Where the Missing Go(68)

‘Careful!’ One of assistants is already hurrying up. He stops: ‘Are you all right, madam? You look a bit peaky …’

I nod, slowly righting myself. ‘Sorry. I’m fine, yes.’

I start walking again.

Of course Sophie went away. That’s what everyone knows. There’s no doubt about it, it was clear from the start. There’s been so much: her note, the sighting at the bus station, the postcards home. The call to the Message in a Bottle helpline, a helpline for runaways, for God’s sake.

Although she sounded scared; no ‘Love you, Mo’ for me. Just ‘I’m still here …’

And then the diary, pointing to why she’d really gone. Just in case, say, someone started asking questions. Because in the end, the diary wasn’t what it seemed, was it?

‘I’m still here …’

I stop. Behind me, the automatic doors open and shut, sensing I’ve not moved.

I know. I know what those postcards were telling me. It was there, all the time, under my nose: you just have to read them properly. It’s so simple I hear myself laugh out loud, then stop, shocked at myself.

No wonder I couldn’t see it. Sophie was never into crosswords, word games, all that stuff I liked. She was visual, she loved art, her drawing. And that’s how she’s been trying to communicate with me, even now.

Sophie wasn’t just doodling flowers on her messages home. Oh, she was, but that’s not all they are.

I know them. I know what they are now.

Stylised and symmetrical, they’re not much like real roses. But that’s because she’s not drawing roses, but carvings of roses, the kind you might see etched into antique stonework. Pretty, carved stone roses that might run round the sides of a big Victorian mansion house, say, with a little ruff inside of each one, the sort of detail we don’t bother to build into our homes nowadays.

Slowly I break into a jog, heading to my car, then pick up my pace. Because I recognise them now – I am absolutely certain where I saw them.

I was outside Parklands. Sophie’s been drawing the roses that cover Parklands, sending me the house’s motif. I bet you’d find roses inside that place, too – inside Parklands, the house where Nancy grew up.

Because Nancy was always the answer.





37


SOPHIE


There was nothing I could do, not at first. I couldn’t see any way out: I just had to get through it, I told myself, wait it out. I didn’t let myself think about what I was waiting for. I couldn’t break down. If I lost control … something told me that would be a bad idea. I just had to wait, for an opportunity. Be patient.

And then one day, that first winter, the opportunity came: he said it was time for another postcard.

The first one had been my idea, something we’d discussed before I went. We’d been planning how we could be together, without people coming after us. We never used the word police.

‘I just need to get a message home, don’t I?’ It seemed so simple to me. ‘So they don’t worry.’

‘How?’ We’d been in his car as usual, he’d picked me up to snatch some minutes together. It was easier than you’d think, when no one’s looking to catch you.

‘Well, I could phone.’

‘They’d trace it. You couldn’t phone home, not straight after anyway. There’ll be too much attention.’

I felt silly. ‘A letter then,’ I said. ‘In my handwriting, so they know it’s real.’

He was silent, so I knew he was thinking about it.

But I didn’t like it when he showed me the postcards. It must have been a fortnight into me being here. Still the early days. Even then, they didn’t sit right. I don’t know where he’d got them, he must ordered them off some collectors’ website or something. They were so anonymous. Spain! read the one on the top.

So this is where they might think I was, sunning myself on sandy beaches? It seemed like such a slap in the face, for everyone I’d left behind.

‘There’re a lot of them,’ I remember saying, uncertainly. He was wearing plastic gloves, so he didn’t get his fingerprints on them. The hair on his wrists showed through the rubber. I didn’t want to look at it for some reason. It made it all too real, silly as that sounds – given how far things had already gone.

But I did it, as we’d agreed. I wrote the message he told me to say, word by word – ‘We can’t take any risks, or let any detail slip, you need to say exactly what I want’ – then signed my name, with my little daisy flower as normal. It was such a short, cold little message, I couldn’t imagine what Mum would think.

I hoped she wouldn’t worry too much.

I didn’t know he’d ask me to do it again. The days were so short by then, we must have been well into winter. I couldn’t quite believe I was still in there, if I actually let myself consider how much time was passing. I didn’t know what was happening outside, and he didn’t tell me – or wouldn’t tell me.

Like before, he dictated it to me.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’m not sure that’s a word I’d use.’ Because I’d thought about this, in case he said I had to do it again. I’d had a lot of time to think.

I was going to send a little message of my own somehow. With the first letter of each line, I’d spell out a word down the side of the card: Help. Or maybe SOS. Whatever I could get past him, I wasn’t sure. So I kept making mistakes – not all of them deliberate – trying to get in the odd word that I’d chosen. But he would just make me start again, and he was getting frustrated. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, tears in my eyes. ‘I keep getting it wrong.’ I wasn’t just acting. These postcards, these messages home – they scared me, hiding our tracks even more. How would they ever find me?