Little White Lies

‘That’s him,’ said Robert. ‘John Henry Cassingham.’

Six syllables that sounded so painful in my husband’s mouth and I took each one, turning it over and over in my mind, trying to find any answer, any clue. But it was a stranger’s name, a complete and utter stranger, and when I looked at Robert he shook his head too.

Gently, he took my hand in his. ‘DS McCarthy is on his way.’

It had come to this: DS McCarthy in our house with his shiny shoes making divots in the living-room carpet.

Abigail sat opposite him, her big frame half sunken into the cushions of the couch; Robert sat beside her, a foot of space between them, and I stood in front of the mantelpiece, filling the gap where Robert’s roses should have been.

‘Do you remember the address,’ the detective was saying to her, pushing his fingertips into the leather of our chair, ‘that you gave us at the start?’

Abigail gazed across at the detective without blinking. ‘Fifteen Martin’s Road, in Southwark, in London.’

I swallowed. She reeled it off like a schoolchild reciting by rote, as though it was her home. This address, this place in South London, so little distance, I realized now, from where she’d gone missing; just a walk through the rain from London Bridge.

‘All right, well. On Monday afternoon we sent officers to the address.’ His voice was soft, like suede, designed for gentle handling. ‘The trouble is, there was no one at home.’

Abigail continued to gaze at him, childlike, open-faced. It had come to this: the detective here, struggling for leads, looking to my daughter to give him the answers and I thought, what on earth is this like for her? What sense is she making of any of this? Here we are, all gathered round her, piling her with questions as though she has the answers when she still hardly seems to understand that she’s home.

‘We know from a neighbour,’ DS McCarthy went on, ‘that Mr Cassingham came home mid-morning. And left again, with a duffel bag, about fifteen minutes later.’

‘What are you saying?’ I said. ‘What are you trying to ask my daughter?’

His grey eyes came to rest on me and I made myself hold my own gaze steady. He said his next words to Abigail very quietly. I thought I had misheard him.

‘Do you know anything about this, Abigail?’

I stayed right where I was. I was afraid if I moved, I’d slap him. The insinuation, the accusation in his tone as though somehow we were the ones under suspicion, as though my daughter were somehow responsible for this. ‘Why should she?’

My daughter’s fingers were picking at each other as if she couldn’t keep them still, and I wanted to reach over and make her stop.

‘Abigail?’ The detective’s voice was a soft murmur.

She slowly slid her gaze up to me, then away again to the window, to outside. She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh.’

‘There was a dark blue car,’ DS McCarthy pressed on, his fingers pushing right into the arm of our chair. ‘Like the one seen near Tonia Dillon’s house. We got his details from the registration plate. We contacted the school where you said he worked. He hasn’t been there since Monday morning.’

Abigail’s shoulders hunched up to her ears, a shrug. I knew the detective was only doing his job: gathering information, piecing together clues. It was the way Abigail seemed so uncaring, so complacent, as though she couldn’t see what the fuss was about, why the police were so desperate to find him; as if she didn’t think her abductor had done a single thing wrong. For a blind moment, something slipped in me again and I had the sudden urge to grab her and drag her up from the couch, march her upstairs, and shake the answers out of her. Explain yourself! Explain yourself!

The detective looked as though he was bracing himself for what he’d say next and automatically I braced myself too. He leaned forwards.

‘Abigail. Do you know where he is?’

Then the detective was gone and we were alone again. Robert put an arm around our daughter. I stood up. ‘I’m going to check on the twins.’

As I climbed the stairs, I could hear Abigail’s voice below me in the living room. ‘I told them all this. They went over and over it in London.’ Then Robert: ‘It’s all right. If you don’t know, you don’t know.’ Even now, his simplicity allowed him to steady her: no sharp corners, no edges to get in the way. I knew it was something I should be grateful for, something that could only be good for my daughter; it was just that it brought an ache to my heart because I only wished I could be the same way.

The boys were sitting in their bedroom propped against Laurie’s bunk; they’d been so good, keeping out of the way. On the carpet beside them, an abandoned iPad game blipped, a message flashing, Restart game? ‘What’s happening?’ said Sam. ‘What’s going on?’

But I was looking at the mess on their desk: a whole pile of papers with her face on each, dozens of pictures of her: Abigail White, missing, missing, missing. All those posters that Robert had kept printing, more than he could use, the extras that had sat in boxes in her room. ‘Why have you got these? What are you doing?’

Laurie jumped to his feet. I felt the sharpness of his elbows as he pushed up beside me, his voice shrill as he pressed his hands to the pages. ‘We rescued them! When we were clearing her bedroom. We wanted to keep them.’

The computer game suddenly stopped pinging. I breathed in hard. I mustn’t shout, I mustn’t be angry. ‘She’s home now,’ I said. ‘We don’t need any of this. You were there when we put all this away.’ I scooped the accusing posters up, catching the ones that fell to the floor. I crumpled them, the paper unyielding, and crammed them into the bin by the door. When I was done I let out my breath. ‘You can come downstairs,’ I said. ‘We’re finished.’

Slowly, Sam uncurled himself from the floor. As he headed past me, I caught at him and Laurie too, hugging them to me. ‘I love you,’ I said, but their faces were sullen and as soon as I let them, they wriggled away.

I listened to their feet bang down the stairs, with something cold and hollow in my chest. I sat down on Laurie’s bunk, the rockets and spaceships so innocent and familiar, symbols of everything I should be fighting to protect. I took out my phone, scrolling through my contacts to the old profile, stored simply as ‘P’. The choice was gone; I knew I couldn’t call him now. My hands heavy, I deleted his voicemail.

After a moment I deleted his phone number too.

Chapter 8

Sunday 2nd June:

Day 7

JESS

On Sunday I made Mum let me call them. When the phone rang it was Auntie Anne who picked up. ‘And Abigail?’ I asked. ‘Can I speak to Abigail? Can she come to the phone?’

But Abigail was sleeping, Auntie Anne said, even though it was the middle of the day. ‘The detective was here yesterday and it tired her out. I’m sorry, Jess.’

‘Well, and how is she?’ said Mum. ‘Any dissociation, any nightmares?’ She had been reading up on ‘trauma symptoms’.

‘No,’ said Auntie Anne. ‘Nothing like that.’ She paused. Something hung there, unsaid. ‘But I’ll get her to call you, shall I, Jess – when she wakes up?’

But Abigail must have slept right through because come eleven that evening she still hadn’t called, and then it was Monday and I had to go to school.

I woke with a thick head, a shivery fever, like coming down with ’flu. Mum held the back of her hand against my forehead, not even checking with the thermometer, and said I’d be fine. I got her to drive me to school at least. I couldn’t face the bus. She wrote me a note too, for my teachers. Explaining everything that had happened.

When she dropped me off at the top of the road, it felt like I’d been away for years, not a week. Maybe that’s what was making me feel so ill, the flip from one world straight into another. Lena was there though, waiting for me by the high green school gates. Standing by herself, and I was properly grateful for that. Around me, pupils off the bus shoved past, eyes on me, knowing about me, knowing what had happened. I didn’t listen. I didn’t look at any of them, only Lena. Her fair hair – that used to remind me so much of Abigail’s – looked peroxided, so sun-bleached from her holiday. I stopped in front of her.

‘It’s really happened then?’ she said.

She had a new piercing high up on her ear, the skin inflamed and red. Had she got that done abroad? I didn’t know. She did all kinds of stuff on her own now, without telling me. Things she knew I wouldn’t want to do. ‘Yes,’ I said. So you see I was right – said the voice in my head – to hope, to wait, to refuse to move on.

‘Wow. Okay. And, you know – how is she?’

Her words seemed unreal, like her disbelief was rubbing off on me. I tugged at the strap on my bag, tightening it. ‘She’s fine. She’s good.’

A shadow weighted Lena’s expression. ‘Really?’ She had this thing about her these days, a skepticism I kept pulling away from. ‘But all that stuff they said on the news…’ She reached out to take my arm and I flinched back.

She stared at me. ‘What?’

I looked back at my best friend, the heavy liner round her eyes. We used to be two kids together. So what if Lena’s parents had blazing rows, so what if my aunt and uncle still cried? Forget it, I’d say, let’s play hide-and-seek. Then at thirteen, her parents separated, got divorced. And since then, she was always seeing the cracks in things, like she couldn’t just let anything be pretty any more.

But I wouldn’t let her be like that about Abigail.

‘It’s nothing.’ I slid my arm behind my back. ‘And everything is great with Abigail. You’ll see.’

In the form room, I gave Mum’s note to Mr Chalmers. He read it, then asked if I wanted him to let the class know. I said yes. Probably most of them had seen on the news, and better someone told them than they whispered behind my back. I sat down next to Lena and let him announce it. And then everybody knew for sure. Mr Chalmers told them not to trouble me with questions, but then he got called away to another classroom and then there was no one to stop them talking. I sat there with Lena, so glad she was next to me, choosing me over the other girls she got along with so easily these days. Somehow I’d never known how to fit in in groups – without Lena, I didn’t have other friends.

Their questions came in a hungry swarm.

Seven whole years?

What’s she like? Does she talk?

Bet she’s got PTSD. Does she? Does she have that?

They wanted horror stories and gory details. I had nothing like that to give them, and what did I care if they were disappointed? I rubbed my arm absently where little patches still ached under the skin. She wasn’t their cousin, Abigail was mine, and I knew her better than anyone. I answered their questions with a shrug of my shoulder, repeating, she’s fine, she’s happy, she’s glad to be home. Like a record on repeat. The man, I said, they had dozens of police looking for him, and they’d find him, arrest him and it would be done. Their questions buzzed like wasps and I flicked them away.

But behind the buzz, something else was going on, a scuffle in the background, stifled giggles, a phone passed from hand to hand. Lena slipping out from our desk, sliding her way to the knot of girls in the corner. Snatching the mobile from them, glancing at the screen, her face drawing fierce. But just as our eyes met, the bell rang – time up – and she went to her class and I went to mine.

Just before the end of school, Lena texted me: Meet me after in the usual place?

For a while, I stared at my phone, the handset hidden under the desk, a glow filling up my chest. The usual place. Not far from the school and halfway between mine and Lena’s houses, there was a play park, a sorry affair with a dented slide, peeling climbing frame and creaky swings. Little kids didn’t go there much, but for years Lena and I had met there whenever we had something important to talk about, too big to bring up at home or at school. These last couple of years, we’d hardly gone there – so much felt different and only because she had changed. But the park, our park, was still there.

When the last bell rang, I headed straight out, ahead of the swarming crowds. I got there first. I swept the grit from a swing and sat down, the ridges of the rubber pressing through my skirt. The rest of the playground was empty, except for two small children playing in the concrete tunnels bored into the slope at the top of the park. A boy and a girl, about seven and four. Brother and sister, I guessed, but I couldn’t see their parents anywhere. It put me on edge a bit, them being out alone like that.

I rocked the swing, its rhythm a comfort. While I rocked, I thought about another play park. Until she was five, Abigail’s dad still had contact and she’d gone to see him every other Saturday. At his house, she’d sit in a room with drab brown curtains and watch repeats of some car programme, his favourite. Then he’d take her out to the park so he could have a cigarette, leave her to push herself on the swings. I’d asked her once: don’t you mind? She just shrugged, like she didn’t know any better. But after each visit there was always an argument, a tantrum, something. If not with her mum, then between Auntie Anne and him. It was my mum who’d put her foot down in the end. He lived abroad now, Spain or somewhere, and hadn’t had contact with our family for years.

The park gate clanged. Lena was coming through the railings with her pearly hair catching the sharp sunlight, the same sunlight that was making me squint. I dug my toes into the wood chip as she came up. ‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’

She sat down with a bump beside me. ‘Weird day, huh?’

I leaned back on my swing, hanging off the chains. ‘A bit.’

We didn’t say anything for a while. I was just glad she was here. I cocked the swing and lifted my feet, air rushing against my face as I swooped forwards. Times like this, we felt back to normal. Same as when we were ten, same as when we were twelve. Then Lena got hardened and it all started to change. Now, instead of swinging, she was fiddling with her bag, digging something from a zippered pocket. She pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. ‘I wanted to show you this.’ She unfolded it and held it out to me, making me bring my swing to a halt. ‘They were making stupid jokes about it, but I thought you’d want to see.’

I took the page from her and smoothed it on my lap. A printout of an old news article with a picture of a teenager, a boy, grainy and blurred, a woman next to him.

‘I printed it out in the library,’ she said. ‘Tom said the page might get taken down.’

‘Why? What is it?’

Lena twisted her swing, leaning over to point at the tight-printed text below. I scanned the lines. Something about a school football star, scoring three goals to win a local championship. Pictured here with his foster mother and soon to sit his GCSEs.

Football. Foster mum. ‘I don’t get it. Who is it?’

‘Don’t you recognize it?’

I looked again at the grainy photo, printed out in black-and-white. The boy looked fifteen, maybe sixteen. Handsome, I could tell – shiny fair hair, a wide mouth. He was looking right into the camera. His eyes, they sort of drew you in.

Lena stopped twisting, made her swing completely still. ‘You really don’t recognize him?’

‘No.’ And the shameful thing was, I didn’t.

She pointed at the caption. The print was tiny, blurred. ‘Look at the name.’

I did. And froze.

‘And look at the date,’ Lena carried on. ‘I worked it out. If he’s fifteen in that photo, say, he was only twenty-five when he kidnapped your cousin. Twenty-five. I mean, that’s young, right?’

I stared at the photo, his face clicking with that other image, shown daily, shown multiple times a day on the news. She was right. It was him, the name matched. Cassingham.

‘Right?’ Lena repeated. She pushed her swing back up against mine and I could almost feel her breath on my neck.

‘Why are you showing me this?’ My thumbs had turned white where I was pressing the page. ‘I don’t want to look.’

‘This is the man who took her. Don’t you care?’

‘Of course I care!’

Lena’s mouth went tight. ‘But you act like nothing happened! You were just the same at school. “She’s happy”, “she’s fine”. Have you any idea how weird you sounded?’

‘She is happy! She is fine!’ I crumpled the page and stuffed it in my bag. ‘I don’t have to look. This isn’t my job.’ I stood up. I just wanted to go.

She caught me by the sleeve of my blazer. Her nails, black-varnished, were cold against my wrist. ‘So, what is your job? Pretending nothing’s wrong?’

My swing clipped my knee. I hated it – the way Lena was talking like Abigail was some freak, some victim. She was my cousin and I needed her to be fine. I tried to pull away, sick of my friend’s words. As I did so, Lena’s grip dragged my sleeve up.

She stared. Everything in my chest went tight.

‘Jess. What is that?’

‘It’s nothing.’ I wrenched away, trying to pull my sleeve back down. ‘She was asleep. Having a bad dream.’ I pushed away the images that came flashing – Abigail’s eyes glistening in the dark, Abigail reaching for me from her bed.

Lena stared at the bruises. Five yellow fingerprints.

Then she said everything I didn’t want to hear, words that summed up the chasm between us. ‘Stop acting like nothing has happened to her. Stop pretending that nothing has changed. The stuff she’s been through – you can’t just ignore it. For your own sake, Jess, you need to grow up.’

I got home late and exhausted to find Mum and Dad in the study. There were papers, folders, ring binders everywhere. When she saw me, Mum got up off her knees, dusting invisible lint from her jeans. ‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘We’re having a clear-out. You’ll need to sort through your stuff too, so get changed and come and help.’

A clear-out? It was like Mum was trying to change everything too, when all I wanted was for it all to stay the same. Familiar, safe. I didn’t want anything else. I wanted everything to be how it once was. I wished I could have said that to Mum, I wished I could tell her what had happened with Lena. But I knew how she got when she was on a mission, and the ragged edges of my parents’ last argument still filled the house, just waiting for one of us to snag on.

In my room, I stripped off my rumpled uniform and hauled on a clean pair of jeans. In the study, I knelt on the floor as Mum pushed a tall cardboard box over to me. ‘Here. This is mostly your old primary school stuff. Have a look through and give me everything you want to throw away.’ The box was heavy, hard to pull towards me.

Dad was sitting at the desk, turning over pages in a tattered folder. Mum craned over his shoulder. ‘Those are just old water bills. We don’t need to keep them.’

‘Wait. There are other documents in here too.’ He went on turning the pages.

Mum stretched up to pull more stuff down from the shelves. She held out a fan of old dental journals. ‘Throw or keep?’

Dad barely glanced up. ‘Keep.’

‘Really?’

‘Keep.’

Mum dropped them into a pile beside him on the desk, the space already nearly full. I reached into the cardboard box and lifted out a few jotters.

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep her indoors the whole time,’ Mum said, like it was a natural follow-on.

I knew at once she was talking about Abigail. She and Dad had probably been talking about her all afternoon. I kept my eyes on the rough jotters. Between the scuffed covers, my old childish handwriting clambered across the pages, sliding up and down the ruled lines. Every other story was about my cousin. Ever since I could remember, I’d been frightened of things: starting school, new people, the smallest changes in routine. But in my worlds with Abigail, it was never like that.

Dad put his ring binder down on the desk. ‘It’s hard to know, Lillian. There’s still a lot for her to adjust to. Maybe it’s good to let her get used to just being in the house-’

‘Her house.’

‘-first. And they still need to find him.’

I kept my head down, kept turning over the smudgy pages. On the top half of the space, left blank for pictures, I’d crayoned in drawings of flowers, starry landscapes, rainbows. Magical worlds I could never quite capture in pencil and crayon.

Mum shook her head. ‘That could take weeks – months.’

‘Not that long, surely,’ said Dad.

But Mum had already changed her mind about Abigail. Her rules could shift and morph in a moment, keeping the rest of us running to catch up.

She lifted a stack of papers – they looked like old study notes, lines of her neat handwriting and streaks of highlighter pen. ‘I’m throwing these out. Pass me the bin bag.’

Dad held up a black plastic sack. Mum tipped them in, then held the sides open towards me. ‘Have you got stuff to put in here too?’

I looked at the spread of jotters on my lap. All my old stories. Worlds I’d never wanted to leave. ‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t really looked.’ I turned another page in the jotter. Me and Abigail in bright-coloured crayon. How old were we meant to be here – six, seven?

Mum lifted another armful of papers into the sack, tipping them away with hardly a glance. ‘She was cooped up, Fraser, for years and years. Not just cooped up. Trapped. Held hostage. Don’t you think she needs to know that it won’t be like that now? And another thing… I really think they need to redecorate her room. How is she supposed to move on in a time warp like that?’

Dad stood up from the desk. ‘Look, I don’t know what’s best. Maybe you need to let Anne and Robert decide. Maybe, for a change, we should leave it up to them.’

It felt like a whole set of windows had been suddenly slammed shut.

I stared down at the pile of jotters in my lap. Abigail stared back at me, her hair swirled in bright yellow, crayoned fingers entwined in mine. I needed her, I always had done. Ever since I could remember, I’d been frightened of this too. The intangible tensions I’d always felt in our house. But our happiness together had made everything safe.

Mum held the bin bag out to me, its mouth a gaping hole. ‘Well?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m keeping them all.’

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