‘I’d ask you if there was anything I could think of,’ I said wearily, ‘but there’s nothing left. You’ve done too much already. I’ll give you some rest. Come on, Jackson. We’ll go home. Thanks, Rick.’
‘She’ll turn up,’ Rick said. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘I guess so,’ I said. ‘You’ve never come across an Olivia Mullen, have you? Or Liv Mullen? Charlie got to know her over the summer.’
Rick looked thoughtful and shook his head. ‘It doesn’t ring a bell,’ he said. ‘But there are so many people who come to the beach in the summer. It’s hard to keep track. Who is she?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. Joel said the same about her. Nobody seems to have met her except Charlie. Anyway, thanks for everything.’
‘That’s all right, my love,’ said Rick. ‘Go home and get a good night’s sleep. You look as if you need it. Things will be all right, Nina.’
I thought that for the first time in that frenzied day, with his wife, the injury and the visit to the hospital, he seemed calm, composed. Perhaps it was a relief to have Karen away for a night. He closed the door and I walked to the car with Jackson, my arm round him. I held him as close as I could, feeling his warm, solid body against mine. I opened the front passenger door for him. He took the newspaper that was
lying there and opened it on his lap. I switched on the car and drove away from the kerb. ‘What did you do with Rick?’ I asked.
‘Played on the computer.’
‘And then you went out?’
‘Yeah.’
I imagined Rick taking Jackson for a treat, like the uncle my son didn’t have. ‘Did he buy you anything nice?’
‘No, nothing. Just a booklet he needed. He was looking for it in all his drawers and then he said we might as well buy another.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘We’re home.’
I opened the door and the light inside the car came on. Jackson looked down at the paper on his lap. ‘What’s this?’ he said.
‘The local paper,’ I said. ‘The vicar left it. He fixed the car. First Rick tried to fix it when there was nothing wrong with it, and then the vicar fixed it when it wouldn’t start. People have been trying to fix things all day.’
‘I mean why’s her picture in the paper?’ asked Jackson.
‘Who’s her?’
‘That.’
He held up the paper. On the front page there was a photograph of a girl, full face, smiling at the camera. She was wearing a hooped T-shirt. The picture was taken in bright sunshine and she was blinking at the camera, dazzled by the light. She had dark brown hair and looked happy and young. The headline read, ‘Missing Girl, 16’, and in smaller letters, ‘Police Hunt’. I looked at the caption to the photograph and saw what I expected: ‘16-year-old schoolgirl, Olivia Mullen, missing since last week.’
I put my hand on Jackson’s. ‘It’s very sad,’ I said. ‘Her body was found here today.’
‘She’s the girl who took the photo.’
‘What photo?’
‘The one of me and Charlie. The one she sent in the post.’ The one I’d given to the police. My head was spinning. My thoughts were like mud. I leaned towards him in the half-darkness, and gripped his arm.
‘You were saying who was she, and I didn’t know, but it was her.’
‘Liv,’ I said.
‘Yeah, that’s it. Now I remember. She was nice. Giggly.’ Suddenly he jerked away from me. ‘What d’you mean, her body?’
‘She was with you and Charlie last week?’
‘Is she dead?’
Somewhere deep in the recesses of my brain, I knew that things were piling up that I would have to deal with on another day: careless words, cruel ones, people insulted and hurt, secrets exposed, wounds reopened, trust abused; above all, Jackson, my little boy, who had stumbled unaided through this terrible day. One day, not now. Not yet.
‘Darling Jackson,’ I said, ‘she’d dead, yes, but I’ve got to find Charlie…’
‘What’s Liv got to do with Charlie going?’
‘I’ve got to think,’ I said. ‘Don’t say anything. Wait.’
I turned on the car light and scanned the story. Olivia had disappeared last Sunday. She had told her parents that she was going shopping with a friend, and had seemed cheerful, but they had neither seen nor heard from her since.
Did this change anything? I tried to clear my brain of
everything but the necessary information. I had the feeling that I knew all I needed to know but hadn’t been able to make it add up, and the effort now to connect the pieces felt physical. I could almost feel my brain humming, fizzing, overheating.
Outside, a young couple walked past, leaning against each other and laughing. They were both smoking cigarettes. I stared at them blindly for a couple of seconds, then leaped out.
‘Excuse me, can I nick a cigarette from you?’
‘You what?’ The youth goggled at me and the girl he was wrapped round snickered. For a flash, I saw what he was seeing: a middle-aged woman with wild hair, red eyes, dirty hands and shabby, rumpled, mucky clothes, begging for a smoke.
‘I’m desperate,’ I said.
Wordlessly, he handed me one. I took it and leaned forward while he struck a match, cupped his gloved hands round the frail flame, and put it to my cigarette. I sucked until the end flowered and I felt the acrid sting in my lungs. ‘Thanks.’
I stood by the car with my back to the house, aware of Jackson still huddled inside, tired, hungry, wretched and scared. I gazed out at the sea, almost invisible in the dark, the frosty ground glinting beneath me, and smoked the cigarette.
Olivia Mullen had come to see Charlie on the morning of Sunday, 12 December. I knew that from the date printout on the photograph. I even knew the time: 11.07. According to the paper, that was the day she had gone missing. So she had visited my daughter and then she had disappeared. And she had said she was going to ‘finish it’.
Then – I took a huge drag at the cigarette and, for a moment, felt dizzy and sick – a story about Olivia’s disappearance had been published this morning in the paper that Charlie was delivering, and Charlie had also disappeared. The two linked facts whirled in my brain: Olivia went missing after she’d visited Charlie. Charlie went missing when a story about her friend’s disappearance was published.
What else did I know? I knew Charlie had been bullied and yesterday night had had her drinks spiked by her so-called friends.
I knew that she had a boyfriend, but had kept it secret for months, creeping out to assignations with him on the hulks.
I knew she’d had a fling with Eamonn and had feared, or maybe known, that she was pregnant.
I knew that Eamonn had told his father.
I knew that someone had come into my house while the abortive party had been going on and taken things that belonged to Charlie, but that it couldn’t have been Charlie. Why had they? This was after the bicycle had been abandoned half-way through the paper round. Could it have been as a decoy? To make it look as if Charlie had run away when she’d done no such thing? Whoever had done it had only done it for show. They had only taken things that were visible, things whose absence would be noticed.
I knew that Rory had been there this morning, secretly, and had met Charlie on her newspaper round, that he’d lied about it to me and then to the police, and had only come clean when I’d discovered Charlie’s things in the back of his car.
I knew that Olivia and Charlie had met in the summer on a course that Joel had taught on. But so had dozens of others.
There’d been hundreds of them down by the beach, sailing and windsurfing.
‘Hang on,’ I said, under my breath, dropping the cigarette on to the ground where it glowed up at me, a winking red eye. ‘Wait.’
Something had crept into my brain, a tiny wisp, like fog. What? I stared at the darkly glinting sea and tried to catch it. Yes: something about so many people coming to the beach that it was hard to keep track. Who’d said that? Who’d just said that?
‘I never said the beach,’ I whispered aloud. ‘I never said Liv was connected to the beach.’
Think. Think. Joel had said that many people from the island taught kayaking and sailing in the summer: himself, Alix, Rick, Bill, Tom… I remembered Rick’s calm look, the sudden sense of composed purpose. Why would Rick be calm? What was his purpose?
The waves licked at the shingle a few feet away from where I stood; a soft shucking sound. They gave me my answer: calm because the tide was rising to the full flood and my time to find Charlie had all but run out. I opened the car door and leaned in. ‘Jackson.’
‘Mummy? Can I –’
‘What did Rick get when you went out with him?’
‘What?’
‘Tell me what he got. You said a booklet.’
I knew what he was going to say and he said it. ‘For the tides. When it’s high and low.’
I tore open the car’s front locker and pulled out a pile of maps, service records and, yes, a tide table. I opened it and followed with a finger the tides for Saturday, 18 December.
Low tide was at 10.40 a.m.; high tide was at 4.22 a.m. and 5.13 p.m. Beside the day’s times was a dotted black line, signifying that today’s was a relatively high one. I glanced at the screen of my mobile: 16.56.
Rick had left Charlie just before low tide, and had spent the whole day – with Karen at the hospital, with Jackson, of all people – being hampered from getting back to her. But now, when the tide was up and the waves were lapping on the shore, he had relaxed. There was only fifteen minutes before it was at its highest. And Rick had been calm, knowing that.
I pulled out my mobile and punched in the number of the police station. A familiar voice answered. ‘This is –’ I began, but then, with a start, I disconnected.
Because now I was thinking with complete clarity. I knew what would happen. The detectives would bring Rick in and he would spend hours giving a statement, admitting nothing. And all the while the sea would be doing his work and everything would be lost. There were few certainties, but I was nearly sure that to call the police would be finally to lose any chance of finding Charlie.
‘No,’ I said.
I turned to Jackson. I took a breath and made my voice slow, calm, reassuring. ‘A change of plan, honey. You’re going to have to wait for me in the house.’
‘No,’ he said, in a wail.
‘It’s important and I’m very proud of you, my darling.’
‘No!’ he shouted, his voice high with hysteria. ‘I won’t. I’ll run away. I’ll follow you. You can’t leave me again. It’s not fair.’
For a desperate stupid moment, I thought of taking him
with me. He could hide on the back seat. He could stay quiet. He might fall asleep. I was considering it, even though at that moment I had no time. Then, somewhere out of my reverie, I saw two figures walking down the road, an adult and a child. The adult was laden with shopping-bags, shuffling towards me. I saw that they had come from the bus stop. And then I recognized them: Bonnie and Ryan.
‘Bonnie,’ I called, opening the door.
She recognized me and smiled. ‘We’re all done,’ she said. ‘It took us five hours and we hardly had time to eat but we’ve got presents for everyone, haven’t we, Ryan? In fact we were so busy examining them we missed our stop.’ Then her expression changed. ‘But weren’t you supposed to be on your way to Florida by now? Nina, you look terrible.’
‘No time,’ I said. ‘An emergency. The biggest emergency. You’ve got to take Jackson again. I’m so sorry. Charlie’s missing.’
‘Missing?’
‘No time. Take Jackson. I’ll phone. Jackson, out. Quick.’
‘But –’ said Jackson.
‘Great!’ said Ryan.
‘Right,’ said Bonnie immediately, dragging Jackson out by his forearms. Then she looked at me. ‘Go.’
I sped away as she slammed the door, driving back from the direction I’d just come. When I was a few yards from Rick’s house, I drew to a halt. I switched off my headlights but kept the engine running.
And I waited, praying that I wasn’t too late, praying that I hadn’t got it wrong, praying that I had and that in the nightmare of fear I had simply concocted a Gothic tale that had no roots in the truth. This was my gamble, my one
last throw of the dice. I was risking the life of my daughter on the chance I was right. I knew now that Rick had taken Charlie. I believed that he had hidden her somewhere that would be covered by the tide, which was now almost at its height. And I was staking everything on the hope that he was still at his house and that he would now go to her and I would be able to follow and stop him. Such a frail vessel in which to place all my faith. I knew, oh, I knew, how very likely I was to be wrong. And if I was wrong, I would have the whole of the rest of my life to dwell upon these moments, to replay them and to know what I should have done if I could have looked down upon the story from a distance. But it was all I had. I was trapped in the foggy darkness, groping after the truth and seeing only tiny fragments of it.
I don’t know how many minutes I sat there. Maybe very few. There was a movement, the front door opened and he emerged. I clenched the steering-wheel with both fists. He carried a sack over his shoulder that looked, as far as I could tell in the darkness, like the nylon bag that sailors use. He walked over to his car, slung the bag into the back, and started the engine. I waited as he drew off. I let him disappear round the bend, his tail-lights red. I memorized his number-plate and the back of his old grey Volvo in case I lost him, although there was no one on the roads this winter evening. They were all inside, in the glowing warmth, with their Christmas trees, their televisions and their log fires. Sheltering from the storm.
The road turned right and I could see Rick ahead. I followed at a distance, praying he wouldn’t notice my car in his rear-view mirror. We crossed The Street, then took the right
turn that led to the barrow, where he turned left, on to Lost Road. Everything was dark, except the red lights in front of me. I slowed the car and turned off the headlights. Now I could barely make out the road in front of me and several times the car bumped against the verge, once tipping sharply sideways. I shuddered at the thought of sliding off the road into a ditch. But if Rick saw me, broke off and returned home, that would be the end.
I leaned forward, concentrating on the road just ahead but making sure that I could still see the pair of red lights. My fingers were numb with cold, but there was sweat on my forehead and between my breasts. I could hear my breath coming in short, ragged gasps. Now on my right there was farmland and I could occasionally make out, between the trees built as a windbreak, the lights from Birche Farm. On my left there were the empty stretches of marshland. In the distance the sea came back into sight, rising up like a wall of darkness under the dark sky. The moon cast a wavering yellow path over its waters.