She’s letting me skip the rest of the shift: she thinks it’s best if I go home. She can handle it tonight. For Alma, a veteran of the helpline, family break-ups and reunions are the bread and butter of her life, as much as trips to the supermarket and walking her dachshund.
I find I am trembling now, despite the two sugars in the milky tea Alma’s made me sip (‘For the shock, dear’). I want to get out of here, itching to act. And there’s something on the edges of my mind, if I can only grasp it …
I shake my head. Be practical. I’ll leave a message on the extension of the family liaison officer the police assigned to us. If it’s not too late, maybe I’ll drive to Dad’s. I want to tell him in person. And I need to get a message to Mark, I suppose. It’s the right thing to do. As Sophie’s father, my ex needs to know.
As soon as she hung up, I’d tapped in the numbers for caller ID, even though I knew what the answer would be. That automated voice: ‘The service requested is not available.’ We can’t identify our callers even if we want to – it’s a fundamental policy, and the system’s set up to ensure that.
But I’d know that voice anywhere. She was talking quietly perhaps, and the line was terrible, but it was her. She wants to get a message to Kate and Mark: me and her dad. Not to worry about her – and not to worry if we don’t hear from her? What does that mean?
I feel a burst of longing, raw and hurtful. If only I could have spoken to her longer, I could have persuaded her to come back, I could have. Come home, Sophie, I will her, as if I can convince her to do so through the sheer force of my emotion. Come home.
I am halfway to my car, keys in hand, when I realise. I check myself, stopping dead in the car park, suddenly rigid. What it is that’s bothering me.
I’ve thought about this call before. I’ve imagined it so many, many times: all the things she could be. Distant. Angry. Upset.
But I never imagined that she’d sound so … scared.
3
My coffee from the vending machine, lukewarm to start with, is now cold. It’s not making it taste any better. With my back to the room, I pull a face.
‘Well, there must be something you can do to find her,’ I say steadily, turning round. ‘There must. Some sort of log kept by the phone company maybe – something.’ I sound more confident than I am, I used to be good at that. ‘I mean, the police must trace calls all the time.’
‘I do understand your frustration, Mrs Harlow. I really do.’ The young officer taking down a report of the call has been polite, even solicitous, making me go over every detail. Getting him to do something about it, and now, is another matter. ‘But we can’t do anything until we take a look into the original investigation, get up to date with that. Which will be this week, I can assure you.’
‘This week?’ I catch the expression on his face. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘I know how it sounds. But it’s not what she said. It’s how she said it.’
‘Yes, you mentioned. You’ve a feeling,’ he says. I give him a sharp glance, but his face is blank. ‘But did she say she needed help? Police assistance? Has someone threatened her, attacked her?’
‘No, I told you,’ I say, trying to suppress my frustration. He already knows she didn’t. ‘She said to tell us not to worry any more. But – but she didn’t say she was safe.’
‘And no one else heard her, no one else heard you take the call, even?’
‘No, I said, it’s a skeleton staff on Saturday nights. My colleague had just gone out for her break.’
‘And this caller—’
‘Sophie,’ I interrupt.
‘As you say, Sophie – she ended the call—’
‘Yes, of course I didn’t end it, I wouldn’t hang up on her.’
‘As I said, she ended the call after she realised it was you at the end of the line?’
‘I think so, yes, but it would have been a shock.’
‘Well, then. Maybe she’ll ring again?’
I grit my teeth. I was always so grateful before, so guilty. I’m the mother whose daughter had run away. But now I’m not just upset, I’m angry.
I don’t know what I expected, really, but something a bit more than this. Some sense of urgency, at least.
There’d been no reply when I’d left a message on the number I’d saved in my mobile phone for Kirstie, our old family liaison officer. So I’d simply driven straight round to the police station in Amberton, the market town next to Vale Dean, the village where I live. I got ushered in to a room before an officer came in to take down my report. It was early enough that it was quiet, the Saturday night drunks not yet starting to fill the town centre, still calm under the pink skies.
Not any more, though. I’ve been here for what feels like hours, waiting for them to swing into action. It’s become clear that I’ll be waiting a while.
‘Now, in the meantime, you said she told you not to worry,’ he says. He fiddles with a page of his notebook. ‘You know, at eighteen, if someone doesn’t want to come home, well. The truth is, Mrs Harlow, this may not actually be a police mat—’
‘Not a police matter? My daughter, who’s been missing for two years, calls me and what? It’s not a police matter?’ My voice cracks on the last few words and he casts his eyes down. He’s embarrassed for me. He thinks I’m grasping at straws.
‘You don’t understand,’ I say bleakly. ‘I know my daughter. Or I did. Please, PC’ – I try to remember how he introduced himself – ‘Jesson. You know …’ I say slowly, the thought unfurling as I talk, ‘do you have a sister called Jessica, did cross-country for the county?’
‘Uh, no. Jessica’s my cousin,’ he says, a little more warmly. ‘That name’s a mouthful, but people don’t forget it. She’s at uni now, doing law.’ He pauses, as he realises the most likely reason I’d know the name. ‘She must have been a couple of years older than your Sophie. Was she a runner too?’
‘Is,’ I say, meaningfully. ‘Not was, is.’
‘Is,’ he corrects himself. ‘All right,’ he says, more quietly. ‘There’s really nothing we can do tonight. This will have to go to our detective unit, you understand. It’s not a simple thing, pulling phone records, even—’ he stops. Even on priority cases, I fill in silently. ‘Even when it’s not a Saturday night. But I’ve noted your concerns. We will be in touch.’
This is as far as I’m going to get this evening. What else can I do?
‘Thank you,’ I say, getting up to leave. There’s no point antagonising him.
It’s dark when I leave the station. I have to navigate a hen party, weaving their way through the back streets, before I get to my car. I am used to being out of sync with the rest of the world.
Driving home, I turn the radio on loud, flicking through the club music until I find some call-in show with mindless chatter to distract me.
‘… so do today’s teenagers have it tougher than we used to? A new report says that mental health problems are on the rise among the young – but what do you think, give me a call. Now, Dave from Stockport has quite a controversial view about body image, don’t you Dave, he’s on the line now, he—’
I flick it off. But as I leave the fringes of the city, the built-up estates giving way to fields, the memories keep coming.
I’d been away, on the tail-end of an over-the-top hen do that I’d wobbled about attending. ‘She’s more Charlotte’s friend than mine,’ I’d said, looking at the programme: a race day, spa treatments.
Sophie had encouraged me to go for the whole thing. ‘You should. You might enjoy it.’
Afterwards, the police said she probably knew then that she was going to leave while I was away: that perhaps – they phrased this tactfully – a mother might be slightly more observant than a father.
It had been a source of contention between us: me, always trying to keep our daughter at home, safe, close, concerned about her schoolwork; Mark, more confident that things turned out for the best, arguing that a teenager needed her freedom, that I’d end up pushing her away.