The Night She Disappeared Page 3

  Tallulah watches her head to the till. Her people are already gravitating toward her, following in her wake, ensuring that they will find space next to her once she has decided where she will sit. Tallulah picks up a ham sandwich and an orange juice and pays for them. She sits at a table close to Scarlett’s.

  Scarlett sits with her long legs stretched out, her huge high-top trainers resting on the chair opposite her, her shins still boasting a silky summer tan. She opens the chocolate soya milk and pours it onto her Rice Krispies, then lowers her face to the bowl and shovels them into her mouth with a spoon. At one point she spills chocolate milk down her chin and wipes it away with the cuff of her hoodie. She’s with the kids she always hangs around with. Tallulah doesn’t know their names. Scarlett and her clique all used to go to the posh school in Tallulah’s village, Maypole House, which has a reputation for being for thick rich kids or rich kids with behavioral issues or rich kids with ADHD or rich kids with drug-abuse problems. They screech around the village in their convertible Mini Clubmans, stalk into the local pubs with their fake IDs and their loud voices and their rich-kid hair. In the co-op you could hear them before you saw them, calling to each other across the aisles about how there was no fresh mozzarella, then talking across the heads of the village teenagers manning the tills as if they didn’t even exist.

  Now a small group of them has, for some unknown reason, ended up at the local further education college in Manton, the nearest town. Most of them are in their first year of a fine art diploma. A couple of them are studying fashion. They clearly all come from families that had expected them to end up in good universities and instead had ended up at Manton College of Further Education and consequently there is a defensiveness about them.

  Tallulah puts a hand to her belly. The flesh there is still so loose and blubbery. It’s been nearly three months since she gave birth, but it feels like half her insides are still made of baby. She just stopped breastfeeding a week ago and her breasts still leak sometimes and she keeps pads inside her bra. She switches on her phone and looks at the photo of Noah on her home screen. Her stomach flips, a mixture of unbearable love and fear. For three months she and Noah have been inseparable; her first day at college last week was the first time she’d left him for longer than a few minutes. Now he is half an hour away from her, a bus ride, six and a half miles away, and her arms feel weightless, her breasts feel heavy. She texts her mum. All OK?

  Her mum replies immediately. Just got back from looking at the ducks. All good.

  At the next table, Scarlett has zoned out from talking to her clique and is staring at her phone in a way that suggests she’s not really looking at anything. She rolls the apple on the tray around and around with the fingers of her spare hand. Her face, in profile, is interesting; there is a bump in her nose, a slight curve to her chin. Her mouth is a thin line. But still she is somehow pretty, prettier than any other girl at the college, even the ones with perfect noses and pillow lips. She turns and catches Tallulah staring at her. She narrows her eyes, then turns away from her, drops her feet back to the floor, picks up the apple, tucks it in the pocket of her hoodie, and leaves her group of friends without saying goodbye to any of them. As she passes Tallulah she narrows her eyes again, and Tallulah imagines for a split second that she sees a smile pass across her face.

  6

  JUNE 2017

  Kim buckles Noah into his car seat and gives him one of his fabric books to flick through. Ryan sits in the back with him, while Kim gets into the driver’s seat and switches on her phone to put the address into Google.

  “Dark Place,” she says as she types. “It’s only a mile away, I wonder why I’ve never heard of it before.”

  She slots her phone into its holder, presses start, and pulls out of the quiet cul-de-sac where she has lived since she was twenty-one years old. She hums distractedly under her breath. She doesn’t want Noah to pick up on her anxiety, doesn’t want Ryan to have to deal with her mounting feelings of dread and fear.

  They drive through the sun-dappled lanes that connect Upfield Common with Manton, the nearest big town. Just before the large roundabout that marks the end of the village, Google tells them to turn right, up a tight dogleg. The signpost is overgrown with buddleia, but Kim can just make out the words UPLEY FOLD ½.

  It’s a single-lane road and she drives cautiously in case she meets a vehicle coming the other way. It’s nearly 4:00 p.m. and the sun is still high in the sky. She peers into the rearview mirror and says to Ryan, “Can you put the screen down on Noah’s side? He’s in full sun.”

  Ryan leans across and pulls it down. Noah points at something in his fabric book and attempts to tell Ryan what it is, but he hasn’t learned how to talk yet so Ryan just looks at the page and says, “Yes, piggy, that’s right. Piggy!”

  Google tells her to take the next turning on the right. She cannot believe that there is actually a turning on the right, but there it is, a track with a line of meadow grass running down its center, the hedgerows lower here so Kim can see blinding fields of rape, some cows silhouetted in the distance, a cluster of cottages. And then, after another few minutes, a pair of metal gates, a gravel driveway pointing due south, the name DARK PLACE fashioned out of wrought iron, the suggestion of a turreted house in the distance. Kim turns off the engine and puts her phone into her handbag.

  “What are you going to do?” asks Ryan.

  Her eyes scan the gate for a doorbell or entry system, but there’s nothing. A footpath runs alongside the gravel drive. She gets Noah’s pushchair out of the boot and assembles it, batting midges out of her face. “Come on,” she says to Ryan, unclipping the fastenings on Noah’s seat. “We’re going to walk.”

  * * *

  Ryan uses his phone to google Dark Place and he gives her a running commentary from its Wiki page as they walk. Kim enjoys the distraction from her thoughts.

  “It was built in 1643,” he says. “Wow, 1643,” he repeats. “But most of it got burned down a few years after it was built. It lay empty for seventy years and that’s how it got the name ‘Dark Place,’ because of the charred wood that surrounded it. The Georgian wing was added in 1721 and the Victorian wing in the late 1800s by a coffee plantation owner called Frederick de Thames. Who… God…” He pauses and scrolls back. “Who fathered at least thirty-eight children in Colombia, seven in the UK, and died of the Spanish flu when he was only forty-one. The house was left to his last wife, Carolina de Thames, who was only twenty when he died, and who passed it on in turn to her son, Lawrence. In 1931 three of Frederick’s older children plotted to have Lawrence assassinated, but the man they hired to kill him got caught in a fox trap in the grounds of Dark Place and wasn’t found until five days later when he’d been partially eaten by foxes and had his eyes pecked out by crows. He had the assassination orders on a signed form in the pocket of his coat. The three brothers who’d plotted Lawrence’s death were sent to prison and Lawrence lived in the house until he died in 1998. Whereupon, with no living heirs, the house went back on the market and was purchased by an unknown buyer for nearly two million pounds in 2002.”

  As they walk Kim casts her eyes across the ground, across the horizon, all around her, looking for signs of her daughter. She’d called all three local taxi companies before leaving the house and none of them had collected anyone from Dark Place last night.

  They walk for nearly ten minutes until finally she sees the house. It looks just as Kim had expected it to look from Ryan’s description. A hodgepodge of disparate architectural styles, blended almost seamlessly together across three wings, set around a central courtyard. The sun sparkles off the diamonds of leaded windows on the left wing and larger Victorian casement and sash windows on the right. It should be a mess, but it is not; it is exquisitely beautiful.

  In the driveway are four cars and a golf buggy. Even from here, Kim can hear the sound of people splashing in a swimming pool. Ryan helps her pull Noah’s buggy up the steps to the front door and she rings the be
ll.

  A young man answers. A huge Saint Bernard dog follows behind and collapses, panting, at his feet. The man is bare-chested and holding a six-pack of beers in one hand and a tea towel in the other.

  He looks from Kim to Noah to Ryan and back to Kim. “Hi!”

  “Oh, hi. My name is Kim. I wondered if Scarlett was around? Or her parents?”

  “Er, yeah. Yeah, sure. Hold on a sec.” He turns and yells out, “Mum! Someone for you at the door!”

  Behind him, Kim sees a pale stone staircase, with a striped runner up the middle. She sees modern art and designer light fittings and then a woman in a loose white sundress and white flip-flops appears. The dog stands heavily to greet the woman, who peers at Kim curiously through the door.

  The boy smiles at Kim and then disappears.

  “Yes?” says the woman.

  “Sorry to disturb you like this, on a Saturday.”

  The woman looks across her shoulder at the gravel sweep and says, “How did you get here?”

  “Oh,” says Kim, “we parked at the gate, and walked.”

  “But that’s half a mile! You should have rung the bell.”

  “Well, we looked, but we couldn’t see one.”

  “Urgh, yes, sorry, it’s a movement sensor. You need to stand over it. Lots of people miss it. You should have called.”

  “Well, I didn’t have a number. Or at least, I had a number but I didn’t realize how far the house was going to be from the gate, but anyway, it’s fine. It’s just… I’m looking for my daughter.”

  “Oh,” she says, “are you Mimi’s mum? I think she left this morning…”

  “No,” says Kim. “No. Sorry. I’m not Mimi’s mum. I’m Tallulah’s mum. She was here last night?”

  “Tallulah?” The woman rubs the dog’s head absentmindedly with a hand bearing just one wide band on her wedding finger. “Gosh, no, I don’t think I know a Tallulah.”

  “Lula?” she suggests. She hates the name Lula, but her daughter’s friends have always tended to shorten her full name; it’s something she’s learned to accept.

  “No.” The woman shakes her head. “No. I’ve never heard of Lula either. Are you sure she was here?”

  Kim is hot and anxious. There’s no shade where she’s standing and the sun is beating down on the back of her neck. She can feel a hot dampness breaking out all over her body and feels a flash of anger at this woman in her crisp white sundress and freshly brushed hair, her cool, dry complexion and the suggestion in her clipped English accent that Kim is somehow mistaken and in the wrong place.

  She nods and tries to keep her voice pleasant. “Yes. I spoke to your daughter a couple of hours ago. She said Tallulah was here last night with her boyfriend, Zach, and they left in a minicab at three a.m. But I’ve called all the minicab numbers and none of them has a record of a pickup from this address or anywhere in the vicinity of this address. And it’s nearly four p.m. and my daughter is still not home. And this”—she points behind her at Noah in his buggy—“is Tallulah’s son and she would never deliberately leave him. Just never.”

  Her voice begins to crack dangerously and she breathes in hard to stop herself from crying.

  The woman looks unperturbed by this display of emotion. “Sorry,” she says after a pause. “What was your name again?”

  “Kim. And this is Ryan. My son. And Noah. My grandson.”

  “Gosh,” says the woman. “A grandmother! You look far too young to be a grandmother. Anyway. I’m Joss.” She puts out a hand for Kim to shake and then says, “Come on, then. Let’s go and see what Scarlett has to say about all of this. Follow me.”

  She leads them across the courtyard and through a tall wrought-iron gate set in an ancient brick wall grown over with ivy. The huge dog pads heavily behind them. The courtyard is smattered with tiny white stone figures set on Perspex plinths. They follow her down a flagstone path lined with sculptural plants in cobalt-glazed pots and then turn a corner.

  In front of them is the pool.

  It’s set in a cream marble terrace with a curtained pagoda at one end housing a huge cream-cushioned daybed. At angles along its length are teak sunbeds with matching cream cushions. Floating at the pool’s center, inside a bright pink inflatable flamingo, is a tall, thin girl with lime-green hair and a black bandeau bikini top. She peers at Kim and her entourage curiously. Then she says, “Oh,” as the penny drops.

  “Tallulah?” says Joss, shielding her eyes from the sun shining off the pool’s surface with her hand. “Apparently, she was here last night. Any idea where she got to?”

  Scarlett pushes herself to the pool’s edge by paddling her hands through the water; then she dismounts the flamingo and ascends the stone steps. She pulls a black towel around herself and sits down at a teak circular table covered with white candles in glass jars.

  Kim sits opposite her. “I know,” she begins, “you said that you don’t know where they went. I know you said that Tallulah was sick and they got in a minicab. But the cab firms are all saying that they didn’t pick anyone up from here. I just wondered if there was anything else that happened last night that might explain where they are.”

  Scarlett picks at the wax on the top of one of the candles and makes no eye contact with Kim. “Genuinely,” she says, “honestly. That’s all I know.”

  “And did you see them getting into a car?”

  “No. I was out here, with Mimi. And Zach came and said Lula had been sick and he was going to take her home, that there was a taxi coming.”

  “He said that? That the taxi was coming? Or did he say he was going to call one?”

  Scarlett shrugs. Kim watches crystal beads of pool water coalesce and collapse on her angular shoulders and run down her arms in rivulets. “I’m pretty sure he said one was coming.”

  Kim can see Ryan hovering in her peripheral view. She pulls out a chair for him and he sits down, bringing Noah’s pushchair close to him. “So, is there a chance, do you think, that Zach tried to call a taxi and no one could send one so they ended up walking?”

  “Yeah?” says Scarlett. “I guess?”

  Kim turns to Scarlett’s brother, who is perched on the end of a sunbed across the pool, with a bottle of beer hanging between his knees. “Were you here last night, at the party?” she calls over to him.

  He puts out a hand defensively and says, “No. Not me. I just got home this morning.”

  Kim sighs. “And if they had walked, where might they have ended up?”

  Scarlett shrugs again. “It depends, I suppose. On which way they went. If they went up the driveway they could have ended up on the main road, or Upley Fold if they turned the wrong way. If they went the back path, they would have ended up back in Upfield Common.”

  “The back path?”

  “Yes,” she replies, waving her hand in a vague arc behind her. “There.”

  Kim gazes over her shoulder. All she can see are lawns and flower beds and hedges and gravel pathways and pockmarked stone steps and sundials and arbors.

  “Where?”

  “Beyond,” says Scarlett. “Behind. There’s a path there that goes through the woods and into the back end of Upfield Common. Near the Maypole. I used to walk that way to go to school sometimes when I was there.”

  “How far?”

  Joss interjects. “A mile, just over. But I wouldn’t recommend it. Especially not with a baby. You really need to know where you’re going, otherwise you’ll get lost.”

  “Did Tallulah know about the back path?”

  Scarlett shrugs. “I don’t think so,” she said. “She’d never been here before so there’s no reason she should have known about it.”

  “And who else,” Kim continues. “Who else was here last night?”

  “Just us three,” says Scarlett, “and Mimi. Lexie Mulligan was here before they left. She lives at Maypole House. Her mum’s the matron there. You know, Kerryanne Mulligan?”

  Kim nods. She knows Kerryanne well. Everyone in Upfield Common knows Ke
rryanne. She’s larger-than-life.

  “Yeah. Her daughter. She’s, like, in her twenties. But she left early. She was driving. And she took my friend Liam with her.”

  “So, after that, it was just you, Tallulah, Zach, and… Mimi?”

  “Yup.”

  “And your mum and dad?”

  “Mum was here. She was asleep. Dad’s away on business.”

  Kim turns to Joss, who is sitting on the steps behind her, listening into the conversation. “You don’t happen to have security cameras, do you? Anywhere in the grounds?”

  Joss nods and says, “Yes, tons of them. But I’m afraid I haven’t got the vaguest idea how to use them.” She glances across at her son. “Rex? Any idea how to look at the camera footage?”

  Rex grimaces. “Not really. I know there’s like some kind of centralized panel in Dad’s study, but I’ve never actually used it.”

  Kim says, “Do you think we might try?” And as she says it she feels the mood change immediately. Until now she’s been a minor distraction, entertained on their own terms. Now she’s asking people to go indoors, to open doors, work out how to use equipment. She sees the three of them exchange looks. Then Joss gets to her feet and approaches Kim and says, “Tell you what. Save us all traipsing about in Martin’s office, why don’t I just get Rex to have a look in a bit. I’ll get him to give Martin a ring to talk him through it. Scarlett’s got your number. We’ll call you if we find anything.”