Where the Missing Go(87)

And it was the truth, in a way. Heath was hiding his secret in plain sight. She’d long ago learned not to talk about her son, who liked to keep his humble background quiet. Handy, too, when he returned to Amberton, that no one would ask awkward questions.

Yet I wonder how much she knew about him, or had guessed at over the years. I remember the way she pretended not to know who Nancy was, the first time I asked. Of course, a housekeeper would have learned not to gossip about the family she worked for, and later to dodge curiosity about the painful past. And yet. I know how far we’ll go to protect the people we love.

In the end, I let it drop.

They had her new social worker break it to her that he was gone, but I know she spared Lily exactly how. She seems to think that Heath got mixed up in a fight. She gets confused, even now, but she’s out of hospital, where they put her under observation. She’s been moved into a new flat, where she’s with people who can look after her if she needs it, and we come and see her, Teddy and I, and even Sophie’s been once. I helped set it up: Heath’s estate went to Lily, as it should have. He’s had to go away, I tell her if she asks, and once – and I hope she’d forgive me the lie – ‘Oh, he sends his love.’

They found some of Sophie’s stuff, too, a bit later. He’d already taken it to the tip. If I’d done what he wanted, at the end … I don’t think he’d have kept her.

Suddenly I don’t want to think about any of this any more. I get up and put the kettle on again.

‘So. Got any more safety talks planned at the Grammar, then? Maureen will be delighted.’

Nicholls looks surprised, then laughs. ‘Maybe. You should probably be giving one too.’





50


Sophie, they say, is making a remarkable recovery, all things considered. I don’t really understand how strong she was. Is. ‘Youth, maybe,’ says the counsellor, Sally. ‘Teddy. And hope, that you’d find her.’ I’m seeing one again. I might as well, Sophie thinks it’s good for me.

And Teddy? He’s a little bundle of joy. We had to childproof the house, of course. It is full of people now. Mark’s here a surprising amount. Sophie likes it, so it’s fine, and I feel bad for him. He’s struggled with the knowledge that he stopped searching – that he gave up on her. But maybe, I thought the other day, it was neither of our faults. It came out of the blue, but something’s loosening in me.

He’s still nervous around her. And he keeps trying to say sorry to me, too. I was trying to be magnanimous, but it got to the point when I just wanted him to stop. ‘Mark, I forgive you, all right. Just please – stop following me about like a wounded puppy and make us all a cup of tea.’

‘Well,’ he said, the wind taken out of his sails, ‘there’s no need to be so rude about it.’

Incredibly, I heard a little laugh from the doorway. We looked round, both red-faced. I hadn’t realised Sophie had come into the kitchen to catch us bickering. ‘You two don’t change, do you?’ But she didn’t seem to mind. And the truth is, he doesn’t need to say sorry to me. No one does.

Ben’s been round again, too. Nicholls, I mean. He’s good company, actually – funny, in a deadpan way. Maureen at the school was right; he has got something about him, when you think about it.

I don’t know if it could be something more, one day. For now, a friend is enough. He knows: what it’s like to have something dark in your past that won’t go away.

I’ve been so lucky. I almost can’t believe it.

When I’m alone at night, my big house quiet again, everyone else asleep, and I’m in that drifting space between wakefulness and sleep, I still feel it: that cold familiar fear rising up to clutch at me again.

Because close your eyes and you know in your bones: Sophie never came home. The questions you nursed – the wheres, the whys, the what-ifs – were never answered. It’s just you, alone, waiting. No change, no revelation, no daughter returned like something from a fairytale. Just more long years to endure …

And then I catch myself and realise that I am doing it again. Because if those dark years of absence came to an end, in a way they will never end for me. They showed me. They lifted the thin veil between the safe, normal world, the one most of us live in, and the world as I know it can be – a place of sharp edges and dangers, where bad people want to hurt my loved ones and me. So I hug my arms around myself, tight, and try not to think about that night in late summer, after the storm broke.

It’s easier to do than you might think. They have stopped asking questions now, the official statements done. There were some uncomfortable articles in the papers about the first police investigation, how they were hoodwinked by the notes, the postcards, the rest of it; whispers of an inquiry by the police watchdog into the lessons to be learned.

But weren’t we all deceived by Heath? That’s the question I ask, as I tell everyone that we, as a family, want to move on, that we will address it all once we’ve some distance from the past. Maybe. And everyone accepts it. It’s surprising what people will believe.

Most of them, anyway.

It was just something Ben said once, early on, when I still had to spend all that time at the station. I was sitting outside one of those little rooms, drinking sugary vending machine coffee. The duty lawyer who sat in with us had gone off to make a phone call, when he came by to say hello.