Little Sister

by Isabel Ashdown

  “Emily, we’ve had a witness come forward in Portsmouth—the owner of a hair salon who says she met Avril King around the date she’s thought to have traveled to the island. This woman says she cut Mrs. King’s hair, and she’s now helping us to reconstruct the photographs for circulation tomorrow.”

  “Is she sure it’s her? How can she be certain?” Emily can’t bear the thought of more disappointment. “She must do dozens of haircuts every week.”

  “Well, she says she’s ninety percent certain. Apparently this woman told her she was off to the island to visit her daughter—and it was a particularly memorable haircut because she went in with fairly long hair and had a close crop. Emily, these new pictures could be just the thing we need to jog someone’s memory—and it gives us a firmer time frame for her movements.”

  “OK, so what now?” Emily peers down the stairs to see Jess and James listening in, waiting for her update.

  “We’ll get these new images circulated to the press, and to all the local transport links and business networks overnight, and then we’ll wait and see what follows. Trust me, Emily, no one’s giving up hope just yet.”

  Emily hangs up the receiver and stares at Daisy’s picture on the landing wall, but the dream image obscures it, the image of little Jess trapped behind glass, with no one to help her.

  19

  Avril

  I’ve never really been one for the newspapers. There’s nothing good to be found there, no more than there is on the television news or the radio. It seemed to affect me more than others, to pain me more, seeping into my dreams and anxieties, causing me to wonder if the human race wouldn’t be better off extinct than killing each other like savages. Years ago, I remember telling Dr. Selton how the daily news so often caused me to weep, and he said, quite pragmatically, “Well, I advise you to stop listening to it, then.” But yesterday morning as I was making my way to the Botanic Garden, I stopped off at the little shop in Freshwater to buy some fruit sticks for Chloe, and there he was on the newsstand—James. It was a close-up photograph, and I was surprised by how much older he looked, and how much more serious. He looked angry, and I picked the paper up and stared at it in amazement. And then Chloe reached out her chubby little hand and made grasping movements toward it, and I thought, of course, she recognizes her daddy! How lovely, I thought, knowing she would be able to see him in a few hours, but when I unfolded the bottom half of the paper I saw the words: DAISY’S DAD FEARS “UNSTABLE” EX-WIFE.

  It was too much, and I dropped the paper and left the shop, forgetting to pay for the apple slices gripped in my hand, and I ran with the stroller bumping over pavements and curbs, splashing through puddles and soaking my shoes, back toward the bus stop where I’d just alighted. Daisy? The paper said “Daisy,” as if I don’t know my own daughter’s name! Is it a trick? I felt sick with the fear of it. I stood and stared at the pole-mounted timetable, and I knew I couldn’t go now. I couldn’t meet James now I knew that was what he really thought of me, could I? I felt mortified that I’d been so foolish as to think he’d want me back in his life.

  An elderly man was approaching on the pavement ahead of me, and he smiled gently, and I asked, “What’s in Yarmouth?” and I pointed toward the timetable to explain myself.

  “The ferries, love,” he replied. “What are you after, then?”

  I turned to look at Chloe, who was getting damper by the minute. “A day trip, I suppose.”

  “You wanna go over to Lymington,” he said, “s’lovely in Lymington,” and he carried on up the path, and then the bus to Yarmouth arrived, and I paid the fare, and that was that.

  Last night, we stayed in a nice little B&B looking out over Lymington harbor, and I thought of those early days with James, when we were young and full of hope, when we couldn’t stop looking at each other, couldn’t stop touching each other, perhaps to check it wasn’t a dream, because surely that’s all happiness really is?

  The rain has eased up now, and the quayside is bustling around us as we sit on a weathered old bench near the water’s edge. It must be lunchtime. Does Chloe want feeding? My gaze rests on the horizon, back in the direction of the island, in the direction of James. What is he doing now, what is he thinking? Is he disappointed that I didn’t come? A thought occurs to me: that perhaps he didn’t say those hateful things at all, that the newspeople have twisted it, distorted it to keep us apart. It’s a terrible thought! Perhaps I should return, take the next island-bound ferry and make myself known to him? But I’m so tired, so, so tired and so profoundly sad, more sad than I’ve been in a very long time, and I know I won’t make that journey today.

  Despite the icy, sharp wind, the rhythmic shimmer and furrow of the sea’s surface is soothing, like the mermaid’s song. I look at Chloe, my sleeping water-baby, swaddled beneath her layers, oblivious to the evils of the world, and I feel so very lonely. I consider the idea of Lily, allowing the digits of her phone number to run across my thoughts; perhaps I’ll call her from the B&B and see if I can meet her tomorrow? She’ll help me. Lily will know what to do. And then I think about those newspaper articles, full of their bloodshed and horror, and again I wonder, wouldn’t we all just be better off dead?

  20

  Jess

  There’s been a breakthrough! DC Cherry arrives mid-morning to tell us that the newly circulated photographs have prompted a flurry of fresh sightings, one in particular placing Avril and Daisy together on a regular basis just a few miles along the coast.

  “It was actually one of your local shop owners in Freshwater who gave us our first lead. We went in to follow up after Avril’s call to you was traced back to the telephone booth outside the store.” Cherry is smoking in the back doorway of the kitchen, while I fill the kettle and let Emily and James ask all the questions. “Apparently, Avril has been a regular customer there over the past couple of weeks, but they never suspected her because she didn’t look like the woman in the original photograph.”

  James shakes his head. “Of course she didn’t. That photograph was so out of focus, it could have been anyone.”

  “She seemed completely normal, they said, which is encouraging. And then we got a call from the bus company that runs the service from Alum Bay, telling us that one of the drivers thinks he’s picked her up—her and Daisy—on a number of occasions, which led us to suspect she must be staying at a holiday property in that area. We’ve had the entire team on it since the early hours, phoning around to all the property agents.”

  “And?” Emily asks, taking the coffee mug from me.

  DC Cherry smiles, and I realize I’ve never seen him so animated, never heard him speak with such fervor. Perhaps he’d rather be out there investigating, instead of stuck here with us.

  “You’ve found them?” James gasps.

  “No, no—not yet,” Cherry replies, reverting to his safer expression of seriousness. “But we have found the house. It’s a remote coastguardman’s cottage, tucked away right up near the Needles. DCI Jacobs is over there now with forensics. Apparently, there’s no sign of them in the property itself, but there are signs that they’ve been there recently.”

  “What signs?” Emily demands, fear pulsing in her voice. “What signs?”

  “Nothing alarming, don’t worry. Baby clothes, a makeshift crib, jars of baby food, that kind of thing. And Mrs. King’s personal belongings are still there, so we don’t think she’s gone far.” DC Cherry puts his hand on James’s shoulder. “Don’t look so worried, please. We think this is good news. All those things—the clothes and food—they all indicate that Daisy’s being well looked after.”

  One after the other, I reach out to embrace Emily and James, and I’m so overjoyed at the news that I want to shout it from the rooftops. “We’re going to get her back, Ems! Oh, God, I’m so relieved!”

  And then she slaps me with her words.

  “What do you mean, we? You’re not her mother, Jess. I’m her mother. You don’t have any right to feel relieved.”


  DC Cherry and James look stunned.

  “I just meant—you know how much I love Daisy, I just—”

  But she doesn’t let me finish. “You have no idea what this has been like for me, Jessica. No idea at all. Because you’ve never been a mother, have you? You haven’t got a clue.”

  * * *

  DC Cherry has left now, instructing us to stay put and wait for news. But it’s impossible. None of us can stay still. James has been pacing the ground floor, phoning Chloe, telling her to come home, checking the BBC headlines every five minutes to see if there are any updates. Emily is wide-eyed, and I know she’s taken extra tablets this morning because she has that glassy look about her as she sits in her corner seat, staring at her own hands, turning them over this way and that. It’s strange to see her so helpless; she was always the strong one, the decisive one. The leader. Look at her now, the way she just waits for life to happen to her, waits for others to sort things out, to bring her the solutions she wants. It’s as though the loss of her child has disabled her, or perhaps rather it has given her permission to opt out, to give up all control. If I were Daisy’s mother, I think, I’d be in the car right now, driving like crazy to reach that house, to scour the coast and paths that surround the place, to find my little girl. If I were Daisy’s mother, I wouldn’t leave a thing to chance; I’d do everything in my power to get her back.

  As though she can hear my thoughts, Emily tilts her head a fraction to appraise me. It’s a tiny standoff: me propped against the island unit, her balled up in her armchair in the corner of the dining room. Our eyes are locked in silent combat. She hates me just for being here; I hate her for her hatred. “Wake me up when there’s news,” she says to no one in particular, and she heads for the staircase and is gone.

  There’s something of an ending in those few words, and without warning, James stops his pacing and rests his head on my shoulder, wrapping his arms up around me, at once strong and needful, and I don’t want to let him go. Even when Chloe lets herself in through the back door, we don’t move but wait for her to join us, to join us in our tangled pillar of care and grief and relief and yearning.

  “Shall we drive there?” I whisper, and the pair of them pull back, all eyes conferring.

  “To the Needles?” James asks. “But DC Cherry said—”

  “I don’t care what DC Cherry said!” I exclaim, pushing between them and snatching the car keys from the hook. “Well?”

  And then we’re in the car, the three of us, hurtling along hedge-lined lanes with the windows rolled down and the sharp January air rushing in at us—and the sense of anticipation is exhilarating. We’re going to find Daisy, I know it, and Chloe knows it, and James knows it, and we’re doing it together.

  At the foot of the winding approach to the Needles, we find the road blocked with police tape, and we’re forced to park in the Alum Bay car park, where we abandon the car, rushing past the glassblowing center and the sand shop and the games kiosk with its Tin Can Alley and Hook-a-Duck and traditional Isle of Wight candy sticks—and James’s phone rings, bringing us all to a sliding halt. He answers it.

  “Jesus—Jesus, no,” he says, and I know it’s Emily because I can hear her hysterical cries even from several feet away. “Emily, calm down—please—I’m here now, I’m at Alum Bay. It’s a mistake, Ems. The journalists are always getting these things wrong. It’s got to be a mistake! I’ll call you back.”

  He cuts off the call, and he’s suddenly so shock-pale that I don’t want to ask him what she said. I don’t want to know. He looks around, turning in circles as though searching for the nearest exit. “Chloe, what’s the quickest way to get down the bay?”

  “Alum Bay?” she replies. “The chairlifts, I guess.”

  And we’re running again—sprinting at speed toward the old-fashioned ski lift that ferries holidaymakers down to the colored sands below—and Chloe’s begging James to tell her what Emily said. But he refuses; he won’t tell her, and I know it’s got to be bad. To our agony, the young man operating the lift raises a flat hand as we approach, pointing to the sign at the turnstile: The chairlift may not operate in conditions of high wind.

  “Please,” Chloe begs. Long strands of her copper hair swirl around her head, cruelly reinforcing the turbulent weather conditions. “It’s an emergency!”

  “Sorry, the wind’s up at the moment. Might be OK in half an hour or so?”

  James runs his hands up over his face, the panic in him mounting. In our rush to leave the house, he hasn’t shaved, and I notice how crumpled he looks in his unironed shirt and scuffed shoes. Emily once told me that the rigidity of his routines drove her a little mad: shoe shining on a Sunday, ironing on a Monday, car wash on a Friday. Perhaps this change in him will please her. “Please,” he begs the young man, “it really is a matter of life or death.”

  An older man arrives, hands on slow hips, and he nods at the younger chap. “What”s the panic?” he asks, and his casual manner is excruciating in the face of James’s turmoil.

  “Just tell him,” I urge James, clutching my jacket tight at the neck, willing the wind to drop from the sky. “Just tell him!”

  “It’s my daughter,” he says, finally, and he turns his back on Chloe and says slowly and quietly. “She’s the baby who’s missing—and they think a body has washed up in the bay below.”

  * * *

  Emily’s words, “You’ve never been a mother,” ring in my ears, rushing me back to a time I wish never to revisit, a time of secrets and lies, of another infant taken too early.

  I think I knew I was pregnant almost immediately. Something shifted inside me, but it was so fundamentally connected to my terrifying loss of memory that night, and the physical marks left on me, that I failed to acknowledge it until my period was two months overdue. My breasts swelled painfully; tiredness would come upon me like an assault; my appetite changed, ranging from ravenous to sickened. I locked it away, hid it beneath layers of fear and self-loathing, until one day I caught sight of my reflection as I dried from the shower, and I was shocked at the thickening of my waist, at the rivulets of fine veins that converged across my taut stranger’s breasts. A baby, I said quietly into the dense steam of the room, and cautiously I let my fingertips rest on the curve of my stomach, the slightest of curves, imperceptible to anyone but me. Would it be a monster, born out of violence? Somehow, I knew it would not. Already I could feel the heat of the infant, the warm, belonging glow of a nestled secret. No one need know, I told myself, but of course I was being naïve. Because Emily already knew—she’d known before I had—and before I even had the chance to think about how it might be, how my future could be a different one, she took that secret away.

  I want to scream into the howling wind, Please, not Daisy too! Please, God, don’t take away another child!

  * * *

  Chloe falls against me, a groan rising up through her juddering torso, and without another word the man at the chairlift opens the turnstile, refusing our money and helping us into our chairs. James takes the first seat; Chloe and I sit side by side in the next. A body washed ashore. A dead baby.

  “It can’t be,” I tell Chloe firmly, as I grip her hand in mine, our knotted fingers turning white with the pressure of it. I fix my eyes on the vertical cable ahead. “It can’t be her.”

  At first, as the chairs descend, all we can see are treetops below us, but when the wind whips beneath us, rocking our carriages like swings in a playground, my terror kicks in. There’s the feeblest of bars securing us; the cable above looks ancient and salt-rusted. The carriage swings and tilts, shudders and bucks. My heart pounds, my breaths grow shallow, and I think, Please, not now, please give me the strength to remain in the moment, to keep it together—and then the trees drop away, along with my stomach, and we see them below. There on the desolate winter beach, a huddle of men and women, arranged around a dark mass of flotsam and weed, their fascinated formation concealing the central object as photographers rush down the coastal step
s, clicking away, shouting for news. James’s chair reaches the landing point, and he jumps, hitting the sand at a run, quickly followed by Chloe and me, running, running, pushing through the assembled bodies to see the horror we know awaits us at the water’s edge.

  It’s a doll. A limbless, sightless doll, pink and grubby, with oil-streaked blond curls that lift and flourish on the incoming tide. Chloe drops to her knees, her forearms and face pressing into the cold sand, and she sobs with such force and volume that the gathered witnesses step away, frightened at the sight of her unbridled grief. When James and I help her to her feet, she is wet with dark sand, and she forces us away, refusing our comfort.

  “Chloe, sweetie, it’s not her,” James says, holding his hands out beseechingly. “It’s not her.”

  Chloe shakes her head and takes another step back. “You don’t understand,” she says between racking sobs. “It’s all my fault. It’s my fault she got into the house and took Daisy. Avril. It’s because of me she got in.”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” I tell her, but she waves her hands in front of her face, batting my words away.

  “Yes, it was! Don’t you understand? It was me who left the back door unlocked! Me and Max went back to the house when you were asleep, Jess! We came in the back when you were sleeping on the sofa—to nick some of Dad’s booze—but then you started to cough and wake up, so I just grabbed a couple of bottles, and we legged it. And I know I didn’t lock it again. We just pulled the door shut and ran.”

  “It’s not your fault, Chloe,” James says.

  Chloe hangs her head and weeps. She looks tiny and broken and covered in sand, and I want to sweep her up inside my jacket and make it all disappear. “Yes, it is, Dad. Yes, it fucking is.”

  21

  Emily

  She’s on her own again. After years spent complaining of never having a moment to herself—always at someone or other’s beck and call—Emily realizes she has wasted valuable time yearning for it. She’s incomplete without others around her. She’s less of a person without others to witness her existence. Where are they all? They were here when she went upstairs to lie down, and now they are gone. Perhaps Daisy has been found and they’ve gone to fetch her? She feels strangely detached from this possibility, and she wishes she could hate herself for it, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t feel very much at all. Maybe they’ve popped out for groceries; there’s hardly anything in the house, so that’s likely. She hopes they will remember wine. God, she could kill for a glass of chilled Sancerre right now, but at the same time her mouth is as dry as sand, and she knows water is the thing she needs. Emily runs cold water into the kitchen sink and drinks straight from the tap, catching her craze-haired reflection in the shine of the chrome faucet. Did Jess polish it to such a high mirror shine? She must have done, unless James did it, having grown tired of the way Emily has let the place slip. These days Emily does nothing. She hasn’t just eased up a bit on keeping the place straight; she does absolutely nothing. She’s gone from being one of the most well-presented people she knows—in all matters—to this. She does nothing, goes nowhere, cares about nothing. What is she now? she wonders. She lifts up her T-shirt hem, perhaps simply to confirm to herself that she’s still flesh and blood. She prods at her bony ribs with a close-bitten fingernail.