ONE NIGHT I COME HOME and Simone isn’t there. When I realise she isn’t in her room I go downstairs to look around and bump into Mrs Shimansky talking to one of the other tenants. When I ask casually if they’ve seen Simone, they both shake their heads. I sense Mrs Shimansky’s shrewd eyes on my back as I walk away towards the lift, trying to act normal, forcing myself not to run up the stairs. I have prepared for this moment ever since Simone arrived in my life; I have a list of numbers to call in order of importance. I bypass Mr Smyth and start with the district manager of the security company that has the contract for our apartment block. He calls me back to say the afternoon security guard has confirmed that Simone never came home that afternoon. After that I leave a message for Klaus. I manage my rising hysteria by recalling everything I can, making notes on my laptop, using what Elijah taught me.
When I open the front door to Klaus, the words come tumbling out, ‘She’s run away. Elijah said that the first thing to look for if a teenager goes missing is if the mobile charger is missing. If it’s missing, it means they weren’t abducted.’
‘What time did you last see her?’ Klaus asks, moving past me quickly to Simone’s room. ‘What about clothes?’ he asks, his eyes checking as he talks: window closed as always, bed made up as always, no school case, no lunchbox, no homework books out. ‘Dis onnatuurlik,’ he mutters. I know what he means, it’s struck me before as well – it’s an unnaturally neat room for a teenage girl. Just the one pretty vampire boy poster that she put up with Prestik on the back of the door. For the rest it’s as if she never actually lived there. Except for the laptop. Klaus is already moving towards it as the thought forms in my head. But his training kicks in and he stops himself just before his finger touches the ON button. He tells me not to go into the room under any circumstances because he wants his fingerprint man to go over it with a comb − I let it go. He starts calling as we back out the room, and I hear him ask for an officer to be sent round to our apartment to secure the area. Then we move to the bathroom, and in the bathroom mirror I see Klaus’s face above my head, both of us staring at the lipstick words:
You
lied
to me
My eyes move to the empty glass shelf on the right − the shelf that used to house Daniel’s razor and deodorant. Her toothbrush, toothpaste and hairbrush are gone.
‘What is she talking about?’ Klaus asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply, wondering which one of the many omissions of truth has finally caught up with us. Klaus makes a few more calls, getting his team together. While we wait, he asks what I’ve got in the way of current photographs. I pull out a class photo, in colour, taken by the school photographer. Simone is in the back row of tall girls, her blonde hair provocatively arranged, and suspect maroon lips pouting mutinously (lipstick is strictly forbidden). Occasions that demand her best behaviour bring the worst out in her. Klaus asks me if I’ve checked with Simone’s friends, and I nod numbly. He writes down the names and numbers I provide and tells me to let him know immediately if she comes back. He explains they’ll be taking her laptop with them and I’ll be asked to sign a document for its release.
Klaus’s team arrives while he’s there, and I realise he’s taking Simone’s disappearance seriously. This hasn’t just been logged as a runaway teenager call. The officer he asked for is standing with his hands behind his back outside the door to Simone’s room. Truschka has positioned herself directly in front of him and is staring upwards as if she might read something from his young stiff face. They start in my bedroom, and when they’re finished, I go to lie down on my bed, listening to them nosing around and talking in low voices. I get up to tell them to check under her pillow for her favourite Charlie Brown pyjamas that she had on this morning at breakfast. They make a note that the pyjamas are missing. When I finally lock the front door behind them it’s almost daybreak.
Mid-morning, Klaus calls to say they are still processing information and awaiting some tests but there was nothing obvious in the apartment to indicate any external agency had been involved. This made it more likely − especially since she’d taken her mobile charger − that she’d planned it and just packed her school backpack with the few items she’d taken with. They’d been in contact with the school secretary, who confirmed Simone was there until normal closing time. His team were checking with the other kids in her class to see if anyone saw anything. It was all so familiar it was surreal.
‘You still think she might have been abducted.’
Somewhere there is a skinner. Each layer of skin he takes off my daughter is a layer of my skin. I am being flayed alive as I speak.
There’s a short silence. ‘We can’t take anything for granted, Paola. The first twenty-four hours are crucial in a missing-person case. If she hasn’t returned overnight, we’ll question the whole school if we have to.’ He hesitates and then says, ‘I have men covering the port and the airports.’
‘You think they’re taking her to France?’
‘It doesn’t have to be France,’ Klaus says in an exasperated voice. ‘Can we forget fokkin Frankryk?’ He apologises immediately. ‘Sorry Paola, but you’re like a stuck DVD on that bloody country. We’re following up, okay? That’s what you need to know. My men are making sure there’s a copy of her photograph with every duty officer, and passport control and Home Affairs have been advised to be on the lookout. But in cases like this the abductor often lies low for weeks and even months until the heat is turned down.’
‘Abductors don’t wait for you to take your hairbrush,’ I say desperately. ‘Until the heat is off, that’s the right expression.’
‘We’ll find her, Paola. Get some rest now.’
But they don’t find her, not the next day or the next day. The GPS signal that is supposed to be emitted from her phone so that we can find her is not emitting anything. Klaus says she must have turned off Location Services. Or the phone has been destroyed.
‘What about Simone’s laptop?’ I ask. ‘Is there anything there that might help us to find out where she’s gone?’ He says the experts are still looking at it, but it looks like she was messing about on sites that were below the radar of the big search engines.
‘What does that actually mean, Klaus? Are you telling me she’s trying to hire an assassin on Silk Road? Or buy a gun? Or what?’
‘Nothing like that that we can see,’ Klaus replies evenly. ‘She had Tor loaded on her laptop. But so far we’ve only found typical teenage chat. There’s nothing to tell us where she’s gone.’
My mother is disbelieving (Why has Simona run away? Does she have bad friends who take drugs?), Monica paces and smokes on the balcony, looking out to sea, Kiki makes us tea and wipes tears off her cheeks, and Sharon is a blind, petrified mummy. Their sorrow attaches itself to me with hooks. I tell them I must be alone, and one by one they go. Truschka arranges herself stiffly on my lap, circling a few times before she settles, and we both sit staring out to the horizon until darkness falls. Eventually we go inside and I switch a light on and take the sheet music for R.E.M’s ‘Nightswimming’ out the piano stool. My unpractised fingers ease into the serene circular melody that Daniel never tired of. It dawned on me some time after Daniel’s disappearance that the skinny-dipping theme was allegorical; the aching song was really about loss and the accommodation of guilt into ordinary life. Daniel, Nicky and I were once a threesome. Memory is our light to those bright days.
Nobody knows where our daughter is.