Then She Was Gone(9)

They exchanged another glance. ‘Are any of her things missing?’

She shook her head and then shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. I’ve been in her room and it looks exactly as it was.’

There was a beat of silence as the police officers moved awkwardly from foot to foot.

‘We couldn’t see any broken locks or windows. How did the burglar gain access?’

Laurel blinked slowly. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Any windows left open?’

‘No, I …’ She hadn’t even thought about it. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Do you leave a key out?’

‘No. Never.’

‘Leave one with a neighbour? Or a friend?’

‘No. No. The only people who have keys are us. Me, my husband, our children.’

As the words left her mouth she felt her heart begin to race, the palms of her hands dampen. ‘Ellie,’ she said. ‘Ellie had a key. When she went missing. In her rucksack. What if …?’

They stared at her expectantly.

‘What if she came back? From wherever she’s been? Maybe she was desperate? It would explain the fact that only things we don’t care about have been taken. She knows I don’t like those candlesticks. I was always saying I was going to take them on the Antiques Roadshow one day because they were probably worth a fortune. And the cake!’

‘The cake?’

‘Yes. There was a chocolate cake on the counter. My daughter made it. My other daughter. I mean, what sort of burglar takes a cake?’

‘A hungry burglar?

‘No,’ said Laurel, her theory solidifying quickly into fact. ‘No. Ellie. Ellie would have taken it. She loved Hanna’s cakes. They were her favourite thing, they were …’ She stopped. She was going too fast and she was alienating the people who were here to help her.

No neighbours had seen anything out of the ordinary: most of them had not even been at home at the time of the burglary. Nothing stolen from the house had ever been recovered. And that was that. Another dead end reached. Another gaping hole in Laurel’s life.

For years though, she’d stayed close to home, in case Ellie came back again. For years she’d sniff the air every time she returned home from her brief sojourns beyond her front door, looking for the smell of her lost daughter. It was during those years that she finally lost touch with her remaining children. She had nothing left to give them and they grew tired of waiting.

Then three years ago Laurel had finally given up on Ellie coming home again. She’d accepted that it had been a simple burglary and that she needed to start again, in a new place. Three years ago she’d stepped backwards out of her lost daughter’s bedroom for the last time and closed the door behind her with a click so soft that it nearly killed her.

For three years she had put Ellie from her mind as much as she was able. She’d strapped herself into a new routine, tight and hard, like a straitjacket. For three years she’d internalised her madness, shared it with no one.

But now the madness was back.

She climbed into her car near the police station and as she put the car into reverse she stopped for a moment, stopped to suck the madness back down, suck it as far inside as she could get it to go.

But then she thought of her daughter’s bones being placed at this very moment into plastic bags by strangers in rubber gloves and it burst back up and emerged into the silence of her car as a dreadful roar, her fists pounding off the steering wheel, over and over and over again.

She saw Paul then, across the road, walking towards his own car, the terrible hang of his face, the sag of his shoulders. She saw him stare at her, the shock in his eyes as he registered her fury. And then she saw him begin to walk towards her. She put the car into gear and drove away as fast as she could.





Eleven


Then


Ellie had not thought too much about Noelle Donnelly since their final lesson.

According to her mother she had been a ‘bit arsey’ about it, said that had she known her time with Ellie would be cut short she might not have taken the job and now she had a slot she could not fill, and it was not really the done thing blah blah blah. Her mother had brushed it off when Ellie had said she felt bad.

‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I think she’s just the type to take umbrage. She’ll be OK. And she’ll definitely find someone to take that slot so close to the exams. Some last-minute panicking parent will snap her up.’

Ellie had felt reassured by this and removed Noelle Donnelly from the bit of her brain that concerned itself with the here and now. The here and now was oversubscribed as it was.

In fact it had taken her a moment to place Noelle Donnelly at all when she saw her on the high street that Thursday morning during the May half-term. She was on her way to the library. Her sister had a friend over who had a really loud, really annoying laugh. She needed some peace and quiet. And also a book about the workhouses in the nineteenth century.

So, in retrospect, she could have blamed her sister’s friend with the loud laugh for her being there at that precise moment, but she really didn’t want to do that. The blame game could be exhausting sometimes. The blame game could make you lose your mind … all the infinitesimal outcomes, each path breaking up into a million other paths every time you heedlessly chose one, taking you on a journey that you’d never find your way back from.