The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
13
August 2018
Sophie leans down to read the inscription on a small wooden plaque beneath the rose bush behind the bus stop. It says: ‘Tallulah Rose, until we meet again.’
She stands straight again and glances around herself, looking for the window at which poor Tallulah’s mum might have stood, watching her girl waiting for her bus to school. There are no houses directly opposite the bus stop, but there is a small cul-de-sac just off the other side of the common, very close to Maypole House. From here Sophie can see the glint of sunlight off windows.
She crosses the common again and heads towards the cul-de-sac. It consists of about six houses, set in a half-moon around a small patch of green, cars parked half up on the pavements to make room for other cars to squeeze past. The houses themselves are small post-war dwellings, with rendered fronts and wooden porches. She turns and looks back across the common, trying to ascertain which of the houses might have a view of the bus stop. Two of them appear to. One of them seems quite run down; the other looks bright and modern, with cacti in copper pots in the window and a brown leather sofa covered in brightly coloured cushions just visible against the back wall.
The article said that, on the night they went missing, Tallulah and her boyfriend had been drinking at the Swan & Ducks, the local gastropub that had been recommended to Sophie and Shaun by Peter Doody the day they arrived. Sophie carries on circling the common until she finds herself outside the pub. It’s very attractive, freshly painted in heritage shades of grey, a gravelled front area with round wooden tables and chairs, huge cream parasols and chalkboard signs advertising the menu and the beer selection.
She pushes open the door. It’s classic gastropub: tongue and groove, funky abstract art on the walls, designer wallpaper, reconditioned floorboards and halogen spots. The woman behind the bar is forty-something, attractive in an unconventional way. She’s wearing a fitted black cap-sleeved T-shirt with black trousers and a bartender’s apron tied tight around her waist. Her dark hair is tied back in a ponytail. As she approaches Sophie she rests her hands against the bar, fixes a smile and says, ‘What can I get you?’
‘Oh, just a cappuccino please. Thank you.’
‘Coming right up.’
She turns towards the big chrome coffee machine and Sophie notices the tattoos on the undersides of her arms. At first she thinks they might be burns or scars, then she sees that they are baby footprints.
‘Your tattoos are really cute,’ she says. ‘The baby feet.’
The woman turns and Sophie sees her smile fade a little. She glances down at one of her arms and touches the image of the foot gently with her other hand. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Thanks.’
She carries on making the coffee; the hiss and splutter of the machine is deafeningly loud and Sophie doesn’t attempt to continue the conversation. Her gaze drops to the woman’s feet while she waits. She’s delicately built but wearing somewhat incongruous scuffed leather army boots. Something twitches in Sophie’s memory. She’s seen those army boots before, recently, really recently.
And then she remembers: the pictures in the village newsletter of Tallulah’s memorial procession – the mother had been wearing army boots, with the pretty floral dress.
The woman turns, with Sophie’s cappuccino in her hand. ‘Chocolate on top?’ she asks, with aloft the canister.
And Sophie sees that it is her. It’s Tallulah’s mother. Kim Knox.
For a moment she is silent.
‘Yes? No?’ says the woman, waving the canister.
‘Sorry, yes. Please. Thank you.’
The woman sprinkles the chocolate powder over the coffee and slides it to her. Sophie feels inside her handbag for her purse, barely able to make eye contact with Kim Knox, feeling as though she’s about to be caught out in her snooping around. She pays using her contactless card and takes the coffee to a small purple velvet armchair set next to a low brass coffee table. From here she watches Kim Knox restocking the shelves with Fevertree tonic waters. She has an odd energy about her; she looks as if she weighs no more than nine stone, but her movements are those of someone heavier. A young man walks into the pub and heads towards the gap in the bar. ‘Hi, Nick,’ she calls after him, as he passes through.
He calls out, ‘Morning, Kim,’ before disappearing through a door at the back of the bar.
So it’s definitely her. Kim Knox.
The man reappears a minute later tying an apron around his waist and then rolling up his shirt sleeves. ‘Want a hand?’ he asks her.
‘Sure,’ she says, scooting along a little to give him space.
Sophie drops her gaze and pretends to be looking at her phone.
She wonders how long Kim’s worked here. She wonders if she was working here the night her daughter disappeared. There’s so much she wants to know, wants to ask. She feels the tendrils of her fictional south London detective duo, Susie Beets and Tiger Yu, start to thread their way through her psyche.
When she’s writing, her brain comes up with mysteries and Susie and Tiger have to solve them for her; that’s how it works. And Susie and Tiger would have no qualms about approaching this sad, pretty woman and asking her questions about what happened to her daughter; they would just do it, because it was their job. But it’s not Sophie’s job. She’s not a detective. She’s a novelist and she has no right to invade this woman’s privacy.
When she leaves a few minutes later, Kim Knox smiles. ‘Have a good day,’ she calls out, leaning to collect Sophie’s empty coffee cup from the bar where she left it.
‘Yes,’ says Sophie. ‘You too.’
Sophie hauls an old bike out of the shed attached to their cottage, rids it of cobwebs and dead leaves and cycles out towards Upley Fold.
After a hazy morning the sun is now starting to break through the cloud. The hedgerow smells of cow parsley and dead straw and the air is heavy and warm. She dismounts the bike outside the house and crunches across the gravel driveway towards the front door, where she cups her hands to the glass and peers into the hallway. There’s a small fan of mail spread across the front-door mat and a gap under the front door with a brush strip attached to the underside. She delves into her rucksack, her hands searching for the wire coat hanger she’d put in there earlier for this very eventuality. She gets down onto her knees and slides it through the brush strips. It hits something. She gets lower to the floor and manipulates the hanger and the object until she thinks it might be close enough for her finger to locate it and then tugs it gently and there it is: an envelope.
It’s a letter addressed to Mr Martin J. Jacques. She breathes a sigh of relief. Jacques. An unusual name. A good name to put into Google. She takes a photograph of the letter and then gently pushes it back under the door.
The time is approaching eleven o’clock. She has another few minutes, she reckons, to snoop about, before heading back to the village for her lunch with Shaun. She circles the house, heading through the pretty wrought-iron gate with the arched top that leads to the back garden and the swimming pool. She peers through windows. She goes into a greenhouse and lifts up featherlight plant pots, watches spiders scuttling into corners. There’s a small rusty trowel on the wooden bench and she slips it into the outside pocket of her rucksack. She has had an idea.
The arrow on the piece of cardboard nailed to the fence points down and slightly to the left. She has no idea if ‘Dig Here’ is a precise instruction, or a general suggestion, but she starts digging as close to the tip of the arrow as she can. She has butterflies as she digs; her blood is filled with the adrenaline of dread.
Fourteen months ago two teenagers went missing somewhere between Dark Place and the village, possibly somewhere in these woods. The sign that appeared so innocuous two days ago, the sign she’d thought a leftover part of a team-building exercise or a treasure trail, the sign that she still feels so strongly she has seen somewhere else, at some other juncture of her life, now carries a shadow of potential horror. Might it be a shred of torn clothing? A tiny shard of bone? A hank of hair tied in faded satin ribbon? She holds her breath as the trowel goes deeper and deeper into the summer-dry earth. Every time it hits a stone she inhales again.
Nine minutes later the tip of her trowel dislodges something small and hard. A dark cube. She pulls it out of the ground with her fingertips and dusts it down. There’s a gold logo stamped on to it, impossible to ascertain what it is exactly, and as her fingers feel around it she realises that it is a ring box.
She pulls it apart with her thumbs.
Inside is a perfect, gleaming, golden engagement ring.