Then She Vanishes(5)

Jack cranes his neck, like an elegant giraffe, to get a better look out of the windscreen. ‘Where is this place?’ he says, as I swing right at the roundabout. ‘I thought we were going to the beach.’ Jack is from Brighton but moved to a flat in Fishponds with his police-officer boyfriend, Finn, nine months ago. I know he misses living by the sea.

‘The caravan park where Heather Underwood was found is about half a mile inland,’ I explain. ‘To get to the beach you have to take a left at the roundabout.’ I haven’t been to Tilby for more than a decade, not since my mum remarried and emigrated to Spain, but I remember the way.

The address Ted gave me was number 36 Cowship Lane. I never took much notice of road names back then – I’d been fourteen the last time I was at Heather’s house. And, anyway, I always took shortcuts. I had to trudge through fields of cowpats and long grass to get from my house to hers, but even so, I know that was the name of her road because I remember us laughing at it, nicknaming it Cowshit Lane.

The road narrows and I see the familiar landmarks: the church on the corner where Heather and I used to sketch the gravestones, the Horseshoe pub with its mock-Tudor exterior – we’d stood outside one summer, spying on her uncle Leo and his hot new girlfriend – the row of identical cottages with the playground opposite. I point to number seven. ‘Me and my mum lived there,’ I say, my heart unexpectedly heavy. I haven’t seen Mum in too long.

‘Oh, aren’t they sweet? They’re like little toy houses,’ says Jack, pressing his nose to the glass. Jack is what my mum would call posh. He grew up in a big, rambling house with sea views and speaks the Queen’s English, not a dropped h in sight. He went to boarding school and skis at his family’s lodge in the winter. His mother’s a barrister and his dad is a partner in some big corporation. But there’s no side to Jack. He’s not being snobby in his assessment of the cottage I grew up in. He just says things as he sees them. ‘They’re full of character, aren’t they?’

‘Yes. But you’d be permanently stooped living in one,’ I acknowledge.

I slow down as we drive along the high street. There’s a Costa now and a WHSmith. Greggs is still there – Heather and I used to club together to buy one of their sausage rolls on the way home from school. It’s been updated with an awning and a few rain-spattered bistro tables outside – one of the chairs has toppled onto its side in the wind. The Gateway supermarket has been replaced by a Co-op. And then I come to the clock tower. It’s smaller than I remember and sits in a triangle between a fork in the road. It’s where I – along with most of Tilby’s youth back in the day – used to hang out when we couldn’t be bothered to walk the ten minutes to the sea front. But that was after Heather, when I’d tried to fill the chasm she’d left in my heart by turning my attention to Woodpecker cider and boys. ‘Shit,’ I say, as a lorry beeps at me and I’m forced to move lanes. ‘It’s all one-way now.’ I take a sharp left onto a narrow track. ‘This is Cowship Lane. Look out for number thirty-six.’

Most of the properties are detached with land. Some are bungalows, others barn conversions and then, towards the end of the lane with a huge corner plot and the sea in the distance, I spot it and my stomach convulses.

It’s the house from my memories.

There’s a huge sign now with ‘Tilby Manor Caravan Park’ emblazoned on it at the entrance to the driveway. I’m sure they didn’t have that back then.

Even though, deep down, I’d known it would be her, I still feel a sudden crushing sadness as I turn into the sweeping gravelled driveway with the familiar stone house in front of me. Everything comes flooding back: the long summer evenings, the smell of hay that would tickle my nose and make me sneeze, the tinkle of the pond, the dust motes floating in the fading sunshine of the barn. I know that, from the main bedroom at the back of the house, you can see the sea; her sister’s bedroom overlooked the front lawn, and Heather’s the caravan park in the distance. For a short time in my life this was like a second home.

I swallow the lump in my throat and pull in beside a battered Land Rover. Behind the house is the caravan site – a two-acre field that used to accommodate about eight static caravans, with space for ten tourers – although it’s not visible from here. To the right-hand side of the house is the barn where we used to hang out. It has police tape surrounding it now, a piece of which has come loose and is fluttering in the wind. Is that where it happened? Where Heather shot herself? I’m struck by the horror of it.

It’s nothing new, I tell myself. I’ve seen it all: a family carried out in body bags after the father killed them all and then himself because he was in debt; the bloodied pavement where a terrorist attack took place outside Madame Tussaud’s; a tent erected in the woods after a missing teenager was found dead. With each story I had to remain detached for my sanity. But this. This is different. This is Heather.

I turn off the engine and stare straight ahead, my hands gripping the steering wheel. The front door is around the side. But from here I can see into the bay window of the living room. I remember that room. Heather and I used to snuggle under blankets during the winter, the smell of burning wood and ash from the open fire making our nostrils itch. I take a deep breath. I can almost remember the smell, the feeling of contentment. There’s a woman at the window, partly obscured by the gossamer net curtains. Her face is in shadow, but by the set of her hair in its familiar chignon and the shape of her long, elegant neck and sharp nose, I know she’s Heather’s mum, Margot.