Her Last Tomorrow (2 page)

There’s an operator on the end of the line very quickly and I tell her I want the police. Within a couple of seconds I’m put through and before I can even think straight I’m babbling garbled words about my daughter having disappeared, someone having taken her and far too much detail about the picture she drew of Miss Williams.

The man on the other end of the phone does his best to calm me down with his matter-of-fact questions.

‘How long has she been missing?’ he asks.

I dart a glance at my watch. I don’t know. It feels like hours, weeks, years, but it can only have been minutes at best. I don’t even know what time we got to the car in the first place. Right now, I barely know my own name.

‘I don’t know. Not long. But she’s never done this before. I left her for thirty seconds. I’ve looked. I don’t know.’

I can feel tears breaking.

‘And you say you last saw her outside your house? Have you searched the street and spoken to your neighbours to see if they saw anything?’

‘I looked. And asked the man on the ladder. I can’t find her. She’s nowhere. Please just help me. Please come and find her.’

‘How old is your daughter?’ he asks.

‘Five. She’s meant to be at school,’ I say, my brain switching into organisational — safe — mode. ‘She’s going to be late.’

‘Try not to worry too much,’ he says, trying to sound soothing but instead coming across as patronising. ‘Most children return very quickly. It’s usually just a misunderstanding. Do you have any friends or family around who could help you look?’

‘No. I don’t. Please, please just come and help me. I... I think she’s been abducted.’

At the other end of the phone I hear what either sounds like the clicking of a computer mouse or the man’s tongue against the roof of his mouth.

‘Is there someone who would want to abduct your daughter, sir?’

‘I don’t... I don’t know. But I’ve looked everywhere. She isn’t here. There’s no way for her to have got in the house. I was there. I’ve checked the front garden and you can’t get into the back from the front. I’ve looked all around the street. She isn’t there!’

‘Okay, sir, try not to panic,’ he says, riling me even more. ‘Could she have reached the end of the street in the time you were apart?’

‘No,’ I say, firmly. ‘No chance. It’s impossible.’

There’s what could only have been a few seconds’ silence, but it seems like hours before he next speaks.

‘What I’m going to do is I’m going to send some local officers out to you. In the meantime, can you knock on your neighbours’ doors and ask them to check their gardens and houses. It’s possible she might have wandered into someone else’s property quite innocently.’

‘I will,’ I tell him. ‘Thank you.’

I have to tell Tasha. I tap her name in my Favourites list and the call takes an age to connect.

‘What is it, honey? I’m just about to head into the office,’ she says, without giving me a chance to speak or even saying hello.

‘Ellie’s gone,’ I say.

‘Gone?’

‘Yeah. Gone. I went to get something for her and I came back and she was gone. The police are on their way, but—‘

‘What do you mean? She left the house?’

‘No, she was in the car. I went to—‘

‘You left her in the car?’ she says, her voice rising in both volume and pitch.

‘For ten seconds. At the most. I just went to grab something. Then I came back and she was gone. I’ve searched everywhere, and the police—‘

‘Christ, Nick.’

That’s all she can say. Brilliant.

‘Are you coming home?’ I ask.

‘What choice do I have?’ she says. ‘And I’ve only just got here. You
knew
I had that meeting with Maxxon today. Why do you always do this to me?’ she says and hangs up the phone.

I do as I was told and jog down the street, searching gardens and knocking on doors trying to rouse my neighbours’ attention. I’m four houses down on our side of the road before anyone answers. I’m now opposite the man on the ladder and he’s looking at me strangely again.

An old lady answers the door. She must be in her nineties.

‘Hi. I live a few doors down and I’m looking for my daughter. I think she might have run into someone else’s garden or house. Have you seen her? A young girl, about this tall,’ I say, holding my hand out to my side.

The woman just looks at me. Considering the number of chains and locks she had to take off the door just to open it a moment ago, I’m guessing there’s no way Ellie’s in here.

‘I’ll just look in your hedges to see if she’s hiding there,’ I say. The woman still says nothing.

I turn and look more closely at her front garden. The grass is overgrown and the ‘hedges’ are mostly weeds and thistles. I move a few clumps aside with my foot and call Ellie’s name, but there’s nothing.

At the next two houses there’s still no answer, but before I can try the next one I hear the sound of a car engine increasing in volume. I look. It’s them. I jog up the road and wave my arms as they round the corner and pull up alongside me.

‘Are you here for my daughter?’ I ask.

‘Mr Connor, is it?’ the middle-aged uniformed policeman asks as he gets out of the passenger side door.

‘Yes. Nick Connor. I don’t know what you’ve been told, but she was in the back seat of the car for a few seconds, if that. I went into the house to get something she’d forgotten and I came back and she was gone.’

‘Right. Which house is yours?’ he asks.

‘Down there,’ I say. ‘Number forty.’

He gestures to his younger counterpart with a flick of the head and they both follow me down the road towards the house.

‘Thank you for coming so quickly,’ I say, trying to act as normally as possible, a large part of me realising that they’d probably think I was completely overreacting. ‘I thought you usually left it a day or two before looking for people.’

‘Depends on the circumstances,’ the younger officer says. ‘With young children it’s a bit different. Especially if there’s a chance someone else might’ve taken them.’

The older officer darts a look at him, thinking I hadn’t noticed.

‘You seem quite calm, Mr Connor,’ the younger officer says. ‘Does this sort of thing happen often?’

‘No, of course not,’ I reply. ‘I just didn’t want to seem like some panicking lunatic, that’s all. Inside I’m a wreck. Trust me.’

The older officer nods. ‘I’m PC Briers, by the way,’ he says. ‘This is PC Robinson.’

I nod. ‘That’s mine, there,’ I say as we get closer to the house. ‘She was in the back of the car.’

‘Was she strapped in? Was the door locked?’ PC Briers asks.

‘It wasn’t locked, no. I was only gone a few seconds. She was strapped in, though.’

‘Was it a safety catch at all? Could she have undone it herself?’

‘Well yeah, she could. She has done before. She’s five, for Christ’s sake. She’s always fiddling with everything.’

Briers and Robinson look at each other. I can tell what they’re thinking.

‘But she’s not the sort of kid to just walk off or disappear. She knows about things like this. We talk about it all the time at home, keeping safe and things like that.’

‘You say she can’t have disappeared on her own, though?’ Briers asks. ‘Why’s that?’

‘I dunno,’ I say. ‘It just doesn’t seem possible. There’s no way she could’ve got to the end of the road on her own in the time I was inside.’

‘Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to take Ellie?’

I can see the way he’s looking at me. We walk up the driveway to the house.

‘No. My wife, Tasha, was at work. She’s on her way back but it’ll take a while as she works in London.’

‘That’s Ellie’s mum?’ he asks. The question strikes me as bizarre, but I guess it’s reasonable in the modern age.

‘Yeah, it is.’

‘Did you hear a car outside while you were in the house?’ PC Robinson asks, making himself useful for the first time as I let the officers inside.

‘I don’t think so. I don’t remember hearing anything,’ I say. ‘Anyway, should we not be outside looking?’

‘That’ll all be taken care of,’ PC Briers says, smiling as he tries to reassure me. ‘There are certain procedures we have to follow. PC Robinson and I are here to speak to you and find out a little more about Ellie, perhaps try to ascertain where she might have gone and why.’

I nod silently. In my very British way, I do all I can do in times of tension and I put the kettle on.

I feel helpless and useless as I sit quietly sipping my tea. What is the right thing to do? Should I be here giving as much information as I can to the officers in my living room or should I be out pounding the streets doing all I can to look for Ellie? Both options seem futile, and once again PCs Briers and Robinson remind me that there are officers out looking for her. They tell me that my efforts are best served at home, providing information and waiting to welcome Ellie home on her return.

I look at the empty photo frame on the side unit, the photo of Ellie that was in it now sitting on PC Robinson’s lap. This is what they’ll circulate with a description, they say.

‘Is there anything else we should know about Ellie?’ PC Briers asks.

I want to ask why they’ve only sent two lowly PCs but my guess is that they’re hardly likely to ship out the local equivalent of Sherlock Holmes or Colombo when, as far as they’re concerned, it’s probably just a case of a wandering child who’ll be back home in half an hour.

I shake my head silently. ‘She was just a... normal girl. She liked all the normal things. Playing with her friends, watching TV, making things. None of it makes any sense.’ There’s a bizarre haze in front of my eyes as I speak, both mentally and physically. My eyes are clouded with tears and my mind with confusion.

The nature of my own unproductive working days really hits home when I see how much these guys manage to pack into a couple of hours. We’ve had officers searching the home, looking at nearby CCTV and knocking on doors in the area. We’ve had the car taken away on a low-loader — it’s a crime scene, apparently — and now we’ve got a Detective Inspector sitting in our living room, summoned to get to the bottom of what’s happened before it’s even really sunk in for me.

She introduced herself as Jane McKenna. I imagine she’s seen by her male counterparts as a bit of a ball-breaker. It seems ridiculous to say that, with all that’s going on, but it’s my writer’s instinct to want to guess what people’s personalities are the second I meet them.

‘Does Ellie have any brothers or sisters?’ she asks — just one in a long line of questions. DC Brennan is sitting in the armchair, a fairly nondescript guy who hasn’t said much at all.
 

‘No,’ I say. ‘She’s an only child.’ Just saying those words brings back both the painful memories and feelings of elation. The pain at finding out we couldn’t have kids and the joy at discovering Tasha was pregnant with Ellie. ‘We weren’t really even meant to have Ellie,’ I say.

McKenna’s ears prick up.

‘We were told we weren’t able to have children. Before Ellie was born, I mean. Tasha has severe endometriosis. The doctors said it had damaged her ovaries. We were told it meant we couldn’t have children. We tried IVF through the NHS but it didn’t work. It would have cost tens of thousands of pounds to go private, and we didn’t have that sort of money. We just kind of came to terms with the fact that that was how things were. Three years later, we found out that Tasha was pregnant with Ellie.’

‘That must have been quite a shock,’ McKenna says.

‘You can say that again. The doctors were more amazed than anyone. Actually, it made the papers,’ I say, walking over to the side unit and rifling through the middle drawer, pulling out a slim ring binder. ‘They called her the miracle baby.’

I hand the ring binder to McKenna and she leafs through the laminated pages within it, scanning the newspaper cuttings. Brennan peers over her shoulder.

‘Defied the laws of nature,’ she says, quoting from a headline.

‘Yeah. It was quite something. I must admit we weren’t massively keen on the publicity, but you know how these things are.’

I see the McKenna’s eyes stop moving, but she’s still staring at the newspaper cuttings.

‘You’re a writer, aren’t you?’ she says. ‘Urban horror stuff?’

‘Yeah, that’s me,’ I reply, for some reason feeling a little ashamed.

‘I’ve seen them.
Black Tide
. That was one of yours, wasn’t it? Must be a couple of years ago now.’

‘Just over five.’

‘Not long after this article was written then,’ she says, finally making eye contact with me. ‘Good timing, wasn’t it? Must have helped push the book a bit.’

I’m really not sure what she’s getting at. ‘I guess so,’ I say. ‘Come to think of it, it was Peter, my agent, who spoke to the papers about all this. Said it would be a human interest story or something.’

She nods silently and looks back at the newspaper clippings. I can see Brennan looking up at me from underneath his brow.

‘If you’re thinking we got pregnant just to promote a bloody book, I wish it was that fucking easy,’ I say, feeling the fury rise to the surface. ‘We tried for years —
years
— to have a kid. If you think we could just pop one off on a whim, don’t you think we would’ve done?’