Nowhere Girl (13 page)

She looked at them with such naked desperation that Cate felt crushed by it.

“I’m so sorry, Bridget,” she said. What else was there to say?

She was a mother whose child was lost, whose spine was now made of string, whose brain obsessively processed only one thought. It was the nightmare every mother knows too well, but one they usually wake from. This woman had now lived that nightmare for sixty hours.

Eva thrust the goulash pot into the woman’s empty arms, and she clutched it automatically.

“Please, Bridget, accept this. It’s all I could think of to do.”

“Oh, Eva, thank you…”

And Bridget, too polite to tell them to go away even though they had nothing for her, nothing she wanted anyway, invited them inside.

The police officer was seated in the dining room, at the round mahogany table. Arranged in front of him was his radio and police notebook, all at perfect angles, which he was scrutinising with a short black pencil. Olivier had a similar notebook that was never far from his grasp. All police officers kept notes in case they were later required to give evidence in court.

Bridget ignored him, he had already become part of the furniture. She walked past the dining room to the kitchen where she opened the fridge, standing uselessly in front of it as if she had suddenly forgotten why she was there. Her thoughts were elsewhere.

Eva went to her, took the casserole pot from her hands and moved some items around to find a place for the pot, lingering a moment to rob some of the cold air before closing the fridge door. Then, with a hand cupping each shoulder, she guided Bridget to one of the bar stools at the kitchen counter. Cate perched alongside as Eva returned to the fridge for juice, then found glasses. All the while Bridget watched this other woman move around her kitchen as if she had no idea where she was.

Finally, Eva took a stool opposite Cate and gazed at her expectantly, Cate understood: Eva had done her best, she’d found Bridget’s address and cooked the goulash, now she was passing the ball to Cate.

Cate glanced to the hallway, thinking that just yards away in the dining room the police officer would be making notes in his book, about their arrival. He should have taken their names, surely? Or was he assuming that woman bearing food could never be significant to any investigation?

“We want to help, if we can.” Cate leaned forward, both to establish eye contact with Bridget and so she could speak softly, though the police officer was surely too far away to hear their conversation. “If there’s anything we can do…”

The sentiment was as limp as the mother’s body, as empty as she must feel inside.

“I just want her home,” Bridget said, plaintively.

“Do you have any idea where she could be?” asked Cate, gently.

Bridget’s head jerked as if Cate had said something shocking and then she quickly shook her head. Her lip wobbled and her eyes welled with tears.

“What about any friends or boyfriends?”

“Ellie has not run away,” Bridget answered firmly. “We are a close family, we love each other. She would not do that to me.”

Cate thought that though this was undoubtedly how she felt, it could not be entirely true. Teenagers were selfish beings with secret lives, even Amelia had picked up that there was tension in the home. And hadn’t she said that Ellie had indeed spent a night away before, with a boyfriend? She felt uneasy, remembering also that Bridget had apparently slapped Ellie.

“Whoever Ellie is with, there will be some connection.” She meant that it was unlikely to be a stranger, but didn’t feel able to state this so bluntly. “Maybe someone you disapprove of?”

“Are you a police officer?” Bridget asked sharply, as if seeing Cate for the first time. Once again, hope darted through her expression, held there, waiting to be dashed.

“Sorry, no. I was a probation officer, back in the UK. So I know about criminals, I suppose I have some knowledge about what makes bad people tick.” Cate felt a fraud even saying it, but she also knew it was her only ticket to ride. “And I would like to help, if I am able.”

Eva put her hand on Bridget’s wrist. Her own role more clearly defined than Cate’s, as a supportive and nurturing friend. For a second, Cate envied her.

“Talk to us, Bridget,” she urged. “Maybe we can help, and maybe not. Either way, what do you have to lose?”

There was a long pause, until finally Bridget said, “We should never have left Heidelberg. We’ve been in Luxembourg for almost two years and I still feel like I really don’t belong. Before this it was other things that made me feel this way in Luxembourg, like dealing with people in shops or in the banks. The way they saw me, as a privileged ex-pat housewife, not as anyone who had anything valuable to contribute. But Ellie’s disappearance is something else, everyone I speak to, it’s as if they don’t even accept that it has happened. The whole situation feels beyond my control. The police aren’t listening. Their presence will stop Ellie coming home.”

Cate raised a meaningful glance towards the dining room, where the police constable was seated. He must be able to hear. But Bridget didn’t care about offending him, she was too angry.

“What is the good of him just sitting there? It’s just a gesture, probably to appease Achim. He’s been very insistent,” snapped Bridget. “But it will stop anyone from returning her, it will scare them away. And they won’t tell me anything.”

“This is usual with the police, isn’t it?” Eva tried to sound positive and looked at Cate expectantly. “They play things very close until they have something concrete to share. It is us, us mothers, who must think the worst has happened, but it can often be fine in the end.”

Bridget looked towards the landing that led to the circular staircase, as if checking it was still empty. “Achim, my husband, has called everyone on Ellie’s phone at least twice. He is wandering the streets, demanding that the school increase their security. He’s driving himself crazy, yet he hasn’t spoken with me once. He hasn’t even held my hand.” She was holding her own hand, clasping it in a grip that was so tight her knuckles were white. “I thought situations like this were supposed to bring a couple together, not drive them apart.”

Bridget looked so lost at that moment, so confused by her husband’s behaviour that Cate winced for her. She had seen how relationships suffered when a child was hurt, had experienced it after her sister, Liz, went missing. After the accusations and the blame her parents had divorced, both convinced that the other was responsible for their runaway daughter. Even now, back in England, they were establishing who was to blame in court as Cate’s father tried to defend himself against claims that he had abused Liz.
I’ll call this evening
, Cate thought.
I’ll find out how Liz and Mum are, how the court case is going. I’ll offer more support than I have
.

Liz had run away for a reason, and maybe Ellie had too. Thinking that Bridget herself may be to blame, if it was true that she hit Ellie, Cate had no comfort for her and looked away. She saw a police business card pinned with a magnet to the fridge. She recognised it as Olivier’s. Would Bridget throw her out if she knew she lived with him?

“It’s the police’s job to find Ellie,” she said, as much to the card as to Bridget. “You must trust them.”

Bridget turned in a fury of energy, following Cate’s eyeline, and snatched the card so the magnet went spinning on the ground, tossing it onto the granite worktop.

“This man,” she spat, “Detective Massard. He tried to imply I abused my daughter at the fair! Some crazy idea he got from someone that I swore at her, that I hit her. That’s why he thinks she’s run away. Why he’s not taking this seriously.”

It stung, to hear Bridget verbalise the very thought that Cate had just had, and of course she was right, Olivier did believe that. And Olivier’s source was Amelia.

For the sake of disclosure she should tell Bridget, right now, that Olivier was her boyfriend. She should make her apologies and leave. But she stayed silent.

Eva had to be back at work and Cate said she had things to do too, not admitting that her list consisted of walking General and shopping for milk. She had told Bridget that she’d collect Gaynor along with Amelia when school finished, save the poor woman the ordeal of the school run. It was the least she could do.

Waiting outside the school entrance, with General straining at his lead, Cate saw the first trickle of school children run out onto the playground. In the corner, shaded by a single tree, Mary-Ann stood with a group of women and only when Cate drew nearer did she sense the panic being whipped up. By then it was too late to turn away.

Katrina was regaling the group with a story about a boy who was taken from the school bus stop one morning, only to be found later that day, naked in a field. “But he had a scar,” she said, in hushed awe, indicating the place where a kidney would be.

“Well, I’ve bought my daughter a tracker,” a diminutive but beautiful Japanese woman said proudly. “She wears it on her wrist and I can see where she’s at.” She flashed her gold iPhone, which showed a map with a red dot bleeping in the centre. Presumably the dot indicated the very place where they were now standing.

Jesus, was this what it had come to?

“Where did you get it?” Mary-Ann asked timidly.

“Tokyo. But they sell them on
Rakuten.com
,” her friend added helpfully.

Ellie’s disappearance had united the mothers, blurring the boundaries of nationality and language and given them a subject in common. She gathered from the chatter that Ellie’s father had attended the meeting, and implored them all to be extra vigilant.

As Cate was backing away, tugging General so she could simply wait for Amelia and Gaynor on her own, the woman who’d bought the tracker thrust a flyer into her hand.

“The Parents’ Association are issuing these to every child,” she said bossily. “The Ministry of Education has issued the same message to all schools in the city.”

No doubt the result of the emergency meeting that morning. In Cate’s hands was an official-looking missive in bold print:

Try to be accompanied by an adult to and from school.

Do not accept a lift from anyone, if it has not been agreed beforehand.

Avoid talking with anyone you do not know.

If anyone approaches you, tell your parents and/or a member of staff.

Cate didn’t realise she was holding up a line of women, eager for their copies of the flyer, until they tutted her out of the way. She folded it into quarters and slid it in her pocket, thinking she’d show it to Olivier later,
See, people don’t believe this is just a teenage rebellion. You can’t contain this
.

Since Saturday she’d tried to talk to Olivier about Ellie’s disappearance several times but he’d been unwilling to share anything with her. It was not yet an equal partnership, she was reliant on him for a home and it still felt as though she was his guest. She knew that by moving to Luxembourg, she was escaping the trial. Even if she didn’t want to admit it. Since her sister Liz was taking their father to court, the abuse finally in the open, Cate felt unable to see any of her family. It was just too painful, the guilt about not being the victim, the endless wondering if she had failed Liz. The complicated feelings she felt for her mother, who had colluded with the abuse, but who was also a sad alcoholic. Cate vacillated between pity and contempt, but being in a different country, just as the court case commenced, brought her a distance that she grasped with sheer relief. She was yet to even contact home and find out how things had gone on the first two days of the trial.

Frankly, she had wanted an escape and Olivier had offered one. But that respite was now in danger of becoming something else.

Olivier was late home. He wasn’t interested in the pasta and jar of sauce she’d heated, and she could hardly blame him for that, but he opened some local wine and they took it outside, to the table and chairs on the balcony, savouring the warm evening. From where Cate sat it seemed the moon was directly above them, camouflaged by a smoke screen of mist. The street lights were orange love for the mosquitoes and gnats that buzzed around the glowing bulbs, the lamps set down the street so it was like a runway into the city.

“Napoleon, he planted trees in lines like this,” said Olivier, pointing to the equidistant oaks, “so his soldiers would have shade as they marched.”

Cate mulled this over, watching as the only soldiers left were the gnats.

As they sat in the warm night there was a grumble of thunder, some distance away but lengthy, a signal of what was to come. General knew it too; less brave than his namesake, he cowered at Cate’s feet, his nose pushed deep between his forelegs.

She waited. Waited until they had finished the wine, until the evening was almost done and the rain had started, making them move to the living room where Olivier was nursing a stubby bottle of beer as he resumed tapping on his laptop. General was laid out like a rug at Cate’s feet, one black furry paw rested across her toes.

“Any developments today with the Scheen girl?” Cate asked, as innocently as she could though her face was burning. “Has she been found?”

Olivier looked up, sipped his drink. “No, she hasn’t come home yet.”

“You still think she will? On her own, I mean.”

Olivier put his bottle down, the glass clinked on the table, and leaned back in his seat, arms behind his head and eyes closed. He looked tired, and also less certain now.

Cate moved next to him, dislodging General’s purchase on her feet, bringing her knees up and resting them in Olivier’s lap, his arm came down, around her shoulder. She placed her head against his chest, listening to the rapid throb of Olivier’s pulse.

“What if this isn’t just a case of teenage runaway?” She asked, feeling how much she longed for it to be. It was with dread that she said, “What if it’s a kidnapping?”

She felt Olivier’s chin rest gently in the crown of her head. “Mmm. It may not be as straightforward as we first thought. But we’re checking things out.”