The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
42
September 2018
‘Hi, Dom. It’s me,’ says Kim. ‘I wondered if you’d had a chance to look at the link I sent you, to that girl on YouTube?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘Not yet. I’m really sorry. I’ll look at it now and get back to you. But we’ve had some good movement. We’ve finally tracked down Martin Jacques, Scarlett’s father. Or at least, we’ve got hold of his PA who keeps telling us that he’ll get back to us but he’s a bit tied up in Abu Dhabi. We’re still trying to trace the rest of the family. They were in Guernsey but apparently nobody’s seen them for a couple of weeks. But please believe me, Kim, we’re doing everything we can. Things are happening. Painfully slowly, in some cases, I’ll grant you that. But it just takes so long to get anything done these days, with all the government cuts, and when it’s a cold case, it takes even longer …’
When the bones are already icy cold, Kim thinks. When the blood is dried hard. When it’s too late to save anyone.
‘I’m pushing against it all as hard as I can for you, Kim. It’s all I’m doing. It’s all I’m thinking about. I swear.’
She hears a crack of emotion in his voice and feels it reverberate into her own psyche. She swallows it down and says, ‘Yes. Of course, Dom. I know you are. I know you are. I’m just so …’
‘Yes,’ says Dom. ‘Yes. I know.’
There’s a heat contained within their exchange, created from the energy of desperation and loss and frustration and misguided hope, but also from the intimacy that’s built up between the two of them as everything else has peeled away from them and the thing that unites them.
She sighs. ‘Thank you, Dom. Thank you for everything you’re doing.’
‘It’s my pleasure, Kim. Always.’
He ends the call and Kim stands for a moment, staring through the kitchen window at the trees at the end of her garden. She thinks of the skinny, sad girl talking to a camera in a room somewhere, a girl who knows something about the things that are currently taking place at Maypole House. And then, clear as though it was actually happening, she remembers that hot June afternoon, walking up to Dark Place, the trickle of sweat down her back, Ryan rocking Noah in his pushchair, the drops of pool water on Scarlett’s shoulder coalescing and collapsing, the handsome son with the beers in his hand, the brittle mother in the white sundress, the way Scarlett had been unable to make eye contact, but then the way she’d said her daughter’s name. Lula. In every other respect she’d been so cold and distant, but when she said Tallulah’s name, her voice had sounded thick and heavy, as though the name meant something to her. She thinks about the night that Tallulah said she’d spent at Chloe’s because Chloe was feeling suicidal and wonders again where she’d been. She thinks of all those Sunday mornings when Zach was playing football and Tallulah took her bike and went for a ride in the countryside. She thinks of how she would return with a glow and a flush, looking engorged with secrets. She even remembers asking Tallulah once, ‘Where do you actually go when you go for your bike rides? You always look like you’ve just been somewhere magical when you get back.’
And Tallulah had smiled and said, ‘Just around the back lanes, you know. Where there’s no traffic. It’s gorgeous.’
‘And do you stop?’ she’d asked. ‘Stop and explore?’
‘Yes,’ she’d replied, busying herself with removing Noah’s bib. ‘I stop and explore.’
And there’d been a richness in her tone, the same richness that she’d heard in Scarlett’s voice when she said Tallulah’s name. And as she thinks this, another memory jumps to the forefront of her mind, of Scarlett, in her towel, the pool water falling in rivulets from her wet hair and her fingers clasping her narrow feet, and then, just for the briefest of moments, a snatched view of a small tattoo just below her ankle, the letters TM, and Kim noticing it on some subliminal level but also not noticing it because, really, why would this girl she’d never heard of before have her daughter’s initials tattooed on to her foot, and the hand had slipped down once again to cover the marks and Kim had both seen it and not seen it, but it was there all along, like a sunspot.
She grabs her phone and finds Sophie’s number in her WhatsApp. She types her a message incredibly quickly.
It’s me, Kim. Are you busy? Can I talk to you about something?
Immediately there comes a reply.
Not busy at all. I can talk now.