Little Sister Page 9

  The room falls silent.

  “Thank you all for coming.” DCI Jacobs addresses the crowd from her position behind the table. Their arrangement reminds me of the television appeal, and I wish they had chosen a different way to sit, a less intimidating pose. She has a strong voice, though, commanding and clear. “First, let me say that a case like this, of a missing child, always has the power to provoke strong feeling in a small community like yours—feelings of fear and even anger—and those feelings can cause us all to take our eye off the ball, can distract us all from the job at hand.” She pauses, a well-timed moment to add weight to her message. “And that job is the task of finding Daisy. Agreed?”

  Around the room people nod in agreement, a few clap hands, along with an encouraging “Hear-hear!” from the far corner.

  DCI Jacobs continues. “Already this evening, a few of you have expressed frustration that the police force aren’t working fast enough—and I ask you now, each and every one of you, to please be patient, be vigilant, and let us do the job we’re trained to do.”

  I run my eyes around the edges of the room, where people are propped against walls or perch two to a chair, listening intently. She must have had an ear-bashing from some of the more militant locals before we arrived, for her to start the evening with this kind of plea.

  “You’ve had a week now, mate.” A deep male voice carries over from the back of the room. “I dunno about anyone else, but I can’t see you’ve made much progress.”

  A growing murmur of assent ripples through the audience: you can feel it, see the confrontation move through the crowd like a gently undulating spring tide.

  DCI Jacobs holds a hand up, trying to contain the sudden volley of questions that are fired at her. “We are making progress. There are a number of leads coming in as a result of the television appeal, and several new lines of inquiry have opened up to us in the past week. What we want to ask of you—Daisy’s friends and neighbors—is that you go back home from here and think really carefully about your movements on that night. It shouldn’t be too difficult, with it having been New Year’s Eve, but we also want you to think about the week or so leading up to it. Have you noticed anyone different hanging around—any strangers, anybody asking questions about the King family or taking an unusual interest in local events? Has anyone you know been behaving strangely, perhaps more stressed or upset than usual, or has anyone you know gone away lately, unexpectedly or otherwise?”

  “So you think it’s a stranger, then—not someone in the family?” This from a man in a fur-hooded parka near the front right-hand wall—a Scottish accent, I think. I’d heard that large numbers of the islanders are incomers, immigrants from the mainland, many of them looking for new lives, new hopes, new futures. Does he look like a kidnapper? I wonder. Any one of these people could be guilty of unspeakable crimes. They all look ordinary, blameless, but that doesn’t mean a thing. And then I understand that this is the way it could be for us, forever wondering—is it you, is it you, did you do it, are you a kidnapper, or worse?

  “We’re not ruling anything out,” DCI Jacobs replies. “We’re considering every possibility—so it is vital that you provide us with any information you have, no matter how small it might seem. No one will be made to feel foolish or disloyal if they come to us, and my colleague at the door there will be giving out the direct contact number you can use if you want to talk to us confidentially.”

  I turn to look back over heads to see the officer at the open double doors holding up a handful of business cards to make himself known among the gaggle of locals. It’s dark outside, and the white mist of breath lingers in the space above their heads. I notice James’s business partner, Marcus, at the edge of the group, and he nods gravely when we look in his direction, clearly trying to convey support to his friends. James returns the gesture; Emily turns back sharply, impatiently, and I wonder if she even saw him, if she even cares.

  Somewhere in the middle of the seated area, a woman stands up. I don’t know any of these people, and I wonder if Emily and James do, if they are friends or acquaintances or if they’ve never even met before. “We’ve all heard about Max Fuller. Being beaten up.” Her voice is nervy, indignant. “I heard you’d had him down at the station beforehand.”

  More murmurs, louder and more excitable this time. I’m aware of James along the row, his head lowered as more voices join in the discussion, his jaw clenched.

  “Druggie,” another angry voice adds to the growing alarm, and I recognize its owner as the woman from the fish and chips shop at the end of our road.

  Someone right behind me asks, “Why did they let him go?”

  Beside me, Chloe covers her nose and mouth with a mittened hand. I see the tears streaming into the bobbled purple wool, the taut effort of her presence, and I feel relief as James silently reaches for her hand and she allows it.

  DCI Jacobs looks annoyed. “OK! Calm down, everyone, please. Yes, I can confirm Max Fuller was taken in for questioning—along with a number of other people—and he was released, for the very good reason that we were satisfied he was not anywhere near the King household on New Year’s Eve.”

  “But he’s got a record for drugs, hasn’t he?” demands the fish and chips woman. “He got done for possession last year. Everyone knows that.”

  “We have several witnesses that prove Mr. Fuller was nowhere near Daisy’s house that night,” DCI Jacobs responds firmly. She points across the hall to a young woman with her hand in the air, waiting to ask a question. “You, at the back?”

  “What about local pedophiles?” the woman asks. Her broad Yorkshire accent lends a softness to the harsh noun. I can’t bring myself to look at Emily; I don’t want to see what this question will do to her. “There are a few of ’em living nearby—you only have to go online to find out who they are. Have you questioned them all?”

  DCI Jacobs tries to maintain her calm demeanor, but she senses the crowd gaining volume and vigor, their individual fears gathering momentum as the woman at the back puts a match to the kindling.

  “Here?” another woman calls out. “Who are they?” It’s becoming hard to distinguish the voices, as thrown sentences jostle and tangle with each other, obscuring words.

  The Scottish man in the parka again. “You’re telling me we’ve got these perverts living on our doorsteps and the police don’t think to warn us about them?”

  “And the thing I would very much like to know—” This from a young woman sitting in the front, several seats along from me, pronouncing the words carefully in a heavily accented voice. Spanish, perhaps? “Where were the parents when this child was taken?” She leans out, fixing her attention firmly on Emily. “They were out! At a party!”

  DCI Jacobs tries to bring the room into order, but it’s too late: James and Emily are on their feet, pushing through the crowded aisle toward the exit doors at the back, Chloe following close behind. I turn to look at the young woman before I leave, and she clutches her scarf to her broad neck in a briskly self-righteous motion, narrowing her eyes at me before looking away. It’s only when we get outside that I learn this woman is Marta, Emily’s ex-nanny, and by the sound of her, she’s got an axe to grind.

  * * *

  For most of our childhood, Mum was a constant presence, the archetypal stay-at-home mum, always there to greet us after school, to help us with our homework and put dinner on the table at six. I remember my friends saying how lucky we were, that we didn’t know how awful it was to have a working mum, to go home to an empty house. We were in the minority, with nearly all the other mums going out to some kind of work or other, and once the difference was pointed out to me, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Sammie would regularly come back with us after school—an unofficial arrangement—for the company (and the food, it had to be said), and over the years, she grew as close to my mum as she was to us girls. She was a tiny little thing—delicate as a fairy, Mum would say—and more often than not she would hop up and sit in the windowsill li
ke one of Mum’s Staffordshire figurines and chat with Mum while Emily and I mooched about the kitchen grazing on freshly baked biscuits.

  “Saves us having to chat to Mum,” Emily said one evening as we all headed out into the yard to top up our tans.

  Sammie told her she was horrible, and she should think herself lucky to have a lovely mum at home baking biscuits.

  “I’d rather have one like yours,” Emily said.

  “What’s ‘one like mine’?” Sammie asked, stretching out on the blanket between us and hiking up her little skirt.

  “Invisible and loaded,” Emily replied, and we all laughed, because it was so awful, so deeply insulting to both mothers in wildly different ways.

  Sammie would always head off home around half-five, before Dad got back for dinner, and often my mum would stand at the door and sigh, and say again, “Poor mite—she misses having her mother around. It’s all well and good having that lovely big house and all the trappings, but a girl needs family. Especially when she’s an only child.”

  But I wasn’t sure it sounded so awful. Sometimes I would lie on my bed and imagine how it might feel to take the bus from school, to travel along the high street, out toward our leafy suburban road, to walk the last few steps home alone with no chatter from Emily or Sammie rattling in my ears. I imagined how it would feel to arrive on the doorstep and turn the key in our front door, opening it into dimmed silence. I saw myself walking through the hallway, breaking through sunlit dust motes, and throwing myself across the sofa, where I would recline and pick out shapes and faces from the ceiling swirls above. I would tune in to the drip-drip-drip of the kitchen tap, to the chitchat of birdsong in the yard beyond, to the distant rumble of the train track several streets away. I would lie there for hours and hours and hours, and when I’d had my fill of solitude, there would be Mum and Dad and Emily in the doorway, home for supper and happy to see me. That was the fantasy, though I never told Emily; she would never be able to understand it, never see how I could wish for something so strange as a little time alone.

  At the end of our last year at primary school, Mum had to go away for several weeks in the summer holidays to care for our grandmother. Her mother was in heart failure, and it was agreed that it was no place for us girls, and so a nanny was employed to care for us at home for the month of August, while Dad was out at work. When I look back on it now, I wonder if Mum purposely chose an aging, mousy little woman for fear of her catching Dad’s eye; his eyes always twinkled a little more when a pretty woman entered the room. While she was lovely, and sweet, and a wonderful cook, Dad’s eyes never twinkled when Lizzie Glass was in the room.

  Lizzie Glass didn’t lay down too many rules for us, but as it was the summer and we wanted to be outside all day long, she merely insisted that we come home by midday for lunch and then again in the afternoon in time for tea. With Mum away, we were now eating at five with Lizzie, and Dad was eating his dinner later alone, to allow him longer at the office. Emily hated the arrangement, hated the change.

  “Why can’t we eat with Dad?” she asked Lizzie one teatime. Lizzie had cooked a fish pie, with an apple crumble for dessert. Both were delicious.

  “Your dad has lots of paperwork to catch up on at the office,” she replied in her softly lilting Scottish accent, patting Emily’s hand.

  Emily snatched it away, and Lizzie Glass did her best not to let on she was hurt.

  After a week or so, Emily started to find reasons to make us late home for lunch, dragging her heels when I tried to hurry her along, making up diversions for us before we reached our street. She’d insist on a detour to the duck pond to poke around for newts, or to the library on the corner of the high street to hang around in the children’s section until the librarians had to ask us to leave so they could shut up for half-day. I knew Emily was punishing Lizzie for being there instead of Mum, but nothing I could do would speed Emily home. Every day we were arriving later and later, until one day we didn’t get in until after two o’clock, to find Lizzie sitting at the kitchen table, the hem of her apron clutched in her papery hands, tears of frustration pricking at her eyes. I was mortified, and I moved to comfort her, but Emily snatched hold of my wrist, and I stopped where I was.

  “Girls?” Lizzie asked. She rarely showed disapproval, and even now her voice was soft and unthreatening. “Where is it you get to? I’ve been worried sick, and I don’t want to bother your father, but I’m going to have to let him know. You come in later and later every day. He would be so cross to think I’m letting you run around all over the place, and me with no idea where you are. I don’t know what to do!”

  Emily threw herself at her, wrapping her arms around her neck and saying, “We’re sorry, Lizzie. We’re sorry, sorry, sorry!” Emily held on with such affection that the little woman seemed to melt before us.

  “Oh, darling, I know you are!” Lizzie Glass cried out, and she mopped at her wet eyes and agreed not to tell our father as she set out our egg sandwich lunch and poured our milk.

  That evening, as Lizzie served up our father’s dinner, Emily beckoned me into the hall. I watched her take a twenty-pound note from our father’s wallet and push it into the pocket of Lizzie’s cardigan where it hung in the hallway. I shook my head at her, but she brought her finger to her lips with a fierce scowl and sent me into the living room to watch TV.

  We never saw Lizzie Glass again.

  12

  Emily

  There’s a dreamlike quality to Emily’s waking: the winter sun streams in behind James where he stands at the window knotting his tie. When she stirs, his attention turns toward her as he flips his collar down, fastens his cuffs. These feel like the everyday actions of normality, of before—the time before Daisy disappeared—and for a few seconds she’s filled with hope that it’s true, that this whole black episode was a figment of her imagination. The police, the interviews, the town meeting—and, she remembers with a gasp, that terrible Marta woman—all just a horrible waking dream. She tries to speak but finds her mouth slow to move, her reactions still sluggish from the sleeping pill she took before bed last night.

  “Stay in bed,” James tells her. “Jess is already downstairs, and she said she’ll get Chloe off to school.”

  “What?” Emily asks, baffled by this sudden burst of domestic activity.

  He picks up his mug of coffee and takes a sip, a cautious tone creeping into his voice. “I think it’s best if I get back to work—there’s no point in sitting around here for hours on end, just waiting for the police to call. We’re all driving each other crazy, sitting on our hands day after day, wondering and worrying.” She knows he’s still mad about the family liaison officers; he thinks not letting them stay overnight makes the family look guilty. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Emily told him, we already look guilty. The parents always look guilty.

  Emily doesn’t speak, doesn’t even blink. A few days ago she e-mailed the head teacher at the school where she works, informing her that she can’t contemplate returning to work until Daisy is found. How could James be doing exactly the opposite? Her fingers curl over the edge of the duvet, and she feels she must hang on tight for fear of falling.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Ems. I’m going out of my mind too. I feel so helpless—at least at the office I’ve got something to do, and things are starting to grind to a halt down there without my input. It is my business, after all. I can’t leave everything to Marcus; it’s not fair. He needs me back on board.” He tries to smile at her, but she sees his insincerity as the warmth fails to reach his eyes. He’s just looking for an escape, she knows.

  “Well, if Marcus needs you, you’d better go,” she replies, hating him, hating that he isn’t hurting as much as she is. Doesn’t he feel distraught? Doesn’t he feel guilty too? She feels reduced by their relative positions, he up and dressed and ready for the world, she cowering vulnerable beneath the bedcovers, puffy-eyed. “Don’t worry, James,” she says above the hammering pain in her templ
e. “You run off to work, and I’ll stay here and sit around feeling helpless for the both of us. And if Daisy happens to come home while you’re out, I’ll send you a text message.” She curls onto her side, not wanting a reply.

  And he doesn’t reply. He picks up his mug and his jacket and exits the room, leaving the door open just enough for her to hear the distant cheery tone in his voice as he puts on a positive front for Chloe and Jess downstairs. Groggily, Emily rolls onto her back and looks around at the material objects in the room, remembering the brief glow of pleasure they’d imprinted on her at the time of their purchase: the expensive Conran drapes and glass-drop lampshade she’d talked James into buying soon after they’d moved in, the wall-to-wall cupboards that had cost a fortune to have custom-built. Cupboards that contained thousands of pounds’ worth of clothes and shoes and handbags and boots, most of which had only been used once or twice but which had seemed so important to own at the time.

  She was lucky, she knew. James’s IT business generated enough income that she had never really had to work, and he never begrudged her using his money as if it were her own, never questioned how much she spent or what she spent it on. It was one of his most attractive qualities, his generosity, and she recalls his surprise when she announced she was starting a part-time job as a teaching assistant at the local school Daisy would eventually attend. Emily shakes her head, trying to get her thoughts straight. No, that was all wrong: when she took that job, there was no Daisy—she wasn’t even pregnant, she didn’t even want a baby, though she’d never said as much to James. James had said he didn’t understand why she wanted to take on more work when Chloe still needed her around, and she’d replied, Chloe’s old enough to look after herself, and he had said, But we’ll have another child before we know it and then what? By that point Emily really, really wanted the job, and before she knew what she was doing, she had said, It’s the best school in the area, and there’s a lovely nursery attached that feeds straight in, and we’d definitely get a place with me working there, so it could be perfect, couldn’t it? And James had hugged her and agreed, yes, it could be perfect, because he was so happy, so completely thrilled that for the first time she was making the same noises as him about having a baby together, and that was what he wanted more than anything. She had been able to stall for another couple of years, secretly popping her contraceptive pills, but when he started suggesting fertility treatment, she silently conceded defeat and gave him the child he longed for. Now she lies alone in their bed, her sadness and disappointment weighting her limbs like rocks, and she wonders how he would feel if he knew she had deceived him for all those years, if he knew Daisy—their beautiful, profoundly loved child—might never have been. Would that have been better? To have never loved her, never held her, never felt the pain of her loss, like a limb being wrenched from the body, the ache of it endless and raw.