The Rift

by Nina Allan

  Selena had never once pretended to believe in her father’s theories about flying saucers and the people – Ray called them passengers – who claimed to have been transported in them. She had always seen her not pretending as a part of her love for him, a sign of faith that the real Ray would eventually be restored.

  Pretending to Julie, even for a day, would be like saying her sister had ceased to exist.

  They’d been living inside a bubble, she could see that now. But that’s what addicts do – they make you complicit in their compulsions. It was time to call a halt, to expose Julie’s fantasy of alien abduction to the light. As if it were a vampire. She remembered the scene in Interview with the Vampire, Madeleine and Claudia, trapped in the round courtyard as the sun came up, their insides catching fire, their bodies crumbling to dust. Selena sat very still, both hands clasped around her tea mug. She wished Julie no harm – the opposite. She wondered how much damage she’d already done by playing along.

  “All right,” Julie said. “You can tell her.”

  Selena stared at her incredulously. She had expected Julie to react to her suggestion with hostility, with outright anger even. Her acquiescence was more shocking than either.

  “You’re OK with that?” she said at last.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  It’s for the best, Selena thought but did not say. Already her mind was swimming with doubts, and she could not escape the feeling that she had broken something, some vital marker of trust that she had stupidly refused to recognise until it was too late. She wished she could talk to Johnny, who had a way of accepting things at face value that Selena had been wont to criticise as naiveté but secretly envied.

  She remembered a discussion they’d had once, about whether ghosts existed.

  “If they exist they’ll carry on existing, whether we believe in them or not,” he had said. Selena imagined he’d have been equally laid back about the idea of Julie being whisked away to another planet.

  Cool, he would say, most likely, and the thought made her smile, in spite of herself. There were so many of these stories out there. Would it really be so weird if some of them were true, some of the time?

  “Do you still have the necklace?” Selena said suddenly. “Lila’s pendant?”

  A look passed across Julie’s face, an expression Selena found it difficult to decipher. Was it hurt, or just disappointment?

  “You want proof? Here.” Julie reached down inside the neck of her T-shirt, ducking her head as she drew forth the chain. “I never take it off, usually.”

  The pendant was large, Selena saw, and teardrop-shaped, exactly as Julie had described it. The links in the chain were large and square, bright as platinum but with a higher sheen. The central stone was smoothly polished, a cloudy greenish-blue, speckled with darker patches, like a bird’s egg. There was no sign of anything inside it. Selena thought it looked like a moonstone, or possibly moss agate.

  The silverwork around the stone was also as Julie had described – a mass of tiny intertwined figures, satyrs or demons – though nothing she said had prepared her for the virtuosity of what the maker had accomplished, the individual manikins so lithe and so lifelike it was almost possible to imagine that they were moving, crawling over each other in a frenzy of mysterious activity, like ants in the secret chambers of their underground warren.

  The pendant felt heavy in her hand, heavier than it ought to. Alien, Selena thought, and then checked herself. She laughed softly without meaning to, wondering where Julie had happened to find such a thing, how much she’d paid for it. The pendant looked valuable – not just an antique, but a rarity. As to its origins, Selena had no idea. At first glance she would have said Indian – something in the fine detailing, the seething liveliness of those strange little figures – but she knew her guess would be wrong. Julie had said the manikins reminded her of German folk art, but that wasn’t right either.

  The truth was, Selena had never seen anything like it, anywhere, ever. It was ugly, but it was compelling, too. There were people who would pay a lot of money for something that strange. She had a fleeting vision of the woman she’d seen on the Antiques Roadshow the evening Julie had first telephoned, the woman with the flowery dungarees and the Elton John spectacles, deferring to the expert with the voluminous sideburns.

  See what you make of that, waistcoat man. That should take the wind out of your sails.

  “It’s very unusual,” Selena said. Julie’s palm was open, waiting. Selena placed the pendant into it. Her hand felt curiously light afterwards, like a puppet hand being tugged upwards at the end of a string. “Beautiful.”

  “You don’t like it, I can tell,” Julie said.

  “I do,” Selena answered her, although Julie was right, she realised, there was something about the pendant that creeped her out.

  “It doesn’t matter. I should be going now, anyway.” Julie sounded sad, worn down. She slipped the chain back over her head. The pendant disappeared inside her T-shirt. Selena felt relieved to see the back of it.

  “We’re going to sort this out,” she said to Julie. “You do know I care about you?”

  “Of course,” Julie said. She smiled, but her thoughts were already elsewhere, Selena could tell, worrying away at scraps, tag ends of old memories, the faded rags of time. Selena thought again of Johnny, who enjoyed surprises the way a child did. Johnny had dreamed of racing monster trucks, so that’s what he did. He never gave a thought to what others might think, or what was sensible. Possible, even. The only question Johnny had asked himself about chasing his dream was how best to go about it.

  Selena tried to imagine Johnny in his new world: the shapes, the colours, the pervasive heat. Forty degrees, she thought. For the first time she wondered if she might have made a mistake in not going with him, as he had wanted her to.

  What was so great about her life that she couldn’t imagine changing it for someone she loved? What had she been waiting for?

  Then she realised that if she had gone to Kuala Lumpur, Julie would most likely never have found her.

  The kind of coincidence that only someone with Johnny’s love of the ineffable would properly appreciate.

  2

  Selena remembered seeing Allison Gifford on the TV news, a straight-backed, dark-haired woman with a habit of looking away from the camera. She had scant memory of the newspaper articles though, the endless, predatory speculation about Gifford’s personal life: the partial breakdown she’d suffered during her final year at Oxford, the death of her partner, the lack of any regular contact with her parents and sister. Selena found it difficult to imagine what it must have been like for Allison Gifford to have her privacy violated like that, to have her rights called into question on the basis of a few unsubstantiated rumours.

  Selena wondered who had reported her, who had seen it as their business – their duty, even – to make that phone call.

  In the end, the story had run its course and then died down. Going on for a year after Julie’s disappearance, a brief article in the Warrington Guardian announced that Allison Gifford had resigned from her part-time teaching position at Priestley College and would not be returning in the new academic year. Gifford briefly hit the headlines last summer when she was arrested as part of the investigation surrounding the disappearance of Priestley student Julie Rouane, the article stated. The college authorities have issued a statement affirming that Allison Gifford was an excellent teacher in every way and that her students would miss her. It is believed that Gifford has since moved away from the Manchester area.

  Selena continued her search of the online news archives, surprised by how much of this stuff she had forgotten or simply chosen not to remember. I must have blanked it, she thought. Pushed it to the back of my mind, the way people move unwanted furniture into the spare room and then forget about it. At the time, Margery had done her best to banish newspapers from the house entirely, and yet Selena had sought them out anyway, sneaking copies of the Warrington Gua
rdian from the pile that always accumulated in the laundrette she passed on her way home from school, hiding them in the bottom of her bag and then sneaking them up to her room to read in secret, as if they were pornography. She would pore over every article, trying to still the flutter of excitement that would flip up inside her each time she saw Julie’s name mentioned and never quite managing it.

  She asked herself if this was what it felt like to be famous.

  Not that anyone gave a monkey’s what she thought or felt. Selena remembered how she had become afraid of mentioning her sister or even speaking her name, caught as she was between the shame of saying something stupid or irrelevant and the horror of accidentally revealing her obsession with the forbidden news stories. The illicit delight she felt in being important when she happened to overhear her schoolmates repeating those stories on the playground at break time, saying that teacher of Julie’s must have been guilty of something, or why would she have been arrested? Julie and Gifford had been lesbian lovers, that was obvious, they were planning to run away together. Only Julie got scared, that’s what happened, and so the bull dyke strangled her with a piece of fishing line, stuffed her body in the back of her car and…

  Dumped her in the lake, didn’t she? That’s why the police keep looking there.

  What Selena feared most was that in listening to these snippets of gossip she was letting Julie down in some way, that she was maybe even preventing her from being found. She lived in terror of Margery unearthing her secret stash of newspapers.

  Above all, she was furious at Julie, for disappearing. Trust her sister to grab the headlines – she would love this. But how can you be angry with someone who might be dead?

  ‘A Woman Seldom Seen’ – Celeste Adewami for the Independent on Sunday, May 2012

  ‘Did I think she was beautiful?’ says Allison Gifford. ‘That’s a question I can’t answer. I think beauty is a dangerous conceit, especially when it’s applied to people and especially when it’s applied to women. Julie was tall, and rather angular. She never wore much make-up, if any, and she didn’t dress up. She seemed most comfortable in jeans and trainers, plain T-shirts and jumpers in neutral colours. I don’t think Julie disliked her body, she just wasn’t bothered about clothes in the way some girls are. She was a private sort of person. Not shy exactly, just cautious. I never had sex with her, whatever the newspapers wanted people to believe. I have no idea if Julie had a love life – she never told me and I never asked. Did I have fantasies? Yes, I had fantasies. Who doesn’t?’

  The first draft of what eventually became my fourth novel, Snake in the Grass, was inspired by the disappearance of the Yorkshire chef Claudia Lawrence in 2009. What fascinated me especially about the case was the way it went cold. For a week or so the news was full of Claudia – her photograph, documentary footage of where she’d last been seen, interviews with members of her family and with her colleagues. But look at the papers a month afterwards and there’s nothing.

  A large number of missing persons cases are actually resolved fairly quickly. Either the person turns out not to have been missing in the first place, or the police follow a trail of clues, resulting in an arrest and, not infrequently, the discovery of a body. Very occasionally you might hear about the kind of case we all recognise from detective fiction: someone really does go missing, only this time the police are clever enough or lucky enough or simply quick enough to find that person alive.

  What we hear less about are what I like to call the real missing persons cases: those individuals who disappear from their lives one day, never to return. Sometimes such a disappearance may be voluntary, sometimes not. In the case of Claudia Lawrence, there was no evidence to suggest she planned her departure, and as I studied the dwindling news reports I began asking myself how many other cases like hers might exist.

  What interested me most was what happens next. There is no more news, because there is no news. But what might be going on behind the scenes?

  I began reading about as many of these cold cases as I could find, and it was during the course of my search for information that I first came across the case of Allison Gifford, and Julie Rouane. Julie disappeared from her home in the village of Lymm, near Manchester, in the mid-1990s. Her body was never found, nor was anyone ever convicted of her murder or kidnapping. The Rouane case remains a mystery, unsolved. Of the three suspects apprehended and questioned by the police, only one of them, Steven Jimson, turned out to be of significant interest. Several years after Julie’s disappearance, Jimson was tried and convicted on four counts of murder, along with a string of violent sexual offences. He is currently serving a life sentence, although he has always vehemently denied any involvement in the disappearance of Julie Rouane.

  The other two suspects could best be categorised as innocent bystanders. The first to be arrested, Brendan Conway, was a man in his thirties with moderate learning difficulties. In the hours and days following his arrest, the tabloid news media portrayed Conway as a ghoul, a misfit, the stereotypical dangerous loner who is a menace to society in general and to young women in particular. When Conway was proved to have no identifiable connection with the case, the papers lost no time in recasting him as a local hero, misunderstood by the public and deserving of a wider sympathy. Many photographs of Conway with his two Irish wolfhounds appeared in local papers and on television.

  The second suspect, Allison Gifford, was not so quickly exonerated. Gifford, who worked as a part-time teacher at the sixth-form college attended by Julie Rouane, was taken into custody four days after the teenager disappeared. Although all allegations were eventually dropped, Gifford was suspended from her job and faced an onslaught of intensive media scrutiny for weeks and even months following her release. It was rumoured that Gifford had been pursuing an illicit relationship with Julie, and although Gifford always insisted that her friendship with the teenager was entirely innocent, the news editors at the time seemed reluctant to give up the story, fanning the flames of outrage and running a number of interviews with a former male partner of Gifford’s. After receiving a particularly offensive series of poison pen letters, Gifford reluctantly decided to sell her home and make a new life elsewhere. She appears to have no online presence, and I was finally able to make contact with her through the English department of the adult education college in the west of England where she now teaches. She informed me she has little interest in or knowledge of crime fiction, but generously agreed to meet with me and answer some questions.

  Allison Gifford was thirty years old at the time of her arrest, still in recovery from the death of her then partner and still trying to decide if her move from journalism to teaching had been a good one. Her hair is grey now, but she is recognisably the same person: courteous but bluntly spoken and with a directness of approach to difficult subjects that is unusual. We spend some time talking about the inevitable difficulties of the north-south adjustment before I begin to tentatively ask her about Julie Rouane. I am interested to know if Gifford remembers the first time she saw Julie, if she made a particular impression? I expect a degree of prevarication on Gifford’s part, nervousness even, but she answers me as fully and as thoughtfully as she answered my earlier question about leaving Manchester:

  ‘Yes, she did make an impression, but not in the way most people mean it when they say that. People want to believe there was a big attraction, but I noticed her because she was sitting by herself. She was already in the room when I got there, reading a book and fiddling with a pencil. She didn’t seem to have any friends, and I made a mental note for myself to keep an eye on her. She had the look of someone who was being bullied, or who had been bullied in the past – a closed-off, watchful look, as if she found it difficult to trust anyone. I remember checking to see what it was she was reading – a book about alien abductions, or flying saucers, not what I’d expected at all. That was something else that made her stick in my mind.’

  When I ask Allison Gifford if she thinks Julie was someone who went out of
her way to be different, she shakes her head at once.

  ‘Was she seeking attention, you mean? I don’t think so, not at all. She seemed very shy the first time I spoke to her. A week or two later I asked her if she wanted to go for coffee. She said yes, but she looked scared, as if she thought she might be in trouble for something. I shouldn’t have done it, I knew that even at the time. I’d never behaved that way before, not with a student, although nothing really happened. The newspapers said all kinds of stupid things, but none of them were true. One of those parasites even tried to make a connection between Julie and Jo, although Julie was the opposite of Jo in almost every way. Jo always knew what she wanted. She never compromised and that was part of why I loved her. If I had to use one word to describe Julie it would be restless. She seemed to have no idea of what she wanted, or even who she was, most of the time. There was an energy about her though, an intensity. Like a radio with the volume turned down, only still broadcasting. She said some strange things, Julie. She once told me she’d been adopted, although I was pretty certain that wasn’t true.’

  Jo was Josephine Adams, a young dramatist Gifford met when the two were both students at Oxford. Adams was diagnosed with leukaemia while Gifford was working on assignment in Beijing. She died eight months later. It was Adams’s death that prompted Gifford to give up news journalism and move into life writing. At the time, she says, the change seemed dramatic, a necessary withdrawal from the world, though she has since come to believe that the two disciplines are closely connected.

  ‘The wars between individuals and families are really not all that different from wars between nations. Observe closely enough and you’ll see it’s just a matter of scale.’

  Does Gifford believe that Julie’s disappearance might, as some believed at the time, have been connected to problems within her own family?