Vernon’s daughter was missing. McTullough, her moral tutor, called. Vernon wasn’t shocked so much as confused.
‘She’s meant to be at school,’ he said.
‘That’s my point, Mr Strand. She isn’t.’
Vernon knew the rules. When girls were absent, they or their parents were meant to call in. If the school heard nothing, a teacher would get in touch. Today was Wednesday. Jayney hadn’t been seen all week.
‘She called me yesterday lunchtime,’ said Vernon.
‘From school?’
‘I thought so.’
Teenage absences were commonplace. There was usually an innocent explanation, and the job of the moral tutor was to discover it. To begin with, girls had only a form teacher. But later their morals were assigned elsewhere: to a woman teacher usually, but in Jayney’s case to McTullough. Any worries about work, boyfriends, home, etc, and a girl should talk them over. As far as Vernon knew, Jayney had never availed herself of this service. He’d a vague memory of her calling McTullough a ‘tosser’.
‘No problems with Jayney over the weekend, Mr Strand?’
‘Not that I can think of.’
‘But you last saw her on Monday morning?’
‘I suppose so. Yes.’
Vernon felt irritated. Shouldn’t he be the one asking the questions? It was the school who’d mislaid Jayney, not him. He tried to remember McTullough, from parents’ evenings. A middle-aged man with a beard. Solemn face. Piercing eyes. Scottish accent. Probably Christian. Keen on words like ‘probity’ and ‘prudence’. Should have been a police detective, to judge by his interrogation methods. He taught Physics, didn’t he? Jayney’s subjects were all arts subjects. Perhaps that was how it worked, with moral tutors - they came from the other side. He seemed to remember that McTullough had a hobby of some kind, stamp-collecting or model aeroplanes, and would bore his students with it when he wasn’t boring them with Physics. He had bored Jayney, anyway. And now was boring into Vernon.
‘So when she didn’t come home on Monday night, you weren’t concerned?’
‘She’d an arrangement to stay with a friend. They were working on a history project together.’
‘Does she often stay out during the week?’
‘Hardly ever. But she asked us. And we couldn’t see why not. She is seventeen.’
She was seventeen. She drank, smoked, was taking driving lessons, could debate politics and ecology on the rare occasions when she sat at the dinner table. But what consolation was all that, now she was missing? He thought of the soft toys in her bed. He remembered how he used to carry her on his shoulders. She seemed absurdly vulnerable.
‘It could be they bunked off to finish the history project,’ he said.
‘At her friend’s home, Mr Strand?’
‘Yes, obviously. I’m not hiding her here.’
‘Which friend was this? We can check if she’s in class.’
‘Lizzie, I think it was.’
Lizzie? Or was it Lucy? Or Laura, Lara, Lily, Lindy? It could have been any of them. Or none. He didn’t have a surname. He didn’t have a face. In the old days, it had been easy: Jayney and her friends had been in and out of each other’s houses, and he and Ruth had come to know their parents - had chatted on their ivy-fringed doorsteps, drunk wine with them in the aftermath of birthday parties, picked up enough about their jobs and holiday habits to feel they knew them. But then Jayney had shed her old friends, or they had shed her. There was no official breach just a drift away. Jessica, Helen, Trish: it was months since she’d mentioned them. Which didn’t matter. It wasn’t that she lacked friends. But who were these friends? They’d become the faceless enemy, the anonymous world which had swallowed her up.
‘And it was with this Lizzie’ - the ‘this’ was a reproach, Vernon could hear - ‘that your daughter’ - not naming Jayney: another reproach - ‘stayed last night as well?’
‘Yes. She called my wife to ask if she could. To do some more work on the history project.’
She’d also talked about a gig, but Vernon thought it unwise to tell McTullough that. The gig had been the treat that she and Lizzie would award themselves after their work. Her honesty about it had been part of what had won Ruth over: such a mature, upfront daughter - how could they deny her? Now the gig became the focus of his alarm. Suppose there’d been drugs, ecstasy or something, and Jayney had reacted badly, and was now in hospital. Or suppose the girls had stayed late, and become separated from each other, and there’d been an incident in an alley somewhere, shadows, darkness, a man or several men, and Jayney, unprotected and unparented, on her own.
‘And your wife believed the story of the history project?’ said McTullough, with studied incredulity. Vernon felt guilty. He hadn’t meant to shift the blame on Ruth. These days she was the one stuck in an office all day, while he did most of his work from home. Jayney was an only child and he’d become her main carer. No that, at her age, she needed care. Or so he’d thought, until today.
‘Jayney sounded so full of enthusiasm,’ he said. ‘And we knew she had her laptop with her. So my wife said yes. She is seventeen.’
He was beginning to repeat himself. It must defensiveness. Or anxiety. Was he anxious? He couldn’t really believe Jayney was missing. He need only call her on the mobile. Yet when he’d called this morning, ahead of school, to ask how she was, the phone had been switched off. Likewise at lunchtime, an hour ago. He had thought nothing of it. But he must have been thinking of something, or he’d not have called at all. A faint worry had been niggling away. Now the niggle had become a silent scream.
‘As you know, her academic record is excellent,’ said McTullough. ‘We expect her to do well next year. I doubt there’s any cause for worry.’
Now Vernon thought of it, there were several causes for worry. Hadn’t Jayney’s spirits been a bit low before she went? She’d been at a party on Saturday night, slept in till Sunday afternoon, had a bath, stayed in her room emailing friends, emerged only reluctantly for supper - a typical adolescent weekend, it seemed, but now, with hindsight, he pictured her looking sullen and distraught, brightening only when given permission to spend a night away. Perhaps her boyfriend had dumped her. Or she’d found a new boyfriend and was staying with him. As far as Vernon knew, she didn’t have a boyfriend. But he couldn’t be sure. Jayney had closed down on him. She had taken her secrets with her into the underworld.
‘So how shall we proceed, Mr Strand? I’m sure Jayney’s perfectly safe. But I’d like to feel steps are being taken.
‘I’ll call her mobile.’
Something else had struck him. Today was the 3rd. Her monthly allowance, pocket money as they used to call it, was always paid in on the 1st. With a mobile phone, a laptop, a change of clothes, an overnight bag, and a month’s worth of pocket money, she’d have most of what she needed. Or valued. Or felt she could get by on for a while. As far as he knew, she’d no reason to run away. But ‘as far as he knew’ took him nowhere. His child had gone missing. When they reach a certain age, most children go missing. But not so literally as Jayney.
‘And if you can’t get hold of her on the mobile?’ said McTullough.
‘If you let me have the telephone numbers of her classmates, I’ll try them.’
Vernon could see Jayney’s photo on the mantelpiece. From Year 10. The last she’d had taken at school. Striped tie. White blouse. Hair falling over one eye. ‘Gross,’ she’d called it. Since then, she’d avoided school photographs, or avoided bringing them home. He could give it to the police, if it came to that. It would be something to go on. Though it wasn’t how she looked now, not really. How did she look? He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the photofit. Instead he saw the alley again, outside the club where the gig had been. He willed the alley to open out and become a brightly lit street, with vigilant shopkeepers and friendly policemen on the lookout for girls in trouble. But he couldn’t see Jayney. Jayney was lost. There was only McTullough.
‘As you’ll appreciate, with data protection and so on, the school isn’t allowed to give out pupils’ telephone numbers.’
‘But surely in an emergency...’
‘It’s not really an emergency, is it? Not yet. Yes, perhaps it was unwise to let your daughter stay out two nights in a row. It’s also incidentally a violation of school rules, but be that as it may. We mustn’t panic. I’ll make enquiries among Jayney’s classmates before they go home.’
‘That would help, certainly. And then you’ll call me?’
‘If you’d like me to.’
‘In the circumstances, yes, I would.’
‘Fine. Till later then, Mr Strand.’
Vernon put the phone down and stared into the garden. The lawn, the shrubs, the wooden chairs all looked the same - yet utterly different. It had been fourteen years since they came here. Jayney was a toddler then. Her tree house still hung in the holm-oak, precarious and half-rotten.
He tried her mobile again - still switched off - then climbed the stairs to her bedroom, looking for clues. Soft toys crowded the pillow, posters covered the walls. The silence unnerved him. The tidiness, too - no socks or dirty plates across the floor. Without noise or mess, the room seemed drained of character, Jayney’s character anyway. It had become a shrine.
He opened the drawers of her desk, feeling guilty at the invasion but telling himself the usual proprieties could go. An only child could be suffocated by parental attention, and he and Ruth had tried to respect Jayney’s privacy. What a mistake that now seemed. If only they’d kept closer tabs. Yet there was nothing in the desk to suggest she’d been planning an escape. No note or diary or love letters, just empty key rings, unused paintboxes, discarded make-up sets - stuff she’d outgrown or never wanted in the first place, the museum pieces of childhood. With luck, she’d not notice he’d been poking around, if she returned. If? When. Surely a man to whom the worst was about to happen would feel it coming. Would know, instinctively. Would have caught a whiff of the desolation ahead. Vernon took comfort that the sun was out, that his hand wasn’t shaking as he walked downstairs. In an hour or two Jayney would be home and - though she’d lied, truanted, and maybe been up to no good - they’d have it out with her and make things all right. He could see it already. The three of them at the kitchen table. Jayney in tears. He and Ruth sitting calm and unjudgmental till she’d finished her story. Truth and reconciliation. This is how it would end.
Yet there was another ending, beyond that ending, and as he stood there dialling Ruth’s number at work he knew that too. Jayney would be back. But only for so long. There would be other departures: to college, to a flat of her own, to adulthood. This was what children were for - to grow up and leave you. You did your best for them and in return they left. Their leaving was a tribute to your nurturing skills: you didn’t want them to be over-dependent and stay. But that didn’t stop it hurting. Cradling the phone, waiting for Ruth to come on, Vernon heard the hiss of missingness - not just Jayney’s but his own. The hollowness and nullity and silence. What would the house be like, with only him and Ruth in it? Today was just a taster. A message sent through McTullough, to prepare him. He must get ready for the absence to come.
Ruth’s voice answered.
‘Darling, don’t panic,’ he said, ‘but I’ve had a call from Jayney’s school.’