Where the Missing Go(28)

Twenty years after she vanished, Nancy Corrigan is still missing

Missing

Missing

Missing

So there was another girl, who went missing too.

Nancy.

It doesn’t take me long to read what’s online. The articles are sparse, archive stuff that local papers have put on their websites. The twentieth anniversary they’re marking was back in 2012, before we moved here. But I quickly glean the basics.

Nancy Corrigan was a local girl, who went missing in April 1992. Sixteen years old.

She’s not one of those that I’ve heard of, that I try not to think about any more.

The housewife who stepped out and left a note ‘back in two minutes’. The baby left in the rear seat of a car, just for a moment, and never found. The children known by their first names only – or over-familiar nicknames that their families never used. And all the pages devoted to them online, articles and discussion forums. What happened? Where did they go? Without a trace.

My family told me to stop torturing myself. Eventually, I listened.

And it’s so very different to our situation, I tell myself. Thank God we heard from Sophie, that she didn’t just disappear. But they fill me with cold horror, all the same.

I make myself continue, but I can’t find much from the time it happened, just the few marking the twentieth anniversary and repeating the appeal for information. There’s a sister who’s quoted.

‘This is a difficult time of year,’ said Olivia Corrigan, 29. ‘I have never lost hope that we will hear from her again. I think about my big sister a lot.’

There’s not much else, but I keep scrolling.

Oh, I see. That’s why I haven’t heard of her. Not such a mystery, after all. She ran away. So that’s why Lily got mixed up.

Nancy left a note, too.

I wonder, vaguely, if I’m going to be sick. Suddenly I’ve got to know. What happened next? So she never came back? Did they ever hear from her again? I feel caught out, like I should have known about this. But why would I? It’s so long ago.

Think. It’s a Saturday, so Lily will be out – she gets picked up by people from the church for a coffee afternoon, I know that. It’s fine, I can just ask her later. If she remembers any details. My heart sinks a little. It’s hard to get information out of her at the best of times. She hates to admit she’s forgotten anything. Sometimes she pretends not to hear me. ‘You what, dear?’

Olivia Corrigan, 29. So she’d be 35 now. Younger than me. It brings Nancy’s story closer, out of the past.

But it doesn’t mean anything for you, I tell myself, it’s not a sign. It’s not. Don’t think like this. There are so many families like mine, after all. That’s what working on the helpline’s taught me. So many parents whose children don’t – won’t – come home, I tell myself, even as I go into the hall and rummage for my car key in the drawer. The library’s not far, it’s just off the high street in the village. And then I can just settle my mind.

The phone rings as I’m going through the front door and I wait until it clicks to answerphone, the voice carrying loud from the kitchen. It’s Charlotte again.

‘Kate,’ she sounds harassed, noise in the background: the boys. ‘Kate, are you ignoring my calls now? It’s really not on.’

No, she sounds upset. Nothing drives Charlotte crazier than someone ignoring her. I should know, it was my last resort to wind her up when we were little. I’d compose my face, and block her out.

It’s harder now. ‘I really need to talk to you, I mean it, Katherine.’ Like Mum used to call me. She’s definitely mad. ‘You are not doing to me what you’ve done to everyone else. I’m not letting you. Call me back, or I’m coming round. Soon.’

Shit. I almost stop, pick up the phone to call her back, then tell myself I’ll wait – I’ll go now, before the library closes, then I’ll call her. Maybe.

I have to speak to the librarian to get access to the archives and sign something promising I won’t make off with any of their microfilm, but after explaining the machine to me, a sort of light-up magnifying box with a screen, he leaves me alone in a small dark cubby off the main room.

It’s story time this afternoon, and snatches of the book being read to the half a dozen or so children drift through the door left ajar. ‘Once upon a time, there was a princess, who lived in a castle …’

They’ve only kept records of the very local papers here, the weeklies, they don’t even have copies of the daily evening paper. But as I’m here, I might as well look. I’ve a pile of little paper boxes to go through, each containing weeks, months, of Amberton Telegraphs copied in miniature onto small rolls of film. The librarian’s showed me how to do it; loading the right one into the machine for me to start me off.

I start scrolling, turning the knob on the machine, and watch the pages of old newsprint blurring on the screen in front of me till I near the date Nancy went missing, Friday 10 April, 1992.

I start to track forward more slowly. It’s easy to find once I’ve got the hang of it: an appeal for a runaway Vale Dean schoolgirl. It’s dated 15 April, the Wednesday after she went, so the first mention in the local paper. She’s made the front page, alongside suspected arson at Amberton football ground.

The piece about her is surprisingly short, just a headline and a couple of hundred words, relating that police are appealing for information after Nancy Corrigan, 16, from Vale Dean, went missing. She left a note signalling her intention to run away, it says.