Local Gone Missing(90)

I remember we sat on the floor in the dark and I watched Stuart messing around with his phone.

It got late and I started looking at the door. I was hungry but Stuart was sniffing stuff. He suddenly stopped and stood up. He looked like he was standing in a big wind, swaying all over the place.

“I’ve got to go to work,” he said. “Where’s your brother?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you’ll have to wait here for him.”

“No,” I said, and started to cry. “Don’t leave me on my own. Please.”

“For fuck’s sake. Okay, put your coat on.”

I ran after him, clattering down the stairs, and walked in his footsteps. He didn’t speak to me. I think he forgot I was there.

He climbed through a window at the back of the house and I did the same. It was all dimly lit and so warm. I remember the carpet felt like a mattress under my feet. Stuart went into a room off the hall and told me to stay quiet until he was done. But I got bored and wandered farther down the big hallway. I wanted to see. And I heard a voice—a girl’s voice—and followed it.

She was lying on the sofa when I walked in. I’d never seen such a beautiful room—it had a glass chandelier and everything was shiny. And the girl shouted when she saw me. “Christ, what are you doing here?”

And Stuart came running in and tried to grab me to go but she started screaming and he got hold of her. And it was too late to leave.

She was shouting for someone to help her. And we heard a door slam and someone running. And yelling, “Sofia.” Stuart picked up a poker from the fireplace and hit the man when he rushed in. I stood in a corner and saw it all playing like a video game, the blood splashed in neon colors, the screams digitally manipulated. The man didn’t say anything after that. Stuart tied up the girl with her belt and sat her on a chair. He kept shouting, “Where’s the silver stuff? The jewelry?” And there was spit coming out of his mouth. But she wouldn’t say. He put a clear plastic bag over her head and said he would take it off if she told him. And he got me to hold where he’d twisted it while he put a computer in his backpack. I was supposed to stand at the back of her but she twisted her head and I could see her face through the plastic. She was wearing a really pretty necklace and I reached to touch it. Her eyes were bugging out, her mouth sucking the bag in. “Tell him,” I whispered to her. But she didn’t. She just stopped sucking the bag in.

“Stuart,” I remember saying. And he came over and pulled the bag off.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Can we go home now?”

“Go, get out of here!”

And I went out the front door and stopped at the bottom of the steps. I couldn’t remember where I was for a minute. Then I saw the gardens opposite and ran.

Phil wasn’t there when I got back to the squat. He crawled in beside me later. He smelled really badly of drink and wasn’t making any sense. I clung to him as he snored and tried to go to sleep.

When I woke up, the police were all over the squat. Stuart had gone—he’d been captured on CCTV on the way home. Phil couldn’t look me in the eye. He said he’d got drunk with mates and forgotten the time. He’d been blind drunk when he’d rolled in. He’d fallen on the bed and gone to sleep.

“Just keep quiet about Stuart babysitting you here last night or they’ll take you away, Diana,” he said.

Being taken away was what Mum used to threaten me with when I talked back or came in late from playing. So I didn’t say anything. But they took me away anyway.

A nice lady asked me how old I was and where did I live. I said with Mum, like Phil had told me to say. But she went to see Mum and came back very angry.

“We’re going to go somewhere nice,” she said in the car. She’d held my hand on the long journey to Wales until it had got sweaty and uncomfortable and I pulled away.

I’d locked all that in a box, deep in my head. It was one night in my whole life, I told myself when I got old enough to think like that. I had to forget it and get on with living. I called myself Dee and grew into another person.

But I looked online later. Of course I did. The press coverage said that a teenage burglar, high on drugs when he broke into the million-pound house, had found Sofia Nightingale and her boyfriend there, bludgeoned him to death, and tied the girl up. He’d put a plastic bag over her head. “It was just to scare her,” Stuart had wept in his police interview. “She should have told me where the stuff was.”

She should have, I thought.

The girl wasn’t dead when we left. She was in a coma in hospital. Then I couldn’t find anything else. I thought she must have died. It was weird reading about it. But good weird. It felt as though it had happened to someone else. Not me. A story I’d heard somewhere.

Until Phil died. And I went to see Stuart. And saw Charlie’s passport.

I couldn’t quite believe it at first. Could it be him? Here in Ebbing? Someone I worked for? And liked?

I sat and wrote down what I knew: His real name was Williams, the same name as on the rent receipt I’d found in Phil’s notebook. But lots of people were called Williams.

The brain-damaged daughter in the home. He never said what had happened to her, did he?

And why had he taken a new identity? What was he hiding?