The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

50

September 2018

It’s four o’clock. Kim left Maypole House two hours ago to collect Noah from nursery and now Sophie pulls on a cardigan, grabs her phone and heads out into the grounds. Classes are over for the day and the paths swarm with teenagers. She imagines these same paths swarming with Scarlett’s cohort. She pictures tall, lean Scarlett as Liam described her back then, with her hair a natural dark brown, a minidress, opaque tights and clumpy boots, followed by her adoring coterie.

And then she pictures Scarlett on a boat, her bleached hair burning blonder in the sun, sitting with her dog, posting abstract photos sporadically, possibly strategically, for a handful of people to see, so that they know that she is still alive. But what of Tallulah? What of Zach? And what, she wonders, of Jacinta Croft’s husband?

Her thoughts spiral as she walks. A few students smile and say hello. She returns their greetings, blankly; she has no idea who they are, but they know that she is Mr Gray’s girlfriend, and no doubt, by now, they know she is a published author too. She has an ephemeral, slightly elevated status here which she finds somewhat unsettling.

She sits on a bench in the cloisters and she googles ‘Cherryjack’ on her phone. It brings up dozens of hits for a cherry-flavoured rum from the Virgin Islands. It also brings up at least half a dozen social media accounts for other users calling themselves Cherryjack. She clicks the Google filter to ‘Images’ and scrolls through them. She finds endless photos of rum and rum-based cocktails and boys called Jack Cherry but nothing that looks anything like Scarlett Jacques.

She glances up as she feels someone approach. It’s Liam. She smiles and says, ‘Just the man.’

‘Am I?’ he says.

‘Yes. I wondered, if you’re not busy, if we could have a chat?’

‘Of course,’ he says, ‘sure. Here? Or …?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘I mean, you could come up to my room. I was on my way there. I have cold beers.’

She nods and smiles. ‘Sure,’ she says, ‘that would be great.’

Liam’s room is nothing like Kerryanne’s. It’s a rectangular box with a bed on one side, a sofa on the other, sliding doors directly on to a small balcony and a tiny kitchen tucked away inside an alcove.

‘Snug,’ she says, running her eyes instinctively across his bookshelf as she walks past it.

‘Yes,’ he says, pulling off his jacket and hanging it from a knob by the front door. ‘Small, but big enough. You know. Here.’ He moves some paperwork from the arm of the sofa and invites Sophie to take a seat.

The room is neat and fragrant, filled with the clutter of his life, but in a way that seems very organised.

‘So,’ he says, going to his fridge. ‘How’s your day been?’

‘Kind of weird,’ she replies. ‘I’ve spent most of it with Kim Knox. You know, Tallulah’s mum. We’ve been trying to find Scarlett Jacques online.’

He takes two beers from the fridge and passes her one. She glances again around Liam’s room. He has some interesting art on his walls, the most overpowering of which is a large canvas portrait. She narrows her eyes to make sense of it and sees that it is a rather jumbled painting of what appears to be a young woman sitting on a throne with a dog by her side, and then the pieces fall into place and she points at the painting and says, ‘Is that …?’

‘Yes. It’s Scarlett. A self-portrait. She gave it to me.’

‘Is it OK if I have a look?’

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Be my guest.’

She rests her beer on the coffee table and walks towards the painting. As she gets closer, more and more detail reveals itself. Both Scarlett and the dog are wearing crowns. Scarlett looks slightly imperious, her hands spread out upon her open knees, each finger sporting a huge golden ring, picked out in shiny metallic paint. There are various things on tables in the background, including a throbbing heart on a platter and a cake slice dripping with blood.

‘Bloody hell,’ she says. ‘This is, erm … odd?’

‘Yeah. It is.’ He shrugs.

‘What does it all mean? The heart, for example. What do you think that represents?’

‘She never really explained any of it to me, to be honest. She just turned up with it one day and asked if I wanted it and I said yeah, because I knew it would look really cool in here, and also because, you know, it was nice just to have a bit of her …’ He trails off slightly.

‘You know,’ she begins carefully, ‘I saw Jacinta Croft the other day and we were chatting about Scarlett and she told me how heartbroken you were after you split up.’

He nods, just once, and then takes a swig of beer. ‘I guess I was,’ he says. ‘In a way. I mean, a girl like Scarlett doesn’t come along very often, especially not for a guy like me. She made things feel kind of exciting. She made me feel like maybe I was special. Special because she chose me. You know. But …’ He sighs and rallies, ‘… it is what it is. I’m over it now.’

‘Anyone else on the scene?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he says. ‘No. Not really. I mean, I’m on dating sites, so it’s not as if I’m not actively looking, but I’m also not that bothered either. You know?’

‘So, you and Lexie …?’

He looks up at her smartly. He seems confused. ‘Lexie Mulligan? God. No. I mean, we’re friends and everything. But no. Not in that way. You know, I’m pretty sure she’s not even straight. She had a big crush on Scarlett for a while. But anyway. No. Not Lexie. Not anyone. Just me.’

‘You know the other night? When the police were here after they found the second “Dig Here” sign?’

He nods.

‘Had Lexie been up here that night?’

‘Here? You mean, in my room?’

‘Yes. In your room.’

‘No. Definitely not. I actually don’t think Lexie’s ever been in my room.’

‘Can I go out on your balcony?’

‘Sure,’ he says. ‘It’s not locked.’

She slides the door open and goes to the edge of the balcony. She peers over and out towards the flower bed and she steps on to her tiptoes and leans out even further and she realises that even at this angle and at this height, she cannot see the spot where the ‘Dig Here’ sign had been posted. She turns round and looks overhead, but there are no balconies above. Lexie had definitely been lying about seeing the ‘Dig Here’ sign from her apartment. Or from anywhere, for that matter. She knew about it, not because she’d seen it but because either she or her mother had put it there.

Sophie walks back towards the sofa, but as she does so, her eye is caught by another painting on Liam’s wall; it’s a smaller canvas than Scarlett’s self-portrait, but painted using the same strokes and the same jolting, in-your-face colour palette. It’s a stone spiral staircase, with the steps painted in garish rainbow shades all blending and bleeding into one another almost like melted wax. A pole of bright golden light beams down from a circular window at the top of the tower that the steps are housed in and pierces the stone floor at the bottom, creating a plume of purply-grey smoke and sparks of glitter. Just to the side of the hole is another knife, again smeared with what looks like blood.

‘What the hell is this one?’

Liam shrugs. ‘It’s another one of Scarlett’s. She painted it during her breakdown. She said she needed me to take care of it for her. For posterity.’

‘But what’s it of?’

‘I don’t really know. I mean, I know what it looks like – there’s a staircase in her house, in the really old part of the building. It goes up to a kind of turret with a tiny room at the top with little slit eyes for arrows. They never used the little room. It was too small to put any furniture in.’

Sophie stares at the painting, hard, trying to divine some more meaning from it. ‘Did she ever say anything about the room?’

She stands closer and peers at the detail. There’s a kind of rectangle of light around the bottom step. It bleeds through a small gap. The blood from the knife trickles towards this gap and then disappears. As she stares at the knife, she notices that it’s not actually a knife at all, that it has a bent end with a U-shape cut into it. It’s not a knife, it’s a lever. She feels her heart stop beating for a split second, and then start again, twice as fast.

‘Would you mind’, she says, ‘if I take a picture of this?’

‘Sure,’ he says casually. ‘Do you think it’s a clue of some kind?’

She nods. ‘Yes,’ she says, her cool tone belying the electric instincts setting all her nerves on edge. ‘I think it might be.’