First One Missing (8 page)

As they saw him approaching, the photographers and reporters went quiet. Rory always thought it was rather funny how they didn’t know quite how to treat him. He knew they were desperate to ask him all sorts of questions, but it was a bit dodgy as he’d only just turned sixteen, so they kind of hopped from foot to foot murmuring, ‘All right, Rory?’ as he pushed past.

All right, Rory?
That was a joke in itself. It really fucking was.

He got out his key, praying it wouldn’t be one of those days when it inexplicably decided not to work. His mum said it was because he’d lost his key so many times they were always having to make copies from copies. She’d tried to make him wear his key around his neck once. Like that was going to happen. As the door opened there was a chorus of frenzied snapping from the photographers behind trying to get a shot into the hallway. Of what, he wondered? The grief-stricken coat-stand? The sorrow-struck shoe-rack? Stepping inside, he heard Mum’s worried voice calling from the kitchen.

‘Rory? Is that you?’

Rory had read books where people said ‘my heart sank’ and he recognized the symptoms all too well. One minute his heart was sitting happily in its proper place behind his ribcage, and the next it was squelching around somewhere in his stomach along with the remains of the chicken tikka sandwich he had for lunch. His mum always did that.

He did his ‘walking but not really moving’ motion down the black-and-white-tiled hall. By the time he reached the five stairs at the back that led down to the kitchen-diner, he was practically going backwards.

‘Oh darling, has it been awful for you?’

She flung her arms around his waist and pressed her head into his shoulder. Looking down, he was pleased to note her head stopped lower down his body than the last time they’d stood in this awkward position. He was still growing then.

Holding him at arm’s length, she peered up into his eyes. He noticed she looked paler than usual but she had those red spots on her cheeks and on her neck that she got whenever she was agitated or excited (or drunk).

‘I’m fine,’ he said, crossing to the back of the room to toss his bag down on the kitchen table.

‘It is all right, you know, to say how you’re really feeling.’

Rory turned his back to her and pretended to be looking through the French windows into the garden, but really he was wondering how to get up to his room without having to go through another hug.

It wasn’t that he didn’t feel sorry for his mum. Obviously it was crap, having your daughter murdered and then having to relive it every time the freak did it again. But the thing was, life went on.

‘That poor, poor woman,’ Mum was saying.

Rory didn’t need to ask who she was talking about. She said that about them all. All the mothers. All of them poor, poor women.

‘I saw her on the news earlier,’ she said. ‘Just a glimpse. Just to think of what that poor woman is going through. No doubt the police will ask me to talk to her soon enough.’

‘You can always say no,’ he pointed out.

Mum looked over at him, frowning.

‘It’s not something you choose, Rory,’ she said, and he noticed with panic that her eyes were starting to well up. ‘No one
chooses
to be a bereaved parent. Choice doesn’t come into it. You can’t just say, “No, not today, thank you.” Like it was a pint of milk.’

He stared down at the floor so as not to see her cry. The laces of her brown brogue-type shoes were undone and he almost pointed it out, but stopped himself at the last minute.

‘People will start bringing it all up again, Rory. I want you to promise me not to let it get to you. Your exams are coming up soon and you must focus on those. What happened to Megan wasn’t your fault. You mustn’t let anyone upset you.’

Rather than having to meet her eyes, Rory followed the course of the tear snaking down her left cheek. Now he was feeling really awkward because he wanted to go to his room, but knew he shouldn’t leave his mother crying on her own in the kitchen. He knew she wanted him to say something. It was what she was waiting for.

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ he said finally, his voice coming out all croaky, like it did when he was really embarrassed. ‘I know it wasn’t my fault.’

For a moment her hand stayed resting on his arm, just where it emerged from the sleeve of his white school shirt. Her blue eyes, blurred by the tears, continued looking right at him and a strange expression passed over her face. Then her hand dropped and he was free to go. Briefly he considered stopping on the way out to grab a packet of biscuits from the cupboard because he was starving, but he didn’t want to risk getting drawn into another conversation, so he went straight past.

Sometimes he really hated having to climb up the three sets of stairs to his room at the top of the house, past all those photos (though not the school photo used over and over again by the media, thank God), past Simon’s stupid certificates in their stupid frames, but today he practically jogged up there without noticing. When he finally pushed the door open and flopped down on his bed, his whole body sagged with relief.

Much later on, Rory had a gatecrasher in his sanctuary at the top of the stairs. As soon as he heard the tell-tale slap-slap on the staircase, he knew it was his stepfather on his way to talk him into going to the next Megan’s Angels meeting. As far as Rory was concerned, it was bang out of order for Simon to start telling him what to do. None of his business, Rory reckoned. Rory wouldn’t dream of telling his stepfather how to live his life. If Simon wanted to sit around all weekend on his fat arse stuffing himself with junk food and playing online poker, that was up to him.

But this thing of meeting up with the fucking Botsfords and the fucking Reids, well, Rory just didn’t see the point. If it would help find the killer, he’d do it, but just sitting around with a load of miserable people so they could all be miserable together, what was that all about?

So now Simon was standing in the doorway of Rory’s room (out of breath from going up those few stairs – he really needed to get fit) and giving him that reproachful look.

‘You know what this means to your mother,’ he said in that voice that made every single one of Rory’s muscles tighten up.

Rory fixed his eyes on his electric guitar propped against the wardrobe, and imagined playing the opening chords of ‘Get Lucky’, seeing where all his fingers would go on the fretboard.

But still Simon droned on and on. ‘We’ve all got to pull together now and stop being so bloody petty. Your mother needs you. I know it’s difficult when it all gets dredged up again, but you know what? Them’s the breaks.’

Them’s the breaks?
Why did his stepfather have to be such a dick?

As Simon talked, he picked up Rory’s phone from his desk where he was leaning, and started playing around with it, passing it from hand to hand. Rory’s phone was a piece of shit, but still it was annoying. Rory would like to see what would happen if he went into Simon’s office and started tossing his stuff around. He noticed, with distaste, how the skin around Simon’s wedding ring was all puffy. Simon wasn’t obese or anything but he needed to lose a few pounds. No joke.

‘I think you need to think very seriously about your priorities.’

He fixed Rory intensely with his pale eyes and it was that same look he gave Rory’s mum when he was telling her to do something but trying to disguise it as a request. Rory looked down to avoid his gaze and found himself staring at Simon’s blue-white toes, emerging from the straps of his sandals. The toes had thick black hairs sprouting all over them.

Previous experience had taught Rory that Simon wouldn’t leave without ‘the bonding bit’. Maybe that’s something you got taught at stepfather school: ‘the bonding manoeuvre’ to follow up the tough-love bit. Sure enough, the older man leaned in and put a hand on Rory’s biceps which he instinctively tightened up.

‘We’re family, yeah?’ Simon asked in his best fake young-person’s voice. ‘And families stick together.’

Listening to his stepfather lumbering back down the stairs, his sandals slapping on the carpet on each tread, Rory wondered whether there might actually be, right in the back of Simon’s mind, a tiny millionth of a chance that he actually believed the stuff that came out of his mouth. He’d have to be pretty thick though, wouldn’t he?

8

Emma could make out Leanne’s shadow through the opaque-glass panels in the front door. When they’d bought the house, she’d wanted to replace the panes with stained glass that she’d specially commission from a local expert craftsman, to bring the entrance back into keeping with the period of the house, but Guy had baulked at the thousand-plus cost. Ten years on, she still felt a pang every time she went into the hallway. Now, seeing the dark shape through the glass, she hesitated with her hand on the brass latch. It wasn’t that she disliked Leanne. You couldn’t dislike Leanne. She was warm and straight-talking and she knew when to step back and give you space, reappearing discreetly some time later with a freshly made cup of tea, and a squeeze of the elbow or shoulder so fleeting you almost thought you might have imagined it.

It was just the baggage Leanne brought with her – trailing it through the house like mud – that Emma couldn’t stomach: the memory of the first time they met, when Emma was still The Woman She’d Been Before, still believing Guy when he said that Tilly would turn up somewhere, and this would become one of those family legends that gets repeated at weddings and Christmas dinners. ‘Remember the time …’ And then those other memories that Emma tried to block out – Leanne’s face when she came in from the back garden where she’d been talking on her phone in a low murmur, and how even before she’d sat them down and leaned forward to put a hand on Emma’s knee, she’d known what she was going to say and buried her head in Guy’s shoulder, closing her eyes as if that could shut out the truth. Leanne sitting two rows behind at the funeral, wearing a pink cardigan in compliance with the family’s no-black request, mascara snaking down her cheek, while Emma’s own dry eyes burned with unshed tears. Then a gap of more than a year before Leila Botsford’s death brought Leanne once again to her door, just as she was now, causing all Emma’s muscles to tighten and her head to ache with the effort of keeping the memories at bay.

Leanne had put on weight. That was Emma’s first thought when she opened the door, and immediately she felt ashamed of herself for noticing. Another child dead, and she was thinking about how much someone weighed. Anyway, the extra pounds suited her. Leanne was one of those curvy women whose skin was better for being stretched smooth like the cover of a well-stuffed cushion, not sagging and puckered over pockets of air.

If only she dressed a little better, Emma couldn’t help thinking, Leanne could be quite attractive. That black skirt was clearly from her thinner days and creased over her hips where the unlined material was pulled too tight. And the peculiar white wraparound shirt had come loose, revealing a flash of flesh-coloured bra. Her thick, wavy hair was held back from her face by a brown hair elastic (she had a spare one around her left wrist) but some of it had come loose at the back and was curling damply in the heat of the day.

The longer Emma focused on Leanne’s clothes and hair, the longer she could put off having to meet her eyes, and see that familiar look of pity and apprehension, and hear the new facts about this new child who’d got up one morning and pulled on socks and pants and brushed her hair and gone out into the world without looking back as if it was a normal morning. The longer Emma kept her mind trained on why Leanne was wearing tights on the hottest day of the year so far, the longer it would be before she had to hear about this new mother spending her first day in a world that was completely altered, unable yet to believe that every day now would be like this, that things would never go back to how they were.

‘Can I come in?’

Leanne was smiling, which caused a dimple to form in her left cheek. She was pretty, the detached, objective side of Emma decided, and even that felt like an affront. Far better that the lost girls should have a spokesperson who was plain and unremarkable rather than a woman whose sparkling blue eyes reminded you that other people’s lives were still going on, that when they went home they would still be laughing and loving, still getting pleasure from the sun on their skin or a glass of decent wine.

Inside the house, neither seemed to know how to start.

‘You’ve changed the cupboards,’ Leanne observed, looking around at the industrial-style kitchen. Immediately Emma felt reproached. How must it look to an outsider? Her daughter was dead, but still she found the energy to care about whether her doors were white or the ubiquitous downpipe grey? She could explain, she supposed, about those endless hours when Guy was at work and the girls at school and the only thing that stopped her going quite, quite mad was to go online and shop indiscriminately. New clothes for the girls, new cushions to replace the ones not even a year old, a £700 bike she’d ridden only once, a kitsch tablecloth in a designer print that she’d never even removed from the packaging. The cupboards had been an extravagance, but there had been other large purchases, most notably a beach hut in Whitstable.

‘Sixty miles away, that’s convenient,’ Guy had mocked when she showed him the photograph. The first summer they’d used it exactly twice. In September, Guy had listed it for sale without consulting her on a website devoted entirely to beach huts, telling her only after an offer had been made. Amazingly they’d even made a profit. That’s when Guy had started suggesting she go back to work, maybe set up another high-end recruitment agency, as she’d done before the children were born. ‘You need to have another focus in your life,’ he had said clumsily. ‘You think a job will take my mind off my dead daughter?’ Emma had demanded. But really she was scared. Scared because a job would reveal to everyone that her brain had crumbled inside her head, leaving nothing there but a pile of dust. Scared in case filling her thoughts with something apart from Tilly would mean she started to lose what little she had left of her daughter, the snapshots of memory driven out by deadlines and figures and profit and loss.