The Missing (41 page)

‘I don’t—’ Mum began, but he cut her off smoothly.

‘I want to have a word with Sarah, if that’s all right, before we go.’

The policewoman was standing at Mum’s elbow, and helped her to her feet at Vickers’ nod. I was braced for Mum to argue with them, and it was a surprise when she
meekly
followed the woman to the door. When she got there, however, she stopped, one hand on the door frame for support, or effect, or both.

‘I must thank you, Chief Inspector Vickers.’

‘No need. No need at all.’ Vickers shoved his hands in his pockets and ducked his head. ‘If you have any questions or want any reassurance, do call me. Sarah has my number. And we’ll let you know as soon as we find anything.’

Once Mum was safely installed in the kitchen behind a closed door, Vickers headed out to the front of the house and I followed.

‘He didn’t confess to Jenny’s murder, in case you didn’t guess.’

‘Why am I not surprised?’ I folded my arms tightly, hugging myself against the cold. It was starting to rain again, coin-sized drops of water falling like hammer blows around us.

‘The sex was all her idea. He went along with it because he wanted to make some money – his job doesn’t pay enough.’ Vickers’ tone was cutting. ‘He recruited abusers from his dad’s old mates. That was something they had in common, apparently – an interest in kids.’

‘I don’t think I want to hear any more,’ I said, and my teeth were starting to chatter.

‘What he told us confirmed what Paul said – he did it all for you.’

‘God …’

‘He never thought he was worthy of you, apparently. He’s got you up on quite a pedestal. So he went on living out his fantasies with young Jenny, who didn’t know any better.
He’s
immature. Inadequate. Afraid of women. Kids are easier to handle.’

‘I understand,’ I managed. ‘Thank you for explaining.’

Vickers nodded. ‘I know you’d have preferred it if I hadn’t told you, but it’s for the best. Get it out in the open. It’ll be reported, when it comes to court – you need to prepare yourself for the publicity.’

‘Will I be a witness?’ I couldn’t think of anything worse than standing in court, accusing Danny, looking him in the eye …

‘Up to the CPS and the barristers, but I can’t think why. You don’t actually have anything relevant to say, do you? Not now Danny’s confessed. It’s not as if you witnessed anything strange going on over there.’ Vickers jerked his head in the direction of number 7 as he spoke.

‘No,’ I said numbly. ‘I didn’t notice anything.’ I’d been lost in my own tragedy, blind to the new one that was unfolding across the street. I’d kept my head down, my face turned away. I’d missed all the clues.

Vickers leaned past me and called, ‘Anna!’

The kitchen door opened and his PC hurried out, looking relieved. Vickers turned and went down the path towards his car. I followed him again, drawing the cuffs of my jumper down over my hands.

‘Inspector, I just wanted to say – thank you for not saying anything about Danny and me in front of Mum.’

‘She’s a real lady, isn’t she? Dignified.’

‘She can be,’ I said, thinking of the many occasions when she had been quite the opposite. It was true, though, she hadn’t let me down in front of the police.

Vickers had turned away from me and was folding himself into his car. I went over to stand by the door.

‘Inspector … tomorrow, could I come along?’

He stopped dead. ‘To the dig, you mean? Why?’

I gave a one-shouldered shrug. ‘I just feel that someone from the family should be there.’

‘You do know that Daniel Keane is going to be there too.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll stay well away from him, I promise. I really don’t want to talk to him.’

Vickers lifted his right leg into the car and reached past me to grab the door handle. I hopped out of the way. ‘You can be very persuasive when you choose to be. But I don’t want any scenes. This is not your opportunity to get your revenge.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it. I just – I’d like to come along. To be there for Charlie.’

He sighed. ‘We do try to respect the wishes of the family on these occasions. Against my better judgement, I’ll send Blake around to collect you tomorrow morning. Be ready at 6.30.’

I beamed. ‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t thank me. And wear wellingtons, if you’ve got them. Have you heard the forecast? We’ll be needing an ark if it doesn’t let up soon.’ Shaking his head, Vickers slammed the car door. I watched him drive away, strangely glad that he had been the one to tell us about Charlie. I couldn’t tell how Mum would react once the news had sunk in, but at least she had heard it with composure, and believed it.

The rain was beginning to be more organised, gathering strength. Even so, before I went inside, I forced myself to look across the street, at number 7. The windows were dark, the curtains drawn. The house had an abandoned look, and all of the little defects I had noticed before looked worse, as if it was starting to corrupt and decay before my eyes. ‘I hope you fall down,’ I said aloud, hating it, hating what it represented. All those years of waiting. All that pain.

I still saw Danny Keane as a monster, not a victim. He’d chosen to follow in his father’s footsteps, even though he knew better than anyone else how much damage that could do. It was hard to accept that across the road, not fifty yards from my front door, there had been such a catastrophic failure of imagination, of self-awareness, of simple humanity. Knowing it had happened didn’t make it any easier to understand.

Mum was holding a glass when I got back to the sitting room, which didn’t surprise me. But the difference I had marked in her appearance was still there. She looked up when I came in.

‘Have they gone?’

I nodded.

‘Were you surprised by what he had to say?’

I didn’t really know how to answer her. Did she mean about Danny? Or that Charlie was dead? ‘I didn’t know that Derek Keane was so evil,’ I said in the end, lamely.

‘I never liked him,’ Mum said and took a long swallow from her glass. Whisky, by the looks of it. ‘I never liked Charlie playing with Danny. Your father –’ I stiffened,
ready
to leap to his defence ‘–always thought I was a snob, because the Keanes weren’t well off and Danny always looked – well, dirty. But I didn’t like Derek. He came over here, just after we moved in, and asked if I needed any jobs done around the place – you know, DIY. There were lots of things to do, actually – the house was very rundown. About as bad as it is now,’ she said with a little laugh, looking around in some surprise as if she hadn’t actually seen it for a decade or so. ‘But there was something about him. His eyes. They were … greedy. And I was on my own in the house, just with you. You were only a baby. I said no, we were fine, and I shut the door straight after that; I didn’t even say goodbye. It was rude, really. I wouldn’t have done it ordinarily. But there was something about him that frightened me.’ She sighed. ‘I’m glad to know, you know. About Charlie.’

‘It’s better to know.’ It was the first thing we’d agreed on in years.

She drained the glass and set it down. ‘I’m going to bed.’

‘I might be gone in the morning, when you get up. I’m going out – early.’

‘To where they’re going to dig?’

I spun twelve different lies around in my head, then gave up. ‘Yes.’

‘I’d do the same if I were you.’

I gaped. I was poised to give her all the reasons why I should go, all the arguments that would persuade her it was the right thing to do. Not needing them was distinctly weird.

She stood up and came over to me. With just a second’s hesitation, she put her arms around me and squeezed. ‘You’re a good daughter, Sarah,’ she whispered, then went past me and up the stairs before I could muster a response. And the good daughter sat down on the sofa and cried her heart out, for her mother, for her father, for Charlie and Jenny and all of them, all the victims, for longer than I care to admit.

The bedroom is small, overheated and full of people I don’t know, and I sit on the floor, my knees pulled up to my chest. The stereo is pumping out a bass-heavy dance track. It’s so loud that the beat vibrates in my chest. Two girls are kissing uninhibitedly in the corner, while a group of boys heckle them from the bed, half entertained, half awed. I am holding a coffee cup filled with blackcurrant vodka, as sticky as cough syrup and about as inviting.

The room is dim, lit only by a desk lamp that has been twisted to shine up the wall. I don’t know whose room this is, or how they managed to decorate it in the space of two days with cushions and posters and a rug for the floor, so that it doesn’t have the bland, institutional austerity of my own room down the corridor. People are dancing, shouting conversations, making friends. I try to decide what to do with my face, settling on a frozen half-smile. I am petrified. I am never
going
to fit in. I have made a mistake by choosing this university, this course, this hall of residence.

A tall, athletic guy pushes through the crowd and sees me. He’s a second-year student who I met earlier in the day at an induction session. To me, he seems terrifyingly grown-up and accomplished. He reaches out and grabs my hand, hauling me to my feet.

‘Come with me,’ he bawls in my ear.

‘Where to?’ I ask, but he doesn’t hear. He draws me out of the room and down the corridor to the stairwell, where there’s a little group of people. I don’t recognise most of them, but one or two are on my course. The stairwell is cool and quiet. A girl with a nose piercing and a distant expression has opened the window, and is smoking, against all regulations. She tries half-heartedly to waft the smoke out through the window with her hand, but most of it blows back, swirling around us. I would like a cigarette, I think. I would like to have something to do.

I slip the cup of vodka through the banisters onto an unoccupied step and sit down where the others have made space for me. The second-year sits beside me and puts an arm around my shoulders. I can’t remember his name. I can’t possibly ask what it is. He introduces me to everyone. They are talking about people I don’t know, about parties they went to last year and work they have to do for the following week,
while
the other first-years swap stories and ask questions. The others seem so bright, so funny. The occasional question comes my way and I answer briefly, smiling until my face hurts. Some of them are very drunk. Others are very drunk indeed. No one except me is sober, and I feel bored and boring.

I don’t know who starts it, but suddenly the conversation is all about families.

One of the boys I haven’t met before turns to look at me. ‘How about you? Any little sisters I should know about?’

Everyone laughs; he has a well-earned reputation for sleeping with visiting younger sisters, I gather.

‘Neither little sisters nor big sisters. Sorry.’

The girl by the window lights another cigarette. ‘How about brothers?’

It’s just a casual question. She doesn’t mean anything. Before I’ve even thought about it, I hear myself say: ‘No. No brothers either.’

That’s it. That’s all I have to say. No one asks any further questions. No one suspects a thing. It’s so easy to lie, so easy to be an only child, one without a past, someone to take at face value, someone to like. Just like that, I’ve left the last ten years behind. I feel something click in my mind, something that I think is freedom. It’s only later, much later, that I identify it as loss.

I WAS READY
to go long before Blake’s car drew up outside the house. I had passed another restless night, waking up finally at half past four to the sound of soft, relentless drumming on the roof. I pulled back the curtain to see the rain, hypnotised by the sheer volume of water that was swirling in the gutters and coursing down the road. The ground was already saturated; the neighbours’ lawns looked boggy and bloated. I watched for a few seconds before realising with a jolt that if the weather stayed like that, the dig might not go ahead. After all these years, where was the urgency for anyone except Mum and me? I bit my lip; I didn’t think that we could wait any longer.

It was a distinct relief to see Blake’s car when he turned up. He was better than on time: five minutes early. I had showered and dressed quietly, without disturbing Mum, pulling on an old pair of jeans that were, it transpired, too big for me, sitting low on my hips. I looked in the mirror. My stomach was concave, my ribs sketchily visible under lifeless skin. When was the last time I’d sat down and eaten a proper meal? I couldn’t recall. There was precisely no chance that I would manage a sit-down breakfast that morning; my throat closed up at the prospect of food. I found a
belt
instead, and covered the join with a long T-shirt and a hooded anorak. High fashion it wasn’t, but it would do.

Before Blake had time to turn the engine off, I ran out to the car, hood up.

‘Nice morning for it,’ he said and peered into the footwell, frowning. ‘Did you remember your boots? Those trainers won’t last long.’

‘Why is everyone obsessed with what I’m wearing on my feet?’ I waggled the plastic bag I was holding. ‘My boots are in here.’

‘Where we’re going is basically a bog at the moment. The embankment is held together with luck and a few tree roots. Give it another couple of hours of this weather and the whole thing will slide down onto the tracks.’

‘Not really,’ I said, nervous again.

He laughed. ‘Not as far as I know. But we went out and had a quick look yesterday to see what sort of equipment we’d need, and the conditions were horrible. Vickers wrecked his shoes. Poor bloke, he only has two pairs.’

I smiled, too tense to laugh. I was feeling a strange mixture of emotions – excitement and dread all jumbled together, overlaid with a sense that it was important not to get too excited, that they might not find anything, that Danny Keane might have been lying.

‘How’s your mum?’

‘Surprisingly OK. She took the news well, actually. I was expecting – well, I wasn’t expecting her to be calm.’