1. Mel, A Few Days Earlier
Voicemail, again. “Hi. You know what this is, you know what to do, so beeeeep.”
She’d heard that message three times now, and this time, finally, decided to leave a response. “Hey, Harriet. Mel here. But you know that. Anyway... Call me, yeah? You’re starting to make me worry, and that’s not cool, okay? So... you know what to do.”
Mel didn’t even understand why she was worrying like this. Yes, Harriet had failed to turn up the previous afternoon when they were supposed to be going shopping, but Harriet was hardly the most reliable of people. Just turned seventeen, the trip had been a late birthday treat, not something she’d be likely to forget about, but still... Harriet could be a law unto herself sometimes.
Maybe it was the big sister, little sister thing. Mel was ten years older, and there was no actual family connection, but they’d been close for a long time now. The two had a connection, an easy understanding where they would communicate with an expression – a roll of the eyes, a subtle smirk, a wrinkling of the nose – and finish each other’s sentences. Mel had lost count of how many times people had asked if they were sisters.
But now...
It was Sunday, and even if she’d forgotten the arrangements they’d made or got distracted, Harriet would have been in touch. She would, at least, have answered her phone.
§
“Hey, Jo. Mel. Yeah, that’s right. Listen, have you heard from Harriet recently? She was supposed to meet up with me yesterday, but... No? Oh, okay, then. If you do hear anything, though, right?”
She sat back in the over-sized beanbag that occupied one corner of the little loft bedroom she had in a house-share in north London. Outside, a train rumbled past. The window set into the sloping ceiling showed a rectangle of blue bisected by a wispy contrail.
None of Harriet’s friends knew anything. Nobody had seen her since Friday.
She should leave it, but she couldn’t convince herself that this was just Harriet being flaky old Harriet.
There was another call she could make, but she hesitated, knowing that would be an escalation in many ways. She’d learned never to ask her father for favors, knew it always became more complicated than it should.
But... Harriet.
Even if the nagging fear gripping Mel’s belly was a false alarm she knew she would hate herself if she did nothing. What kind of friend was that? What kind of faux-sister?
She had to make that call.
§
“Dad?”
She walked across short grass. Sun shone down from the blue sky she had glimpsed from her bedroom’s dormer window. Families played ball games all around her. Dogs chased and barked.
Her ear hurt from pressing the phone too hard against the side of her head. She forced herself to relax, let the tension go from her shoulders, her jaw.
“Melissa.” He never gave anything away – no expression, no intonation to give a clue as to his mood. When she’d first moved away to go to university it had taken her a long time to get used to how he was on the phone, and she’d had to learn not to take it personally. He was a far easier man in person.
Sometimes getting outside, with normal life all around, was the best way to deal with this.
“How’re you doing, Dad?”
“Oh, you know.”
She didn’t. That was the point of asking. When had he ever given a straight answer to anything?
“Listen, I just wanted to pick your brains.” Straight to the point – cut the small talk. “You remember Harriet Rayner? Penny’s daughter? I’ve been trying to get in touch with her, but, well... nothing. It’s not like her. I don’t know what’s happened. Nobody’s seen her since Friday. What’s the appropriate thing to do here? How long do I leave it? What can I do?”
“Have you asked Penny?”
“You know what she’s like.” Even flakier than her daughter, Penny Rayner had never found life easy. “I don’t know the last time Harriet even saw her mother.”
“Is that normal?”
“For them, yes.” Harriet might only have just turned seventeen, but she’d lived on her own for most of the last year in an apartment funded by the trust fund her late father had left her, knowing she and her mother could never actually live together.
“Has anyone reported her missing?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t. That’s why I’m asking. I don’t know what a normal person does in these circumstances.”
“Do you have any reason to suspect she’s at risk? Either from other people, or...”
Mel swallowed. Looked around at all the happy little groups in the park. Her father didn’t need to finish that sentence, even though it was an obvious thing to ask.
“She was doing well, Dad. Going to college. Happy. I see a lot of her. I’d know if she was... I don’t know... unstable.” Like her mother.
Silence.
“What do you want?” It sounded blunt, but that’s just how he was: he knew there was a point to this call – he’d probably already worked out what it was – and he was a direct man.
“Advice?” Mel said, tentatively. “Help?”
It was the great unspoken. What he did... who he was. The strings he could pull but never acknowledge.
“Report it, Melissa. Do the right thing. Then leave it to the professionals. That’s the way to handle it. And when she turns up in a couple of days, back from the kind of bender her mother used to pull, you can be embarrassed for making a fuss but you’ll know you did the right thing.”
He was trying to be kind, but it was the sort of kindness that felt like a slap.
She wasn’t asking him to tell her to do what everyone else does in a situation like this. She was asking him to help.
And she knew he was right and she should never have asked. Whatever he did in the corridors of power, it wasn’t something that could – or should – be exploited for personal reasons.
“Sorry,” she said softly. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” he said. “But I’d be disappointed if you hadn’t at least tried.”
§
Penny Rayner lived in what had been a free-standing garage in the garden of a very up-market house in north London. Mel always thought it an odd choice. On the one hand, it allowed her to continue to live in the kind of neighborhood she had when her husband had still been alive. But on the other, every time she looked out of her converted garage and saw her surroundings, it was a reminder of the life she had lost. Of the fortune she had eaten into for drugs and rehab when her husband had been alive; and then of the fact that his will had left her a carefully managed income and the wherewithal to pay for this modest home, living a life that was a quiet shadow of the one she’d had with him.
Mel wasn’t quite sure what to expect when she rang on the doorbell, but she wasn’t ready for–
“Melissa! Have you found her? Is she safe?”
Penny Rayner’s eyes were wide, the whites showing all the way around the irises, made even more dramatic by exaggerated use of mascara and eyeshadow, the animated workings of her mouth emphasized by thick red lipstick so dark it was almost black – a shade chosen to match the dark auburn hair cut into an Eton crop.
Mel couldn’t work out if the woman was high or simply alarmed.
Gently, she extricated herself from Penny Rayner’s grip on both arms, so tight it must surely leave bruising.
She’d expected confusion, had been trying to work out how to broach the subject of Harriet’s whereabouts without alarming a woman already prone to outbreaks of paranoia and anxiety, not to mention the various pharmaceutical ways she had of coping with those outbreaks.
Or better, she’d hoped Penny might actually know where her daughter was.
Now, Mel felt as if a lead weight had descended into her belly, a confirmation that her fears were well-founded.
“You don’t know where she is?”
Penny had wrapped her arms around herself when Mel eased her hands away from that tight grip on her. Now, she shook her head. Looking closer, Mel saw faint black panda smudges around each eye from where she’d rubbed away tears.
“When did you last speak to her?”
Penny shrugged, those wide eyes turning away. “I don’t know. What month is it now?”
Stupid question.
Penny and Harriet rarely spoke, barely acknowledged each other’s existence, but Mel knew she kept tabs on her daughter. The woman had no concept of normal timekeeping, so on more than one occasion Mel had been woken in the early hours by a call to ask how Harriet was keeping. She suspected these calls had something to do with the peaks and troughs of Penny’s emotional condition, but at least they showed she gave a shit.
“Have you spoken to anyone?” asked Mel. “Any of her friends?”
“You!” That shrug and eye-slide again, this time accompanied by a fragile smile. “I asked Jo and... what’s her name? Surita. One of them, I forget who, saw her on Friday, I think. Or Thursday.”
“So what makes you think she’s actually missing?”
“Saturday. It’s the anniversary. She always goes and lays flowers, first thing in the morning. I... I see her there. I watch.”
Mel put a hand on Penny’s arm and gave a gentle squeeze. Three years since her husband had passed away, the glue that had held this brittle family together. She hadn’t realized Saturday was the anniversary.
“Do you think... Was she upset?” Unbalanced. Over-emotional. Mel realized she was repeating her father’s questions, sounding like him, but this was a question that had to be raised. Particularly as it was the anniversary of Harriet’s father’s death.
For the first time, she found herself believing her young friend might have done something stupid.
Penny was shaking her head. “No, no. Harriet, she always had a... a sensible head, do you know what I mean?”
Mel nodded. For all her unreliability, it was hard to imagine Harriet losing control of herself as her mother had repeatedly done over the years.
“Have you reported her missing?”
Penny gave a brief nod, eyes averted again. “This morning,” she said. “There’s a superintendent I know, an old chum of Geoffrey’s. I thought he would listen.”
Mel sighed. There was so much unsaid in those last five words: squashed hopes, a sense of being let down, the implication that her husband’s old friend hadn’t listened. She reached out, squeezed the older woman’s arm again.
“What did he say?”
A shrug. An eye-roll.
“He asked how I was keeping. People have a way of doing that, don’t they? You wouldn’t know, dear, but when you’re... well... you know. When you have my history. It means something different. It means ‘Are you straight?’ It means ‘Are you having another breakdown?’ And while they ask you just know they’re looking for signs, the smell of booze, the tics.”
“He didn’t take you seriously?”
“Oh, he did, dear. He took me very seriously, but for all the wrong reasons. I’m sure he thinks I’m undergoing some kind of major paranoid delusion. I didn’t help myself. I became hysterical, and it’s not as if I have anything like facts or evidence or eyewitnesses to back up a mad woman’s fears, now, do I? When you banged on my door I thought it was the mental health crisis team coming to take me away again.”
Mel smiled in what she hoped was a sympathetic way. She could understand why someone would read Penny Rayner in that way when she was like this. And she was reminded how she had slowly come to the understanding that Harriet wasn’t estranged from her mother because they fought or didn’t love each other, but because she simply didn’t have any idea how to deal with her mother when she became unstable – or even when she was relatively stable. Penny Rayner was not an easy person to handle.
“She loves you, you know,” she said now.
“Oh yes. Of course. I do know that.”
Penny remained silent for a moment, her gaze faraway.
“What do you want me to do?” Mel asked. Again, she was aware of how she retreated into her father’s responses: practical questioning, straight to the point, looking for simple answers that suggested a course of action, a difference that could be made. Until now she’d never really seen how like him she could sometimes be.
Mel’s hand was still on Penny’s arm, and now Harriet’s mother moved a hand to cover it, to press it against her. “You’re the closest she has to family,” she said.
Mel opened her mouth to protest, but stopped because what Penny said was true. Arguing the point would only open wounds.
“Find out where she is, Melissa. You know who to ask. You know how to ask. I just mess things up.” She paused, that absent look in her averted gaze once again.
“I’ll do what I can. I’m already asking around. That’s why I came here. Is there anything? Anything at all that might help, Mrs Rayner?”
“Give me a sec,” said Penny, straightening, and easing Mel’s hand away from her arm as if it were something fragile. She turned, and vanished into the house, emerging a short time later with a photograph in a wooden frame. “This,” she said. “This is her. It’s all I have.”
For a moment Mel battled to suppress a smile. She knew what Harriet looked like! Then she realized the significance of this picture. Penny Rayner had never got to grips with technology – computers and tablets and fancy phones. She didn’t do social media, so didn’t have access to the hundreds of selfies and other photos Harriet had posted.
And also... The picture was of the three of them, shortly before Geoffrey Rayner had died of a heart attack. The three of them cuddled together, somewhere outdoors, arms around each other. Smiling and happy. It wasn’t just a photograph, it was a talisman, a relic of another time, another set of people.
“It really is all I have,” said Penny, still holding the photograph close. “I... After Geoffrey’s illness, I wasn’t well. I moved here, and lost a lot of my things.”
‘Lost’ was a euphemism. In a manic phase, she’d been found one night burning most of her past life in her then back garden, Harriet clinging to her in an effort to subdue her after calling the police.
“My memories... Geoffrey. Harriet growing up. They’re not what they were.”
Memories lost to drugs and drink and breakdown. The remaining memories blurred and muddled. Much of a life: lost.
This small photo really was one of the pillars of her existence.
With shaking hands, Penny teased the picture out of its frame and handed it over.
Mel held it carefully, studying the smiling faces. “Are you sure?” she said. “I could just–”
“Take it,” said Penny, folding a bony hand around Mel’s wrist. “It means a lot to me that you have it.”
And with those words, that gesture, Harriet’s mother transferred a tremendous weight of responsibility onto Mel’s shoulders, and they both knew it.
Mel looked at the picture again. Oddly, given that this photograph must have been at least three years old, the likeness of Harriet as she was now was uncanny. Straight golden blonde hair, a simple, very English-rose beauty to those round eyes and bud-like lips and the tiny stub nose – almost doll-like in her looks. She always had looked much younger than her years, much to her frustration. As Mel sometimes joked, Harriet had the angelic features of a twelve-year-old and the gutter humor of someone twice that age.
“Thank you,” said Mel. “I’ll be careful with it.”
Penny hugged her then, her body feeling bony and frail, like that of someone a good two or three decades older. She smelled of Chanel and cigarettes, and Mel realized even she was doing that thing: smelling for booze, just as earlier she’d wondered if Penny was high or merely anxious.
Mel stepped back, her turn to avert her gaze. “I’ll ask around,” she said. “And I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.”