I spend the afternoon inside, with the study blind drawn against the sun, trying once more to get into the email account from Sophie’s diary. I’m optimistic at first. Surely inspiration will strike, it can’t be that hard.
But I still can’t do it, locked in a cycle of getting the answer to her security question wrong and freezing the account. After that, I focus on trying different passwords, typing in different variations of her ‘loopysophie’ password, before starting to randomly type in words that she might have chosen instead. Amberton, for her school. Charlotte, her middle name. Lilac, her favourite colour. What bands did she like? Pop stars? I start typing in names, and then names with numbers – 2000, for the year she was born. 99, just because. Eventually I break, my eyes gritty and tired.
I will sleep on it. And then if I can’t get into it, I will tell the police.
I groan, my head in my hands. I can just imagine Nicholls, polite as ever: ‘And what exactly do you think it means if a teenage girl has more than one email address, Mrs Harlow?’
He’ll think I’m looking for a way out. That I just can’t accept that Sophie went through all this alone. That she would rather run away than confide in me. Which is true, I suppose. I can’t.
I’ll sleep on it, I tell myself. And then I’ll decide.
I’m winding down for the night, pottering about the kitchen and wiping down surfaces that are already clean – there’s less mess with everyone gone – when the phone rings. I consider letting it ring out.
‘Who the hell’s this?’ I mutter to the cat. Charlotte and I used to say this to each other if anyone rang after dinner, parroting our favourite Peter Kay sketch. I check the oven clock: 9.35p.m. Even by my family’s standards, I’m keeping old lady hours. I reach for the phone.
‘Hello?’
For a heartbeat, the faint crackle on the line catches at me, casting me back to the other night, at the charity …
‘Mrs Harlow?’ The woman’s voice is soft, American vowels. I relax, a little. It’s not Sophie again.
‘Yes, that’s me.’
‘It’s Olivia Marnell. I got your message, about the house.’ It still takes me a second to place her, then I do. Not American, Canadian. ‘I used to be Olivia Corrigan.’
She’s very polite, apologetic even. I’ve explained who I am, and talked – tactfully at first – about the state of Parklands. I got the impression she doesn’t realise in quite how bad a state it is. Eventually I tell her more bluntly: it’s been pretty much derelict now, at least since I’ve moved in. The trees are so big they could be undermining the houses around it, let alone hers.
Finally she gets it. ‘Oh dear.’ She sighs. ‘I do apologise. My parents – they didn’t want to deal with it, really. For personal reasons. And now it’s fallen to me, there’s been a surprising amount to take care of this end, in terms of arrangements, after my mother died.’ She sounds tired. ‘But I’m going to get on top of the house now. I’m going to decide what to do with it, in terms of selling or getting it redeveloped. It shouldn’t go to ruin.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It could be a beautiful property again.’ How can I bring it up? I decide honesty is the best policy. ‘I can understand it must have been hard for your parents, though, if they were getting older. I heard’ – I pause delicately – ‘I understand there was a family tragedy. In the past.’
There’s silence on the line.
‘Sorry,’ I say hastily. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’
‘No, that’s OK,’ she says slowly. ‘I’m just not used to talking about it. My husband, my kids – they never knew my sister. And after we lost my dad, then Mom – well, nobody really knows.’
‘So – what happened? I read that she ran away.’
‘Yes,’ she says simply. ‘That’s right.’
‘And after that you didn’t ever hear from her?’
‘No. We never heard from her,’ she echoes.
I’m shocked, somehow. For some reason I thought that there’d have been some sign, at least, some phone call or … I don’t know, something they hadn’t mentioned in the papers. ‘But people don’t just vanish, not now …’ I stop myself from saying anything else clumsy.
‘I’m afraid they do. It was a different time then, too, no Facebook, nothing.’
‘Even so,’ I protest, feeling irritated. How can this woman sound so … resigned to it all? Suddenly, I realise that I was hoping to hear what I wanted to hear: Nancy had come back.
‘What was Nancy like?’ I ask. ‘If you don’t mind.’ I just want to keep her on the line.
‘What was she like?’ She sighs again. ‘She was clever. She did well in school. She liked horses – she had a pony, Blossom, that she loved.’ She laughs. ‘He was vicious. He was sold, afterwards.’
‘But what was she like to you?’
‘To me? I don’t know. She was my big sister. There were six years between us, so I looked up to her. She used to tease me sometimes, and I’d cry. But she’d braid my hair, sometimes, and let me play with her make-up. And she could make me laugh like no one else ever has.’
‘And what about, erm, boyfriends?’
I can hear the smile. ‘I don’t really know. I was only ten when she went. But she was very pretty. She loved attention. I can’t imagine anything got that serious.’
‘I read that he, Nancy’s boyfriend, was questioned by the police, afterwards.’ She doesn’t bite, but I press on. ‘I don’t suppose you remember his name?’
‘No, I don’t. They spoke to lots of her friends.’ Her voice hardens. ‘Are you a journalist?’
‘No, absolutely not. Sorry. I don’t want to pry. I just—I’m sorry.’
But she’s upset now. ‘This is exactly why my parents left, to escape all the curiosity. To protect me from all the questions. We came to Canada for a new start.’
I feel bad: I can hear the quaver in her voice under the anger. ‘I really don’t mean to upset you. It’s just – my daughter’s gone missing too. She ran away.’ I might as well admit it. ‘Your family’s story struck a chord, that’s all, being local, and I wondered what had happened.’
‘Oh,’ she says, mollified. ‘Well, you should have said. You don’t meet many …’ People like us, I fill in. The ones left behind. ‘I guess then I’m some years ahead of you.’ She doesn’t offer any reassurance, or platitudes.
‘So what do you think happened to Nancy?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t know, and there’s where I leave it. I leave it in the hands of God. Or whatever there is.’
‘Why do you think she went?’
‘Well. They were going to send her to boarding school. My parents thought it would be best for her – they were traditional, you know? I’ve wondered if maybe that was why … she never seemed that upset. But you just don’t know, do you?’
‘But you do think she – that she’s OK?’
She’s silent. She’s definitely going to hang up this time. And now, I don’t want to know her answer. ‘Ignore that, I shouldn’t have asked—’ but she interrupts.
‘Nancy’s dead.’ She’s almost casual. Like it’s that obvious.
‘Dead?’
‘Of course she is,’ she says, more gently. ‘I’ve known that for a long time.’
‘You have?’
‘Oh, I don’t know what happened, what she might have got mixed up in. Who might have picked her up. But I do know that if Nancy was still alive, she would have come back. A very long time ago.
‘They used to hitchhike, in those days, you know.’ She lets that hang in the air.
I wish, quite definitely, that I hadn’t talked to her now.
‘But why was everybody so sure that she’d run away then, that nothing else – God forbid – had happened to her? Didn’t they search for her?’ I sound angry: like they’ve let Nancy down.
‘Well, they did, at first,’ she says, still infuriatingly calm. No, resigned. ‘But they didn’t think anything that bad had happened. At first, they thought she’d still come back. You see, she left a note.’
‘A note. And that’s what it all hung on?’ At least with Sophie we knew, I think wildly, there was the CCTV at the bus station, her postcards home after—
‘The housekeeper found it, on her bed, in the morning. She’d gone in the night. Although in a way,’ she continues, her tone thoughtful, ‘that was worse. Because it gave my parents hope.’
I don’t want to think about that. ‘What did the note say? I hope you don’t mind me asking. It’s only …’ I trail off. I can’t really conjure up a reason why I should know.
‘That’s OK. I can remember it, even now.’ Now that she’s talking about Nancy she doesn’t seem to want to stop. I suppose it’s the same reason families called me at the helpline.
She recites it by rote, sing-song like a nursery rhyme: ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go away. Please don’t worry about me, it will all be fine. But I need to get away. All my love, Nancy.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘So short.’
‘She was never really a writer, Nancy. More of a doer.’
Outside in the dimming light, Tom is stalking something, slowly pacing forward across the grass. ‘Short like Sophie’s,’ I say, watching the cat. He freezes, a paw suspended in the air. ‘And it was definitely her handwriting?’ Another slow pace forward …
‘Yes, we all knew that. There was never any doubt about that …’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Me neither.’
There doesn’t seem much to say after that. I thank her, before I hang up. And I mean it. She’s been generous with her time, and her story.
I stay by the phone. I should get on. But I can’t seem to move, a chill pooling at the bottom of my stomach.
It has to be a coincidence.
Brief little notes. No long explanations, no angry justifications, no recriminations. Just short, earnest goodbyes, in their own handwriting. So who could doubt, really, that they meant what they said?
And then, of course, there was the call from Sophie, I remind myself. Nancy never did that.
But a phrase plays in my mind again: ‘But I need to get away.’
I don’t need to pull out Sophie’s note to know that it’s the same, but I head into the living room and take it down from the mantelpiece anyway. There it is.
I’m sorry everyone. But I need to get away. Please try not to worry about me, I’m going to be fine. I love you all, Sophie xxx
Just similar words, and that phrase, shared by two missing girls decades apart. Nothing really, for anyone to get alarmed about. Certainly nothing that couldn’t be put down to simple coincidence – or the desperation of a mother to find what’s not really there.
I know that, I do. But I can’t stop myself asking the question.
Why does a runaway note that’s nearly thirty years old sound like my daughter wrote it?