Where the Missing Go(51)

And ‘See you soon’. But when? The next day, at school? Or afterwards – only after she’d gone?

But I just know.

The email shows that it was sent on 13 May, 02.35a.m. – three days after their exchange. The day she ran away. Sophie forwarded this brief conversation to herself the night before she left, in the early hours, when we were all asleep – filing it away where no one could see.

This was a back-up plan, a just-in-case. She’s her mother’s daughter, after all: cautious. Oh, not enough to let me know where she was going. Not enough to tell me who she was going with. But just enough to leave a trace, in case … in case she ever wanted to?

Because wherever my daughter was headed, and whoever she trusted to know about it, a part of her – however small – didn’t trust them. Not entirely.

I stay at the computer, trawling the internet for traces of this email address, the ‘king_pluto’ one. I don’t expect it to lead to a business card, but I hope that someone was stupid enough to slip up, just once, using that email or username to sign up for something or, forgetting they’re still logged in, comment on some forum. To leave a footprint, somewhere.

There’s nothing.

I lean back. Now it’s happened I’m strangely calm.

I knew it. I knew it didn’t make sense. Not how it was supposed to have happened. Not my Sophie.

I can’t wait until we can be together.

Then I do it before I can think about it any more: I log in to my own email, the one I use for everything. I go to my drafts and pull up my standard enquiry email: ‘Have you seen this girl?’ with her picture attached.

Within seconds I get a reply: I open it.

Your message couldn’t be delivered … the recipient’s mailbox is unavailable.

The email’s been shut down. Someone’s already covered their tracks.

I prop my elbows on the table and rub my eyes. So who could she have been talking to? Be logical.

Danny? Or even a friend, in whom she’s confided; someone who wants out too. OK. But then what? They just chickened out – and kept quiet all this time?

No. It’s not just a friend. I can’t wait until we can be together. But it’s not Danny, either, I’m sure, after reading that diary, knowing how bad things were between them at the end …

I jerk myself straight: I can’t trust that diary, not any more. Because it didn’t make any mention of this – this person, sending secret emails to my daughter. For whatever reason, Sophie didn’t want to write about him in her diary, even as she confided details of her pregnancy, her problems with her boyfriend, her unhappiness.

So the diary entries are … off. They’re not telling the whole truth.

My heart starts to thud.

Was any of it true? All those new entries that I hadn’t seen before, making it look like her leaving was all about a teenage pregnancy, getting the situation ‘fixed’, and a hot-headed boyfriend reacting badly. Sophie running away had finally started to make sense.

But a little voice whispers: and it gave you a scapegoat. Danny.

It’s all so much, I want to push the idea away.

How would I not know if Sophie was tangled up with someone else? She was sixteen, it’s not possible.

But then there’s the timing. After two years, for the diary to come now, and only now, when I’d found out about the pregnancy test, when I’d started asking questions … And what did Nicholls say? He said something about my raising concerns, that I’d done the right thing. ‘Because it meant that Sophie was on our radar again, when the diary got handed in.’ How lucky, I thought then. They might have missed it.

Now I think: it’s too neat, the timing, for it to be anything but odd.

Jesus. If I’ve got Danny all wrong … what did he say, when I went to see him? I wish I’d taken notes; I’ve gone about this all the wrong way, so slapdash. He said that nothing ever happened between him and Sophie, he was adamant. And there was something else, surely. I’m missing something … no, it’s gone.

But if there’s a scapegoat, then there’s someone else who’s being protected: the emailer. The person who knows where Sophie is?

The person who really got her pregnant?

I get up, needing to move. Because why do all this, Sophie? Why lead me to the email messages? Why even bother with the diary if you’re letting me know it’s not telling the full truth? Why cover up for someone, and undercut it all at the same time? And why phone the helpline to say you’re OK, then fill me with fear?

It doesn’t make sense.

Until, with a sick lurch of my stomach, it does.

There’s one logical answer, really, when you come down it.

Because it was all she could do. It was all he let her do.





25


SOPHIE


At first, it was like playing house. Our own little world, just me and him – like I’d wanted. And it was exhilarating, after all the secrecy, to spend so much time together.

It was odd, though, at the same time. Sometimes we just didn’t have that much to say to each other. I never had that much to tell him about how I’d spent my day, for obvious reasons. It was different to how I’d imagined it, if I’d thought about it all.

This is what it’s like, I’d tell myself. Being grown up. So grow up.