I missed my old friends, their sophistication, the brightness, the cleverness of their talk. I missed our weekend trips into London, visits to shows and galleries and shops. The girls at my new school mainly came from rural backgrounds, and boarded only because their homes were too far away to travel in from every day. We had nothing in common. But I didn’t need friends anyway. And I definitely didn’t need rosy-cheeked Robyn, who, when she smiled, had actual dimples in her cheeks.
There was, of course, a point to my going all the way across the country, almost as far west as it was possible to go, to start again somewhere new. My parents had thought no one would recognize me.
But everyone knew who I was.
That was my fault. I drew attention to myself. I didn’t mean to, but I kept thinking I’d seen her. She was everywhere. She’d be in a thick pack of younger girls ahead of me in a corridor or else running, a distant figure on the other side of the sports field, or that girl leaning out of a top-floor window, waving to a friend. Every dark-haired girl made me do a double take. Once I ran after a girl and touched her on the arm, making her turn to look at me, startled at first, then perturbed. When I walked down the corridors, conversations stopped, and began again only after I’d passed. Eyes followed me. People whispered. I was given excessive praise in the boarding-house for small tasks such as making my bed, keeping my shoes polished, tidying my locker, having neat hair. The teachers were overly kind. They spoke to me as if I were a little slow and marked my work a little generously.
That I didn’t need. Fact: I didn’t need anyone’s help to know how to be the best in the class. Work was the one thing I could throw myself into. I was taking English, maths and history. Robyn, to my surprise, was taking four subjects: all the sciences and English too, just because, she said, she loved books. Sometimes she was in the English class with me, but at other times she wasn’t, because her timetable clashed with biology. Any classes she missed she made up in her own time. I’ll admit I was a little envious about that. I asked if I could start another A Level too, French perhaps, but my housemistress said no, I had enough on my plate. The problem was that they didn’t know me at that school. They had no idea what I could do.
In the evenings, Robyn would work silently at her desk, sucking on teaspoons of Marmite and, with my back to her, I would work at mine. On our first graded paper for English, “Discuss the difference between appearance and reality in King Lear,” I scored 81 percent. Robyn scored 92.
“Can I see your essay?” I asked. I wanted to know where I’d lost marks.
“Sure,” she said. She showed it to me. She’d made some good points. Really good points. Okay, I thought. Fine. I need to do better.
In the mornings, Robyn often wasn’t there when I woke up; she liked to go running before school. I would open my eyes and have the room to myself. That was the only time, ever, that I spent time on my own. I could look at the ceiling and think about Laika. Where was she? How was she? Doubt had been cast on the kidnap theory. Why kidnap a girl and then not demand money for her return? Every single TV report had mentioned Dad’s haulage firm and the fact he owned a whole bunch of London lockups, plus the photos taken of our house from a helicopter clearly showed the pool, so my family was obviously wealthy. Some of the grubbier papers postulated that she had been trafficked. Horrifying thoughts filled my head. I imagined her chained by her wrist to a metal bedstead in some grungy bedsit, half covered by filthy sheets, men in a queue by the door. And once those thoughts had sidled into my head, I couldn’t get rid of them. I would see her at the bottom of a lake, her dark eyes open to a distant wavering moon, pale limbs floating in the dark. Or else covered by leaves in a wood, beetles crawling through her skull. I imagined her swimming, strong limbs tearing through waves. I imagined her saying Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck the lot of you.
For our second English essay, “Discuss loyalty and disloyalty in King Lear,” I scored 89 percent. Robyn got 93. In our third assignment of the term, “Lear’s youngest daughter is admirable, but not entirely: discuss,” I beat Robyn’s 90 percent by a clear five marks.
No one asked me a single thing about Laika, not once. I began to wonder if the entire school had been put under instruction not to mention her to me. Either that, or no one cared. But it was better than being at home. No journalists for a start, or baggy-eyed detectives endlessly repeating the same questions, going round in circles. My father had become increasingly infuriated by them: their lack of progress, the evident lack of a successful conclusion and their focus on blatantly inconsequential details, such as the long lock of Laika’s dark hair they’d found behind the cistern in our bathroom.
She’s been snatched off the street, my father said. In what conceivable way is it relevant if there’s a bit of hair in the house? He told them they wouldn’t survive in business: things didn’t work like that when he was running the show. He didn’t like the detectives as people either, the shabby way they dressed, the sloppy way they drank their tea, the tone of their voices, the vile, loaded, intrusive nature of their questions.
She’s my daughter, for Christ’s sake, of course she’s not sexually active. She’s thirteen.
Of course she wouldn’t run away. Use your eyes.
You’re the fucking detectives. Bring her back.
Would she have gone anywhere without telling them? Never, my father said, she’s a child, she did what she was told. Did she have a boyfriend? Absolutely not, my mother said, she hadn’t even started her periods.
They interviewed me as well, always with my parents there for support, one on either side. Tell us about the morning she disappeared. I looked at my father.
“Just tell them, Willa, exactly what happened the morning she disappeared,” he said.
So I did. I told them exactly what happened the morning she disappeared. I told them how it had been the very first day of the new school year, how Laika had been late getting up, how I didn’t like to be late, not ever. Especially not on the first day of the new school year, and also because I was starting my A Levels and I was looking forward to seeing my friends, so I hadn’t waited for her. How I’d walked to school on my own.
“I know this is hard,” the policewoman said; “nobody blames you.”
That’s what my parents said too, even when the detectives found Laika’s bloody handprint on the underside of my bedroom door handle, and I had to explain how it got there. I told the truth but don’t know if they believed me, because after that crime-scene investigators went through the fabric of the entire house, fiber by fiber. They sat in my father’s study, reading through his papers, going through his receipts. They took his computer away.
Then the police asked me to walk with them the way Laika and I usually walked to school. On my own, they said, just them and me. I really didn’t want to go. I’d noticed the tricky way they spoke to my father, asking the same questions over and over from slightly different angles, like they were somehow trying to trip him up. And I get tongue-tied at the best of times.
“You’re an intelligent girl,” my father said. “You know how to handle a few direct questions. If you feel at all worried, just imagine I’m there, walking alongside. Be clear, be direct, be polite.”
He placed a large hand on my shoulder, softly reassuring. I looked him in the eyes.
“All right,” I said. “Okay.”
I went. Two officers came to the house early the next morning and we set off at exactly the same time that Laika had left. Just go the way you’d normally go, they said, do what you’d normally do, don’t change a thing. On the way they asked new questions. What was Laika like as a person? Down the road, up an unmade lane, over a stile. Would I say we were close? Through the woods that skirted the golf course, past the pond at Hole 9, through a field, up another lane, into the school. What was her relationship like with our parents? Did anything significant happen in the days leading up to her disappearance, anything out of the ordinary? Anything I could think of, no matter how small. Also, who cut our hair? Then they went back and, on their own this time, they searched with dogs in the woods, with divers in the pond. I saw it on the news.
I thought they might want to interview me again, but, as it turned out, that was it, my one chance to talk. They seemed more concerned with my father than either my mother or me.
My mother insisted the police interview the neighbors too, but all the houses had long driveways and were set far back in their own private grounds, so, with the exception of the one neighbor who’d spotted Laika talking to my parents’ builder that morning, nobody had seen a thing.
***
My mother drove all the way down from East Sussex at half-term. As a nice surprise, she said, instead of driving all the way home and then back again in a week, we were going to be driving on to Cornwall to spend the week at a spa. My mother put on a bright expression, as if this were a real treat. I did the same for her. During our first few days we sat around in soft white robes picking at salads, watching strangers as they went from treatment to treatment, glowing. My mother asked me about school. I’m not sure she heard my replies. She threw back glasses of gin and went to bed early. I badly wanted to ask her things. I wanted to discuss all the things we’d been bombarded with, all the routes of inquiry followed by the police, even the terrifying, lunatic ideas dreamed up by the tabloids. More than anything, I wanted to know whether she shared my own secret fears, the ones I didn’t even know how to voice. In the strange, clear light of the indoor pool, her face looked waxy and baffled. Unsaid words hung between us like steam.
Finally, my mother mentioned that my father was looking for a new builder, since the work on the conservatory had stopped.
“What, now?” I said. “Who cares about a sodding sunroom?”
“He seems obsessed with the thing. Says he wants it done by Christmas.” My mother sighed, then said, “I think it just gives him something else to think about. The investigation has really got under his skin. He hit the roof with the inspector last week and now they’ve impounded his vehicles.”
We were sitting on loungers at the time, by the side of the indoor pool. As for Ian Cox, she said, the builder who’d started the project, she wanted the police to interview him again, to put him under duress. He’d been forced to admit that he’d seen Laika that morning, and that he’d been speaking to her: a neighbor, Felicity Williams, had witnessed them together, talking at the end of our drive. That made him the last person to have seen her. Which was clearly significant. He had to know more. My mother kept her eyes on the water as she spoke, following the slow movement of its surface. She was angry. Angry at Cox. Even more angry at the detectives who’d interviewed him and then let him go. He knew something. They just had to get him to say so. Something was wrong about the man, and she’d known it straight off, even when she’d first met him: he was taciturn, uncommunicative. She hadn’t liked the way he’d looked at any of us; he had sly, avaricious eyes. She should have trusted her instincts, insisted on hiring someone else, no matter the cost. Someone different. Someone she liked.
“Do you honestly think it was Cox?”
My mother gave me a look of pure astonishment. “Of course it was Cox. He followed her out of the house. He’s seen talking to her, then, minutes later, he’s captured on CCTV, driving out of the road. And no sign of Laika. Not a trace. Not on that camera, not on any camera. And apparently there’s CCTV everywhere: at the golf club, at the train station, the bus station, on the high street, at the school, everywhere. The police say they’re impossible to avoid. And she didn’t appear in any of them. Not one. So Cox took her, of course he did. He bundled her into his van.”
“But the police said it couldn’t have been. He has an alibi.”
“He’s lying, Willa. Or someone is lying for him.”
“But there’s no way she would have gone with him willingly. Laika wasn’t a victim, she would have fought. And the police told us that. They said if she’d been in that van then they’d know.”
“Then they are wrong. No one can simply vanish, Willa. He would have had sheets of plastic in there or something. Knocked her out and rolled her up. It was Cox.”
