Then She Was Gone(34)

‘Yes. Noelle was Irish.’

Laurel stares into her glass at the undulating reflections of halogen lights in the surface of the liquid. There’s something wriggling beneath her consciousness. Something about the combination of the name and the hair colour and an Irish accent – and she knows this woman. She knows her.

‘Did she have any other children?’ she asks. ‘Older children?’ Maybe she was a mum at the school.

‘No. Just Poppy.’

‘Did she work round here? Locally?’

‘Well, kind of,’ says Floyd. ‘She was a tutor. Maths. I think she taught a lot of the local kids around here.’

‘Oh!’ says Laurel. ‘Of course. That’s it! She must have taught Ellie. Ellie did have a tutor for a while. A short while anyway. Just before …’ Her words peter out.

‘Well,’ says Floyd. ‘What a remarkable coincidence! That really is. To think that our paths came so close to crossing. Just one degree of separation.’

‘Yes,’ says Laurel, her hand tightening around the wine glass. ‘What a coincidence.’

She mentions it to Hanna when she phones her on Monday. ‘Remember’, she says, ‘when Ellie had that tutor, the year she disappeared?’

‘No,’ says Hanna.

‘You must do. She was Irish – tall woman, red hair? She used to come on Tuesday afternoons?’

‘Maybe.’

Laurel can hear her typing as she talks. She swallows down a swell of irritation. ‘Well, weird thing,’ she continues, ‘but turns out that she was Poppy’s mum.’

‘Who was?’

‘The tutor! The maths tutor!’

There’s a small silence and then Hanna says, ‘Oh yeah. Yeah. I remember her. Ellie hated her.’

Laurel laughs nervously. ‘No,’ she says, ‘she didn’t hate her. She thought she was wonderful. Her saviour.’

‘Well,’ says Hanna, ‘that’s not how I remember it. I remember her saying she was weird and creepy. That’s why she stopped the lessons.’

‘But …’ Laurel begins, pausing to try to order her memories. ‘She didn’t say any of that to me. She said she needed more time to study other things. Or something like that.’

‘Well, she told me she didn’t like her and that she was creepy.’ There’s a note of triumph in Hanna’s tone. She and Laurel had always vied for Ellie’s attention.

‘Anyway,’ says Laurel. ‘Isn’t that strange? What a small world!’

She’s talking in lazy clichés, using words that don’t quite add up to the sum of her disquiet. In the hours since discovering that Noelle Donnelly was Poppy’s mum, Laurel has remembered more and more about her: the slightly hunched back, the stale-smelling cagoule and sensible rubber-soled shoes that squeaked against the tiled floor in the hallway, the nervous imperiousness, the pretty red hair left unbrushed and pushed back into clips and claws. She cannot reconcile that woman with Floyd, who may not be a classically handsome man but is groomed and stylish, fragrant and clean. How did they come together? How did they meet? How did they fit? And how, more than anything, did they make a baby together?

But she doesn’t say any of this to Hanna. She sighs. She’s been overthinking things as usual and now she’s run out of steam. ‘How did you enjoy Friday night?’ she asks. ‘It was fun, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah. Yeah. It was good. It was nice, actually. Just to be together like that. Thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘For organising it. For suggesting it. For being the first person in this family to do something brave since Ellie went missing.’

‘Oh,’ says Laurel, taken aback. ‘Thank you. But I think you have Floyd to thank. He’s the one who’s given me courage. He’s the one who’s changed me.’

‘No,’ says Hanna. ‘You’ve changed you. You wouldn’t be going out with him otherwise. I’m really pleased for you, Mum. Really pleased. You deserve it.’

‘Did you like him, Hans?’

‘Floyd?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yeah,’ says Hanna. ‘Yeah. He seems OK.’

And that, coming from Hanna, is praise indeed.





Twenty-four


Laurel doesn’t see Floyd that evening. But he calls her at seven o’clock, just as he’d said he’d do, and Laurel is surprised to feel a little pulse of annoyance.

‘I’ll call you at seven,’ he’d said. And here he is, calling her at seven. She might have enjoyed a few moments’ indulgent anticipation. For a minute she toys with the idea of not answering her phone, but then she checks herself. She’s doing it again, keeping too much of herself back. And this was exactly why she and Paul had not survived the years of Ellie’s disappearance, because of her, because she’d never allowed herself to be properly subsumed into her relationship with him, had disapproved of him for loving her so deeply and unquestioningly, felt gently suffocated by the lack of gaps in his feelings for her. At the first moment of mutual desperation, she’d escaped into the airlock inside herself that she’d deliberately kept empty all those years.

‘Hi,’ she says brightly, ‘how are you?’