The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
28
September 2018
The police have cordoned off the woods again. The sight of the plastic ribbon fluttering in the late-summer breeze sends Kim back in time to the hazy, frazzled heat of that June afternoon last year, the weight of Noah in her arms, the sweat running down her back, the blinding white glamour of the Jacqueses’ house in Upley Fold, the cobalt blue of the swimming pool, the empty eyes of Megs and Simon, the stale smell of lunchtime rosé on their breath, the eager rustle of the sniffer dogs as they headed into the darkness of the woods. She shivers at the sight of it, but then straightens up and smiles when she sees DI Dom McCoy climbing out of his unmarked car.
‘Hi,’ she says.
‘Nice to see you, Kim,’ he replies. ‘Here we go again.’
She rolls her eyes and says, ‘Indeed we do.’
He leads her to a spot away from the cars, in the shade of a large tree. ‘The sign has gone. I went to view it with Miss Beck this morning and it’s been taken down. The nail is still embedded in the fence, but the sign has gone. However, thankfully, Miss Beck did think to take a photograph of the sign, so we have that to send out for analysis. She writes detective novels, apparently, so I guess her mind works like that.’
Kim raises an eyebrow. ‘Does she, really?’
‘Yes. I know. She doesn’t look the type – not exactly Agatha Christie, is she?’
Kim smiles. ‘No, not exactly.’
‘Anyway, we’ve sent the photo for handwriting analysis, et cetera. But it definitely looks to me like someone is actively trying to draw us back to the case. Someone who knew that a new head teacher was arriving. Someone who wanted the engagement ring to be uncovered. Someone, it feels like, who wants to play games with us.’
‘But why would someone want to do that?’
Dom sighs. ‘People want to do all manner of things, Kim. If it wasn’t for people doing things that the likes of you and I would never do, I’d be out of a job. My theory, currently, is that this is someone who has known something all along whilst remaining in the shadows. Someone who knows what happened to Tallulah and Zach. And for whatever reason they’ve grown bored of the silence. Grown bored of nobody being caught.’
Kim flinches at his use of the word ‘caught’. ‘Caught’ suggests that someone has done something to her child. It suggests that her child is dead. And not once, not in all of the nearly fifteen months that have passed since she watched her daughter leave the house in cut-off denim shorts and a smock top, an uncertain smile on her face as she kissed her baby son goodbye and headed out into the soft warmth of a sunny summer night, not once has Kim imagined that possibility to be anything other than a sliver of a bad dream that she could easily chase away with the power of her own thoughts.
‘Annoyingly the school’s CCTV doesn’t extend this far. It cuts off just on the boundary of the residential area. Miss Beck and Mr Gray have CCTV on the front of their cottage, but not at the back. We’re going through footage now, but unless we have a picture of someone flagrantly walking across the campus holding a cardboard sign, a nail and a hammer, it’ll be a little bit of a needle in a haystack. But’ – he shrugs and smiles, hopefully – ‘you never know.’
Kim closes her eyes briefly and musters a smile.
‘Are you OK?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I feel sick.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ says Dom. He reaches out and touches her arm. ‘But maybe this is it, Kim,’ he says. ‘Maybe this is the turning point. A little flame of hope.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Maybe it is.’
She calls Ryan when she gets home and fills him in on the police activity in the woods. It’s lunchtime, but she’s not hungry. She puts her hand into a bag of Noah’s favourite cereal and eats the nuggets from the palm of her hand, like a pony eating sugar cubes. She checks the time. Three hours until she collects Noah from nursery. Dom told her that he’d have an update for her in the early evening. Her next shift at the Swan & Ducks is not until tomorrow. She’d been pleased when she’d seen the gap between shifts on her rota the previous week, she’d been looking forward to the time off, but now she wishes she was at work, her mind taken off the painful events unfolding behind Maypole House.
She opens up her laptop and types, not for the first time, the name ‘Scarlett Jacques’ into the search box. And once again, the internet shows her nothing. A defunct Instagram account. A defunct Facebook page. A defunct Twitter account.
She types in the name ‘Joss Jacques’ and gets nothing at all. She cannot for the life of her remember the name of Scarlett’s brother, the handsome boy who’d opened the front door to her all those months ago with a beer in his hand.
As she’s done at intervals over the past year, she tries calling Mimi on the number that remained on her phone after their conversation when Tallulah and Zach had disappeared. And as happens every time, it hits a dead tone. She sighs and runs her hands through her hair. The key players, all the people who were there that night, the people who might know what happened, have vanished. The only ones who remain are the nice boy Liam, Scarlett’s ex, and Lexie Mulligan, who comes and goes from the village for long intervals.
It can’t be a coincidence, she thinks now; it can’t be a coincidence that they’ve all gone, that they’ve abandoned houses, social media platforms, college places, friends. And now this: the deliberate presentation of the previously missing ring to the world, someone purposely restarting the engines of the investigation. But why? Why now? And who?
And as she thinks this, she thinks again of the nice boy called Liam, the big bear-like boy with the gentle West Country burr. She thinks of the fact that he is still here, he who had the most reason to leave. He’s still in the village, still at Maypole House, where he works as a teaching assistant. He would have known that there was a new head teacher arriving. He would have known about the entrance to the woods at the back door of the head teacher’s cottage. He was there the night that Zach and Tallulah disappeared. Maybe he found the ring? Maybe Zach dropped it and Liam found it and kept it for some reason?
Or maybe …? No. She shakes her head against the thought. Such a nice boy. There’s no reason why he would want to harm Zach or Tallulah. None whatsoever. But maybe he knows who did and maybe he’s tired of keeping the secret.
She switches on her phone and types in a message to Dom:
You should talk to Liam Bailey again.
A moment later Dom replies.
Good idea.