Sarah pressed 3. The phone rang five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five times. She put it down, dialled 1471 again and wrote the number down. That’s something, she thought. She looked at the number but didn’t recognise it. That’s where she must be. I can ring it again and if it doesn’t answer the police can find out where it is.
The police. It isn’t going to come to that, is it?
The back door opened. She turned with hope singing in her heart but it was Bob. He stood there in boots and anorak, breathing heavily as though he had been running.
‘Have you found her?’
‘No. You?’
‘No. There’s a number on the phone.’ She showed him. ‘I rang it but it didn’t answer.’
‘I don’t recognise it, do you?’
‘No. I thought …’
‘What?’
‘The police could find out who it was if …’ Sarah hesitated, not wanting to draw the conclusion. It seemed so ridiculous. Things like this didn’t happen to them. ‘… if she doesn’t come home soon,’ she finished more firmly.
‘Soon? She’s been gone over twelve hours! I’m going to ring them now. Give me that.’ Bob took the receiver out of her hand. For a moment she thought of resisting but then she looked out of the window and saw it was nearly dark. He was right. It was already far too long.
Chapter Eleven
‘So when they sing, they’re calling their families over hundreds of miles,’ Jessica explained earnestly. ‘They haven’t got ears, but they feel the sounds in their heads … they’ve got, like …’
‘Supersonic earsight,’ ventured Terry helpfully, spooning up his cornflakes.
‘We saw a whale in a museum once, didn’t we, Dad?’ Seven year old Esther was determined not to be left out. ‘It was as big as a bus.’
‘Two buses, actually. We measured it, remember?’ Jessica, two years older, was used to competition for her father’s affections.
Diplomatically, Terry wiped the spilt milk from around his younger daughter’s plate while smiling encouragement at the elder one, whose enthusiasm continued unchecked. ‘A sperm whale is the biggest creature on the planet, and it doesn’t attack people at all, it just feeds off small planks …’
‘Plankton.’
‘Yes, that’s it, millions and millions of them. Mr Jones said whales are like huge cows eating grass in the sea. They’re gi-normous …’
‘Who’s ready for waffles? Esther?’ Trude, the nanny, came in bearing two hot waffles on a plate and wearing a t-shirt cut to display her exquisite belly-button to perfection. She flopped a steaming waffle onto Esther’s plate. ‘Strawberry jam or blackcurrant?’
‘Treacle.’
‘Oh no. Not before school,’ said Terry firmly. ‘Remember yesterday.’
‘But I like treacle!’
‘No one in Norway has treacle for breakfast,’ said Trude supportively. ‘It’s a law.’
Esther gaped at her, then gave in and reached for the blackcurrant jam. Even without treacle, waffles for breakfast were an incredible luxury, one of Trude’s best introductions. The young nanny had been amazed to find herself in a family with no waffle-iron. Every Norwegian family had one, she said. She immediately sent for one and now it was in constant use, delighting Terry and his daughters equally.
But a different aspect of their nanny’s culture was troubling Jessica.
‘Only two countries still hunt whales,’ she whispered solemnly, her big brown eyes fixed on her father as she folded her waffle. ‘Japan and — Norway.’ She grimaced towards the kitchen in a way intended, no doubt, to show an adult appreciation of a touchy problem. To Terry it conveyed something utterly different — a twinge of memory, sharp as toothache, of exactly the same expression on the face of the child’s mother.
‘Don’t you think it’s important?’ Jessica persisted.
‘What?’ Forget the pain, he told himself. It will pass. And Mary’s still here, her genes are alive in this child we made together. ‘What’s important, Jess?’
‘Dad! Norwegians killing whales, of course!’
Trude, coming in from the kitchen, overheard. ‘I don’t kill them,’ she protested. ‘Though I did have whale meat once. It was good. Better than reindeer.’
‘Reindeer? Yuck!’ said Esther. ‘Trude, you can’t!’
‘Whales are intelligent animals, like us!’ Jessica protested. ‘You can’t eat them!’
Trude looked amused and hurt at once. She sat down, sweeping her long fair hair back as she tried to explain. ‘Well, most Norwegians don’t kill them …’
The mobile in Terry’s pocket rang. Irritated, he answered it. ‘Yes?’
It was Sergeant Rossiter at the station. ‘Sorry to trouble you at home, sir, but there’s been a flap overnight about a missing person out your way and I thought you might want to go straight there before you come in.’
‘A misper? Aren’t uniform dealing with it?’
‘Well, yes sir, they are, but like I say it’s out your way and one of the parents is someone you know, as it happens. A Mrs Sarah Newby.’
Terry groaned. ‘All right. But I’m having breakfast with my kids first. Okay?’
‘Sir.’ It was not a thing CID officers usually said. ‘I’ll tell them you’re on your way.’
At the Newby house no one had slept.
Bob had called the police at 8.30 p.m. but at first it had been hard to get them to take him seriously. A fifteen year old girl, still early in the evening — it didn’t seem urgent. Nonetheless they would send a car round.
When the two PCs arrived Sarah and Bob were bemused by the uniforms and crackling radios in their own living room. They gave the details anxiously, submissively almost. No, Emily had no problems except her exams; no, there had been no family quarrel; yes, she was nearly sixteen; yes, she had been out at night before but always with friends; yes, she had a mobile but it was at home. Sarah gave them the number she had got from ringing 1471 and a constable wrote it down without comment. They checked Emily’s room, took a photograph that Sarah gave them, wrote down Sarah’s guess at the clothes her daughter had been wearing, and then — left.
‘They’re not bloody interested!’ she fumed after they had gone. ‘They think it’s just a family quarrel. They’re not going to do anything at all!’
Bob frowned. ‘We did say she might turn up at any time, after all.’
‘If she does I’ll kill her, the spoilt brat.’
‘Maybe that’s why she went.’
‘Oh, it’s my fault now, is it?’
‘You didn’t show her much sympathy over her exams this morning, did you?’
‘I talked to her, didn’t I? You were still semi-conscious, as you are every morning. I said I’d phone her at lunchtime and I did, too. I can’t help a person who isn’t there!’
‘Maybe she thinks you’re never there when she wants you.’
‘Oh shut up, Bob, this is no time for pop psychology. The fact is the wretched girl has vanished and you’re quite right, it is out of character and it is late and the useless plods aren’t interested.’
‘They did take her photo.’
‘Yes.’ That was the thing that had shaken Sarah. It was a school portrait in a frame, of a slightly younger Emily smiling engagingly at the camera. The sort of photo of someone posed and pretty and full of bubbling happiness which the newspapers splash on their front pages when a girl has been stripped, raped, mutilated and murdered. Look at me, the photos always seem to say. I’m a star at last!
But unlike newspaper readers, the police and lawyers get to see the real photos, of the naked strangled corpse with the wounds and swollen eyes and the purple tongue hanging out.
That’s not going to happen to Emily, Sarah thought. It can’t. It won’t. This is all a bad dream.