The Missing: The gripping psychological thriller that’s got everyone talking... (33 page)

Mark’s fingers brush mine but we don’t hold hands. It is enough that he’s beside me, enough that we’re talking. The house has been on the market for three weeks. I don’t know what we’ll do when it sells. We might buy a smaller place together. We might choose to live apart. I might go to nursing college. I might not. Billy’s disappearance revealed a lot about my relationship with my husband – good and bad – and I need to decide what I can live with and what I can’t. I’m certain Mark was telling me the truth when he said he had no idea why Billy had defaced the photo album and that he didn’t have the strength for another argument, not when there were so many other things stressing him out. But he did lie when I asked him if he knew where it was. And he tried to kiss another woman. I need to decide whether I can forgive him for that and whether I would be happier with or without him. But there’s no hurry to make that kind of decision. There are some things you can’t force. Some things only time will reveal.

‘Do you think Jake will be okay?’ Mark asks as we walk past a faded sign offering one donkey ride for £3, two for a fiver.

‘Just a second.’ I dip down to undo my shoes. When I shake them out there’s half a sandcastle’s worth of sand in each one.

‘Jake will be fine,’ I say as we continue to walk. Mark in his trainers, me barefoot, despite the biting November wind. ‘Living with mates will be good for him. They won’t let him wallow.’

It’s a new start for him. A clean slate. I drove to Chew Valley the day after we saw Kira in the hospital and I threw the tote and knife into the lake. There are days when I wonder whether it was the right decision, whether I should have told DS Forbes about the paedophile Jake met. He might have been jailed, taken off the streets so he couldn’t go looking for other boys. Or Jake might have been the one that ended up behind bars. It was a risk I couldn’t take. Not after everything he’d been through.

‘Practically, I mean.’ Mark says. ‘He’s never so much as boiled an egg. You’ll have to give him lessons.’

‘He’d love that –’ I smile – ‘his mum popping round in her pinny! Honestly, Mark, he’ll be fine. He’s made of stern stuff.’

He gives me a sideways glance. ‘Like you.’

I felt anything but stern stuff at Billy’s funeral. I managed to keep it together all the way through the ceremony but my knees buckled at the graveside and Jake and Mark had to prop me up. There was no holding back the tears as Billy’s coffin was lowered into the ground. We all cried as we said our final goodbyes. No one cared who saw, least of all me.

Billy’s friends had asked us if they could graffiti his coffin. We talked about it for a long time. Mark said no, immediately. He wanted our son to have a normal funeral, he wanted to have his death taken seriously, not marred by strange and obscure tags and designs on his final resting place. I was torn. Billy wanted to be remembered. In one of the text messages the police found on his phone he’d told Kira that he wanted to be infamous, that he wanted the world to see his tags and know that Billy Wilkinson had existed. But the world does know that Billy existed, at least our small part of it. We deliberately avoided the papers when the police released the news of his death. We closed our doors to the reporters and photographers who turned up on our doorstep. We hid ourselves away from the world, the world that knew that our younger child was dead, and we grieved in private. Billy wanted to tag buildings but it is our brains that his name is inscribed upon, our lives that have been transformed through knowing him, our hearts that have been for ever changed.

Finally we said no to the coffin being graffitied. We wanted it to be new, untainted, untouched by the world, just as Billy was when he was born. He was such a beautiful baby. The moment he was in my arms I pressed my nose into his hair and inhaled the heady softness of him and my heart swelled with love. My child, my second child. We had created him – me and Mark. We had produced another perfect little boy. I felt blessed. I knew enough women who’d suffered miscarriages to know how very, very blessed I was to have conceived, carried and birthed a healthy child. I don’t believe in God but doing it twice in a row felt like a miracle. He was a miracle. And he had his whole life ahead of him. A life of joy and fun, love and adventure. He could have been anything, done anything but all I ever wanted was for him to be happy.

We tried to be good parents. We did everything we could for our children. We clothed them, fed them, played with them and loved them but one of them slipped from our fingers. One of them let go when we told him to hang on.

Why did that happen? Where did we go wrong?

That was the question we asked ourselves, over and over again, in the days that followed the funeral. We hid behind closed curtains, side by side on the sofa, sheltering in the dimly lit living room as we tore ourselves apart. Had we been too hard on him? Too soft? Too judgemental? Too lenient? Mark blamed himself. It was his fault, he said. His fault for letting Billy down, for letting him see a moment of weakness instead of setting him an example. If he hadn’t cried, he kept saying, if he hadn’t tried to kiss Edie Christian, then Billy never would have done what he did. He wouldn’t have thrown a rock at Mark’s car, fought with his brother or taken his anger out on Kira. He wouldn’t have died.

Billy was his own person.

That’s what I told Mark. Our son had already made some bad decisions before he overheard the conversation in the car park, before he saw the kiss through the pub window. He’d already rebelled against us and his school. And that came from nowhere, or from hormones, or from growing up and realizing that actually the world doesn’t hand you your dreams on a plate. You need to work for your dreams and even then, sometimes they still don’t come true. That’s a hard thing to wrap your head around when you’re fifteen and you’ve been told as a child that you can be, or do, anything you want in life. The one thing Billy’s death has taught me is that happiness doesn’t always lie in the future and in any success you hope might come your way. It’s in the here and now. It’s in your children throwing their arms around your neck and pressing wet lips to your cheek. It’s in the laughter of friends. In a walk or a run or just breathing in and out. It’s in surprises, in day-to-day comforts, in a voice on the telephone, the warmth of an embrace, the soft gaze of someone who loves you. You never know how much you have, you never realize how much you’ve got to be grateful for, until it’s snatched away from you. Cherish every moment. Cherish your life and all its ups and downs. Cherish the lives of those you love. We’re only here for a short time, so much shorter than you might think.

‘Has Jake heard from Kira?’ Mark tenses ever so slightly as he says her name, unsure how I’ll react.

I shake my head. ‘Not recently. They exchanged a few texts but he found it too upsetting. He asked her not to contact him again.’

‘Right.’ Mark digs the toes of his shoes into the sand as he walks, leaving small ridges behind him as we head towards the pier. ‘Have you heard from her?’

‘Not since the card.’

‘The one asking us to forgive her?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Can you? Forgive her, I mean?’

A cloud passes over the sun and I wrap my arms around my body as the wind bites at my thin cardigan.

‘I already have. Billy too.’

We pass silently under the thick metal struts of the pier. By the time we come out the other side the sun has reappeared from behind the clouds.

‘Look at that!’ Mark points into the distance where two young boys, bundled up in coats and hats, are running along the beach side by side trying, and failing, to launch their kites into the air. ‘Reminds me of our two.’

‘I remember that holiday.’ I catch his eye and smile. ‘We kept telling them to just buy one kite and take it in turns to be the one that ran with it and the one that threw it up in the air, but they insisted on having one each.’

‘And neither of them could get their kites into the air.’

‘Until we stepped in to help.’

Now we watch as the boys charge up and down the sand laughing and shouting and tripping over their own feet as their parents point and smile and take photos.

One day those boys will be teenagers and they won’t look to their parents for reassurance any more. They’ll make their own decisions and come up with their own definitions of right and wrong. I blamed myself for Billy’s disappearance for far too long. For not understanding what was going on in his head. For not knowing what he was up to. For not being there when he needed me. But you can’t hold your children for ever. You have to let them choose their own path and hope that, if they choose the wrong one, they’ll come back to you and reach for your hand.

As I gaze across the sand, one hand raised to shield my eyes from the sun, it’s Billy and Jake racing across the beach and throwing their kites up into the air. They play until they get bored and then Jake points out to sea and Billy nods excitedly. The sea is further than it looks, maybe a quarter of a mile from where we’re standing. The kids will have to wade through thick mud before they reach it. But they don’t care. They whoop with delight, their faces tipped up to the sun as they speed towards the sea without looking back. I could call them back. I could tell them the mud is dangerous. I could tell them they won’t make it.

I let them run.

1. Where did you get the idea for
The Missing
?

Most of my novels begin with a ‘what if…?’ question and
The Missing
was no different. My initial thought was, ‘What if a child disappeared in the middle of the night?’ My second thought was, ‘What if everyone in that child’s family felt guilty about the disappearance?’ As I was brainstorming the idea I read about Agatha Christie’s fugue to Harrogate and that sparked new ideas – what if Claire was responsible for her son’s disappearance but couldn’t remember what happened? What if she’d suffered a fugue and started a new life with him somewhere and left him behind? I considered lots of different possibilities but the one I kept coming back to was – what if Claire couldn’t accept that someone in her family was responsible for Billy’s disappearance? How would that affect her subconsciously? What if it triggered a psychological disorder? I wanted to write a novel that explored family dynamics, the pressures of motherhood and the lies we tell ourselves and each other.
The Missing
was the result.

2. Did you include any real-life experiences in the novel?

This is the first psychological thriller I’ve written that doesn’t include any of my real-life experiences but it does explore one of my fears, and a fear a lot of parents have – the loss of a child. There’s something very cathartic about writing through your fear, but it’s also very difficult as you have to put yourself in the main character’s shoes and let yourself feel every emotion she’s feeling. It took me about five months to write the first draft of
The Missing
and there were at least two months when I felt constantly tense and unsettled. I couldn’t understand why I felt so odd but then I realised it was because I was so immersed in Claire’s feelings that they’d become enmeshed with my own. As soon as Claire came to terms with her feelings in the book it was as though a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

3. Your main character, Claire, is a very unreliable narrator. Did you find her difficult to write?

She was quite difficult to write as I wanted her to be a strong character who was a bit of a control freak but she had to be likeable too. I needed the reader to identify with her, care about her and feel her confusion each time she suffered a fugue. But I also needed the reader to mistrust her and question whether she had anything to do with Billy’s disappearance.

4. Did you always know how the novel would end? Did elements change during the writing process?

I always knew that Billy would be found and that he would be dead. I did play around with a couple of scenarios where he was found alive but that would have watered down the emotional journeys that all the other characters go through. They, and their lives, needed to be changed forever by Billy’s death.

5. As a mother yourself, did you find that the writing process and subject matter affected you emotionally?

It did, yes. The subject matter really affected me emotionally as I was writing
The Missing
and much earlier than that, when I was researching the subject of missing children and read books about Madeleine McCann and James Bulger. I found those books utterly harrowing. I cried, I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t get certain images out of my mind. I knew there was no way I could write a book about a very young child going missing (my son is four) so I chose to make Billy a teenager. I also made him quite unlikeable. It worked for the storyline and it also allowed me more emotional distance than writing about a toddler or pre-schooler would have.

6. What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

It’s hard to give blanket advice because each author’s journey to publication is so different. I started by writing short stories. I entered them into competitions and submitted them to women’s magazines and, once I felt I could craft a good short story, I turned my hand to novels. But lots of authors have never written a short story, or have no interest in writing one. I learnt about writing novels by reading ‘how to’ books. I read everything I could get my hands on – books about crafting characters, creating plots, the three act structure, the hero’s journey, writing a ‘blockbuster’ – everything. I also read, and continue to read, books on writing screenplays as a lot of what you can learn from a gripping film you can also apply to novel writing. But the best way to learn how to write a novel is to read. Read everything and anything, within your chosen genre and outside it. Read with a critical eye. What makes one book good and another bad? Analyse a book you found compelling. Why did you keep turning the pages? When you’ve finished writing your book get a second opinion from someone who isn’t a friend or related to you. Join a local or online writing group or befriend another aspiring writer online and swap manuscripts. Learn from feedback. The chances are it will sting and you might be tempted never to write another book but if you can learn from it and bounce back you’ll become a better writer and your book will become a better book. Rejection and criticism are something all writers experience and it doesn’t end when you get an agent or a publisher. You need to be thin skinned to be a writer, but thick skinned to get published. To get a book published you need to write a damned good book and you need to be determined. Keep going!