I keep it together long enough to get out of the supermarket. I can’t remember exactly what I’d said to Ellen, enough to get her to stop talking – ‘Don’t worry at all, it’s fine, I’ll see you.’ – then I’d dumped my basket, marched straight back through the entrance doors and into the car park.
I’d assumed it would fade out in time, that he’d move on. But here he is, moving from his rented flat in town back into a family home. Lisa’s got her kids most of the time, but then he’s always liked family life. My face is wet, I realise.
This is what happens when you try to be normal again. The past lays traps.
Looking back, it’s hard to remember those first days. I could answer questions and make tea for the police and Dad and Charlotte, who seemed to be here all the time, and do what was required. Then another great wave of terror would roll over me, flushing my body with panic: where was she?
The police talked to teachers and pupils at school. Sophie had signed in for registration on the Friday, that they could agree on. But this close to exams, the timetable was pretty much abandoned, much of the students’ time supposed to be spent in the library.
Then Jennifer Silver said she’d seen her heading to the changing rooms straight after registration, her big bag on her shoulder. Jennie Silver, I remembered Sophie telling me, laughing, was a total busybody. I held onto these nuggets of information. She’d got so protective of them.
They found Sophie’s navy skirt and jumper in the changing room, hung neatly on a peg. She’d just walked straight out of the school’s front door, as the older pupils were allowed to do, in her own clothes. In a letter to parents I heard the embarrassed head promised to review the sign-out procedure.
The upshot was the same: she’d been gone since Friday morning.
It didn’t take the police long to get hold of the video footage. The bus station in Amberton had been full of people, but they’d freeze-framed a shot, where she’d swung round in the direction of the camera, and zoomed in on her, a grainy black-and-white figure on their computer.
‘Mrs Harlow …?’ the officer with me had prompted. ‘Is that your daughter?’
I’d had to clear my throat. ‘Yes, that’s her.’
I still couldn’t believe it, that she’d actually done this. But there she was, in jeans and her winter jacket, too hot for the weather – at least she’ll be warm, I’d thought – stepping onto a coach. I couldn’t read her expression, as I tried to decipher the dots on the screen.
The coach was one of those on interminable routes that students love for their cheapness, winding south. They tracked down the driver; he thought he remembered her buying a ticket to London, but he couldn’t be sure, and nor could the police. They weren’t even sure where she’d got off.
‘It’s easier to disappear in a big city,’ said Kirstie, the officer assigned to us as ‘family liaison’ – to hold our hand through the worst. She was Scottish, in her thirties, I guessed, and didn’t shrink from telling me the truth, despite her warm manner. But there wasn’t that much to report, in the end.
They went through her phone, email, her Facebook – nothing out of the ordinary. Her internet searches though, on the laptop she used for homework and watching films, were another matter.
‘Budget work’
‘Casual work’
‘Cash in hand’
‘Travel work student’
Pages and pages, almost laying out her thought process for us.
‘You’d know if she’d gone abroad, wouldn’t you?’ I said, my panic mounting. ‘She’s taken her passport but it’s all electronic now, isn’t it, they must be able to track it. Right?’
‘The records are thorough,’ said Kirstie, ‘especially flights.’
‘Of course, no border system’s infallible,’ said the officer with her that day, a younger guy. ‘It’s not impossible.’
Sometimes my frustration spilled over: I wanted them to do even more.
‘This is a – a child. She’s still at school.’
‘She’s sixteen,’ Kirstie said once. ‘And she’s a clever girl, you say. Lots of teenagers leave home at sixteen.’ I think she was trying to reassure me.
‘Not girls like Sophie,’ I’d replied.
I read her reaction in the swift glance around our spacious living room. She knew: bad things happen to people in nice houses, too. I knew what I meant though: I just couldn’t see why Sophie’d gone.
Yes, we’d had rows; she wanted to go out more; she’d moaned about her revision workload. She loved art, and would happily spend hours hunched over her coursework, but she didn’t understand why I cared so much about maths and science and the rest.
‘Surely that’s not enough for her to do – this?’ I protested.
Kirstie didn’t need to contradict me: Sophie’s absence was its own rebuke.
At least there’d been no sign of … well, anything else. I could picture, all too easily, how it could have unfolded: long grass by a canal, a dog walker out early one morning, following their excited pet off the path: ‘Easy boy, hold on, what’s that … Oh God.’
I had to shut out the images that threatened to overwhelm me, that drove away sleep while Mark was snoring gently in the bed next to me. So I stayed busy. I started off local, driving around the streets at night, just to see. Then I went further, into the city, parking up behind derelict warehouses and near the railway arches, to show them my photos: Sophie, in her school uniform; Sophie, at the dinner to mark her sixteenth that April; Sophie, in cagoule on a school trip to the Lakes.
Mark said it was dangerous. ‘We need to let the professionals do their jobs.’ But I knew they wouldn’t hurt me, these tired people handling my photos so carefully under the street lights. ‘I’ll keep an eye out for you,’ they’d tell me. ‘I’ll ask around.’ I said Mark should come with me, then, if he was so worried for me. He kept it up for a bit, and, later, at the weekends, after he went back to work.
The police had questions for us, too. Was there anywhere she could have gone? Anyone that she might have been in contact with? Anyone we could think of, at all?
Dad, Charlotte and Mark, we talked endlessly, racking our brains at the kitchen table, late into the night. Back to London? She hadn’t lived there since she was, what, twelve – everyone she knew was up here. Some pretty seaside resort we’d once visited? We didn’t think Sophie would even remember the time we used to holiday closer to home, before Mark started doing so well. Still, we dutifully wrote all our ideas down and passed them on to Kirstie.
And then there were the other types of questions, more personal. How was Sophie feeling about her GCSEs? How important is academic success in your family? Did Sophie go out with her friends? Was she allowed to? Could you run through again, just so we understand, what exactly you were rowing about, in that last argument you mentioned? And, once: you lost your mother in recent years, Mrs Harlow, in distressing circumstances, we understand?
I’d drawn in my breath. I didn’t know Mark would have told them about that. The driver had been heading home the morning after a wedding, after catching a few hours’ sleep to sober up. Except he hadn’t sobered up, he was still well over the limit when he’d ploughed his four-wheeler into the car in front. Mum had been on her way to the garden centre. It had been quick, at least.
‘That – that was a shock, yes, but I don’t think it changed the way I treated Sophie in any way …’ I trailed off. Maybe it had, just as she hit the age when she needed more freedom.
And, underneath it all, I heard the questions left unspoken but sounding just as loud: Is this your fault? Did you do this? Did you push your daughter away?
Sophie, I’m so sorry, I’ve failed you. I’m so sorry.
In the end it had been Charlotte, always such a mum, who told me I needed to go to my GP, that I should get some pills. And Dr Heath was very understanding, writing a prescription that finally let me sleep; more for the daytime ‘if I needed them’. I’d been grateful for that.