Where the Missing Go(16)

Because I’m thinking of the start, when they kept asking me what she’d taken. Sophie would never have gone without her blankie, I knew that, even when she was sixteen years old and would blush to admit it. I knew that she couldn’t sleep without it tucked under her pillow – a childhood habit that she’d yet to drop. But she had, of course, she had left it at home along with all the rest of the life she’d discarded so easily. I didn’t know her that well, after all. And now, the one time I want it, I can’t find it.

It’s such a small stupid thing. I shouldn’t even care. But the lightness had already dissipated, the familiar anxious buzz swelling up again.

No, I can’t accept that she’s gone. Nothing about this has ever felt right, has ever made sense, whatever they said to me. It still doesn’t.

‘Love you, So,’ I said on the phone. And then she hung up on me.

She’d never do that. It’d be ‘Love you, So’, ‘Love you, Mo’. Just one of those silly family jokes from childhood. She’d never forget that. But why would she punish me with that little snub, withhold that endearment from me? Is she that angry?

A chill goes down my spine. Have I got it wrong, so horribly wrong, that I don’t realise I wasn’t speaking to Sophie at all, just some confused, troubled caller, me hearing what I wanted to hear?

No. It can’t be, it was her. I know my daughter, I do.

Something isn’t right. Whatever they say. Whatever she told me.

And that’s when I decide. That’s when I know, with rare clarity.

I’m not going to rely on them to find her, not any more. It didn’t work the first time, after all.

This is my last chance. My last chance to find Sophie.





9


My stomach flutters as I pull into the car park in the village. I’m nervous, I realise. I was surprised to find myself feeling buoyant this morning, the sense of optimism unfamiliar. I made the effort to scramble eggs and drink two cups of milky coffee, the cat prowling around my feet. Now it’s all still churning unpleasantly inside me. But I’d decided. This time around, I’m not going to just sit tight and wait for the police to let me know what’s happening.

I’ve got a plan.

First on my list is speaking to Holly Dixon – just to ask what she thinks, if there might be any possible factor I don’t know about that’s keeping Sophie away. And then maybe she’ll have an idea, someone else I can talk to. Isn’t that how it works? Anything to stave off that old trapped feeling. I’m determined to stay active, to hold on to this new stirring of purpose. My grief coach (Lara doesn’t like the word ‘counsellor’, she says we are partners together in this) would be proud of me. If I still saw her.

Last night I left a message on Holly’s mobile, hoping she hadn’t changed the number. We haven’t spoken in a long time. I left a long, rambling message about Sophie’s call, that I could explain properly later, but did she think we could meet? Within about twenty minutes my phone beeped.

OK. Can do 11 tmrw, coffee?

We arranged to meet in the village, as she’s still local. Not in the cutesy cafe, where you can buy the knickknacks that take your fancy. I know too many people in there. I’ve gone for the pizza chain one everyone disapproved of when it opened, staffed by breezily anonymous Australians. I like it.

I’m five minutes early but she’s already sitting there at a table in the corner. ‘You’ve changed your hair,’ I say. ‘Blue!’ Still so much make-up, I see.

‘Oh, yeah,’ she says, touching a mermaid strand. ‘Well, I got bored of the lilac. Everyone was doing it, didn’t you notice.’

I smile, looking around. Today the place is fairly empty, but there’s not a lot of purple hair around here, it’s all tasteful honey highlights, from the girls in school to their mothers.

‘It’s pretty,’ I say.

She quickly covers the flicker of surprise. Too late, I remember.

Holly used to stay over all the time. She and Sophie would disappear upstairs and there’d be screams of laughter into the small hours, the two of them doing God knows what in Sophie’s bathroom. One time, they’d emerged in the morning with pink hair – ‘It washes out, Mum, don’t worry!’ Sophie reassured me, Holly looking at me sidelong, amusement in her eyes as I tried to keep my temper.

Teenagers were always looking for a reaction, I knew. But it had been an expensive trip to the hairdresser to take Sophie’s hair back to its baby blonde. She hadn’t been grateful at all. ‘Well, I think it looks cool, Mum. I don’t want to change it.’

Holly and I order cappuccinos. Her mum’s well, she says in answer to my questions.

I’ve seen her, since Sophie went, but after the first few encounters, we seemed to make a tacit agreement to smile and nod. I heard Holly didn’t stick around in school after her GSCEs, but she seems to have done well since then. She has started at college and plans to be a nurse. Her tutor, she tells me, ‘is a total b—’ she catches herself.’ … a bit difficult’, but she’s enjoyed it.

What she doesn’t need to spell out is the reason why I’ve avoided her until now. The wound Sophie left in her life is healing over. She’s hitting milestones Sophie hasn’t. I keep asking questions, suddenly wanting to hear the detail, though it stings. But the lull’s inevitable.