The Moment She Left (3 page)

Martin was that, too.

He started to speak, cleared his throat and ran a hand over his unshaven chin. ‘So when do I next get to see you?’ he asked gruffly.

She didn’t know what to say to that. Anything would be wrong.

‘You don’t have to answer now,’ he said, reaching for his keys. ‘Call me when you’ve decided to stop behaving like a bitch.’

As the front door closed behind him, she turned back to the window and watched as he emerged into the street below and crossed to the van he’d hired to help move her in.

She was touched that he’d helped her, how could she not be when he was acting against his own interests?

He was kind; she’d always known that about him, it was a large part of why she cared for him so much – of why she
loved
him. She just didn’t want to carry on pretending there was more in her heart than friendship. Perversely, she didn’t want to lose him either, though she had to accept that she might, at least for a while.

As he pulled out into the slow-moving traffic she wondered where he would go after dropping the van and picking up his car. To his mother’s, or to hers? Either would offer him a sympathetic ear, although, to be fair, both mothers had been understanding and patient with her too, which couldn’t have been easy when they treasured how close they were as a family. So close that until today Andee and Martin had been living at her mother’s in a craggy little hamlet up on the northern headland known as Bourne Hollow.

They should have moved into a place of their own long ago; perhaps this was another indication of how uncommitted she had felt to their future, that she had never been able to find the right house.

Martin was due to move over to his own mother’s in the leafy suburb of Westleigh sometime in the next few days, where the children would join him for alternate weeks throughout the summer. They still had their own rooms in both grandmothers’ homes, and no matter where life took them once they’d finished uni, Andee couldn’t imagine that ever changing.

There was an extra bedroom here in the flat, and Andee was hoping that they might at the very least crash with her after a late night out in town.

Alayna was clearly still furious with her. She wasn’t returning texts, or calling back after Andee left messages.

Andee would deal with that when the time came. For now she had a lot of unpacking to do, emails to send and a call to make to Helen Hall, the lawyer who’d asked her to try and help Blake Leonard, whose teenage daughter had disappeared without trace two years ago.

Andee remembered the case well, it had been all over the news at the time; that kind of story always resonated deeply with her.

When she’d first received Helen’s call asking her to help, her immediate reaction had been to refuse. Trying to find missing children – and to her nineteen still qualified as a child – was one of the main reasons she’d ended up leaving the force. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to help these families, she longed to do so, knowing only too well what they were going through, but the emotional strain on her had become too great. She was no longer the right person to judge how best to handle panicked, shocked, terrified and even in some cases guilty parents, when she could never put her own parents out of her mind, and how it had been for them when her sister, Penny, aged fourteen, had disappeared from their lives.

If Penny had eventually come home Andee would almost certainly have put it all behind her by now. She
might not even have joined the police force in the first place. As it was, no body, no trace of her at all, had ever been found. They’d received a letter though, sent around two weeks after she’d vanished, and the words were seared so deeply and painfully into Andee’s heart that she knew she’d never forget them.

Dear Mum and Dad, I probably ought to say sorry for leaving the way I have, but maybe you already don’t mind very much that I’m not around any more, so instead I’ll say sorry for always being such a disappointment to you. I know Dad wanted a son when I was born, so I guess I’ve been a let-down to him from the start, and I don’t blame him for always loving Andee the most because she’s much nicer-looking than I am and likes sports, the same as him, and is really clever so it stands to reason that he’d be really proud of her. I know I shouldn’t say this, but sometimes I hate her for being so much better than I am at everything. No one ever seems to notice me when she’s in the room. It’s like I become invisible and I know she wishes I would go away. So that’s what I’m going to do.

I don’t know what else to say, except sorry again. I expect you’ll all be much happier without me. Please tell Andee she can have whatever she likes of mine, although I don’t expect she’ll want anything at all.

Your daughter, Penny

To this day they still didn’t know whether Penny had committed suicide after sending the note, or if she’d gone off somewhere to make a new life. At fourteen it had seemed unlikely she’d make a new life, how would she, unless there had been someone to help her? No evidence had ever come to light of her being
involved with someone who might have enticed her away. And surely, after seeing the news and realising how much they were all suffering, she’d have come back. With their father being a chief superintendent with the Met every imaginable effort had been poured into finding his daughter, and it hadn’t stopped there because Andee herself had revisited the case several times over the years, but there was never anything new to be uncovered.

Almost as heartbreaking as losing Penny was their father dying without ever knowing what had happened to her.

It was like that for some families, Andee knew that better than most, not only because hers was one of them, but because of how many others she had watched suffering, while she, unable to give them the answers, or even the body, they needed, had felt every part of their helplessness and pain.

She hoped to God that Blake Leonard’s family wasn’t going to end up amongst those she’d been unable to help. No one, but no one, deserved to go through such interminable hell. However, two years was a long time in a missing person case, and going by the police files she’d so far been given access to, the search appeared to have been thorough and extensive. So she had to concede that the chances of finding Jessica really weren’t good. Not that she was prepared to rule it out, miracles did happen, as the news occasionally showed, and who was to say that one wasn’t waiting to happen here?

‘Daddy, you are totally amazing. I had no idea you could do that.’

Blake Leonard’s hazel eyes sparkled with mischief. ‘You’d be surprised at what I can do, young lady,’ he teased, as she checked that the drawing really was exactly the same no matter which way up she turned it.

‘Because you’re magic,’ she cried, and laughing delightedly she threw her skinny arms around him.

‘Ask him if he can magic you off to your dance class,’ Jenny called out from the kitchen.

Jessica’s eight-year-old eyes grew round. ‘Shall we fly there, Dad?’ she whispered.

‘Good idea,’ he whispered back. ‘I’ll go and get my wings.’

The joy, the comfort of the unexpected memory abruptly vanished as Blake’s attention was snatched back to the present, where he was kneeling in front of a planter carefully tugging dead blooms from a fuchsia.

‘So have you heard any more from the detective woman?’ Matt asked, coming to stand at the back door of their terraced home on the edge of Kesterly old town. He was a tall young man with a lot of dark stubble
hiding the delicate set of his jaw, long, spiked lashes around his deep navy eyes and an attitude that could switch from belligerent to vulnerable to frightened in the blink of an eye.

Before answering Blake glanced through the open French doors to the dining room where the whitewashed walls were cluttered with some of the many paintings he’d done over the years, and the table was strewn with a number of books he was consulting for his work at Ogilvie’s. Remembering that his wife had gone to stay with her parents, he felt a jolt of sadness, though it left him free to speak – it was rarely a good idea to talk about Jessica, or anything concerning her, in front of Jenny.

‘She’s an ex-detective,’ he reminded Matt, ‘and I’m seeing her tomorrow.’ His once lively, handsome face, always claimed by Jenny to be too cheerful for an artist, had become creased and dulled by the blows life had dealt him, most particularly the disappearance of his daughter.

Matt sank his gangly frame into one of the canvas chairs in front of a rusting wrought-iron table. ‘Is she coming here?’ he enquired.

Blake wondered if Matt wanted to meet Andee Lawrence. Since the police had scaled back their search for Jessica they’d felt abandoned and helpless, frustrated to a point of madness, but then a friend of Matt’s had said they should try talking to his mother who was Helen Hall, one of the town’s more prominent lawyers. So Blake had called, and Helen Hall had put him on to ex-Detective Sergeant Andee Lawrence. ‘I asked her
to come to the shop again,’ he told Matt. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to invite Andee to their home, he simply didn’t want any of the neighbours recognising her and asking questions. They’d been subjected to enough attention at the time Jessica had vanished.

‘So did she say if she’d found anything new yet?’ Matt asked.

Blake shook his head, his heart aching with the torment they shared, the anguish and confusion that never went away. ‘She’s had no time, and anyway I don’t think she would on the phone.’

It was so much easier to cope on the good days, and they happened from time to time. On the bad days it was so awful he felt like ending it all rather than carry on with the not knowing, the self-loathing and blame he heaped upon himself for what he’d done to his family. If he hadn’t been forced to bring them here, Jessica and Matt would have taken their gap year and probably been thousands of miles from London on that fateful day. Jessica would never have known the person or persons who’d taken her, would even now be hanging out with her family here, or off somewhere with friends, maybe rehearsing for a gig, or writing new material with Matt.

Although the initial shock and disbelief, the sheer horror of her disappearance had eased some time ago, almost anything could make it feel present and terrible again. The crazy, unacceptable truth of it would creep up on him, catching him unawares, and he’d feel the panic, the debilitating helplessness and dread building all over again.

Thanks to counselling he could control it better now, but his imagination remained the very worst of his enemies. At any given moment it would conjure the sound of her screaming, shouting for him –
Daddy! Daddy! –
begging him to find her.

The media attention had dried up now, but in the early months it had been intense – and even welcome, for there was always the chance it would help to find her. The questions had gone on and on, creating ever more speculation and gossip. There had even been a time when they’d suspected him, though of what exactly he’d never discovered.

Matt had gone for counselling too, and they’d both clung to every word of advice they were offered, had tried every coping technique, breathing exercise, and support system that was in place for people like them. They’d prayed, meditated, run for miles, eaten recommended foods, written things down, spoken about them, and even drawn them.

Blake had wished with all his heart that Jenny would join them, but she’d always been nervous of strangers, and had started withdrawing from the world even before Jessica’s disappearance. The way they’d left the north, what had happened to force their departure, had already been too much for her. Once she’d started to realise that they might not get their daughter back, it was as though the woman he loved, his muse, his passion his life partner, had disappeared too.

Jessica wasn’t dead. He couldn’t, wouldn’t allow himself to think that, and no one had recommended that he should. If he did it would mean he’d have to
give up searching for her, and he could never do that either. Nor could Matt, who looked, and felt, as though he’d lost a part of himself, which of course, as her twin, he had. What devastation this had wrought on his young life. He would never get over it.

Watching his son now, gaunt, good-looking, helpless, aimless, a shadow of who he should have been at twenty-one, Blake laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. He felt the bones, the frailty. He was too thin. They both were.

Matt stared straight ahead as he said, ‘I still keep hearing her, inside my head. It’s so real I think she’s there, or somewhere close by, I just have to work out where.’

Knowing exactly what he meant, Blake said, ‘Maybe Andee Lawrence will be able to find something the police missed.’

‘I forgot to tell you,’ Matt responded. ‘She’s Luke Farnham’s mum. You know, he was in the same halls as me during our first year at uni.’

‘I remember him. Have you seen him lately?’

Matt simply shrugged.

It was unlikely that he had, since Matt had dropped out of uni after Jessica’s disappearance and though he had friends around the area, most of them had flown the nest by now, or were managing to hold down jobs.

One of these days Blake would have to get on Matt’s case about finding a job too, or going back to his studies, but he could tell that the thought of going forward without Jessica was one his son still couldn’t tolerate. It
was as though he too had stopped on that fateful day. He was too locked into their closeness, their bond as twins, to be able to carry on with his life the way he’d planned. It would feel like the worst kind of betrayal when she couldn’t do the same.

‘He needs a girlfriend,’ Jessica laughed, poking Matt in the ribs. ‘That’s what he needs. Someone gorgeous and sexy and who’s ready to . . .’

‘Yes, OK, we get the picture,’ Blake interrupted, with a wink at his son.

‘He shouldn’t still be a virgin at his age. He’s seventeen, for God’s sake.’

‘Who says he’s a virgin?’ Blake countered.