“Tuesday, yes?”
“Yes. Ten a.m. Then the second paper the week after.”
Noelle nodded, her eyes never leaving Ellie’s. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been using a practice paper with my other students. They all say it’s been superhelpful. And from what I’ve heardthrough the grapevineit has a lot of crossover with this year’s paper. If you like I could give you a copy?”
NO,Ellie screamed at herself from beyond the beyond.NO.I DO NOT WANT YOUR PRACTICE PAPER.But the here-and-now Ellie, the one who wanted to spend her summer paragliding and losing her virginity, the one who was having pizza tonight and seeing her boyfriend tomorrow morning,thatEllie said, “Oh, right. Yes. That could be good.”
“Now let me see,” said Noelle, touching her lips with her forefinger. “I could drop by this evening. I’ll be close to you then.”
“Great,” said Ellie. “Yes, that would be great.”
“Or... you know, maybe better still”—she looked at her watch and then briefly behind her—“I’m just here.” She pointed at a side road. “Literally four houses down. Why don’t you pop in now? It’ll take ten seconds.”
It was busy that Thursday morning. People passed on either side of them. Ellie thought of those people afterward, wondered if they’d noticed, wondered if somewhere in someone’s head there lay an untouched memory of a girl with a rucksack, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans talking to a woman in a khaki waterproof with a Daunt Books shoulder bag. She imagined aCrimewatchreenactment of these moments. Who would they cast as her? Hanna, probably. They were almost the same height these days. And a red-haired female police officer togged up in an ugly green coat, pretending to be Noelle.
“Were you there,” Nick Robinson would say afterward, eyes narrowed at the camera, “on the morning of Thursday the twenty-sixth of May? Did you see a middle-aged woman with red hair talking to Ellie Mack? They were outside the Red Cross charity shop on Stroud Green Road. It was about ten forty-five a.m. You might remember the weather that day; it was the day of an electrical storm over London. Did you see the woman in the green coat walking with Ellie Mack toward Harlow Road?” The screen would shift to some grainy CCTV footage of Ellie and Noelle walking together up Stroud Green Road—Ellie would look tiny and vulnerable, turning that last corner, heading toward her fate, like a prize idiot. “Please,” Nick would say, “if you remember anything from that morning, if you saw Ellie Mack on Harlow Road, please get in touch. We’re waiting for your call.”
But nobody had seen Ellie that morning. No one had noticed her talking to a woman with red hair. No one had seenher walking with her toward Harlow Road. No one had seen Noelle Donnelly unlock the door of a small scruffy house with a flowering cherry tree outside and turn to Ellie and say, “Come on then, in you come.” No one had seen Ellie walk through the door. No one had heard the door close behind her.
12
Paul and Laurel buried the partial remains of their daughter on a sunny afternoon at the tail end of an indolent Indian summer. They buried her femurs, her tibias, and most of her skull.
According to the forensics report, her daughter had been run over by a vehicle, her broken body then dragged some distance through the woodland, buried in a shallow grave, and left for animals to take her bones and scatter them through the woods. For days dogs had swarmed through the woods where she’d been found, looking for more pieces of their daughter, but they’d found nothing else.
The police trawled local garage records for cars that had been brought in with damage commensurate with hitting a body. They also leafleted the surrounding areas, asking if anyone remembered a female hitchhiker, a passenger on a bus, a young woman with a navy-blue rucksack; had she stayed in your hostel, your home; did you come upon her sleeping rough; do you recognize this face, this girl of fifteen years old, this computer-generated woman of twenty-five? Photos of Laurel’s candlesticks were circulated. Had anyone sold them, seen them, bought them? But no one came forward. No one had seen anything. No one knew anything. After a twelve-week flurry of activity everything went still again.
And now Ellie was dead. The possibility was gone. Laurel was alone. Her family was broken. There was nothing. Literally nothing.
Until one day, a month after Ellie’s funeral, Laurel met Floyd.
PART TWO
13
Laurel hands the young girl who washed her hair a two-pound coin. “Thank you, Dora,” she says, smiling nicely.
Then she gives the hairstylist a five-pound note and says, “Thank you, Tania, it looks great, it really does. Thank you so much.”
She eyes her reflection one more time in the wall-length mirror before leaving. Her hair is shoulder-length, blonde, shiny and swishy. Her hair is entirely unrepresentative of what lies beneath. If she could pay someone in Stroud Green eighty pounds to give her psyche a shiny, swishy blow-dry, she would. And she would give them more than a five-pound tip.
Outside it is a blowy autumn afternoon. Her hair feels light as silk as it is whipped around her head. It’s late and she’s hungry and decides that she can’t wait to get home to eat so she pushes open the door to the café three doors down from her hairdresser’s and orders herself a toasted cheese sandwich and a decaf cappuccino. She eats fast and the cheese pulls away from the bread in unruly strings that break and slap against her chin. She has a paper napkin to her chin to wipe away the grease when a man walks in.
He is of average height, average build, around fifty. His hair is cut short, gray at the temples, receding, and darker on the top. He’s wearing good jeans with a nice shirt, lace-up shoes, tortoiseshell glasses: the sort of clothes that Paul would wear. And whatever her feelings are now about Paul—and they are conflicted and horribly confusing—she has to concede that he always looks lovely.
She finds, to her surprise, that she is almost admiring the man in the doorway. There is something about him: a low-key swagger and a certain—dare she say it?—twinkle in his eye. She watches as he queues at the counter, takes in more detail: a flat but soft stomach, good hands, one ear that protrudes slightly farther than the other. He’s not handsome in the traditional sense of the word but has the air of a man who has long ago accepted his physical limitations and shifted all the focus to his personality.
He orders a slice of carrot cake and a black coffee—his accent is hard to place, possibly American, or a foreigner who learned English from Americans—and then carries them to the table next to hers. Laurel’s breath catches. He didn’t appear to have noticed her staring at him yet he’s chosen the table closest to hers in a café full of empty tables. She panics, feeling as though maybe she’s subconsciously, inadvertently, invited his attentions. She doesn’t want his attentions. She doesn’t want any attention.
For a few moments they sit like that, side by side. He doesn’t look at her, not once, but Laurel can feel some kind of intent radiating from him. The man plays with a smartphone. Laurel finishes her cheese sandwich in smaller, slower mouthfuls. After a while she begins to think maybe she was imagining it. She drinks her coffee and starts to leave.
Then: “You have beautiful hair.”
She turns, shocked at his words, and says, “Oh.”
“Really pretty.”
“Thank you.” Her hand has gone to her hair, unthinkingly. “I just had it done. It doesn’t normally look this good.”