This morning I set off early to walk the Tennyson Trail alone, driving out to Alum Bay before dawn and reaching the hilltop monument in time for the Solent sunrise. There’s rarely anyone to be seen at this time of day, and the peace and serenity of this natural spectacle expands in my chest as I wrap my coat closer, pulling my scarf up over my nose and mouth. Somehow the crisp beauty of moments like this seems to sharpen the pain of losing Daisy; in the mundane, everyday grief of her absence, sensations are dulled, like sounds heard from below water. But the recurrence of these natural events, events that continue day after day in spite of our human tragedies … somehow such beauty has the power to illuminate and intensify feeling, and for the first time in days I allow my tears to fall.
At Emily’s house, I can’t do this. At Emily’s, I must be strong and solid, the person they can depend on to keep life ticking along. There, I can cook, clean, drive Chloe around, field unwanted phone calls, see off doorstep reporters, run the gauntlet of the weekly supermarket shop. I can listen quietly, give approval, make gentle suggestions, empty the laundry basket, discreetly fold Daisy’s clean baby clothes and slip them away. I can put out the empty milk bottles, open up my arms for needful embraces, switch off the TV when the inevitable news updates appear. But I can’t cry. To do so would be cruel, self-indulgent, when James and Emily have lost so much. Of course, I am heartbroken too at the loss of Daisy; that precious child inhabits my every waking thought. But I don’t have the right to show my grief. Not in the face of Emily, who conceived Daisy, gave birth to her, held her to her breast as an infant, and hadn’t yet even seen her take her first tottering steps. To cry would be an insult. She needs protecting as much as possible, when she has so much to bear.
I think about the phone call from Sammie yesterday afternoon. Apart from a few brief words at the funeral, she and Emily have barely seen each other since their teens, and Emily said it herself, she’s fed up with all these ‘friends’ calling to get the latest gossip on the case, to draw themselves into the drama of it all. Sammie means well, of course – she’d seen the TV appeal and wanted to see if we were all OK. She did ask to speak to Emily too, to let her know she was there for her if she needed anything, anything at all. And I told her, thank you, it will mean a lot, and I’ll pass it on, but not to expect a return call straight away because Emily’s not in much of a state to talk at the moment. Sammie said she’d try again in a week or so, and I told her it was probably best if she waited for Emily to call, when she was ready. I hope she wasn’t too upset by my fobbing her off, especially after everything she did for me around my mum’s funeral, putting me up when I had nowhere else to go. She’s a precious friend, but the family needs shielding, and I’ll do whatever it takes to protect them from more hurt.
I narrow my eyes at the red-pink horizon, willing my mind to clear, to move momentarily away from the nightmare of the here and now. But it’s impossible, and I hate myself for even trying. It’s been two days since DCI Jacobs came and interviewed Chloe, since they took Max in for questioning. It seems an age away now, and in that time it seems the fractures in the family have deepened, with each of them retreating to their chosen corners of the house, into their own private state of misery. Emily is popping pills like there’s no tomorrow, and I am certain she’s taking more than prescribed, knocking back the wine when she’s supposed to avoid alcohol altogether. But who can blame her, who can take that small comfort from her, when all she wants to do is sink into dreamless sleep to escape the dreadful reality? James is in his own private hell, masking it as best he can, making small talk with Cherry and Piper, plying them with endless hot drinks and sandwiches, treating them as much like guests as Emily treats them like visiting salesmen. The liaison officers are clearly used to this; they accept James’s hospitality for what it is – the desperate time-filling attention of a devastated father. They ask easy questions, listen to James’s concerns, making notes and following up on any queries the family might have. They liaise. Chloe, for now grounded from leaving the house – even for school – only leaves her room to fetch food or use the bathroom. I’ve been popping in and out of her bedroom to check on her, but now she’s even uncommunicative with me, who she usually sees as an ally. I know she’s finding it hard to forgive me for blowing the whistle on Max; but I didn’t have any choice, did I? I would never have betrayed her trust, but Daisy’s disappearance has changed everything. When James found that key to be missing, the police had to know, didn’t they? After all, I wasn’t foolish enough to think that I wasn’t still under some kind of suspicion myself, and, if the missing key was enough to give the police another lead, then I had to let them know. If there was any chance – however remote – that it could bring Daisy back, Chloe’s secret had to come out. I’ve told her this, and I know the rational, caring part of her understands; I know she’ll come round to me again.
How do the police ever get to the bottom of these things, I wonder, when everyone lies so routinely? Look at Chloe, how effortlessly she told DCI Jacobs she wasn’t sleeping with her boyfriend, even embellishing the untruth by saying he was ‘respectful’ of her age. I was in the kitchen when the interview was going on, but the door remained open and in the frozen silence of the house I heard every word spoken. Perhaps she would have found it harder to lie if I had been in the room, if she had had to look at me. Me, who sat down with her after that first encounter with Max, who asked her if she was being careful. ‘Careful?’ she had repeated, knowing exactly what I meant. ‘You don’t want to get pregnant, Chloe,’ I’d replied. There was no point in being anything other than direct in these matters. She had laughed, and after I’d finally got the truth out of her – that they’d been sleeping together for a couple of months already – I persuaded her to let me take her to the family planning centre to get checked out and arrange some reliable form of contraception. She begged me not to tell her parents. ‘Emily will literally KILL me,’ she had fretted, as we left the clinic, a white pharmacy packet secreted in her school rucksack. ‘Believe me, Chlo,’ I’d replied, ‘I’ve got more to worry about on that front than you. I think Emily would kill me first.’ We had laughed, and hugged, and never spoke another word about it again.
Maybe some lies are best kept. I don’t know; I’m no expert on the matter. When it comes to secrets and lies, sometimes I worry I’m so full of them that one day they’ll just come spilling out of me, in such a rush of shame and torment that they’ll wash my new life away, Chloe and all.
I was seventeen when it happened, and yet, when I think back on it, I remember myself as so much younger than Chloe seems now at fifteen. Was it because of my heart condition, and the kid gloves my parents used to handle me after I’d started having my episodes? Or was I just naturally quieter, shyer, less bold than others? It was something that came up at every parents’ evening – the teachers’ coaxing suggestions that I should be more ambitious, put my hand up more, be more like Emily. It was impossible to avoid the comparisons; we were in the same class, after all, Emily one of the eldest, me, the youngest. I was smaller, quieter, less visible all round – and to be frank I was perfectly happy that way. ‘We can’t all be in charge,’ Emily once told me as I sat cross-legged in our shared bedroom, following her instructions to line up our soft toys in tidy classroom rows as she set up her miniature teacher’s desk. ‘It would be chaos if we all tried to be in charge.’ She must have been eight or so at the time. What kind of eight-year-old uses the word ‘chaos’? But she was right, we couldn’t all be in charge. Emily and I had always been treated more like twins than sisters, and, with less than a year between us, that was how we behaved. I was the subordinate ape to her silver-backed gorilla. And I was fine with that; Emily’s extroversion gave welcome shade to my quiet ways.
It carried on this way right into our teens, and when Emily worked out that I was pregnant she kept it to herself for a week or more, her rage bubbling deep, before she finally confronted me on a rainy Tuesday morning as I got ready for college. Despite my remorse and fear – and my abject terror of what the future might hold for me now – I remember a tiny part of me thinking, she doesn’t like it when I do something first, no matter how awful that thing is. And she doesn’t like it when I keep secrets.
She was waiting for me when I got out of the shower, sitting on my bed, her hands folded neatly on her lap.
‘Bloody hell, Ems! You scared the life out of me.’ I nearly dropped my towel at the sight of her, but my startled smile quickly faded when I saw the hard line of her mouth, the seething shine of her eyes.
The party loomed large in my mind – both the bits I remembered and the bits I did not – and I’d known right from the start, deep in my gut, that things could never be the same again between my sister and me. How could they be? When terrible things like that happen, they change the way you look at the world, the way you look at each other, and you’re altered permanently, with no hope of return to the state of life before. Our relationship had been strained for weeks, ever since the party, ever since that horrible, terrifying blank hole that opened up around me at Sammie’s house. At the time, we’d been over it again and again, Emily worrying away at it like a child at a scabby knee, demanding that I try harder to remember the exact sequence of events that night, to remember what really happened in the bedroom while she was dancing with Sammie and the others downstairs. The fact that I couldn’t recall any of it didn’t take away my grotesque sense of disgust at what must have occurred while I was absent from myself – and still, night after night, I would wake, my breath caught in my throat, the helpless sensation of being paralysed overwhelming me, threatening to send me under.
But how could I explain any of this to Emily? She wouldn’t believe me; didn’t believe me. As far as she was concerned, I was to blame for what happened that night. ‘You’re a tease,’ she had said again, the morning after the party, talking to my back as I stood at the kitchen worktop making tea with shaking hands. ‘You give off this virginal not-interested vibe, Jessica, but all the time you’re loving the attention.’ She was leaning up against the kitchen table, the stains of last night’s mascara still streaked down her cheeks.
‘What attention?’ I had whispered through my tears, still not turning to face her. ‘I never wanted any of his attention.’
‘Well, you got it!’ she’d hissed, and for several weeks that had been the very last thing she said to me.
When she got mad like this, all I wanted to do was put my arms around her until she stopped thinking bad thoughts about me, and in the old days that was just what I would have done. But not now. These days she didn’t want my arms about her; she wanted Simon’s.
‘Close the door,’ she whispered now, as I stood shivering in my towel. Mum and Dad were still in the house, bumbling about, Dad getting ready for work, Mum in the kitchen taking her rota turn at preparing the floral arrangements for weekend mass.
I drew my towel closer, quietly pushing the door closed behind me. I really didn’t want to be alone with her. I knew that expression; I knew I wouldn’t like what was coming. She barely moved as she spoke, and my gaze became transfixed on her lips, as the damning words flowed from her, floating into the room like black smoke.
‘So, when were you going to tell me?’
I gawped back at her.
Really? her expression said to me. Really, you’re going to deny it? She jerked her chin towards my belly, the movement aggressive, disgusted. ‘You’re pregnant,’ she said simply.
I couldn’t speak. I just couldn’t speak, and I crumpled to my knees, pulling my towel tighter, my sense of nakedness suddenly overwhelming. I shook my head – I wasn’t denying it but trying to shake it away, to expel this horror from my thoughts. To give it words was to give it life.
‘You’re trying to tell me it’s not true?’ Her words came out incredulous, a nasty scoff punctuating the question. ‘Jessica – I know you better than anyone knows you – better than you know yourself. Do you think I haven’t noticed the change in you? The nibbled breakfasts. The pale skin, the shaky hands in the morning – the dry-heaving in the bathroom. My room’s right next door, for God’s sake. I can hear everything!’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. It was all I could think of. It was what I thought she needed to hear, though I’d said it a hundred times since that dreadful night, when she’d dragged me out of that room and away from the party, mortified at the behaviour of her pathetic little sister, her sister who gets into God knows what state and shows her up and lets her down. Her little sister who spoils everything. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, because there was nothing else available to me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Beyond my bedroom door, Mum was saying goodbye to Dad on the front step, something she’d done every morning since I could remember, a strangely formal ritual that seemed to belong in the 1940s: he in his shapeless grey solicitor’s suit, she in her pinny.
‘Will you look at me, Jess?’ The hard edge in Emily’s voice had softened. ‘Jess?’
I hadn’t realised I was crying until this moment, and I wiped the palm of my hand across my face. The action felt dragged out, like a film on slow-play.
‘So I take it that it happened there? At the party? Unless you’d been at it before then too –’ Her words stung – they were intended to, suggesting I was some cheap slut who slept with anyone who came her way. How could she even think it? Before that night, I’d never even kissed a boy.
I gasped. ‘I – I haven’t – it’s –’ There were no words to convey what I wanted to say, the shame and fear I felt.
Emily’s face was starting to harden again, her hate for me expanding in the face of my cowardly blustering.
‘Yes,’ I said, defeated. ‘It was that night. But, Emi, I don’t remember a thing!’
In a rush, she was on the floor beside me, her arms encircling my bare shoulders, her face pressed into my damp hair, and she was crying and rocking me, and I never wanted her to let me go.
‘It’s OK, Jess,’ she whispered into my neck. ‘I’m here for you. I’m sorry I’m so hard on you, but you can’t go on pretending nothing’s happened, can you? We’ll get this sorted, OK? We’ll get this all sorted and no one ever needs to find out about it.’
And that’s how I found out I was having an abortion. My big sister told me, and that was that.
When the sky has morphed from pink into blue, I leave my hilltop bench and continue along the Tennyson Trail, aiming to reach Carisbrooke by one o’clock, where I can grab a sandwich in town and catch the bus back home. The gulls are flying high, soaring to great heights before bombing down towards the choppy waters, and the great expanse of open grass and gorsey meadow spreads out before me, giving me the sense of being the last person on earth. From here, there are no houses to be seen, no cars, no litter, no noise but for the screech of birds and the rush of wind and ocean, and when I turn in arm-flung circles there is only blue and green stretching out all around me, reaching fingers of rich colour towards the white rocks that tether the island to the sea. As I approach the stile, the goats appear, startled and staring on the path ahead. So I’m not alone, I think, and I step up on to the wooden strut and jump over, but the goats aren’t taking any chances and they bound towards the cliff edge and disappear with a graceful leap. I gasp in shock at their sudden demise, and in a beat I’m after them, racing towards the wire-chained precipice, leaning out as far as I can go without falling, and I see them: two white horny heads huddled together on a narrow ridge not five feet below. I marvel at their nimble art, the way in which they must know this landscape, to leap so fearlessly from the rock face, confident that they will thrive.
My phone rings in my jacket pocket, the sound of it startling as it breaks through the tranquillity of my escape. I don’t recognise the number, but I can’t just let it go, in case it’s something, anything to do with Daisy. ‘Hello?’
As soon as I hear her voice, I recognise it as DCI Jacobs. I scrabble to my feet and return to the trodden path, now marching with purpose, as if this might somehow help me to think, help me to answer her questions correctly, to not get it all wrong.
‘Is it a good time to talk, Jess?’ she asks.
A whistle of wind howls past the mouthpiece, and I tug up my collar to shield our conversation. ‘Yes – yes, it’s just a bit windy. I’m walking.’
‘Well, I won’t keep you too long,’ she says, her tone brisk as ever. Strangely, I realise it’s one of the things I like about her: she is who she is, and that’s reassuring. ‘There are two things. Firstly, you and your sister, Emily. It’s only just come to my attention that until recently you two had been estranged for many years. Is that correct?’
‘That’s right,’ I reply, a knot of nervousness balling up in my gut. ‘We met again at my mother’s funeral last year.’
‘So I understand. My condolences. And, before that, it was sixteen years since you’d last seen each other?’
‘Uh-huh.’ I really don’t know what else there is to say.
‘Jess, I’m wondering why neither of you thought to tell me about this estrangement?’
‘Why would we? I don’t see how it –’
DCI Jacobs interrupts. ‘Everything is relevant in a case like this, Jess. Everything. Family disputes, disagreements with colleagues, suspicious neighbours – anything that might lead us towards reasons – possible motives – for Daisy’s abduction.’
Abduction. The word is so violent in its simplicity. It conjures up faceless men in the night, cloaked figures who spirit babies away, pied pipers with evil intent. I mustn’t cry, I tell myself, I must stop this constant desire to cry, and pull myself together – for Daisy’s sake, if for no one else.
‘Yes, of course,’ I reply, trying my best to sound like a good, trustworthy person. ‘Of course.’
‘So, Jess, can you tell me the reason for your separation from your sister for those sixteen years?’
I know that she will have already asked Emily the same question, that she will have phoned the house first before trying my mobile phone, and my mind scrambles to find the answer that Emily will have given her. What would she have said? What would Emily do in this situation? She won’t have told them the truth, that much I know. She won’t have told them the real reason for my leaving home – she won’t have told them how she blamed me for everything, how she couldn’t be near me, how we didn’t so much as speak to each other in sixteen years.
‘I guess we just drifted apart,’ I say, gaining confidence in my answer as it arrives. ‘You know how it is – I went off travelling when I was seventeen or eighteen, and got wrapped up in that, I suppose. And Emily was always the more academic one, so she stayed on with Mum and Dad, went to uni – and after a while we just stopped writing and got on with our lives. I know it’s a bit of a dull answer, but that’s it really – we simply drifted apart.’
There’s a pause, before DCI Jacobs speaks again. ‘Yes. That’s pretty much what your sister said. Still, it’s a long time to lose touch, isn’t it?’
She’s not going to let this go as easily as I hoped. ‘Well, I suppose we were never that close as kids,’ I say. ‘Not like now.’
‘I understand,’ DCI Jacobs replies, but judging by her tone I’m not sure she’s completely satisfied. ‘OK, Jess. Thank you.’
I think she’s about to hang up, but then I remember she said there were two things she wanted to talk to me about. ‘Oh, yes,’ she says, as if it’s an afterthought. ‘Your brother-in-law, James. Do you know where he was last night? Around 7pm?’
‘No,’ I answer, knowing he didn’t arrive home till late. ‘He got home about nineish – he was meeting up with Marcus and some of his team from the office. Why?’
‘Max Fuller was attacked last night. He was given a pretty nasty going-over – he’s in St Mary’s at the moment. A couple of broken ribs and a lot of bruising. He’s not saying anything, but we’re pretty sure James King is behind it. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?’
I think of James arriving home last night, looking uncharacteristically unkempt and smelling of beer. Emily was already in bed, and I warmed up a plate of food for him, noticing the purple bruising that had started to snake around the knuckles of his right hand.
‘Jess?’ DCI Jacobs repeats.
‘Sorry,’ I reply, my eyes fixed on the undulating winter ocean, on the bright liquid sunlight that ices its shifting surface. ‘The signal dropped off for a second. No, I’m sorry – I don’t know anything about it. James seemed fine when he got home – completely ordinary. And I’m sure he wouldn’t do a thing like that; he’s not capable of that kind of violence.’
DCI Jacobs releases a small, humourless laugh. ‘You’d be surprised what the most ordinary of people are capable of.’