The Night She Disappeared by Lisa Jewell
71
September 2018
Kim uses her expensive hair conditioner, the one that she has to scoop out of a pot with her fingertips. She smooths it down the length of her hair and she leaves it on for two minutes, as per the instructions, before rinsing it off.
Afterwards she picks an outfit, leafing through clothes that she hasn’t worn for months, clothes from another time that have looked so alien to her these past fifteen months: another woman’s wardrobe of positive colours, optimistic prints. She pulls out a tea dress that buttons down the front. It’s the same dress she wore at Tallulah’s candlelight vigil on the anniversary of her disappearance. She teams it with a rose-pink cardigan and her army boots. She blow-dries her hair into a shiny sheet and she paints liquid wings on to her eyelids.
It’s still five hours until Tallulah is flown into the army base. Five long hours. But five hours is nothing compared to the fifteen months she has lived without her.
Her ex is flying down. He’ll be here any minute. Ryan is going to meet them there. Noah is at nursery, for the routine, for the normality, to give Kim this time to make herself ready. She’ll collect him in a couple of hours.
‘Mummy,’ he’s been saying for days. ‘Mummy comin’ home.’
She wishes, in a selfish way, that it could just be her. Just her, on the tarmac, waiting with held breath, with flowers, with her heart pounding and her pulse racing, for those doors to open, for her girl to be there, on the steps, to take her in her arms. But she knows it can’t be just her. She sits in the kitchen and waits for Jim to text that he’s on his way.
Megs. She cannot think of Megs. She cannot talk to Megs or see Megs or even say her name. She keeps expecting her to call or text or appear on her doorstep. But there’s been no word from her. Kim feels the pain of Zach’s death like a corset, tight around her gut; it stops her breathing sometimes when she thinks about it. That poor boy. Left down there. It was the girl. It was Scarlett. The mother had first told police that she had no idea where Zach was, that she and her children and Tallulah had just been enjoying an impromptu gap year together, ‘keeping a low profile’. Kim had smashed her fist into her wall when Dom had relayed this nugget to her. When the police told Joss Jacques that they’d found Zach’s body in a tunnel beneath her house she changed tack and told the police that actually it was Tallulah who’d killed Zach, that she’d hit him on the back of the head with a bronze statue and that they’d been trying to protect her. At first Scarlett had gone along with her mother’s story and for an endless day and a half Kim had felt nauseous at the prospect of her daughter spending the rest of her life in prison.
But then yesterday Scarlett had confessed, quite unexpectedly, quickly, as though the whole thing were a suit of armour that she wanted to rip off. She told police that Zach was a bully, that he’d controlled Tallulah, that he’d hurt her. She told them that she’d heard Zach threatening to take Tallulah’s baby away, that she’d reacted instinctively to protect her, without aforethought. She told police that it was all because of her love for Tallulah. And Kim is sure that that is true and somewhere deep inside feels certain that she too would kill someone who threatened to take Noah away from Tallulah.
That is what she said happened. Who knows if it is true. And who knows what will become of Scarlett Jacques, this girl who has Kim’s daughter’s initials inked into her flesh. Kim doesn’t know Scarlett Jacques. She has seen her only once, floating across a pool in a pink flamingo, dripping water in a black towel, answering questions about her missing daughter in a sulky, condescending tone. She doesn’t know Scarlett Jacques. She doesn’t need to know Scarlett Jacques. Kim cannot feel sorry for her or care about her fate, as young as she is, as much as she may claim to love her daughter. She simply cannot.
Tallulah was found to be in the grip of a profound opioid addiction when she was taken to hospital and Kim has been told that she will need to spend time in rehab to recover. She’s been warned that Tallulah will not look like the fresh-faced girl she said goodbye to on that June night all those months and months ago. But she’s also been told that Tallulah is desperate to get well and come home and be a mother to her son again.
And now they stand in a row on the grey tarmac. Kim, Ryan, Jim, Noah in his best shirt and trousers in Kim’s arms. A warm wind whips around them and across them. It messes up Kim’s shiny, flattened hair and she tucks it behind her ears repeatedly. A wheeled staircase is put into place below the door of the aeroplane. The door opens. A man appears, then another man. Kim sucks in her breath and breathes it out again into Noah’s hair. She sucks in her stomach, tucks her hair behind her ear one last time and then, there, with a huge brown dog standing at her side, is Tallulah.
Kim runs.