They had come in then, both of them, Mr Shepherd pacing back and forth restlessly. I had met him in November at my first round of parent-teacher meetings, when he had
been
loudly cheerful, cracking jokes that made his pretty, glamorous wife roll her eyes good-naturedly. Jenny had Mrs Shepherd’s fine-boned build and long-lashed eyes, but she’d inherited her father’s smile. Today that smile had not been in evidence in my classroom, his anxiety vibrating in the air around him, lines scoring his forehead above dark, intense eyes. He towered over me, but his physical strength was undermined by his evident distress. He fetched up by one of the windows and leaned against the sill as if his legs wouldn’t support him any longer, looking at us hopelessly, hands dangling by his sides, waiting.
‘I suppose I should fill you in, Sarah, so you know what’s going on. Mr Shepherd came to see me this morning to ask for our help in finding his daughter, Jennifer. She went out over the weekend – on Saturday, wasn’t it?’
Shepherd nodded. ‘Saturday evening. Around six.’
I tallied it up and bit my lip. Saturday evening, and it was now nearly midday on Monday. Almost two days. Not long – or a lifetime too long, depending on your perspective.
‘He and Mrs Shepherd waited, but there was no sign of her by nightfall, and no answer from her mobile phone. They went out looking for her along the route they thought she had taken, but didn’t find any sign of her. On their return, Mrs Shepherd called the police, but they weren’t particularly helpful.’
‘They said she’d come back in her own time.’ His voice was low, gravelly, filled with pain. ‘They said that girls that age don’t have any idea of time. They told us to keep calling her mobile, and if she didn’t pick up, to call all of her
friends
and ask their parents if they’d seen her. They said that she’d have to be missing for longer before they would do anything. They said a kid goes missing in the UK every five minutes – can you believe that? – and they can’t commit resources until they’re concerned the child is at risk. They said a twelve-year-old wasn’t particularly vulnerable, that she’d probably turn up and say sorry for worrying us. As if she’d go out and not come back and not tell us where she was if everything was OK. They didn’t know my daughter.’ He looked at me. ‘You know her, don’t you? You know she’d never just go off without telling us.’
‘I can’t imagine that she’d do that,’ I said carefully, thinking of what I knew of Jenny Shepherd. Twelve years old, pretty, academically diligent, always ready with a smile. There was no hint of rebellion in her, none of the anger that I saw in some of the older girls, who seemed to take vindictive pleasure in worrying their parents. My throat had closed up with worry for her, with the dreadful familiarity of what he was saying –
two days missing
– and I had to clear it to speak. ‘Did you manage to convince them to take it seriously?’
He laughed, without humour. ‘Oh yes. They took me seriously once the dog turned up.’
‘The dog?’
‘She was out walking the dog on Saturday evening. She has a little Westie – a West Highland terrier – and it’s one of her jobs to walk him twice a day, unless there’s a very good reason why she can’t. That was one of the conditions she had to agree to before we got the dog. She had to take responsibility for it.’ He sagged against the windowsill,
suddenly
stricken. ‘And she did. She’s so good with that animal. She never minds going out in bad weather or early in the morning. Totally devoted. So I knew, as soon as I saw the bloody dog, I knew that something had happened to her.’ He choked a little, blinking away tears. ‘I should never have let her go out on her own, but I thought she was safe …’
He buried his face in his hands and Elaine and I waited for him to recover his composure, not wanting to intrude on his private grief. I didn’t know what Elaine was thinking, but I found it pretty unbearable. After a moment, the bell for the end of class cut through the silent room and he jumped, brought back to himself.
‘So the dog just turned up at your house?’ I prompted once the bell had vibrated itself to silence.
He looked baffled for a second. ‘Oh – yes. It was around eleven o’clock. We opened the door and there he was.’
‘Did he still have his lead on?’ I could tell that both of them thought I had taken leave of my senses, but I wanted to know if Jenny had let the dog off the lead and then lost sight of it. She might have stayed out late looking for it, and could have had an accident. On the other hand, she might have lost hold of the lead – perhaps if someone had made her let go of it. No dog lover would choose to let a dog run around unsupervised with a trailing lead; it would be too easy for it to get tangled up in something and hurt itself.
‘I don’t remember,’ he said eventually, rubbing his forehead in bewilderment.
Elaine took over the story. ‘Michael – Mr Shepherd
–
went to the police station in person and asked them to investigate, and they finally got started on filling out the correct forms around midnight.’
‘By which time she’d been gone for six hours,’ Shepherd interjected.
‘That’s ridiculous. Don’t they know how important it is to find missing children quickly?’ I couldn’t believe they had been so slow; I couldn’t believe they had waited to take his statement. ‘The first twenty-four hours are critical, absolutely key, and they threw away a quarter of them.’
‘I didn’t realise you were so knowledgeable, Sarah,’ Elaine said, smiling thinly, and I read the expression on her face all too easily.
Shut up and listen, you stupid girl
.
‘The police helicopter went up around two,’ Michael Shepherd went on. ‘They used their infrared camera to search the woods where she usually walked Archie. They said she’d glow, even in undergrowth, from her body heat, and they’d see her. But they didn’t find anything.’
So either she wasn’t there or her body was no longer emitting heat. You didn’t have to be an expert to work out where this was going.
‘They keep saying it takes time to trace a runaway. I told them, she’s not a runaway. When they didn’t find her in the woods, they started looking at CCTV from the stations around here, to see if she went to London. She wouldn’t do that; she found it scary, any time we went there with her. She wouldn’t let go of my hand the whole time when we went Christmas shopping last year. The crowds were so dense, and she was afraid she’d get lost.’
He
looked from me to Elaine and back again, helplessly. ‘She’s out there somewhere and they haven’t found her, and she’s all alone.’
My heart twisted with sympathy for him and his wife and for what they were going through, but my mind was still turning over what he had said and there was a question I had to ask. ‘Why hasn’t there been an appeal? Shouldn’t they be asking people if they’ve seen her?’
‘They wanted to wait. They told us that it was best to have a look themselves first, before they had to deal with false sightings and members of the public starting their own search, getting in the way. We wanted to go out looking ourselves, but they told us to wait at home in case she came back. At this stage, I just don’t think she’s going to walk through the door under her own steam.’ He ran his hands through his hair, digging his fingers into his scalp. ‘Yesterday, they searched along the river, by the railway line near our house, the reservoir up near the A3 and the woods, and they still haven’t found her.’
I wondered if he could miss the awful significance of the places they were focusing on. Whatever her parents thought, the police seemed to have made up their minds that what they were searching for was a body.
Without noticing, I’d reached the edge of the woods. I put on a turn of speed and slipped in between two oaks, following a sketchy path that forked almost immediately. On the right side, I saw a chocolate-brown Labrador barrelling towards me, towing a slender, elderly woman in pristine slacks and full make-up. It didn’t look like the
kind
of dog that spooked easily, but even so, I turned to the left path, running away from where people might be. The path I took looked more challenging. It led towards the middle of the woods, where the tracks were narrow and steep and tended to peter out unexpectedly in a welter of brambles and unkempt bushes. The paths nearer the road were the dog walkers’ favourites, well worn and wide. A wide, even path wouldn’t distract me from the dark beat of tension that had been thudding monotonously in my head all day with heavy, unforgiving force. I headed uphill, thinking about Jenny’s father.
The quiet of the classroom was disturbed again, this time by scuffling outside the door, footsteps clattering up the corridor, and voices. Jenny’s classmates, 8A. There was a ripple of laughter and Michael Shepherd flinched.
I let them in, telling them to hurry to their seats. Their eyes were round with curiosity at the sight of the head teacher and a parent; this was far better than discussing
Jane Eyre
. Michael Shepherd squared his shoulders as if preparing for a round in the boxing ring and faced his daughter’s contemporaries. The role of victim didn’t suit him. The desire to do something had driven him to the school. He wouldn’t wait around for the police; he would do what he thought was right and deal with the consequences later.
Once they were all waiting in their places, silently attentive, Elaine began to speak.
‘Some of you will know Mr Shepherd, I’m sure, but for those of you who don’t, this is Jennifer’s father. I want you
all
to listen very carefully to what he has to say. If you can help him in any way, I am sure you will do so.’
Rows of heads nodded obediently. Michael Shepherd moved to stand beside Elaine at her invitation. He looked around the room, seeming slightly confused.
‘You all look so different in your uniforms,’ he said eventually. ‘I know I’ve met some of you before, but I can’t quite …’
A ripple of amusement went through the class, and I hid a smile. I’d had the same experience myself in reverse, seeing some of my students in town at the weekend. They looked so much older and more sophisticated out of uniform. It was unsettling.
He had spotted a couple of girls he recognised. ‘Hi, Anna. Rachel.’
They blushed and mumbled hello, simultaneously delighted and appalled to be singled out.
‘I know this is going to sound silly,’ he began, trying to smile, ‘but we’ve lost our daughter. We haven’t seen her for a couple of days now, and I was wondering if any of you had heard from her or if you had any idea where she is.’ He waited for a beat, but no one said anything. ‘I know it’s a lot to ask – I do understand that Jenny may have her own reasons for not coming home. But her mother is very worried, as am I, and we just want to know that she’s OK. If you haven’t seen her, I’d like to know whether anyone has spoken to her or had any contact with her since Saturday evening – a text or an email or whatever.’
There was a muted chorus of ‘no’ from around the room.
‘OK, well, I’d like to ask you to check when you last
heard
from Jenny, and what she said. Does anyone know if she had any plans to go somewhere over the weekend? She won’t get in trouble – we just need to know that she’s safe.’
The girls stared at him in silence. He had earned their sympathy, but no useful response. Elaine stepped in.
‘I want you all to think very carefully about what Mr Shepherd has asked you, and if you remember anything – anything at all – that you think we should know, I’d like you to tell us. You can talk to me in complete confidence, or Miss Finch, or you can ask your parents to call me if you feel more comfortable talking to them.’ Her face darkened. ‘I know you are all too sensible to keep quiet because of some misplaced sense of loyalty to Jennifer.’ She turned to me. ‘Miss Finch, we’ll leave you to get on with your class.’
I could tell that Michael Shepherd was unhappy about leaving the classroom without finding out anything from his daughter’s classmates, though he had little choice but to follow Elaine as she swept out. He nodded to me as he went, and I smiled, trying to think of something to say, but he was gone before anything remotely suitable occurred to me. He walked with his head down, like a bull being led into an abattoir, all that power and determination draining away, leaving only despair.
In the woods, the traffic noise fell away as if a soundproof curtain had dropped behind me. The birds sang and a breeze sighed through the treetops with a sound like rushing water. The rhythmic thud of my feet on the dark, firm
ground
punctuated the rasping of my breath and every now and then a singing note was the whiplash of a thin, reaching branch that had snagged on my sleeve for an instant. Tall, ancient trees with knotted trunks spread a canopy of bitingly green new leaves overhead. The sunlight slid through their shade in slanting beams and pinpricks of light, dizzying brilliance that glanced off a surface and was gone the next instant. I felt, briefly, almost happy.
I kicked myself up a long, steep hill, toes digging for purchase in the leaf mould, my heart thumping as my muscles burned. The ground was as dark and rich as chocolate cake; it had just enough give in it. I had run on iron-hard, ankle-killing parched earth the previous summer, and slithered through slick mud on icy days midwinter, black splashes streaking up the backs of my legs like tar. These conditions were perfect. No excuses. I fought all the way to the top, to the pay-off downhill slope on the other side, and it felt as if I was flying.
After a while, of course, the euphoria wore off. My legs started to complain at the exertion, my thigh muscles aching. I could run through that sort of niggling discomfort, but my knees were also protesting and that was more serious. I winced as a careless step on the uneven surface jarred my left knee, sending a jolt of pain up the outside of my thigh. Checking my watch, I was surprised to see that half an hour had slid by since I left the house; I had done about three and a half miles. It was far enough to count as a decent run by the time I got home.
I made a wide loop and doubled back on myself, running parallel to the route I’d taken on the way out. There was
something
disheartening about running over the same ground on the way back; I hated to do it. The new route took me along a spine of higher ground that ran between two steep-sided depressions. The surface here was crumbly and knotted with roots. I slowed right down, wary of twisting an ankle, eyes glued to the ground in front of me. Even so, I came to grief, skidding on a smooth root that angled sharply downwards. With a muffled squawk I pitched forward, hands outstretched, and ended up sprawling in the dirt. I stayed in that position for a second, my breath rasping, the woods around me suddenly hushed. Slowly, painfully, I peeled my hands off the ground and sat back on my heels to inspect the damage. No broken bones, no blood.
Good
. I brushed the worst of the dirt off my hands and knees. Bruises, maybe a slight graze on the heel of my right hand. Nothing too remarkable. I stood up, holding on to a convenient tree trunk for support, grimacing as I stretched out my legs, glad that no one had seen me fall. I bent forward and stretched out my hamstrings, then walked around in a tight circle, gathering the motivation to carry on. I was about to set off again when I stopped, frowning. Something nagged at me, something strange that I’d half seen out of the corner of my eye, something out of context. Even then, it didn’t occur to me to worry, even though I’d been thinking of the missing girl all day.