The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

3

June 2017

Zach’s mum is older than Kim. Zach is her youngest child; she has another four, all girls, all much older than him. Her name is Megs. She answers the door to Kim in combat shorts and a voluminous green linen top, sunglasses on her head, a patch of sunburn on the bridge of her nose.

‘Kim,’ she says. Then she turns immediately to Noah and beams at him. ‘Hello, my beautiful bubba,’ she says. She chucks him under the chin, and then glances back at Kim. ‘Everything OK?’

‘Have you seen the kids?’ Kim says, hitching Noah onto her other hip. She walked here without the pram, it’s hot and Noah is heavy.

‘Tallulah, you mean? And Zach?’

‘Yeah.’ She shifts Noah again.

‘No. I mean, they’re at yours, aren’t they?’

‘No, they went to the pub last night, no sign of them now and they’re not answering their phones. I thought maybe they might have come back to yours to crash.’

‘No, love, no. Just me and Simon here. Do you want to come in? We’re just out in the garden. We can try calling them again?’

In Megs’s back garden, Kim lowers Noah down on the grass next to a push-along plastic toy that he attempts to pull himself up on to. Megs takes out her phone and presses in her son’s number. Megs’s husband Simon nods at Kim curtly and then turns back to his newspaper. Kim’s always had a horrible feeling that Simon finds her attractive and that his offhand manner is his way of dealing with how uncomfortable this makes him feel.

Megs scowls and ends the call. ‘Straight through to voicemail,’ she says. ‘Let me call Nick.’

Kim throws her a questioning look.

‘You know, the barman from the Ducks? Hold on.’ She prods the screen of her phone with blue acrylic nails. ‘Nick, love, it’s Megs. How are you? How’s your mum? Good. Good. Listen, were you working last night? You didn’t happen to see Zach in there, did you?’

Kim watches Megs nod a lot, listens to her making receptive noises. She pulls a lump of earth from Noah’s hand just as he’s about to press it into his mouth and waits patiently.

Finally Megs ends the call. ‘Apparently,’ she says, ‘Zach and Tallulah went off after the pub to someone’s house, someone Tallulah knows from college.’

‘Yeah, I know that. But any idea who?’

‘Scarlett someone. And a couple of others. Nick seemed to think they were heading out of the village. They went in a car.’

‘Scarlett?’

‘Yes. Nick said she’s one of the posh kids from the Maypole.’

Kim nods. She’s never heard of a Scarlett. But then Tallulah doesn’t really talk much to her about college. Once she’s home, Noah is pretty much the only topic of conversation in the house.

‘Anything else?’ she asks, pulling Noah onto her lap.

‘That’s all he had, I’m afraid.’ Megs smiles at Noah and stretches her arms out towards him, but he curls himself closer to Kim and she sees Megs’s smile falter. ‘Should we be worried, do you think?’

Kim shrugs. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

‘Have you tried calling Tallulah’s friends?’

‘I don’t have any numbers for them. They’re all on her phone.’

Megs sighs and leans back into her chair. ‘It’s strange,’ she says. ‘If it wasn’t for the baby, I’d just assume they were sleeping something off somewhere, you know, they’re so young, and God knows the things I got up to at their age. But they’re both so devoted, aren’t they, to Noah. It just seems a bit …’

‘I know.’ Kim nods. ‘It does.’

Kim wishes that she and Megs were closer, but Megs never seemed to believe in Zach and Tallulah as a couple and then after Noah was born she backed off completely for a while, barely visiting Noah and acting like a distracted aunt when she did. And now she’s missed her moment with Noah, who recognises her but doesn’t know that she’s important.

‘Anyway,’ Kim says. ‘I’ll go and do some research into this Scarlett girl. See what I can dig up. But hopefully, I won’t need to. Hopefully, they’ll be home by the time I get back, looking sheepish.’

Megs smiles. ‘You know what,’ she says, brightly, in a tone of voice that suggests that really she just wants to get back to relaxing in the garden in the sun, that she really isn’t in the mood for worry, ‘I bet you anything they are.’

In Tallulah’s room, Kim rifles through the contents of her schoolbag. Tallulah is studying Social Care; she wants to be a social worker. Most of her coursework is done at home and she only has to go into college three times a week. Kim watches her at the bus stop from the front window sometimes, her fresh-faced baby in her casual college gear, her hair tied back, clutching a folder to her chest. Nobody would ever guess that she has a child of her own at home, she looks so young.

Kim finds a planner in the bag and flicks through it. It’s full of Tallulah’s dense, somewhat inelegant handwriting – she’d started off left-handed and forced herself to learn to write with her right hand to fit in when she was at primary school. There’s no point looking for phone numbers – no one writes down phone numbers any more – but maybe Scarlett’s name will appear on a class list or some such.

And there it is, glued down and folded up on the back inside cover of the planner: ‘Student Contacts’. Kim scans it quickly, her finger coming to rest on the name ‘Scarlett Jacques: Student Event Planning Committee’.

And there’s her email address.

Kim immediately starts to type a message:

Scarlett. This is Tallulah Murray’s mum, Kim. Tallulah hasn’t come home since going out last night and isn’t answering her phone and I wondered if you had any idea where she might be? A friend said she was with someone called Scarlett. Please call me on this number as soon as possible. Many thanks.

She presses send and then exhales and rests the phone on her lap.

Downstairs the front door clicks shut. It’s 2 p.m. and it’ll be her son Ryan home from work. He works at the grocer’s in the village every Saturday, saving up for his big summer holiday to Rhodes in August, his first without his mum, just with friends.

‘Are they back?’ he calls up the stairs to her.

‘Nope,’ she calls back down.

She hears him dropping his keys on a surface, throwing his trainers into the pile of shoes by the front door, then bounding up the stairs.

‘Seriously?’ he says. ‘Have they called?’

‘No. Not a word.’

She tells him about Megs calling Nick at the pub, and the girl called Scarlett and as she talks her phone rings with an unknown number.

‘Hello?’

‘Oh, hi, is this Lula’s mum?’

‘Yes, hi, this is Kim.’

‘Hi. It’s Scarlett here. I just got your email.’

Kim’s heart begins to race painfully, then skitter.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘Scarlett. Thank you. I just wondered—’

Scarlett cuts in. ‘They were at my house,’ she says. ‘They left at about three a.m. That’s all I can tell you.’

Kim blinks; her head rocks back slightly. ‘And were they … did they … say where they were going?’

‘They said they were going to get a cab home.’

Kim doesn’t like the tone of Scarlett’s voice. She has one of those clipped, chilly voices that tells of four-poster beds and bohemian private schools and gravel on the driveway. But she also sounds disinterested, as though talking to Kim is beneath her somehow.

‘And did they seem OK? I mean, had they had a lot to drink?’

‘I guess, yeah. Lula was sick. That’s why they left.’

‘She threw up?’

‘Yeah.’

Kim pictures her slight, kind girl, bent double over a flower bed, and her heart lurches.

‘And did you see them? Get into a taxi?’

‘No. They just left. And that was that.’

‘And – sorry – but where do you live, Scarlett? Just so that I can ask around the local cab companies?’

‘Dark Place,’ she replies, ‘near Upley Fold.’

‘Street number?’

‘No street number. Just that. Dark Place. Near Upley Fold.’

‘Oh,’ says Kim, drawing two rings around the words on the paper where she’s written them down. ‘OK. Thank you. And please, if you hear anything from either of them, will you give me a ring. I mean, I don’t know how well you know Tallulah …’

‘Not that well,’ Scarlett interjects.

‘Yes, well, she’s not the type just to disappear, not to come home. And she has a baby, you know.’

There’s a brief pause at the other end of the line. Then, ‘No. I didn’t know that.’

Kim gives her head a small shake, tries to imagine how Zach and Tallulah could have spent a whole night with this girl without once mentioning Noah. ‘Well, yes. She and Zach are parents. They have a son, he’s twelve months old. So not coming home is kind of a big deal.’

There’s another silence at the end of the line and then Scarlett says, ‘Right, well, yeah.’

Kim says, ‘Call me, please, if you hear anything.’

‘Yeah,’ says Scarlett. ‘Sure. Bye.’

And then she ends the call.

Kim stares at her phone for a moment. Then she looks up at Ryan who has been watching the phone call curiously.

‘Weird,’ says Kim. She relays the detail of the call to her son.

‘Shall we drive over there?’ he suggests. ‘To her house?’

‘Scarlett’s?’

‘Yeah,’ says Ryan. ‘Let’s go to Dark Place.’