KATE
Here she was. Here they were. And I’m too late.
I’ve lost her. I’ve failed her. And I’ve now lost her again, forever. The thoughts loop ceaselessly through my brain, as I wander back downstairs. Through the outside door, it’s raining properly now; the raindrops falling with the pent-up force of a summer storm. I stay in the hall, sheltered. The picture’s still in my hand, Sophie’s drawing, the child’s colouring in. My face is numb. Dimly, I wonder if I’m in shock. But I’ve got to keep going. I pull out my phone to call. Who? Dad. No, Charlotte. No, the police, I’ve got to … Evidence. I shouldn’t have touched this, should I? But then I see I’ve got a text.
Hello! Have you got it? Tell me what you think. What a find! Vicky x
It takes me a second, and then I place her. Vicky, the librarian’s sister. What’s she talking about? On autopilot, I pull open my email and scroll down; I don’t see it. So I check my junk folder, wait for it to load – and there it is: an email sent last night.
Hiya Kate
You’ll never guess. After we spoke, you got me thinking: maybe I still have it. So I went round to Mum’s and, guess what, I found it. It was to mark the centenary, they got all of us out on the playing field. Back row, right on the end – next to Nancy. Told you he was a bit of a hunk! Vx
Jay. It feels like an age ago: she was going to try to find his surname somehow. I feel like I’m a swimmer, coming up from the bottom of a pool – rising back to reality. But a part of me’s still in that room. It was so small. Just that tiny skylight, set into the roof.
I click on the attachment. My phone freezes, the digital egg-timer telling me it’s slow to load: blurry black and white shapes. Vicky must have taken a picture of this on her phone – it’s loading sideways, I think – rows hinting at … what? I turn my phone around to understand what I’m looking at.
Yes, it goes this way, the detail now appearing. It’s part of a school photo. She hasn’t bothered to try to get the whole thing in, she’s just got the end of the student body; three dozen or so little figures, stacked in four rows, a green stretch of lawn behind them.
The faces are tiny, just smudges above the blue of their uniforms. I pull at the photo to zoom in on the back row. I misjudge it and go too far – a face fills the screen.
Nancy. Smiling, her shoulders back.
I wonder if it was the same day they took the portrait that ended up in the paper, her fair hair’s pulled back the same way. I pore over it for clues, traces of what happened to her, but of course there’s no sign – nothing to say, ‘This is the girl’ – that marks her out. She’s a pretty teenager, nothing more, nothing less, and oh, so young …
Carefully, I nudge the photo to the right again, just one place, and wait for my phone to catch up with the boy on the end.
A shock of dark hair, pale skin, sleepy eyes. He looks younger than I imagined.
I suppose I’d always pictured him as just a little older than me, ageing in the same way. But he was, of course, a teenager then, just sixteen.
Here is he is. Jay.
No, this isn’t right.
I scroll down to where the names are listed in tiny print along the bottom. It’s almost impossible to read – out of focus and the camera’s captured the shine of the photographic paper, a pale streak wiping out the lettering in places. I read across to find the right name, scanning the row … Billingsley, E – I squint – Elisabeth. Curran, Helena. I skip across: Corrigan, Nancy; there she is. And next to her, Nicholls – I scroll in closer, trying to make out the blurred lettering. Nicholls, Benjamin.
That’s him, to Nancy’s right, at the end of the line. Benjamin Nicholls.
I think: she’s got confused. Vicky’s got this wrong. Because this isn’t Jay.
Then: it’s been a long time, no wonder she’s got mixed up after all these years. And I knew Nicholls grew up round here, I knew that already, didn’t I? DI Ben Nicholls, alumnus, who still comes back to the school, like Maureen the secretary told me so proudly.
And at the same time another part of my brain is running over the sums. Jay would be what, sixteen back then, add twenty-six years, so, early forties now? Like me. Like Nicholls. So yes, they could well have been in the same year. Friends, even.
I scroll back up again, my sweating fingers leaving faint smears against the glass. I pull at the image to expand it, so the whole face fills the screens the picture grainy this close up.
Chin up, confident, staring across the decades. I can see the likeness to the man he’d become so clearly now. Those curtains of hair, all the boys had that style then. Now he’s got that short, professional crop. And he’s filled out – his face is weathered, of course. What is it again, more than twenty-five years? That will do that to someone.
And then finally, I know, my thoughts coalescing into some kind of sense.
I’ve no doubt now, no doubt at all.
DI Nicholls. Benjamin Nicholls. Benji.
Jay, for short.
OK. Don’t panic. Think.
It can’t be. Not a policeman.
Someone touched by an old tragedy, they might well choose to start afresh, to drop an old name. And there’s no reason he’d tell me about his past, about a missing girl from nearly three decades ago.
But now images start to flash through my mind, disjointed scenes. Maureen, at the school. ‘He gives talks to the students … He’s very popular with the teenage girls in particular …’
Nicholls, when I first encountered him: ‘I’m up to speed on the case, I’ve read through the files.’ Yet from the start, somehow … off. Reluctant for me to get too involved.
And then telling me about those strange calls, from near my house, that made me look crazy. Did anyone else even know about them? Did they even happen?
Say he saw Sophie, at school. Did seeing her, the spit of Nancy, dislodge something in him, an old obsession reigniting? He saw a chance, to what – repeat the past?
And that phone call when I told him what Holly said about the pregnancy test warning me off. ‘I would suggest, Mrs Harlow, that you don’t take investigations into your own hands. That’s rarely – helpful.’ He was warning me off.
And I saw him here. That black silhouette against the sunshine when I saw him here, right here at the house. ‘I wouldn’t suggest you start trying to find any trespassers yourself.’ And me wondering why I hadn’t seen his car. ‘You can park in the lane, that way’– gesturing to behind Parklands. ‘There’s a little path that cuts through.’
My stomach is churning. I wonder, distantly, if I actually will be sick. I was so focused on being caught here, I felt guilty. He said he was checking up on the house. Was he? Or was it him the night before in my garden, checking on me? Curious, maybe. Before he went back – back to Parklands. Back to Sophie. A policeman wouldn’t struggle to find a reason to look around an empty house. And he’d know how to get in.
I’m absorbed in my thoughts, riveted to the spot. So maybe that’s why I don’t hear the sound, so faint, just a soft footstep on the tiles of the porch. It must be just the light that changes, the pale slice into the hallway dimming as I stare at the phone screen in my hand.
Something, anyway, makes me look up.
The figure in the doorway is blocking out the light.