It’s just Jeanie that’s missing. Just the body that’s not here.
I kick the washing machine some more until there’s a huge fucking dent in it.
And then the officer at the door coughs gently, and I turn towards her.
We get in the police car, and we continue the search for my sister.
One, a special constable it seems, mutters to the other, ‘Twice up here in two days. There was that biker last night…’
The other frowns.
The first one says, ‘Did you see the blood in the bathroom?’ and then the other casts a furtive look at me in the mirror, hushing her colleague.
We drive on in silence, only the crackling police radio for company.
* * *
The day is drawing in, just a thin line of light left across the horizon, when the call comes.
Apparently a sheep farmer from Castern saw a woman walking near the bridge over the river Dove late last night as he drove back up to his farm. He thought she looked a bit unsteady on her feet, but he was on his way to check his sheep after a call about a savage dog roaming the fields. In the ensuing drama the woman slipped his mind. But this evening he found a rucksack in another one of his fields, below Thorpe Cloud, near a shepherd’s hut. And a pair of broken glasses.
They might be Jeanie’s.
As we drive down the ploddingly windy roads, the radio crackles to say they’ve found someone.
‘Is she alive?’ I keep asking frantically. ‘Please – is she alive?’
‘Please, Miss Randall,’ the WPC repeats, ashen faced as her colleague drives faster. ‘Let’s just wait till we get there, all right?’
Then she turns the radio off so I can’t hear anything more.
* * *
By the time we get out there, the bewildered farmer is being led off for questioning. Halfway up the track, an ambulance is parked as near to the stone hut as it can get, and as I scramble up the hill, I see them carry a stretcher to the door.
‘Jeanie, I’m coming!’ I’m screaming, falling and righting myself and falling again. ‘Jeanie! I’m here. It’s all right!’
But of course it’s not all right, is it? It really, really isn’t all right.
They give me the broken glasses later, and the twisted frame breaks my heart. They are so pathetic. They are Jeanie.
* * *
Later.
When I can catch my breath.
When I’ve gone in the ambulance to Derby and they’ve taken her off and she’s not moved a hair, an inch, a muscle, a nerve ending.
When I’ve felt like I should call someone but don’t know who. When I’ve seen my big sister Jean looking very small; tubed up, gowned up, not breathing for herself any more but hooked up to a machine that’s doing the breathing for her, her face as white as the sheets she lies between. When I’ve sat holding her limp hand, berating both of us for this sorry state of affairs – but mainly myself of course. When I’ve smoked fags out the front next to the women with bad roots and pink towelling robes, shuffling in slippers, I catch a cab, and I go back to the cottage.
I try to think logically.
They showed me the note earlier: it was baldly simple and written in printed capitals.
I’m sorry – I can’t go on.
But why? Why now, exactly?
Because of Matthew? Really? Would it affect her to this degree, the heartbreak?
But maybe it was the final straw, after the hell that was Simon, twelve years ago. And then the Seaborne business – and then Prince Charming – who turned out to just be fucked-up Matthew.
Given the crap we grew up in, it’s amazing really how high functioning she was, how she kept going most of the time. Because she had to. Because one of us had to.
Would she really have left Frankie? That’s what haunts me, more than anything. I have to tell Frankie – and soon.
I go through everything in the house.
It doesn’t take long to find the diary in her bedroom, tangled in the bed sheets – but it’s almost brand new I realise, as I tear through it; only been started this week.
So where’s the one before? That’s the one I need.
It’ll all be there in black and white I imagine. Where are the secrets of her heart?
Some time after I start searching I stop and drink the dregs of a bottle of wine in the kitchen – acidic Sauvignon Blanc that I hate and she likes – and then I check the time.
It’s dark outside now, but I walk down into Ashbourne and buy a bottle of vodka just before the off licence shuts.
I trudge back up the hill with it, spooked by the darkness of the countryside.
I sit at her table, and I drink the vodka neat, and I read the brief contents of the diary again, looking for clues.
There’s hardly anything though.
When I finish I go outside, and I smoke a cigarette, sitting on the bench in the tiny front garden. The sky is very big here, and there are hundreds of stars, and all the space scares me. It’s not natural.