The man hesitated. “Phone again tomorrow to talk to Kenny. He runs the place,” he said. “I’m not promising anything, mind, but Kenny might be able to put you on the cancellation list.”
“Great,” said Jess. But when she’d put the phone down, she thought maybe this hadn’t been such a great idea after all.
It was one of the hardest phone calls Abby had ever had to make. Jean had offered her a cup of tea to combat shock, but Abby had said no, she had to get home and wait in case Jess phoned. And she had to tell Jess’s father what had happened.
She dialled Tom’s number. He answered on the second ring.
“Jess is missing. I don’t know where she is and she left a note, but there’s no sign of her. Steph doesn’t know where she is and she’s not answering her mobile phone.” Abby blurted it all out in an instant.
“Hold on,” said Tom, trying to pick up the salient points. “Jess is missing since when? Are you sure she’s not just bunking off school or something, or down at that animal refuge?”
“No,” said Abby, her voice breaking. “I’ve been there and they haven’t seen her. She’s definitely gone. I talked to Steph and she said that Jess hadn’t been in school today. The school rang me to inform me—that’s how I found out in the first place. She’s been gone all day and I had no idea. I talked to Oliver’s mother and she gave me his number. He’s at school, but I think he and Jess had a falling-out. He hasn’t seen her since the party and he sounded really upset about it. He says he rang and rang on Sunday and she never an-swered.”
“Have you contacted the police?” said Tom, instantly acting like the professional teacher.
“No,” cried Abby. “I thought I’d ring you and ask you first what you thought.”
“I’ll phone the police and then I’ll come on over,” said Tom deci-sively.
Within half an hour both Tom and a kindly policewoman called Anna Dunne were sitting in the kitchen in Lyonnais.
As soon as Tom had arrived, Abby had thrown herself into his arms, hugging him and crying at the same time.
“It’s all my fault. If I’d been here, I’d have known that she wasn’t at school today and we could have started looking earlier and, oh my God, Tom,
anything
could have happened to her.”
It was as if they’d never been apart, Tom thought, holding Abby tightly in his arms. He stroked her hair and murmured comforting noises into her ear. “It’s all right,” he said, “it’s all right. We’re going to sort it out. She can’t have gone far. She knows we love her and that we’ll be worried. She’ll phone.”
He’d dealt with runaways before through his work, but it was a different kettle of fish when it was your child who’d run away.
Somehow, the policewoman’s factual information about how many teenagers ran away and were found quickly afterwards didn’t seem to comfort quite so much when you were talking about your teenage daughter.
Because Jess was under the age of eighteen, she was considered a high-risk category, Sergeant Dunne explained. The fact that she’d left a note was a positive thing, but the usual police search proce-dures would take place regardless.
“If you agree to publicity, we can try to have Jess’s picture on the news tonight. The papers will probably carry her description and the fact that she’s missing tomorrow.”
Abby clung to Tom’s hand. This was all so frightening. “Yes,” she said, “we want publicity. Anything to find her.”
“Did you have a row with Jess?” asked Sergeant Dunne, taking notes.
Abby shook her head. “Not today or yesterday.” She wanted to say that there had been so many rows in the household over the past few months that it would be impossible to pin Jess’s actions on any one row. “Tom and I are separated,” she sighed, “and that’s been very difficult for Jess. But we have been working through it and we’re all getting on. I think she may have had a row with her boyfriend. They were at a party on Saturday night and she left early to come home and hasn’t spoken to him since. And she’s being bullied at school too,” she added.
Tom looked horrified. “Bullied at school?” he asked.
Abby nodded. “I didn’t know either,” she admitted to the police-woman. “Her best friend, Steph, told me today. One of the girls in her class has been picking on her, sending text messages and just generally being a bitch. Steph said they couldn’t prove where the messages were coming from but they both figured out it was this girl. I don’t know if that’s what pushed her over the edge or whether it was Oliver.”
Abby started to cry and Tom put his arms around her again. He thought of the times he’d had parents in his office in school who were shocked and astonished when he told them that their sons had been bullied or were bullies themselves. Tom had always wondered how they didn’t know what was going on in their children’s lives, but now he understood that all too well. He’d been so tied up in his own problems that he’d neglected Jess. He’d spent Sunday with her and she’d seemed fine—a bit quiet, yes, but he hadn’t noticed any-thing else. And apart from that weekend in Kent when she’d stunned him by her mature awareness of what had gone on with him and Abby, he hadn’t really asked her about how she felt. He’d assumed that she was able to deal with everything, but he was wrong.
Anna Dunne spent an hour with them, talking about all Jess’s friends, the places she went, what she did in her spare time. Abby told her about the refuge.
“I’d never been there,” Abby sobbed. “When she started working there, I rang and I talked to Jean, but Jess didn’t want me to go. She wanted it to be her own place. I should have realised that there had to be something wrong.”
“The fact that she didn’t want you going to the refuge doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” said the sergeant calmly. “She volun-teered there, so she wasn’t keeping that from you. Teenagers are al-ways pushing the boundaries. They want lives away from their parents and this could have been just that for Jess. But the bullying is something we have to look into, and we’ll need to talk to her friends and the boyfriend.”
“I’ll kill that bitch Saffron Walsh when I get my hands on her,” Abby vowed. “How dare she do that to Jess?”
“There’s a lot of it about,” Sergeant Dunne pointed out. “Mobile phone bullying is endemic. Lots of kids get bullied and they don’t tell their parents. Schools find it hard to cope with it and plenty of parents don’t want to believe it when they hear that their kids are bullies.”
Tom was about to point out that his school had a good pro-gramme on bullying, but he stopped himself. What was the point of telling everyone how marvellously his school had dealt with the problem when all along his daughter was trying to deal with the same thing and he hadn’t even noticed?
Sergeant Dunne took a photo of Jess and said the national and regional radio and press would be contacted that evening, although it was up to individual news organisations as to whether they ran with the story or not. She, as the family’s liaison officer, would be in constant contact.
“Let us know if she gets in touch, obviously,” said Sergeant Dunne.
When she’d left, Tom and Abby sat together in the kitchen hold-ing hands, as if the close contact could somehow protect them from bad news.
“She’s not the sort of person to run away just for the sake of it, just to worry us,” Abby said. “I can’t bear to think of her alone …” She couldn’t continue the sentence. The world was full of sick and twisted people. If only Jess would phone. “How could I not have known she was being bullied?” Abby fretted. “I should have known. She’s been so quiet since last weekend and I just thought it was over you and me and the divorce and everything. Why didn’t I ask her?”
“Why didn’t
I
ask her?” Tom said. “If she had a row with Oliver on Saturday, she must have been upset about it on Sunday and I never realised.”
Tom and Abby Barton didn’t sleep that night. They lay down to-gether in the big bed they used to share, fully dressed and holding hands for comfort. They talked about what it had been like when Jess was a child, the funny things she used to do, how they loved her so much, how she was growing up so quickly. Sleep was out of the question.
At half-past five, Tom got up and went downstairs to make some tea. Abby, shattered from lack of sleep, walked into Jess’s room and lay down on the bed.
“Where are you, Jess?” she begged, her eyes closed as if in prayer. “I know you’re hurting, Jess, but please, please come back to us. We miss you and we’re so worried.”
Many miles away, in the uncomfortable bunk bed of the hostel room, Jess lay awake and listened to the snores of the girl sleeping in the bunk below. She held on to her mobile phone tightly. She’d woken half an hour ago and suddenly felt scared because she hadn’t known where she was. Then she remembered running away and leaving the note, not caring what effect it would have on anyone. And now, too late, she did care. She thought of her mum finding the note and being terrified; she thought of her dad. He was always warning her about strange guys who tried to get teenage girls into cars.
“Dad,” Jess used to say in exasperation, “that sort of thing only happens in movies.” Honestly, he worried so much. But Jess knew Dad believed that sort of stuff. And he might think that was what had happened to her now. She should have phoned.
And she thought of Oliver. She didn’t know why, but she felt guilty. She hadn’t given him a chance to talk to her and explain things. She’d been so angry and hurt on Saturday night that she’d acted on impulse, but now she understood that the Oliver Saffron described wasn’t the Oliver she knew. Saffron was evil. She’d twist anything to upset Jess. She switched her phone on, her fingers lightly touching the buttons. The phone beeped loudly, telling her she had messages, but Jess didn’t want to access them. Oliver could have left one and she couldn’t bear to hear his voice. And Mum would have left one, or many more than one, probably. Jess defi-nitely didn’t want to listen to that.
She
could
send a text message, maybe, to let Mum and Dad know she was OK but then they’d want to come and get her, and they’d be angry. Jess couldn’t cope with a row; there had been so many rows.
Her eyes got used to the dark and she looked around the small dormitory room. Maybe if they came and got her, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea, after all. This place wasn’t exactly the Ritz. She should have phoned the animal refuge before she’d come here—how dumb was that just to rush onto the train without checking if there was a job vacancy? Oliver would have checked. She missed him, she thought suddenly. She wished she hadn’t erased his mes-sages, then she could listen to his voice. She pushed a button on the phone and the display lit up, showing her the time: it was a quarter to six. It was too early to send a text or phone. Everyone would still be asleep. Anyway, they knew she wouldn’t do anything silly. She’d give it a little bit longer before she phoned.
Tom came into Jess’s bedroom with two cups of tea. He hadn’t bothered to bring anything to eat. There was no point. Neither he nor Abby had been able to eat a single thing the night before.
“Sit up and drink some tea,” he said to Abby gently.
Tom had put milk and sugar in it. She needed the sweetness.
“I thought she’d like this bedroom best of all,” Abby said, her voice far away. “Do you remember when we looked at the house first, Tom, I thought she’d like this room because it looks out over the town and it’s got the cherry trees outside the window? I thought it was like a bedroom in one of those books I used to love when I was a kid. I always wanted a bedroom like that myself.”
Tom thought about Abby’s childhood home. He hadn’t been there often—the last time was when Abby’s mother had been dying and they’d come to take her to the hospital. It was a small, shabby house with no luxuries. Abby’s father had drunk too much of the family’s money for them ever to be able to afford anything better. There had been no cherry tree at the window of the room where Abby had grown up. Tom felt a pang of misery for his wife. She’d tried so hard to give Jess the things that she hadn’t had when she was a child, and all he’d done was knock her for her efforts. She’d thought she was doing so well in earning the money to buy this beautiful home and, all the while, he’d silently resented her for it.
“I’m sorry, Abby,” he said, and he really meant it. “I wasn’t much of a husband to you, was I? You did your best, you tried to make us all happy, and I was so caught up in my own jealousy that I couldn’t see it. I’m sorry, so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said, in that same faraway voice. “I should have seen what it was doing to you. I thought it was great if I earned more money, so we could go on better holidays, and have a bigger house, and everything. Because I didn’t have those things when I was a kid, I thought they were important but they weren’t. We were important; the family was important.”
“But we could have had it all,” Tom said. “There’s nothing to say we couldn’t have been a happy family, and had the better life. I was the one who couldn’t cope with that, not you.” He reached out, took her hand and held on tightly. “We could try again, Abby, we could. Jess would love that. The weekend we were over in Kent with Caroline and Phil, she asked me why we weren’t getting back to-gether. If only I’d said we would,” he said in anguish, “then maybe we wouldn’t be in this position now.”
Abby raised exhausted eyes to his. “You weren’t the one who broke the family up in the first place,” she said.
“But it didn’t really mean anything, did it?” Tom asked.
Despite the pain and fear she was going through, Abby knew this was a question she had to answer seriously. “No,” she said in heart-felt tones. “No, it didn’t mean anything. I told you that before and you didn’t believe me, but it’s true. And I love you, Tom. I’ve always loved you. I suppose I forgot it a bit when we were going through bad times and we were too stupid to see that,” she said.
“I was too stupid to see it,” Tom said, “but I love you too, Abby. We can get through it, can’t we?”
Abby looked at him sadly. “We have to get through this first, Tom, before we think of anything else.” But she kept her hand clasped in his and squeezed it more tightly.