‘I’ll try and join you,’ says Shaun.
‘That would be very nice indeed.’
After Shaun leaves, Sophie spends some time unpacking boxes in the cottage. Then she makes herself another cup of coffee and takes her laptop to the kitchen table and replies to some emails. She is flying to Denmark in just over a week’s time,to attend a crime festival as P. J. Fox, and there are some last-minute additions to her itinerary, including an interview with a TV station which means she’ll want to do something about her hair before she goes. She thinks maybe she’ll take a day trip into London, visit her stylist there, maybe have lunch with someone, see if her publishers would like her to visit. She feels herself get quite excited at the prospect.
After a while she switches screens to her latest manuscript. She hasn’t looked at it for days. Life has been nothing but packing and unpacking and saying goodbye and saying hello. She hasn’t been in the right headspace to get any work done. But now she has no excuse.
The tail end of her last paragraph stares at her blankly, something she wrote in another world when she was a Londoner, when she had a boyfriend who taught at a sprawling Lewisham secondary school, when moving to Surrey was a date in her diary, rather than her reality. She stares back at it for a moment, then scrolls upwards through the rest of the chapter trying to slot herself back into ‘London Sophie’ but just can’t do it.
Instead, she flicks screens to her browser and types inMaypole Houseandmissing person. She sets the filter to news and clicks on the first link in the results:
Local Teen Parents Remain Missing After Night Out
Upfield Common resident, Kim Knox, 39, has reported the disappearance of her daughter, 19-year-old Tallulah Murray and her boyfriend Zach Allister, also 19, who have not been seen since the early hours of Saturday morning.Murray and Allister, who have a 1-year-old son together, spent the previous evening at the Swan & Ducks pub, before taking a lift with a local friend to a private home near Upley Fold, where they partied with friends, former students at Maypole House, until 3 o’clock in the morning. According to the same friends, they left to catch a taxi home but never returned. If anyone has any information about their whereabouts, please contact detectives at Manton Police Station.
Sophie feels a small chill of something ripple up and down her spine. She clicks through the rest of the links, looking for an update, but can’t find anything, just varying versions of the same report that the local paper carried.
She then googlesKim Knox, Upfield Commonand a few hits come up, including a couple of links to a village newsletter called theUpfield Gazetteer. One article in the newsletter is about a vigil held in June, marking the one-year anniversary of Tallulah and Zach’s disappearance. There is a photograph attached to the article: an attractive woman with dark, mid-length hair, wearing a long floral dress with buttons down the front and a pair of black army boots, holding the hand of a very small boy, also dark-haired, clutching a single pink rose. A teenage boy in a dark shirt and combat trousers stands close to the woman; he bears a strong resemblance to her. Behind them is a sea of faces, a lot of young people.
Kim Knox, 40, of Gable Close, Upfield Common, led a candlelit procession through the village on Saturday nightto mark the first anniversary of the disappearance of her daughter, Tallulah Murray, who would have been 20 in March. Also commemorated during the ceremony, was Zach Allister, Tallulah’s partner and father of her son, who would also have turned 20 in March. The procession began on the common and concluded at St Bride’s Chapel, where songs of hope and remembrance were sung by a choir from Tallulah’s old school, Upfield High, where she was a student until 2016. Tallulah was studying Social Care at Manton College of Further Education when she disappeared in June of last year after a night at a friend’s house.
The other link takes Sophie to an article from three months before that, a rose-tree burial ceremony on the date of Tallulah’s twentieth birthday in March.
The rose tree, an Australian shrub rose called ‘Tallulah’, has been planted behind the bus stop on the common, where Kim Knox used to watch her daughter as she waited for the bus to take her to college.
Sophie turns away from the screen. She feels a chill of raw emotion pass through her at the thought of a woman holding back a curtain, peering across the street, looking for the shadow of her missing child, and seeing roses instead.
11
December 2016
Tallulah sits at her mother’s dressing table. Her mother has a magnifying mirror here, plus things like cotton-wool balls and make-up brushes that Tallulah doesn’t own because Tallulah has never really enjoyed wearing make-up. She puts on mascara for special occasions and uses cover-up on her under-eye bags and any breakouts, but doesn’t bother with the rest of it. The front sections of her dark hair are currently a kind of washed-out navy blue; she’d been hoping for the electric blue of the model on the packaging, but like everything in her life, it didn’t turn out how she expected.
She opens up her mother’s make-up bag and searches through it for liquid eyeliner, then sweeps the liner across her eyelids, trying to emulate the perfect wings the girls at college alwaysseems to have. It’s a disaster. She wipes them away and starts again. Eventually she picks up her phone and texts her mum:
Can you come upstairs and help me with my make-up?
She feels a bit bad. Her mum does enough for her these days. Noah’s napping and her mum is enjoying a rare moment of peace on her own.
But a few seconds later her mum replies with a thumbs-up emoji and then she is there, her warmth filling the room immediately. ‘Right then, what do you need doing?’
‘The wings,’ Tallulah replies, passing the liquid liner to her mother. ‘I keep mucking them up.’
Her mother pulls a stool across the room and straddles it so that she is a few inches from Tallulah’s face. Tallulah can smell the perfume on her neck: it’s from the Body Shop and has musk in it. Her mum says that musk makes men want to have sex with you. Which strikes Tallulah as unlikely; why would anyone bother doing all the other things you’re supposed to do to make men want to have sex with you if you could just wear a particular perfume and be done with it?
The outline of one of her mum’s tattoos is just visible over the neckline of her top: the tip of a feather that further down forms part of a bird. Her mother has six tattoos; she had one done before Tallulah was born, and the rest after she was born. She has Tallulah’s baby footprints tattooed in pale pink on the underside of her arm, three inches long, with her initials in a flourish underneath. On the underside of the other arm she has Ryan’s baby feet tattooed. On her back she has a Japanese-style fish, on her ankle she has a flock of swallows and on her ring finger she has a diamond. She says the diamond is to symbolise her marriage to herself;after she split up with Tallulah and Ryan’s dad she vowed never to marry again and the tattooed engagement ring would mean she was already taken.
Tallulah closes her eyes and angles her face towards her mother’s outstretched hand.
‘So,’ says her mother, applying the brush to the rim of her left eye. ‘What’s with the make-up?’
It’s the college Christmas party tonight, a disco in the canteen, famously awful but she knows the cool kids will be there, Scarlett and her lot, because they’re on the social planning committee, and she feels very keenly that if she doesn’t go, she might miss out on something, but she’s not entirely sure what.
She shrugs. ‘Just felt like it,’ she says.
Her mother completes the second wing and she turns to see herself in the mirror. The wings are perfect. ‘Thanks, Mum,’ she says. ‘You’re the best.’
‘What are you going to wear?’ asks her mum.