The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

62

June 2017

Tallulah awakes from a sleep so deep that she can remember nothing about it. She awakes and there is light shining through the skin of her eyelids. She awakes and she is on a soft surface. She awakes to the sound of a gentle panting and a kind of lip-smacking noise and she slowly opens her eyes and she sees Toby’s face. He is staring at her, placidly. He licks his lips again and then pants some more. As her eyes grow accustomed to the light, she sees she in the snug in Scarlett’s house. The door is open just a crack and she can hear voices beyond. Gentle laughter.

She tries to sit up but stops when she realises that she is tied down somehow. She glances at her feet – they are tied together with a plastic cord. Her hands are tied at the wrists.

‘Hello!’ she calls out, her voice a croak.

She hears it go quiet in the kitchen.

‘Hello!’

She hears footsteps across the stone floor in the kitchen and then there is Scarlett. She’s wearing black joggers and an oversized Levi’s T-shirt.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘You’re awake. Mum!’ she calls out behind her. ‘Tallulah’s awake.’

She walks towards her and sits perched on the edge of the sofa between Toby and Tallulah’s head. She puts out a hand to Tallulah’s face and strokes her cheek. ‘How are you doing?’ she says.

‘What’s happening? Why am I tied up?’

‘To keep you safe,’ says Scarlett’s mother appearing in the doorway. She’s clutching a black mug, dressed in a jade-green cotton dress, which ties at the waist. Her hair is pulled back hard from her face.

‘Safe from what?’

Scarlett’s mother sighs. ‘We need to get you away from here. The police have gone for now. But they’ll be back. They think you and Zach have both disappeared, together, and that’s how it needs to stay.’

‘But …’ Tallulah feels a kind of thrum pass through her head and her vision go grey around the edges. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I have to go home. I have to see my baby.’

‘Tallulah,’ says Scarlett, ‘if you go home now, you will never see your baby again. Do you understand? If you go home now, the police will ask you a million questions about Zach and you will somehow have to explain what happened to him. And what would you say?’

‘I’d say that he … I’d say …’ She stops, tries to pull the threads of her thoughts together and feels them unravel again almost immediately. ‘I’d say he left.’

‘Yes. And that would be an obvious lie. Do you want to lie to the police?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t care. I just want to go home.’

‘No,’ says Scarlett’s mum. ‘I’m afraid that’s not an option. A terrible thing happened here on Friday night. A really terrible thing. And I know you only acted out of passion, out of fear. I understand that mother’s instinct. But the fact of the matter is that Zach is dead. And you killed him.’

‘No. No, I didn’t. I—’ Tallulah’s mind fusses for a while over the detail of that moment as it has done non-stop for the past however many days it’s been. And each time she sees it differently. But every time she sees it, she feels it, in her bile, in her gut, in her very essence, the knowledge that it wasn’t her, that she didn’t do it.

But how can she prove that to anybody?

‘I didn’t kill him,’ she says. ‘I didn’t do it.’

‘Well, the whole thing was rather confused. Nobody was sober. Nobody was in a clear state of mind. But your fingerprints are on the sculpture. And clearly you were the only one with the motive to have wanted him dead. So, I think, or at least let’s assume, that you are the prime suspect and that the safest place for you to be right now is far, far away from here.’

‘But for how long?’ Tallulah asks.

‘Well, until the police have come up with another theory about Zach’s disappearance, I suppose.’

‘But what if they never do?’

‘They will. Of course they will. We just need to get you away from here. Just for a while. So, the car is ready, Rex is waiting at the airfield for us with Martin’s plane and we are all off to Guernsey. But, Tallulah, we need you to be ever so careful. OK? You are flying as Rex’s girlfriend, Seraphina. You look enough alike. Just play the role, play the part. We’ll have you back here before you know it.’