Authors: Adam Croft
‘What about the search?’ Tasha asks.
‘Our officers are still out looking,’ McKenna says. ‘There’s no sign yet, but that’s no bad thing. A five-year-old girl can’t get far on her own, like you said, and we got the search started very early so the chances are she hasn’t gone far at all. We’re still working on the assumption that she’s hiding in a neighbour’s garden somewhere. We’ve got officers going door to door along the street, asking your neighbours to check their gardens. We’re looking ourselves if people aren’t at home, but obviously we can’t get into anyone’s back gardens without their permission.’
‘What do you mean?’ Tasha asks, her face showing incredulity. ‘Surely if you think she’s hiding in someone’s garden you need to look in all of them.’
‘I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple,’ McKenna says. ‘We’re doing what we can. For a start, if she is hiding, we don’t want to alarm her by leaping over fences and storming the area. We want her to come out and back home.’
This seems to have pacified Tasha.
‘There are a couple of things I need to check with you, though, Mr Connor. I’ve just been across the road speaking to your neighbour, a Mr Francis?’ McKenna’s intonation rises on the name, indicating that perhaps I should have a clue as to who this Mr Francis is. She sees the lack of recognition on my face and elaborates. ‘At number 39, directly opposite you.’
‘Oh, Derek,’ I say. This is the first time I’ve ever heard his surname.
‘His house overlooks yours, so I thought maybe he might have seen something.’
‘Yes, that’s what I thought,’ I reply. McKenna and Tasha both look at me. ‘I went over to speak to him. When you left earlier. I wondered if he’d seen any strange cars knocking about or anything like that.’
‘Yes, Mr Francis did mention that you visited,’ McKenna replies. I try to detect the tone in her voice, but she’s kept it as neutral as possible. ‘He said he didn’t see anything. Nothing out of the ordinary, anyway,’ she says. ‘I presume he told you the same thing?’
I nod.
‘Can you confirm what time you put Ellie in the car again for me please?’ McKenna asks.
‘I’ve already told you this. It was a few minutes before nine.’
‘Jesus, Nick,’ Tasha says. Trust her to be more worried about Ellie being a few minutes late for school than the fact that she’d just disappeared off the face of the earth.
I look at McKenna. ‘We were late. I fell asleep,’ I say, before turning my glance back to Tasha. ‘I’d been up since five.’
‘Mr Francis told me he was doing his ironing in his living room, in front of the window, from a quarter to nine until just before quarter past, when we turned up,’ McKenna says. ‘He would’ve had a clear view of your driveway, wouldn’t he?’
‘I guess so,’ I say.
McKenna nods, not breaking eye contact with me. ‘Not only did Mr Francis say he didn’t see anyone odd lurking around, nor Ellie walking off. He says he didn’t see you putting Ellie in the car in the first place.’
I see Tasha’s head spin round towards me out of the corner of my eye.
‘What? No, that’s not possible,’ I say, but McKenna continues.
‘He says the first sign of life he saw was you leaving the house and jogging down the road a few seconds before we got here in the police car.’
‘He’s lying. He must have seen. He sees everything! How the hell could he miss that? Have you looked at his record?’ I say, feeling the beads of sweat breaking on my brow. ‘There’s something not right about him. How do you know he hasn’t got her? There are stories about him.’
‘Mr Francis said he thought it was a bit odd,’ McKenna continues, ‘because you usually set off for school with Ellie some time between eight-fifty and just gone nine.’
Tasha looks at me again. I could really do without her judging me over what time I manage to get her to school, seeing as she’s long gone and farting about in London by then.
McKenna stands and paces about the living room as she speaks. ‘In fact, he says he went over and knocked at your door a bit earlier this morning. The postman delivered one of your letters to him by mistake, apparently, so he brought it over for you. He says you didn’t answer.’
‘Well, no. I mean, I heard the doorbell go but I was busy getting Ellie ready for school. It’s not exactly easy doing it on your own,’ I say, darting a look at Tasha out of the corner of my eye.
‘I can imagine,’ McKenna says. ‘Must be very stressful indeed, day after day. It must eat away at you over time.’
I ignore the comment. ‘Anyway, that can’t be right,’ I say. ‘He wouldn’t knock. He never knocks on anyone’s door. He barely ever answers his own. He would’ve just put it through the door or stuck it back in the postbox or left it out for the postman the next day. There’s no way he would’ve come and knocked.’
‘I’ve only got your word for that, Mr Connor,’ she says. ‘Just like I’ve only got your word for it that you put Ellie in the car when you said you did and that you were in the house when Mr Francis knocked at the door.’
‘Well you’ve only got Derek’s word for it that I didn’t, haven’t you?’ I say. ‘Since when is his word taken more seriously than mine?’
McKenna doesn’t respond to this.
‘Let me ask you again,’ she says. ‘Where were you?’
The last few hours have been a blur. It’s now starting to get dark and we’ve still heard nothing.
The accusatory tone of McKenna and the things she insinuated have poisoned the atmosphere in the house and Tasha’s gone out to join the search for Ellie. One of us needed to — it’s a case of getting as many people involved as possible — but we also need to keep someone in the house in case Ellie comes back. Tasha made it perfectly clear that that person should be me, suggesting that I’d done enough damage today already.
Tasha’s put out a Facebook appeal which has already been shared over five hundred times. The police say that if we haven’t found her by tomorrow they’ll go to the press. Bearing in mind Ellie’s age, they say, it’s vital that we get the usual appeals out much faster than would otherwise be the case.
It seems like everyone’s getting involved. A few of Tasha’s former school friends — Emma, Leanne and Cristina have been in touch. I was surprised at that, as she seems to have alienated most of her old friends by setting her sights so blindly on career progression. Tasha’s parents are on standby and have planned to fly over from Brisbane on the next available flight if Ellie hasn’t been found by tomorrow. I told them that wouldn’t be necessary and that by the time they’d got here we will more than likely have found her anyway. Deep down, I really don’t want them around, judging me on my behaviour.
Julie and Tim are good people, but I can’t deny that it’s a relief knowing they’re on the other side of the world. Life has been so much quieter and easier since they moved away. My parents, on the other hand, would know just what to do. Mum would go straight into organisational mode, drawing up maps and itineraries and splitting everyone off into groups. Dad would do his best at keeping everyone calm and spirits high. I’ve missed that direction and positivity since they died.
It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to be in the position where you know you need to do everything but can’t possibly do anything. Lying in your bedroom staring at the ceiling while everyone you know is out looking for your missing five-year-old daughter feels so wrong on every conceivable level, but there really is no other option.
You always hear people say that the worst part is the not knowing. I’ve never really understood that phrase until now. Not knowing where she is. Not knowing whether she’s coming back. Not knowing if she’s with anyone. Not knowing if she’s safe. Not knowing if she’s happy. Not knowing if she’s alive.
Not knowing.
I guess it’s one of those moments where your life changes forever. There was before Ellie disappeared and after Ellie disappeared. A firm, deep line in the sand. A gulley. A canyon. Not to be crossed. My new life began on this day.
I ponder this, and many other things, but nothing seems to help. There’s nothing that will bring Ellie back other than looking for her and I can’t even do that. All I can do is lie here and feel shit and sorry for myself. Because it’s my fault. I was the one who left her in that car. Tasha’s right. She’s always right. If I’d just taken her back inside with me, or even manned the fuck up and told her she could take the picture in tomorrow, we’d all be sitting around the dinner table right now talking about our days. As it is, I haven’t eaten since breakfast, the dining room’s in darkness and Miss Williams still hasn’t got her picture.
I’ve never got on particularly well with technology and I’m really starting to detest it today. The text messages and phone calls are endless, with friends and family phoning one after another. The most depressing fact is that most of them probably found out through Facebook.
I’ve become quite adept at cancelling the calls that come through from numbers I recognise. I’ve changed my voicemail message to say that I’m passing calls from friends and family to voicemail as I need to keep the line free in case the police call. This is partially true, but I also don’t want to speak to anyone right now.
A few have taken to emailing me instead, which is starting to get pretty annoying. My iPhone’s email icon has a red blob telling me I’ve got nineteen unread emails. As I’m looking at it, the phone pings like a hotel reception bell and the number changes to twenty. The alert message at the top of the screen shows that the new email’s subject line is
Ellie
, but the name is one I don’t recognise: Jen Hood.
Must be another friend of Tasha’s, I think, but then why would she be emailing me? I haven’t opened any of the other emails, but then I know who they’re from and I can almost guess word for word what they’re going to say.
There’s no way in hell I could have guessed what this email from Jen Hood says, though. I open it and read it three times, just to be sure my mind isn’t playing tricks on me.
ELLIE IS SAFE. YOU CAN HAVE HER BACK AFTER YOU KILL YOUR WIFE.
I must have read that email a hundred times over the past few minutes. I’ve stared at every word, every letter, willing them to say something different. I’ve looked for the deliberate joke, the typo, the sign that it might have been sent to the wrong person.
Perhaps it’s been sent to the right person, but it’s just a bad joke. I’m sure I heard somewhere that this happens in cases like this. Troublemakers — trolls, they call them — like to prey on people when they’re at their lowest ebb.
I look for signs of some sort of mistake. There’s nothing. It really is an email from someone who wants me to kill my wife to get my daughter back.
I march into my office and flip the lid up on my MacBook. Fortunately, it starts up about ten seconds after I press the power button and twenty seconds after that I’m staring at the Facebook login screen.
I’ve only ever used Facebook about five times in my life, so I struggle to remember my username and password, but I’m lucky on the third attempt and I’m greeted by a newsfeed showing me pictures of my own daughter, shared by family and friends from around the country. I try not to look at the photos and instead click the Search bar at the top of the page and type in
Jen Hood
.
There are so many results, I don’t know where to start. There are Jens, Jennys and Jennifers. There are women with Hood as their married name and some with it listed as their maiden name. There are even some Jens who live in towns called Hood, worked for companies or went to schools called Hood. Most are from America, but there are a couple in Scotland, Ireland and even France.
Where do I start? I can’t just send them all messages saying ‘Did you kidnap my daughter?’. I grab my phone and look at the email again. It’s come from a Gmail address:
[email protected]
. No clues as to where the person lives whatsoever.
Once again, that same feeling hits me: the feeling of not knowing. Someone has sent me this email and I don’t have a clue who it could be. Is Jen Hood even her real name? If so, could it be one of the women staring out at me from my MacBook screen right now? If so, who are they? Do they have my daughter or is this some sort of cruel trick?
I remember from reading some crime thrillers that often the problem police have is weeding out the cranks from the real information and clues they get. There’s a whole subsection of society that gets its kicks from trying to interfere in police investigations and sending idiotic letters and messages claiming to be responsible. It’s all part of the desire to be seen as powerful and in control. It’s a psychological disorder, and a dangerous one too.
I vaguely recall reading about the investigation into the Yorkshire Ripper in the 1970s. After ten women had died, the police received letters and phone calls from someone with a Wearside accent claiming he was the Ripper. The police took it seriously and focused their search on Wearside. In the meantime, the real Yorkshire Ripper carried on and killed three more women.
In a way, I hope that’s what this is. It would be the sickest possible prank to play, but at least it would mean that its contents weren’t real. Although, as much as I try to deny it, something about the message seems all too real. I don’t know if it’s a sixth sense or what, but I can almost feel the sincerity and determination behind those words.
Presuming it is real, what can I do? Sure, I can go to the police with it but then it’d either be taken seriously or treated as a potential hoax. If it’s the former, what can they do? Odds are it will have been sent from an internet café or some sort of anonymous server. Deep down, I know that there’s another reason why I don’t want to alert the police to the email just yet, but that’s not something I’m willing to entertain.