Little Sister

by Isabel Ashdown

  “You didn’t write back?” Jacobs asks, ignoring his question.

  “No, and it was the only letter I received, so I thought she’d given up.”

  “You haven’t had any phone contact or spoken to her in any other way?”

  “No!”

  DCI Jacobs turns to Emily. “And you didn’t know about this letter, Mrs. King?”

  “Of course not! Until a few minutes ago, I thought the woman was dead! Of course I don’t know about the bloody letter!” Emily has now moved away from the table, articulating her words in a low, menacing snarl. “Are you telling me that this crazy woman has my daughter? That Avril has Daisy?”

  James is shaking his head, trying to get her to sit, to calm down. “Emily—back up. It can’t be Avril, can it? We haven’t had contact for over a decade, she wouldn’t just . . .” He gnaws on his knuckle, his eyes roaming the tabletop as he tries to make sense of it all. “I’ll get you the letter! There’s an address on it—somewhere in Surrey. I’ll try to find you the letter—I’m not even sure where I put it—and you can speak to her yourselves.” He looks at DCI Jacobs for reinforcement. “Can’t you?”

  DCI Jacobs picks up her mug of tea and takes a sip from it, carefully returning it to the tabletop in front of her. “From what we know, she was in and out of the hospital and independent living for several years after her first stay at St. Justin’s—culminating in a five-year stay in a place called Buddleia Hill when her condition became quite severe. But she was actually signed out altogether a year ago, Mr. King. She’s been living in a small town just outside Croydon since then, and according to her local police force, the neighbors say she hasn’t been seen for over a fortnight. The next-door neighbor said she told her she was taking a holiday somewhere off the south coast, visiting her baby daughter. The officer said he wouldn’t have thought any more of it, but this neighbor was insistent that it didn’t add up—she’s never seen any evidence of a baby in the year she’s known her, and apparently Avril was very vague when the woman asked to see a photo. All she told the neighbor was the baby’s name. Chloe.”

  Emily crumples against the table, her cries pouring out, muffled and keening, incomprehensible. I rush to her side, crouching beside her to cradle her frail body against mine, and we stay like that, her slumped against my chest like a rag doll, my eyes locked on Chloe’s, trying to convey my thoughts to her. We’ll be OK, I’m trying to tell her, we’ll be just fine.

  “Look, it’s important to understand there is absolutely no guarantee that Avril has Daisy, so I don’t want you getting your hopes up just yet. But we will follow it up as a matter of urgency. We’ve already got officers checking her bank accounts to see if there’s been any unusual activity—hotel bookings, large withdrawals, transactions of that kind. We’ve got her car registration details, and we’re checking with the ferry companies to see if a matching vehicle has traveled to the island in recent weeks. And yes, James, can you look for that letter?” DCI Jacobs stands, inviting him to lead the way. She regards each of us in turn, before her voice softens a little. “I know this is alarming for all of you. But the good news is we now have a clear and significant suspect for Daisy’s disappearance. We already have the entire force out there working on tracing Avril King—checking the ferries, the bus companies, the hotels and holiday rentals. This is an island, and there are only so many places a woman and a baby can hide indefinitely. Emily?”

  Raw-faced, Emily looks up at the detective.

  “Trust us, Emily. We’re doing everything we can to find Daisy.”

  As DCI Jacobs leaves the room, my sister turns back to me, with terror in her eyes. “What if she’s killed her, Jess? What if she’s dead? I’d never forgive myself,” she says quietly, before bringing both hands up over her mouth, like the speak-no-evil monkey, and I swear she’s scared of what she might say next.

  3

  Emily

  Emily refuses to be part of the next television appeal. At the press conference, she sits at the side of the room, close to the front, disguised under a heavy coat and hat, and she feels as though she’s watching the whole thing through water. Her rational brain fears that she’s becoming too dependent on the tablets that get her through each day, but the part of her that is still fighting to survive knows that she couldn’t do it without them.

  The conference table is arranged with DCI Jacobs and DC Piper to the left, James and Chloe in the middle, and the chief of police to the right. Jess isn’t here; she’s outside in the car park, waiting with DC Cherry to speed them away as soon as the appeal is over. Thank God for Jess.

  They start with an introduction from the police chief, and Emily is zoned out, not hearing a word he says, not caring, her attention trained on that horrible #FINDDAISY banner—and then she regrets it, regrets not listening to every little detail, so that she will know what she’s dealing with here. So she knows what’s what. When DCI Jacobs begins to speak, Emily is better focused, concentrating hard, straining to take it all in amid the fidgeting, note-taking, photo-snapping background of the hungry press row.

  “What we know about Avril King is that she’s a forty-three-year-old woman, five foot six inches tall, medium build, with dark blond, shoulder-length hair, usually worn up. Given her age, she could be presenting herself to others as Daisy’s mother, or even her grandmother, and if she knows she is being looked for, it’s quite possible she is disguising her appearance in some way. With all these difficult factors in mind, we’re hoping that members of the public will be vigilant in looking out for anyone they feel may fit this profile. Do you know anyone who has recently been visited by a new grandchild or niece, for instance? Is there anyone new in your area, on her own with a child of Daisy’s age? Have you noticed anyone acting suspiciously? We do know that Ms. King traveled over in a silver 2008-reg Renault Scenic and that she arrived on the island twenty-four hours before Daisy’s disappearance on New Year’s Eve. Any help in locating this vehicle could be crucial to our investigation.”

  Behind her is a poster-sized image of Daisy—blown up from the photograph Emily handed the police on the night she was snatched two weeks ago. DCI Jacobs half turns and gestures toward it. “This is Daisy, taken only a few weeks before she disappeared. Details to look out for are her lilac-print sleep suit”—the DI holds up an identical romper—“and her favorite toy, a velvet plush elephant like this one, purchased from Debenhams.” She holds up a toy elephant just like Ellie, but newer, and Emily thinks how ridiculous the inspector looks—a middle-aged woman, grave-faced and composed, brandishing a bean-bottomed elephant with a droopy trunk.

  Farther along, behind the chief of police, there’s another poster. It’s of Avril King—“A,” she thinks bitterly, remembering the simple sign-off at the foot of that letter she’d found in James’s office—but the picture is too out-of-date to be of much use. It’s at least a decade old, and it’s a grainy, unprofessional image, blown up from a group photo taken at the mental health facility she stayed in—long before she’d been moved into the lower-security care home where she resided up until her release last year. These are the details the police have shared with them over the past twenty-four hours. The care provision details of a woman who, up until now, Emily hadn’t thought existed in the world, a woman she had believed to be long dead and buried. God knows, she recognizes the irony of her wish on New Year’s Eve—the thought that James’s first wife would be more tolerable still alive and divorced than dead and sainted. Guilt rises up in her: she could have prevented all this; she knows it. She should have worked out the truth of James’s past earlier, but she never tried to, did she? Even when he was evasive about his first wife, about their home and life together, Emily never pressed him, and she wonders whether deep down she knew he was lying. She didn’t want to know, didn’t want to open up anything that might smudge the unblemished life she was so proud of. In a rare surge of self-awareness, Emily sees herself for the flawed, shallow creature she really is. It’s all her fault. It’s Emily’s
fault that Avril came looking for them, Emily’s fault that Daisy has gone.

  She clenches her fingers into fists and stares ahead.

  Now, it’s James’s turn to talk, and as agreed late last night, sitting around their dining table with the police officers and their media consultant, his appeal is directed at Avril. The experts fear Avril’s confusion is so profound that she believes she has taken Chloe, her baby, and that their best chance of bringing her forward is by showing her Chloe now. Chloe the teenager. What a shock that would be, thinks Emily, and she imagines not seeing Daisy again until she is a fifteen-year-old, makeup-wearing, attitude-filled teenager with views of her own. The thought is appalling.

  James reads from a script, careful to look up between sentences—as coached—to make contact with the camera, ultimately to make a connection with Avril. “Avril, if you’re watching this, I hope that it means you are well, and that you’re caring for Daisy. I’m sure you are, because you were always a good, loving mother to our baby daughter, Chloe. Avril, we don’t harbor any ill feeling toward you. All we care about is having Daisy returned to her family where she belongs—and making sure that you are all right, that you are cared for too.” He pauses, and Emily wonders if this is also scripted, to make him appear more vulnerable, to pull on Avril’s heartstrings, if she has any. He rests his hand over Chloe’s, who sits beside him like an ivory-skinned mannequin. “This is Chloe, your daughter. It’s been nearly fifteen years since you saw her, and we’re hoping that when you bring Daisy home, you’ll be able to see her at last.”

  Chloe doesn’t move, doesn’t react at all. When this line of appeal was put to her last night, she said she didn’t care what they promised Avril, so long as she could bring her baby sister home. “I’d cut off my right hand if it meant we could get Daisy back,” she’d said, and Emily had felt a lurch of self-disgust, because she knew that she couldn’t be certain she would promise as much.

  James turns his face toward Chloe and gives her fingers a squeeze of encouragement. She too looks directly into the camera, but she’s struggling to keep her upset and anger inside, and her words come out robotic and stilted. “Please. Mum.” She says this last word with such weight that it could be construed either as something that means a great deal to her or as something that cost her a great deal to give up. “Please bring my little sister back home. Please, Mum.”

  And that’s it. That’s where they end the appeal, with the word “Mum.” As Emily dashes from the room ahead of the gathered television crews and journalists, she wonders, will she ever get to hear that word spoken to her? Will Daisy ever be old enough to graduate from Mama to Mummy to Mum?

  * * *

  When Chloe was ten, she asked James and Emily about her “real” mother, while traveling in the back seat of the family car as they drove along the old Military Road on a bright August day. Out beyond the tent-festooned fields, the sun shone brightly on a sea dotted with sailing boats. Emily was wearing a new pair of designer sunglasses for the first time, enjoying the Hollywood feel of them, and she had just been silently musing that there was nowhere more idyllic than this island on a summer’s day, nowhere more perfect. It was one of those rare moments in which she felt wonder—and pride—at the faultlessness of her life: she had a handsome husband, a stepdaughter who adored her, a comfortable lifestyle, and the figure of a woman several years younger. What more could she want?

  “I just wondered,” Chloe asked, ever so casually, as the warm breeze whipped through the open windows and snatched up her long, honey-colored hair. “You know my mum? My real mum? Is there a grave we could visit? You know, to put flowers on or something.”

  Emily felt a powerful and unusual twinge of spite toward the girl, for yanking her from the indulgence of those earlier thoughts. She noticed with irritation how James’s grip tightened momentarily on the steering wheel, how he paused before answering, his eyes darting up toward the rearview mirror and back to the road again. Did the mention of Avril still upset him so much all these years later? It was nearly a decade since her death, Emily thought, and he had her now, didn’t he? Wasn’t their relationship, their stability, enough to have got him past it all? “James?” she urged him quietly, wanting to hear his reply.

  “It’s a long way away,” he told Chloe. “Too far to visit very easily.”

  “Do I have any cousins?”

  “No,” James replied.

  “What about photos? Are there any photos of me with my mum before she . . . you know? Before she died?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, love. I’ll have a look when we get back.” James was clearly struggling to keep his voice even, and he kept his eyes fixed ahead, ignoring Emily’s attempts to catch his attention.

  “Do I look like her?” It was as though Chloe had discovered curiosity for the first time; the questions just kept flying out of her. “I mean, I know I look a bit like you, Dad—but my hair’s different isn’t it? I thought if I could see some photos, it would be good. It would be interesting.”

  Where was this all coming from? Emily’s heartbeat quickened, and she wondered why she should feel so panicked by this unexpected interrogation.

  “All right, Chloe! For God’s sake!” Her tone was far harsher than it had sounded in her head—virtually a shout—and she turned to look back between the headrests to see that Chloe looked as though she had been slapped. Emily tried to soften her voice a little, forcing a smile onto her lips. “Stop bombarding your dad when he’s driving—we could crash if he takes his focus off the road. He’ll see if there’s a photo when we get back, won’t you, James?”

  James nodded, frowning hard, and Emily wondered if he was frowning about Chloe’s inquisition or about her raising her voice so severely.

  “Why all the questions, anyway?” Emily asked, attempting to bring serenity back into her tone.

  Chloe shrugged, the firm set of her jaw showing she was still stung. “We’ve been doing family trees at school,” she replied, turning her face away to look out across the horizon. “That’s what I took the photo album in for. Beth said I didn’t look anything like my mum, and everyone agreed. So I told them”—and now, she looked straight back at Emily—“that you’re not really my mum.”

  This time, it was Emily who was stung. Was that the beginning of the end for her and Chloe? she ponders now. Was that the moment their bond began to fray loose?

  4

  Avril

  The coastal cottage is perfect, the end terrace in a row of three, nestled into the hillside overlooking the Needles in a location almost entirely abandoned at this time of year. The other two cottages stand empty, and when we return from our walks, we barely see another soul on the path, save for the occasional walker or cyclist, too busy in their own solitary pursuits to take much notice of an ordinary mother and child on an afternoon stroll. I always smile and say hello, and most often people are friendly and return the greeting as they carry on by. It’s nice; being outside is good for me, and I know I could be happy here. The cottage itself is simple, small, and perfect for the two of us, and even though there are two bedrooms, we’ve chosen to be together in the one at the front, with Chloe sleeping in a cushion-padded drawer I’ve placed between the two single beds that dominate the room. There’s a little kitchen, perfectly adequate for our needs, and a small lounge with an open fire and television, although I’ve draped a throw over that as I know it’s not good for me to spend too long gazing in at the sadness of the wider world. Initially, I booked for a fortnight, and it felt like a stroke of luck when I phoned ahead and the owner agreed to hold the reservation without a bank deposit. He was happy to accept cash on arrival, what with the holiday season being so far away and the cottages standing empty. He’s a quiet sort, lives alone in the farmhouse a mile or so along the coast; he says we won’t see hide nor hair of him, unless we call needing anything. This weather-beaten high point on the island is all but deserted. At nighttime, the wind howls around the building, whistling down the chimney and channeling alo
ng the courtyard that runs the length of the cottages. When the wind drops, the quiet is more eerie still, and I take comfort in the sleeping form of my girl, as I reach down to touch the curled fingers that rest like a delicate stack of slipper limpets on the pillow beside her face.

  How could his mother think I wasn’t fit to look after her? Of course, she never said as much, always made a good show of helping out, of caring, and James would never hear a bad word said about her. And when I really concentrate on those memories of Alicia now, I can’t be sure if I was right or wrong, whether my feelings toward her were fair or clouded by illness. I know I wasn’t always reliable, wasn’t always focused, but that was the medication, not me. And even then, my erratic behavior never impacted on Chloe, not at first anyway. In the beginning it was simple things, like losing my house keys or leaving bags of paid-for shopping on the conveyor belt at the supermarket. I was so tired all the time; those errors were just drifts of concentration, small mistakes. But everyone made so much of them. “Oh goodness, you’ll poison everyone!” I remember Alicia saying to me as she scraped an entire chicken casserole into the kitchen bin before I even had a chance to serve it up to James. Her small hand moved in a brisk, efficient motion, scrape-scrape-scrape into the bin. “You can’t eat that now, dear!” I’d been preparing it—and myself—all afternoon, desperate to make an effort to pull myself together, to show him I was all right. As Alicia lowered the bin lid, I felt foolish to be wearing the dress James had once loved me in, ashamed of the time I had wasted on applying makeup, when all the while the meat was spoiling on the sun-drenched worktop downstairs. James must have seen I was upset, because he had tried to defend me—tried to say it’ll be fine, I’ll eat it—but she wouldn’t let him. “No, James, you really mustn’t risk it. That chicken was out on the side all morning, on a hot day like today! I’ll never forget the time I made the same mistake when I was young. Your poor father, James. He was sick for days.” She turned to me with her gentle blue eyes and said, “You must be exhausted, dear,” and she reached for the mixing bowl and whipped up some omelettes.