First One Missing (11 page)

‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’

She started at the voice, which was close enough to her ear to send a spray of spittle across the lobe. But when she turned round and recognized the man behind her, she relaxed. Ken Forbes was a creep, but he’d been a fixture on the Sunday tabloids since long before Sally cut her journalistic teeth. She felt a kind of affection for him.

‘Oh you know how it is, Ken. Thought I’d step over to the dark side for a bit.’

‘Yeah, well, this is dark all right.’

‘Awful,’ said Sally distractedly, trying to peer in through the ground-floor windows from their vantage point on the pavement.

‘No. I mean, this one is even worse than the others,’ he clarified.

Now Ken Forbes had her attention. She turned her eyes to him, taking in his florid nose, threaded with broken capillaries, and the thinning sandy hair through which his scalp shone lobster pink.

‘What do you mean, worse?’

Ken smiled. His teeth were custard yellow and his breath pungently over-ripe; Sally had to stop herself from stepping back from him.

‘Now why would I tell you that? Come on, darling. I’ve got to leave you a bit of legwork to do. Can’t have your lovely arse getting fat from sitting on it all day.’

Sally knew no one was supposed to put up with being spoken to like that any more, but she couldn’t be bothered to make a fuss. There was something a bit pathetic about Ken Forbes. She was just old enough to feel nostalgic for the Fleet Street days of three-hour liquid lunches and news stories bashed out on desks littered with overflowing ashtrays. Ken still had the contacts, and he didn’t lose any sleep over what was and wasn’t ethical. None of that Leveson crap for him. He’d obviously found something out. But from whom? No one had been briefed beyond that farce of a press conference, as far as she knew. She made a mental list of the police officers on the case she knew – Leanne Miller, Jo Barber. Not those two. By-the-book worthy sorts, both of them. The Botsfords’ FLO then. The good-looking one. What was his name now. Pat? No, Pete. Or someone from the Murder Squad, perhaps?

‘What are they like?’ she asked Ken, nodding towards the flat with the cheap white canvas blinds in the windows. ‘The new family?’

‘They’re like people who’ve had a ruddy great bomb dropped on their lives. What do you expect?’

Sally resented the way Ken was looking at her as if she’d said something crass.

She was about to say something sensitive, just to put him right, but as she opened her mouth a scream pierced the air – shocking and animalistic, like a sound dragged up from a person’s guts and ripped out through their throat. As one, the gathered reporters and photographers turned to look at the house from where the harrowing noise was emanating. On Sally’s right a TV camera crew scrabbled for their equipment, wanting to be prepared. And still it went on, a raw howl of pain that set Sally’s nerves jangling. The young news-agency guy with the low-slung trousers dropped his eyes to the ground and kicked at the pavement with the toe of his suede trainer. Throughout the knot of reporters, people would catch each other’s eyes, shrug and then immediately look away as if caught doing something not quite nice. Sally shivered, though the temperature had to still be in the low twenties.

She watched Ken Forbes reach his yellow-tipped fingers into the pocket of his nylon backpack.

God, she could murder a fag.

10

The noise is horrible.

The noise is coming from me.

‘Susan, stop,’ Oliver implores me. His eyes are sunk into his head like black stones.

‘Stop,’ he says again. ‘You’re upsetting Mia.’

That stops me finally. The word ‘Mia’ like a tap turning me off.

This time two days ago she was right here on the sofa scrubbed and pink, fresh from the bath, in the white pyjamas with pale-blue dogs on them. ‘This is my favourite,’ she’d said, pressing a small, chubby finger on a random dog that was just the same as all the others. ‘His name is Max. When we get a puppy can we call him Max, Mummy?’

Now I’d buy her a puppy. I’d buy her a litter of puppies. I’d fill the flat with puppies until we couldn’t move for them.

Why didn’t I say yes? Why didn’t I say yes to it all – sleepovers, trips to Disneyland Paris, a doll that wees like a real baby, just one more chapter, rollerblades, night-vision goggles, Super Soakers, great slabs of chocolate big as breezeblocks? Why did I purse my lips and frown and shake my head and shake it again watching the spark of hope fade in her blue eyes? Why did I dole out pleasure so grudgingly, snapping shut wallet and sweetie jar and favourite picture book with such brutal firmness, enjoying my own sense of control?

If You let her come back I’ll never deny her anything again. If You let her come back I’ll be a better mother, a better person. If You let her come back I’ll never ask for anything. I won’t complain about Oliver taking me for granted or about my brain atrophying through overexposure to children’s nursery rhymes and soft-play areas in primary colours or about how there’s never enough money for a babysitter or even a nice bottle of wine now that the cost of childcare has made it impossible for me to go back to work.

This time two days ago I was a different person living in a different world and there were no reporters outside on the pavement and no policemen in my living room drinking tea from the mugs that came free with the girls’ Easter eggs. And she was here with her newly washed hair and her dog-print pyjamas. And I want it back. I want her back.

I want.

11

In the end his mum had got around the potential embarrassment of having Rory fail to turn up for the Megan’s Angels meeting by holding it in their own front room as opposed to the upstairs room at the Victoria Arms where they usually went. It was too annoying, he reflected as he grudgingly set out bowls of peanuts and crisps, pausing every now and then to scoop out a handful and pour them into his open mouth. He’d been all set to boycott it but she’d teared up and he’d found himself saying, ‘All right then. If it’s such a big deal.’ And she’d pressed his hand between both of hers and said that, yes, it was a big deal to her, and how grateful she was to have such a considerate son, until he’d have said yes to anything just to get her off his case.

His mum and Simon had been bickering all morning – about whether it was appropriate to supply wine and beer at an afternoon event, about why she was asking him to clean the very top loo when no one in their right mind was going to trek all the way up there. There was a hissed exchange in which the phrase ‘that woman’ was used several times. Rory had never fully got to the bottom of what had happened, and he was glad to be spared the details. Oldies with sex lives. Could there be anything more gross? But from the snippets he’d overheard over the past months, he reckoned Simon had had some sort of fling. Must have been someone with serious mental health issues, was all Rory could think. Who else would want to shag podgy Simon with his permanently shiny forehead and sweat-rings under his arms? Rory felt bad for his mum though. Kind of humiliated on her behalf, although he had to admit she wasn’t exactly making the best of herself. Sometimes when his mates came round he’d find himself wishing she made a bit more of an effort. He didn’t want her to go too over the top, though, not like Chigsie’s mum who always wore skintight jeans and low-cut Lycra vests and he had to concentrate so hard on not looking at her chest he always came away with a headache. But often his mum just looked so
old.
What he really meant was that she looked so defeated. Like she’d given up trying.

Sometimes he tried to remember what she’d been like before Megan, but it was like trying to remember what it was like to be cold when you were sweltering in 80-degree heat. Too alien to compare.

Now Simon came stropping into the living room where Rory was trying to decant the remaining peanuts from one bowl into another to disguise the fact he’d eaten most of them.

‘I hope you’re not going to have that face on the whole time they’re here.’

Occasionally, Rory would find himself thinking Simon wasn’t so bad as stepfathers went, then he’d say something like this and it’d remind him what a complete knob he was.

‘It is my face,’ said Rory. ‘Whose face would you prefer me to have on? Gary Lineker’s?’

Simon put on his long-suffering look. ‘Listen, mate. Would it be too much to ask you to stop the wisecracks, just for today? For your mum’s sake. You know how much these occasions take it out of her.’

The doorbell interrupted the stare-off that followed this request. Immediately there came the sound of Helen’s shoes slapping against the hall tiles.

Rory’s spirits sagged. It wasn’t just that there’d be all those same faces, talking about their dead children, and Jemima Reid following him with her eyes everywhere he went – although that was bad enough, if you asked him. It was also that his mum would try to get them all to cry. She had this idea that crying was a good thing and that they’d all feel a million times better once they’d done it. What she didn’t appreciate was that some of them didn’t want to cry. It wasn’t that he thought he wasn’t allowed to, or it was wimpy to, or people would think less of him, or any of the reasons she expected were going through his head. It just made him uncomfortable. And the only reason he ever felt better afterwards was because he was glad it was over.

Now voices were coming nearer.

‘The last ones upped sticks yesterday afternoon,’ his mum was saying as she came into the living room followed by Flo-Jo. It had just been a throwaway comment when Jo first came to them as their FLO. ‘Can I call you Flo-Jo?’ the young Rory had asked. But of course his mum had seized on this weak joke as evidence that Rory was doing OK, being ‘normal’, and she’d insisted on repeating it so many times it eventually stuck.

‘I was just telling Jo that the last of the media left yesterday,’ his mum repeated as if they were all deaf. ‘Probably all gathered outside the poor Glovers’, I expect.’

She glanced at Flo-Jo for corroboration, but she just smiled in that ‘I’m giving nothing away’ manner she had and came over to give Rory a hug. He liked Jo well enough, but he found it embarrassing to be pressed against her huge bosoms and was relieved when she eventually pulled away. Plus there was something about her that gave him a sour taste at the back of his mouth. Something about the memories she stirred up especially when, as now, he hadn’t seen her for a little while.

‘How’s life?’ she asked him.

‘Oh you know.’ He shrugged. ‘Usual crap.’

The doorbell sounded a second time, causing his mother to jump up out of her seat like it had caught fire or something. She’d got him and Simon to carry chairs in from all over the house, so the living room resembled a junk shop, and she had to pick her way around bits of mismatched furniture on her way to the hall. As she opened the front door Rory heard her say the same thing about the press having left only yesterday, and it made him feel unaccountably embarrassed for her.

She was just showing Fiona and Mark Botsford into the room when the doorbell rang a third time and, not long after that, a fourth. In a few minutes the living room was bursting with people, and more seats had to be brought, even the moth-eaten piano stool from the room next door. In the mêlée, Rory was conscious of Jemima Reid’s eyes following him from where she sat with the rest of her family squashed up on the sofa in front of the window. He knew she was younger than him and everything, but did she really have to stare like that?

His mum stood up and flicked the side of her wine glass with her nail, then called out, ‘Ting, ting.’ Rory briefly closed his eyes so as not to see her. She was wearing a long shapeless pink cotton dress with thin straps that failed to cover her beige bra and she kept smoothing down her frizzy hair with her free hand, which was what she did when she was nervous. There was a tightness in his chest when he looked at her so instead he glanced around the room. All the FLOs seemed to be there, which was unusual, and there was even an extra one, a man who’d been introduced as having been assigned to the new family. Even though he was old, thirties at least, he still had raised red bumps all over his chin and neck like teenage acne.

Rory concentrated on the man’s skin so he wouldn’t have to think about the new family and what they were going through, which might remind him of what his own family had gone through.

‘Thank you all so much for coming.’

His mum’s cheeks were flushed pink like her dress. She wasn’t used to drinking during the day. Rory hoped she wouldn’t get pissed.

‘I only wish we didn’t always have to meet in such unhappy circumstances,’ said his mum.

This was met with a low murmur as people resolutely avoided each other’s eyes.

‘We all know now that another little girl, another family’s daughter, has … gone to join ours. Our hearts go out to the parents. Their grief is still too raw for them to be here today but Kieren, their FLO, is here on their behalf. Where are you, Kieren?’

The spotty policeman half raised his hand while his cheeks flushed to match the inflammation around the lower part of his face.

‘I’m sure in time the Glovers will come to find solace in this group, just as the rest of us do. Sometimes I really don’t know what I’d do without you all. When the news broke the day before yesterday, the only people I wanted to speak to are in this room. The only ones who can possibly understand.

‘In a few moments, Pete Delagio would like to say a few words on behalf of the police. But first, as ever, shall we just have a minute’s silence while we think about our girls.
All
our girls.’

Rory fidgeted on his uncomfortable kitchen chair. This was precisely why he didn’t want to come to these things any more. As if they didn’t think about the girls all the time anyway! Why would they want to come all the way here to sit in his living room and think about them some more?

Over the sea of bent heads, he caught Jemima Reid’s eye. He was about to raise his eyebrows in a complicit ‘what are they like’ gesture, but she’d already looked away, frowning in that intense way she had.