The Girl Who Never Came Back Page 6

  "I'm sorry?" the officer replied.

  "Ask her," Ruth continued, her words dripping with disdain.

  Charlotte felt her heart sink as everyone in the room turned to her. She'd known that the subject would have to come up eventually, but she'd been hoping to put it off for as long as possible. Whenever she had to talk about her past, she always felt that a whisper of suspicion was laid at her feet, now more than ever.

  "It was twenty years ago," she said with a sigh. "It's really not going to be relevant."

  "What happened?" the female officer asked.

  "It doesn't matter..."

  "Please," the male officer said, "let us be the judge of that. Just tell us what happened to you."

  "I was eight years old," Charlotte replied, figuring that there was no point delaying the inevitable. "I was playing in the garden with my sister, with Ruth, and..." She paused for a moment, trying to think back to that long-ago day before hitting the mental wall that always prevented her from remembering. "I don't really remember it very well," she continued, "but apparently I went off by myself, down to the river, and I ended up going into this small cave up near the bridge, and..."

  "And she disappeared," Ruth said, as if the words sickened her. "To cut a long story short."

  "For how long?" the male officer asked.

  Charlotte and Ruth exchanged a worried glance.

  "A day?" the female officer asked. "A couple of days?"

  "A year," Charlotte said eventually, before clearing her throat nervously. "There was an extensive search. I'm sure you have records in your system somewhere. Police dogs, helicopters, national appeals, you name it. Everyone looked for me, but eventually, after a few weeks, the media moved on and..." She paused again. "They could never work out of I'd had an accident, or been snatched or whatever, but after a year they'd pretty much given up on the idea that I'd ever be found -"

  "That's not true," Ruth said firmly.

  "Yeah," Charlotte replied, "it kind of is. Ask Mum. And then, exactly a year later to the day, I came wandering up to the house from the bottom of the garden, from near the river. No memory, no recollection of where I'd been or anything. I was just... back!"

  "Maybe the witch took you," Ruth muttered with clear disdain.

  "There must have been an investigation," the male officer said, clearly taken aback by the tale.

  Charlotte nodded.

  "It was all Charlotte's little mystery," Ruth said bitterly. "She always claims she doesn't remember a thing, and that we should all just stop asking where she was. She acts like it doesn't really matter. An eight-year-old girl vanishes for a year, and when she comes back, everyone's supposed to just shrug and get on with their lives."

  "I didn't say that it doesn't matter," Charlotte replied, forcing herself to stay calm. "I said that I don't remember what happened."

  "And you don't want to find out, either, do you?" Ruth replied.

  "Not particularly," Charlotte muttered.

  "See?" Ruth said, turning to the police officers. "See what I have to put up with here? What kind of person doesn't even care about what happened to her while she was missing?"

  "And you really don't know where you were for a year?" the female officer asked. "That... must be quite a difficult thing for you to get your head around."

  Charlotte shrugged.

  "She refuses to try psychotherapy," Ruth muttered. "It's like she doesn't want to know where she was for a whole year. Either that, or she's lying her ass off and she just doesn't want to say."

  "This isn't about me," Charlotte continued, determined to get the focus back onto Sophie. "What happened to me is just a coincidence. It's not gonna help anyone find Sophie any quicker, is it?" She paused. "I mean, that's why we're here, right? To find Sophie? Not to rehash everything that happened with me."

  "But in both cases," the female officer added, "the missing child was eight years old?"

  Charlotte nodded wearily.

  "Same age," Ruth said firmly, "same place, same family. Is that really a coincidence?"

  "This is some kind of sick joke," Tony said, still staring out the window. "It has to be. Someone's doing this on purpose, to torture us." He paused, before turning to the police officers. "Couldn't that be it? Someone wants to mess with our heads, and they know about what happened before, so they've done this because they want to watch us squirm. There's no other explanation."

  "Do you have any enemies?" the male officer asked.

  Ruth shook her head.

  "Miracle of miracles," Charlotte muttered under her breath.

  "The house is very remote," the female officer pointed out. "Where's your nearest neighbor?"

  "About four miles away," Ruth replied, her voice trembling. "We've already phoned everyone in the area, but no-one's seen her. They're all going to keep an eye out and search their out-buildings, just in case she turns up." She paused for a moment. "You need to..." Her voice trailed off, and she put her head in her hands, clearly starting to sob. "Divers," she blurted out eventually, taking big gulps of air. "You need to check the river! She might -" Before she could finish, put her head in her hands and began to sob. "You need to check the river," she said eventually, as tears dripped down onto the kitchen table. "She might have been washed away..."

  "We're going to do everything in our power to find your daughter," the male officer said, glancing over at Charlotte for a moment before turning back to Tony, who had hurried over to put an arm around his wife. "I need someone to draw up a list of any places in the area that she might have gone. Parks, buildings, school... any place she might be familiar with. If she's lost, she might head to a familiar location and hope that someone comes to find her. Children sometimes do that if for some reason they're disorientated. If that's the case, we need to get to her before nightfall. I'm sure the temperature could get pretty low after dark."

  "There are a few places," Tony said. "There's are a couple of parks we go to sometimes, and there's the dog shelter, and -"

  "Can you write them down for me, Sir?" the office said, passing him the notebook and a pen. "Anywhere you can think of. It might seem silly, but we have to check every possible location. Would you describe Sophie as being worldly-wise? Do you think she'd be good at looking after herself?"

  Charlotte couldn't help but grin at the suggestion.

  "She's eight years old," Tony said, as Ruth continued to sob at the table. "How worldly-wise can an eight-year-old girl be?"

  As the discussion continued, Charlotte waited a few minutes before slipping over to the door and heading out into the garden. She'd been feeling suffocated in the house, as if somehow everyone was blaming her for Sophie's disappearance. Standing on the porch and staring down toward the river, she waited for some sign of life; anything that might indicate Sophie's sudden return. Although she fully understood the seriousness of the situation, she hadn't yet given up hope that this was all some kind of huge misunderstanding, in which case Sophie might suddenly come running home, breathless with excitement after some kind of adventure and completely shocked that anyone was worried about her. That was the best-case scenario, at least.

  "This must be very difficult for you," said the female officer, coming out to join her. "I'm sorry, we weren't introduced properly. I'm Eve Locklear. I do a lot of cases like this."

  Charlotte nodded, preferring not to shake the woman's outstretched hand.

  "I hope you don't mind," Eve continued, "but I'd like to ask you a few questions about the time you went missing."

  "It's a pretty simple story," Charlotte muttered. "I went missing, and then a year later I came back. Apparently, anyway."

  "Apparently?"

  "It was twenty years ago," Charlotte replied, hoping to head off any questions as quickly as possible. "I was a kid, I really don't remember anything. Most of it, I just know from what I've been told."

  "But you were away for a year?"

  Charlotte nodded again.

  "And you don't remember anything at all
from that year? Not even a place or a face?"

  "Nothing," Charlotte replied. "Before you mention it, my sister was lying. I did go and see a psychotherapist. I had several extremely tedious and expensive sessions before I finally figured I'd tried enough and there was no need to put myself through any more of that crap. I wasn't making any progress. Whatever I forgot, it's probably best left undisturbed."

  Eve paused. "Were you examined for -"

  "Yes!" Charlotte said firmly, keen to cut the question off. "I was poked and prodded once I came back and generally examined at great length. There was nothing wrong with me, and nothing had been done to me." She sighed. "That's the first thing everyone fucking things."

  "But you must be curious about what happened," Eve replied. "If it was me, I'd be going crazy until I got an answer."

  "People always say that," Charlotte replied with a sad smile. "People always think I must be traumatized by the whole thing, but the truth is, I've managed to rather successfully compartmentalize things and not think about it too much. I don't know if that makes me lucky or unlucky, or smart or dumb, but it's the truth. I'm not haunted by nightmares, I don't wake up sweating in the middle of the night, I have a perfectly reasonable sex life, I don't use drink or drugs to self-medicate my fears, I just..." She paused, aware once again of a faint tightening sensation in her chest. "I get by. I deal with any doubts I have, and I get on with life. There's no point wading back into the past."

  "Still," Eve continued, "a year -"

  "Is a very long time," Charlotte said, with a hint of bitterness in her voice, "but the way I see it is that if I'm okay with not knowing, then no good can come of raking up the past. And ultimately it's my life, so I figure I'm old enough and stubborn enough to make my own decisions."

  "But if something traumatic happened to you -"

  "Then it's a good job I don't remember it, huh?" Charlotte replied. "I mean, seriously, isn't that a great thing? Shouldn't I be fucking over the moon that my subconscious mind, or whatever, has managed to bury it away? I mean, the whole point of fucking therapy is to help you get over and deal with shit, and I've managed that all by myself. I should be fucking commended and told I'm a genius, not pushed to go and see some quack doctor who might be able to fuck my head up for me." She paused for a moment as she realized that she was probably allowing herself to get too worked up. "I'm fine as I am. I'm not perfect, but I'm not nearly as fucked up as the rest of my family. I guess I just don't have their insatiable desire to go ripping things apart, looking for cracks."

  "You must have been affected in some way," Eve replied.

  "Nope," Charlotte said, starting to feel as if she needed a cigarette. She decided to hold back, but she knew the siren call would be too strong eventually. "I guess I'm lucky," she added. "I was able to put it all in the past and focus on the future."

  "And you were eight years old when it happened?" Eve asked. "Just like Sophie?"

  Charlotte nodded.

  "And it happened in the exact same place? And in the same way? Down by the river at the bottom of the garden?"

  "I guess so," Charlotte replied, immediately tensing as she realized that her own personal explanation, that it was all a coincidence, probably wouldn't wash with everyone. She knew, deep down, that she was probably just trying to deflect questions, but at the same time, she couldn't see how there could possibly be a link. The last thing she wanted was for Sophie's disappearance to be used as an excuse to dig into her own troubles.

  "We need to consider every possibility," Eve said after a moment. "Even if -"

  "Like what?" Charlotte asked. "That whatever happened to me, has happened to Sophie? In the exact same way? Are you serious? How the fuck would that even work? Whatever happened to me, it was a once in a lifetime, one in a million kind of deal, and there's no way lightning could strike twice. When we find out where Sophie is, which will happen, you'll all see that any similarities are just totally superficial."

  "You seem a little defensive."

  "Of course I'm fucking defensive," Charlotte replied, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She was damn well not going to bother fighting her nicotine craving, not on a day that so far had delivered nothing but a whole load of trouble. "You want one?"

  Eve shook her head.

  After lighting up, Charlotte took a long drag and held the smoke in her mouth before exhaling slowly. "It's a disgusting habit," she said after a moment, "but it helps." She paused. "Whatever happened to me when I went missing," she continued eventually, "it didn't hurt, and it didn't leave scars, and I've learned to live with it, so..." She took another drag on her cigarette, her eyes fixed on the glistening water of the river a couple of hundred meters away. "It's got nothing to do with whatever's happened to Sophie."

  "And what do you think has happened to Sophie?" Eve asked.

  Charlotte paused. "An accident," she said finally. "The kid's too smart to just go wandering off by herself, and all that talk of her getting distracted is bullshit." She took a deep breath. "She's hurt. Maybe not badly, but enough so that she can't get back home. Maybe she's unconscious, or maybe she just got lost and she's wandering through some field somewhere. My sister was right, though. You need to be checking the river. She might have fallen into the water, in which case she could have been swept downstream."

  "There's also that cave," Eve pointed out.

  Charlotte shook her head. "There's nothing in there," she said quickly.

  "We still need to take a look."

  "It's barely even a cave," Charlotte replied, trying not to sound too annoyed. "It doesn't go very far back, and all you'll find is some wet rocks and a damp smell. Everyone acts like it's some kind of fucking mystical place, but it's nothing of the sort. It's just a dank little place with no light and a bunch of wet rocks, and a river dribbling out of a hole."

  "An eight-year-old girl isn't very big in the grand scheme of things," Eve pointed out. "There are plenty of place she could be. We have to search each and every one of them, including the cave."

  "If you want to waste your time," Charlotte replied, "that's your own business, but there's no way Sophie'd go in there. She's too timid and careful." She paused. "You don't know her. I do. She's quiet and careful. You've seen what my sister's like. She's the most attentive, coddling mother in the world, and she's made damn sure that Sophie's afraid of her own shadow. It's a miracle she was brave enough to go down to the river by herself, let alone go out of sight for even a fraction of a second. She's great kid, but she's timid as hell."

  "Were you the same?" Eve asked. "When you disappeared, I mean. Were you timid and cautious?"

  Charlotte paused again, finding the question a little personal. "I was a bit of both back then," she replied eventually, not wanting to arouse suspicion. "I had my moments." Stubbing the cigarette out against the side of the house, she tossed the butt to the ground. She wanted to say that Sophie would be okay, to express some kind of meaningless platitude that might somehow make them both feel better for a few minutes, but she couldn't quite bring herself to get the words out. Hearing the sound of Ruth sobbing in the kitchen, she decided that she should probably go back inside and see if she could help. She hated it when her sister became emotional, but she realized that this time there was probably some decent context behind the tears and tetchiness.

  "Sorry," she said to Eve, "I think I'm needed. Time to go and be a good sister for once."

  "Sure," Eve replied, "but if you think of anything that might help, you'll let me know, won't you? Even if it seems insignificant, it could help in some way."

  Charlotte nodded cautiously.

  "I really think we'll find her," Eve continued. "I know the media's always full of terrible stories about young children who go missing, but those are just the cases that end badly. You wouldn't believe how many other kids disappear for a few hours and then turn up right as rain, and it never gets reported." She paused. "We're doing everything we can."

 
"I'm sure she'll turn up soon," Charlotte replied. "And, hell, if she doesn't, I guess she might come back in a year, right? Just like I did?" Realizing that she'd perhaps gone a little too far, she smiled awkwardly before turning and heading into the house, where everyone seemed paralyzed with fear and the ghost of Sophie's absence hung in the air like a fine morning mist.

  Twenty years ago

  Charlotte didn't know why, but she was starting to get short of breath. Beyond the pain and the fear, it was as if her chest was getting smaller and smaller, and she was taking in big gulps of air in an attempt to stop feeling as if she was suffocating.

  Wedged between two rocks, she felt too weak to call out for help. At the same time, she was starting to worry that her mother wasn't going to come and find her at all. Summoning up the very last of her strength, she tried to ease herself up, ignoring the sensation of her snapped angle dangling from the bottom of her leg, held on by little more than a section of skin and meat.

  "Mummy," she whispered, hoping that maybe if screaming didn't help, that something else might attract her mother's attention.

  Slowly, she inched forward. She had no idea which way to go, but she figured her best bet was to keep going up. Reaching out, she tried to get some kind of grip on the cold, wet rocks. It was difficult, but eventually she felt confident enough to try pulling herself up. No matter how weak she felt and how much pain was coursing through her body, she knew she had no choice but to keep trying.

  "Mummy?" she called out, before realizing that maybe someone else could help. "Ruth!" she shouted, hoping against hope that her older sister might hear. "Ruth! Help me!"

  She continued with her desperate climb. No-one called back to her answer her cries for help. The only sound in the cave, apart from her hands scrabbling at the rocks, was a distant dripping sound and the faintest hint of running water, along with an occasional howl of wind. For several minutes, Charlotte continued to haul herself up the side of a nearby rock, until finally she was on level ground. She stayed perfectly still for a moment, trying to ignore the crippling cold water that had soaked through her dress.