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Copyright © Lisa Jewell 2017
Cover design: Melissa Four
Photographs: Getty Images
Extract from Watching You © Lisa Jewell 2018

Lisa Jewell has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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For Lor

A note on the character name of ‘Sara-Jade Virtue’

The name ‘Sara-Jade Virtue’ was given to me by a real life Sara-Jade Virtue, the winner of last year’s Get In Character auction which raises money for the UK charity, CLIC Sargent. Incidentally, Sara-Jade is one of the greatest, most passionate and influential people currently working in British publishing and I was super-proud to use her name.

CLIC Sargent’s mission is to change what it means to be diagnosed with cancer when you’re young. They believe that children and young people with cancer have the right to the best possible treatment, care, and support, throughout their cancer journey and beyond. And they deserve the best possible chance to make the most of their lives once cancer treatment has ended.

http://www.clicsargent.org.uk/

Prologue

Those months, the months before she disappeared, were the best months. Really. Just the best. Every moment presented itself to her like a gift and said, Here I am, another perfect moment, just look at me, can you believe how lovely I am? Every morning was a flurry of mascara and butterflies, quickening pulse as she neared the school gates, blooming joy as her eyes found him. School was no longer a cage; it was the bustling, spotlit film set for her love story.

Ellie Mack could not believe that Theo Goodman had wanted to go out with her. Theo Goodman was the best-looking boy in year eleven, bar none. He’d also been the best-looking boy in year ten, year nine and year eight. Not year seven though. None of the boys in year seven were good-looking. They were all tiny, bug-eyed babies in huge shoes and oversized blazers.

Theo Goodman had never had a girlfriend and everyone thought maybe he was gay. He was kind of pretty, for a boy, and very thin. And just, basically, really, really nice. Ellie had dreamed about being with him for years, whether he was gay or not. She would have been happy just to have been his friend. His young, pretty mum walked to school with him every day. She wore gym gear and had her hair in a ponytail and usually had a small white dog with her that Theo would pick up and kiss on the cheek before placing it gently back down on the pavement; then he would kiss his mum and saunter through the gates. He didn’t care who saw. He wasn’t embarrassed by the powder-puff dog or his mum. He was self-assured.

Then one day last year, just after the summer holiday, he had struck up a conversation with her. Just like that. During lunch, something to do with some homework assignment or other, and Ellie, who really knew nothing much about anything, knew immediately that he wasn’t gay and that he was talking to her because he liked her. It was totally obvious. And then, just like that, they were boyfriend and girlfriend. She’d thought it would be more complicated.

But one wrong move, one tiny kink in the timeline, it was all over. Not just their love story, but all of it. Youth. Life. Ellie Mack. All gone. All gone forever. If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backwards it was obvious all along. But back then, when she knew nothing about anything, she had not seen it coming. She had walked straight into it with her eyes open.

One

Laurel let herself into her daughter’s flat. It was, even on this relatively bright day, dark and gloomy. The window at the front was overwhelmed by a terrible tangle of wisteria while the other side of the flat was completely overshadowed by the small woodland it backed on to.

An impulse buy, that’s what it had been. Hanna had just got her first bonus and wanted to throw it at something solid before it evaporated. The people she’d bought the flat from had filled it with beautiful things but Hanna never had the time to shop for furnishings and the flat now looked like a sad post-divorce downsizer. The fact that she didn’t mind her mum coming in when she was out and cleaning it was proof that the flat was no more than a glorified hotel room to her.

Laurel swept, by force of habit, down Hanna’s dingy hallway and straight to the kitchen where she took the cleaning kit from under the sink. It looked as though Hanna hadn’t been home the night before. There was no cereal bowl in the sink, no milk splashes on the work surface, no tube of mascara left half open by the magnifying make-up mirror on the windowsill. A plume of ice went down Laurel’s spine. Hanna always came home. Hanna had nowhere else to go. She went to her handbag and pulled out her phone, dialled Hanna’s number with shaking fingers and fumbled when the call went through to voicemail as it always did when Hanna was at work. The phone fell from her hands and towards the floor where it caught the side of her shoe and didn’t break.

‘Shit,’ she hissed to herself, picking up the phone and staring at it blindly. ‘Shit.’

She had no one to call, no one to ask: Have you seen Hanna? Do you know where she is? Her life simply didn’t work like that. There were no connections anywhere. Just little islands of life dotted here and there.

It was possible, she thought, that Hanna had met a man but unlikely. Hanna hadn’t had a boyfriend, not one, ever. Someone had once mooted the theory that Hanna felt too guilty to have a boyfriend because her little sister would never have one. The same theory could also be applied to her miserable flat and non-existent social life.

Laurel knew simultaneously that she was overreacting and also that she was not overreacting. When you are the parent of child who walked out of the house one morning with a rucksack full of books to study at a library a fifteen-minute walk away and then never came home again then there is no such thing as overreacting. The fact that she was standing in her adult daughter’s kitchen picturing her dead in a ditch because she hadn’t left a cereal bowl in the sink was perfectly sane and reasonable in the context of her own experience.

She typed the name of Hanna’s company into a search engine and pressed the link to the phone number. The switchboard put her through to Hanna’s extension and Laurel held her breath.

Laurel didn’t say anything, just touched the off button on her screen and put her phone back into her bag. She opened Hanna’s dishwasher and began unstacking it.

Two

What had Laurel’s life been like, ten years ago, when she’d had three children and not two? Had she woken up every morning suffused with existential joy? No, she had not. Laurel had always been a glass-half-empty type of person. She could find much to complain about in even the most pleasant of scenarios and could condense the joy of good news into a short-lived moment, quickly curtailed by some new bothersome concern. So she had woken up every morning convinced that she had slept badly, even when she hadn’t, worrying that her stomach was too fat, that her hair was either too long or too short, that her house was too big, too small, that her bank account was too empty, her husband too lazy, her children too loud or too quiet, that they would leave home, that they would never leave home. She’d wake up noticing the pale cat fur smeared across the black skirt she’d left hanging on the back of her bedroom chair, the missing slipper, the bags under Hanna’s eyes, the pile of dry cleaning that she’d been meaning to take up the road for almost a month, the rip in the wallpaper in the hallway, the terrible pubescent boil on Jake’s chin, the smell of cat food left out too long and the bin that everyone seemed intent on not emptying, contents pressed down into its bowels by the lazy, flat-palmed hands of her family.

That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills.

And then one morning, her girl, her golden girl, her lastborn, her baby, her soulmate, her pride and her joy, had left the house and not come back.

And how had she felt during those first few excruciatingly unfolding hours? What had filled her brain, her heart, to replace all those petty concerns? Terror. Despair. Grief. Horror. Agony. Turmoil. Heartbreak. Fear. All those words, all so melodramatic, yet all so insufficient.

‘She’ll be at Theo’s,’ Paul had said. ‘Why don’t you give his mum a ring?’

She’d known already that she wouldn’t be at Theo’s. Her daughter’s last words to her had been: ‘I’ll be back in time for lunch. Is there any of that lasagne left?’

And then there’d been the click of the front door, the sudden dip in volume with one person less in the house, a dishwasher to load, a phone call to make, a Lemsip to take upstairs to Paul, who had a cold that had previously seemed like the most irksome thing in her life.

How many people had she said that to in the preceding day or so? A weary sigh, a roll of the eyes. ‘Paul’s got a cold.’ My burden. My life. Pity me.

‘No,’ said Becky Goodman, ‘no, I’m really sorry. Theo’s been here all day and we haven’t heard anything from Ellie at all. Let me know if there’s anything I can do …?’

As the afternoon had turned to early evening, after she’d phoned each of Ellie’s friends in turn, after she’d visited the library, who’d let her see their CCTV footage – Ellie had definitely not been to the library that day – after the sun had begun to set and the house plunged into a cool darkness punctuated every few moments by blasts of white light as a silent electrical storm played out overhead, she’d finally given in to the nagging dread that had been growing inside her all day and she’d called the police.

That was the first time she’d hated Paul, that evening, in his dressing gown, barefoot, smelling of bed sheets and snot, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, then blowing his nose, the terrible gurgle of it in his nostrils, the thickness of his mouth-breathing that sounded like the death throes of a monster to her hyper-sensitive ears.

He’d acquiesced, like a browbeaten child, and come downstairs a few minutes later wearing a summer holiday outfit of combat shorts and a bright T-shirt. All wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

‘And blow your nose,’ she’d said. ‘Properly. So there’s nothing left.’

Again, he’d followed her instruction. She’d watched him with disdain, watched him fold the tissue into a ball and stalk pitifully across the kitchen to dispose of it in the bin.

She occasionally wondered whether if Paul hadn’t had a cold that day, if he’d rushed back from work at her first call, rumpled in smart clothes, full of vim and urgency, if he’d sat upright by her side, his hand clasped around hers, if he hadn’t been mouth-breathing and sniffing and looking a fright, would everything have been different? Would they have made it through? Or would it have been something else that made her hate him?

The police had left at eight thirty. Hanna had appeared at the kitchen door shortly afterwards.

‘Sorry,’ said Laurel, glancing across the kitchen at the clock. ‘Christ, yes, you must be starving.’ She pulled herself heavily to her feet, blindly examined the contents of the fridge with her daughter.

‘This?’ said Hanna, pulling out the Tupperware box with the last portion of lasagne in it.

She’d made her beans on toast, sat and watched her eat it. Hanna. Her middle child. The difficult one. The tiring one. The one she wouldn’t want to be stranded on a desert island with. And a terrible thought shot through her, so fast she barely registered it.

She touched Hanna’s cheek, gently, with the palm of her hand and then left the room.

Three

Then

The first thing that Ellie shouldn’t have done was get a bad grade in maths. If she’d worked harder, been cleverer, if she hadn’t been so tired the day of the test, hadn’t felt so unfocused, hadn’t spent more time yawning than concentrating, if she’d got an A instead of a B+, then none of it would have happened. But going further back, before the bad maths test, if she hadn’t fallen in love with Theo, if instead she’d fallen in love with a boy who was rubbish at maths, a boy who didn’t care about maths or test results, a boy with no ambitions, or better still no boy at all, then she wouldn’t have felt that she needed to be as good as him or better, she’d have been happy with a B+ and she wouldn’t have gone home that evening and begged her mum for a maths tutor.

So, that’s where it was. The first kink in the timeline. Right there, at four thirty or thereabouts on a Wednesday afternoon in January.

She’d come home in a temper. She often came home in a temper. She never expected to do it. It just happened. The minute she saw her mum or heard her mum’s voice, she’d just feel irrationally annoyed and then all the stuff she hadn’t been able to say or do all day at school – because at school she was known as a Nice Person and once you had a reputation for being nice you couldn’t mess with it – came spitting out of her.

‘My maths teacher is shit,’ she said, dropping her bag on the settle in the hallway. ‘Just so shit. I hate him.’ She did not hate him. She hated herself for failing. But she couldn’t say that.

‘I just told you!’ She hadn’t, but that didn’t matter. ‘My maths teacher is so bad. I’m going to fail my GCSE. I need a tutor. Like, really, really need a tutor.’

‘We can’t afford a tutor,’ her mum said. ‘Why don’t you just join the after-school maths club?’

There was the next kink. If she hadn’t been such a spoiled brat, if she hadn’t been expecting her mum to wave a magic wand and solve all her problems for her, if she’d had even the vaguest idea about the reality of her parents’ finances, if she’d cared at all about anything other than herself the conversation would have ended there. She would have said, OK. I understand. That’s what I’ll do.

But she had not done that. She had pushed and pushed and pushed. She’d offered to pay for it out of her own money. She’d brought up examples of people in her class who were way poorer than them who had private tuition.

‘What about asking someone at school?’ her mum suggested. ‘Someone in the sixth form? Someone who’ll do it for a few quid and a slice of cake?’

And there it went, slipping away like a slippery thing, another chance to save herself. Gone. And she didn’t even know it.

Four

Between the day in May 2005 that Ellie had failed to come home and exactly two minutes ago there had been not one substantial lead regarding her disappearance. Not one.

The last sighting of Ellie had been caught on CCTV on Stroud Green Road at ten forty-three, showing her stopping briefly to check her reflection in a car window (for a while there’d been a theory that she had stopped to look at someone in the car, or to say something to the driver, but they’d traced the car’s owner and proved that he’d been on holiday at the time of Ellie’s disappearance and that his car had been parked there for the duration). And that was that. Her recorded journey had ended there.

They’d done a house-to-house search of the immediate vicinity, brought in known paedophiles for questioning, taken CCTV footage from each and every shopkeeper on Stroud Green Road, wheeled out Laurel and Paul to be filmed for a television appeal that had been seen by roughly eight million people, but nothing had ever taken them further than that last sighting of Ellie looking at her reflection at ten forty-three.

The fact that Ellie had been wearing a black T-shirt and jeans had been a problem for the police. The fact that her lovely gold-streaked hair had been pulled back into a scruffy ponytail. The fact that her rucksack was navy blue. That her trainers were bog-standard supermarket trainers in white. It was almost as though she’d deliberately made herself invisible.

Ellie’s bedroom had been expertly rifled through for four hours by two DIs with their shirtsleeves rolled up. Ellie, it seemed, had taken nothing out of the ordinary. It was possible she might have taken underwear but there was no way for Laurel to know if there was anything missing from her drawers. It was possible she might have taken a change of clothing, but Ellie, like most fifteen-year-old girls, had way too many clothes, far too many for Lauren to keep an inventory. But her piggy bank still contained the few tightly folded ten-pound notes she forced into it after every birthday. Her toothbrush was still in the bathroom, her deodorant too. Ellie had never been on a sleepover without her toothbrush and deodorant.

After two years, they’d downgraded the search. Laurel knew what they thought; they thought Ellie was a runaway.

How they could have thought that Ellie was a runaway when there was no CCTV footage of her at any train station, at any bus stop, walking down any road anywhere apart from the one from which she’d disappeared? The downgrade of the search was devastating.

There, right there – the final nail in the dry box of bones of their marriage.

The children meanwhile were shuffling along, like trains on a track, keeping to schedule. Hanna took her A levels. Jake graduated from university in the West Country where he’d been studying to be a chartered surveyor. And Paul was busy asking for promotions at work, buying himself new suits, talking about upgrading the car, showing her hotels and resorts on the internet that had special deals that summer. Paul was not a bad man. Paul was a good man. She had married a good man, just as she’d always planned to do. But the way he’d dealt with the violent hole ripped into their lives by Ellie’s disappearance had shown her that he wasn’t big enough, he wasn’t strong enough – he wasn’t insane enough.

The disappointment she felt in him was such a tiny part of everything else she’d been feeling that she barely registered it. When he moved out a year later it was nothing, a small blip in her existence. Looking back on it now, she could remember very little about it. All she could remember from that time was the raw need to keep the search going.

‘Can we not just do one more house-to-house?’ she’d pleaded with the police. ‘It’s been a year since we did one. That’s long enough, surely, to turn up something we didn’t find before?’

The detective had smiled. ‘We have talked about it,’ she said. ‘We decided that it was not a good use of resources. Not at this time. Maybe in a year or so. Maybe.’

But then suddenly this January, out of the blue, the police had called and said that Crimewatch wanted to do a ten-year anniversary appeal. Another reconstruction. It was broadcast on 26 May. It brought no fresh evidence. No new sightings.

The detective on the phone had sounded cautious. ‘It could be nothing. But we’d like you to come in anyway.’

Five

Then

Someone from up the street had recommended her. Noelle Donnelly was her name. Ellie stood up at the chime of the doorbell and peered down the hallway as her mum opened the door. She was quite old, forty maybe, something like that, and she had an accent, Irish or Scottish.

She had pale red hair, twisted up at the back and clipped into place. She smiled down at Ellie and said, ‘Good afternoon, Ellie. I hope you’ve got your brain switched on?’

Ellie couldn’t tell if she was being funny or not so she didn’t smile back, just nodded.

They’d set up a corner of the dining room for Ellie’s first lesson, brought an extra lamp down from her room, cleared the clutter, laid out two glasses, a water jug and Ellie’s pencil case with the black and red polka dots.

Laurel disappeared to the kitchen to make Noelle a cup of tea. Noelle stopped at the sight of the family cat, sitting on the piano stool.

‘Well, I can see why you call him that. He does look like a big hairy bear!’

Had she liked her then? She couldn’t remember. She just smiled at her, put her hand upon her cat and squeezed his woolly fur inside her fist. She loved her cat and was glad that he was there, a buffer between her and this stranger.

Noelle Donnelly smelled of cooking oil and unwashed hair. She wore jeans and a bobbly camel-coloured jumper, a Timex watch on a freckled wrist, scuffed brown boots and reading glasses on a green cord around her neck. Her shoulders were particularly wide and her neck slightly stooped with a kind of hump at the back and her legs were very long and thin. She looked as though she’d spent her life in a room with a very low ceiling.

‘Well now,’ she said, putting on the reading glasses and feeling inside a brown leather briefcase. ‘I’ve brought along some old GCSE papers. We’ll start you on one of these in a moment, get to the bottom of your strengths and weaknesses. But first of all, maybe you could tell me, in your own words, what your concerns are. In particular.’

Mum walked in then with a mug of tea and some chocolate chip cookies on a saucer which she slid on to the table silently and speedily. She was acting as though Ellie and Noelle Donnelly were on a date or having a top-secret meeting. Ellie wanted to say, Stay, Mum. Stay with me. I’m not ready to be alone with this stranger.

She bored her eyes into the back of her mother’s head as Laurel stealthily left the room, closing the door very quietly behind her: The soft, apologetic click of it.

Noelle Donnelly turned to Ellie and smiled. She had very small teeth. ‘Well, now,’ she said, sliding the glasses back on to her narrow-bridged nose, ‘where were we?’

Six

The world looked loaded with portent as Laurel drove as close to the speed limit as she could manage towards the police station in Finsbury Park. People on the streets looked sinister and suggestive, as if each were on the verge of committing a dark crime. Awnings flapping in a brisk wind looked like the wings of birds of prey; hoardings looked set to fall into the road and obliterate her.

She’d lived alone for seven years; first in the family home and then in the flat she moved into three years ago when Paul put the final nail in any chance of a reconciliation by somehow managing to meet a woman. The woman had invited him to live with her and he’d accepted. She’d never worked out how he’d done it, how he’d found that healthy pink part of himself amongst the wreckage of everything else. But she didn’t blame him. Not in the least. She wished she could do the same; she wished she could pack a couple of large suitcases and say goodbye to herself, wish herself a good life, thank herself for all the memories, look fondly upon herself for just one long, lingering moment and then shut the door quietly, chin up, morning sun playing hopefully on the crown of her head, a bright new future awaiting her. She would do it in a flash. She really would.

Jake and Hanna had moved away too, of course. Faster, she suspected, and earlier than they would have if life hadn’t come off its rails ten years ago. She had friends whose children were the same age as Jake and Hanna and who were still at home. Her friends moaned about it, about the empty orange juice cartons in the fridge, the appalling sex noises and the noisy, drunken returns from nightclubs at four in the morning that set the dog off and disturbed their sleep. How she would love to hear one of her children stumbling about in the early hours of the morning. How she would love the trail of used crockery and the rumpled joggers, still embedded with underwear, left pooled all over the floor. But no, her two had not looked backwards once they’d seen their escapes. Jake lived in Devon with a girl called Blue who didn’t let him out of her sight and was already talking about babies only a year into their relationship, and Hanna lived a mile away from Laurel in her tiny, gloomy flat, working fourteen-hour days and weekends in the City for no apparent reason other than financial reward. Neither of them were setting the world alight but then whose children did? All those hopes and dreams and talk of ballerinas and pop stars, concert pianists and boundary-breaking scientists. They all ended up in an office. All of them.

Laurel lived in a new-build flat in Barnet, one bedroom for her, one for a visitor, a balcony big enough for some planters and a table and chairs, shiny red kitchen units and a reserved parking space. It was not the sort of home she’d ever envisaged for herself, but it was easy and it was safe.

And how did she fill her days, now that her children were gone? Now that her husband was gone? Now that even the cat was gone, though he’d made a big effort to stay alive for her and lasted until he was almost twenty-one? Laurel filled three days a week with a job. She worked in the marketing department of the shopping centre in High Barnet. Once a week she went to see her mother in an old people’s home in Enfield. Once a week she cleaned Hanna’s flat. The rest of the time she did things that she pretended were important to her, like buying plants from garden centres to decorate her balcony with, like visiting friends she no longer really cared about to drink coffee she didn’t enjoy and talk about things she had no interest in. She went for a swim once a week. Not to keep fit but just because it was something she’d always done and she’d never found a good enough reason to stop doing it.

So it was strange after so many years to be leaving the house with a sense of urgency, a mission, something genuinely important to do.

She was about to be shown something. A piece of bone, maybe, a shred of bloodied fabric, a photo of a swollen corpse floating in dense hidden waters. She was about to know something after ten years of knowing nothing. She might be shown evidence that her daughter was alive. Or evidence that she was dead. The weight on her soul betrayed a belief that it would be the latter.

Her heart beat hard and heavy beneath her ribs as she drove towards Finsbury Park.

Seven

Then

Noelle Donnelly began to grow on Ellie a little over those weekly winter visits. Not a lot. But a little. Mainly because she was a really good teacher and Ellie was now at the top of the top stream in her class with a predicted A/A* result. But in other ways too: she often brought Ellie a little something: a packet of earrings from Claire’s Accessories, a fruit-flavoured lip balm, a really nice pen. ‘For my best student,’ she’d say. And if Ellie protested she’d brush it away with a ‘well, I was in Brent Cross, y’know. It’s a little bit of nothing, really.’

She’d always ask after Theo as well, whom she’d met briefly on her second or third session at the house. ‘And how’s that handsome fella of yours?’ she’d ask in a way that should have been mortifying but wasn’t, mainly because of her lovely Irish accent which made most things she said sound funnier and more interesting than they actually were.

‘He’s fine,’ Ellie would say, and Noelle would smile her slightly chilly smile and say, ‘Well, he’s a keeper.’

GCSEs were now looming large on the horizon. It was March and Ellie had started to count down to her exams in weeks rather than months. Her Tuesday-afternoon sessions with Noelle had been building in momentum as her brain stretched and tautened and absorbed facts and formulae more easily. There was a snappy pace to their lessons now, a high-octane rhythm. So Ellie noticed it immediately, the shift in Noelle’s mood that first Tuesday in March.

‘Good afternoon, young lady,’ she said, putting her bag on to the table and unzipping it. ‘How are you?’

‘Well, that’s good. I’m glad. And how did you get on with your homework?’

Ellie slid the completed work across the table towards Noelle. Normally Noelle would put on her reading glasses and start marking it immediately but today she just laid her fingertips on top of it and drummed them absent-mindedly. ‘Good girl,’ she said. ‘You are such a good girl.’

Ellie watched her questioningly from the corner of her eye, waiting for a signal that their lesson was about to begin. But none came. Instead Noelle stared blindly at the homework.

‘Tell me, Ellie,’ she said eventually, turning her unblinking gaze to Ellie. ‘What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?’

‘Ha, well then, maybe that. Maybe not having a hamster is the worst thing that ever happened to you?’

‘Well, then, what did you want? What did you really want that you weren’t allowed to have?’

In the background, Ellie could hear the TV in the kitchen, the sound of her mother hoovering overhead, her sister chatting to someone on the phone. Her family just getting on with their lives and not having to have weird conversations about hamsters with their maths tutor.

Noelle sighed and pulled Ellie’s homework towards her. ‘Well, then, you are a very lucky girl indeed. You really are. And I hope you appreciate how lucky you are?’

‘Good. Because when you get to my age there’ll be loads of things you want and you’ll see everyone else getting them and you’ll think, well, it must be my turn now. Surely. And then you’ll watch it disappear into the sunset. And there’ll be nothing you can do about it. Nothing whatsoever.’

There was a moment of ponderous silence before finally, slowly, Noelle slid her glasses on to her nose, pulled back the first page of Ellie’s homework and said, ‘Right then, let’s see how my best student got on this week.’

‘Just to do really well in my GCSEs. And my A Levels. And then go to a really good university.’

Noelle tutted and rolled her eyes. ‘What is it with you young people and your obsession with university? Oh, the fanfare when I got into Trinity! Such a big deal! My mother couldn’t stop telling the world. Her only girl! At Trinity! And look at me now. One of the poorest people I know.’

‘No, there’s more to life than university, Miss Smarty Pants. There’s more than just certificates and qualifications. I have them coming out of my ears. And look at me, sitting here with you in your lovely warm house, drinking your lovely Earl Grey tea, getting paid a pittance to fill your brain with my knowledge. Then going home to nothing.’ She turned sharply and fixed Ellie with a look. ‘To nothing. I swear.’ Then she sighed and smiled and the glasses came up her nose and her gaze left Ellie and the lesson commenced.

Afterwards Ellie found her mother in the kitchen and said, ‘Mum. I want to stop my tutoring.’

Ellie thought about telling her the truth. She thought about saying she’s freaking me out and saying really weird things and I really don’t want to be alone with her for an hour every week any more. How she wished she had told her the truth. Maybe if she’d told her the truth, her mother might have been able to work it all out and then everything would have been different. But for some reason she didn’t. Maybe she thought her mother would say that it was a silly reason to want to stop having the lessons so close to her exams. Or maybe she didn’t want to get Noelle into trouble, didn’t want a situation to develop. But for whatever misguided reason she said, ‘I just honestly think I’ve gone as far as I can go with Noelle. I’ve got all the practice papers she gave me. I can just keep doing those. And it will save you some money.’ She smiled, winningly, and waited for her mother’s response.

‘Exactly. I think there are other things I could be using the time for now. Geography, for example. I could really do with some extra study time for geography.’

This was a 100-per-cent untruth. Ellie was totally on top of all her studies. The extra hour a week would make no difference to anything. But still she smiled that mum-pleasing smile, left the request hanging in the air between them, waited.

Ellie nodded encouragingly, the echo of Noelle’s loaded words, the tired aroma of old cooking and unwashed hair, the mood swings and the tangential, slightly inappropriate questions pulsing through her consciousness.

‘If you’re sure? It would be nice not to have the extra expense,’ her mother said.

‘OK,’ said her mother, pulling open the fridge door, taking out a tub of Bolognese sauce, closing it again. ‘I’ll call her tomorrow. Let her know.’

‘Great,’ said Ellie lightly, feeling an odd, sordid weight lifting from her soul. ‘Thank you.’

Eight

The suited policeman who greeted Laurel was young and washed out, clammy-handed and slightly nervous. He led her through to an interview room. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said, as though there’d been an option not to come. Sorry, I have a lot on today, maybe next week?

Someone went to fetch her a cup of water, and then a moment later the door opened again and Paul walked in.

Paul, God, of course, Paul. She hadn’t even thought of Paul. She’d reacted as though this was all down to her. But clearly someone at the station had thought of Paul. He blew into the room, all floppy silver hair, rumpled suit, the dry smell of the City embedded in his skin. His hand reached for Laurel’s shoulder as he passed her but she couldn’t bring herself to turn to acknowledge him, just forced a small smile for the benefit of people watching the exchange.

He took the seat next to her, his hand pressed down against his tie as he lowered himself into the chair. Someone fetched him tea from a machine. She felt cross about the tea. She felt cross about Paul.

‘We’ve been investigating a site near Dover,’ said the detective called Dane. ‘A dog walker called us. His terrier dug up a bag.’

Dane pulled some 10- by 8-inch photos from a hard-backed envelope. He slid them across the table towards Laurel and Paul. ‘Do you recognise any of these items?’

It was Ellie’s bag. Her rucksack. The one she’d had slung over her shoulder when she left the house for the library all those years ago. There was the small red logo that had been such a vital part of the police appeal. It had been virtually the only distinguishing feature on Ellie’s person that day.

The second photo was of a black T-shirt, a loose-fitting thing with a slash neck and cap sleeves. The label inside said ‘New Look’. She’d worn it partly tucked into her jeans at the front.

The third was a bra: grey jersey with small black polka dots. The label inside said ‘Atmosphere’.

The fourth was a pair of jeans. Pale denim. The label inside said ‘Top Shop’.

The sixth was a plain black hoodie with a white drawstring. The label inside said ‘Next’.

The seventh was a set of house keys. The fob was a small plastic owl with eyes that lit up when you pressed a button on its stomach.

The eighth was a pile of exercise books and textbooks, green and rotten with damp.

The ninth was a pencil case: black and red polka dots, filled with pens and pencils.

The eleventh was a tiny leather purse, purple and red patchwork, with a zip that went round three sides and a red pompom on the zipper.

She pulled the photo closer; Paul leaned towards her and she pushed it so it lay between them.

Ellie had not taken her passport. Laurel still had Ellie’s passport. She took it from the box of Ellie’s possessions from time to time and gazed at the ghostly face of her daughter, thought of the journeys she’d never take.

‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘This is my elder daughter’s passport. We thought she’d lost it. But …’ She stared down at the photo again, her fingers touching the edges of it. ‘… it’s here. In Ellie’s bag. Where did you find this?’

‘In dense woodlands,’ Dane replied. ‘Not too far from the ferry port. One theory we’re looking at is that she may have been on her way to Europe. Given the passport.’

Laurel felt a burst of anger, of wrongness. They were looking for evidence that backed up their long-held theory that she’d run away from home. ‘But her bag,’ she said. ‘With just the things she had when she left, when she was fifteen? And you’re saying that she took the same things with her to leave the country? All those years later? That doesn’t make any sense.’

Dane looked at her almost fondly. ‘We’ve analysed the clothing. There’s evidence of intensive wear.’

Laurel clutched her chest at the mental image of her perfect girl, always so impeccably clean, so fresh-smelling and fragrant, stumbling around in the same clothes for years on end. ‘So … where is she? Where’s Ellie?’

She could sense that Paul was staring at her, that he needed her to engage with him in order to process this jumble of information. But she could not face his gaze, could not give him any part of herself.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘we were burgled a few years after Ellie went missing. I told the police at the time that I thought it was Ellie. The things that were taken, the lack of forced entry, the sense of …’ She pulled herself back from talking about unsubstantiated feelings. ‘She must have taken Hanna’s passport then. She must have …’

She trailed off. Was it possible that the police had been right all along? That she’d run away? That she’d been planning an escape?

At that moment the door opened and another policeman walked into the room. He approached Dane and he whispered something in his ear. Both men looked towards Laurel and Paul. Then Dane sat straighter, adjusted his tie and said, ‘They’ve found human remains.’

Nine

Then

Theo, whose head was in Ellie’s lap, turned his face up to her and smiled. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Let’s do completely nothing.’

Ellie put down her paperback and rested her hand on Theo’s cheek. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘I want to do everything. Everything that isn’t revising and learning and studying. I want to go paragliding. Shall we do that? Shall we go paragliding?’

‘So your plan for the summer is basically to die?’ Theo laughed. ‘You are so weird.’

She punched him gently against his cheek. ‘I am not weird. I am just ready to fly.’

‘Yes, literally. Oh, and Mum says we can use Grammy’s cottage for a few days if we want.’

It was Saturday afternoon, May, a week before GCSEs. They were in Ellie’s bedroom, taking a break from revision. Outside the sun was shining. Teddy Bear the cat lay by their side and the air was full of pollen and hope. Ellie’s mum always said that May was like the Friday night of summer: all the good times lying ahead of you, bright and shiny and waiting to be lived. Ellie could feel it all calling to her from the other side of the dark tunnel of exams; she could feel the warm nights and the long days, the lightness of having nothing to do and nowhere to be. She thought of all the things she could do once she’d finished this chapter of her life, all the books she could read and the picnics she could eat and the funfairs and shopping trips and holidays and parties. For a moment she felt breathless with it all; it overwhelmed her and made her stomach roll over and her heart dance.

Ten

The police investigation into the burglary at Laurel’s house all those years ago had come to nothing. They’d found no fingerprints of any distinction anywhere on the property, checks of CCTV footage from the two hours that Laurel had been out of the house showed no sign of anyone meeting the description of Ellie, or of any teenage girl for that matter. The ‘thief’ had taken an ancient laptop, an old phone of Paul’s, some cash that had been tucked into Laurel’s underwear drawer, a pair of art deco silver candlesticks that had been a wedding present from some very rich people who they weren’t friends with any more and a cake that Hanna had baked the day before that had been sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be iced.

They hadn’t taken any of Laurel’s jewellery – including her wedding and engagement rings which she’d stopped wearing a few months ago and which had been sitting in plain sight on a chest of drawers in her bedroom. They hadn’t taken the Mac, which was newer and more valuable than the laptop they had stolen – and they hadn’t taken her credit cards, which she kept in a drawer in the kitchen so that if she was mugged on the street they wouldn’t get stolen.

‘It’s possible they ran out of time,’ said one of the police officers who arrived at her front door ten minutes after she’d called them. ‘Or they were stealing to order and knew what they could sell and to whom.’

‘It feels strange,’ Laurel had said, her arms folded tight around her middle. ‘It feels – I don’t know. My daughter disappeared four years ago.’ She looked up at them, eyed them both directly and uncompromisingly. ‘Ellie Mack? Remember?’

‘I could sense her,’ she said, sounding mad and not caring. ‘When I walked into the house I could sense my daughter.’

She shook her head and then shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. I’ve been in her room and it looks exactly as it was.’

There was a beat of silence as the police officers moved awkwardly from foot to foot.

‘We couldn’t see any broken locks or windows. How did the burglar gain access?’

‘No. No. The only people who have keys are us. Me, my husband, our children.’

As the words left her mouth she felt her heart begin to race, the palms of her hands dampen. ‘Ellie,’ she said. ‘Ellie had a key. When she went missing. In her rucksack. What if …?’

‘What if she came back? From wherever she’s been? Maybe she was desperate? It would explain the fact that only things we don’t care about have been taken. She knows I don’t like those candlesticks. I was always saying I was going to take them on the Antiques Roadshow one day because they were probably worth a fortune. And the cake!’

Also by Lisa Jewell

For Lor

A note on the character name of ‘Sara-Jade Virtue’

Prologue

PART ONE

One

Two

Three

Then

Four

Five

Then

Six

Seven

Then

Eight

Nine

Then

Ten