The Girls Who Disappeared(5)

When she reaches the gate she pulls back the latch, lowering her torch as she does so. The gate crashes closed and suddenly someone is in front of her. A white face peering out of the darkness. Olivia screams and jumps back in fright.

‘Liv, it’s me, you idiot,’ says a familiar voice. Wesley. It’s just Wesley. Of course it is. He’s holding a golfing umbrella and moves forwards so that she’s under it too. ‘You’re soaked, you wally,’ he says, wrapping a protective arm around her shoulders and squeezing her to him so tightly she can barely breathe. ‘I knocked and your mum said you were still finishing up.’

‘What are you doing here?’ she shouts, above the rain. ‘I thought we were having a night off.’

He guides her towards the house, buffeted by the wind and rain. ‘I wanted to see you. Is that a crime?’ His voice carries over the wind. ‘What a fucking awful night.’ She nods although he can’t see her in the dark and she leans against him. Her head only reaches his shoulder and she finds his height and weight comforting, despite how firmly his arm is clamped around her waist. She realizes, with a sudden jolt of horror, that he’s been holding her up for the past twenty years. She’s surprised he still hangs around. Maybe their relationship – which has never moved beyond the dating stage even though they’re in their late thirties – suits him. It must do, she supposes. She’s thought about it a lot, alone in the bedroom of the house she grew up in. But she feels she’s living a static kind of life, the kind of life she’s lived ever since the accident, like she’s been stuck, unable to move on, to move past it, to grow. So it’s only natural her relationship with Wesley would be stunted too. She knows others think it strange that they have never married or even moved in together. But this is the life she deserves, she supposes, when she is here and her friends are not.

They don’t speak until they’ve reached her mother’s odd, mismatched pebbledash house. They fall into the glass lean-to that smells faintly of feet and rubber. A bare light bulb hangs above their heads as Wesley shuts the door against the noise of the wind and rain and Olivia’s ears ring with the sudden silence.

‘How’s your leg?’ he asks, as he closes his massive umbrella and shoves it in the corner. A spoke has come loose from the fabric.

She rubs her knee. It aches so much she wants to cry. ‘I think I need my painkillers,’ she replies. She perches on the wooden bench while he helps her take off her boots. She can do it herself but she knows he likes to feel useful. She was in a wheelchair for six months after the accident and Wesley had been her saviour, pushing her around the narrow streets of Stafferbury, fending off unwanted words and attention like a shield.

And he’s still doing it.

He looks up, his blue eyes serious, and inclines his chin just a fraction, his jaw set. He bends down and takes her hands in his. ‘I’ve spoken to Ralph,’ he says, his voice sombre. ‘And I came here to warn you.’

‘Warn me?’ She feels a flash of panic.

‘There’s a journalist sniffing around. Just remember what we’ve always agreed. Okay? No interviews.’ When she doesn’t say anything he adds, more harshly this time, ‘I said, okay?’ He clasps her hands even tighter so that she feels like an animal caught in a trap.

She nods, swallowing her cocktail of anxiety and doubts. ‘Okay.’





3



Jenna


It’s gone midnight and I’ve been sitting at the kitchen table for hours, poring over old articles and photographs between cups of tea punctuated by the odd glass of warm wine I brought down from Manchester. Gavin never liked it when I drank too much, being teetotal himself. I eye my empty wine glass. It doesn’t matter now, does it? He’s not here. I can drink as much as I like. But the thought isn’t a jubilant one. I sigh and move away from me the documents I’d been leafing through. A headline screams out at me: ‘THE GIRLS WHO DISAPPEARED: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MISSING THREE?’ It’s a puff piece from about five years ago disguised as investigative reporting, although most of the facts look as though they’ve been cobbled together from articles that came out at the time. I doubt the journalist who wrote it even came to Stafferbury.

I push my reading glasses back onto my hair and rub my tired eyes. Earlier, after several failed attempts and a burnt fingertip, I was successful at lighting the fire and the crackle of the flames and the warmth had made me feel less alone somehow. But now it’s died out and the room is cold and silent, apart from the rain throwing itself against the window panes. I wrap my cardigan further around myself and get up. I’ll take a cup of tea to bed, I think, as I turn on the tap and fill another cup with boiling water. Gavin had wanted a Quooker when we renovated our kitchen two years ago. I’d said no, telling him I found the reassuring bubble of a kettle boiling comforting. I play that conversation back regularly wondering if things would have been different if I’d said yes to the sodding Quooker. If I’d been more pliable, less bossy. If I hadn’t taken charge of that kitchen renovation, persuading him to go with the painted white Shaker-style cabinets and charcoal grey island even though I knew deep down he wanted something more contemporary.

I sigh heavily and peer between the thick moss-coloured curtains. The cabin opposite is in darkness. There is no comforting glow from the rectangular window poking through the trees any more, just the faint intermittent flicker of a solar light at the end of my drive and the purple hue of the uplighters in the trees opposite. The person I saw leaving there hours ago still hasn’t returned, as far as I can tell. I feel totally alone in the forest. The thought chills me. I drop the curtain and move away from the window with my mug of tea. I want to go home to the Victorian semi in a leafy street in Manchester with the cherry blossom in the front garden and the hot-tapless kitchen that I love so much. I want my old life back with Gavin and Finn and being curled up in bed on a Sunday morning drinking coffee, the newspapers spread out on the duvet in front of us and Finn snuggled between us playing Minecraft on his iPad. I yearn for it so much my heart aches with longing. I thought we were happy.