The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell

69

September 2018

As the plane comes to a standstill on the runway, Sophie clicks open the overhead locker and pulls down her small wheely case and her jacket. At the luggage carousel she is met by her Danish publisher, a woman her age with pale red hair held in a bun, wearing a long blue bouclé coat over a floral dress. They hug briefly – they have met twice before and even got drunk together last time Sophie was in Copenhagen and shared extraordinary intimacies including details of her publisher’s extra-marital affairs. But now a year on, it’s like a fresh start; once again they are author and publisher, talent and manager, cordial, warm, but not friends.

Sophie is taken directly to a hotel with velvet chairs in sun-bleached colours and glass lifts that ascend and descend on metal poles, oversized cactus plants and the Chainsmokers on the sound system. She opens up her suitcase on the footstool in her beautiful room and removes her toiletry bag, unzips it and takes out her toothbrush and toothpaste.

In the bathroom she stares at her face as she brushes her teeth; she’s been awake since 4 a.m., the alarm breaking into dark and worrying dreams. She’s had two hours’ sleep. She has the pallor of an early flight, but in twenty minutes she will be on her way to a conference at which she has a tight schedule of interviews and events detailed on a piece of paper handed to her by her publisher in a canvas gift bag, which also includes energy bars, mineral water and a copy of the Danish edition of her latest book.

Her phone buzzes in her bedroom and she wanders out of the bathroom and picks it up. It’s a message from Kim.

They’ve found her,it says simply. She’s coming home.

Sophie blinks. She sits heavily on the end of the bed and gasps, the phone clutched to her heart. Then she finds herself suddenly, dramatically, unexpectedly, weeping.

‘Hello, Sophie. If I may?’

Sophie smiles encouragingly at the reader in the audience clutching the microphone that has just been passed to her by one of the team.

‘Sophie. I am a big fan of your books. There has now been six of the books of the Little Hither Green Detective Agency. Do you have another one on the way? And if so, can you give us a clue about what to expect? And if not, what is next for P. J. Fox?’

At first she is wrong-footed by the question, but then she realises exactly what to say. She smiles and lifts her own microphone to her mouth. ‘That is a very good question,’ she says. ‘And you know what, a few weeks ago I would have been able to give you a very straightforward answer to that question. A few weeks ago I was living in south-east London, very close to Hither Green, alone, in my nice little flat which is not dissimilar to Susie Beets’s flat, in fact. I had a boyfriend, a teacher, who I met through my job, just as Susie always meets her boyfriends. A few weeks ago I was, essentially, Susie Beets.’ The audience laughs. ‘And the funny thing is that I didn’t even know it. Because two weeks ago I left London …’ She pauses as she feels a rush of emotion pass through her. ‘I left London on a wing and a prayer and a sense of some invisible clock somewhere ticking away, to start a new life with my boyfriend in the countryside. I was to become the headmaster’s wife in a very expensive boarding school in a picture-perfect English village.’ A murmur of laughter passes through the audience. ‘And I had no idea,’ she continues, ‘no idea at all how much this was going to change everything. Because I found myself not only stranded in the countryside, a million miles from my comfort zone, unable to get back into Susie, unable to write, but also in the middle of a real-life crime. Do you want me to tell you about it?’

A louder murmur passes through the audience. Sophie nods and recrosses her legs. She turns to her moderator and says, ‘Is it OK? Do we have time?’ The moderator nods and says, ‘I am agog! Please take all the time you want.’

‘Well,’ says Sophie. ‘It all started on the first day, when I found a cardboard sign, nailed to a fence. It had the words “Dig Here” scrawled on it.’

She pauses and looks around the audience, waiting for someone to pick up on the significance of this. The girl who asked the question gets it first. ‘You mean’, she says, ‘like in the first Hither Green book?’

‘Yes,’ says Sophie. ‘Like in the first Hither Green book.’

A gratifying ripple passes through the room, and Sophie carries on. ‘So I got a trowel,’ she says. ‘And I dug …’

As Sophie talks, she feels herself come together, as though she were a broken vase and now the pieces of her are being glued back into place. She knows that she cannot be in Upfield Common any more. She knows that Shaun must leave Maypole House and get a job he loves. She knows that this was a mistake, for both of them, in so many ways, but that it was also fate, playing out in the most extraordinary way. The way it all happened, the steps in the dance. And now Tallulah Murray, found, alive. Sophie also knows that she does not want to write another Little Hither Green Detective Agency book after the one she’s writing now, that it will be her last. That she needs to stop writing about herself and start writing about the wide world, not just one corner of it. That she is nearly thirty-five and it’s time for her to move on.

With or without Shaun.

She gets to the end of the story and the woman in the audience says, ‘And so? What happens next? What will happen to the family? To the people who took her?’

Sophie says, ‘I guess I’ll find out when I get home.’

She rests her microphone on the table and smiles as the audience claps for her.