People LIke Her(80)

If that was the case, it made sense in terms of the direction we were already heading.

What makes you so sure it was that service station? someone asked.

They pointed out the waving artificial man on the forecourt, the mannequin in overalls with the painted smile and the bobbing arm. They noted his distinctively chipped head, his weather-beaten features. They listed all the things you’d see if you reversed the shot 180 degrees—the chip shop across the road, the paper place, the closed-down Chinese restaurant with newspaper over all the windows.

It was good enough for us.

We didn’t speak much, Irene and I. She was driving, I was trying to keep up with what was going on online.

What was going on online was that the whole community was assembling. Already—I wasn’t sure whether at Irene’s bidding or of their own volition—the rest of the pod had amplified our call for help. Not just the pod, either. All the small fry, all the followers. People in Scotland, people in Wales, people in the US. As it turned out, it was lucky they did. It was a woman in Arizona, an expat, who first suggested that a stretch of trees and open green in the back of Emmy’s next Instastory was Claremont Park at the point where it runs along the A307, who noted that if we looked carefully we could see a glint of lake in the distance.

At that very moment I spotted a National Trust sign with the name of the park on it, approaching on our left. A few minutes later, we passed another sign indicating where to turn into the park.

As we drove, the landscape was darkening around us. We’d been on the road now for at least an hour and a half. The last of Emmy’s Instastories had been posted at about twenty to one on the day she and Bear vanished. It had shown the car turning off the main road onto a narrower, hedge-lined road with a ditch running alongside it. The caption to the Instastory had been Where the f*ck . . . ? It was deeply unsettling watching the videos as we drove through the same landscape, knowing what we knew now. What kept bringing a lump to my throat was the thought that if something awful had happened to Emmy, this would be the footage that would be on the news, poignant and fascinating, like someone’s last grainy CCTV appearance before some awful tragedy or horrible crime.

I swear there were times that afternoon when a ransom note would have been a relief.

“There,” I said suddenly, almost as we were passing the turnoff.

Irene hit the brakes hard, looked behind us, put the car into reverse.

“You’re sure?” she asked me.

I nodded.

We both peered down the long, narrow, hedge-lined road. I checked once again the paused image on my phone.

“This is it,” I said.

It was one of those country lanes I hate driving down at the best of times, the kind you find yourself on when you’re on holiday, where you dread anything coming the opposite way because there’s nowhere to pass or pull over and one of you is just going to have to back up and back up and eventually try to nudge into a tiny space next to a gate or where the road slightly widens and hope you don’t end up scratching the rental car or reversing it into the ditch.

Irene was taking it at about fifty miles an hour. You could hear thorns scraping along the paintwork, branches slapping against the side mirrors.

We passed several gaps in the hedge, several gates opening onto what looked like empty fields. It was nearly ten minutes before we reached the house. Irene slowed the car almost to a halt as we both peered up the drive. No lights on. No sign of a car.

“What do you reckon?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

We kept going. Up ahead, the road began to curve. Two minutes later it came to a halt at a gate. I got out of the car first. The gate was closed. On the far side of it was a field, which sloped away downhill. Standing on the lowest rung of the gate, I could look down across it as far as the little stream that marked its far boundary. Somewhere in a clump of nearby trees, a wood pigeon was burbling. I could hear the faint hum of the electricity lines strung from pylon to pylon across the middle of the field.

I looked back at Irene and shook my head.

There was only one place a car—as opposed to a tractor—coming up this road could have gone.

Irene turned the car around.

It was a strange feeling, knowing that Emmy and Bear had been here, knowing they had driven up this very road, looked out at these very bushes. I wondered at what point Emmy would have realized something was wrong, that this was not where they were supposed to be going. That was almost the hardest thing to picture, to think about. I had no doubt her first thought would have been for Bear, to protect Bear. Would she have tried to get away? Would she have tried to reason with them? To bargain?

Halfway up the drive, Irene pointed out that the garage door was ajar.

She pulled up in front of the house, left her headlights on. I had my door open and was stepping out of the car before it had even come fully to a halt. It was one of those garages that had been built into the house, with a bedroom over it, some time after the rest of the house. The double doors of the garage were wooden, old, losing their paint in places. I pulled one open and then the other.

Apart from a refrigerator and a square of carpet with some oil on it in the middle of the cement floor, the garage was empty. Two tiled steps led up to the rest of the house. I tried the door. It opened.

Behind me I could hear Irene talking to someone on the phone. The police, I presumed.

The room on the far side of the door was in darkness. Some kind of storage room, it felt like. The window onto the back garden was frosted, letting in little light. I got an impression of piled chairs and tables under sheets, stacks of plastic boxes. I felt for a light switch but couldn’t find one. There was a sort of path through the middle of the room that I groped my way down, and at the far end of it I fumbled around in the dark until I found a door handle and then opened it.