Then She Was Gone(3)
‘Mum,’ she’d said in an apologetic voice, ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Sorry,’ said Laurel, glancing across the kitchen at the clock. ‘Christ, yes, you must be starving.’ She pulled herself heavily to her feet, blindly examined the contents of the fridge with her daughter.
‘This?’ said Hanna, pulling out the Tupperware box with the last portion of lasagne in it.
‘No.’ She’d snatched it back, too hard. Hanna had blinked at her.
‘Why not?’
‘Just, no,’ she said, softer this time.
She’d made her beans on toast, sat and watched her eat it. Hanna. Her middle child. The difficult one. The tiring one. The one she wouldn’t want to be stranded on a desert island with. And a terrible thought shot through her, so fast she barely registered it.
It should be you missing and Ellie eating beans on toast.
She touched Hanna’s cheek, gently, with the palm of her hand and then left the room.
Three
Then
The first thing that Ellie shouldn’t have done was get a bad grade in maths. If she’d worked harder, been cleverer, if she hadn’t been so tired the day of the test, hadn’t felt so unfocused, hadn’t spent more time yawning than concentrating, if she’d got an A instead of a B+, then none of it would have happened. But going further back, before the bad maths test, if she hadn’t fallen in love with Theo, if instead she’d fallen in love with a boy who was rubbish at maths, a boy who didn’t care about maths or test results, a boy with no ambitions, or better still no boy at all, then she wouldn’t have felt that she needed to be as good as him or better, she’d have been happy with a B+ and she wouldn’t have gone home that evening and begged her mum for a maths tutor.
So, that’s where it was. The first kink in the timeline. Right there, at four thirty or thereabouts on a Wednesday afternoon in January.
She’d come home in a temper. She often came home in a temper. She never expected to do it. It just happened. The minute she saw her mum or heard her mum’s voice, she’d just feel irrationally annoyed and then all the stuff she hadn’t been able to say or do all day at school – because at school she was known as a Nice Person and once you had a reputation for being nice you couldn’t mess with it – came spitting out of her.
‘My maths teacher is shit,’ she said, dropping her bag on the settle in the hallway. ‘Just so shit. I hate him.’ She did not hate him. She hated herself for failing. But she couldn’t say that.
Her mum replied from the kitchen sink, ‘What’s happened, love?’
‘I just told you!’ She hadn’t, but that didn’t matter. ‘My maths teacher is so bad. I’m going to fail my GCSE. I need a tutor. Like, really, really need a tutor.’
She flounced into the kitchen and flopped dramatically into a chair.
‘We can’t afford a tutor,’ her mum said. ‘Why don’t you just join the after-school maths club?’
There was the next kink. If she hadn’t been such a spoiled brat, if she hadn’t been expecting her mum to wave a magic wand and solve all her problems for her, if she’d had even the vaguest idea about the reality of her parents’ finances, if she’d cared at all about anything other than herself the conversation would have ended there. She would have said, OK. I understand. That’s what I’ll do.
But she had not done that. She had pushed and pushed and pushed. She’d offered to pay for it out of her own money. She’d brought up examples of people in her class who were way poorer than them who had private tuition.
‘What about asking someone at school?’ her mum suggested. ‘Someone in the sixth form? Someone who’ll do it for a few quid and a slice of cake?’
‘What! No way! Oh God, that would be so embarrassing!’
And there it went, slipping away like a slippery thing, another chance to save herself. Gone. And she didn’t even know it.
Four
Between the day in May 2005 that Ellie had failed to come home and exactly two minutes ago there had been not one substantial lead regarding her disappearance. Not one.
The last sighting of Ellie had been caught on CCTV on Stroud Green Road at ten forty-three, showing her stopping briefly to check her reflection in a car window (for a while there’d been a theory that she had stopped to look at someone in the car, or to say something to the driver, but they’d traced the car’s owner and proved that he’d been on holiday at the time of Ellie’s disappearance and that his car had been parked there for the duration). And that was that. Her recorded journey had ended there.
They’d done a house-to-house search of the immediate vicinity, brought in known paedophiles for questioning, taken CCTV footage from each and every shopkeeper on Stroud Green Road, wheeled out Laurel and Paul to be filmed for a television appeal that had been seen by roughly eight million people, but nothing had ever taken them further than that last sighting of Ellie looking at her reflection at ten forty-three.
The fact that Ellie had been wearing a black T-shirt and jeans had been a problem for the police. The fact that her lovely gold-streaked hair had been pulled back into a scruffy ponytail. The fact that her rucksack was navy blue. That her trainers were bog-standard supermarket trainers in white. It was almost as though she’d deliberately made herself invisible.