How to Disappear

by Gillian McAllister

  Gillian McAllister

  * * *

  HOW TO DISAPPEAR

  Contents

  Prologue

  Before Chapter 1. Zara

  Chapter 2. Lauren

  Chapter 3. Aidan

  Chapter 4. Zara

  Chapter 5. Aidan

  Chapter 6. Aidan

  Chapter 7. Zara

  Chapter 8. Lauren

  Chapter 9. Aidan

  Chapter 10. Zara

  Chapter 11. Lauren

  Chapter 12. Zara

  Chapter 13. Aidan

  Chapter 14. Poppy

  Chapter 15. Lauren

  Chapter 16. Aidan

  Chapter 17. Lauren

  After Chapter 18. Aidan

  Chapter 19. Lauren

  Chapter 20. Zara

  Chapter 21. Lauren

  Chapter 22. Aidan

  Chapter 23. Poppy

  Chapter 24. Lauren

  Chapter 25. Zara

  Chapter 26. Aidan

  Chapter 27. Lauren

  Chapter 28. Poppy

  Chapter 29. Aidan

  Chapter 30. Zara

  Chapter 31. Aidan

  Chapter 32. Lauren

  Chapter 33. Aidan

  Chapter 34. Lauren

  Chapter 35. Aidan

  Chapter 36. Lauren

  Chapter 37. Aidan

  Chapter 38. Poppy

  Chapter 39. Zara

  Chapter 40. Lauren

  Chapter 41. Aidan

  Chapter 42. Lauren

  Chapter 43. Aidan

  Chapter 44. Poppy

  Chapter 45. Aidan

  Chapter 46. Zara

  Chapter 47. Aidan

  Chapter 48. Poppy

  Chapter 49. Zara

  Chapter 50. Lauren

  Chapter 51. Aidan

  Chapter 52. Lauren

  Chapter 53. Poppy

  Chapter 54. Zara

  Chapter 55. Aidan

  Chapter 56. Zara

  Chapter 57. Lauren

  Chapter 58. Poppy

  Chapter 59. Lauren

  Chapter 60. Aidan

  Chapter 61. Zara

  Chapter 62. Aidan

  Chapter 63. Zara

  Chapter 64. Aidan

  Chapter 65. Poppy

  Chapter 66. Zara

  Chapter 67. Poppy

  Chapter 68. Aidan

  Chapter 69. Poppy

  Chapter 70. Aidan

  Chapter 71. Lauren

  Chapter 72. Aidan

  Later Chapter 73. Aidan

  Epilogue

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Gillian McAllister has been writing for as long as she can remember. She graduated with an English degree before working as a lawyer. She lives in Birmingham where she now writes full-time. She is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Everything but the Truth, Anything You Do Say, No Further Questions and The Evidence Against You.

  Follow Gillian:

  Twitter @GillianMAuthor

  Instagram @gillianmauthor

  By the same author

  Everything but the Truth

  Anything You Do Say

  No Further Questions

  The Evidence Against You

  For David, forever

  Prologue

  During

  Lauren ducks into the alleyway without warning. She’ll do it here, before she goes inside. She gets out the lipstick. It’s a nude shade she’s worn for years. Her mirror is old, too. Aidan bought it for her the Christmas before last. She looks at it now, her initials inscribed on the back, and opens it. One blue eye stares back at her.

  As she hides in the alleyway, she sees what she assumes is the candidate before her leaving the nursery. Oh no, Lauren thinks, as she watches her go. The woman is wearing a skinny trouser suit, burgundy loafers. Good hair. But more than that: she has confidence. It’s everywhere. In her walk, in the way she holds her handbag, dangling at the end of a slim arm. Her appearance is neat whereas Lauren, looking back at herself in the mirror, is definitely messy. Her hair has frizzed in the rain, around her temples. The woman glances briefly at her, and Lauren shrinks further back into the alley. Don’t look at me. Don’t speak to me.

  She stares out on to the rain-slicked street after the woman has gone. There are people coming and going in winter coats, Christmas shopping in their hands. It’s late afternoon, already dark. The light from the shopfronts creates blurred sepia puddles of spilled light on the pavement. It is a totally normal street full of totally normal people. She hopes.

  Lauren looks again in the mirror and puts her lipstick on. It feathers at the edges and runs. She wipes around her mouth but smears it further, leaving her skin red and sore-looking. What will they ask? Sweat gathers across her lower back. She doesn’t know how to answer interview questions any more. Not even the most basic ones.

  She gives up with the lipstick, closes the mirror and slides it back into her handbag. Inside the bag is a Portuguese custard tart from the bakery, which she will eat on the bus home, the paper bag spread across her lap to catch the crumbs. She’s also saved a trashy article to read about two celebrities who are rumoured to be having an affair. Five minutes of guilty bliss, just for her, afterwards. What remains of her, anyway.

  The handbag, the lipstick and the preference for custard tarts and celebrity gossip are old. The parts of her that she has been permitted to keep. The parts of her that are left. She thinks of everything she can no longer do. Kiss her husband. Post on Instagram.

  Tell the truth.

  Lauren goes inside. The reception has wooden floors and a branded rug with the nursery’s name on it. High Trees. They’re going to ask her competency questions, she is thinking, as the receptionist slides the glass screen back. ‘Can I help?’ she says, and Lauren thinks: no, nobody can. Suddenly, I can’t recall a time when I helped a difficult child to develop, or I reported a safeguarding concern. Perhaps she can just tell them the truth. A half-truth. That she really, really needs this job. That she would be good at it. That she will love the children. That there is nothing better, to her, than seeing a three-year-old late talker say, ‘Lauren, look!’ out of nowhere, as though somebody just turned on the speech part of their brain overnight.

  ‘I have a four-thirty interview,’ she says. As she speaks, she smells it. All nurseries smell the same. Poster paints. The plastic smell of lunchboxes: cucumber and bread. She blinks and glances around her. She is home, home amongst these smells and the little starfish hands and feet of the children she will fall in love with. Lauren forgets her frizzy hair, her smudged lipstick.

  ‘Great,’ the woman says. Her nails click on the keyboard. ‘Please can you confirm your name?’

  ‘Leonora,’ Lauren replies. She glances at her reflection in the glass screen. There is no Lauren any more. Lauren is gone.

  BEFORE

  * * *

  1

  Zara

  Holloway Grammar School, London

  August

  Zara is fourteen years old when she witnesses the murder.

  She is reading a book as she walks from the school football pitch to the surrounding fields. Dry clumps of yellow-green grass litter the lawn like balled-up socks, and she keeps tripping over them. She’s reading Eleanor & Park. She knows it makes no sense to read and walk, but she can’t help it. She’s gripped by the love story.

  As she narrowly misses walking into a goal post, she puts the book in her bag and thinks, instead. Specifically, Zara begins to think about stationery. She bought new pens today, a pack of three wrapped in cellophane. Blue, black, red. She’ll never use the red one – isn’t it rude to write in red? – but she likes the collection, the
three together in a neat row. Zara likes tidiness, though she thinks maybe she shouldn’t. She should like drinking and boys.

  But anyway, it is so nice to look forward to things in this way. The past few years have been full of worry. It came from nowhere. One morning when she was eleven, Zara began to worry about everything. What if her mother died, what if she attended a party and felt so panicked she needed to leave, what if the Tube crashed, what if, what if, what if …? It has taken Zara years to learn to manage it. Anxiety. Such a bland name for something so sharp.

  Zara has always felt on the sidelines – thinking about books at the school disco when she should be thinking about dancing, apparently – but the anxiety somehow made her more so. An observer of life, not a participator in it. She once said this to her stepsister, Poppy, who said, ‘I die, Zara, you’re such a mood.’

  It’s already dusky, at eight o’clock, but the evening stretches out in front of her: tonight is going to be spent in a delicious frenzy of unpacking. Four stiff cardboard folders. Slippery A4 plastic wallets. Sticky tabs. Joy Of Missing Out, is it called? JOMO. Well, that. She’ll sort out her folders, and then she’ll return to school, to Year Ten, a new woman, she has decided. She doesn’t quite know who she will be. Not yet. But it won’t be who she was before.

  When she first hears the noise, she tells herself it’s nothing. An unexplained shout on a hot summer’s evening. Her pace is slow and relaxed across the empty field, the sky a high lavender dome above her, little dried tufts of grass sticking to her trainers.

  It’s only when she hears the second shout, then the third, that she stops, a fine layer of sweat on her lower back slowly evaporating as she turns, scanning the horizon for the noises like an animal looking for its predator.

  Her eyes land on the bandstand. It’s been having its roof repaired over the summer. Each week, on the way home from her extra literature lessons – not cool, at all, but she loves everything about them – slightly more progress has been made. She squints now in the half-light. That’s where the noise is coming from. Two men. One on the stage, another halfway up the steps.

  She paces forward, then stops, maybe forty feet away. Something’s happening. Zara’s anxiety often used to make her think that something bad was happening when it wasn’t, but this time she thinks she might be right.

  Goosebumps appear on her arms as she moves back across the field to one of the greenhouses nearby. She lets herself in and breathes in its familiar, hot musk tomato smell. She spent so many hours in here over the spring, growing organic and non-organic lettuces for a biology experiment that she found stressful. She would re-pot the lettuces in her break times, moving them from small pots on the window sill to fat Gro-bags outside. She would lie awake, sometimes, worrying about her frilly-leaved lettuces out in the cold, which her mum, Lauren, laughed at. ‘But there’s no need to worry about that,’ she said, a sentence she had uttered often.

  Concealed by forgotten, spindly, grey-green plants, she looks carefully through the holes in the leaves and into the bandstand. She can see the figures clearly. Two boys, a couple of years older than her, maybe sixteen. Not men, as she had first thought.

  There is no way she can intervene. All of the old feelings rear up. Butterflies in her stomach. Cold hands. A feeling of being watched, being hunted. The old anxiety, but this time with reason. She can’t step forward. She is frozen in fear.

  She can’t leave the safety of the greenhouse. She puts a hand on the mottled green windowpane, just looking. It is important, if she can’t step in, to look. It is the right thing to do, to watch, when something important is unfolding, and Zara so likes to do the right thing.

  She watches it unfold, staring, unblinking, so hard her eyes become dry and painful. Something horrendous is happening, but Zara forces herself to keep staring, not glancing away for even a moment. She counts, instead. One second. Two. Three.

  It’s over in ten. And nothing is ever the same again.

  2

  Lauren

  Islington, London

  October, the following year

  Lauren watches Zara walk into the kitchen. She’s wearing a white blouse and a black skirt. Her legs are long now, somehow gamine, like a deer’s or an antelope’s. She seems to have grown since witnessing the crime last summer. Taller and more womanly. The way she holds herself, the things she says. ‘A Catch 22, isn’t it?’ she said the other day – her baby daughter!

  Lauren considers her, now, just standing there in a patch of October sunlight. She’s so beautiful that Lauren feels pride bubbling right up through her like pink lemonade.

  ‘Feeling okay?’ she asks. Zara’s role in today’s trial has become part of their lives this past year. At each meeting, Zara has seemed to mature even further. Speaking up, giving opinions, organizing the family. ‘We’re at the lawyer’s at seven, remember?’ she said recently, and Lauren thought: who are you? The anxiety that has plagued Zara since she was eleven is still there, sometimes, but so is another Zara, too. A newly brave, bold girl who wants to be a proofreader – ‘I’d get to read books for a living!’ – and who won’t eat meat or buy leather. Her daughter, the almost-adult, grown so fully and so beautifully into herself that Lauren wants to call it out of an open window: I, Lauren Starling, have raised a woman!

  Zara shrugs and Lauren waits. This is what they do. Zara is as circumspect as her absent father, who left before she was born. Or, rather, was never with Lauren enough to call his abandonment leaving. Lauren still marvels at how many of his traits have filtered down to her daughter, even though he never sees her, like how the moon still pulls the tides from afar.

  ‘I mean – it’s the right thing,’ Zara says now. Zara thinks plenty of things are the right thing. Recycling. Slow fashion. Free-range eggs. And now this, too.

  ‘It is absolutely the right thing,’ Lauren says to her, wondering if she sounds patronizing, as Aidan walks into the kitchen.

  He paces across the tiled floor, dodging the hanging lamps they put up above the table last year. He has one hand in his hair. Shirt untucked. His body is an open bracket, taut with tension. He has wild, dark hair, still thick into his forties, and round brown glasses. He always looks slightly harassed, and more so right now.

  ‘But,’ Aidan says, raising his head in a sort of backwards nod at his stepdaughter, ‘you don’t have to do it. You do not. It’s not too late to say no. Say the word,’ he brandishes his mobile phone, ‘and I’ll cancel.’

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ Lauren says, giving him a look.

  ‘I hope so,’ Zara says on an exhale. ‘I’ll look back and be glad I did it. I know I will.’

  On the advice of the Crown Prosecution Solicitor, Harry, an unmarked police car is waiting for them outside. ‘More anonymous,’ he had said lightly. ‘And all three of you in the back is best. Harder to distinguish her that way.’

  As they file out down their front path, their neighbour does, too. ‘Nice day for October,’ he says cordially to Lauren.

  She’s always liked Ray. He’s ninety-three this year and always wears the same jacket, which he repairs in small patches.

  ‘It’s been such good weather lately,’ she says to him. Aidan rushes past her, throwing her a look. She reluctantly gets into the car. Why can’t they chat with Ray, on a stressful day like today, to ease the tension just a little?

  Aidan sits pavement side in the car, his back rigid, blocking anybody from seeing in, even though the windows are opaque with frost.

  Now they’re in the car, she can’t prevent herself from thinking about it any longer. That her daughter, who she shielded from swear words on the television and ‘scenes of a distressing nature’, whose ears she covered during Radio 4 programmes about the Iraq War, was the sole witness of a homeless man being murdered by two footballers.

  Today, Zara will enter the courtroom through a back door shown to them last week, and give evidence from behind a screen, known to the jury and the public only as Girl A, her identity protected by the
State.

  Lauren has been impressed with the justice system’s dedication since Zara gave her statement. Not a single slip-up. Zara’s identity has been protected by an injunction, redacted documents and the law. The press cannot name her and, if people leak it online, their posts are deleted, and they are arrested.

  ‘Scarf on,’ Aidan says as they do a slow loop behind the Old Bailey, ready to be deposited at the back entrance. ‘Face covered.’

  Zara obliges, wrapping a black scarf around her head, saying nothing, her dark eyes – so like her father’s – the only visible feature, scanning the world outside.

  ‘Stop fussing,’ Zara says.

  ‘Our little fusspot,’ Lauren says affectionately, glancing at Aidan.

  He gives her an indulgent, private smile, just for her.

  Lauren smiles back, then turns to look at Zara. As she does so, she feels a dropping sensation in her gut, like they have just driven over a low bridge. It’s unusual for her. She is the calm one. The optimist. The it’ll be fine-er.

  Lauren explores the unpleasant sensation within her. It’s similar to grief. A slow, soft, sad feeling. She looks down at Zara’s hand still in hers. It has lost all its childhood chubbiness, around the knuckles, in the past year.

  No. It’s fine. It’s fine. It is high-level, and nerve-wracking, but it is fine. Nothing is going to happen. They are here, together, the sunlight on the backs of their necks. Nothing will hurt them, ruin them, destroy them. She tilts her face up to the light. It’s not possible.

  3

  Aidan

  The Old Bailey, London

  Aidan watches as Zara is led, an animal to the slaughter, into the witness box in the empty courtroom. Her eyes are downcast, head bowed, like somebody about to be executed, not cross-examined. She’s just shy, he tells himself. She’s just nervous, not properly scared.