The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
24
February 2017
Tallulah stares down the long driveway, through the elaborate metal gates towards Scarlett’s house where it emerges from a crown of trees at the top of a small hillock. It looks like it could still be another mile away. She squeezes her bike through the narrow pedestrian gap to the side of the gates and then remounts and cycles onwards.
She doesn’t know what she’s doing or why she’s doing it. She just feels like the walls of her life are closing in on her and she needs to find a gap just for a minute, just so she can breathe.
As she draws closer to the house she gasps quietly to herself. It’s magical, the sort of house that you have a really intense dream about and then wake up the next morning feeling sad that it’s not real.
She leans her bike against a wall and crunches across white gravel towards the front door.
For a moment she considers calling Scarlett, giving her a chance to pretend to be out or to hide. But then she looks at the time and sees it’s only an hour until Zach gets back from football and she’s made it all the way and she just really, really wants to see her. She presses the doorbell and clears her throat and touches her hair and clears her throat again and a moment later she hears a female voice, calling, ‘Coming!’ And it’s her, it’s Scarlett, and she’s getting closer to the door and she’s opening the door and Tallulah realises she has been holding her breath and as the door opens and Scarlett’s gaze takes her in there is a tiny fraction of a moment where someone should say something but nobody does and Tallulah almost says, I should go. But before the words leave her mouth Scarlett gives her head a small shake, blinks and says, ‘Oh my God. It’s Tallulah from the bus.’
A large dog ambles into view. It’s the dog from Scarlett’s self-portrait in the art block at college. It’s gigantic.
‘Hi,’ says Tallulah. ‘I’m sorry to just turn up, but I was chatting with Mimi and she said if I saw you in the village I was to say hello and tell you to get in touch and then I did see you in the village but you drove off before I could say anything and the girl in the shop, I kind of know her and she told me where you lived and I just kind of thought … I could come and pass on the message in person. Kind of.’
‘You emailed me, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, after I saw you in the village.’
‘And I didn’t reply.’
‘No. But that’s fine. Totally fine, I wasn’t expecting you to.’
‘How did you get here?’
Tallulah turns her head towards the bike. ‘I, er, cycled.’
The dog has walked past Scarlett and is now standing right next to Tallulah, panting loudly. ‘Can I …?’ she asks. ‘Can I stroke him?’
‘Of course you can. My God. Yes. He lives for being stroked by strangers. He’s a total whore.’
Tallulah presses her hand into the dog’s thick fur and smiles.
‘I remember,’ says Scarlett. ‘You like dogs. You said you wanted one. Did you get one?’
Tallulah shakes her head and crouches down to be face to face with the dog. ‘What’s his name?’ she says, scruffing under his huge jowls.
‘Toby.’
‘Yeah, he looks like a Toby.’
For a moment it feels like there’s nothing left to be said. Tallulah straightens up and says, ‘Anyway. That was all really. Just Mimi says to stop being a fucking dick and to let everyone know how you are because they’re worried about you.’
She glances at Scarlett, assessing her response to the message. She sees that Scarlett looks thinner than ever, that her hair has grown out into surprisingly dark roots, that she’s dressed less theatrically than she used to dress for college, in plain-cut jeans and an old sweatshirt with the words ‘Guernsey Yacht Club’ and a little red and white flag printed on it. ‘Wanna come in?’ she says.
‘Er, yeah. Sure. If that’s OK with you?’
‘It’s OK with me.’
‘I can’t stay long, I need to be home by two. So …’
‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ says Scarlett. ‘Everyone’s out so it’s nice and quiet.’
Tallulah follows Scarlett through the hallway and into an extraordinary kitchen which looks like a glass box stuck on to the back of the house. Even on this overcast day it is dazzlingly bright, a dozen halogen lights sparkling off the glossy work surfaces and cabinets. A delicate wooden table surrounded by grey velvet dining chairs sits by a set of huge sliding doors that open out on to a sun terrace and, just beyond, what looks like a swimming pool with the cover drawn over it. Overhead is a Perspex chandelier dripping with red beads. The walls are white-painted brickwork hung with abstract canvases. At the other end of the glass box is a seating area with an electric-blue L-shaped sofa and the biggest plasma screen Tallulah has ever seen.
The dog follows closely behind Tallulah and then collapses at her feet when she sits down.
‘He loves visitors more than he loves his own family. It’s pathetic really,’ says Scarlett, filling up the kettle and switching it on.
Tallulah smiles and says, ‘He’s lovely. You’re really lucky.’ There’s a beat of silence. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Have you got a message for me to send back to Mimi and that lot?’
Scarlett, who has her back towards her, sighs. ‘I don’t want anything to do with Mimi. Or Roo. Or any of them. So no. Just don’t tell them you’ve seen me.’
‘Oh,’ says Tallulah. ‘Did you fall out?’
‘Well, no. I just …’ She pulls open the fridge door and takes out a bottle and says, ‘Milk?’
Tallulah nods.
‘It’s complicated,’ Scarlett continues. ‘I’d rather not talk about it.’
She finishes making their tea and brings the mugs over to the table.
‘So, how are things at college?’ she asks Scarlett.
Tallulah shrugs. ‘Boring.’
‘What is it you’re studying again?’
‘Social Science and Social Work.’
‘So, you want to go into social work then?’
‘Yeah.’ She nods and picks up her tea. ‘That’s the plan.’
‘Well, that’s very worthy. You’re clearly a very nice person.’
Tallulah laughs nervously. ‘What about you? What do you want to be?’
‘Dead, mainly,’ Scarlett replies darkly. ‘Yeah. Dead would be good.’ Then she rallies quickly and says, ‘Do you want to see something amazing?’
‘Er, yeah? Sure?’ Tallulah replies uncertainly. She puts down her tea and gets to her feet. The dog lumbers up onto his feet too.
‘Now,’ says Scarlett, ‘seriously, you cannot tell a soul about this, OK? I mean, this is literally mind-blowing and I am literally the only person in the whole world that knows about it and in a minute you will be literally the second person in the world to know about it. Can I trust you?’
Tallulah nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Of course.’
Scarlett’s eyes stay on her for a moment, assessing her. Then she smiles and says, ‘Come on. This way.’
They wend their way through the house, through snugs and piano rooms and boot rooms and hallways and studies and dining rooms and sitting rooms and drawing rooms until they reach a small door set into the corner of what Scarlett refers to as the ‘Tudor wing’. The room is small and contains just a black lacquered desk, a brass standard lamp with a red velvet shade and a piece of modern art hanging from an ancient timbered wall. The door is wooden and has a latch opening.
‘So,’ says Scarlett, opening up the door and peering upwards. ‘This is the staircase to the turret room.’ She moves out of the way so that Tallulah can see. It’s a set of spiral stone stairs, very small, very narrow. They look like the sort of stairs tourists queue to go up in cathedrals and such.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘wow.’
‘Well, yeah, but that’s not the amazing thing. The amazing thing is this.’
Scarlett falls to her knees and pulls a strange tool from the back pocket of her jeans. It’s ancient-looking, slightly rusted, has a long handle with a kind of flat foot on the bottom which she inserts into the underside of the first step and then uses to lever away the stone from its setting. She carefully removes the piece of stone and sets it behind her. A cold draught blows through the hole and Tallulah shivers slightly.
‘I found this book,’ Scarlett is saying as she slides her hand into the open hole in the staircase. ‘A history of this house. And there was something in there about a secret tunnel. Like an escape tunnel. This wing was built during the English Civil War in 1643 and the architect was asked to include a secret tunnel in case the inhabitants needed to hide or run away. And’ – her face contorts as she tries to get hold of something inside the hole – ‘the plans were destroyed in a fire that burned down half of the building. In fact, that’s why it became called Dark Place, because of the black circle that surrounded it after the fire, all the charred wood.
‘So the house was abandoned and empty for nearly seventy years until a really cool young couple from London bought it, probably equivalent to hipsters of today, wanted a doer-upper, something with a bit of character. And they were the ones who attached the Georgian wing. It was seen as super super modern at the time, no one could quite believe their eyes; it was the talk of the village. Anyway, this couple had no idea where the tunnel was and spent years trying to find it and moved back to London when they were old without ever finding it and by the 1800s everyone just thought it was a myth. That it had never existed.
‘And then early in 2017, a young woman called Scarlett Jacques, who had nothing to do all day because she’d left college under a cloud and was depressed and incredibly bored, decided to make it her mission to find the tunnel. And finally, after many many days, she had a brainwave. What if?’ She pants slightly as she pulls hard at something in the hole, suddenly lifting the entire stone panel, removing it and putting it next to the first piece of stone. ‘What if,’ she continues, ‘the architect decided that the best place for an underground staircase was at the base of an overground staircase? And what if that weird metal thing that’s been hanging off a hook in the woodstore since the day we moved in, what if that might be the key to open the base.’ She leans back and brushes some hair from her face. ‘And lo and behold,’ she says to Tallulah, waving her arm across the opening, ‘she was fucking right.’
Tallulah’s mouth is hanging open. She stares into the hole and then up at Scarlett. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispers. The dog has been snuffling at the pieces of stone and now passes Tallulah to peer down the hole, sniffing the air loudly.
‘Want to come and have a look inside?’ says Scarlett, turning on the flashlight on her phone.
‘Erm, I’m not sure. I really need to get back. And I’m arachnophobic. Like, seriously. Full-blown panic attacks.’
‘Just come and see the room at the bottom of the steps. There’re no spiders there, I promise. It’s really cool. Come.’
An image passes through her subconscious, an image of her in a spider-filled tunnel, looking up at Scarlett, who cackles maniacally whilst pulling the stone cover back into place.
Tallulah told no one she was coming here. There’s nobody else in the house. All that’s here is her mother’s bike which Scarlett could easily dispose of. She could seal Tallulah up down there and no one would ever hear her and no one would ever know.
She thinks of Scarlett’s self-portrait in the art block at Manton, the cake knife with the blood on it, the handgun, the fresh beating heart on the plate, and she wonders about this girl whom she barely knows. Who is Scarlett Jacques? What is she?
But then she looks at Scarlett and sees the cool girl from college, the girl that everyone wants to be, and she’s looking back at Tallulah with a playful smile, saying, ‘Come on. I’m not going to eat you,’ and she follows her into the hole, her hands grasping on to damp brick walls as the steps lead downwards.