The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

38

September 2018

Sophie sits at her desk in the hallway of the cottage by the front door. The weird burning petrol smell in the hallway that’s been there since they moved in has finally started to fade and she’s moved her work area here where the window overlooks the college campus so she can watch the comings and goings in the school grounds. Shaun told her last night what the detectives had found buried in the flower bed outside the accommodation block; he said it was a lever of some kind, a piece of metal with a handle and a bent tip, very old, apparently. Nobody knows what it is or why it was buried there or by whom. It’s a total mystery.

But there’s another mystery preying on Sophie’s mind.

The cardboard sign had been spotted by Lexie Mulligan, Kerryanne’s daughter, just hours after she returned home from a trip to Florida. She claims to have seen it while standing on her mother’s terrace, vaping. Earlier today, Sophie had gone for a walk around the accommodation block and stared upwards to Kerryanne Mulligan’s terrace and felt a jolt in the pit of her stomach at the stark realisation that the terrace was far too low down to see across the flower bed to the spot where the cardboard sign had been left, and she’d known immediately that, for some reason, Lexie had been lying.

Sophie flips open the lid of her laptop, now, and googles Lexie Mulligan. She clicks the link to her Instagram account, which is called @lexiegoes. Lexie looks very different in her photos to how she looks in real life. In real life she is attractive, but has a certain flatness to her features, a lack of delicacy, but in these shots she looks like a model. There she is in a black satin dressing gown printed with roses, cross-legged and sipping a cocktail on her Florida balcony with the backdrop of a heart-shaped swimming pool. The accompanying text is a thinly veiled promotion for the hotel, and is full of hashtags relating to the hotel and its parent company. Sophie glances at the top of the page and sees that Lexie has 72,000 followers. She assumes that the hotel was a freebie as recompense for the publicity and she assumes that with that many followers (Sophie herself has 812) Lexie must get lots of freebies and lots of pay-outs from the businesses she promotes and she wonders why a grown woman with what looks like a great career is still living with her mum in a tiny flat in a boarding school in Surrey.

As she thinks this she glances again through the window and sees Lexie herself striding across the campus. She’s wearing patterned leggings and a black hoodie and her hair is in two plaits. She has a carrier bag that looks like the ones they give you at the Co-op and she looks a million miles from the girl in the Instagram posts. Sophie watches her as she heads towards the accommodation block. A few minutes later she sees the door open on to Kerryanne’s terrace and Lexie appears with a mug of tea. She gazes out across the campus and into the woods beyond for a moment, before turning and heading back indoors.

For some reason there is something unsettling about the way she does this, something strangely forensic. Sophie glances down at Lexie’s Instagram feed again and scrolls downwards and downwards, through Cuba, Colombia, Quebec, Saint Barts, Copenhagen, Belfast, the Hebrides, Beijing, Nepal, Liverpool, Moscow. Her head spins with the breadth of Lexie’s travelling. She keeps scrolling until she gets to something more familiar: it’s Lexie in front of the beautiful main doors to the school. Behind her the light from the stained glass in the reception area falls into coloured puddles on the tiled floor. She’s wearing an ankle-length fake-fur coat and a green woollen hat with a furry bobble. By her side is a pair of huge suitcases. The caption says, Home sweet home.

Sophie does a double take. She scrolls through the comments and sees that Lexie’s followers are under the impression that these are the doors to her house. That this is her home. And Lexie does nothing to correct these misapprehensions. She lets her followers believe that yes, this is where she lives.

Sophie sees a comment from @kerryannemulligan:

And your mummy is so happy to have you back!

She blinks. Kerryanne appears to be supporting the illusion that Lexie lives in a Georgian mansion.

She’s about to start scrolling deeper into Lexie’s feed when she hears a knock at the back door. She closes her laptop and walks through the cottage. She calls out hello.

‘Hi, Sophie, it’s me, Liam.’

Sophie’s breath catches. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Hi. Just one minute.’

She checks her reflection in the wall mirror and pulls her hair away from her face. Then she opens the door and greets Liam with a smile.

He stands before her clutching a novel in his hands.

She glances down and sees that it is her book, the first of the series, the one she wrote when she was still a teaching assistant, the one she had no idea anyone would ever actually read. And now here it is, being held in the good, strong hands of a handsome boy called Liam and her words, she realises with a jolt, have been inside his head.

‘I’m really sorry to disturb you,’ Liam says, breaking into her train of thought, ‘but I finished your book, last night. And I just – I loved it. I mean, I really, really loved it. And I just wondered, if you had a minute, I’d love to ask you a question about it. But I can come back another time if you’re busy?’

She stares at him for a second; then she shakes her head a little and says, ‘Oh. Thank you. I wasn’t expecting … I mean, yes, sorry. Please come in.’

He follows her into the kitchen and pats the spine of her book against the palm of his free hand a couple of times. ‘I won’t keep you. I just, er … But your book, there was something I wanted to ask you. Susie Beets. Is she you?’

Sophie blinks. It’s not the question she was expecting.

‘I mean,’ he continues, ‘you have the same initials. And she’s blonde and in her thirties and comes from south London and used to be a schoolteacher.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘No. She’s not me. She’s more like a really good friend. Or the sister I never had.’ It’s a stock answer, but she continues: ‘If anything, Tiger has more of my personality traits and opinions in him.’

‘Really?’ says Liam, his face lighting up. ‘Wow. That’s so interesting. Because, I don’t know, I felt like I was reading about you, when I pictured everything in my head; I just saw you doing everything that Susie does. Even down to your shoes.’

‘My shoes?’

They both glance down at her feet. She’s wearing white trainers, as she nearly always does.

‘I mean, you never describe her shoes, but I pictured her in white trainers. Because that’s what you wear.’

Sophie doesn’t quite know how to respond. ‘Do I not describe her shoes?’ she asks.

Liam shakes his head. ‘No. Never.’

‘Well,’ she says, slightly breathlessly. ‘Thank you for pointing that out. Next time I describe what she’s wearing I will put in a description of her shoes, just for you.’

‘Seriously?’ he says.

‘Yes. Seriously.’

‘Wow. And which book would that be in? Are you writing one now?’

She glances behind her towards her laptop on the desk in the hallway. ‘Well, technically, yes. But I haven’t written a word since I moved here, to be truthful. Despite my best intentions.’

‘Writer’s block?’

‘Well, no, not strictly. Writer’s block is a serious psychological malaise. It can last for years. Forever in some particularly tragic cases.’

‘So why do you think you haven’t been able to write?’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Lots of reasons. But mainly, I think, because of finding that ring. And now all the other stuff going on.’

Liam nods. ‘It’s all a bit freaky, isn’t it?’ He taps her book against the palm of his other hand again and steps from one foot to another. He seems a little anxious. ‘I guess it’ll all become clear eventually. I wonder what they’ll uncover next. Maybe there’s someone out there, as I’m talking to you, burying another little surprise for someone to uncover.’

‘Like Easter eggs.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I suppose they are. I just …’ He stops tapping the book and rubs the back of his neck with his free hand. ‘I just don’t get it. I don’t get any of it. If someone knows what happened to those kids, then why the hell don’t they just go to the police and tell them?’

‘Because maybe they had something to do with it?’

She sees him shudder slightly. ‘Freaks me out,’ he says. ‘Really freaks me out. Anyway …’ He appears to reset himself. ‘I’d better let you get on. I just wanted to ask you that. About Susie Beets. About the shoes.’ He taps the book one more time against his hand and then turns and heads towards the back door.

After he’s gone, Sophie goes back to her desk and sits for a while, imagining handsome Liam, alone in his room, reading her book. She tries to remember the content of the book, but can’t. She goes to her bedroom to find the packing box that has her P. J. Fox books in it. She slices through the tape and burrows through the contents until she finds the one she’s looking for: the first in the series. Perched on the edge of the bed, she flicks through the pages, skimming them with her eyes. And that’s when she sees it. The thing that’s been hovering in her subconscious since the day she arrived. She flattens the two sides of the book and she reads:

Susie opened the creaky gate and peered up and down the high street. It was just getting dark and the wet pavements were glowing warm amber in the streetlight. She pulled the sides of her furry coat together across her body and was about to head back out into the night when she saw something from the corner of her eye, in the flower bed to her left. It was a flap of cardboard, nailed to the wooden fence. In black marker, someone had scribbled the words ‘Dig Here’, with an arrow pointing downwards into the soil …