The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

53

September 2018

Sophie stands at the front door of the cottage, her hands clasped in front of her, her hair neatly combed, her teeth freshly brushed to take away the scent of Liam’s beer. Pippa crunches across the gravel pathway holding a twin’s hand in each of hers, each twin towing a small wheely case behind them.

‘Hello, hello, hello!’ says Sophie. ‘Welcome!’

It’s 6 p.m. and Shaun is running late at school and has called Sophie in a frazzle of anxious apologies to ask her to be there when they arrived. She’d held back a long, deep sigh and said, ‘Of course, of course, no problem.’

‘I’ll try and be there as quickly as I can. I promise.’

‘It’s fine,’ she’d said. ‘Just do what you have to do.’

‘Thank you, darling,’ he replied. And she’d started, because he’d never called her darling before. He always called her Sophes. Or baby. Darling seemed to her like something you called a wife you’d run out of genuine enthusiasm for. Darling was what her friends’ parents called each other. Darling was old.

She moves towards Pippa and the children and leans down to hug them to her. They are both in Gap hoodies: Jack’s is green, Lily’s is baby pink. They hug her back hard and she feels a sense of relief because it’s been so long since she’s seen them and she’d been scared they might have forgotten that they like her.

‘Come in,’ she says. ‘Come in.’

‘Is this really Daddy’s house?’ asks Jack.

‘Well, sort of,’ Sophie says, holding the door for them to troop through. ‘It really belongs to the school. But they lend it to the head teacher for when they’re working here.’

‘So does Daddy still have his other house in London?’ asks Lily, wheeling her pink Trunki down the flagstones and towards the kitchen.

‘Yes. Daddy still has his other house and I still have my flat. We’re just borrowing this cottage for a while.’

‘It’s nice,’ says Jack, who likes most things.

‘It looks a bit spidery,’ says Lily, who always finds something to mention.

‘I promise you’, says Sophie, straightening their suitcases for them, ‘that I have cleaned every last inch of this cottage and there is not one solitary tiny weeny creature anywhere in it.’

‘I don’t mind other creatures,’ says Lily. ‘I just don’t like spiders. What’s that smell?’

‘What smell?’

‘Like a burned smell.’

‘Oh, God, I don’t know. I thought I’d managed to get rid of it. I must have got used to it. Sorry. It’s just an old house, I suppose.’ She turns to Pippa. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’

Pippa heaves a travel-weary sigh. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No. Very kind. But I’m expected for dinner in N5 at eight thirty. I’m only just going to make it as it is. I must say, I’m not sure how tenable this is going to be as an ongoing thing. I mean, if Shaun can’t even make it back to a house that’s actually in the same place as his school on time, how on earth is he going to get these children back and forth from N1 every other weekend? I can smell disaster already.’

She angles her face slightly to the right, almost as if she is sniffing the air for the oncoming disaster, then checks her phone and says, ‘Jesus Christ, Google Maps is saying two hours and five minutes. Shaun swore blind this drive was only an hour and a half.’ She sighs and runs her fingers through her shiny chestnut hair. ‘So, children, be good for Sophie. And for Daddy. Make sure you do everything you’re told.’

‘Do you want to see their room?’ asks Sophie.

‘No,’ she replies crisply. ‘I’m sure it’s fine. Shaun said you’d made it lovely for them, and I’m sure it is.’

Sophie feels a small flush of pleasure at Pippa’s words, at the innate suggestion that she is to be trusted to do the right thing with regard to her precious children.

Pippa leans down and kisses her children. Then she kisses Sophie lightly on each cheek before heading up the path back towards the main building and the car park.

When she’s gone, Sophie breathes a sigh of relief. She realises immediately that Pippa’s visit had been hanging over her for days without her even really being aware of it. And now it is done and the twins are here and she can cast the anxiety away from her like loosened chains.

‘Right, kids,’ she says, coming back into the kitchen. ‘Who’s hungry?’

Shaun returns half an hour later, and for an hour or so the cottage is alive with the energy of a joyful reunion. He loses his heavy demeanour the moment he removes his tie and lets the children crawl on to his lap. Sophie puts a chicken lasagne in the oven (Lily won’t eat cows, sheep or pigs, but says that chickens have scary faces so it’s OK to eat them) and opens a bottle of wine. Afterwards, Shaun runs the twins a bath and oversees them getting into their pyjamas and they both run down the stairs bare-footed and damp-haired with pink cheeks and Sophie finds a movie on the TV and they all sit bunched together on the sofa watching something that swirls and twirls drunkenly through the pillars of Sophie’s consciousness because she cannot focus on anything right now apart from the painting of the spiral staircase on Liam’s wall.

She pulls her phone from the arm of the sofa and switches it on. She opens up the photo she took of the painting and zooms in on it with her fingertips, then moves around the image from corner to corner, trying to find the thing that makes sense of it. As happens when she’s plotting a novel in her head, she mentally lines up the players and the timeline and the clues and tries to arrange them into a logical narrative.

And then she feels a shiver run through her as she realises that she’s got it. Or at least, she’s got the key to it. The metaphorical monkey wrench to pull the whole thing open with. She gasps slightly, loud enough for Shaun and the twins to all turn to her as one and look at her questioningly.

‘Are you OK?’ asks Shaun.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes. I just, er, I had a thought about the new book, a way to make it work. I think I might just, er …’ She gets to her feet. ‘Do you mind?’ she says. ‘If I do a bit of work? I won’t be long.’

She scurries from the living room and to her desk where she flings open the lid of her laptop. She scrolls quickly through one of the articles she’d found after her meeting with Jacinta Croft about the history of secret tunnels in old houses and discovers, as she’d suspected, that many secret tunnels were accessed via ‘camouflaged doors hidden behind paintings, sliding bookcases or even built into an architectural feature’. She finds many pictures of stone spiral staircases in medieval buildings and castles, all of them spiralling upwards, towards turrets, like the one in Scarlett’s painting. But what if the architect of Dark Place had designed a spiral staircase that went down as well as up? And what if you could access it through a secret slab of stone at the foot of the visible staircase. And what if that weird metal implement in Scarlett’s painting was actually designed to lift up the secret slab of stone?

She screenshots the article and then WhatsApps the page and the photo of Scarlett’s painting to Kim.

Is this what the tool looked like that the police found in the flower bed?she types, adding in an arrow pointing to the implement in the painting.

She presses send and waits for the ticks to turn blue. Almost immediately she sees that Kim is typing.

Yes,comes her response. Nobody could work out what it was.

A shiver runs through Sophie as she realises what this might mean. Look at the rectangle of light on the painting, at the bottom of the steps.

Kim replies, OK.

This is a painting that Scarlett made. Apparently it’s of a stone staircase in Dark Place.

Kim replies with an emoji with a slack jaw.

Then she says, Can I send this to Dom?

Yes, of course,Sophie types. Be my guest.

Shaun and Sophie put the twins to bed at nine thirty, finish the dregs of the wine they’d had with dinner and then head to bed themselves. Sophie watches Shaun remove his clothes and pull on the T-shirt and cotton trousers he wears in bed. The pulling on of the T-shirt and the cotton trousers is a silent signal that there will not be any sex tonight and that’s fine with Sophie. The day has been inordinately long and intense. Her head is packed with things that have no correlation with sex: dusty tunnels and missing teenagers and grieving mothers and haunted-looking girls with PTSD on YouTube. She unties her hair from its ponytail and she slips into her own pyjamas and then eases herself gratefully under the duvet.

‘Did you manage to get some good work done?’ Shaun asks.

She should tell him, she thinks. She should tell him what’s been happening and whom she’s been talking to, she should tell him about the paintings in Liam’s room, about talking to Kim. But she can’t. She just can’t. This weekend is meant to be about the twins. He hasn’t seen them for three weeks. It’s the longest he’s ever been without seeing his children. The only reason they ever came to this stupid school in the first place was so that Shaun could afford to educate his children the way their mother wanted them to be educated. This was never about Shaun’s career. If this had been about his career, he’d be running a huge, sprawling state secondary school in inner London right now, not this glorified crammer college in a chocolate-box village. He sacrificed so much to do this and she did not have to come with him; it was her choice to be here. He didn’t cajole or persuade her.

And now his children are finally here and this weekend needs to be perfect, absolutely perfect: two whole days unsullied by work or detectives. Just the four of them doing wholesome, countryside things as a family.

So she nods and she says, ‘Yes, I got a few words written.’

He smiles at her and says, ‘Well, that’s good. Maybe you’ve finally broken through your writer’s block? Maybe it’ll all start to flow now.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Let’s hope so.’

As she says this her phone buzzes with a message. She picks it up and looks at it. It’s Kim.

Dom says they’ll definitely get a warrant to go into Dark Place now. Hopefully as soon as tomorrow morning. Thanks for everything. You’re amazing.

She types a reply. No worries. Glad I could help.

‘Who was that?’ asks Shaun.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘just the family WhatsApp.’

She turns her phone off, plugs it in to charge and closes her eyes with her head full of staircases that spiral around and around and down into the dark soft sands of sleep.