Her eyes scan the gate for a doorbell or entry system, but there’s nothing. A footpath runs alongside the gravel drive. She gets Noah’s pushchair out of the boot and assembles it, batting midges out of her face. ‘Come on,’ she says to Ryan, unclipping the fastenings on Noah’s seat. ‘We’re going to walk.’
Ryan uses his phone to google Dark Place and he gives her a running commentary from its Wiki page as they walk. Kim enjoys the distraction from her thoughts.
‘It was built in 1643,’ he says. ‘Wow, 1643,’ he repeats. ‘But most of it got burned down a few years after it was built. It lay empty for seventy years and that’s how it got the name “Dark Place”, because of the charred wood that surrounded it. The Georgian wing was added in 1721 and the Victorian wing in the late 1800s by a coffee plantation owner called Frederick de Thames. Who … God …’ He pauses and scrolls back. ‘Who fathered at least thirty-eight children in Colombia, seven in the UK and died of the Spanish flu when he was only forty-one. The house was left to his last wife, Carolina de Thames, who was only twenty when he died, and who passed it on in turn to her son, Lawrence. In 1931 three of Frederick’s older children plotted to have Lawrence assassinated, but the man they hired to kill him got caught in a fox trap in the grounds of Dark Place and wasn’t found until six days later when he’d been partially eaten by foxes and had his eyes pecked out by crows. He had the assassination orders on a signed form in the pocket of his coat. The three brothers who’d plotted Lawrence’s death were sent to prison and Lawrence lived in the house until he died in 1998. Whereupon, with no living heirs, the house went back on the market and was purchased by an unknown buyer for nearly two million pounds in 2002.’
As they walk Kim casts her eyes across the ground, across the horizon, all around her, looking for signs of her daughter. She’d called all three local taxi companies before leaving the house and none of them had collected anyone from Dark Place last night.
They walk for nearly ten minutes until finally she sees the house. It looks just as Kim had expected it to look from Ryan’s description. A hodgepodge of disparate architectural styles, blended almost seamlessly together across three wings, set around a central courtyard. The sun sparkles off the diamonds of leaded windows on the left wing and the larger Victorian casement and sash windows on the right. It should be a mess, but it is not; it is exquisitely beautiful.
In the driveway are four cars and a golf buggy. Even from here, Kim can hear the sound of people splashing in a swimming pool. Ryan helps her pull Noah’s buggy up the steps to the front door and she rings the bell.
A young man answers. A huge Saint Bernard dog follows behind and collapses, panting, at his feet. The man is bare-chested and holding a six-pack of beers in one hand and a tea towel in the other.
He looks from Kim to Noah to Ryan and back to Kim. ‘Hi!’
‘Oh, hi. My name is Kim. I wondered if Scarlett was around? Or her parents?’
‘Er, yeah. Yeah, sure. Hold on a sec.’ He turns and yells out, ‘Mum! Someone for you at the door!’
Behind him, Kim sees a pale stone staircase, with a striped runner up the middle. She sees modern art and designer light fittings and then a woman in a loose white sundress and white flip flops appears. The dog stands heavily to greet the woman, who peers at Kim curiously through the door.
The boy smiles at Kim and then disappears.
‘Yes?’ says the woman.
‘Sorry to disturb you like this, on a Saturday.’
The woman looks across her shoulder at the gravel sweep and says, ‘How did you get here?’
‘Oh,’ says Kim, ‘we parked at the gate, and walked.’
‘But that’s half a mile! You should have rung the bell.’
‘Well, we looked, but we couldn’t see one.’
‘Urgh, yes, sorry, it’s a movement sensor. You need to stand over it. Lots of people miss it. You should have called.’
‘Well, I didn’t have a number. Or at least, I had a number but I didn’t realise how far the house was going to be from the gate, but anyway, it’s fine. It’s just … I’m looking for my daughter.’
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘are you Mimi’s mum? I think she left this morning …’
‘No,’ says Kim. ‘No. Sorry. I’m not Mimi’s mum. I’m Tallulah’s mum. She was here last night?’
‘Tallulah?’ The woman scruffs the dog’s head absent-mindedly with a hand bearing just one wide band on her wedding finger. ‘Gosh, no, I don’t think I know a Tallulah.’
‘Lula?’ she suggests. She hates the name Lula, but her daughter’s friends have always tended to shorten her full name; it’s something she’s learned to accept.
‘No.’ The woman shakes her head. ‘No. I’ve never heard of Lula either. Are you sure she was here?’
Kim is hot and anxious. There’s no shade where she’s standing and the sun is beating down on the back of her neck. She can feel a hot dampness breaking out all over her body and feels a flash of anger at this woman in her crisp white sundress and freshly brushed hair, her cool, dry complexion and the suggestion in her clipped English accent that Kim is somehow mistaken and in the wrong place.
She nods and tries to keep her voice pleasant. ‘Yes. I spoke to your daughter a couple of hours ago. She said Tallulah was here last night with her boyfriend, Zach, and they left in a minicab at three a.m. But I’ve called all the minicab numbers and none of them has a record of a pick-up from this address or anywhere in the vicinity of this address. And it’s nearly four p.m. and my daughter is still not home. And this’ – she points behind her at Noah in his buggy – ‘is Tallulah’s son and she would never deliberately leave him. Just never.’
Her voice begins to crack dangerously and she breathes in hard to stop herself from crying.
The woman looks unperturbed by this display of emotion. ‘Sorry,’ she says after a pause. ‘What was your name again?’
‘Kim. And this is Ryan. My son. And Noah. My grandson.’