The Night She Disappeared Read online

  And so she said yes.

  She and Shaun made the most of every minute of their last few weeks in London. They sat on every pavement terrace in South London, ate every kind of obscure ethnic cuisine, watched films in multistory car parks, wandered around pop-up food fairs, picnicked in the park to the background sounds of grime music and sirens and diesel engines. They spent ten days in Majorca in a cool Airbnb in downtown Palma with a balcony overlooking the marina. They spent weekends with Shaun’s children and took them to the South Bank to run through the fountains, for al fresco lunches at Giraffe and Wahaca, to the Tate Modern, to the playgrounds in Kensington Gardens.

  And then she’d leased her one-bedroom flat in New Cross to a friend, canceled her gym membership, signed out of her Tuesday-night writers’ group, packed some boxes, and joined Shaun here, in the middle of nowhere.

  And now, as the sun shines down through the tops of the towering trees, splashing dapples onto the dark fabric of her dress and the ground beneath her feet, Sophie starts to feel the beginning of happiness, a sense that this decision borne of pragmatism might in fact have been some kind of magical act of destiny unfurling, that they were meant to be here, that this will be good for her, good for both of them.

  Shaun takes their lunch things through to the kitchen. She hears the tap go on and the clatter of dishes being laid down in the butler’s sink.

  “I’m going for a wander,” she calls to Shaun through the open window.

  She turns to put the latch on the gate as she leaves the back garden and as she does so her eye is caught by something nailed to the wooden fence.

  A piece of cardboard, a flap torn from a box by the look of it.

  Scrawled on it in marker and with an arrow pointing down to the earth are the words “Dig Here.”

  She stares at it curiously for a moment. Maybe, she thinks, it’s left over from a treasure trail, a party game, or a team-building exercise from the Glee course that is finishing today. Maybe, she thinks, it’s a time capsule.

  But then something else flashes through her mind. A jolting déjà vu. A certainty that she has seen this exact thing before: a cardboard sign nailed to a fence. The words “Dig Here” in black marker pen. A downward-pointing arrow. She has seen this before.

  But she cannot for the life of her remember where.

  3

  JUNE 2017

  Zach’s mum is older than Kim. Zach is her youngest child; she has another four, all girls, all much older than him. Her name is Megs. She answers the door to Kim in cargo shorts and a voluminous green linen top, sunglasses on her head, a patch of sunburn on the bridge of her nose.

  “Kim,” she says. Then she turns immediately to Noah and beams at him. “Hello, my beautiful bubba,” she says. She chucks him under the chin, and then glances back at Kim. “Everything OK?”

  “Have you seen the kids?” Kim says, hitching Noah onto her other hip. She walked here without the pram; it’s hot and Noah is heavy.

  “Tallulah, you mean? And Zach?”

  “Yeah.” She shifts Noah again.

  “No. I mean, they’re at yours, aren’t they?”

  “No, they went to the pub last night, no sign of them now, and they’re not answering their phones. I thought maybe they might have come back to yours to crash.”

  “No, love, no. Just me and Simon here. Do you want to come in? We’re just out in the garden. We can try calling them again?”

  In Megs’s back garden, Kim lowers Noah down on the grass next to a push-along plastic toy that he attempts to pull himself up onto. Megs takes out her phone and presses in her son’s number. Megs’s husband, Simon, nods at Kim curtly and then turns back to his newspaper. Kim’s always had a horrible feeling that Simon finds her attractive and that his offhand manner is his way of dealing with how uncomfortable this makes him feel.

  Megs scowls and ends the call. “Straight through to voicemail,” she says. “Let me call Nick.”

  Kim throws her a questioning look.

  “You know, the barman from the Ducks? Hold on.” She prods the screen of her phone with blue acrylic nails. “Nick, love, it’s Megs. How are you? How’s your mum? Good. Good. Listen, were you working last night? You didn’t happen to see Zach in there, did you?”

  Kim watches Megs nod a lot, listens to her making receptive noises. She pulls a lump of earth from Noah’s hand just as he’s about to press it into his mouth and waits patiently.

  Finally Megs ends the call. “Apparently,” she says, “Zach and Tallulah went off after the pub to someone’s house, someone Tallulah knows from college.”

  “Yeah, I know that. But any idea who?”

  “Scarlett someone. And a couple of others. Nick seemed to think they were heading out of the village. They went in a car.”

  “Scarlett?”

  “Yes. Nick said she’s one of the posh kids from the Maypole.”

  Kim nods. She’s never heard of a Scarlett. But then, Tallulah doesn’t really talk much to her about college. Once she’s home, Noah is pretty much the only topic of conversation in the house.

  “Anything else?” she asks, pulling Noah onto her lap.

  “That’s all he had, I’m afraid.” Megs smiles at Noah and stretches her arms out toward him, but he curls himself closer to Kim and Kim sees Megs’s smile falter. “Should we be worried? Do you think?”

  Kim shrugs. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Have you tried calling Tallulah’s friends?”

  “I don’t have any numbers for them. They’re all on her phone.”

  Megs sighs and leans back into her chair. “It’s strange,” she says. “If it weren’t for the baby, I’d just assume they were sleeping something off somewhere, you know, they’re so young, and God knows the things I got up to at their age. But they’re both so devoted, aren’t they, to Noah. It just seems a bit…”

  “I know.” Kim nods. “It does.”

  Kim wishes that she and Megs were closer, but Megs never seemed to believe in Zach and Tallulah as a couple, and then after Noah was born she backed off completely for a while, barely visiting Noah and acting like a distracted aunt when she did. And now she’s missed her moment with Noah, who recognizes her but doesn’t know that she’s important.

  “Anyway,” Kim says. “I’ll go and do some research into this Scarlett girl. See what I can dig up. But hopefully, I won’t need to. Hopefully, they’ll be home by the time I get back, looking sheepish.”

  Megs smiles. “You know what,” she says, brightly, in a tone of voice that suggests that really she just wants to get back to relaxing in the garden in the sun, that she really isn’t in the mood for worry, “I bet you anything they are.”

  * * *

  In Tallulah’s room, Kim rifles through the contents of her schoolbag. Tallulah is studying social care; she wants to be a social worker. Most of her coursework is done at home and she has to go into college only three times a week. Kim watches her at the bus stop from the front window sometimes, her fresh-faced baby in her casual college gear, her hair tied back, clutching a folder to her chest. Nobody would ever guess that she has a child of her own at home, she looks so young.

  Kim finds a planner in the bag and flicks through it. It’s full of Tallulah’s dense, somewhat inelegant handwriting—she’d started off left-handed and forced herself to learn to write with her right hand to fit in when she was at primary school. There’s no point looking for phone numbers—no one writes down phone numbers anymore—but maybe Scarlett’s name will appear on a class list or some such.

  And there it is, glued down and folded up on the back inside cover of the planner: “Student Contacts.” Kim scans it quickly, her finger coming to rest on the name “Scarlett Jacques: Student Event Planning Committee.”

  And there’s her email address.

  Kim immediately starts to type a message:

  Scarlett. This is Tallulah Murray’s mum, Kim. Tallulah hasn’t come home since going out last night and isn’t answering her phone and I
wondered if you had any idea where she might be? A friend said she was with someone called Scarlett. Please call me on this number as soon as possible. Many thanks.

  She presses send and then exhales and rests the phone on her lap.

  Downstairs the front door clicks shut. It’s 2:00 p.m. and it’ll be her son, Ryan, home from work. He works at the grocer’s in the village every Saturday, saving up for his big summer holiday to Rhodes in August, his first without his mum, just with friends.

  “Are they back?” he calls up the stairs to her.

  “Nope,” she calls back down.

  She hears him dropping his keys on a surface, throwing his trainers into the pile of shoes by the front door, then bounding up the stairs.

  “Seriously?” he says. “Have they called?”

  “No. Not a word.”

  She tells him about Megs calling Nick at the pub and the girl called Scarlett, and as she talks, her phone rings with an unknown number.

  “Hello?”

  “Oh, hi, is this Lula’s mum?”

  “Yes, hi, this is Kim.”

  “Hi. It’s Scarlett here. I just got your email.”

  Kim’s heart begins to race painfully, then skitter.

  “Oh,” she says, “Scarlett. Thank you. I just wondered—”

  Scarlett cuts in. “They were at my house,” she says. “They left at about three a.m. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Kim blinks; her head rocks back slightly. “And were they… did they… say where they were going?”

  “They said they were going to get a cab home.”

  Kim doesn’t like the tone of Scarlett’s voice. She has one of those clipped, chilly voices that tells of four-poster beds and bohemian private schools and gravel on the driveway. But she also sounds disinterested, as though talking to Kim is beneath her somehow.

  “And did they seem OK? I mean, had they had a lot to drink?”

  “I guess, yeah. Lula was sick. That’s why they left.”

  “She threw up?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kim pictures her slight, kind girl, bent double over a flower bed, and her heart lurches.

  “And did you see them? Get into a taxi?”

  “No. They just left. And that was that.”

  “And—sorry—but where do you live, Scarlett? Just so that I can ask around the local cab companies?”

  “Dark Place,” she replies, “near Upley Fold.”

  “Street number?”

  “No street number. Just that. Dark Place. Near Upley Fold.”

  “Oh,” says Kim, drawing two rings around the words on the paper where she’s written them down. “OK. Thank you. And please, if you hear anything from either of them, will you give me a ring? I mean, I don’t know how well you know Tallulah…”

  “Not that well,” Scarlett interjects.

  “Yes, well, she’s not the type just to disappear, not to come home. And she has a baby, you know.”

  There’s a brief pause at the other end of the line. Then, “No. I didn’t know that.”

  Kim gives her head a small shake, tries to imagine how Zach and Tallulah could have spent a whole night with this girl without once mentioning Noah. “Well, yes. She and Zach are parents. They have a son, he’s twelve months old. So not coming home is kind of a big deal.”

  There’s another silence at the end of the line and then Scarlett says, “Right, well, yeah.”

  Kim says, “Call me, please, if you hear anything.”

  “Yeah,” says Scarlett. “Sure. Bye.”

  And then she ends the call.

  Kim stares at her phone for a moment. Then she looks up at Ryan, who has been watching the phone call curiously.

  “Weird,” says Kim. She relays the detail of the call to her son.

  “Shall we drive over there?” he suggests. “To her house?”

  “Scarlett’s?”

  “Yeah,” says Ryan. “Let’s go to Dark Place.”

  4

  AUGUST 2018

  Shaun heads into work early the following morning. Sophie stands at the door of the cottage and watches as he disappears up the glass passageway, toward the main school building. He turns at the double doors and waves at her and then he is gone.

  The grounds of the school are full of people wheeling small cases behind them, heading toward the car park at the front of the school. The residential Glee course is over, summer is coming to an end, from tomorrow the boarding-school students will start returning. Cleaners wait in the shadows to enter their vacated rooms and prepare them for the new term.

  She heads back into the cottage now. It’s a pleasant house, functional. The air inside is clammy and cool with small windows grown over with ivy and wisteria branches that don’t let in much light. It still smells of other people and there’s that odd, damp bonfire smell in the hallway, which seems to emanate from between the floorboards. She’s covered the floorboards over with a runner and placed a reed diffuser on the sideboard, but it still lingers. It’s going to take a while to make the cottage feel like home, but it will, she knows it will. Shaun’s children are coming the weekend after next: that will bring it to life.

  Sophie turns to a box that she is halfway through unpacking when there is a knock at the door.

  “Hello?”

  “Oh, hi! It’s Kerryanne! The matron!”

  Sophie opens the door and sees a woman with thick golden hair held back with sunglasses, bright blue eyes, and sun-burnished cleavage. She’s wearing a maxi dress and bejeweled flip-flops. She does not look like a matron.

  “Hi!” says Sophie, reaching out to shake her hand. “Lovely to meet you!”

  “You too. You must be Sophie?”

  “Correct!”

  Kerryanne has a huge set of keys hanging from her hand. “How are you settling in?” she says, passing the keys from one hand to the other. “Got everything you need?”

  “Yes!” says Sophie. “Yes. Everything’s just fine. Shaun’s first day. He headed into work about ten minutes ago.”

  “Yes, I just saw him. We exchanged pleasantries! Anyway, I wanted you to take my number, in case you need anything. Obviously, my primary function is student welfare, but I’ll be keeping my eye out for you as well. I know how weird and new everything must be feeling, so please consider me to be your matron too. And if you’re missing home and need a shoulder to cry on…”

  Sophie blinks, not sure if she’s being serious or not, but Kerryanne beams at her and says, “Just joking. But honestly, anything you need—advice about the village, about the staff, the kids, whatever. Please just text me. And I’m on the second floor of Alpha block, just”—she crouches slightly to peer beneath an overhanging tree on the periphery of Shaun and Sophie’s garden—“that window there. With the balcony. Room number 205.” She passes Sophie a piece of paper with her details written on it in neat, schoolteachery script.

  “Is it just you?”

  “Most of the time, yeah. My daughter comes to stay sometimes, Lexie, she’s a travel blogger so she comes and goes. But mostly it’s just me. And I hear there’ll be some little ones here from time to time?”

  “Yes. Jack and Lily. Twins. They’re seven.”

  “Aw. Nice age. Right, well, any questions, anything at all, just ask. I’ve worked here for twenty years. I’ve lived in the village for nearly sixty. There’s nothing I don’t know about Upfield Common. In fact, you and Shaun should come over for a drink tonight, I can chew your ears off over a glass of wine.”

  “Oh,” says Sophie. “That would be lovely. Thank you.” She is about to thank her again and head back indoors, when her eye is caught by a pair of magpies taking flight from the treetops in the woodland beyond her garden. “Those woods?” She gestures at them. “Where do they lead?”

  “Oh, you don’t want to go too far into those woods.”

  Sophie throws Kerryanne a questioning look.

  “They go on for miles. You’ll get lost.”

  “Yes, but where do they come ou
t at?”

  “Depends which direction you go in. There’s a hamlet about a mile and a half that way.” She points to the left. “Upley Fold. Church, village hall, a few houses. It’s quite pretty. And if you head straight for a mile or so”—she points ahead—“there’s the back end of a big house. ‘Dark Place,’ it’s called. Empty now. It belongs to a hedge-fund manager from the Channel Islands and his very glamorous wife.” She rolls her eyes slightly. “Their daughter was a student here for a while, actually. Scarlett. Amazingly talented girl. But I really wouldn’t recommend trying to get there. Students head over there sometimes because there’s an old swimming pool and a tennis court, but then they can’t find their way back and there’s no signal in the woods. We even had to get the bloody police involved once.” She rolls her eyes again.

  Sophie nods. She’s feeling a bristle of excitement. In London when she needs writing inspiration, she’ll walk up to Dulwich or Blackheath and look at the grand old houses there and imagine the stories that lie within. Now she thinks of her walking stick and her compass and her water bottle and the opportunity to get some proper steps on her fitness app. The sun is hazy, it’s about seventy-two degrees, perfect walking weather. The words “old pool” and “tennis court” swim through her imagination. She thinks of the dryness of the air of a house abandoned throughout a long, hot summer, the bleached lawns, the dusty, cracked flagstones, the birds nesting in grimy window casements.

  She smiles at Kerryanne. “I’ll try to resist the urge,” she says.

  5

  SEPTEMBER 2016

  Scarlett Jacques is standing next to Tallulah in the queue at the canteen. She is five foot ten, thin as a stick; her bleached hair is dyed pale blue and gathered on top of her head in a bundle and someone has drawn a tiny rainbow on her cheekbone. She’s wearing a man’s hoodie, with sleeves that come to her knuckles, and a pair of oversize jersey shorts, with high-top trainers. Her fingers are covered with heavyweight rings and her fingernails are painted green. She hovers over the miniature cereal boxes, her fingers dancing across their spines until they land, decisively, on Rice Krispies. She grabs it and adds it to her tray, next to a carton of chocolate soya milk and an apple.