Emily is aware of James shaking her for several seconds before her mind catches up with her body and she opens her eyelids, flinching against the bright morning light that streams through the bedroom windows.
‘Emily? Emily?’ His face is barely recognisable, sallow and drooped. When did this happen? Emily wonders as she stares up at him, blinking slowly. When did he grow so old? ‘Chloe’s gone,’ he tells her, taking a step back, snatching up his wife’s dropped clothes and stuffing them in the laundry basket, sharp criticism conveyed in the simple movement. ‘Her bed wasn’t slept in.’
With great effort Emily pulls herself to a sitting position, and runs a hand across her face, pushing the hair away. The daylight is coursing in, directly on to her face, and she shrinks from it, imagining the effort it would take to ease her legs out of bed and cross the carpet to draw the curtains closed again. Her attention is pulled back to James, whose movements are jerky and impatient. What does he want her to say?
‘Emily!’ He shouts it now, moving to her bedside to pick up a glass of water that’s stale and bubbled.
Even in his panic James is tidying up, Emily notices. She allows herself the briefest memory of Marcus’s eyes locked on hers, his wide hands hard on her hips as he thrust her against the wooden beach hut. She can’t remember the last time James looked her in the eyes as they made love. She can’t remember the last time they made love. She blames him for all of it – for Daisy, for Avril, for Marcus – for all of it.
James glares at her. ‘Didn’t you hear me? Chloe has gone!’
‘So?’ she replies. You’re still hiding something, she thinks. I can see it in your eyes.
‘Christ, you’re insane,’ he says. His eyes are bulging and she wants to laugh. ‘What if she’s with Avril?’ he demands. ‘What if Avril realised she’s got it wrong with Daisy and came back here for Chloe?’
Emily snorts. Two days ago she learned that her husband had been lying to her about one of the most fundamental parts of his life – of their life – and now he expects her to continue playing Happy Families as if nothing has happened? He’s deluded.
‘She’ll be with Max, James. Obviously.’
James’s face moves through conflicting emotions, ultimately landing on relief. Max is better than Avril, his face says.
‘So what if your underage daughter’s shacked up with a nineteen-year-old man? It’s not a big deal, James. Not on the scale of things.’ Emily can’t stop herself. She’s woken full of hatred, and it has to go somewhere. She shrugs like a child and raises her eyebrows, inviting her husband’s response.
‘What do you mean, it’s not a big deal?’ he says, and he looks as though he believes he might be dreaming the whole thing. Welcome to my world, Emily thinks.
‘Well, it’s not as if we need to protect her chastity, is it? Max has seen to that already. Nothing to protect there.’
Even as she says it, she knows she’s gone too far. At close range, James throws the water in his wife’s face, drenching her, shocking her into silence.
‘You’d better get dressed,’ he says, calmly now. ‘DCI Jacobs will be here in half an hour. They’re going to give us an update.’
Emily knows herself well enough to recognise that sometimes she gets a little carried away with her emotions. She remembers a time in their early teens when a secret she had only ever told Jess started circulating around their year group – the details of an insignificant and long-extinguished crush she’d had on one of the popular boys two years above them. It was a silly thing, a tiny thing, but, by the time the rumour mill had done its worst, the story was that she’d kissed him – ‘got off with him’ – and worse, until it finally reached his ears and he stopped her in the corridor for a public showdown. As if he’d ever go near a Year Nine? What did she think he was, some kind of pervert? His girlfriend had stood beside him, eyeing her, crossed-armed and pitying, and the whole experience had been degrading in the extreme.
Jess had insisted she knew nothing about it, that she’d forgotten all about her sister’s fleeting fascination with the boy, and, while her pleas had been convincing, Emily wouldn’t believe her. Instead, she retaliated with her own rumour – that Jess’s fainting episodes weren’t real, but were merely a ruse she used to get attention. Their schoolfriends were incensed: how could Jess lie about something so serious, how could she trick them all like this? It was disgusting, and generally agreed that she should be given the silent treatment for a couple of weeks to teach her an important lesson about friendship. Jess tried to talk to them, but whenever she approached any of the group they’d turn their backs, swatting her away like a wasp, pretending they couldn’t hear a word. After a week of this, she broke down, refusing to go to school, to eat, to speak. Mum and Dad were fretful with worry, and Emily resented Jess more than ever. It all came to a head one morning as Emily was getting ready for school, when Jess collapsed in a dead faint, resulting in a two-night hospital stay while they monitored her heart rate. While she wanted to believe her sister was faking, the doctors’ reports said otherwise, and Emily had to admit to herself that she felt just a little bit guilty for her part in Jess’s state of stress before the collapse. So, when it had finally emerged that the source of the original rumour was Emily’s best friend Sammie, who had sneaked a read of her diary and clumsily let it slip, she had known that the right thing to do was to apologise to Jess, to make things right. But honestly, by now she’d had enough of being her little sister’s guardian, and she was glad to have cause to keep her at arm’s length. These fits of hers – or faints, or whatever it was she was having – were getting more and more frequent, and Emily had had enough. It was time for Jess to stand on her own two feet.
After the police have gone, James leaves for work and Jess heads off for her beach walk. She pops her head in to ask Emily if she’d like to join her, ‘to clear her head’, but Emily waves her away, sarcastically explaining that someone ought to be at home when Chloe gets back. She wishes she meant this, but really she just wants to be alone, to pour herself a large glass of cold white wine and stare at her own reflection in the dressing table mirror.
James had eventually managed to get through to Chloe’s phone, and she’d explained she was at Max’s house, telling her dad that she needed a few days to work things out, that she was still reeling from the news that her mother was alive. He couldn’t argue with that, could he? He could hardly go marching around there to drag her out, not when he was responsible for putting her through something as awful as this.
Earlier, when DCI Jacobs arrived, they had drunk yet more coffee and listened patiently to the inspector’s pointless update of leads they’d extinguished and avenues yet to be explored. It had told them nothing, and it certainly brought them no closer to finding Daisy. Emily had hardly been able to contain her frustration as she listened, and found herself desperate to share her own thoughts, her own suggested lines of enquiry. Much to the astonishment of James and Jess, she passed on her theory that Chloe might have traced Avril in the first place – that Chloe might have been the cause of Daisy’s disappearance.
‘Do you think this is possible?’ DCI Jacobs asked James.
His steepled fingers grew white at the tips. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Absolutely. Not.’
‘I think it is possible, James,’ Emily said with affected patience. She gave DCI Jacobs a knowing look. ‘I know James only wants to think the best of his daughter, but it is possible.’
‘Jess?’ DCI Jacobs looked to her for an opinion.
‘No way. Sorry, Ems, but I think you’ve got this wrong. You saw Chloe’s reaction when we learned Avril was still alive – I’ve never seen a person look so shocked.’
DCI Jacobs turned back to Emily and gave her a sympathetic but unconcerned shake of the head. ‘I’m inclined to agree with James and Jess –’ she began, but was cut off when Emily slapped her hands down violently, causing coffee to spill over the table.
‘What is wrong with you people?’ she screamed, her serene veneer cracked. ‘What is wrong with you all?!’ She shut herself away in the bedroom until the last of them had left the house.
Somewhere around midday, Emily stops crying and decides it would be a good idea to visit the school where she works, to discuss her return in the next week or two. If James can do it, so can she. It’s not as if Daisy will return any quicker with her just sitting around here getting more frantic by the day. Work would do her good. Work would set her mind straight. Work would stop her thinking about all the things she’s got wrong in her life, all the bad things she has caused.
At the front desk Violet looks shocked to see her. ‘Emily, love! How are you?’
She hates this. Before, people used to say, ‘How are things?’ or ‘How’s it going, Emily?’ Casually, as though she was one of them, the same as everyone else. Now it’s ‘How are you?’ with all the emphasis on the are – as if she’s an invalid, or a child … or a grieving mother.
‘I’m fine,’ she replies, staggering slightly as she misjudges the front step. ‘I wanted to see Josie, if she’s in?’ She leans heavily on the reception desk, wiping the sweat from her upper lip, feeling uneasy as she remembers the man who was parked in her street earlier, the man who took a photograph of her as she dropped her door keys more than once on her way out of the house.
Violet looks concerned, and turns to make eye contact with old Mrs Hilgard in the back, who raises a hesitant wave in Emily’s direction.
‘Zat a problem?’ Emily asks. She finds her words running together involuntarily, and she wishes she hadn’t had that little drink before she came out.
Violet leaps from her seat, excessively cheery, her tiny hands fluttering at her neckline as she busies around the desk towards Emily. ‘Of course not! You take a seat out here, love, and I’ll see if I can find her. She’s on class walkabout this morning, otherwise I’d send you straight in.’
Emily sits, thinking she’s in for a long wait, but Violet returns minutes later with a concerned-looking Josie by her side. The head teacher embraces her and ushers her inside her office, where she takes a seat on the far side of the desk, offering Emily the one opposite. Staring at the little wooden block marked ‘Mrs Priestly’, Emily feels as though she’s in an interview, and she straightens herself up, smoothing down her dishevelled hair, moistening her dry lips with the tip of her tongue.
‘I want to come back to work,’ she announces. Her heart is thumping, and she focuses on Josie’s thick, jowly neck, noticing the way it presses solidly against her beige roll neck sweater.
Josie is clearly taken aback. ‘When?’ she asks, folding and unfolding large pink hands on the desk before her.
‘Soon as possible,’ Emily replies, but again her words are like sludge in her mouth. She hopes Josie hasn’t noticed.
‘Do you think you’re ready, Emily? What with everything you’re going through right now?’ She waits for Emily’s answer, and when none comes she asks, ‘Is there any more information about Daisy yet? We all saw the news about her – her …’ Josie’s words trail off.
‘Her abductor,’ Emily says, and then she leans over the arm of her chair and vomits on the head teacher’s floor.