‘Youdumped me when I was pregnant,’ she interjects through bared teeth.
‘And why do you think that was?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘You tell me.’
‘Because I didn’t believe you. Did I? I didn’t believe you were really pregnant, I thought you were just trying to trap me. Because we were so careful and I knew we’d been careful and I couldn’t see how it could have happened and then I started to think, all those times you said you were revising for your A levels, all those times you were too busy to see me. I just thought, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were off with someone else. And that that’s how you got pregnant. Because it can’t have been me.’
‘So you dumped me because you thought I was pregnant with somebody else’s baby?’
‘Yeah. Basically.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘But then I saw you out and about with the baby and you looked so happy and so beautiful and the baby was just, like, the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen and I thought—’ His voice starts to crack. ‘I thought, well, I wouldn’t be feeling that way if it wasn’t mine. I thought I’d know.I’d knowif he was someone else’s. And every time I saw him I just fell more and more in love with him, and even though he doesn’t really look like me, I could just tell that he was mine. You know? Like, in here.’ He bangs hischest with his fist. ‘Mine. And I think my mum’s wrong. I mean, I know she’s wrong. Because he is. Isn’t he? Noah is mine?’
Zach’s eyes are filled with tears. He looks desperate and pathetic. For a moment Tallulah’s heart fills with a kind of pitiful love for him and she finds herself moving towards where he sits on the edge of the bed and putting her arms around his neck and whispering into his ear, ‘God, of course he’s yours, of course he is. He’s yours. I promise he’s yours.’
And his arms reach round her and pull her tighter towards him and she feels the wetness of his tears against her cheek and he says, ‘Please, Lules, please don’t go out tonight. Please stay home. I’ll go out and get us a bottle of wine. And some Doritos. Just you and me. Please.’
Tallulah thinks of Keziah and her weird little gang of local friends, all so alien to her with their barely begun lives and their safe little jobs, still waiting for boyfriends and babies as if that was all there was to life. She thinks of them all staring at her like an exhibit at a zoo, talking about motherhood and cohabitation as if it was an end goal, rather than a place you might find yourself by accident. She pictures them sitting primly on the velvet sofas at the Swan & Ducks, sipping cheap prosecco and laughing in high-pitched voices at things that aren’t particularly funny, and then she thinks of drinking wine with Zach, of capitalising on this rare moment of softness after all these weeks of hard edges and cutting comments, of pulling Zach back from the brink, persuading him that he could move back to his mum’s, that they could just co-parent, amicably, just as they’d done before he moved in. She thinks, if they can be nice to each other tonight maybe they can move on to a place where no one is angry andeveryone gets what they want. And what they both want, more than anything, is Noah. And maybe Zach will learn to accept that this is enough, that he doesn’t need Tallulah too, that he doesn’t need a nuclear family, that there are other girls out there who will love him for what he is and not just put up with him for the sake of happy families, girls who would want a future with him, who would want to have sex with him more than once a week – girls who aren’t into girls.
So she nods her head against his face and says, ‘Yes. Let’s do that. It’ll be good. I’ll send Keziah a text now. We can stay in. We can stay in.’
40
September 2018
The following morning, Sophie stays in bed while Shaun gets up and ready for work. She has not slept well. She’s nervous about the children coming tonight. Shaun’s ex Pippa is bringing them, and there’ll be an awkward handover to deal with. She knows the twins will be fine, they are robust and uncomplicated children, mainly, she suspects, because they are twins. But she’s still stressed about having to play mother for two nights and two days, having to focus on someone else after all these days of having her head in the mysterious disappearance of Tallulah and Zach. It’s forecast to rain for the entire weekend which means that all the lovely things she thought they might do together are not going to happen and they’ll be stuck indoors or having pub lunches across the common. But mainly she has not slept because of her chillingencounter with Liam the previous day and the revelation of the passage in her own book.
After he’d left she spent some time on Instagram searching for him and finally found his account twenty down; his profile photo was a picture of his face and his profile name was @BoobsBailey, which struck Sophie as very bizarre. He had very few posts, only about twenty or thirty. But one had jumped out at Sophie. A photo taken in June 2017. It appeared to have been taken in the small courtyard garden at the back of the Swan & Ducks; Sophie recognised the big wrought-iron clock that hangs on the wall out there. The photo was of Liam and Scarlett and Lexie. They all had their arms around each other and Scarlett had her tongue out, a flash of silver piercing as it caught the sun. Underneath Liam had written the wordBeauties.
Liam and Lexie, it appeared, were friends.
The post had seven likes and Sophie clicked it to see if any were from people she knew. One was from Kerryanne Mulligan, another from someone called @AmeliaDisparue. She clicked on this and brought up a page for a young girl with fine blonde hair and an elfin face. Her bio described her asSkinny, Mini, Lost in the middle of f***ing nowhere.
Her feed consisted of a few strangely abstract shots of landscapes and the last post was dated 16 June 2017. Sophie’s heart had skipped a beat. A dark shimmer of underlit pool water, a hint of hot-pink flamingo, a hand just out of shot cupped around a lit cigarette, the blurred outlines of figures behind huddled together under a throw. She clicked on the image and zoomed in on it, but it was impossible to tell who the people in the background were. The photo had no caption and no likes and no comments. It hungsuspended there, like an empty thought bubble, without context or meaning. But it was, Sophie was sure of it, a tantalising fragment of the night Zach and Tallulah went missing.
She’d become distracted then by a flurry of activity in her inbox, always the way at that time of the day, as people who worked in offices tied up loose ends before leaving for home. And then Shaun had returned. That night in bed her head had spun with disparate pieces of information, dissonant feelings about the key players and unanswered questions. She dreamed about the pool, about inflatable flamingos and weird metal levers and Liam Bailey scribbling on her trainers with a pink highlighter pen and telling her that she needed to shave her legs.
Now she sits in bed, scrolling through her phone, mindlessly. She has a food delivery coming at ten, lots of good healthy stuff for the twins, some wine, some treats – which the twins will look at in awe and wonder as if they had never seen chocolate rice cakes before – and extra milk for all the cereal. Apart from that, her day is free. She should pack for Denmark. She’s leaving first thing on Monday morning; she has a car coming to take her to Gatwick at four thirty in the morning and the children will be here until early evening on Sunday. She should use the day wisely and sensibly to clear her email inbox, get ready for her trip and be relaxed for the children’s arrival.
But she can feel it inside her like a strange piece of music on repeat, the need to keep digging, both literally and metaphorically. She googles ‘Amelia Disparue’. A girl called Mimi was the only other person at Dark Place that night, apart from Liam, Lexie and Scarlett’s mother. Like Scarlett and her family, Mimi has also erased her online presence.Disparueis French for‘Disappeared’ and Mimi, thinks Sophie, could be an abbreviation of Amelia.
The search results bring up a YouTube account for someone called Mimi Melia. She clicks on it.
Immediately she sits bolt upright in bed.
On screen is the same young woman with the fine blonde hair and elfin face. She appears to be in a bedroom. She adjusts the angle of the camera she’s using to record herself and then says, ‘Hi, guys, welcome to my channel. My name is Amelia. Or Mimi. Or anything you like really, at this point, who really cares. I was going to talk to you all today about my struggles with coeliac disease. But as some of you know, I have had another struggle in my life for the past year, fifteen months. Post-traumatic stress caused by an incident last summer that I have hitherto not spoken about in order to protect someone very close to me. But I have recently discovered that that person is not the person I thought they were and …’ She pauses then and her gaze leaves the camera and hovers somewhere towards the bottom of the screen. She’s wearing a white vest top and her arms are very pale and thin.
Her eyes come back to the camera. ‘Well,’ she begins. ‘I can’t say too much. In fact, I can’t say anything. But …’ She pauses for dramatic effect. ‘… the thing that cannot be named looks like it might finally, finally, finally’ – she crosses two pairs of fingers – ‘be about to spill its guts. And just you wait, just you wait until it does.’ She makes her hands into two fists, side by side, and then explodes them. ‘Pyow,’ she says. ‘Pyow.’
Then it ends and Sophie sits, dumbstruck, her jaw hanging slightly. She watches it again. The date on the video is yesterday’s date.
Sophie has no idea if this is the girl called Mimi who was there the night that Zach and Tallulah disappeared. But this girl once liked a photo of Liam and Lexie and Scarlett taken at the Swan & Ducks and now she is discussing an event that happened over a year ago, that she has not been allowed to discuss but that has left her with PTSD.
Sophie puts down her phone, jumps out of bed and gets in the shower.
Twenty minutes later she is outside Kim Knox’s house.