‘Have you?’
‘Yes. I mean, I was only a kid in 2005 so I’d never heard of Ellie Mack before. And now, well, it’s sort of weird that you’re here, in my dad’s house, and that this hideous, terrible thing happened to you, a thing that just doesn’t happen to people. And I keep thinking …’ She pauses. ‘Do you believe that she ran away?’
Laurel feels herself almost physically pushed backwards by the unexpectedness of the question.
‘No,’ she says softly. ‘No I don’t. But then I’m her mother. I knew her. I knew what she wanted and where she was heading and what made her happy. And I know she wasn’t stressed about her GCSEs. So no, deep down I don’t believe she ran away. But I have to because the evidence is all there.’
‘The burglary, you mean?’
‘Yes, the burglary. Except I don’t think of it as a burglary. She used her key. She just came home to collect some things. That’s all.’
‘But … the bag. Don’t you ever wonder about the bag?’
‘The bag?’
‘Yes. Ellie’s rucksack. The one they found in the forest. Don’t you think, I don’t know, but surely after all those years on the run she’d have had some different things in it? Not just the things she had when she ran away from home?’
A chill runs through Laurel. She thinks of the hours she spent asking herself the same question at the time. Eventually she’d made peace with the theory that Ellie had deliberately kept a bag with her things from home in it as a kind of security blanket, in the same way that Laurel had kept Ellie’s bedroom untouched for most of the years that she was missing.
‘And you know,’ SJ continues, ‘there’s another thing, something really strange, about Poppy’s mum—’ She stops talking and they both turn at the sound of the door opening. It’s Floyd. He’s holding two mugs of tea and he throws Laurel a grateful look.
‘There you go,’ he says, putting the mugs down on the table and then sitting down next to Laurel. ‘Medicinal tea. For frayed nerves. Everything OK?’
Laurel touches Floyd’s leg and says, ‘We’ve had a good chat.’
‘Yes,’ agrees Sara-Jade. ‘It’s been a good chat. I’m going to think about things.’
Laurel and Sara-Jade exchange a look. They have started a conversation that needs to be finished. But it will have to wait for another time.
Twenty-five
The next morning Laurel awakes late and full of unsettling dreams. It takes her a moment to place her surroundings; they’ve conflated themselves with something she dreamed about. But a second later she remembers that she is in Floyd’s bed, that it is Wednesday, that it is nearly nine and that she really, really wants to go home.
She showers and dresses and finds Floyd and Poppy at the breakfast table, reading the papers together.
‘Good morning,’ says Floyd. ‘I didn’t wake you. You looked so peaceful.’
‘Thank you. I must have needed it. Morning, Poppy.’
‘Morning, Laurel!’
She’s back in a classic Poppy outfit: pink cords and a black polo neck, hair clipped back at both sides.
‘Let me get you some breakfast,’ says Floyd, rising to his feet.
‘You know, actually, I’m going to head home, I think, and let you two get on with your day. I need to catch up with myself before I head over to Hanna’s.’
Floyd sees her off from his door with a long kiss and a plan for her to come back that evening. ‘I’ll make you something delicious,’ he says. ‘Do you like veal?’
‘I do like veal.’
‘Great,’ he says, ‘I’ll see you later.’
Laurel feels curiously relieved as she slides into her car and starts the engine. She’d thought that Floyd might try to guilt-trip her into staying longer and was pleased when he didn’t. Now she feels a sense of escape. The discovery that Poppy’s mum used to teach Ellie maths, Hanna’s comment about Ellie finding Noelle Donnelly creepy and weird and her conversation last night with Sara-Jade have all left her feeling shaky and full of holes. She needs to get home and breathe in her own space. And she needs to do something else, something she hasn’t done for a very, very long time.
Laurel makes herself a mug of tea and takes it into the spare room. She sits on the edge of the bed and she reaches down to pull a cardboard box towards her. Ellie’s box. She remembers filling it in the old house. She’d been numb and drained and taken too long over it, a full day, touching and caressing, holding and smelling. She’d read Ellie’s diaries. They were sporadic things that leaped about over the years, making it hard to work out what she was writing about half the time as she rarely dated the entries. Some of it Laurel had skipped over and she’d thrown one notebook bodily away from herself at a reference to giving Theo a hand-job.
There’d been nothing in those diaries then, nothing to indicate a secret life, a secret friend, unhappiness of any sort. She hadn’t looked at them since.
But she pulls some out now, flipping through them to find the entries written in the months before she disappeared. They were messy records. Doodles and cartoons, homework and revision notes here and there, dates and numbers and lists of things to buy on a trip to Oxford Street:
Nice moisturiser
New trainers (not black or white)
Books: Atonement, Lovely Bones
Trainer socks
Birthday card for dad ?
There were lipstick kisses and smudges of ink and glittery stickers. And, scattered in between, loose records of her days. And in those days and weeks before she ran away there were only two things going on in Ellie’s world. Theo and revision. Theo and revision. Theo and revision.
Laurel peers closely at an entry from what seems to be January. Ellie is bemoaning her result in a maths test. A B+. She’d wanted an A. Theo had got an A. Laurel sighs. Ellie had constantly aligned herself with Theo, as though he was the only benchmark that mattered.
‘Asked Mum for a tutor,’ she wrote. ‘Fingers crossed she says yes. I am sooooo shit at maths …’
And there, a few entries later: ‘Tutor came! She’s a bit weird but a great teacher! A* here I come!’
Laurel turns the pages faster and faster. She’s looking for something but she doesn’t quite know what, something to tie all the loose fragments of her dreams together with the reality of the last few days’ revelations.
Tutor today. I got 97 % in the paper she set me. She gave me a set of lip balms. So sweet!
Tutor 5 p.m. She brought me a scented pen. She’s so sweet!
Tutor 5 p.m. She said I’m the best student she’s ever had! But of course!
Tutor 5 p.m. Bit weird today, asking me strange questions about what I want in life. Think she’s having a midlife crisis!
Tutor 5 p.m. 100%!! I literally just got 100%!!! Tutor says I am a genius. She is 100% right!
Tutor 5 p.m. Think I’m over this now. She really freaks me out sometimes. She’s so intense. And she smells. Am going to ask Mum to cancel her. I can do this by myself. Don’t need bunny boilers in my life.