Then She Was Gone Read online

  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.

  Jake and Hanna had moved away too, of course. Faster, she suspected, and earlier than they would have if life hadn’t come off its rails ten years ago. She had friends whose children were the same age as Jake and Hanna and who were still at home. Her friends moaned about it, about the empty orange-juice cartons in the fridge, the appalling sex noises and the noisy, drunken returns from nightclubs at four in the morning that set the dog off and disturbed their sleep. How she would love to hear one of her children stumbling about in the early hours of the morning. How she would love the trail of used crockery and the rumpled joggers, still embedded with underwear, left pooled all over the floor. But no, her two had not looked backward once they’d seen their escapes. Jake lived in Devon with a girl called Blue who didn’t let him out of her sight and was already talking about babies only a year into their relationship, and Hanna lived a mile away from Laurel in her tiny, gloomy flat, working fourteen-hour days and weekends in the City for no apparent reason other than financial reward. Neither of them were setting the world alight but then whose children did? All those hopes and dreams and talk of ballerinas and pop stars, concert pianists and boundary-breaking scientists. They all ended up in an office. All of them.

  Laurel lived in a new-build flat in Barnet, one bedroom for her, one for a visitor, a balcony big enough for some planters and a table and chairs, shiny red kitchen units, and a reserved parking space. It was not the sort of home she’d ever envisaged for herself, but it was easy and it was safe.

  And how did she fill her days, now that her children were gone? Now that her husband was gone? Now that even the cat was gone, though he’d made a big effort to stay alive for her and lasted until he was almost twenty-one. Laurel filled three days a week with a job. She worked in the marketing department of the shopping center in High Barnet. Once a week she went to see her mother in an old people’s home in Enfield. Once a week she cleaned Hanna’s flat. The rest of the time she did things that she pretended were important to her, like buying plants from garden centers to decorate her balcony with, like visiting friends she no longer really cared about to drink coffee she didn’t enjoy and talk about things she had no interest in. She went for a swim once a week. Not to keep fit but just because it was something she’d always done and she’d never found a good enough reason to stop doing it.

  So it was strange after so many years to be leaving the house with a s
ense of urgency, a mission, something genuinely important to do.

  She was about to be shown something. A piece of bone, maybe, a shred of bloodied fabric, a photo of a swollen corpse floating in dense hidden waters. She was about to know something after ten years of knowing nothing. She might be shown evidence that her daughter was alive. Or evidence that she was dead. The weight on her soul betrayed a belief that it would be the latter.

  Her heart beat hard and heavy beneath her ribs as she drove toward Finsbury Park.

  7

  THEN

  Noelle Donnelly began to grow on Ellie a little over those weekly winter visits. Not a lot. But a little. Mainly because she was a really good teacher and Ellie was now at the top of the top stream in her class with a predicted A/A* result. But in other ways, too: she often brought Ellie a little something—a packet of earrings from Claire’s Accessories, a fruit-flavored lip balm, a really nice pen. “For my best student,” she’d say. And if Ellie protested, she’d brush it away with a “Well, I was in Brent Cross, y’know. It’s a little bit of nothing, really.”

  She’d always ask after Theo as well, whom she’d met briefly on her second or third session at the house. “And how’s that handsome fella of yours?” she’d ask in a way that should have been mortifying but wasn’t, mainly because of her lovely Irish accent, which made most things she said sound funnier and more interesting than they actually were.

  “He’s fine,” Ellie would say, and Noelle would smile her slightly chilly smile and say, “Well, he’s a keeper.”

  GCSEs were now looming large on the horizon. It was March and Ellie had started to count down to her exams in weeks rather than months. Her Tuesday-afternoon sessions with Noelle had been building in momentum as her brain stretched and tautened and absorbed facts and formulae more easily. There was a snappy pace to their lessons now, a high-octane rhythm. So Ellie noticed it immediately, the shift in Noelle’s mood that first Tuesday in March.

  “Good afternoon, young lady,” she said, putting her bag onto the table and unzipping it. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, that’s good. I’m glad. And how did you get on with your homework?”

  Ellie slid the completed work across the table toward Noelle. Normally Noelle would put on her reading glasses and start marking it immediately but today she just laid her fingertips on top of it and drummed them absentmindedly. “Good girl,” she said. “You are such a good girl.”

  Ellie watched her questioningly from the corner of her eye, waiting for a signal that their lesson was about to begin. But none came. Instead Noelle stared blindly at the homework.

  “Tell me, Ellie,” she said eventually, turning her unblinking gaze to Ellie. “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

  Ellie shrugged.

  “What?” Noelle continued. “Like a hamster dying, something like that?”

  “I haven’t had a hamster.”

  “Ha, well then, maybe that. Maybe not having a hamster is the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

  Ellie shrugged again. “I never really wanted one.”

  “Well, then, what did you want? What did you really want that you weren’t allowed to have?”

  In the background, Ellie could hear the TV in the kitchen, the sound of her mother vacuuming overhead, her sister chatting to someone on the phone. Her family just getting on with their lives and not having to have weird conversations about hamsters with their maths tutor.

  “Nothing, really. Just the usual things: money, clothes.”

  “You never wanted a dog?”

  “Not really.”

  Noelle sighed and pulled Ellie’s homework toward her. “Well, then, you are a very lucky girl indeed. You really are. And I hope you appreciate how lucky you are?”

  Ellie nodded.

  “Good. Because when you get to my age there’ll be loads of things you want and you’ll see everyone else getting them and you’ll think, well, it must be my turn now. Surely. And then you’ll watch it disappear into the sunset. And there’ll be nothing you can do about it. Nothing whatsoever.”

  There was a moment of ponderous silence before finally, slowly, Noelle slid her glasses onto her nose, pulled back the first page of Ellie’s homework, and said, “Right then, let’s see how my best student got on this week.”

  “Tell me, Ellie, what are your hopes and dreams?”

  Ellie groaned inwardly. Noelle Donnelly was in one of those moods again.

  “Just to do really well in my GCSEs. And my A levels. And then go to a really good university.”

  Noelle tutted and rolled her eyes. “What is it with you young people and your obsession with university? Oh, the fanfare when I got into Trinity! Such a big deal! My mother couldn’t stop telling the world. Her only girl! At Trinity! And look at me now. One of the poorest people I know.”

  Ellie smiled and wondered what to say.

  “No, there’s more to life than university, Miss Smarty Pants. There’s more than just certificates and qualifications. I have them coming out of my ears. And look at me, sitting here with you in your lovely warm house, drinking your lovely Earl Grey tea, getting paid a pittance to fill your brain with my knowledge. Then going home to nothing.” She turned sharply and fixed Ellie with a look. “To nothing. I swear.” Then she sighed and smiled and the glasses came up her nose and her gaze left Ellie and the lesson commenced.

  Afterward Ellie found her mother in the kitchen and said, “Mum. I want to stop my tutoring.”

  Her mum turned and looked at her questioningly. “Oh?” she said. “Why?”

  Ellie thought about telling her the truth. She thought about saying, She’s freaking me out and saying really weird things and I really don’t want to be alone with her for an hour every week anymore. How she wished she had told her the truth. Maybe if she’d told her the truth, her mother might have been able to work it all out and then everything would have been different. But for some reason she didn’t. Maybe she thought her mother would say that it was a silly reason to want to stop having the lessons so close to her exams. Or maybe she didn’t want to get Noelle into trouble, didn’t want a situation to develop. But for whatever misguided reason she said, “I just honestly think I’ve gone as far as I can go with Noelle. I’ve got all the practice papers she gave me. I can just keep doing those. And it will save you some money.” She smiled, winningly, and waited for her mother’s response.

  “Well, it does seem a bit strange, so close to your exams.”

  “Exactly. I think there are other things I could be using the time for now. Geography, for example. I could really do with some extra study time for geography.”

  This was a 100-percent untruth. Ellie was totally on top of all her studies. The extra hour a week would make no difference to anything. But still she smiled that Mum-pleasing smile, left the request hanging in the air between them, waited.

  “Well, darling, it’s up to you, of course.”

  Ellie nodded encouragingly, the echo of Noelle’s loaded words, the tired aroma of old cooking and unwashed hair, the mood swings and the tangential, slightly inappropriate questions pulsing through her consciousness.

  “If you’re sure? It would be nice not to have the extra expense,” her mother said.

  “Exactly.” Relief flooded through her. “Exactly.”

  “OK,” said her mother, pulling open the fridge door, taking out a tub of Bolognese sauce, closing it again. “I’ll call her tomorrow. Let her know.”

  “Great,” said Ellie lightly, feeling an odd, sordid weight lifting from her soul. “Thank you.”

  8

  The suited policeman who greeted Laurel was young and washed out, clammy-handed and slightly nervous. He led her through to an interview room. “Thank you for coming,” he said, as though there’d been an option not to come. Sorry, I have a lot on today, maybe next week?

  Someone went to fetch her a cup of water, and then a moment later the door opened again and Pau
l walked in.

  Paul, God, of course, Paul. She hadn’t even thought of Paul. She’d reacted as though this was all down to her. But clearly someone at the station had thought of Paul. He blew into the room, all floppy silver hair, rumpled suit, the dry smell of the City embedded in his skin. His hand reached for Laurel’s shoulder as he passed her but she couldn’t bring herself to turn to acknowledge him, just forced a small smile for the benefit of people watching the exchange.

  He took the seat next to her, his hand pressed down against his tie as he lowered himself into the chair. Someone fetched him tea from a machine. She felt cross about the tea. She felt cross about Paul.

  “We’ve been investigating a site near Dover,” said the detective called Dane. “A dog walker called us. His terrier dug up a bag.”

  A bag. Laurel nodded, furiously. A bag was not a body.

  Dane pulled some 10- by 8-inch photos from a hard-backed envelope. He slid them across the table toward Laurel and Paul. “Do you recognize any of these items?”

  Laurel pulled the photos toward herself.

  It was Ellie’s bag. Her rucksack. The one she’d had slung over her shoulder when she left the house for the library all those years ago. There was the small red logo that had been such a vital part of the police appeal. It had been virtually the only distinguishing feature on Ellie’s person that day.

  The second photo was of a black T-shirt, a loose-fitting thing with a slash neck and cap sleeves. The label inside said “New Look.” She’d worn it partly tucked into her jeans at the front.