The Night They Vanished, page 7
“Sorry,” the detective says again. “I should have said right away—we haven’t found out anything about your family yet, but I promise local officers are checking it out as a matter of urgency.”
“Then what is this about? I don’t understand what I’m doing here. And where’s Adam?”
“I wanted to ask if you know a Gemma and Katie Bentley?”
I stare at him blankly. “What? Who? What has this got to do with anything?”
“Do you know the names? Gemma and Katie Bentley?” he asks again.
I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”
“They’re sisters—sharing a house on Meadow Close. Gemma’s twenty-four, Katie’s thirty-one.” He’s looking at me expectantly and I try to process the names, where they live—Meadow Close isn’t far from me. Wait… Gemma Bentley…
“It’s not the girl from the hit-and-run, is it? The one before Christmas on the park road?”
“And Katie Bentley?” he asks, not answering my question.
“I’m sorry, no. I definitely don’t know either of them—Gemma Bentley’s name is vaguely familiar, but only from reports about the hit-and-run, I think, because it was just around the corner from my house.”
He sighs and scribbles something on a piece of paper.
“Can I ask what this is about? Why you’re asking me about two complete strangers?”
He looks up at me, face blank. “I’m sorry—it’s part of an ongoing investigation. I’m afraid I can’t share any details with you.”
“What ongoing investigation? How can a hit-and-run from months ago be relevant? I came here because I was worried about my family and now you’re asking me about two women I’ve never heard of, but you won’t tell me anything.”
“As I said—we’re tracing your family as a matter of urgency, but I can assure you anything we ask is not designed to waste your time.” He pauses. “Can you run me through your movements last night? From leaving the house, to meeting Mr. Webster, to what time you got home again.”
He keeps interrupting my account with questions I can’t answer properly: Did anyone see me walking to the pub? How late was Adam? Did he give any explanation as to why he was late? Could anyone vouch for the time we arrived and left the pub? And then as I talk about after we left the pub, my answers are even vaguer because we were walking quiet streets with no one around and then kissing in the grounds of an abandoned house.
But he keeps asking: about how well I knew Adam, where we were, what we were doing… I can’t even give a good explanation for why I left when I did. And none of it helps.
There’s a tap on the door and DC Norton gets up. He goes out of the room and closes the door behind him, leaving me alone with thoughts of gruesome triple murders and guilt and bloody Christmas cards—that stupid card looming large in my mind, like if only I’d opened the damned thing two months ago, there might have been something, some clue as to why the hell this was happening.
The detective comes back in and sits down, and I don’t know how to read the look on his face.
“We’ve had local officers call at the address you gave us for your family.” He pauses, that unreadable look still on his face.
I curl my hands into fists under the table. “And?”
“Your family isn’t there. The house is empty.” He pauses again. “The whole site is locked up. There’s no furniture, nothing there. The local officers said your family moved out two months ago.”
My breath hitches. I don’t know what to say. It’s a blank—last time I actually spoke to my father, did he say anything? No. No, he didn’t. But did I let him? A two-minute conversation, me desperate to get off the phone before he said anything I didn’t want to hear. Did he try? Did he even try to tell me? Or was the plan always to just leave and not tell me. Leave me behind properly, abandon even the pretense of contact in the form of those sporadic phone calls. Dump me at the side of the road like an unwanted dog.
But that’s not true, is it? Maybe it wasn’t entirely my decision to leave but I was the one who chose not to go back. Me. My decision to stay away, to leave them all behind. Even if it felt like the best way at the time, even if I knew they were glad I was gone, still it was my decision.
“The local PC said as far as she knew, they’d moved to West Wales. She didn’t know where, but she’s going to try to find out. There’ll be records—at your sister’s school, forwarding addresses, the estate agent even. Don’t worry—we’ll find them, make sure they’re safe.”
Is it pity? Is that the look on his face? Pity for the daughter whose family moved without telling her?
“And there’s no evidence that…?”
He shakes his head. “No sign of anything wrong at the house, no break-in, nothing. No reports in the area of suspicious activity. It looks like they’ve just moved house. We are, of course, treating tracing your family as a priority—we need to know they’re safe and we need to figure out the connection between yourself, them, and Mr. Webster.”
My fists are still clenched, my nails digging into my palms. The small pain keeps my mind focused, keeps me from crying or screaming.
“Hanna, I’m going to ask again. Can you think of anything that connects you all?”
I want to say no. There’s nothing. We’re ordinary. An ordinary family with no secrets, no skeletons in the closet, no restless ghosts rattling the windows.
But. But… I don’t want to expose myself or them to police scrutiny and I genuinely don’t know what the elusive connection is, who hates one or all of us enough to have done this.
But I do need to know they are safe. So, I need to be honest and explain why my family has moved without me knowing, and why I left home in the first place.
I take a deep breath. “There’s something… It’s not a connection or anything like that, but it might be something that—” I stop. My voice is wobbling. I take another breath, press my nails harder into my palms.
“There’s something I should tell you about my family.”
Chapter 9
Saturday 3 p.m.
I walk away from the police station so fast I’m out of breath before I reach the corner, glancing back too many times. I’m not sure if I want to see Adam or if I’m more relieved I don’t. Either way, I certainly don’t want him driving me home. I want to know what the police said to him, if they told him anymore than they told me, but also… that PC’s urgency as he took him back in, the way he held his arm, like he thought he might run; CID suddenly involved, the questions about those two women. I don’t think I want to see him again until I’ve spoken to Dee and Seb, got my reassurances about him being nice.
And even more, I want to get distance from the humiliation of having to lay bare the disaster of my relationship with my family. What I need to do now is get home, to my safe space—and finally open that bloody Christmas card.
I should have got a taxi or taken the bus. My feet are killing me and I’m shivering by the time I get close to home. All I want to do is get in and wrap myself in a literal comfort blanket, but I freeze when I get to the end of my street—there’s someone outside my house, looking up at my windows. Adam? I hover there, ready to turn and walk away when whoever it is moves on and keeps walking. I sag with relief. Okay. It’s fine. Either Adam is still at the police station or he’s gone home, probably with no intention of ever contacting me again, blaming me for bringing this ridiculous nightmare into his weekend. I let out a humorless laugh as I search my bag for my keys. Bet he wasn’t expecting this aftermath from a blind date.
I head straight to the card as soon as I’m in, door locked behind me, but even with my newfound resolve, my hand is still shaking as I pick it up. I’ve given it such power over me in the months I’ve let it sit unopened—to the point where I almost believe it to be alive, as if when I finally open the bloody thing, my family will come bursting out of the envelope.
But I suppose in a way, they might: if there’s an address in here, a phone number that gets answered. I rip open the envelope before I can begin prevaricating again and pull out the card, a glittery thing with a cheery robin and Season’s Greetings in swirly text on the front. I draw in a shaky breath as I open it and see the message inside.
No address. No new telephone numbers, just a short paragraph scrawled in my stepmother’s handwriting, not even my father’s.
Dear Hanna,
I hope you’re well. Your father said he has called and left messages which you haven’t returned so I’m presuming you are either not listening to them or choosing to ignore them. So, I’m sending this as a last attempt—we are moving soon as your father has found another position in West Wales. Your father is, as I’m sure you understand, happy to be finally leaving this village. We would like you to stay in touch so I’m asking—on behalf of your father and Sasha—to please call us over the Christmas holidays. If we do not hear from you, we will take that as your decision to cut all ties with your family and will not bother you again.
Jen
Shit. It’s an ultimatum that I’m faced with two months too late. I can read the annoyance in her words, picture her tight-lipped face as she wrote those words, the passive-aggressive bit about being happy to leave—yeah, she’s sure I understand, because obviously their continued miserable existence there is my fault. Like they couldn’t have left at any point in the last fourteen years. But my dad wouldn’t, would he? He’d never let it show that he was bothered by being the subject of gossip and speculation. He’d have stayed and suffered there forever, making Jen and Sasha suffer alongside him. I wonder what finally changed his mind.
I look back down at the card. Did my father know she’d written this? Or had he already decided to cut off contact? I don’t know what messages she’s on about. It’s possible I deleted them without listening and have forgotten. But it’s also possible my dad lied to her about leaving messages. I never got on with my stepmother, but she was more patient than my dad ever was, and I can imagine her insisting he left me a message. And she really tried, I’ll give her that. It was one of the biggest things that put me off her—she tried so hard. She might well have wanted to give me one last chance.
I think of Adam’s website again, Jen relegated to nothing more than the lonely wife. Was she, really? I remember her as happy in our old house, fully embracing the housewife role, baking and cooking and cleaning and decorating. There’s nothing wrong with that and maybe if I’d been younger when Dad brought her home, with her arms stretched out, eager to become my stepmother, I’d have welcomed the stability she brought to our lives. I don’t have children of my own, she said. So, I’d love to be your mother if you would like that. But I was all about the chaos then; I didn’t want home-cooked food and my bed made for me. I can’t remember exactly what I said in response to her, but I know it was something horrible. And then they had Sasha and they didn’t need me anymore.
I’ve never really considered Jen beyond my teenage hostility and her Stepford ways, never stopped to wonder if she really was happy, stuck in the middle of nowhere, in a village that rejected us after what I did. I open the card and read her message again. She talks about Dad being happy to leave the village behind, but not her, not Sasha. The truth is, I have no idea. I made no real effort to get to know Jen and I rejected all her overtures, even after everything she did to help me. I have no idea if her life in Littledean was ecstatic or miserable, like I have no idea who Sasha’s friends are, or if there could possibly be dark secrets hidden under the perfect teen exterior.
I thought it was odd when they stopped calling, but I left it, ignored it because in all honesty, it was a relief. Caught up in the mess of my relationship and breakup with Liam, I did not want the added turmoil of family guilt and regret.
I wonder—if I’d opened the card when it arrived, two weeks before Christmas—would I have called? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. And I can’t get away from that. That admission of my own failings.
The words on that website listing start their litany through my mind again—gruesome triple killing, gruesome triple killing—and I pull my knees up to my chest, let my head fall, arms wrapped around my legs, adopting the brace position, waiting for the crash.
Dee and Seb arrive within half an hour of my call, where I unloaded everything that’s been going on. They come in bearing coffee and cakes for me, all hushed voices and grave faces like I’ve been bereaved. It’s not what I want; what I want is for them to come in breezy and joking like usual, reassuring me that all is good, there’s nothing wrong—that it’s just some sick joke.
I don’t show them the card—I don’t want pity or questions from Dee about why I haven’t opened it before now. She doesn’t expect me to have any kind of loving reunion with my dad, but I know she has hopes for some kind of future relationship with Sasha, at the very least. As they sit down, I can see the card has dropped glitter all over the coffee table, an incongruous sparkle I have to look away from, praying they won’t notice and question it, like it’s blood spatter from a crime I’ve hastily hidden, like that Christmas card is a body I’ve stuffed behind the sofa and don’t want them to find.
Dee asks to see the website and I bring it up on my laptop. She frowns as she clicks her way through it, even going so far as to get her credit card out to join the exclusive membership to get full access.
“How well do you really know Adam?” It’s Seb I ask. I wonder again what he told Adam about me, if Adam approached him first expressing interest—Dee would have raved about me, but Seb? Did he warn him off? Did he tell him to be careful? Did he tell him I was trouble? I bite my lip. Did he tell him about Jacob, about my family and my past?
He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “We’ve been talking about this since you called. I met him my first year of university—we were good mates, hung out in the same group the whole time.”
“So, you knew him then as well?” I interrupt, looking at Dee. She used to visit Seb every three weeks—she was in the dorms in Bristol, but he had a shared student house in Cardiff, so it was better for her to go to him. That carried on until graduation when they moved in together.
I only know most of that through hearsay. Dee met Seb at sixth-form college and those and her university years were my lost years—she staged her intervention after she’d graduated and moved back to Cardiff. She turned up on the doorstep of the dive I was staying in, all shiny bright and furious. Furious with me for falling so far without calling her for help. She took me back to her flat that day and defended me to Seb, to the world, every time I made a mistake.
But Dee shakes her head, not looking up from the computer. “Not really—we tended to keep to ourselves on our weekends.”
“Yeah,” agrees Seb. “I had friends party weekends and quieter Dee weekends.”
See? A bunch of nans from the age of eighteen. No wonder we were still such good friends. It just took me a bit longer to get there, that’s all.
“But he was a good friend to you, Seb? You really know him?”
Seb hesitates. “We didn’t see each other that much after graduation. He moved to London, so we mostly kept in touch on Facebook and WhatsApp. Then he lost his job last year and we had work available at my place, so I invited him down. He moved here properly about six months ago.”
I sit back. I’d been allowing myself to be reassured by the fact that Seb and Adam were best mates, like me and Dee, but Dee had obviously been exaggerating. Something I should have realized—wouldn’t I have met him sooner if they’d been that close? But then… there were a few years when I barely saw Dee, that doesn’t mean we’re not the closest of friends.
“Hanna—I know this is freaking you out,” Seb says, “but I swear—Adam can’t have anything to do with this. I know him; he would never do anything to hurt anyone. His website—the abandoned house thing—that started as an art project, that’s all, nothing creepy about it.”
“Maybe that’s how it started,” I say. “But you didn’t even see him for eight years—what if it did become creepy, some weird obsession in that time?”
“It’s definitely not him,” Dee says as she looks up from the laptop. “Look at these listings—you can tell. This is one of his… he talks about the crime sites completely differently to the new one.”
I scan through the listings Dee has pointed out and she’s right. The one about my family reads like a bunch of tabloid headlines, but all the others are matter-of-fact, detailing historic crimes with no sensationalism. I try to find the other new one, but it comes up “listing unavailable.” I don’t know why he’s removed that one but not the one about my family.
I let out a shaky breath. “Yeah… I can see the difference, but why is it still up? He said he was going to take the site down, but all that’s gone is the other new listing the police were asking him about.”
“Have you tried calling him?” Dee asks.
I shake my head. “I think he’s still at the police station.”
“God, this is terrifying,” Dee says. “I’m with Seb—it’s not Adam, no way. But someone’s doing this—someone who has to know you or Adam or both of you. And the other listing—you said it had something to do with the hit-and-run on the park road?”
“I don’t know for sure—the name sounded familiar, that’s all.”
Dee taps a finger lightly on the laptop keyboard. “Let me do some research. Maybe it’ll help us figure out the connection.”
“That’s the other thing I’m trying to work out,” I say. “The connection when we only really met last night.” I pause and look at Dee. “But Adam did say you’ve been trying to set the two of us up since New Year.”
She sighs. “That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I think what actually happened was he mentioned a while before Christmas that he fancied you, but you were seeing Liam. Then, when I was chatting to him at New Year, I just happened to mention you were now single…”
