The Burning Air (7 page)

10

S
OPHIE’S INSTINCT WAS to scream, but she managed to tell herself there was no point in losing her cool. Edie and Kerry were somewhere else in the house, that was all. She forced herself to breathe deeply and slowly, concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

She checked the other bedrooms one by one, starting with Felix’s chaotic room, with its unmade bed and its mess of clothes and bags. Inhale, exhale. Left foot, right foot. She progressed to Tara’s room, then Rowan’s. Inhale, exhale. Left foot, right foot. She checked both bathrooms, pulling back the shower curtains. In each room she entered, she turned on the main light expecting, hoping, to floodlight a blinking, apologetic Kerry. She left all the lights on behind her. This wasn’t funny. Inhale, exhale. Left foot, right foot. With each tread on the stairs, she told herself she would find them downstairs.

But when she called Edie’s name, and then Kerry’s, into the silent cavity of the sitting room, only the tiniest of echoes bounced back. The kitchen was in darkness and so was the mudroom. A few coats and kicked-off boots remained in there, but none was a size 6. Were they
outside
? What reason could Kerry have to take Edie out into this fog? Sophie flipped the switch on the kitchen wall that would illuminate the outside light, but the garden remained in darkness. God, of all the nights for the bulb to blow. There was a large torch in the mudroom but its beam faltered a few yards into the swirling garden. At the side of the house she picked out the dull black and orange bodies of Rowan’s and Felix’s cars.

The country silence was broken by only the odd whistle and bang of a faraway firework. Inhale, exhale. Sophie whispered Edie’s name, repeating it until it was a shriek, running back into the house, no longer caring if she woke Charlie as long as his voice was echoed by Edie’s. She searched the bright, empty bedrooms for anything that would contradict the fact of Edie’s disappearance. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.

Perhaps there had been an accident, perhaps Kerry had had to call an ambulance. Sophie looked wildly around for signs of some kind of tussle, or a fall. There was none, but broken bones and blocked airways would not necessarily leave blood. If something had happened, wouldn’t Kerry have left a message on her mobile? Sophie seized on the possibility that a message had been left while she was driving in one of those dead zones that the mobile phone masts couldn’t reach. Perhaps she had missed the ambulance by minutes. She waved her mobile phone around in the air, as though sheer force of will could create a signal, then suddenly remembered that she could access her voice mail from a landline, Edie’s birthday the code that would grant her access, and walked over to the telephone table. She picked up the receiver, as clumsy as if wearing boxing gloves. These old phones felt unfamiliar to her, so used was she to speed-dialing everything. Something about it felt foreign, wrong. She punched her number in, then waited for it to connect and ring. No sound came. Sophie swore under her breath: now was not the time for her to misdial her own telephone number. She depressed the button to hang up and when she released it again realized what had really been wrong the first time. There was no dial tone. The phone was dead.

An animal whimpering escaped her lips and solidified into a swearword. Had Rowan let service lapse? It was out of character, but then so was much of his behavior these days. She took a deep breath. More likely there was a problem with the line that none of them was aware of because the telephone was so rarely used. Had any of them picked up the receiver this weekend? Or was it simply a loose cable, pulled from the wall by little fingers? She dropped to her knees, examining the cable for signs of wear, tear, or deliberate damage, but it looked perfect. Perhaps then it was loose in its socket. She yanked it out, but it took forever to reinsert into the tricky little hole with its trapdoor. Why didn’t they make this easier? When finally she managed to click it back in, she picked the receiver up again. There was still no tone, no lifeline. She bashed the receiver on the wall, carving a chunk from the plaster and then, incongruously, replaced it very carefully as though she could trick the phone into coming back to life, but there was nothing. She actually relaxed at this.
This
was why Kerry hadn’t left a message; the barn phone wasn’t working. Why hadn’t she left a note instead? Perhaps there had not been time. Sophie’s and Will’s numbers remained stuck to the wall. Perhaps Kerry had been in such a hurry that she had forgotten to take them, and was currently kicking herself for the oversight, or perhaps she had stored them in her own phone and was even now trying to get through. She held her useless mobile phone in one hand, the useless landline receiver in the other, and stared stupidly for a few seconds before some subconscious impetus propelled her into action.

Mobile in hand, she got behind the wheel of Matt’s car, turned the key, put the automatic gearbox into drive. She could feel her heartbeat in the soles of her feet and in the palms of her hands as she drove back down the lane, one eye on the road in front of her, the other checking the screen so she would know the second she was in range of a signal. The vehicle that had seemed so easy to drive on the way here suddenly redoubled its unfamiliarity at a time when what she needed most was to go on autopilot and not have to think about driving, and although her left hand was free, it sought the reassurance of the gear stick for something to do. Her attention briefly snagged on the folded jacket on the passenger seat. What was that doing there? She squinted into the mist and tried to calculate—

Charlie. She had forgotten Charlie.

Sophie put her foot on the brake and kept it there. He was asleep, and unlikely to wake up. But what if it had not been an accident but some brewing domestic emergency that had forced Kerry out of the house? It could have been a gas leak; the whole place could be about to blow. The part of her that still believed that there was a reasonable explanation for this, that the answer to the horrible riddle of the vacant barn lay stored electronically in her voice mail, told her that Edie was fine. That belief, along with a sudden vision of a darkening carbon-monoxide circle—why hadn’t she checked?—and the thought of what would happen if the others came back and found him alone again, sent her back to the barn.

The accelerator on Matt’s car was more powerful than she was used to and on the forward motion she shot forward into a hedge. Trying to reverse, she got confused without the clutch to root her feet and depressed the accelerator instead of the brake. Her insides flipped and her body received a powerful dull impact and suddenly Sophie found herself on her back, staring not at hedgerow and driveway but up through the windshield into the swirling sky. The front of the car rose up before her like a great steel wall. It took her precious seconds to understand that the back half of the car was in the ditch. She opened the door, and managed to haul her body out. She landed ankle-deep in the stinking brook. Clods of mud stuck to her legs as she scrambled up the shallow bank.

Turning around, she saw Matt’s car at a forty-five-degree angle. The headlights slashed a lucid diagonal through the haze; not impossible to retrieve but impossible for her to do it alone.

She ran as she had not run since she was at school, cross-country. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale; her breath ripped open her lungs. She was dimly aware of a creeping cold wetness in one of her boots, saturating her sock. With each stride she felt every fiber of her leg muscles flex and contract.

As she neared the barn, hope began to rise that the whole thing had been a mistake. She wished herself insane, prayed that this was some kind of late-onset postnatal psychosis, would happily sign herself back onto the psych ward for a year if it meant that Edie was near and warm and well and the only terrible power at work here was her own imagination.

The yellow light spilling through the open door promised warmth, welcome, reunion, but the interior remained empty, dead, hostile. There was still no sign of anyone having been there and certainly not of anyone having returned. Inhale, exhale. There was not the faintest trace of gas, and the carbon-monoxide monitor gleamed innocent and white. She ran up the stairs, leaving a trail of muddy footprints on the runner, picked Charlie up and bundled him downstairs. Her shoulders were still tender from the effort of carrying him the half mile to the car park. How would she get him down the lane? Edie’s buggy, folded in the corner, was meant for someone half Charlie’s size, but it would have to do. She laid her stirring son on the sofa and tried to use her foot to undo the catch, a one-step move that she had perfected by now, that she had done with a baby on her hip and another child in reins in pouring rain in a supermarket car park, but now, with both hands free, the mechanism defeated her. Careful depression of the correct lever gave way to frantic rattling. Inhale. Inhale. Inhale. Inhale. Inhale.

And then the sound of tires on the gravel outside, doors slamming, footsteps, angry shouts, and frightened cries carrying from darkness into light.

11

W
ILL WAS FIRST out of the car, his eyes as black as his hair. He gripped her arms.

“Jesus, Sophie, thank
Christ
. I thought something terrible had happened. You’re OK? Charlie’s OK?” Her insides dropped as she understood that he was reacting not to the mystery of Edie’s whereabouts but the discovery of the car in the ditch.

“What’s happened, Mum?” asked Toby. Leo stood behind him, his bottom lip trembling.

Sophie’s protective instinct swam to the surface of her panic. Snapping on a smile, she mustered enough outward calm to say, “Tara, could you get the boys into bed, please?” Her voice was controlled but her eyes must have successfully telegraphed the emergency, as Tara went straight into mother mode too, scooping Charlie into her arms and giving orders in a brisk voice Sophie had never heard before.

“Come on Toby, Leo, up to bed. No ifs, no buts. Jakey, give me a hand?”

“But what’s—”

“Jake.”
Also grasping the gravity of the situation, Jake followed his mother’s lead, walking behind Toby and holding Leo by the hand. Sophie waited until the landing door had clicked shut behind the last of them.

“They’ve gone,” she said simply.

“Who?” replied Will. Sophie let out a noise somewhere between a scream and a growl. Wasn’t the lack of them palpable in the house, more powerful than a presence? How could he not have divined the situation from the empty sitting room, from her face?

“Edie! Kerry! I don’t know what’s happened. Edie’s—missing.” The word was a barbed hook being ripped up through her throat. “They weren’t here when I got back. Edie’s sleeping bag is gone but Cloth Rabbit’s here and the phone isn’t working and I can’t find out if she’s left me a message here and anyway I don’t even know which hospital she would have taken her to. That’s where I was going in the car, to try to get a signal, in case there’s a voice mail. I’ve been everywhere, all the lights are on, I was screaming in the garden but no one came. She hasn’t got any nappies with her, and the boots are gone.”

Will shot a look at Rowan that Sophie couldn’t decipher. He seemed confused rather than afraid. His voice was slower than usual, exaggeratedly deliberate. “Edie doesn’t wear boots.”

For fuck’s sake. “The boots Kerry was wearing, you idiot!” said Sophie.

She could almost see him counting to ten to stop himself losing his temper. They didn’t have ten seconds.

“OK, let’s get to the bottom of this.” Will took both of her hands in both of his, fixed his gaze to hers. “Tell me what you think you know.”

She broke away from him and threw her arms wide.

“What I
think
I know? Look around you! Look in the bedroom!” Matt took this as an instruction and bounded up the stairs two at a time. “Edie’s gone, Kerry’s gone, what more do you need to see? I don’t
think
Edie’s missing. I
know
she is!
Where are they?
”

“Oh, Christ, oh no,” said Will. His face blanched further as his understanding caught up with hers. Rowan and Felix were a second behind him and for a moment fear rearranged their features so they seemed to resemble each other.

“What do you mean,
missing
?” said Felix. “There’s got to be some sort of reasonable explanation. I don’t know, maybe Edie was ill and Kerry took her out for some fresh air.”

“What, all night long? No. Something’s happened, they’ve had to go somewhere. I don’t know how, though. Dad’s car’s still there, your car’s still there. I’ve looked all around outside, I’ve screamed for them, I’ve been in every room of the house. She hasn’t taken any nappies. What if Edie’s hungry? What if she needs changing? What could be so urgent that they had to go somewhere without even having time to pack a
nappy
? What if they’re all in the hospital now, and her nappy needs changing?”

“I’ve had my phone on me all the time,” said Will slowly. “There hasn’t been a message. Sophie, I don’t think it’s that . . .”

“Daddy?”
said Sophie, but it was clear that her father was in no position to provide solutions. His brow was damp with sweat and his eyes bulged.

“I’m calling the police,” said Rowan. He picked up the telephone, dropped the receiver, then began the same futile series of taps and tests that Sophie had conducted. He stared at the mouthpiece. “It isn’t working,” he said, aghast.

“I
told you
that!” Why wouldn’t anyone take her word for anything?

“It must be,” said Will, taking the receiver from Rowan and stabbing the number nine three times.

The landing door clicked open and Matt’s figure momentarily blocked the light from the landing. Sophie held a second’s silly hope that somehow his relative unfamiliarity with the layout and rooms of the barn would enable him to see something she had missed, a trapdoor or secret passage of childhood fantasy. “It just looks normal, like we left it before we went,” he said. “Windows all closed, no one’s there, there’s no, like . . . it’s not like there’s been a struggle or a break-in or an accident or anything.” Every scenario he dismissed was a door slamming in Sophie’s face. “I’m going to check the back door.”

“It’ll be open,” said Sophie. “I told you, I’ve been out the back.
They’re not here
. I’ve checked the garden.”

“I’ll check it again, then,” said Matt helplessly, making for the kitchen. “I can’t just sit around here, not doing anything.”

“Right, I’ll go and use my mobile,” said Will. “Sophie, how long have they been missing?”

That
word
again. They needed another word.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. They were gone when I got back.”

“Hang on a sec, Matt,” said Will. Matt shot back in from the kitchen. “I’ll go and call for help and then I’ll go out in the car and look for them. If I give you a lift to the top of the lane, do you think we can get your car out of the ditch and you can take it around and do a separate scout?”

“Of course. Anything, whatever.”

“Stay here. The police won’t be long,” Will told her. On foot it would take ten minutes to get to the top of the valley, but in the car it would take three or four. Sophie drew comfort from the fact that before the clock next chimed, help would be on its way.

She turned back to her brother. He appeared to have lost control of his hands: they fluttered like winged creatures around his face.

“Felix, is there anything you want to tell me?” she said.

“What?”

“Do you know any reason why Kerry might want to take Edie?”

“No!” Felix was violently indignant. “No, I don’t. None of this makes sense to me. None of it
rings true
. Why are you all assuming Kerry’s taken Edie? Isn’t it just as possible, isn’t it actually
more likely
, that someone came and took both of them?”

Sophie pressed her fingertips to her temples to still her spinning mind and allow this new idea to board. It was true that a woman alone with a baby in an isolated house was vulnerable, but only if someone knew they were there. Far Barn was a pinprick on the map, impossible to find unless you were looking at it, and anyway nobody outside the family even knew they were there. Until Kerry offered to babysit earlier that afternoon, it would have been she,
Sophie,
alone with Edie.

“Felix, if that’s the case, where are the signs of struggle?” said Rowan. “You heard Matt, there’s nothing upstairs. You can pick up a little baby and carry her without permission”—he looked at Sophie—“I’m
sorry
, darling—but you can’t do the same to a grown woman. It really doesn’t look as if anyone else has been here.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” repeated Felix. “I’m as confused as you are, I just . . . I
know
Kerry.”

Their earlier conversation echoed in Sophie’s head, innocent words given terrible new meaning in the terrible new circumstances. “You don’t, though, do you? You don’t know the first thing about her background, you admitted it yourself.”

“I know her in the ways that
count
.”

The legs that minutes earlier had carried Sophie at speed through the dark now began to shake. She sank onto the sofa and began to cry.

“Jesus, Felix, just because she’s a good shag doesn’t mean she can be trusted to . . . It’s my fault. It’s my fault. What was I
thinking
? What the
hell
was I thinking allowing her to look after my baby? She could be a monster. She could be anyone. Felix, can you think of anything that might explain this, anything about Kerry, anything she’s said?”

“Don’t you think I’d have told you if I did? I swear on my life,
no,
” said Felix in a broken voice. “I swear on Mum’s memory. I’m going to search the valley. Dad, I’ll go up in the direction of the orchard, if you do the bit past the trenches?”

“Right behind you,” said Rowan, who was on his knees and examining the telephone cord. “I’m going to give this one last try.”

Blind with tears and swallowing snot, Sophie dashed back up the stairs. Matt had left the landing in darkness. Sophie prayed that the bunker’s legendary soundproofing would hold as she scrambled from room to room, flicking the switches on again as though Edie and Kerry were shadows that could be flushed out with light.

She turned to the room that Kerry had been sharing with Felix. Without knowing what she was looking for, she began to search. She turned Kerry’s pink weekend bag upside down and picked through the resulting heap of clothes, dirty underwear, a condom in a tissue, a slippery tube of hair serum that shot from between her fingers and across the room. No purse, no keys, no phone. Sophie didn’t know what she was hoping to find. A signed confession? An X-marks-the-spot map describing their whereabouts? When she had emptied the pink bag of clothes and toiletries, she turned it upside down and shook it. A single sheet of paper, folded into quarters, slid out of an inside pocket. Before she uncreased it, Sophie knew that it was an official document of some kind, nothing personal, nothing that would shed any light on the state of Kerry’s mind or her intentions or what the hell had happened to her baby. At a glance, she recognized it as the paper counterpart to a driver’s license photo card, and dismissed it, searching again for something that would lead her to understand where they might be.

It was another minute or two of frantic shaking and searching before the part of Sophie’s brain that had scanned the document made contact with her conscious mind. When it happened, her body jerked, like a dog exceeding the bounds of its lead. She stopped tearing at the lining of a jacket, retrieved the discarded license, and this time reread the first line. What she saw made her insides drop.

The printed name was one from her family’s past that she had hoped never to see again. She could not guess what it meant in this context, but it could not be a coincidence. The name Kellaway barred the possibilities of accident and spontaneity and threw open the doors to premeditation and violence.

There was only one other person in the family, now that Lydia was dead, to whom it meant something. Clutching the terrible clue in sweating hands, she walked down the stairs to show it to her father.