Лайза Джуэлл - Then She Was Gone

They’d done a house-to-house search of the immediate vicinity, brought in known pedophiles for questioning, taken CCTV footage from each and every shopkeeper on Stroud Green Road, wheeled out Laurel and Paul to be filmed for a television appeal that had been seen by roughly eight million people, but nothing had ever taken them further than that last sighting of Ellie looking at her reflection at ten forty-three.

The fact that Ellie had been wearing a black T-shirt and jeans had been a problem for the police. The fact that her lovely gold-streaked hair had been pulled back into a scruffy ponytail. The fact that her rucksack was navy blue. That her trainers were bog-standard supermarket trainers in white. It was almost as though she’d deliberately made herself invisible.

Ellie’s bedroom had been expertly rifled through for four hours by two DIs with their shirtsleeves rolled up. Ellie, it seemed, had taken nothing out of the ordinary. It was possible she might have taken underwear but there was no way for Laurel to know if there was anything missing from her drawers. It was possible she might have taken a change of clothing, but Ellie, like most fifteen-year-old girls, had way too many clothes, far too many for Lauren to keep an inventory. But her piggy bank still contained the few tightly folded ten-pound notes she forced into it after every birthday. Her toothbrush was still in the bathroom, her deodorant, too. Ellie had never been on a sleepover without her toothbrush and deodorant.

After two years, they’d downgraded the search. Laurel knew what they thought; they thought Ellie was a runaway.

How could they have thought that Ellie was a runaway when there was no CCTV footage of her at any train station, at any bus stop, walking down any road anywhere apart from the one from which she’d disappeared? The downgrade of the search was devastating.

Even more devastating was Paul’s response to this pronouncement.

“It’s a sort of closure, I guess.”

There, right there—the final nail in the dry box of bones of their marriage.

The children meanwhile were shuffling along, like trains on a track, keeping to schedule. Hanna took her A levels. Jake graduated from university in the West Country where he’d been studying to be a chartered surveyor. And Paul was busy asking for promotions at work, buying himself new suits, talking about upgrading the car, showing her hotels and resorts on the Internet that had special deals that summer. Paul was not a bad man. Paul was a good man. She had married a good man, just as she’d always planned to do. But the way he’d dealt with the violent hole ripped into their lives by Ellie’s disappearance had shown her that he wasn’t big enough, he wasn’t strong enough—he wasn’t insane enough.

The disappointment she felt in him was such a tiny part of everything else she’d been feeling that she barely registered it. When he moved out a year later it was nothing, a small blip in her existence. Looking back on it now, she could remember very little about it. All she could remember from that time was the raw need to keep the search going.

“Can we not just do one more house-to-house?” she’d pleaded with the police. “It’s been a year since we did one. That’s long enough, surely, to turn up something we didn’t find before?”

The detective had smiled. “We have talked about it,” she said. “We decided that it was not a good use of resources. Not at this time. Maybe in a year or so. Maybe.”

But then suddenly this January, out of the blue, the police had called and said that Crimewatch wanted to do a ten-year anniversary appeal. Another reconstruction. It was broadcast on 26 May. It brought no fresh evidence. No new sightings.

It changed nothing.

Until now.

The detective on the phone had sounded cautious. “It could be nothing. But we’d like you to come in anyway.”

“What have you found?” Laurel said. “Is it a body? What is it?”

“Please just come in, Mrs. Mack.”

Ten years of nothing. And now there was something.

She grabbed her handbag and left the house.

5

THEN

Someone from up the street had recommended her. Noelle Donnelly was her name. Ellie stood up at the chime of the doorbell and peered down the hallway as her mum opened the door. She was quite old, forty maybe, something like that, and she had an accent, Irish or Scottish.

“Ellie!” her mum called. “Ellie, come and meet Noelle.”

She had pale red hair, twisted up at the back and clipped into place. She smiled down at Ellie and said, “Good afternoon, Ellie. I hope you’ve got your brain switched on?”

Ellie couldn’t tell if she was being funny or not, so she didn’t smile back, just nodded.

“Good,” said Noelle.

They’d set up a corner of the dining room for Ellie’s first lesson, brought an extra lamp down from her room, cleared the clutter, laid out two glasses, a water jug, and Ellie’s pencil case with the black and red polka dots.

Laurel disappeared to the kitchen to make Noelle a cup of tea. Noelle stopped at the sight of the family cat, sitting on the piano stool.

“Well,” she said, “he’s a big lad. What’s he called?”

“Teddy,” she said. “Teddy Bear . But Teddy for short.”

Her first words to Noelle. She would never forget.

“Well, I can see why you call him that. He does look like a big hairy bear!”

Had she liked her then? She couldn’t remember. She just smiled at her, put her hand upon her cat, and squeezed his woolly fur inside her fist. She loved her cat and was glad that he was there, a buffer between her and this stranger.

Noelle Donnelly smelled of cooking oil and unwashed hair. She wore jeans and a bobbly camel-colored jumper, a Timex watch on a freckled wrist, scuffed brown boots and reading glasses on a green cord around her neck. Her shoulders were particularly wide and her neck slightly stooped with a kind of hump at the back and her legs were very long and thin. She looked as though she’d spent her life in a room with a very low ceiling.

“Well now,” she said, putting on the reading glasses and feeling inside a brown-leather briefcase. “I’ve brought along some old GCSE papers. We’ll start you on one of these in a moment, get to the bottom of your strengths and weaknesses. But first of all, maybe you could tell me, in your own words, what your concerns are. In particular.”

Mum walked in then with a mug of tea and some chocolate chip cookies on a saucer that she slid onto the table silently and speedily. She was acting as though Ellie and Noelle Donnelly were on a date or having a top secret meeting. Ellie wanted to say, Stay, Mum. Stay with me. I’m not ready to be alone with this stranger .

She bored her eyes into the back of her mother’s head as Laurel stealthily left the room, closing the door very quietly behind her: the soft, apologetic click of it.

Noelle Donnelly turned to Ellie and smiled. She had very small teeth. “Well, now,” she said, sliding the glasses back up to her narrow-bridged nose, “where were we?”

6

The world looked loaded with portent as Laurel drove as close to the speed limit as she could manage toward the police station in Finsbury Park. People on the streets looked sinister and suggestive, as if each were on the verge of committing a dark crime. Awnings flapping in a brisk wind looked like the wings of birds of prey; billboards looked set to fall into the road and obliterate her.

Adrenaline blasted a path through her tiredness.

Laurel hadn’t slept properly since 2005.

She’d lived alone for seven years—first in the family home and then in the flat she moved into three years ago when Paul put the final nail in any chance of a reconciliation by somehow managing to meet a woman. The woman had invited him to live with her and he’d accepted. She’d never worked out how he’d done it, how he’d found that healthy pink part of himself among the wreckage of everything else. But she didn’t blame him. Not in the least. She wished she could do the same; she wished she could pack a couple of large suitcases and say good-bye to herself, wish herself a good life, thank herself for all the memories, look fondly upon herself for just one long, lingering moment and then shut the door quietly, chin up, morning sun playing hopefully on the crown of her head, a bright new future awaiting her. She would do it in a flash. She really would.