I needed to think rationally. What were the possibilities? Where were the lamp-posts? Or, rather, where
weren’t
there lamp-posts? Charlie could be dead. I gulped at the thought. She might have left with someone and be off the island and far away from me, where she wanted to be. If she had been snatched against her will, she might have been driven in a white van across the causeway and on to the mainland. In any of those cases, there was nothing I could do.
I had to act on the assumption that she was still on the island, still alive.
The kettle was boiling.
Rory had this idea that if he gave Sludge something of Charlie’s to smell she’d act like a sniffer dog and trace her from that. I collected an unwashed T-shirt from the floor of her room. It was yellow, with short sleeves, and when I pressed it against my face I could smell our daughter’s sweat, deodorant and perfume. We went downstairs and Rory gave it to Sludge. She dribbled over it dutifully and ran round the kitchen holding it in her drooling, happy jaws, thinking it was a game. When Rory tried to take it back, it ripped.
‘We’re ready, I think,’ said Rory. He put on his jacket and picked up the lead.
‘Take Jackson,’ I said.
‘Right. Jackson, Sludge, let’s go. We’ll take the car down to the beach and walk from there. You don’t need your Game Boy.’
‘I want it.’
‘Leave it here.’
‘I want to take it with me.’
‘Jackson –’
‘Let him,’ I said. Rory glared at me, then shrugged.
‘Can I lie on your bed again for a while?’ asked Renata, as they closed the door. ‘I don’t feel too good. I think I might be coming down with something. Unless you need me.’
‘Sure.’ I wanted her out of the way.
The phone rang and I picked it up. ‘Yes?’
‘Nina.’ It was Ashleigh. ‘I did what you said and rang lots of people and they’re ringing people now.’
‘Thank you,’ I said wearily.
‘The thing is, there’s this girl. She’s not really a friend of ours. She’s in the year below us. Anyway, she’s got a friend who lives on Grendell Road, and she was staying over last night. Or, at least, I think she was staying over, she didn’t actually say that, I just assumed –’
‘Yes? Go on.’
‘This morning she thinks she saw Charlie.’
‘When? Where?’
‘She’s rather vague about it. I didn’t know whether to bother you with it. Shall I give you her mobile number? She’s expecting your call. Her name’s Laura.’
‘Thanks, yes.’
She read it out and I wrote it down, repeating it to make sure I’d got it right. I put down the phone and immediately rang the number. ‘Laura?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is Nina Landry, Charlie’s mother.’
‘Charlie? Oh, right, Charlie.’
‘Ashleigh told me you saw her this morning.’
‘Right.’
‘What time was that, Laura, and where? It’s very important I should know.’
‘Is Charlie in trouble?’
‘What time was it?’
‘I dunno, really.’
‘About what time?’
‘I’d had breakfast.’
‘Yes.’ I squeezed the phone hard in my hand and tried to keep calm. ‘What time did you have breakfast?’
‘We didn’t have to get up for anything. It’s holidays and everything.’
‘Nine? Ten?’
‘Maybe. Between that. No, I know, it was nearer half past nine, twenty to ten, because Carrie’s mother said she needed to get to the shops before ten. They were going to Carrie’s gran for lunch and she needed to get something. I dunno. Anyway, we were going to go with her and buy some crisps, but then Carrie said we should bike over towards the oyster beds because there’s this boy she fancies lives near Lower Meadow Farm down there and we might see him.’ She giggled.
‘Go on.’
‘I thought I saw Charlie. I know her from school.’
‘Where did you think you saw her?’
‘It might have been someone else but I think it was her. It was from a distance, you see, and we were at the top of the
long hill. Lost Road or something funny like that. She was at the bottom. She had a bike.’
‘She was riding her bike?’
‘No, she was standing with it and talking to someone in a car.’
‘Listen, Laura, did you see who she was talking to?’
‘No.’
‘Or what kind of car it was?’
‘It might have been a van.’
‘What colour was it?’
‘Red,’ she said. ‘Or maybe blue. It wasn’t white. Definitely.’
‘Red or blue?’
‘Or that silvery colour all cars are.’
‘Red or blue or silver?’
‘I dunno, really. I didn’t think of it.’
‘But you think it was Charlie?’
‘I didn’t think so at the time, but when Ashleigh called Carrie and then Carrie told me, I thought I remembered.’
‘Did Carrie see it too?’
‘No. She was talking about something. She wasn’t paying attention. Maybe it was someone older.’
‘That Charlie was talking to?’
‘Maybe. They had their head out of the window. They didn’t look young.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘You’re asking too many questions. I don’t remember anything. Maybe a man. It was a long way off. Maybe it wasn’t Charlie anyway. I didn’t know I was meant to be keeping an eye out or I’d have noticed more. You don’t notice things if you’re not trying to.’
‘OK, listen to me. I’m going to give you a number to call.
You want to speak to Detective Inspector Hammill, and tell him what you’ve just told me. Do you hear?’
‘Detective Inspector Hammill,’ she repeated.
‘This moment. Do you promise?’
‘Yeah, all right.’
‘Everything you remember, tell him. Don’t wait. If he’s busy, hold on.’
She promised and laboriously wrote down the number as I dictated it but I was doubtful of her managing it, so I phoned DI Hammill and told him what she had said and gave him her details. There. Let him do some detecting.
I went into Charlie’s bedroom once more, my head buzzing. Charlie talking to a man. It seemed like important information, but even when I was talking to Laura I had thought of a snag. I believed that Charlie had been snatched by a man and here was a witness who had seen her talking to one. But it had been too early. With my day of driving around, I had a map of Sandling Island inside my head and I could picture exactly where Laura had been when she saw Charlie and where Charlie had been, and she was at the beginning of her paper round. Whoever the man was and whatever their conversation had been about, Charlie had gone on to deliver half a dozen more newspapers. So who had he been?
The sheep clock told me it was twenty past three. In a couple of hours or so we should have been boarding the plane to Florida. I sat on the floor, among the mess, and once more stared around. Perhaps Charlie had been snatched randomly, and there were no clues or patterns. Or perhaps I would find, among the clutter of her teenage life, some sign. I began with the drawers of her desk. One by one I opened
them and tipped out their contents. I picked up each object and looked at it before replacing it in the drawer.
A lightbulb, a tiny velvet cushion in the shape of a heart, several coloured crayons of various lengths, metal and plastic pencil sharpeners, notepads with nothing in them except blank pages, certificates for swimming and hurdle-jumping, a head teacher’s merit award I’d never seen before, for an excellent essay on
Great Expectations
, an empty bottle of perfume, a crumbling bath bomb, several tangled necklaces, a box of broken pastels, ink cartridges, sanitary towels, tampons, ancient catalogues, last year’s birthday cards from friends – I looked through each one – Thinking Putty, dried-up Pritt Sticks, her old mobile phone minus its SIM card, a canister of safety-pins, a half-full pack of Marlboro Lights, two small boxes of matches, a bookmark she’d made in primary school with cross-stitch embroidery, a few old glossy magazines, a large shell, a battered copy of
Lord of the Flies
, another of
The Outsider
, a small torch that didn’t work, scented candles that had never been lit, hairbands, a thin white wristband with the message ‘Make Poverty History’, a travel sewing-kit, some knickers (clean), gel pens, cartridges for her printer, an ancient Beanie Baby she’d had as a small child, a watch that had stopped working long ago, a bright cotton scarf with an inkstain at one fringed end. There were folders full of GCSE work, and I leafed through every sheet of paper, just in case there was something among the algebraic formulae, the scientific data, the graphs and maps, dates and jottings that would point me in a new direction.
I rifled through the scattered possessions on her desk once more, then stopped abruptly. Her laptop.
I pulled out her chair, threw the hoodie and the old jeans
on to the floor, and sat down. I turned it on with a ping and waited for it to load up. Rory and I had given Charlie her computer on her last birthday. I didn’t know how to find my way round it: it was a different make from mine, with different software. Like her room, her virtual desktop was in a state of total disorganization. I found essays for drama, history, science, English, art and French. I found various quizzes, articles that she had downloaded. There was an MSN icon. But what I really wanted was to go through her emails. I knew Charlie used Hotmail, and I assumed her user name was Charlie, but I didn’t have a clue what her password was. I tried ‘Charlie’ and ‘Charlie1’ and ‘Charlie2’, ‘Charlie3’, ‘Charlie4’. I tried ‘Landry’ and ‘Oates’ and ‘Landry Oates’. I tried the road we’d lived on in London (Wiltshire), then added our old phone number and tried again. I tried ‘Sludge’, then the name of her beloved rabbit, who had died when she was eight, ‘Bertie’. Despairingly, I keyed in several of the bands or singers I knew she liked. I rang Ashleigh and asked if she knew Charlie’s password and she didn’t.
I nearly gave up. I typed in ‘Hope’ (my mother’s maiden name), and ‘Falconer’ (Rory’s mother’s). I remembered that a year or two earlier Charlie had wanted to give herself a middle name: Sydney, of all things. I tried that.
And I was in.
Charlie was fiercely protective of her privacy. I had to knock on her bedroom door and wait for her to tell me to come in. If I happened to glance at what she was reading or writing, she would cover it with her hand and glare at me. If she received a letter, she would often take it to her own room to read it. Now I was here in front of all of her emails. There weren’t very many, once I had discounted the junkmail
and technical updates. Most of her communications were done in MSN chatrooms or by text. But there were enough for me to get an illicit glimpse into her private world. For a start, there were several messages from her father. If I hadn’t known who Rory was I might have thought they were from a boyfriend, for in them he told Charlie how beautiful she was, how special, how she shouldn’t grow up too quickly, how he would always love her. I read them quickly and closed them down.
There were a couple from Ashleigh, in text language so I could barely decipher their meanings. ‘LOL & CU l8er?’ said one. Another sent her the entire text of the song ‘My Favourite Things’.
A boy called Gary had sent her several emails, rather formal and jocose, with articles he’d cut and pasted from various current-affairs websites. There was one about George Bush and his connections with oil companies, and another about fossil fuels. I didn’t stop to read them.
There was one message from Eamonn saying simply, ‘Parents suck. This is the piece I told you about’, followed by an incomprehensible article on some musician whose name meant nothing to me.
And just one brief message from Jay: ‘My phone’s buggered, so this is to say you should meet me in our usual place at 2. I’ll bring the stuff. Jxxxx.’ What stuff? What place? I put my head into my hands and closed my eyes for an instant.
I heard the door slam downstairs and Sludge’s muffled barking, and rose to my feet, closing the lid of the laptop as I did so.
‘Sludge wouldn’t stay out,’ called Jackson, as I went down the stairs. ‘She kept whimpering and dragging at the lead.
She did a poo on the front lawn of those people with the smart house near the pub and we didn’t have a plastic bag.’
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He had to go and fetch the car where we’d left it. He’ll be here soon.’
Jackson’s eyes glittered and his cheeks were flushed. I wondered if he might be feverish, and put a hand on his forehead, but he winced irritably.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know you asked me to make that list?’
It took me a few seconds to remember the instructions I’d given him while I was waiting for the police.
‘Yes. Did you?’
‘Shall I get it? It’s not very long. Really, it only says a few words. It says, have you looked at her computer?’
‘I’ve just been looking through her messages.’
‘And have you looked at her diary?’
‘What diary?’
‘You know.’
‘No.’
‘It’s in her schoolbag probably. That’s where she usually keeps it.’
‘Her bag?’ I hadn’t come across that either, nor had I thought about it. ‘Where is it?’
‘I saw her put it in the downstairs toilet yesterday when she came in.’
It was there, under her old coat. While Jackson watched me, I pulled it down from the hook and opened it at once. Her art scrapbook was in there, the container with the messy remains of yesterday’s packed lunch, her pencil case, two or
three exercise books and a maths textbook. And, in the front zip-up pocket, a little spiralbound diary. I leafed through it, my hands trembling so that I found it difficult to lift the individual pages. At the beginning of the year she’d put in almost everything: the dates that terms began or ended, coming weekends or Sundays with Rory, visits to the dentist, appointments with friends, parties, concerts, inset days. But gradually the pages became blanker. Occasional initials were put against pages with question marks. There were doodles. Phone numbers were jotted in corners. Autumn and winter were scarcely marked except, I noticed, the occasional small cross in the top left-hand corner of a day. I turned back. There was a cross against Monday, 26 July, Friday, 20 August, then again on Thursday, 16 September, Wednesday, 13 October, Tuesday, 9 November. That was all.