The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
7
August 2018
Sophie comes from an outdoorsy family. They go on walking holidays and sailing holidays and skiing holidays. Her father runs marathons, her mother plays golf and tennis, both her brothers work in the sports industry. Sophie was once a swimmer. She has medals and cups and certificates in a big box in her parents’ loft and still has a swimmer’s physique although she barely swims at all these days. When they were all small and getting on her mother’s nerves, she would zip them into their coats and lock them in the back garden. They would moan for a while and then find something to do. Usually involving climbing very tall trees and swinging off things that weren’t designed to be swung off. So Sophie is very comfortable being outdoors and confident in her ability to find her way about and deal with obstacles alone without assistance. And so she sets off into the woods, sensibly dressed and equipped with water, energy bars, a mobile charger for her phone, her compass, some plasters, sun cream, a hat and a packet of bright red plastic space-marker cones that she can drop on the forest floor at intervals if she needs to find her way back.
Inside the woods, the tree cover is immense and very little of the pale gold August sun gets through. Within a few feet she feels the temperature begin to drop. She holds her compass in her right hand and follows the path alongside the arrow telling her where to go.
After twenty minutes the denseness of the middle of the woods starts to thin out again and there are established footpaths meandering through the trees, signs of humanity, pieces of litter, a dog poo in a green plastic bag hanging from a branch. She checks her map again now that she has briefly regained her phone signal and finds that she is about to emerge on to a bridleway. She moves the map across her screen with her fingers and sees the linear representation of a large building to her right.
After a moment she sees a turret and a weathervane. Then she sees the curve of an ancient brick wall and a curtain of bright red Virginia creeper. She squeezes through a parade of trees that abuts the wall and finds herself in front of a rusty metal gate, a broken padlock hanging from its bars, and then she is through the gate and into a clump of woodland; the shimmer of blue sky is visible ahead of her and then she is on a ragged sun-bleached lawn that rolls downwards via wide stone steps overgrown with thistles towards a house that looks like something from a Tim Burton movie.
Sophie catches her breath and puts a hand to her throat.
As she runs down the tiered lawns towards the house she sees the pool appear; it’s dark green, a ripped cover half pulled across it, mulchy dead leaves from the previous winter stacked around it. A pagoda at one end of the pool has been covered in boldly coloured graffiti.
The terrace between the pool and the house is littered with empty beer cans and cigarette ends, drug paraphernalia and discarded crisp packets and takeaway containers.
How, Sophie wonders, could a house of this magnificence, not to mention market value, have been left like this? Why is it not being cared for, even while it is uninhabited?
She picks her away around the house, trying to peer into windows through gaps in the shutters. At the front of the house is an ornate courtyard and beyond that a long cypress-lined driveway that appears to go on for a mile or more. She turns to look at the front door. Above the fanlight, carved into the dark brickwork, is the date AD 1721.
The air is thick and silent here, and nothing else in sight. This house exists almost on an island. Sophie wonders about the family who lived here, the hedge-fund manager and his glamorous wife and their talented teenage daughter. Where are they now, and what on earth possessed them to leave a place like this to go to seed?
She checks the time on her phone. It’s nearly midday.
She stands at the top end of the garden to survey the grandeur of the house one more time. She takes a photograph, then tucks her phone into her rucksack and heads back down the bridleway and into the woods.