What She Left Read online

  Unsurprisingly, they asked to speak to her. ‘And while we’re chatting to her, perhaps you might have a look for your wife’s personal documents? Identification, passport, that sort of thing? Just so we know what she might be carrying with her,’ said the male PC.

  I went upstairs as quietly as I could. Mrs Goode was sitting in the armchair in the corner of Miranda’s room. Marguerite was fast asleep, her hair fanned on the pillow and her cheeks pink. Miranda was lying on her back beside her, arms by her side, staring at the ceiling, eyes wide open.

  I motioned to Mrs Goode, and she stood and tiptoed out of the room. Miranda’s eyes flew to the doorway and locked with mine. I tried to smile and failed. She turned away and went back to staring at the ceiling.

  We returned downstairs. Mrs Goode seated herself opposite the police officers and I went to search through Helen’s desk in the conservatory. The filing drawers containing all our bills, correspondence and important documents were locked, but I had a key. I opened the top drawer and went carefully through each section. There were the girls’ birth certificates, our driver’s licences, our marriage certificate, and our four passports, rubber-banded together. Helen bought matching leather passport holders in different colours to make it quick and easy to identify whose are whose when we travel. Mine’s cobalt blue, hers is green, and the girls’ are pink and purple. Everything was where I expected it to be.

  The male PC came looking for me, and I showed him what I’d found. He nodded. ‘Clever idea with the passport holders, that. My wife spends ages sorting through them for the kids every time we travel.’

  He didn’t look old enough for a wife and kids, but it wasn’t the time for small talk.

  ‘So nothing appears to be missing?’

  ‘Not as far as I can tell,’ I said, and I opened the lower drawer. Here Helen had all our bills and correspondence neatly filed, each section labelled – bank, insurance, mortgage, utilities.

  ‘Very organized, your wife,’ he said.

  ‘Very.’

  ‘She certainly doesn’t look like the kind of person who’d just go walkabout, does she?’ he said conversationally. There was an awkward moment of silence.

  I looked over his shoulder into the kitchen and suddenly remembered my manners. ‘Can I offer you a cup of tea? Coffee? Some water, maybe?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ he said. ‘Now tell me, Mr Cooper, where were you today? Out of town, I think you said?’

  ‘Manchester, for a meeting. As soon as I arrived there, I got the call from the school to say Helen hadn’t turned up, so I got straight on a train to come back.’

  ‘Were you travelling alone? With a colleague?’

  ‘Alone.’

  ‘Did you talk to anybody? Anyone who could confirm that they saw you in Manchester at that time?’

  It took me a moment to work out what he was asking. He wanted to know if I had an alibi.

  ‘I bought a ticket from the ticket office. You can talk to the woman who works there. She might remember me because she sold me a first-class ticket for a train that was just leaving. And I’m sure I’m all over CCTV.’

  ‘What time did you leave for Manchester?’

  ‘Around twelve. I was at my office in Soho before that.’

  ‘Can we check that with your colleagues?’

  ‘Of course.’ I kept my voice calm, but I thought back through the day, hoping that someone in the office would remember seeing me and saying goodbye to me and could attach times to their recollections. I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. That morning I had kissed my wife goodbye. Now I was trying to find ways to prove I hadn’t murdered her. Wait, had I kissed her goodbye? I’d left in a rush. Had she been in the shower? Had I just yelled goodbye as I rushed out of the door? It was entirely possible. If that was the case, had I missed my last chance to kiss her, hold her?

  I shook my head. She was missing, that was all. There was no proof something bad had happened to her. I had read somewhere that 90 per cent of missing people returned home within twenty-four hours. I had to believe she was coming back.

  I realized the PC was standing watching me.

  ‘I know this must be hard,’ he said, ‘but we have to ask all these questions. Do our best to work out what happened.’

  Together, we walked back to the living room, where I could hear Mrs Goode talking to the other officer. She was sitting with her back to the door and clearly didn’t hear us come in.

  ‘. . . lovely couple. . .’ she was saying. ‘Never a cross word, although he does work away a lot. It must be lonely for her.’

  ‘What kind of hours does he work?’ the woman PC said softly. ‘Evenings? Weekends?’

  ‘He’s away overnight quite often,’ Mrs Goode began. ‘I thought you were asking her about seeing Helen this morning,’ I burst out. ‘Not pumping her for information about our family.’

  ‘Mr Cooper. . .’ said the PC, in a conciliatory tone.

  ‘Instead of assuming I’ve murdered my wife and hidden her in the cellar, wouldn’t it be more useful if you actually got off your arses and got some officers out looking for her? For God’s sake!’ I knew I was yelling. I had to stop. I’d wake the girls.

  But Miranda was awake anyway She’d come down the stairs and was standing in the doorway that led from the hall, watching me yell at two police officers, hearing the word ‘murder’. We all saw her at the same time.

  ‘Randa. . .’ I said, reaching for her.

  ‘I’m sorry if we woke you,’ said the woman PC in a honeyed voice. ‘I’m PC Shah and this is my colleague, PC Stevens. We’re here to see what we can do to help find your mummy.’

  ‘She’s not my mother,’ said Miranda calmly, and the two PCs stared at her in silence.

  Miranda

  Marguerite doesn’t remember our mother, but I do. Her name was Leonora, and she was born in Italy. She came to England when she was eighteen years old to go to university, and that’s where she met our dad. He says he liked her the moment he saw her, but she ignored him for two years. Once, I asked him if he had asked her out, and he said no, he just used to see her walking from class to class, but for ages he was too shy to talk to her.

  ‘But if you never spoke to her, how was she ignoring you? If she didn’t know you, how was she supposed to notice you?’

  He laughed. ‘I guess because I noticed her, I thought she might notice me. But she didn’t. She’d just walk around alone or with her friends, and she was tall and slim and beautiful and mysterious.’

  But then one day they met at a party and he did ask her out, and then they were together. They were sweethearts. I like it when he tells me the story and he says ‘sweethearts’, because that sounds old-fashioned and romantic and forever, like in a film.

  And then they left university and started to work, and our mother was a musician, with a degree in music, and trying to make money playing her violin for concerts while she studied to be a music teacher, and our dad was a designer, trying to get work in advertising, and they lived in a flat in south London that was tiny, just one room and a bathroom, and they were as poor as church mice. I asked him why church mice were poorer than other mice, and he said because there was nothing to eat in the church but hymn books.

  Anyway, then our mother got a job being a music teacher and then they had a little bit more money and then they got married. They saved some money and then they went travelling. Backpacking, it’s called, when you put everything in a big bag like a tortoise’s shell on your back and you go to stay in grotty hostels and sleep on the beach. They went to lots of places, and I’ve seen pictures of them in India and Japan and riding elephants and in South America too. They were always laughing, and Dad had a big beard then and our mother was dark brown from all the sun.

  And then they came back to settle down and start nesting. First they were church mice, and then they were birds building a nest, and whenever Dad tells the story, then he says, ‘And then along came you,’ as if I was just passing by and
I moved in with them, but what he means is I was born. My dad still didn’t have a very good job. He was still trying to be a designer, so after a few months my mother went back to work as a teacher and Dad stayed home and looked after me. They got a little house in south London where they had lived before, and my mother worked in a school nearby. I was a baby, so I don’t remember that part.

  And then two years later, Marguerite was born, and my mother stayed home with her for six months and then she went back to work. Dad says she worked hard, teaching in the school and also teaching violin to other children in the evening and weekends to make money. And one day she was teaching at school and she fell down. They thought she had fainted, but she didn’t wake up and they called an ambulance. And when the ambulance took her to the hospital they found she had died. Something broke in her brain, a vein or something.

  ‘Did it hurt?’ Marguerite always asks.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Dad always says. ‘I think it was more like a light going out.’

  ‘Do you think she was scared?’ I want to ask. ‘Do you think before the lights went out she thought about us and what would happen to us?’ But I never do ask, because I don’t want to know the answer. I don’t want to think of her seeing the darkness coming and not being able to stop it.

  Anyway, that was a very hard time for our family, and Dad didn’t know what to do, so he had to come back to north London and we moved in with Granny and Grandpa. Dad stopped trying to be a designer and got a job doing client services in the advertising agency, which is different, and you have to wear a suit and go for dinner and drinks and do schmoozing, but you get a lot more money. And after he had been doing that for about a year, he met Helen at work. She had come from Australia to live in England, not too long before Daddy met her. ‘Down Under,’ she said. She didn’t say under what.

  The first time they went on a date, Marguerite and I came too. We all went for a picnic in the park. Helen was kind and pretty, and when we walked in the park, she and Dad each held one of my hands and said, ‘One, two, three, wheee!’ and swung me off my feet, and then Marguerite, who was two, said, ‘Me! Me!’ and they did it for her too. It was nice. Actually, I’m not sure if I remember it, but there’s a picture of us all in the park that day, and Dad has told us the story often. He couldn’t believe a lady from work could be so nice to his two little children. Anyway, Helen started spending more time with us all, and as Dad likes to say, the rest is history. They fell in love and got married, and then Dad got a big promotion at work and bought this house. That meant that Granny couldn’t look after us and pick us up from school because it was too far, and Helen gave up her job to look after us.

  It’s not a secret at school that Helen isn’t actually my mother – the teachers know and everything – but I don’t talk about it to my friends. Marguerite calls her Mummy, but I don’t like calling her Helen, and she isn’t actually my mother, so I don’t call her anything. I like it that everyone at school says she’s the best mum – the prettiest and best at organizing and cakes and stuff, and I don’t say ‘She’s not my mum’ when they say stuff like that. Some of the other children are late, or their school uniform is dirty or they don’t bring their homework on the right day, and that never happens to us. It’s not so stressful that way, with Helen making everything okay. I sometimes wonder what my real mother would have been like – would she have done my hair so perfectly for my ballet exam as Helen does, or would she have been one of those messy, late mothers? Would I have minded if she was my mum? I don’t know. Life has lots of questions we will never know the answers to.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sam

  Mrs Goode left shortly after the police did. I think she was embarrassed to have been caught talking to them about Helen and me. I wasn’t upset with her. I knew she would have had to answer any questions they asked her, and it’s not as if she was badmouthing us.

  Miranda was still wide awake. ‘Do you want to go back to bed?’ I asked her.

  ‘Marguerite is all star-fished across my bed now,’ she said. ‘There’s no room for me.’

  ‘Let’s watch some TV,’ I said, and she looked at me cautiously. Still up at ten o’clock, an offer of TV on a school night – the rules really had gone out of the window.

  On Miranda’s instructions, I found an animated series on Netflix about a school for vampires, featuring improbably wide-eyed, emaciated girl characters in tiny skirts, who, despite being undead, were worried about boys and being popular.

  Miranda sprawled across my lap, her long, skinny legs dangling over the arm of the sofa. We both stared at the screen in silence. I let episode after episode roll over us. It took longer than I expected – until nearly midnight – for her to fall asleep. When I finally felt her head go heavy against me, I sat for another half an hour or so, comforted by the heat of her and the tangle of her hair on my arm. Then I slid out gingerly and settled her head on a cushion. When I went upstairs to check, Marguerite had indeed taken over the bed. Rather than risk waking either of them, I fetched a blanket from the linen cupboard and covered Miranda where she slept on the sofa.

  The house was so quiet. I wasn’t used to being up that late – I need my sleep, and I’m often in bed by ten. Helen could manage quite happily on four or five hours a night and she’d frequently be downstairs long after I went to bed. She’d use the time to read or catch up on emails for whichever school event she was currently involved in. The quiet, night-time house was her domain. I wandered from room to room, then went back upstairs and looked at our bedroom. The novel Helen had been reading was resting on her bedside table, with a bookmark between the pages about halfway in.

  I went into our en-suite bathroom, and there was her toothbrush and the neat white box in which she kept her makeup. There was her face-wash, her moisturizer, body lotion and deodorant. I opened the medicine cabinet, and there were her contraceptive pills. Every outward vestige of Helen was exactly where it should be. It was absurd that she wasn’t downstairs, her fingers flying over her computer keyboard.

  I wandered back downstairs and stood by her desk again. How was it possible that she was just gone? My head pounded and my stomach twisted in knots. What was I doing there at home? I should be out, running from street to street, looking for her, calling her name, saving her. When I met Helen, after Leonora died, I was a basket case, shuffling along, barely living, just surviving. She saved me then – gave me a reason to live, gave structure and purpose to my life. And now, when she needed me most, where was I? At home, failing her.

  I sank into her desk chair and felt the tears begin to come. ‘For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together,’ I said aloud.

  I picked up the card PC Shah had given me, her direct line and mobile numbers handwritten in neat figures, and called her. She answered after a single ring.

  ‘Mr Cooper?’ she said. She must have recognized my number. ‘Any news?’

  ‘I was ringing to ask you the same thing.’

  ‘We’re working as fast as we can, Mr Cooper.’ Her voice was kind, but there was a hint of impatience. ‘We’ve rung all the local hospitals, and the photos you gave us have been shared with police all over the country. We’ve contacted the Missing People organization and they’ll be publicizing your wife’s details too.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said lamely. ‘I’m sorry. This is so hard. I want to be doing more, but I don’t know what I can do.’

  ‘Sit tight,’ said PC Shah, and her voice was gentler now. ‘Keep your phone on, and keep ringing anyone you can think of that might have seen your wife.’

  ‘I will,’ I said, conscious that I was tying up both her line and mine with the call. ‘And thanks again.’

  ‘If we haven’t heard anything by the morning,’ she said, ‘we’ll be handing this over to the missing person’s team and we’ve agreed we’ll issue a media appeal.’

  We hung up and I sat at Helen’s desk for a while, scrolling through my phone trying to think of anyone else I could ring. There was n
o one. And besides, it was midnight.

  It suddenly occurred to me that though she kept her appointments in her Filofax, there might also be something on her computer – if it was a hair appointment or something, there might be a record of the booking, or if it was a social thing, there might be an email from a friend. There might be a web search for an address, or some notes with a date on. I turned on her PC and waited for it to boot up.

  I never used Helen’s PC, but I had the security passwords and her email password. She had made me record them in a note on my phone in case I ever needed anything off her machine. I opened her email. There were a few new messages – mainly marketing emails and some from the school. I scrolled back through the last few days but couldn’t find any emails that suggested someone had asked her to meet them. I opened her documents folder and looked at the most recent files – again, nothing that gave me any clues. There were spreadsheets of costs for the event she was planning at school, and a series of photos of Miranda practising her dance moves, plus a recipe for a Danish cake, which, I recalled, she’d baked the weekend before. I opened the web browser and looked at the history. She had last performed a search some days ago – Monday. The items in the list were innocuous and predictable: reviews for a film we’d talked about seeing, news sites, Facebook. Nothing out of the ordinary. She clearly hadn’t done anything on her PC for a few days. I opened Facebook, but she was never much of a social media person: she’d not posted anything for some weeks, nor had she said yes to any events. Her feed was a never-ending parade of posts by other people – inspirational quotes and pictures of cats and children. Another dead end.

  I went back into her email and opened her contacts list. I selected all the names – there were a lot, three hundred or so – and opened my own email account. Then I sorted through the list, removing all the companies and leaving some two hundred people, some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn’t.

  I composed a short message with the subject line ‘Have you seen Helen Cooper?’