The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

25

July 2017

June turns to July. Noah turns from twelve to thirteen months. Kim gives up her part-time job at the estate agency up the road. Ryan cancels his first parentless holiday to Rhodes. On the calendar on the kitchen wall, Kim sees her handwriting in the square for 17 July: ‘Last day term, Tallulah’. She weeps.

The police had finally got permission to search the Jacques house but they found nothing untoward and it turned out that the Jacqueses’ security system hadn’t been armed that night, that all the cameras were off. ‘My fault entirely,’ Joss Jacques said. ‘I never follow instructions properly. Drives Martin insane.’

Shortly afterwards, Scarlett and her family flew out to their house in the Channel Islands and never came back.

Towards the end of July, Kim cancels her August holiday to Portugal, to the cute little family friendly resort with the crèche that she and Tallulah had pored over pictures of, imagining Noah there, making new friends, maybe toddling by then, splashing in the baby pool with inflatable arm bands, a zip-up swimming costume and a sun hat. The lady on the phone is incredibly understanding when Kim explains her circumstances and grants her a full refund. Kim cries for half an hour afterwards.

Kim’s ex-husband, Jim, comes and goes; he stays for a few nights, as long as he can get off work, as long as his mother will let him leave her, and then he goes back to Glasgow again. In a way Kim would prefer it if he didn’t come at all. He brings nothing to the situation, no reassurance, no practical assistance, just extra food to buy and cups of tea to make and bedsheets to wash.

In early August he comes again and the moment he walks into the house, Kim knows that something’s up with him. He looks washed-out and tense.

‘I just saw that woman,’ he says, dropping his jacket and his bag onto the floor in the hallway. ‘The mother.’

‘Megs?’

‘Yeah. Whatever her name is. Do you know what she said to me?’

Kim lowers her eyes. She has tried her hardest to avoid Megs and Simon ever since the day of the police search. She crosses streets when she sees them, turns and walks out of shops. ‘Oh God,’ she says. ‘No, tell me.’

‘She said that she thinks Tallulah and Zach have eloped. Gone off for a nice extended honeymoon. She said, “It was all too much for them, having that baby so young. I can’t say I’m surprised.”’

Kim sighs and shakes her head. ‘And what did you say?’

‘I said she was mad. I said she needed her head tested.’

‘Was Simon there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Not a lot.’

‘Did you remind her that neither of them has used their bank accounts since the night they went missing?’

‘Yup. She said they were probably using cash.’

‘Right,’ says Kim, rolling her eyes. ‘Course they are. They’re probably rolling around in banknotes in the bridal suite at the Ritz fucking Carlton right now.’

‘I’m so angry,’ says Jim. ‘So angry that they can take it so lightly. When their son might have … you know …’ And then he starts to cry.

And finally, for the first time since Tallulah disappeared, Kim feels like she and Jim are in the same place, a place of shared horror and fury and rage, and she opens her arms and he comes into them and they hold on to each other for a long time and it’s the first time they’ve touched like that in over ten years and, for a moment, Kim is glad he’s there, glad to have someone to share this with, to stand in this corner of hell with her and hold on to her. But then she feels his cheek pass across her cheek and his groin a little too close to her thigh and his lips are suddenly on hers and she gasps and pushes him away, hard, so hard he almost loses his footing. He stares at her for a moment and she stares at him, her breath coming hard, and then she watches as he picks up his jacket and his bag, opens the front door and then closes it quietly behind him.

Soon it is September and Kim sees the square on the calendar in her kitchen in which she has written the words ‘Tallulah back to college’. She feels too numb to weep.

Noah turns fifteen months and can walk and talk. Ryan gets a girlfriend called Rosie with whom he spends all his time in his room. Kim runs out of money and has to take out a bank loan.

DI McCoy calls occasionally with updates which seem much more like they should be called downdates. Each time he speaks to her it becomes clearer and clearer that they have nothing to go on. The tyre prints on the driveway outside Dark Place belong to Lexie Mulligan’s car. CCTV footage of the main roads in and out of Upfield Common and environs show nothing. Zach’s employers say he was a good lad. Tallulah’s college says she was a great girl. A sea of blank faces, shaken heads. Nobody has an explanation for what might have befallen them.

Kim is haunted constantly by the image of Zach gripping Tallulah’s arms in the snug at Scarlett’s house that midsummer’s night and the sparkly ring in the pocket of his jacket. She goes to Tallulah’s room sometimes, to search again and again for the thing that will open up the mystery to her, dislodge the logjam. But she finds nothing and months pass.

Soon it is June again and Noah turns two and has his first haircut. On the anniversary of Tallulah’s disappearance Kim leads a candlelight procession through the village in an attempt to get some more publicity for her missing girl, in an attempt to get people to care again. Megs and Simon leave the village to live closer to two of their adult daughters who have both recently had babies. They don’t say goodbye. Kim gets a place for Noah at the nursery school in the church hall at St Bride’s for four days a week and she gets a job at the Swan & Ducks doing the lunchtime shifts. She pays off her bank loan. Ryan and Rosie split up and Ryan gets a new girlfriend called Mabel who has a flat in Manton and he moves in with her. And this is now Kim’s life: dropping Noah at nursery, shifts at the pub, collecting Noah from nursery, shopping, cooking, eating. She doesn’t go out now on Friday nights because she has no one to sit with Noah. She drinks wine alone and watches programmes about plastic surgery gone wrong and dogs having hip-replacement operations.

And still nothing changes.

Nothing happens.

Until one morning in early September, fifteen months after Tallulah disappeared, a woman appears at her door, a strikingly attractive woman with soft blonde hair and a pretty summer dress and this woman, her name is Sophie, has found a ring in the grounds of Maypole House and it’s Zach’s ring and it had, apparently, an arrow next to it suggesting that someone dig for it, that someone find it.

And there it is. At long last. A sign that someone out there knows something. A sign that Tallulah’s story is not yet over.

When the woman leaves, Kim picks up her phone and she scrolls through her contacts to one she has not used for months and months.

‘Hello, Dom, it’s Kim.’ (She stopped calling him DI McCoy some time ago, and he stopped calling her Ms Knox.) ‘There’s been a development.’