Authors: Michael Robotham
Maybe she deserved that happy ending, because real life hadn’t been such a picnic. Tash grew up in an old farmhouse half a mile from Bingham, along a narrow lane that is just wide enough for single cars or tractors. Mr. McBain rented the farm, hoping to buy it, but he could never raise the money.
I remember my mother saying the McBains were white trash, something I never really understood. A lot of people rent houses and send their kids to public schools, but that doesn’t make them any more fucked up than the rich people living in Priory Corner.
That’s where I used to live, in a house called The Old Vicarage. It used to house the vicar until the church decided it needed even more money and sold off the house and land. The streets of Priory Corner aren’t paved with gold, but our neighbors act as though they should be.
Like everyone else in town, they put up posters in their windows and stickers on their cars after we disappeared. There were candlelight vigils and special masses at St. Mark’s and prayers at school. So many prayers, I wonder how God missed hearing any of them.
You’re probably wondering how I know this stuff about the police search and the vigil. During those first few weeks George let us watch TV and read the newspapers. We were chained up in an attic room with sloping ceilings and a skylight that was stained with birdshit. The room was airless and hot beneath the tiles, but still much nicer than this place. There was a proper bed and an old TV with a coat hanger aerial and a blizzard of static on most channels.
On the third day, I saw Mum and Dad on the screen, looking like rabbits caught in a high beam. Mum wore her black pencil dress by Alexander McQueen and a dark pair of half-pumps. Tash knew the brand. I’m not very good with designer clothes. Mum was clutching a photograph. She’d found her voice and they couldn’t stop her talking.
She listed all the clothes I might have been wearing, as though I might have dropped them like breadcrumbs, leaving a trail for people to follow. Then she paused and stared at the TV cameras. A tear hovered halfway down her cheek and everyone waited for it to fall, not listening to what she said.
Mr. and Mrs. McBain were also at the news conference. Mrs. McBain hadn’t bothered about make-up… or sleeping. She had bags under her eyes and was wearing a T-shirt and an old pair of jeans.
“Like something the cat dragged in,” said Tash.
“She’s worried about you.”
“She always looks like that.”
My dad took a shaky breath, but the words came out clearly.
“Somebody out there must have seen Piper and Tash. Maybe you’re not sure or you’re protecting someone. Please think again and call the police. You can’t imagine what Piper means to us. We’re a strong family and we don’t survive well apart.”
He looked directly into the cameras. “If you took our babies, please just bring them home. Drop them off at the end of the road or leave them somewhere. They can catch a bus or a train. Let them walk away.”
Then he spoke to Tash and me.
“Piper, if you and Tash are watching. We’re coming to find you. Just hold on. We’re coming.”
Mum had panda eyes from her mascara running but still looked like a film star. Nobody poses for a photograph like she does.
“Whoever you are—we forgive you. Just send Piper and Tash home.”
My sister Phoebe was put in front of the cameras wearing her prettiest dress, standing pigeon-toed, sucking on her fingers. Mum had to prompt her.
“Come home, Piper,” she said. “We all miss you.”
Tash’s father had his arms crossed through the whole circus. He didn’t say a word until at the very end when a reporter asked, “Haven’t you got anything to say, Mr. McBain?”
He gave the reporter a death stare and unfolded his arms. Then he said, “If you still have them, let them go. If they’re dead, tell somebody where you left them.”
He folded his arms again. That was it. Two sentences.
Something tore inside Tash’s mum and she made this small, frightened animal sound, like a kitten squeaking in a box.
There were rumors about Mr. McBain after that. People asked, “Where was his emotion? Why did he suggest they were dead?”
Apparently, you’re supposed to quiver and blubber at news conferences. It’s like some unwritten law, otherwise people will think you’ve raped and murdered your daughter and her best friend.
At the end of the questions, my mother held up a photograph of Tash and me. It’s the picture that became famous, the one everyone remembers, taken by Mr. Quirk, our school photographer (he of the wandering hands and minty breath, notorious for straightening collars, brushing skirts and feeling boobs).
In the photograph Tash and I are sitting together in the front row of our class. Tash’s skirt is so short she has to keep her knees together and her hands on her lap to avoid flashing the camera. Flashing the flash, so to speak. I’m next to her with a mop of hair and a fake smile that would make Victoria Beckham proud.
That’s the photograph everybody remembers: two girls in school uniform, Piper and Tash, the Bingham Girls.
No matter what channel you switched on, you could see us, or hear our parents pleading for information. Millions of words were written in the newspapers, page after page about new developments, which weren’t really new and added up to nothing.
At the candlelight vigil Reverend Trevor led the prayers while his wife Felicity led the gossiping. She’s like a human megaphone with a huge arse and reminds me of those dippy birds that rock back and forth, putting their beaks into a glass.
She and the reverend have a son called Damian who should have a cross carved in his forehead because he belongs to the dark side. The little shit likes to creep up behind girls and flick their bra straps. He never did it to me because I’m quicker than he is and I once shoved his asthma inhaler up his nose.
There was standing room only at St. Mark’s for the vigil. They had to put loud speakers outside so people could hear the prayers and the hymns. The only thing missing were the children. Parents were so terrified of more kidnappings that they kept their little ones at home behind locked doors, safely tucked away.
That was the weekend that the grief tourists began arriving. People drove from Oxford and beyond, circling the streets. They went to the church and stared at our school and at The Old Vicarage.
They watched the reporters talking breathlessly to cameras, making nothing into something, picking the scabs off past tragedies, tossing out names like Holly Wells, Jessica Chapman and Sarah Payne, filling a few more hours with rumor and speculation.
Afterwards the tourists drove away looking slightly disappointed. They wanted Bingham to be more sinister, a place where teenagers disappeared and didn’t come home.
I
t’s freezing outside—minus twenty-six degrees in places—extraordinary for this time of year. I felt like Scott of Antarctica when I walked to work this morning across Hyde Park—O’Loughlin of the Serpentine, battling the extremes—although I looked more like a bloated contestant on
Dancing on Ice
.
The snow began falling four days ago, big wet flakes that melted, refroze and were covered again, stupefying traffic and silencing roads. There aren’t enough snowplows to clear motorways or council trucks to grit the streets. More grit has been needed, literally and figuratively.
Airports have been shut. Flights grounded. Vehicles abandoned. Tens of thousands of people are stranded at terminals and motorway service stations, which look like refugee camps full of the displaced and dispossessed, huddling beneath thermal blankets in a sea of silver foil.
According to the TV weather reports, a dense block of cold air is sitting over Greenland and Iceland, blocking the jet stream from the Atlantic. At the same time winds from the Arctic and Siberia have “turbo-charged” the cold because of something called an Arctic Oscillation.
Normally, I don’t mind the snow. It can hide a lot of sins. London looks beautiful under laundered sheets, like a city from a fairy tale or a sound studio. But today I need the trains to be running on time. Charlie is coming up to London and we’re going to spend four days together in Oxford. This is a father–daughter bonding weekend although she would probably call it something else.
A boy is involved. His name is Jacob.
“Couldn’t you find an Edward?” I asked Charlie. She gave me a look—the one she learned from her mother.
I don’t know much about Jacob other than his brand of underwear, which he advertises below his arse crack. He could be very nice. He may have a vocabulary. I
do
know that he’s five years older than Charlie, and that they were caught together in her bedroom with the door closed. Kissing, they said, although Charlie’s blouse was unbuttoned.
“You have to talk to her,” Julianne told me, “but do it gently. We don’t want to give her a complex.”
“What sort of complex could we give her?” I asked.
“We could turn her off sex.”
“That sounds like a bonus.”
Julianne didn’t find this funny. She has visions of Charlie succumbing to low self-esteem, which apparently is the first step on the slippery slope to eating disorders, rotten teeth, a bad complexion, tumbling grades, drug addiction and prostitution. I’m exaggerating of course, but at least Julianne turns to me for advice.
We’re estranged, not divorced. The subject is raised occasionally (never by me) but we haven’t got round to signing the papers. In the meantime, we share the raising of two daughters, one of them a bright, enchanting seven-year-old, the other a teenager with a smart mouth and a dozen different moods.
I moved back to London eight months ago. Sadly, I don’t see as much of the girls, which is a shame. I have almost come full circle—establishing a new clinical practice and living in north London. This is how it used to be five years ago when Julianne and I had a house on the border of Camden Town and Primrose Hill. In the summer, when the windows were open, we could hear the sound of lions and hyenas at London Zoo. It was like being on safari without the minivans.
Now I live in a one-bedroom flat that reminds me of something I had when I was at college—cheap, transitory, full of mismatched furniture and a fridge stocked with Indian pickles and chutneys.
I try not to dwell on the past. I touch it only gingerly with the barest tips of my thoughts, as though it were a worrying lump in my testis, probably benign, but lethal until proven otherwise.
I am practicing again. There is a bronze plaque on the door saying
JOSEPH O’LOUGHLIN, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST
, with various letters after my name. Most of my referrals are from the Crown Prosecution Service, although I work two days a week for the NHS.
So far today I have seen a cross-dressing car salesman, an obsessive-compulsive florist and a nightclub bouncer with anger management issues. None of them are particularly dangerous, simply struggling to cope.
My secretary, Bronwyn, knocks on the door. She’s an agency temp who chews gum faster than she types.
“Your two-o’clock is here,” she says. “I was wondering if I could leave early today?”
“You left early yesterday.”
“Yes.”
She departs without further discussion.
Mandy enters, aged twenty-nine, blonde and overweight, with terrible skin and eyes that should belong to an older woman. She has been sent to see me because her two children were found alone in a locked flat in Hackney. Mandy had gone clubbing with her boyfriend and slept over at his place. She told police that she felt her daughter, aged six, was old enough to look after her younger brother, four. Both children are fine, by the way. A neighbor found them fluttering like chickens over the biscuit crumbs and feces that dotted the carpet.
Mandy looks at me accusingly now, as though I’m personally responsible for her children being taken into care. For the next fifty minutes we discuss her history and I listen to her excuses. We agree to meet next week and I write up my notes.
It’s just after three. Charlie’s train arrives in half an hour and I’m going to meet her at the station. I don’t know what we’ll do in Oxford on the weekend. I’m due to talk at a mental health symposium, although I can’t imagine anyone showing up, given the weather, but the tickets have been sent (first class) and they’ve booked me into a nice hotel.
Packing my briefcase, I take my overnight bag from the cupboard and lock up the office. Bronwyn has already gone, leaving a hint of her perfume and a lump of chewing gum stuck to her mug.
At Paddington Station I look for Charlie among crowds of passengers spilling from the carriages of the First Great Western service. She’s among the last off the train. She’s talking to a boy who is pushing a mountain bike with all the nonchalance of a Ferrari driver. He’s wearing a duffel coat and is cultivating sideburns.
The boy rides away. Charlie restores a set of white earbuds to her ears. She’s wearing jeans, a baggy sweater and an overcoat left over from the German Luftwaffe.