Emily shot her stepdaughter a vicious look. I leapt in, desperate to save Chloe from Emily’s wrath. “It’s no secret, Emily, really. Each day after school, Chloe simply takes over with Daisy for an hour so I can have a walk on the beach. It keeps me sane! You know it’s pretty full-on all day long with a child, and it just gives me a little break before I come back to start on supper.”
I realized my mistake before Emily even replied.
“Gave,” she says. Her eyes are unfocused. “Not gives. It gave you a little break. Past tense. Daisy’s not here anymore, is she? No need for you to take a little break anymore, is there?” And, with that, she shoved back her chair and took herself to bed.
* * *
This morning she remains in bed, even after DCI Jacobs phones to say she’d like to pop around with an update. Only when the doorbell rings does she come to the top of the stairs, making her way down in her dressing gown, her face slack with a hangover. I’ve never seen her look so dreadful.
DCI Jacobs accepts a cup of coffee and asks us where Chloe is as we pull out chairs and gather around the dining room table.
“She’s upstairs,” James says, glancing at the clock in the kitchen. It’s only just after nine; Chloe always sleeps in on a Saturday.
“OK, well, it’s probably best if you hear this first, as it concerns Max Fuller, and I’m sure Chloe will find it upsetting.”
Emily and James put down their mugs, and lean in to the table in a mirror of concern.
“While Max could provide alibis for New Year’s Eve, the most concrete one was from Chloe, and because they’ve been in a relationship together we have to treat her word with a certain degree of caution. We’ve since spoken to a number of young people who were also at the party they attended, and several have said that Chloe and Max couldn’t be accounted for for the entire evening. There was at least an hour—maybe two—when they weren’t accounted for at all.”
The color has drained from James’s face. “You can’t think . . . ,” he starts, but his mouth seems to run out of strength.
“I’m not suggesting Chloe had anything to do with Daisy’s disappearance, but we have to cover everything. You understand? So, with this in mind, we decided to take a closer look at Max Fuller, and we got a warrant to search his vehicle, his home having turned up nothing.”
Emily is rapping her knuckles against the tabletop, signaling her impatience; she’s unaware she’s even doing it. “And?”
“And we uncovered a number of things that we’d like you to look at, to see if you recognize them.”
My heart lurches—I’ve seen these scenes in television dramas, where the police pull out a child’s mitten or a significant toy, and they lay it down before the parents, and it can only mean one thing—
“Jess, are you all right?” DCI Jacobs is looking straight at me, and I realize I’m clutching my shirt front, barely breathing.
I exhale, and nod for her to continue, and she places four transparent evidence bags on the table. The first contains a House of Fraser store card—with Emily’s name printed on the front. The remaining bags contain items James and Emily confirm as belonging to them: an ornate silver cigarette lighter, a mobile phone, and a gold necklace. All items that hadn’t even been missed, the phone being broken and long since replaced, the store card rarely used, and the Victorian lighter small enough for its absence to go unnoticed. The gold necklace isn’t theirs. James’s expression has shifted from concern to silent fury, the muscles in the side of his jaw working mechanically as he stares at the objects, digesting what it might mean.
None of us hears Chloe descending the stairs, and she walks in just as DCI Jacobs is telling us that they’ve taken Max back to the station for further interviewing.
“Of course, he could have stolen these items when he was here with Chloe—but the fact that he was with her when she used the spare key means that he knew where it was kept and he could have had access to your home without her. We’re now officially treating Max Fuller as a suspect.”
“Max?” Chloe asks, her face breaking into despair. She looks so young and fragile, and I can’t bear to see her so broken.
I go to her, wrap my arms tightly about her, desperate to take away her pain. As I hold her, I am shocked by the way Emily’s watching face is shifting, and I think, She hates me, she really hates me, and then calmly she turns back to DCI Jacobs and says, “Chloe’s fifteen, you know? And he’s nineteen—Max Fuller?”
I feel Chloe gasp, and she pulls free to face Emily, to face James. “What do you mean?” she says through halting breaths.
“I want him charged with statutory rape,” Emily continues, and it’s clear that as far as she’s concerned, Chloe might be too young to consent, but she’s certainly old enough to experience her cruelty. I recognize this cruelty in Emily; I’ve been on the receiving end of it before.
* * *
When I was eighteen, when a full year had passed, I wrote home, addressing my letter to Emily—my first contact since that day we parted at the train station. “I’ll write,” I had said at the time, but she had been adamant we should leave it a while, let the dust settle; and bowed of spirit, and turned inward with remorse, I had agreed.
That first letter of mine was written while sitting cross-legged at a coffee table in a beachside bar in Thailand, where I had come to pause after traveling around Australia for six months and getting swept up with the onward travel plans of a trio of fellow travelers I’d met in a hostel in Cairns. I had never been one for groups, so it had been strange for me to attach myself to these other women, but I think there was something we recognized in each other that was reassuring, an unspoken kind of solitary support. Our ages varied, me being the youngest, Sandy the eldest at thirty-two, and Britta and Angela somewhere in their mid-twenties, and the thing we most clearly had in common was the fact that we were traveling alone, none of us in contact with family at home.
On my first night at the hostel, just hours after first chatting with them in the communal kitchen, we had headed off to the Scratch Bar together and bonded over a shared bottle of tequila and a bowl of tortilla chips, sharing stories of home and history, and by the end of the night making plans to journey onward to Bangkok together, once we’d all managed to earn our airfare. It’s like that when you travel: somehow the usual conventions don’t apply with new people, if you encounter others you connect with. You’re lonely, I guess, and when you find these people, you hang on to them, open yourself up to them, and ultimately let them go again with just as much ease. That evening we learned that Sandy had been married and separated, and that she had left a two-year-old child behind in New Zealand because, in her words, she was “no kind of a mother.” Britta confessed that at home in Sweden she had been indulged by overbearing parents and was running away from their limitless expectations of her, and instead of investing in an education, she was blowing her grandparents’ trust fund on flights and adventure. Angela spoke curtly of a childhood of abuse and neglect in rural Aberdeenshire, going into little enough detail to suggest she was running from the horrors of her past, hopeful of a future on the farthest side of the world. Me? I told them my truth, the truth as I believed it to be then: I had betrayed my sister; I’d broken my parents’ hearts; I didn’t know who I was, or what I was, or where I belonged in the world. We were all four of us seekers, and we liked each other, and as easily as that, we agreed that would follow the next leg of our escape route together and seek out the paradise beaches of Thailand.
By the time we reached Krabi two months later, such effortlessness had developed between us that we behaved more like siblings than recent acquaintances, and when I look back now, I realize that, with the exception of my sister, Emily, I had never before felt such kinship with other human beings. At the Tew Lay bar, a wooden shack set up on stilts overlooking the glistening waters of Krabi beach, I told them how much I yearned to hear news of my family, and how sorry I was about the way things had ended with them. Sandy persuaded me to writ
e. She was working behind the bar there, and she brought to my table paper, pen, a bowl of floating candles, and a bottle of iced lager with a lime slice pushed into the neck. I can see and feel that moment even now: the dark humidity of the Thai night, the moonlight shifting across the lilting water, the smell of candle wax, and the industrious percussion of cooking and chopping drifting in from the kitchen next door. The place itself was half full, the atmosphere relaxed, and Britta and Angela had taken themselves to the bar, where they chatted with Sandy, giving me space to think, to write. To hope.
“Now you just have to wait for a reply,” Britta encouraged me as I handed over my letter at the post office in Utarakit Road. “They’re your family. Of course they’ll be glad to hear from you.”
In the weeks that passed, we all found casual jobs in local restaurants and bars, combining long hours of work with long hours of play, either whiling away the evenings at Tew Lay, or sunbathing and snorkeling in the clear blue waters of Railay beach. When Emily’s reply arrived some four weeks later, it quite took me by surprise, and I barely had the courage to open the letter myself. It was Sandy who tore open the envelope in the end, passing me the folded letter across a table laden with pad Thai and empty beer bottles.
The reply was short, the contents delivered like a sharp blow to the sternum. My father was dead—the funeral had already passed—and my mother was still not ready to see me. Just leave it a bit longer, Jess, Emily’s letter told me. Let her get over Dad first. She’s had a terrible shock, and she doesn’t need you adding to it. There was no warmth, no love, and, in those few lines, no words of encouragement to hasten me home.
* * *
I wake in the night, my skin drenched with the sweat of nightmares, tangled dreams of Thailand and home and Emily and James and Daisy, all mixed up to set my heart racing in panic as sleep slips away. The moonlight beyond my window has crept in through a sliver in the curtains, and it slashes across my torso, cutting me in two where I have kicked the bedclothes clear. I’m on the cusp of grasping something, some kind of knowledge, and at first, I think it must have to do with Chloe, so unsettled am I by the news that Max Fuller is now a suspect. But I realize I’m wrong when it comes to me sharply: a clear memory of New Year’s Eve, which causes me to question everything I thought I knew about that night. Emily—and James—told the police that they had arrived home together at 2:00 a.m. that night, when they found me on the floor of the kitchen. But I can see that moment now, as clearly as if I am reliving it, and I know it was only Emily who found me. There’s the sensation of her hand against my cheek, her shaking me, repeating my name over and over—and then silence, before the terror of her screaming from the landing above—God, the sound of her screaming. But there was no James. Can that be right? I lay there on the kitchen floor, in much the same position as I lie here now—and I know I’d had one of my episodes, as my consciousness desperately clawed its way back up to the surface—and I heard the sound of my sister talking urgently on the phone, and felt her shaking me again, and shouting at me to wake up and tell her what happened—and then there was James coming in through the front door, and the distant chugging sound of a taxi turning on the gravel to drive away. Now I recall his voice, his distress, the rasp of his shoes against the floor tiles as he tried to revive me, before everything shifted again and the police were at the door and the house was alive with voices and light and sound.
Emily and James didn’t come home together that night. So why did they lie about it?
14
Emily
Back in the early days, Emily had trusted James completely. Had she been right to? she wonders now. She had only been twenty-two; ten years younger than him, and she had wanted to save him. She’d wanted to be saved. Was it all a mistake? Was it all a big, nasty mistake? She stares at her ghostly reflection in the dressing table mirror, willing herself to pick up the hairbrush, to get dressed, to pull herself together. Beyond her bedroom door, the phone rings again. It’s Sunday morning, for God’s sake. The Sabbath, the day of rest—is nothing sacred?
“Ha!” she laughs, a hard plosive sound as she hears her mother in that last sentence. Since when did Emily care about “the Sabbath”? She draws the brush through her hair, scraping it back into a tight, neat ponytail, and reaches for the jeans and sweatshirt that lie in a heap on the floor where she dropped them yesterday. She’s done with vanity; she doesn’t have the strength for it anymore. What use are manicured nails and waxed legs when all she wants to do is curl up into a ball and disappear from the world?
Taking a deep breath, she dresses, slips her feet into her slippers and opens the bedroom door to head downstairs where the rest of the family will be having breakfast. This last thought—the rest of the family—comes close to flooring her, and she stops dead on the landing, pausing to gaze at the black-and-white photograph of Daisy, the one James took of her on her first birthday in November, in which she’s sitting up in her high chair, a wonky party hat balanced on her downy head. Her hands are held up, chubby fingers splayed, and her face is full of delight, her dark eyes alive with laughter. Behind James and the camera, Emily was waving Daisy’s toy elephant, making her smile for the perfect picture.
The rest of the family. If Daisy doesn’t return, she knows, there will be no family. Not in the way it should be. It will be broken forever.
“Is that you, Ems?” she hears Jess, calling up to her.
Emily swallows her thoughts away and descends the stairs, making her way into the kitchen, where James and Jess are cooking breakfast together. Chloe is in the dining room, silently laying the table, her phone playing a favorite track from its position on the sideboard. It’s as though nothing has happened, as though everything is just the same as before. This seems impossible to Emily, obscene. Only last night, they’d all sat around this table—she and James, along with Jess and DCI Jacobs—interrogating Chloe yet again, James’s voice soft and coaxing, Emily’s fury rising so violently that at one point DC Cherry had offered to escort her from the room.
“Do you want to help me make another cuppa, Mrs. King?” he’d asked her, and she hadn’t even answered, pointedly ignoring the fact that he’d spoken.
Chloe had denied it all at first, until finally she’d admitted, yes, she and Max had left the party for a couple of hours, but they’d only gone to the pier at Yarmouth, where they’d sat together on a bench overlooking the water, just the two of them, and had a few drinks.
“Yarmouth is only a short distance down the road,” DCI Jacobs had said, direct as ever. “You could easily have come back home, taken Daisy, and returned to the party without anyone there really noticing you’d been.”
“We didn’t!” Chloe had cried out, and she was a mess, a sobbing, sniveling mess, and Emily didn’t believe her for a moment.
Eventually, the inspector left, assuring the family that they would be following up Max’s version of events, along with a check of all the CCTV cameras in the radius surrounding Yarmouth, their home, and the party at Freshwater. She or DC Cherry would be back in touch in the morning with an update.
“Was that the police?” Emily demands of Jess, flicking her hand toward the phone, and even she is surprised at the brusque tone of her voice.
“No,” Jess replies, trying not to scowl in response. “It was just Sammie. I told her you’d call back when you were up to it.”
“Up to it?”
Jess looks apologetic. “I mean ‘up.’ I meant you’d phone back when you were up.”
Emily pours herself a coffee. She’s sick of these sympathy calls. Marcus had phoned last night, wanting to speak to her, but she’d told James she didn’t want to talk. She didn’t care if he was James’s best friend, if he was only trying to show support, she couldn’t stand to go over it all again. If it hadn’t been for Marcus’s party that night, they would have been here, and Daisy wouldn’t be missing now. Let James fill him in on it all.
“Well, anyway, I’m not phoning her back. We barely exchanged two
words at the funeral. Why would I want to speak to her now? She probably just wants all the juicy gossip, like everyone else.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” Jess says, tilting her head in a pose of compassion. “People just want to see how you are—to let you know they’re thinking of you. Everyone’s shocked, you know, Ems? But I’ll field the calls, don’t worry.”
Emily can’t look at her sister. She knows that Jess is saying only kind things, but her presence is a constant reminder of everything she has lost. She’s robbed Emily of so much, of so many things. Jess was the last person to see Daisy—the last person Daisy saw. That should have been Emily, her mother, shouldn’t it? Jess was the last to kiss Daisy, to tuck her into her own bed. Jess’s was the last voice to say night-night; Jess’s were the last hands to smooth Daisy’s sleeping head. Those rights belong to a mother, surely? Not an aunt she’s only known for five minutes—a drunk one at that.
“You were pissed on New Year’s Eve,” Emily snaps, stopping in the doorway to turn as she says it. “I could smell it on your breath.”
Jess’s mouth drops open. “No, I wasn’t.”
“Your fainting thing was always worse if you’d had a few drinks. I remember, from when we were younger. The doctors told you that you shouldn’t drink too much—that it did something to your capillaries—made your episodes more likely.” Emily surprises herself with how much of this she remembers. But then it was such a major factor in their life, how could she forget?
“Yes, that’s right . . .” Jess stammers. “But I wasn’t pissed, as you put it.”
“You reeked of it. Stale booze.”
Jess looks sheepishly at James, and she seems ridiculous, standing there with a spatula in one hand, an unbroken egg in the other. “I had one drink,” she says. “A glass of prosecco at the very start of the evening.”
James nods. “It’s true—I poured it for her,” he says, as if that makes it any better.
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