The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
10
August 2018
Sophie and Shaun arrive at Kerryanne’s apartment at eight o’clock that evening, clutching a cold bottle of wine. The apartment has glass sliding doors almost the full width of her living room facing directly towards the setting sun. It’s hot and stuffy; a large chrome fan plugged into the wall provides a little relief.
‘Sorry,’ she says to Sophie and Shaun, ‘it gets so hot in here on a sunny day, the heat gets trapped. Come,’ she says, ‘we can sit on the terrace.’
There’s a wickerwork sofa on her terrace and a table set with crisps in bowls and wine glasses and a candle in a jar.
Sophie sits down first, followed by Shaun. The view across the woods is beautiful; the sky is turquoise, streaked with coral, a half-moon is just emerging from the shadows.
‘This is lovely,’ says Sophie. ‘Like a different world to the cottage.’
‘Yes, the cottage is lovely, but you don’t get the views. But then again, you don’t get the heat either.’ She pours wine into the three glasses and raises hers to Shaun. ‘Cheers,’ she says. ‘To my fifth head teacher! And to you, too, Sophie, my first head teacher’s significant other!’
‘Are we the first unmarried couple?’ Sophie asks.
‘You are, yes.’
‘Is it a scandal?’ asks Sophie.
‘Oh God, no. Maybe twenty years ago eyebrows would have been raised. But not now. I don’t think anyone cares about these things any more, do they? And actually, Jacinta Croft – your predecessor, Shaun – she arrived married, but left single. Her husband did a runner. One of those “popping out for a pint of milk” scenarios. No one ever found out why. That’s pretty much why she left, because of the scandal of it. So no, you two will not cause any wagging tongues, I can promise you that.’
They chat for a while about Shaun’s first day at work, about the school he used to teach at in Lewisham, about the differences between the two areas, the two schools. Then Kerryanne turns to Sophie and says, ‘Peter Doody tells me that you’re a writer, Sophie? Detective novels, he said.’
‘Yes.’ Sophie smiles. ‘Though I doubt you’d have read them. They’re quite niche. I’m big in Scandinavia.’ She laughs the laugh she always laughs when she has to explain to people why they’ve probably never heard of her.
‘I told my daughter about you,’ Kerryanne says. ‘She’s the reader in the family. Not me. I think she might even have ordered one of your books. What are they called again?’
‘The series is called The Little Hither Green Detective Agency. I write under the name P. J. Fox.’
‘I tell you what,’ she says, ‘if you want any inspiration for your books, I could tell you some stories about this place. I mean, I could tell you some really, really hair-raising stuff. We had the police here twice last year alone, trawling those woods for missing people.’
Sophie thinks of the abandoned mansion beyond the woods. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘What happened?’
Kerryanne glances across at Shaun and says, ‘Hm. Probably a bit indiscreet. Maybe not.’
But she throws Sophie a sideways glance that tells her there’ll be another time.
The following day, Sophie gets up with Shaun at 6 a.m. and they breakfast outdoors together, the golden rays of another beautiful late-August day strobing through the trees and across the tablecloth.
‘What will you do today?’ asks Shaun, collecting the plates and cutlery and piling them together. ‘Will you go for another epic walk?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not today. I thought I might explore the village today. Maybe get some lunch at the infamous Swan & Ducks.’
‘I’ll try and join you,’ says Shaun.
‘That would be very nice indeed.’
After Shaun leaves, Sophie spends some time unpacking boxes in the cottage. Then she makes herself another cup of coffee and takes her laptop to the kitchen table and replies to some emails. She is flying to Denmark in just over a week’s time, to attend a crime festival as P. J. Fox, and there are some last-minute additions to her itinerary, including an interview with a TV station which means she’ll want to do something about her hair before she goes. She thinks maybe she’ll take a day trip into London, visit her stylist there, maybe have lunch with someone, see if her publishers would like her to visit. She feels herself get quite excited at the prospect.
After a while she switches screens to her latest manuscript. She hasn’t looked at it for days. Life has been nothing but packing and unpacking and saying goodbye and saying hello. She hasn’t been in the right headspace to get any work done. But now she has no excuse.
The tail end of her last paragraph stares at her blankly, something she wrote in another world when she was a Londoner, when she had a boyfriend who taught at a sprawling Lewisham secondary school, when moving to Surrey was a date in her diary, rather than her reality. She stares back at it for a moment, then scrolls upwards through the rest of the chapter trying to slot herself back into ‘London Sophie’ but just can’t do it.
Instead, she flicks screens to her browser and types in Maypole House and missing person. She sets the filter to news and clicks on the first link in the results:
Local Teen Parents Remain Missing After Night Out
Upfield Common resident, Kim Knox, 39, has reported the disappearance of her daughter, 19-year-old Tallulah Murray and her boyfriend Zach Allister, also 19, who have not been seen since the early hours of Saturday morning. Murray and Allister, who have a 1-year-old son together, spent the previous evening at the Swan & Ducks pub, before taking a lift with a local friend to a private home near Upley Fold, where they partied with friends, former students at Maypole House, until 3 o’clock in the morning. According to the same friends, they left to catch a taxi home but never returned. If anyone has any information about their whereabouts, please contact detectives at Manton Police Station.
Sophie feels a small chill of something ripple up and down her spine. She clicks through the rest of the links, looking for an update, but can’t find anything, just varying versions of the same report that the local paper carried.
She then googles Kim Knox, Upfield Common and a few hits come up, including a couple of links to a village newsletter called the Upfield Gazetteer. One article in the newsletter is about a vigil held in June, marking the one-year anniversary of Tallulah and Zach’s disappearance. There is a photograph attached to the article: an attractive woman with dark, mid-length hair, wearing a long floral dress with buttons down the front and a pair of black army boots, holding the hand of a very small boy, also dark-haired, clutching a single pink rose. A teenage boy in a dark shirt and combat trousers stands close to the woman; he bears a strong resemblance to her. Behind them is a sea of faces, a lot of young people.
Kim Knox, 40, of Gable Close, Upfield Common, led a candlelit procession through the village on Saturday night to mark the first anniversary of the disappearance of her daughter, Tallulah Murray, who would have been 20 in March. Also commemorated during the ceremony, was Zach Allister, Tallulah’s partner and father of her son, who would also have turned 20 in March. The procession began on the common and concluded at St Bride’s Chapel, where songs of hope and remembrance were sung by a choir from Tallulah’s old school, Upfield High, where she was a student until 2016. Tallulah was studying Social Care at Manton College of Further Education when she disappeared in June of last year after a night at a friend’s house.
The other link takes Sophie to an article from three months before that, a rose-tree burial ceremony on the date of Tallulah’s twentieth birthday in March.
The rose tree, an Australian shrub rose called ‘Tallulah’, has been planted behind the bus stop on the common, where Kim Knox used to watch her daughter as she waited for the bus to take her to college.
Sophie turns away from the screen. She feels a chill of raw emotion pass through her at the thought of a woman holding back a curtain, peering across the street, looking for the shadow of her missing child, and seeing roses instead.