Then She Was Gone(74)

‘No,’ he says. ‘Well, we used to, but we haven’t for years. But we can if you want one. Do you want one? I’ll go and get one now.’

She laughs. ‘I was thinking more of Poppy,’ she says.

‘Pops!’ he calls up the stairs. ‘Would you like a Christmas tree?’

They hear her footsteps, loud and fast. She appears at the top of the stairs and says, ‘Yes! Yes please!’

‘Right then,’ says Floyd. ‘That’s settled then. I will go out now, like a proper father, and I will bring home the mother of all Christmas trees. Want to come with me, Pops?’

‘Yes! Let me just get my shoes on.’

‘We’ll need fairy lights,’ says Laurel, ‘and baubles. Have you got any?’

‘Yes, yes, we do. In the attic. We always had a tree when Kate and Sara-Jade lived here. There’s boxes of the stuff up there. Let me go and get it.’

He bounds up the stairs two at a time and returns a few minutes later with two large paper shopping bags full of tree decorations. Then he and Poppy get into the car and disappear into the dark night together and Laurel looks around and realises that she is alone in Floyd’s house for the very first time.

She turns on the TV and finds a satellite channel that is playing Christmas songs. Then she pulls some things from the bags; random is the word she’d use to describe them. Scuffed plastic balls, a knitted reindeer with three legs, a huge spiky snowflake that snags a hole in her jumper, stern-faced wooden soldiers and a group of slightly alternative-looking wood nymphs in pointy hats with curled toes on their shoes.

She leaves them in the bag and takes out the fairy lights. There are two sets: one multi-coloured and the other white. The white ones work when she plugs them in at the wall. The multi-coloured ones don’t.

She goes through some of the drawers in the kitchen, looking for a spare fuse. She looks in the drawers in the console table in the hallway. Takeaway menus, parking permits, spare keys, a roll of garden refuse bags. But no fuses.

Then she looks at the door to Floyd’s study. This is where he and Poppy do their home-learning together, where he writes his books and his papers. In her own version of this house, they’d knocked through from the front to the back to make a double reception. But Floyd has left the two rooms separate, as they would have been in Victorian times. She hasn’t been in Floyd’s study yet, just viewed it fleetingly as he’s walked in or out. She feels, quite strongly, although she’s not sure why, that Floyd would not want her in his study without his permission, so she stands for a moment or two, her hand on the doorknob, persuading herself that it is just another room in the house, that Floyd cannot live without her, that of course she can go into his study to look for fuses.

She turns the handle.

The door opens.

Floyd’s study is well furnished and cosy. The floorboards are covered over with threadbare kilims. The furniture is solid and old; there are two chrome table lamps with arced necks, one with a green glass shade, the other white. A laptop is open on his desk showing a screen saver of changing landscapes. She quickly starts to sift through his drawers.

Pens, notebooks, foreign coins, computer disks, CDs, memory sticks, everything organised in internal compartments. She goes to another desk, one that sits by the back window overlooking the garden. Here the drawers are locked. She sighs and absent-mindedly rifles through the piles of paper that sit on top of the desk. She is no longer looking for a fuse, she knows that. She’s looking for something to snap her out of the strange fug she’s been trapped in for the past few days.

And suddenly she has it in her hands. A pile of newspaper cuttings, all from around the time of the Crimewatch appeal on 26 May. There’s her face, there’s Paul, and there’s Ellie. There’s the interview she did for the Guardian and the interview she and Paul did together in the local paper. She remembers Floyd in his kitchen coyly confessing to having googled her after their first date. Yet six months earlier, before he’d even met her, he’d been tearing out and collecting newspaper cuttings about Ellie’s disappearance. She slots the cuttings back into the pile of paperwork at the sound of a car door closing on the street outside and quickly leaves Floyd’s study.

Floyd and Poppy return a moment later. They have bought an eight-foot tree.

‘Well,’ says Floyd, his cheeks flushed pink with the effort of getting it into the house, balancing it on its stump briefly so that Laurel can appreciate its great height. ‘Will this fulfil the brief?’

‘Wow,’ says Laurel, pressing herself against the wall so that Floyd can negotiate it through the hallway and into the sitting room. ‘That is a tree and a half. We’re going to need more lights!’

‘Ta-da!’ Poppy appears behind him, clutching bags from a DIY store full of fairy lights.

‘Brilliant,’ says Laurel. ‘You thought of everything.’

The TV is still tuned into Christmas songs; ‘Stop the Cavalry’ by Jona Lewie is playing.

Floyd cuts the netting around the tree and they all watch as the branches spring free. Floyd is strangely overexcited about the tree. ‘Hey,’ he says, turning to Poppy and Laurel, ‘it’s a good one, huh? I got a good one?’

They both assure him that it is a good one. Then Poppy and Laurel begin to dress the tree while Floyd goes to the kitchen to prepare supper.