Where the Missing Go(34)

‘But I do. Charlotte too, you know.’

‘I know, Dad.’

But it’s an old conversation, the two of us settling into its well-worn grooves. Almost reassuring. Things feel back to normal, almost. My normal.

I’ve nearly finished sorting through all my post and am sitting at the kitchen table, pleased with myself, when I notice the brown envelope in my bag on the side. The stuff back from the station. I should go through it now, rather than let it turn into something that I won’t want to deal with for months on end.

Quickly, I go over and tear it open, pouring the contents back onto the table. Sophie’s exercise books I’ll put back where I keep them on her bookshelf, the birthday cards into my special keepsake box in the living room, and the postcards – the postcards I’ll put back on the mantelpiece as usual. Done. This is the way to get things done, I tell myself, without turning everything into a Herculean task.

But instead I spread the postcards onto the table in front of me. All her familiar messages. I wish I had the diary, too. Maybe they’ll let me have it soon. I try to remember the messages, the exact wording, he showed me – but it was all so quick, I barely had time to take it all in.

All I can picture is that frontispiece, her name and personal details. I’m remembering now: something about it, what was it, just seemed a little off …

Name: Sophie Harlow

Age: 15

Address: Oakhurst, Park Road, Vale Dean, Cheshire.

Contact details: [email protected]

Something cold slithers down my spine.

That wasn’t her email address.

Not the one I know anyway, the one I’ve logged into so many times, the contents I know as well as my own. Now I get up and head to the study upstairs, taking the stairs two at a time. I switch on the computer and log into my email. The folder’s called ‘Sophie’, where I keep all the emails she sent me. There aren’t that many of course, she didn’t have much reason to email me. Just stuff she thought I’d enjoy: silly local news stories, funny animal videos.

Yes, I was right. [email protected]. They’re all from this email address, the one we gave the police and the one they went through. She hadn’t even bothered to close the window on her laptop, when they came to take it away.

Maybe she got it wrong, I think, she just filled in the wrong thing. Yaymail not gogomail. That’s easy to do: there’s so many of these email services about; this one comes with our broadband, I seem to remember. But even as I think that I’m shaking my head: she was sixteen years old when she left; if she knew anything, she knew what her email address was.

So. Maybe she had two.

Just so I’m sure, I log into her old email, the one that I know about.

It was never tricky: we’d found the password, ‘loopysophie,’ written on the jotter on her desk by her laptop, almost like she knew we’d look there first. The police took the computer itself too, to check the hard drive for anything alarming, before returning it: all clear. I’m trying to remember: did they ever say anything about a second email account? I’m sure I’d remember if they had.

I haven’t checked in here for a while. I clear the few spam emails, reading each one carefully before deleting: an appeal for a male ‘performance enhancement’ drug, a few fake software upgrades.

Sophie didn’t email much. Teenagers were always all over their smartphones, so I read in the papers, plugged into a scary world we parents couldn’t access. But Sophie was never desperate to be part of it, always leaving her phone around the house until the battery was dead, so we couldn’t even ring it to find it. She seemed aloof in a way I never was, so self-contained.

I was glad of that, then. She didn’t even complain when I told her not to post photos of herself all over the internet, she didn’t know what sort of people might be looking or where they might end up. And what would happen in five years, when she was starting her career? Much better not to leave a trail.

But in the end, all I wanted were traces of Sophie, ways she might reach me. And I worried that it slowed us down, when she went. When her friends at school said Sophie hadn’t replied to their messages that weekend, it didn’t worry them: she was always a bit flaky getting back to them. When, eventually, she did get in touch with us back home, by that postcard of all things, that seemed to fit.

I suppose. It didn’t really feel right and it still doesn’t now.

Now I sign out of that account, and log in again, using the email address she has in her diary with the yaymail.com ending.

You have signed in from a different device, the website tells me.

It asks me to type in those oddly shaped numbers and letters to check I’m not a robot.

Then I type in the password again: loopysophie.

Incorrect password.

I try again, various variations on it:

LoopySophie

loopiesophie

Sophieloopy

Nothing. I keep going.

Too many failed attempts, the screen tells me eventually. Now I have to go through the security questions.

The first flashes up. What was the name of your first pet?

Well that’s easy. Morris, the cat we had when she was little. That cat was so patient, more doglike than feline, allowing Sophie to totter after him and give him clumsy hugs.

I type it in: Morris.

The error message flashes up.

Well it surely can’t be King, the dog, but I type that in anyway.