‘We often find there’s been a row at home when a child goes missing – a falling-out with
parents
or siblings, something of that sort. Anything like that happen here?’ A gentler enquiry this time, the woman speaking with a soft voice.
‘Certainly not,’ my father replies. He sounds tense and angry.
‘Well – there were a few rows. He was growing up. Rebelling a bit. But nothing serious.’
After Mum stops speaking, there’s a silence. My nose tickles. I think about lifting my hand and rubbing it, digging the itch out of it, but that would give me away. I start to count instead. By the time I get to thirty, the itch is nothing more than a tingle.
‘So you think that this young lady knows where he is, do you?’ A shock runs through me; I almost jump. ‘Do you want to wake her up so we can talk to her?’
Someone touches my bare leg, just below the knee, and shakes it gently. When I open my eyes, I expect to see my mother, but it is my father who is standing beside me. Mum is sitting on the other side of the room, sideways on an upright chair, her eyes on the floor. Her arm is hooked over the back of the chair and she is biting her thumbnail the way she does when she’s nervous or angry or both.
‘Come on, wake up,’ my father says. ‘The police are here.’
I rub my eyes and squint at the two strangers.
They
are in uniform, white shirtsleeves rolled up, wrinkled dark trousers that are limp from hours of wear on what has been a hot day. The woman smiles at me. ‘All right?’
I nod.
‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’
‘Sarah,’ I say, my voice low and a little bit husky from long silence and shyness.
‘Your parents tell us that your brother’s gone missing, and that you haven’t been able to tell them where he is. Is that right, Sarah?’
I nod again.
The policewoman’s voice is pitched higher now that she is talking to me. Royal blue mascara has streaked into the creases around her eyes. The blue lines bunch together tightly when the policewoman smiles at me, leaning forward. ‘Do you think that you could tell me where he is?’
I shake my head solemnly.
I would if I could
, I think, but I don’t say it out loud. A glance leaps between the policewoman and her colleague. For a second, his cold stare is reflected in her eyes, but she turns back to me with another smile. ‘Why don’t you show me your brother’s bedroom, then.’
I look to my mother for guidance. ‘Go on,’ she says, looking away from me. ‘Hurry up.’
I get up and walk slowly out of the room, turning towards the stairs, followed by the policewoman. I have never met her before, but I know already
that
she prides herself on being good with children, that when the door closes behind us she will lean down, make eye contact and ask me again if I know where my brother has gone. I walk up the stairs slowly, holding on to the handrail, hoping that when we get to Charlie’s room, I’ll open the door and he’ll be there.
AS I WALKED
through the front door, the phone was ringing. I hurried to pick it up, knowing that Mum wouldn’t bother. My jaw was tight as I lifted the receiver; the last thing I wanted was to talk to anyone else that day, but I couldn’t ignore the insistent shrill of the phone the way Mum could. It was bound to be a sales call anyway.
‘Hello?’
‘Sarah?’ The voice on the other end was warm, full of concern. ‘Are you all right, dear?’
‘I’m OK, Aunt Lucy,’ I said, and the tension in my body eased as I sat down on the bottom step of the stairs. Aunt Lucy was Mum’s older sister. There were only three years between them, but she had always mothered Mum. In all the pictures of them as children, she is pushing Mum’s pram or dragging her around by the hand. Without complaint, without regard for herself, Aunt Lucy had been there to support Mum when Charlie disappeared. Out of all her friends she was the only person that Mum hadn’t managed to push away. If I didn’t have any other reason to love Aunt Lucy, it would be enough that she was as loyal as ever to her sister, no matter how difficult she had become. Aunt Lucy never gave up.
‘I thought of you as soon as I heard about that poor girl. How is your mother?’
I leaned around to check that the kitchen was empty. ‘I haven’t seen her yet. I didn’t see her this morning. I don’t even know if she knows what’s happened.’
‘Best not to upset her if she doesn’t.’ Aunt Lucy sounded worried. ‘I don’t know how she’s going to react. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the news. Where she was found – it’s very close to where you live, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and in spite of myself, my eyes were starting to water. I cleared my throat. ‘Jenny went to Edgeworth School. She was one of my students, Aunt Lucy.’
Oh, and I found the body, by the way
. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words out loud.
She gasped. ‘I didn’t realise you knew her. How dreadful. That’s just going to make it worse for your mum, you know.’
I held the phone so tightly that the plastic of the receiver creaked in protest, discarding the first three things it occurred to me to say in response on the grounds that they would be too hurtful to my poor, well-meaning aunt. It wasn’t Aunt Lucy’s fault. We all spent our time worrying about how Mum was going to react to things, drawn into her emotional orbit by the enormous gravitational pull of her self-pity. I wanted to punish Aunt Lucy for thinking only of Mum, instead of the Shepherds or Jenny’s friends or even me. But I didn’t. In the end, I managed to keep most of the irritation out of my voice when I replied, the words a little stiff. ‘Obviously I won’t say anything to her that would upset her. I wouldn’t dream of mentioning the connection.’
There was a tiny pause before Aunt Lucy spoke again,
and
I felt like a heel. She knew me well enough to have noticed that I was annoyed, even if she didn’t know why. It wasn’t what she deserved.
‘How is your mother these days?’
‘About the same.’
A little hiss of sympathy and concern came down the wire and I smiled to myself, picturing Aunt Lucy sitting on the edge of her bed, a shorter version of Mum but with her hair and make-up immaculate; I thought she might sleep in her mascara. She always called from the bedroom to avoid disturbing Uncle Harry. He liked his quiet. I sometimes wondered if that was the reason they hadn’t had children, or if they just hadn’t been able to. I had never dared to ask. It had meant that she had been free to be a wonderful aunt to me – even, sometimes, a mother.
‘It’s not easy for you, is it?’ my lovely aunt said now, and as usual, I felt instantly consoled.
‘I don’t really see much of her, to be honest. I keep my distance.’
‘Have you given any more thought to moving out?’
I rolled my eyes.
What a great suggestion, Aunt L. Thanks for thinking of it
. ‘I don’t think this is the best time to bring it up, given everything that’s going on.’
Aunt Lucy snorted. ‘If you keep waiting for the right time, you’ll never leave. There’ll always be some good reason why you can’t. But really, the only thing that’s keeping you there is
you
.’
Good old Aunt Lucy, on a mission to rescue the last known survivor of the family catastrophe. She was the one who had encouraged me to use Mum’s maiden name instead
of
Barnes, to shield me from casual curiosity and speculation; she had produced stacks of university prospectuses during my last year in school and oversaw my applications. She had done everything in her power to keep me from going back home, degree and teaching qualification completed, to live with Mum. But it was my responsibility, whatever Aunt Lucy said.
A noise from behind me made me jump and I turned around. My mother, at the top of the stairs. Listening. ‘Mum,’ I exclaimed, running through my side of the conversation as far as I could recall it, checking for any possible offence.
‘You’ve got to let it go, Sarah. Forget about her,’ Aunt Lucy chirped, not quite up to speed on what was going on at my end of the line. ‘I love your mother very much, but she’s a grown woman and she has to live with the decisions she’s made. You have your own life to lead; you can’t let her have that too. And it’s bad for her to live there in a … a …
museum
. I’ve told her she should move up here, make a new life for herself. I’d look after her, you know. She’d be back on her feet in no time.’
‘Er, no, Aunt Lucy –’ I began, eyes trained on Mum. She was barefoot, wearing her nightie and an ancient, moth-perforated cardigan.
‘Lucy!’ Mum wobbled down the stairs towards me, hand out for the phone. ‘I wanted to talk to her.’ Her eyes weren’t quite focused, wavering from side to side, and I guessed that she was already a few drinks down, but she seemed fairly in control. I gave up the phone and stood up, murmuring something about getting dinner ready. As I
headed
for the kitchen, I heard her say: ‘Oh, Luce. Did you see the news? I just don’t know if I can bear it.’
I closed the kitchen door behind me, very softly, and stood in the middle of the room. My hands had balled themselves into fists and I forced myself to uncurl my fingers, one by one. I waited while the good-daughter part of my brain talked the bad daughter out of kicking the kitchen to pieces. It would have been too much to expect that Mum might think first of Jenny, or her parents. Of course, like everything else, this was all about her.
I ended up making beans on toast for dinner. There wasn’t much in the fridge. I’d have to go shopping, I had been forced to conclude, throwing out a sheaf of rubbery, yellowed celery and a bag of tomatoes that had liquefied in the crisper, but I couldn’t face it just then. Baked beans would do. Fortunately, perhaps, neither of us was particularly hungry. I picked at them, rock-hard in cloudy, congealing sauce, speckled with black where I had allowed them to burn to the bottom of the pan. I had been a bit distracted while I was cooking, understandably enough. Mum didn’t even pretend to eat. She just sat there, staring into space, until I decided dinner was over and picked up her untouched plate. ‘Go and watch some TV, Mum. I’ll wash up.’
She shuffled off into the sitting room. Before I turned on the tap, I heard the TV explode into life in the middle of an inane ad. It didn’t really matter to her what programme was on. It was just something to do while she took on board her daily calorific requirements in liquid form.
Washing up was a cheap form of therapy; I worked on the gungy saucepan until every trace of tomato sauce had come off, thinking about nothing in particular. I felt edgy, for no real reason. From the kitchen window, the garden was beginning to lose definition, merging into the darkness. It was a pearly evening, shaded in blue and purple, still and serene. Impossible to imagine that twenty-four hours earlier, I had been at the centre of a storm of activity, the police listening to what little I knew as if I and I alone held the secret to cracking the case. Impossible to come to terms with the fact that we had all arrived in the woods too late, that finding Jenny’s killer was a poor second-best to finding her alive. I dried my hands on a tea towel and sighed; I was feeling, I realised, depressed. Whether that was because I was on the sidelines – where I had wanted to be, after all – or because of deferred emotional fallout from the previous day, I couldn’t tell. And what did I want, anyway? Another opportunity to spar with DS Blake? Another moment in the limelight? The inside track on the case? I needed to get over myself and get on with my life, however dull a prospect that was.
My eyes were blurring with tiredness and I turned off the light, dragging myself towards the sitting room, and the evening news that was just starting. I sat down beside Mum on the sofa, deliberately sitting back against the cushions so she couldn’t see my face without turning her head. I wanted to be able to watch it in peace, without worrying about what she thought.
The titles rolled over a picture of Jenny, a school photograph that had been taken a couple of months earlier.
Tie
neatly knotted, as it never was in life, and hair pulled back in a tidy ponytail. A tight smile; the photographer had been annoying, I recalled – testy, treating the girls as if they were idiots. No one had liked him. I gazed at the image on screen, trying to reconcile it with what Blake had told me.
We could tell that she was four months pregnant
… but the face on screen was that of a child. And I knew that was the real Jenny, didn’t I? I had seen her almost every weekday since she arrived at the school; I had spoken to her hundreds of times. This wasn’t one of those cases where the picture released to the press lags behind the reality of a victim who had turned to drugs or rebellion before meeting their unlucky end. She had really looked like the sweet, good-natured child in the photograph. I had thought her innocent, untroubled, straightforward. How could I have been so wrong?
The grave, sober-suited anchorman gave a brief summary of what had been made public about Jenny’s death. The report opened with footage from the press conference: Vickers first, then the Shepherds themselves. The harsh lights from the cameras picked out the dark circles under their eyes, the lines bracketing Michael Shepherd’s mouth. I hoped it would prompt someone to contact the police, whatever Blake had said. The scene switched to show the reporter outside, the school behind her. I recognised her from the press conference; she had been sitting near the front. I had thought that she was attractive, with arched dark eyebrows, defined cheekbones and a wide mouth. Her red shirt and glossy black hair looked good on camera, too, vivid under the lights. Her voice was carefully modulated,
classless
, neutrally accented. I forced myself to listen to what she was saying.
‘So we now know the identity of the victim, Jennifer Shepherd, and we know how she died – but if the police know anything else, they aren’t telling us. There are questions about where she drowned and how she ended up in the woods not far from here, and of course the biggest question of all: who killed her?’
More pre-recorded footage appeared, this time showing the Shepherds walking into the school building, Valerie acting like a sturdy little icebreaker to make a path for them through the crowd. The reporter’s voiceover continued: ‘For the parents and Jenny’s family, a shattering ordeal. For her fellow students,’ and here the image changed to show a group of girls standing together, sobbing, ‘an alarming reminder that the world is a violent place. And for all who knew Jenny, a terrible loss.’ As she said the last three words, the scene changed again. I stared, open-mouthed, as I recognised Geoff Turnbull, his arms wrapped around a young woman with curly fair hair hanging down her back, a small, slender woman who looked distraught. Me. Every muscle in my body went into a spasm of pure embarrassment. Of all the shots they could have included, of all the emotive images they might have used, they had to choose that one. I remembered what I had been thinking; I had been frantic to escape. ‘Unbelievable,’ I mouthed silently, shaking my head. Mum gazed woodenly at the screen.