hands up and over her face, pressing the tips of her fingers into the dark hollows of her eyes, concentrating hard, trying to unravel it all. Her mind rests on James, on the freeze-frame image of him as he entered the house that night to find her stooped over Jess�
��s bloodstained body, screaming at her to talk, to tell her what happened. Already the police were on their way; after charging up the stairs and finding Daisy gone, she had phoned them—it was the first thing she had done. She remembers the emergency operator telling her to slow down and speak more clearly, and when she asked if anyone was hurt, Emily found herself back in the kitchen standing over Jess, looking down at her prone body, at the golden mess of hair fanned out around her side-turned head, and she’d said no. Why had she said no? She focuses hard on that image, trying to get herself back into the moment. She had been used to Jess’s fainting fits, ever since they started in childhood, and she’d been known to have the occasional nosebleed too. But Emily would have thought all that would’ve stopped long ago, that Jess would have grown out of it, so why wouldn’t she have taken this seriously, finding her sister in that state?

  In her mind, she repeats the sequence and tracks back again to that first moment when she walked through the front door. She was completely sober, as she’d offered to drive that night so that James could have a few drinks with Marcus and their various colleagues, but in the event, she’d driven home alone as James had insisted on staying on for a nightcap. So she’d walked in through their front door, surprised not to find Jess curled up on the sofa watching TV in the living room, and while nothing was obviously out of place, she had immediately sensed something wrong, a stillness. And then she had seen her through the open archway to the kitchen: Jess, or at least her legs, stretched out on the hard floor, just visible beyond the island unit that dominates the large room. Throwing down her bag and keys, Emily had rushed to her—yes, that was the first thing she did—and straightaway she’d felt for Jess’s pulse. Thank God, it was there, a strong beat, and she’d shaken her roughly, calling out her name, even slapping her cheeks with a light hand in an attempt to bring her around. And she had come around, with a gasp of shock, but she had looked dazed, and she’d whispered, “Daisy?”—and instantly Emily had smelt alcohol on her breath, and thought, she’s pissed! She had been so angry, she’d shaken her again, furious that she would even contemplate drinking when looking after their child, but Jess had grabbed the sleeve of her coat and tugged her closer, repeating, “Daisy!” with such urgency that it had sent a pinch of cold fear right through her, and Emily had recoiled and rushed for the stairs.