She presses send and then exhales and rests the phone on her lap.
Downstairs the front door clicks shut. It’s 2 p.m. and it’ll be her son Ryan home from work. He works at the grocer’s in the village every Saturday, saving up for his big summer holiday to Rhodes in August, his first without his mum, just with friends.
‘Are they back?’ he calls up the stairs to her.
‘Nope,’ she calls back down.
She hears him dropping his keys on a surface, throwing his trainers into the pile of shoes by the front door, then bounding up the stairs.
‘Seriously?’ he says. ‘Have they called?’
‘No. Not a word.’
She tells him about Megs calling Nick at the pub, and the girl called Scarlett and as she talks her phone rings with an unknown number.
‘Hello?’
‘Oh, hi, is this Lula’s mum?’
‘Yes, hi, this is Kim.’
‘Hi. It’s Scarlett here. I just got your email.’
Kim’s heart begins to race painfully, then skitter.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘Scarlett. Thank you. I just wondered—’
Scarlett cuts in. ‘They were at my house,’ she says. ‘They left at about three a.m. That’s all I can tell you.’
Kim blinks; her head rocks back slightly. ‘And were they … did they … say where they were going?’
‘They said they were going to get a cab home.’
Kim doesn’t like the tone of Scarlett’s voice. She has one of those clipped, chilly voices that tells of four-poster beds and bohemian private schools and gravel on the driveway. But she also sounds disinterested, as though talking to Kim is beneath her somehow.
‘And did they seem OK? I mean, had they had a lot to drink?’
‘I guess, yeah. Lula was sick. That’s why they left.’
‘She threw up?’
‘Yeah.’
Kim pictures her slight, kind girl, bent double over a flower bed, and her heart lurches.
‘And did you see them? Get into a taxi?’
‘No. They just left. And that was that.’
‘And – sorry – but where do you live, Scarlett? Just so that I can ask around the local cab companies?’
‘Dark Place,’ she replies, ‘near Upley Fold.’
‘Street number?’
‘No street number. Just that. Dark Place. Near Upley Fold.’
‘Oh,’ says Kim, drawing two rings around the words on the paper where she’s written them down. ‘OK. Thank you. And please, if you hear anything from either of them, will you give me a ring. I mean, I don’t know how well you know Tallulah …’