Where the Missing Go(17)

‘So why did you want to meet?’ she says.

I take a breath. ‘Obviously you and Sophie were really close.’ Quickly, I tell her about the call, the bare details of what I heard at the helpline. ‘I have a feeling … that she wants to come back home.’ It sounds weak even as I say it, but Holly’s nodding, her face serious.

‘I do too,’ she says. ‘I knew she’d come back, one day.’

Another memory: Holly loved horoscopes, all that stuff – she even carried around a battered pack of Tarot cards that impressed Sophie deeply. I’d see them bent over the cards on the floor of Sophie’s room, their heads – Sophie’s pale blonde, Holly’s a bleached mirror version – close together, both girls giggling.

‘There’s just a few things I wanted to get straight in my head,’ I say now. ‘About why she left. If she calls again I just – I just want to understand. If something might be stopping her, even now?’

‘Well, it was all said at the time, wasn’t it,’ says Holly flatly. ‘In the papers.’

I flinch, remembering how exposed I’d felt. I’d gone along with it all – media appeals, articles in the evening newspaper, a video plea with Mark for Sophie to ‘Please come home. We’re not angry, we just want to know you’re OK’ that they ran on the local six o’clock news.

Then we made the nationals. There were a few pieces, the longer ones mentioning Mark’s job at the firm, and making much of the fact that Sophie’s exams were approaching. Her school, the local grammar, was described as an ‘academic hot-house’. There was a comment from a ‘neighbour’ that we were new here from London, ‘only the one child, a lot of expectation’. I’d read that article several times.

‘They’re saying she was under too much pressure,’ I’d said to Mark that morning. ‘That’s what they’re implying. From us.’

‘Well, no point worrying about what people write,’ said Mark shortly. He was starting not to like to talk about it so much.

‘A lot of expectation’ – I read the words again, in black and white.

‘Well, that’s wrong,’ Mark said aloud, reading over my shoulder. ‘That’s only what we paid for this place when we bought it, it’s worth a lot more now. See, they can’t get anything right.’ I’d nearly hit him.

The coverage dried up soon enough, anyway. A pair of boarding-school sweethearts used their parents’ credit cards to buy flights to Antigua and refused to come home, pushing Sophie’s humdrum runaway story off the newspaper pages. Even before the investigation ground to a halt.

‘Yes, they said what happened in the papers,’ I say now. ‘But what did you think?’

‘Well,’ Holly says carefully. ‘I know it was hard for her, that she needed to get good grades. But I didn’t always know exactly what was going on with her. She wasn’t always that … easy to ask.’

‘But you were so sure of yourself.’

‘I was a teenager,’ she says, with emphasis. I hide a smile – she can’t be more than eighteen, but I know what she means. ‘That’s what I wanted everyone to think. Sophie liked me when I knew what I was doing, when we were having fun. She just didn’t like it so much when I messed things up.’

‘Like when you had that pregnancy scare?’ I blurt it out.

Holly had been sitting at my kitchen table when I’d come home that night, her feet up on the chair next to her. ‘Hello, Kate. Isn’t that a nice bag, been shopping again?’ I’d said she could call me by my first name. I regretted it.

The girls had disappeared upstairs with pizza to get ready. They were going out that night, just round to Emily’s from school, they said. They’d rushed out when someone’s car beeped outside, and later I’d gone into Sophie’s room to collect their plates. I had taken the wastepaper basket with me too, seeing the liner overflowing.

They’d buried it at the bottom, so it was bad luck really that when I’d tipped the contents into the outside bin that I’d recognised the packaging immediately: ‘99% accurate’.

Mark was away with work, in a different time zone, so I poured myself a glass of cold white wine, and sat there at the kitchen table, thinking. Fifteen. Sophie still had a few months to go until her birthday. Under the age of consent, technically, but perhaps not all that surprising.

I’d still been there when the girls had clattered back in, their faces falling as they saw what I had on the table.

‘It’s mine,’ Holly said immediately, her usual swagger gone. ‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t do it at home. It’s all fine, I promise. I just had to check. Please don’t tell my mum.’

Maybe I should have. But she looked so worried, I’d just nodded. ‘You need to be more careful, Holly.’ Sophie, bless her, had looked even more scared. At least she was taking it seriously.

They’d both sat there, subdued, while I’d booked Holly in online right there and then to an appointment at the family planning centre in town. Afterwards, I’d felt pleased with myself for dealing with an awkward situation so understandingly. I could do this, I could help Sophie navigate the teenage years.

‘No, not the pregnancy scare,’ says Holly across the table from me, drawing me back to the present. ‘No. I mean when I would get upset. My mum and dad … I had a lot going on.’ She hunches her shoulders. ‘It was a good thing when they split up.’