Maybe Silvia put it in the wash, fabric can get so dusty. She was so careful about disturbing things, but she perhaps wasn’t to know … But I’m suddenly torn up inside, blinking away tears again.
Because I’m thinking of the start, when they kept asking me what she’d taken. Sophie would never have gone without her blankie, I knew that, even when she was sixteen years old and would blush to admit it. I knew that she couldn’t sleep without it tucked under her pillow – a childhood habit that she’d yet to drop. But she had, of course, she had left it at home along with all the rest of the life she’d discarded so easily. I didn’t know her that well, after all. And now, the one time I want it, I can’t find it.
It’s such a small stupid thing. I shouldn’t even care. But the lightness had already dissipated, the familiar anxious buzz swelling up again.
No, I can’t accept that she’s gone. Nothing about this has ever felt right, has ever made sense, whatever they said to me. It still doesn’t.
‘Love you, So,’ I said on the phone. And then she hung up on me.
She’d never do that. It’d be ‘Love you, So’, ‘Love you, Mo’. Just one of those silly family jokes from childhood. She’d never forget that. But why would she punish me with that little snub, withhold that endearment from me? Is she that angry?
A chill goes down my spine. Have I got it wrong, so horribly wrong, that I don’t realise I wasn’t speaking to Sophie at all, just some confused, troubled caller, me hearing what I wanted to hear?
No. It can’t be, it was her. I know my daughter, I do.
Something isn’t right. Whatever they say. Whatever she told me.
And that’s when I decide. That’s when I know, with rare clarity.
I’m not going to rely on them to find her, not any more. It didn’t work the first time, after all.
This is my last chance. My last chance to find Sophie.
9
My stomach flutters as I pull into the car park in the village. I’m nervous, I realise. I was surprised to find myself feeling buoyant this morning, the sense of optimism unfamiliar. I made the effort to scramble eggs and drink two cups of milky coffee, the cat prowling around my feet. Now it’s all still churning unpleasantly inside me. But I’d decided. This time around, I’m not going to just sit tight and wait for the police to let me know what’s happening.
I’ve got a plan.
First on my list is speaking to Holly Dixon – just to ask what she thinks, if there might be any possible factor I don’t know about that’s keeping Sophie away. And then maybe she’ll have an idea, someone else I can talk to. Isn’t that how it works? Anything to stave off that old trapped feeling. I’m determined to stay active, to hold on to this new stirring of purpose. My grief coach (Lara doesn’t like the word ‘counsellor’, she says we are partners together in this) would be proud of me. If I still saw her.
Last night I left a message on Holly’s mobile, hoping she hadn’t changed the number. We haven’t spoken in a long time. I left a long, rambling message about Sophie’s call, that I could explain properly later, but did she think we could meet? Within about twenty minutes my phone beeped.
OK. Can do 11 tmrw, coffee?
We arranged to meet in the village, as she’s still local. Not in the cutesy cafe, where you can buy the knickknacks that take your fancy. I know too many people in there. I’ve gone for the pizza chain one everyone disapproved of when it opened, staffed by breezily anonymous Australians. I like it.
I’m five minutes early but she’s already sitting there at a table in the corner. ‘You’ve changed your hair,’ I say. ‘Blue!’ Still so much make-up, I see.
‘Oh, yeah,’ she says, touching a mermaid strand. ‘Well, I got bored of the lilac. Everyone was doing it, didn’t you notice.’
I smile, looking around. Today the place is fairly empty, but there’s not a lot of purple hair around here, it’s all tasteful honey highlights, from the girls in school to their mothers.
‘It’s pretty,’ I say.
She quickly covers the flicker of surprise. Too late, I remember.
Holly used to stay over all the time. She and Sophie would disappear upstairs and there’d be screams of laughter into the small hours, the two of them doing God knows what in Sophie’s bathroom. One time, they’d emerged in the morning with pink hair – ‘It washes out, Mum, don’t worry!’ Sophie reassured me, Holly looking at me sidelong, amusement in her eyes as I tried to keep my temper.
Teenagers were always looking for a reaction, I knew. But it had been an expensive trip to the hairdresser to take Sophie’s hair back to its baby blonde. She hadn’t been grateful at all. ‘Well, I think it looks cool, Mum. I don’t want to change it.’
Holly and I order cappuccinos. Her mum’s well, she says in answer to my questions.
I’ve seen her, since Sophie went, but after the first few encounters, we seemed to make a tacit agreement to smile and nod. I heard Holly didn’t stick around in school after her GSCEs, but she seems to have done well since then. She has started at college and plans to be a nurse. Her tutor, she tells me, ‘is a total b—’ she catches herself.’ … a bit difficult’, but she’s enjoyed it.
What she doesn’t need to spell out is the reason why I’ve avoided her until now. The wound Sophie left in her life is healing over. She’s hitting milestones Sophie hasn’t. I keep asking questions, suddenly wanting to hear the detail, though it stings. But the lull’s inevitable.
‘So why did you want to meet?’ she says.
I take a breath. ‘Obviously you and Sophie were really close.’ Quickly, I tell her about the call, the bare details of what I heard at the helpline. ‘I have a feeling … that she wants to come back home.’ It sounds weak even as I say it, but Holly’s nodding, her face serious.
‘I do too,’ she says. ‘I knew she’d come back, one day.’
Another memory: Holly loved horoscopes, all that stuff – she even carried around a battered pack of Tarot cards that impressed Sophie deeply. I’d see them bent over the cards on the floor of Sophie’s room, their heads – Sophie’s pale blonde, Holly’s a bleached mirror version – close together, both girls giggling.
‘There’s just a few things I wanted to get straight in my head,’ I say now. ‘About why she left. If she calls again I just – I just want to understand. If something might be stopping her, even now?’
‘Well, it was all said at the time, wasn’t it,’ says Holly flatly. ‘In the papers.’
I flinch, remembering how exposed I’d felt. I’d gone along with it all – media appeals, articles in the evening newspaper, a video plea with Mark for Sophie to ‘Please come home. We’re not angry, we just want to know you’re OK’ that they ran on the local six o’clock news.
Then we made the nationals. There were a few pieces, the longer ones mentioning Mark’s job at the firm, and making much of the fact that Sophie’s exams were approaching. Her school, the local grammar, was described as an ‘academic hot-house’. There was a comment from a ‘neighbour’ that we were new here from London, ‘only the one child, a lot of expectation’. I’d read that article several times.
‘They’re saying she was under too much pressure,’ I’d said to Mark that morning. ‘That’s what they’re implying. From us.’
‘Well, no point worrying about what people write,’ said Mark shortly. He was starting not to like to talk about it so much.
‘A lot of expectation’ – I read the words again, in black and white.
‘Well, that’s wrong,’ Mark said aloud, reading over my shoulder. ‘That’s only what we paid for this place when we bought it, it’s worth a lot more now. See, they can’t get anything right.’ I’d nearly hit him.
The coverage dried up soon enough, anyway. A pair of boarding-school sweethearts used their parents’ credit cards to buy flights to Antigua and refused to come home, pushing Sophie’s humdrum runaway story off the newspaper pages. Even before the investigation ground to a halt.