33

We found two seats facing forward as Izzy got travel-sick otherwise, and settled in. I’d brought a sensible packed lunch at Sasha’s insistence, even though she thought we were just going to Exeter for the day. Izzy, on the other hand, had a tote bag filled with crisps, sweets and cans of drink. She got it all out on the flip-down table in front of her, even though it was nine in the morning, opened a Twix and handed me one finger.

‘Go on then,’ I said through a mouthful of chocolate. ‘Tell.’

I was relieved to see that it was going to be something good. She was glowing. She turned towards me, bit off some biscuit from the bottom of the Twix and grinned. She was wearing a pink cardigan over a white T-shirt. She looked adorable.

‘I met someone,’ she said.

‘Seriously? Who?’

Izzy had never had a boyfriend. We’d talked about boys, and plenty of them had asked her out over the years, but she’d always said no. She told me that her standards were too high, and I knew that my dramas had distracted me from asking more.

She was so happy that I wanted to bottle it and make it into a perfume, to be used any time you needed to have a brilliant day. There was something else too, though. Underneath it all she was nervous.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘You ready for this?’

For a wild moment I thought that she, too, might have fallen for a ghost.

‘Yep! Tell me!’

‘It’s someone I met online. We chatted for ages and I’ve met them in real life now too and I’m really happy. I’m so happy, Ariel. I know it’s really early days and I’m trying so, so hard to play it cool, but I’ve never felt like this. Finally …’

‘Finally you’ve met someone who meets your high standards?’

‘Exactly. Finally I have.’

I began to realize.

‘Why are you saying they?’ I said.

She shrugged. ‘Because I was a little bit too shy to say she,’ she said through a mouthful of Twix. She looked away and then her eyes darted back to me. I hugged her.

Izzy’s new love interest was called Tally, and we talked about her for ages. She was seventeen and had lovely thick black hair. They’d met online and clicked straight away. While I’d been looking after Zara and Coco they’d been on their first date. They went for tea and cake and then a movie, and Izzy was buzzing and wild with joy.

‘It’s not just her,’ she said as the train left Devon. ‘Although it is her. It’s very much her. And it’s everything. It’s having the confidence to be myself at last. I tried so hard to like boys because I thought it would be easier, you know?’

I realized that I wasn’t surprised, that it made perfect sense. I was so happy for her.

I was also a bit sad for myself. I hadn’t had any of this, with Joe, and I never would. I couldn’t psyche myself up to tell anyone about him because he’d been dead for twenty years. No one would ever be pleased to hear about this relationship. It could never make sense to anyone but us.

And I didn’t want anyone else. I could have rekindled things with Jack, but I loved Joe. Only Joe. It could only ever be Joe.

We were supposed to be revising the Power and Conflict poems for English lit, but we didn’t even take a book out of a bag. We ate all our food and talked about Izzy and Tally, and then we talked about our mission in London.

‘This is nice,’ Izzy said. ‘Isn’t it? A day trip to London. You know what? You’re mad, but I want to find out what happened to your boy too. Those little girls were so adorable. Their poor dad!’ She shivered. ‘If we can help that family then bring it on. I mean, I can’t have you going to track down a suspect alone, can I?’

Before we knew it we were passing through Reading and I did a namaste hand thing in what I thought might be the direction of the long-defunct Yoga Dojo. Half an hour after that we were in London.

It was warmer than it had been at home, and there were trees with pink cherry blossom at the top of Lucas Ingleby’s road in Haggerston. The sun warmed my cheeks as we walked slowly up to the door of his block of flats. I looked at Izzy, who was clearly regretting the trip now we were actually about to doorstep a strange older man. I could practically see the thought bubble above her head saying, I could be with my girlfriend. I was getting psyched up to find the right buzzer when the front door opened.

He went to walk past without even looking at us, but I stepped into his path.

‘Hi,’ I said, trying to equate this muscular man with the Lucas Joe had told me about, the boy I’d seen in the corridor. His hair was flecked with grey, and that was a jolt, because even though Gus was old too he was Joe’s big brother, while this man was in Joe’s year at school. They were pretty much exactly the same age. If Joe had lived he might have been going grey too. Instead he was younger than me.

Also, I’d seen this man as a boy very recently, and that was enough to freak me right out. I had heard him talk, watched his hurt face when Joe was unthinkingly cutting.

He stopped. ‘Hi?’ he said, neither friendly nor unfriendly. He was just a man who was walking down his own street on a Saturday afternoon. On his way to the gym, judging by his clothes and bag.

‘Lucas?’ I said. ‘This sounds weird, but could we talk to you for a minute? We’re from your old school and we’re writing a thing about Joe Simpson for the school magazine. Because it’s twenty years since he disappeared. His brother, Gus, said you used to be friends with him. Do you have a couple of minutes to talk?’

After working through thousands of more sophisticated ideas than this one we had settled on something as close to the truth as possible. It was important that he shouldn’t think we were interested in him in a sexual way (gross), and this was the best we could manage. Invoking the authority of the school, implying that some teacher was overseeing this, felt like a safety net.

‘Maybe we will even write an article about him,’ Izzy had said.

‘If there was a school magazine,’ I’d added, ‘then they might even have printed it.’

‘So it’s practically true.’

Now I watched Lucas, who was, for lack of any other ideas, our main suspect, to see if anything flickered over his face. All I saw was surprise. He hadn’t expected to be accosted in the street and asked about someone from twenty years ago, which was fair. There didn’t seem to be any panic or guilt, but that didn’t mean anything. If you could kill someone and hide it for twenty years you’d have a good poker face.

Then his expression changed again. He smiled. All of a sudden, he looked nice.

‘Joe Simpson!’ he said. ‘God. Blast from the past. Poor Joe. Have they found out what happened?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re just doing this story because we, the school, want to mark the twenty-year anniversary. I mean, I know it’s technically past, but close enough. I think his family are keen that he shouldn’t be forgotten.’

Lucas nodded. ‘And you’ve spoken to Gus? How’s he doing?’

‘He’s OK. He’s got a lovely partner and two daughters.’

We seemed to be walking down the road with him. I couldn’t help noticing that Lucas hadn’t agreed to an interview, but at the same time he hadn’t told us to go away either, so it was probably best to keep talking.

‘How did you find me?’ he said. ‘This doorstepping thing. It makes me feel quite famous and all, but … couldn’t we have done this over email?’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘We could have emailed,’ said Izzy, ‘but we were in London anyway, on a day out, and when we looked you up and your address was right there we thought we’d try popping over to see you. Haggerston’s cool and we wanted to come here anyway, to walk the canal path.’

I hadn’t even known there was a canal path. This new confident Izzy was amazing.

‘You looked me up how?’

‘Electoral roll,’ I said, and he laughed.

‘I knew I should have ticked the box that keeps it secret,’ he said. ‘Look, I don’t want to be a buzzkill, but what are you, fifteen? Sixteen? You might not want to go turning up at strange men’s houses miles from home on a Saturday afternoon. Email is safer.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But we’re here now. Could we go for a coffee or something? We’ll pay.’

Lucas sighed. He had one of those strange body shapes that I thought meant he went to the gym every day. He was very tall and very broad, but the muscles on his upper body were so developed that he looked as if he was going to tip over, while his legs were quite small. His hair was cut very short, but although all those things added up to quite a scary figure I didn’t feel that he was dangerous, particularly not if we were going for a coffee in a public place.

‘OK, girls,’ he said. ‘For Joe – of course. I’m off to the gym and I’m all psyched for it now, so I don’t want to bail. I’ll meet you in in an hour, OK? Since you want to see the canal, let’s meet at the cafe down there. Turn right here and then left on to the path and you’ll see it in front of you. Hour and twenty maybe?’

‘I don’t think it was him.’

Izzy nodded her agreement. We were waiting at the cafe, at a table in a corner, watching people cycling and running and walking their dogs and children down the path. We were meant to be revising, but really we were people-watching and talking about Lucas.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He didn’t look guilty, did he? He didn’t have an air of …’ She made swirly patterns in the air with her fingers. ‘Oh no! My past has finally caught up!’

‘He was pleased to talk about Joe, if anything.’

I looked at our list of questions. We were prepared for this. Lucas would probably be ages at the gym. We had exams coming up. I pushed the list aside reluctantly and picked up the revision guide.

‘So,’ I said. ‘Themes of power and guilt, right?’

An hour and a half later he joined us at our table, holding some kind of herbal tea in a china cup, and we pulled our attention away from ‘Ozymandias’.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Joe Simpson. Here’s what I’ve been thinking while I pumped iron: why me? I only knew him for, what, a year and a half? Devon must be full of people who hung out with him from when they were babies. And we weren’t even very close. Why doorstep me, girls? Or are you going after everyone?’

‘Weren’t you close really?’ I said. I tried to look innocent. ‘Gus said you were one of his friends. He thought Joe spoke to you on the day he disappeared?’

‘Seriously? I guess he’s right about that, but we weren’t best mates. You need Troy for that. Have you contacted him?’

‘Trying to,’ I said. ‘He lives in France, I think? He’s not on social media at all as far as I can see. It’s really hard to find him.’

‘I could message him for you. Pretty sure I’ve got him on something. Yes! I have. He’s on LinkedIn.’

Izzy laughed. ‘We obviously didn’t think of LinkedIn.’

‘Yes, please!’ I said to Lucas. ‘That would be amazing. So. Do you mind if we record this?’ He shook his head, looking amused, and Izzy carefully switched on the voice recorder on her phone. ‘Lucas Ingleby, thanks for talking to us. Can you tell us your memories of Joe Simpson first of all? What was he like?’

Lucas leaned back in his chair. ‘OK. This was a formative time in my life. I was new to the school in Year Nine. It wasn’t easy arriving when everyone already had friends. I was an outsider. To be honest I never fitted in, and there weren’t exactly many mixed-race guys in Devon, so I always felt like a bit of a target. I was at that school for three years, and Joe’s disappearance came halfway through it. Everything is divided into before and after Joe. I really liked him. I’m not just saying that because of what happened. I remember noticing him straight away because he was one of those, you know, cool kids. He had everything and he didn’t even know it. He was good at the school stuff, and he was sporty too, but he had that extra something. The sparkle. The energy. The magic. He would’ve gone on to do something amazing. I’m sure of it. The moment I saw him I wanted to be friends, and I guess that was my downfall. I liked him, but he didn’t like me, and he could be pretty harsh. I guess I tried too hard and pissed him off. Plus, he was mates with Troy and they didn’t want anyone else because they were fine just as they were. I was jealous. I was big for my age – not like I am now, but tall and a bit clumsy, and … What are you, Year Ten?’

‘Eleven,’ I said.

‘Yeah. You two are obviously fine, but you know the kids in your lessons who can’t quite pull it together? The ones who don’t have best friends and who kick about on their own? It’s shit being a teenager. At least it was for me. I wanted a mate, and I wanted it to be Joe, and he thought I was an embarrassment and a twat, but I kept trying and he kept telling me why I was shit. Bit pathetic really. When he disappeared, it had a huge effect on me. Altered my life forever. I don’t want to make it all about me because it’s not. It’s about Joe and his family, but I still had to find a way to live with it. You know what I mean? We all did. They can give you a counsellor to talk to and whatever, but as far as I was concerned it didn’t scratch the surface. I fell apart. I don’t think you’d have known it to look at me, but I did.

‘I was gutted. I mean, more than gutted. Gutted is when they give you the wrong syrup in your frappuccino. I was devastated. My life stopped, but I still had to carry on.’

He looked at us over the top of his drink. I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.

‘Sometimes the people who look like they’re holding things together actually aren’t,’ I said. ‘I mean, you said we look like we have no problems, but my mum died last year, and my dad ran away, and I live with my sister who’s pregnant.’

‘Oh! Sorry,’ he said, looking a bit thrown. ‘I just meant –’

‘And I literally just came out to Ariel on the train this morning,’ said Izzy unexpectedly.

I took her hand and squeezed it. We grinned at each other.

‘Oh God. Sorry again. I didn’t mean to be flippant.’

‘But what about Joe?’ I said. ‘He had Troy and his dad and Gus. And his mum. Though his parents have divorced since then. Do you think he was struggling in secret?’

‘Did he “do something stupid”, you mean?’ Lucas made air quotes with his fingers. ‘No, I don’t think he did, though of course you can never know. But here’s why I think he didn’t: he would have left a note. He was close to his family. No way would he have done it without leaving one. And also what about his body?’

Lucas was saying all the right things. We’d ambushed him and he seemed interested and helpful, rather than guilty or nervous. Also, I had seen Joe being horrible to him with my own eyes. I didn’t want to make him go into that, but it must have meant his feelings were complicated.

Izzy leaned forward and asked the most important question of all.

‘What do you think did happen then?’

Lucas looked at both of us in turn. I could see him trying to decide whether to say it or not.

‘Can we turn this thing off?’ he said, nodding to Izzy’s phone, and she stopped the recording. ‘I hate to say it, but I’ve always thought someone killed him. Or kidnapped him. It’s the old Sherlock Holmes thing. Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains must be the truth. My feeling is that he was abducted because of the way he vanished without trace. That doesn’t happen by accident. I did try my own detective work in the early days, but I didn’t get anywhere. I mean, I had no idea where to start. Who would kill Joe Simpson? The only person he didn’t like was me, and I didn’t do it. I was pretty sure no one in his family had done it. And people just don’t plot to murder normal teenage kids. He’s not, like, an heir to a fortune, or whatever might draw the attention of proper bad guys.’

He looked up at the ceiling. ‘God, it’s weird going back over this. So, if you rule out suicide, which I tentatively do because of the note thing, and if you rule out someone plotting to murder him because there’s no one, really, who would have done it – that kind of thing doesn’t happen in downtown Devon – then you’re left with a few things. Either he died by accident in a way that meant his body was never found, so probably involving the sea, or he was kidnapped. Or else someone killed him by accident, or on purpose, and did an excellent job of getting rid of …’

He blinked. ‘Sorry. You’ve taken me right back. I was obsessed with this. I became paranoid about attackers. That’s why I decided to get fit. I was ahead of the curve with the gym stuff.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t put any of this in your article. None of it, yeah?’

‘No,’ I said at once. ‘The article will be short. I’m actually getting really interested in this too, in its own right. I know I didn’t know Joe.’

Sorry, Joe, I added in my head. I do know you. I love you.

‘But I feel like I did, and I can’t believe this whole thing is just hanging there. It’s so strange.’

‘Isn’t it? I didn’t sleep for years just thinking about it. There wasn’t a robbery at Beachview. No obvious bad guy skulking about. There’s just nothing. I have no idea. Where would you dispose of a body?’

‘The sea,’ said Izzy.

‘Yeah. It always comes back to that. But even then it would most likely wash back up. I did a lot of calculations on this, and I think I ended up deciding that the river would have been a possibility because it’s deep in places, and if you weighed the body down it could stay there forever. But they dredged it. Of course they did, and there was no trace of anything. That’s why I come back to abduction. His body’s gone, so it must be somewhere else. They could have taken him anywhere in the country.’ Lucas looked at us again and smiled. ‘Sorry. Again, don’t put this in your magazine.’

‘We won’t,’ I said. ‘But, talking of the article, can you give us a bit of background on the day he went missing? Can you remember the last conversation you and Joe had?’

Lucas was silent for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was far away and sad.

‘Funny thing,’ he said. ‘You go over something enough times and it stops being real. Like now – am I remembering my last conversation with Joe, or am I remembering myself thinking about it endlessly for years? I’m not sure I can keep the real thing and my memories of it apart from each other. So he was supposed to be going on the French trip that night. They never went, of course. You can’t set off on a coach when one of the party has vanished. But I do remember seeing him at school that day. I used to hang around on the way to school, on the road that I knew he and Troy took, and try to walk with them. I sound like I had a crush or something. I didn’t. I just wanted a friend, and somehow the more Joe told me to fuck off – he could be direct – the more I hung around like a puppy. Though it would have been quite a puppy: six foot tall and built like a shithouse.

‘Anyway. That day I caught up with them just before we got to school. I was mad jealous that they were going to France. That trip cost two hundred pounds, and I remember how impossible that was for my family. I quite liked French, and I would have loved to go – not for the bit where you have to stay with people you don’t know for a week, but for the bus ride, the ferry, the friendship, the in-jokes you have when you get back, all that – but I had no chance. I was eaten up with jealousy. I think I tried to talk French to him. Ça va bien, that kind of thing, as a way of saying, “Hey, you’re going to France today!” and he told me to fuck off. I don’t know. I wasn’t good at that stuff. I had no social skills. Didn’t get any for years and years. If ever arguably.’

‘You have social skills now,’ said Izzy politely. Lucas nodded his thanks.

‘I don’t think we had any lessons together that day, though as I said it was a long time ago and I don’t know what I’m remembering or what I’m filling in. After school I definitely watched Joe walking into town, telling Troy he was going to get a present for the family in France. I wanted to go with him, but of course I couldn’t. I wish, though, that I had. I wish I’d followed him. Kept him safe. And we know that Joe went to Beachview and then he was never seen again.’

Izzy said, ‘When did you find out that he was missing?’

I was a bit surprised by that. I was surprised by the fact that it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. For some reason I’d been incapable of thinking past the moment when Joe’s eternal day cut out.

Lucas sighed. ‘That night. Everyone did. You can’t imagine what it was like, you kids now, but we didn’t have social media or any of that. Some folks had mobile phones, but I didn’t. People were calling round on landlines, asking if anyone had seen him. Mum knocked on my bedroom door and asked if I had any idea where he was. I think a bit of her thought she’d find him in there, talking to me. If only. We joined in the search they’d started. Small town – you know how it is. Everyone was out. We walked all the way round the streets and shouted his name, asked everybody, stuck his photo on lamp posts like people do for cats. I kept thinking we were definitely about to find him. Just round the next corner. Maybe the next.’

He stopped talking, and I realized that, in a way, this was where the story ended.

‘But no one ever did,’ I said.

‘I don’t think any of us slept that night because it’s really impossible to say, yeah, actually I can’t find him, so I’m just going to go home and have a nice kip instead. I didn’t sleep for weeks, not more than an hour here and there.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘For years. Jeez. Listen to me. Twenty years ago, but it doesn’t get easier. I guess there comes a time when you realize that he’s almost sure to be dead. Again – not easier. And there’s no single moment when you give up hope. You never give it up, not completely.’

‘Sorry for coming along and stirring it all up,’ said Izzy. I was glad she did: he looked terrible. I wasn’t exactly Miss Marple, but I felt as certain as I could that Lucas hadn’t been the one who hurt Joe. I could see (and it was uncomfortable) that Joe had repeatedly hurt Lucas, but I was pretty sure Lucas hadn’t retaliated with an unlucky fatal punch.

Izzy was saying all the right things. I was barely holding it together, so she had taken the reins. She was brilliant.

‘Hey,’ Lucas said. ‘Sorry for landing all that on you. All you wanted was some quotes for your magazine. It’s just good to talk about him. I’m glad you’re writing his story. It’s important that he’s not forgotten. But, seriously, an old guy like me offloading on a couple of teenage girls: that’s really not appropriate. Apologies.’

He looked around, as if the other people here might be disapproving, though they were all busy with their own things.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘And thank you for talking to us. It’s really nice of you. I promise we’ll only take a couple of your quotes for our article.’

‘Oh,’ said Lucas. ‘Print what you like from that recording. I don’t care. Will you send me a copy when it’s done? I think it’s fantastic that you’re interested.’ He blinked. ‘Makes me quite emotional actually. Hey – do you have photos for your piece? I have a couple on my phone. Call me tragic, but I have a Joe Simpson folder right here.’

He found them quickly and handed his phone over. I scrolled through a bunch of pictures of old photos. I could see the creases on them, and the colours were faded and changed.

It took my breath away.

This boy was my Joe, but different. Now, for the first time, I understood why Lucas had been so jealous, why Joe had been a golden boy. There was a life force about him that my Joe didn’t have. I adored my Joe, but I saw now that he was a shadow of his living self. In one of the photos he was grinning into the camera, squinting into the sun, and everything about his hair and his skin and his smile was so young. So alive. I blinked hard, and then decided it was OK to cry.

This Joe had been golden, but he hadn’t been kind to Lucas. I thought that I liked my Joe better, which was a headfuck.

Another was a class picture. I saw Joe straight away, in the middle of the front row, sitting next to a boy who had to be Troy because he was very tall with bright red hair.

And then I realized I’d seen Troy before.

Troy was looking at Joe, and Joe was giving the camera a cheesy grin and a thumbs up. I looked for Lucas and found him in the back row, frowning.

Troy had been the boy in the playground. He had written HELP ME on the wall with a stone.

‘Wow,’ I said.

Izzy was peering over my shoulder. ‘Joe is gorgeous,’ she said. ‘He kind of looks like Robert Pattinson.’

I ignored that.

‘There must be something we can do.’ We looked at each other, and Izzy’s unconditional support made me cry properly. I didn’t care if I looked stupid.

‘Right?’ said Lucas, and he was blinking hard too. ‘Look, give me your email and I’ll send these over. You’re welcome to use them. And, again, I’m glad you’re doing this. It means a lot, to know that the next generation remembers. It’s the only thing we can do now. Give my best to Gus and the family. Is it true that his dad married Mrs Dupont?’

‘It is! And she’s still at the school. She’s our French teacher. Ms Duke. It took me a while to piece that together, but we think she changed her name back to Duke when she got divorced from Dupont, and then just kept it when she married Jasper Simpson.’

‘No way!’ He looked delighted. ‘That’s so surreal. I know the school changed its name and all that, but it’s good to know that some things are the same. She was one of the good ones.’

I wrote down my email for Lucas, aware, as I did it, that it was odd for a teenage girl to start an email correspondence with an older man. I could see that he felt it too.

He hesitated. ‘I’ll drop a message to Troy, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. We were never friends, and after Joe he moved schools. As you’re aware he’s in France now, and I see him doing corporate stuff in French on LinkedIn from time to time. I just added him because he came up as a connection, but I don’t really know much about him. Oh, one thing, though! I think he got married to a Frenchwoman and took her name, the weirdo. His LinkedIn name changed a few years ago.’

‘That’s so cool!’ said Izzy. ‘I love that. Smash the patriarchy.’

‘What’s his new surname?’ I said.

Lucas frowned, then knocked back the rest of his tea. ‘Can’t remember,’ he said. ‘Something French. I’ll find out.’

‘Thanks!’

‘And promise you’ll send me a copy of your magazine?’

‘Sure,’ I said, wondering whether we could mock one up just for him, or maybe start a brand-new magazine.

Izzy asked if she could take some photos for the article and he posed in a self-conscious way.

My emotions were all over the place as we walked away. I was pleased that we’d tracked Lucas down and spoken to him, but the reality was Joe should have been old like that.

Then I looked over at Izzy and saw that she was, in fact, crying, so I let myself do that too. We took each other’s hands and kept walking. By the time we got to the overground train we were smiling at each other. I dried my eyes with my sleeve and we set off into the centre of London to do a few tourist things before we had to go home.