The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
35
September 2018
Noah falls asleep as soon as Kim puts him to bed. He’d been tetchy all evening. Kim can’t quite remember what her two were like at this age. Her memory has recalibrated the detail. She knows that one of them used to have tantrums in the supermarket and she suspects it was Tallulah, but that suspicion has been subverted over the past fifteen months because Kim cannot remember anything bad about Tallulah. She cannot remember beyond Tallulah’s upturned face in her bedroom as she painted black liquid wings on to her eyes before the Christmas party at college: the pale luminescence of her skin, the perfect upward slope of her nose, the pink of her rosebud lips, the fragile, barely noticeable beauty that had always felt like a secret just between the two of them. She can’t square that calm, glorious girl with the two-year-old girl screaming in supermarkets. They cannot be the same person, therefore she tends to imagine that these things hadn’t really happened or that it had been Ryan, in fact, or maybe somebody else’s child. Not hers. Not Tallulah.
But she has no such ghostly veils across her opinion of her grandson. She loves him, but oh, she finds him so very, very difficult to live with. She had not wanted a third child. She had been offered the opportunity; there’d been a man a year or so after she and Jim split up, a man who said he’d give her a baby and she’d been in her early thirties and Ryan had been about to leave primary school and it had felt, for a moment, like the right time to do it. But she hadn’t been able to face the prospect of the sleepless nights and the worry and the adding of another eighteen years on to the journey of motherhood. She’d imagined herself the age she is now, just forty, with two grown-up children and she’d liked the idea of it. So she’d said no to the nice man who’d offered her a baby and they’d gone the distance as lovers, and then he’d left when he realised he wanted more and that was that. She had specifically chosen not to have a third child and now she has one and he is dark and angry and she is tired all the time. All the time.
But for now he is asleep and they have crossed the bridge of another day together and her love for him is as complete as the love she has for the two children she gave birth to, especially now, when he is close but not awake, when she has twelve hours to be herself.
She opens a bottle of wine and pours herself a small glass. The cold kiss of it as it hits the bottom of her stomach is immediate and pleasurable. She takes another sip and picks up her phone, about to spend some time mindlessly scrolling through her Facebook feed. But just as her thumb hits the blue icon on her screen, it is obliterated by an incoming phone call.
Dom McCoy.
She clears her throat and presses answer.
‘Kim. It’s me. Dom. We’ve had a development. At Maypole House. Are you able to come over?’
Kim’s breath catches. ‘Erm. I just put the baby down. I’m alone. I don’t have anyone to ask to sit with him. Can you just tell me?’
There’s a beat of silence; then he says, ‘OK, Kim, give me five. Ten minutes. I’ll come over. Just stay put.’
The ten minutes turn to eighteen minutes before Dom’s shadow finally passes across the panes of glass in Kim’s front door. She opens the door before he’s rung the bell and leads him into the living room. While she’s been waiting, she’s tipped her wine back into the bottle and put it in the fridge. She’s plumped her cushions and put away some of Noah’s toys. She’s tied her hair back and put some socks on so that Dom won’t see her unpolished toenails.
‘How are you?’ Dom begins, taking the blue denim armchair he always takes when he comes to see Kim with updates.
‘I’m OK,’ she says. ‘Tired. You know.’
‘Yes,’ says Dom, ‘I completely empathise with that.’
He doesn’t wear a wedding ring any more. Kim had first noticed this about six months ago. And he’s lost weight. She stares at him eagerly, willing him to say something good.
‘Kerryanne Mulligan called us about an hour ago. Her daughter saw something in the grounds of the college, from her balcony. She went to investigate and found this.’ He turns his phone towards her and shows her a photo of what looks like exactly the same cardboard sign that the head teacher’s girlfriend had found nailed to her fence the week before.
‘What?’ she asks hoarsely. ‘What was it?’
He turns his phone back to himself and swipes left on the screen before turning it back to her. She stares at the image for a moment. It’s a lumpy object in a clear bag with writing on it. It doesn’t make any sense.
‘What is it?’ she asks.
‘Well,’ says Dom, ‘I was hoping you might be able to tell us that.’
She places her fingertips against the screen and pulls the image open. It’s a strange metal tool, with a bent end with a U-shape cut out of it, almost like a very small garden spade. ‘I don’t know what that is. I have no idea.’
She sees a flash of disappointment pass across Dom’s face. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘it’s gone to forensics, so hopefully they might have some kind of idea what it is. And in the meantime, we’re still waiting to hear back from the prints guys about the ring and the ring box, but I have to be honest, Kim, it’s not looking very optimistic there. And the handwriting analysis is back apparently, so I’ll be having a look at that first thing tomorrow. So, still lots to chew over.’
He smiles at her and she knows he’s trying to sound upbeat but she also knows that this isn’t panning out as he’d hoped it might because as much as it’s Kim whose daughter is missing, she also knows that not being able to solve this case has been deeply upsetting for Dom as well.
She musters a smile and says, ‘Thanks, Dom. Thank you for everything.’
‘I wish there was more for me to do,’ he replies. ‘There never seems to be enough for me to do. But this’, he says, tucking his phone into his pocket, ‘is better than nothing. Someone knows something and someone wants us to know what they know. So keep your ear to the ground, Kim. Keep your wits about you. If you hear anything from anyone, if anyone tells you they’ve seen something strange, let me know immediately. OK?’
He glances at her seriously and she smiles and says, ‘Sure,’ and for a moment she feels as though she might just open her mouth and add, ‘I have wine. Do you have time?’ but realises immediately that of course he doesn’t have time, that he’s in the middle of doing a job, that he has a car to drive home and a life to live, children to put to bed, and that he has done what he came here to do, and of course he doesn’t want to stay and drink wine with a tired, sad woman. So she gets to her feet too, and sees him to the door.
‘I’ll be in touch again, first thing tomorrow. Take care, Kim.’
‘Yes,’ she says, clutching the edge of the door, feeling the urgent pull of wanting to be close to another human being, wanting something more than just her and Noah and this house and all these unanswered questions, before closing the door behind him and immediately forcing her fist into her mouth to hold back her tears.