Finding sophie, p.8
Finding Sophie, page 8
Then I notice something.
At the bottom, there is a space where the wall meets the skirting board. The plaster has come away to create a gap of about half an inch. Some stray wallpaper has tucked itself in there and I stoop to pull it clear. But there are other things there.
Hidden things.
I reach for whatever it is with my fingertips and pull until it scrapes free. It’s a wad of folded paper. There’s another wedge of paper. I pick that free too and open them both out on the bed. The thinner package is made up of a sheet of spiral-notebook paper. I unfold it to reveal a pen-and-ink drawing of a butterfly. It reminds me a little of her pendant. It is beautifully done in purple and indigo, but however beautiful, it can’t distract me from what it was hiding. Dozens of small off-white pills. I quickly pick up the other packet. It’s an envelope. Inside are cash and a slip of paper containing numbers and initials.
It’s a lot of money. Much more money than she should have.
The world judders around me. What the hell was Sophie involved in?
I spread the money out, and then using only the tips of my fingers, I smooth out the paper with the numbers and initials. Next to it I empty the pills from the butterfly page and count them. Twenty-one pills. I take several pictures on my phone. This is what Holly meant when she was talking about the chain of evidence, I think. I want to make sure I have continuity before I call her.
Her phone rings three times before I end it. I can’t tell her about this. It would make Sophie just another young person who went off the rails rather than the person I know she is. An innocent girl who has been taken by someone somewhere and who is relying on us to find her. Expects us to find her.
It really changes nothing. Sophie is still who she is. They’re probably not hers. They’re just things she’s guarding for someone else. That was just her nature. Once, we were doing a spring-clean; Sophie would have been eleven. Harry tipped up her mattress to flip it and there, as bold as an Egyptian artifact, was a small gold box of cigarettes.
When we looked at her for an answer she didn’t miss a beat. “They’re not mine. They’re Ophelia’s. You know what her parents are like.”
We did. They were like us. Harry and I exchanged a quick look. When she lied she usually gave herself away. I remember cycling through the possibilities. She never smelled of smoke. I did her laundry and always smelled her clothes to check them to see what had been worn. There was never cigarette smoke.
“But why you?” I’d asked her, worried that she was being bullied into it.
She’d shrugged. “Because she trusts me.”
* * *
—
I scoop everything into my hand and then into my pocket—the paper, the money, and the pills. I’ll deal with it later. I just want some time to process.
In the kitchen I go through the breakfast ritual. Harry comes in as I’m walking my coffee to the garden. The rain last night has given everything an electric glow. The blossoms shimmer, invigorated. The grass shoots out, alive. And everywhere is the scent of a garden after a monsoon. I sip my coffee slowly. What was Sophie up to?
Harry waves at me through the door glass, halfheartedly, as he assembles his breakfast. When he joins me, I see from his eyes that if he slept, it wasn’t well. He crouches next to me and tugs up a handful of bergamot leaves from a pot, releasing their scent.
“So, there’s still Herman at number 210 to be followed up. And the boyfriend.” He pauses as if weighing them up. “I still like Herman for it. There’s something weird about him. It’s not normal living like that. In hiding.”
The secret from Sophie’s room begins to burn inside my pocket. I want him to slow down so I can tell him about it. But he’s too wired for it right now. Later.
“I’ve never seen him out. Or if I have, I didn’t know it was him,” I say.
He stands and wipes his hands on his jeans. “I think I saw him at his door once. Or the back of him. He was sneaking into his own house. Seemed paranoid about anyone getting even a glimpse.”
Then, like an omen, my phone rings and the name DS Holly flashes up.
“Put it on speaker,” he says, and leans across and does it for me. Holly’s voice comes through clearly.
“Zara, Holly.”
“Hi, DS Holly,” I say, with the phone flat on my palm. I wait.
“Just Holly is fine. You called me,” she says. Harry stares at me.
“Oh, just for any news,” I lie. “Did you speak to anyone at the Pig?”
There is a hiss on the line and then her voice again loud and clear. “I’ve already told you that I’d keep you updated as and when there was any news.” She sighs. “Every time you call, it takes me away from the investigation.”
Harry takes the phone. “Hi, Holly. It’s Harry. Did you speak to the pub guy—Andy?”
“I did. There’s only one candidate who was working there at the relevant time. And he was part-time.”
“And?”
“And it can’t be him.”
“Why not?” he asks.
“Because he has year-old twins. He hasn’t got time to wash his face, let alone kidnap someone. He had to quit his job because he couldn’t cope with the hours.”
Harry takes my phone with him and walks around in circles with it, his brow creased. “And what about Herman? Did you look at the tape? It’s him, isn’t it? Has the lab been able to find more footage on the tape?”
She starts to speak, and I have to follow Harry as he paces to catch what she’s saying.
“No. Look, the lab can’t work that fast, and honestly, I’ve told them to put it on ice for now.”
“What? Why?”
“I’ve told you why. We wouldn’t be able to do anything even if it came back. It’s contaminated. And we haven’t got unlimited resources here.”
“Can we pay for our own? I mean, our own expert.”
A breeze blows a spray of last night’s rain from the apple tree down my neck. I shiver.
“No. No. Don’t do that. There’s no point. And listen, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but he’s reported a break-in to his property. Fences broken. He said whoever it was attacked his dog. CID have been round to take a statement from him.”
“Shit,” Harry says.
“He has no idea who it was, but a running shoe was left behind by the suspect.”
“Shit,” Harry says again.
“Exactly. And if you start pushing this the wrong way, it’s going to bite us all in the arse.”
Harry throws his head to the sky in frustration. “So then, where are we? Have you got any more leads at all? Or are you closing the book?”
“Of course we aren’t closing the investigation. But I’d be lying if I told you that there was a line of investigation that we haven’t followed up. We’ve done everything we can. And now—”
“What?”
“We wait. Hope something turns up. Hope there’s a sighting.”
Harry holds out the phone to me, killing the call as he does. I go to take it but he doesn’t let go.
“What?”
“What did you call her about? She was returning your call.”
I can’t tell him yet. His memory of her is all he has to propel him onward. And I need him to keep going. “I was calling for an update. As I said to Holly.”
He lets go of the phone. “I know you’re lying to me, Zara.”
Twenty-Six
Harry
When the doorbell rings after 9p.m., I become immediately apprehensive. But it’s just an Amazon delivery. It’s a camera drone. I smuggle it upstairs before Zara can see it. I skim the instructions and assemble the parts and then put it on to charge. By morning it will be fully charged.
Flipping through the manual, I see there are a million things to learn before I can safely use this machine. Setting pathways, correcting navigational drift, and not least of all, how to fly the damn thing without crashing it.
I need to do a few practice flights. Tomorrow morning.
I pull on a light sweater and head out. The air is still cool from the showers last night. As I step onto the pavement my feet seem to realize where I’m heading before my head does. I stop at number 210 and after hammering on the high gate with my fists, I head toward the Pig. The way Holly is dealing with this case makes my muscles burn with frustration. She’s already drawn blinds over it, despite what she is telling us.
In this light the slick road takes on hues of purple and blue. I walk into the pub and into a tide of warm air and stale alcohol. There is music playing but there’s so much chatter and life for it to fight through that it gets lost in places.
I order an IPA at the bar and scan the room for Andy as I wait for it to be pulled. The young woman serving pushes it over to me, carelessly, and takes my card. She can’t be much more than eighteen, S—’s age. Her hair is pink. Her body is a sapling.
“You’re the guy whose daughter went missing?” she says when she swipes the card. She is trying to keep her voice casual but it is strung taut.
I nod. I had left flyers here. In the early days of her going missing, I think I spoke to a girl serving and showed her the picture. But I can’t be sure now looking at her whether it’s the same one. If she’d had pink hair I think I’d remember.
She hands my card back but she lingers. She leans forward as if to say something but stops when one of the other bar staff calls out her name.
“Lola—can you go and change the barrel?”
She sighs and releases my card.
I walk away wondering whether she was about to say something. It was too gossamer to ask her about directly.
The first third of the pint pours down like silk on glass. And then the alcohol awakens my senses like a memory. My body recognizes this feeling and I have to treat it with care or I could sink.
Out of one eye I see Andy, the manager, on a small stepladder hanging or straightening some pictures. I take my pint and wade over to him. At the foot of the ladder I stare up at him and wait. When he comes down he almost walks into me.
“Sorry, didn’t see you there.”
“Can we talk?” I say. “Maybe outside.”
He narrows his eyes in question. “Do I know you?”
“You do, as it happens. Won’t take long.”
His eyes do a sweep. He’s been a barman long enough to know that in my sweater and clearly on my first pint, I’m no more of a threat than your average schoolteacher.
“Lola, just watch the till a second. I’ll be outside.”
Lola looks up from behind the bar and waves a hand at him.
I lead the way, and when I leave the warmth and clamor of the pub for the street, the sudden change discomposes me. A second ago, everything was dreamlike and now in this wet air, the mundanity is sobering.
“So?”
“My daughter came for a job here, six months ago,” I say, balancing my glass on a window ledge.
“Okay,” he says, and though his face betrays nothing, he stands, hands on hips, ready.
“We met you. All of us, I mean. Me, my daughter, my wife. Sat in that corner over there. And we met you.” He takes a step back and takes another look at me.
“It’s your daughter that went missing.”
“I know,” I say.
He drags a hand down his face. “I was sorry to hear about it. Just spoke to the police. Did what I could.”
“Did you?” A car slides slowly past.
“Yes. They were asking about some lad we had working for us a while back. I gave his details.”
There is a smear of sweat prickling his forehead.
“We know she was seeing someone that worked in a pub. Police thought it might have been him.”
“Okay.”
“Only I don’t think it was a lad that she was seeing. I think it was a man. You know, an older man.”
He bristles, he can see the turn this is taking and doesn’t like it. “All right.”
“I wondered if it was you.” My heart patters as I say this. The words feel like an escaping djinn; there’s no telling what they will summon.
“Me?” he says. He hasn’t decided how to take this yet, I see. Whether to be affronted or surprised.
“You. I saw the way you looked at her. I warned you off her. I reminded you she was underage,” I say as a gust of wind blows away the volume of my words.
“Okay. I think we’re done,” he says, and turns to go, but now it’s not just the words that I can’t control. I reach across and pull him back by the elbow. “I’m not done yet.”
“Let go of my arm.”
“Were you seeing my daughter?”
“I won’t tell you again. Let go of my arm.”
“You seem to have an eye for the young ’uns. That one in there, Lola. How old is she?”
The punch catches me hard in the chest and sends me and my drink scattering onto the curb. I land heavily. There is glass all over me, swimming in beer. Blood blooms from my right hand. A shooting pain runs down my hip as I scrabble clumsily to my feet. He stares at me, waiting. I’m not sure what I thought he’d do. Admit seeing my daughter? Admit having something to do with her vanishing off the face of the bloody earth? What was I expecting?
He shakes his head and then he’s back inside the pub before I can say anything more.
I head back home with my face burning. I’ve never been hard or strong or athletic, but I’ve always imagined myself as courageous, ready if the need ever called. Having her, S—, solidified that belief. When I first held her, I was overcome with the visceral need not just to protect her but to assert my right to protect her. To invite circumstances in which I could prove that I could protect her. I wanted someone to test me. And I am ashamed that he beat me so easily—without a fight.
She was seeing someone who worked in a pub. This was the only pub she knew. I saw the look he’d given her. But if it is him, what good am I?
Outside number 210, I stop automatically. Now I’m overcome by the certainty that Herman, whether he has taken S— or not, is responsible for the twist in the fabric of the world I’m in. Somehow, he’s pulling the weave and making everything on it tumble.
Opposite, the low wall has a run of loose bricks on top jutting like teeth in a seven-year-old’s mouth. I wiggle one free, the mortar still attached to the bottom, and hurl it at the first-floor window. When it smashes, the glass makes a sound like dropped bottles. I stand there, arms wide, waiting for the lights to come on. Seconds later, the fire of a light burns. Do I hear a scream? Is that voice a girl’s? I wait, straining my ears. A shape emerges in the window behind the dirty net.
I wait for the net curtain to part but it doesn’t. He sees me though I can’t see him. I beckon him down, but he remains impassive behind that broken glass.
I head home, slowly. As I near, I look at my own windows and see the warmth of the light that blazes behind the glass in our bedroom. And I want to be there, in the seclusion of my bed and under the awning of my—complete—family, but none of that is real any longer. It was ripped away when they ripped S— away and along with her, all of time and space.
The walls that Katya spoke about—are they those high walls of Herman’s? She comes now unbidden into my mind. Just being with her made me feel as though S— was out there somewhere just waiting to be reached by her. Katya makes me believe that I can find her. When I was there with her, I felt a spike of hope. She didn’t deserve to incite that hope in me. It’s all hocus-pocus. I have to keep reminding myself of that. There’s no magic that can find my daughter. None.
Twenty-Seven
Zara
I take the pills out and look at them. They are off-white and have a star stamped in the middle. Apart from that there’s no way of telling what they are from the pill itself. But I remember that at the school, the deputy head arranged for a drug expert from the Metropolitan Police to come in to teach the parents about drug use and what to look out for. Most of what was said back then has misted away. But a few wisps from the talk still linger. Illicit pills are often homemade and discolored. They sometimes have logos, just like these.
“Look out for ‘tick lists,’ ” the drug expert had said. “Lists showing customers and amounts they owe.”
I remember thinking that that felt outdated. “Isn’t it all on phones and computers now?” someone asked.
No, we were told, paper was the usual choice now. Dealers knew they couldn’t get rid of digital information as easily as paper.
I google “pills with star logo.” Google thinks it’s MDMA. Ecstasy. A class A drug. From what I can find online, if Sophie is caught with it, she’s looking at prison—three years or more. I drop them into the toilet and flush them. They cling stubbornly to the bottom of the pan so I pour toilet cleaner over them and make the water so cloudy you can’t see what’s under the surface.
I keep the butterfly drawn in her own hand. It will not be the last thing she ever draws, I know that. But it has the character of a relic in the same way that her room has become a reliquary. I smooth it out and take it to her room, where I place it carefully between the leaves of a book.
Then I sit on her bed and count the money. There’s £820. Way too much for Sophie to have in cash. Way too much for any teenager. The slip of paper looks like a tick list with initials down one side and figures on the other. She has totaled the sums and at the bottom in red pen has written:
£1960 short!!
Although it is a lot, it doesn’t feel like enough to steal someone for. Hurt them, perhaps, but not vanish them. Even if you added the £820, the total is still under three thousand pounds. But I don’t know enough about this world. Maybe that is enough to cause you serious trouble.
