‘Is Honor unwell today, Mrs Allen?’
Even though she knew the answer, Catherine paused, as if the break in time might alter the implication of that question.
‘No, she’s – I mean, she was fine at breakfast.’
‘It’s just that she hasn’t registered this morning and we wanted to confirm the reason for her absence.’
Catherine’s stomach performed a slow-motion roll. At once, a series of scenarios began to play out in her mind, each more devastating than the last. Truancy. A hit and run. Abduction by a stranger in a car. With her family history, catastrophizing was second nature.
‘She left home at her usual time.’ Catherine’s fingers tightened around the receiver. ‘She’s never missed school before. Something must have happened.’
‘Perhaps she had an appointment she didn’t tell you about.’
‘She’s twelve,’ said Catherine. ‘She doesn’t have appointments I don’t know about.’
But a fissure of doubt opened up.
‘Well, you might want to give her a call on her mobile,’ said Mrs Samuels briskly. ‘The forecast is for more snow. Mr Lexden is thinking about sending pupils home at lunchtime. I’d hate her to turn up when everyone else has left, especially in this weather. Please do let us know if you track her down.’
The nerve above Catherine’s lip began to twitch. It did that when she was stressed. She pressed the tip of her finger to it until the spasm stopped and tried to formulate a plan.
She checked her mobile to see if Honor had texted or tried to call, but there was nothing except a junk email about final ordering dates for Christmas hampers.
When she tried her daughter’s phone, it went straight to voicemail.
The kitchen was colder now, shadows pushing out the light. The snow was like torn feathers falling from the sky. Catherine hesitated, and lifted her car keys from the hook. She slipped on her leather gloves and wrapped a scarf around her neck.
Then she stepped outside into the white world.
The streets of Coggsbridge were almost empty, most of the early-morning shoppers seeking shelter from the weather. With its timber-framed houses and old bridge crossing the River Blackwater, the village looked Christmas-card quaint in the snow.
Catherine drove carefully along the route that Honor took to school. The thought of getting stuck terrified her, but not as much as not knowing what had happened to her daughter.
Snowflakes settled on the windscreen, the wipers a beat too slow to fully clear them. Honor had been born on a twilight December afternoon so cold the hoar frost had lasted all day. This morning’s air had the same taste of winter about it.
As Catherine scanned the streets for a slight figure in a mulberry-coloured coat, she told herself Honor would be fine. Perhaps she had been held up for an unexpected reason and missed registration, slipping past the receptionists and straight into class. She was probably in one of the science labs or the art studio, unaware of everyone’s concern.
Her eyes flicked from the road to her phone on the passenger seat, but it remained silent. ‘Come on, Honor. Where are you?’ Her muttering sounded too loud in the car.
By now, the snow was falling so thickly it had blanketed the asphalt, the trees and the tiled roofs of the houses. It had the odd effect of muffling the sound of the engine.
At the school, the playground and fields were empty. Catherine checked her watch. Less than an hour until lunchtime. Everywhere was colourless, the sky and the air filled with relentless frozen eddies.
She drove on, through the back roads this time, the fields blank and accusing. A pheasant ran across the whitened earth and burst upwards, startled by an unseen enemy. Its gold and green plumage and distinctive red wattle reminded her of festive wrappings. But there was no splash of mulberry, no discarded school bag or slender figure trudging through the snow.
Twenty minutes later, when there was still no sign of her daughter and her tyres were beginning to stick, Catherine turned the car around and headed home.
The house was freezing, and so Catherine relit the fire and boiled the kettle for tea. She would give it until two o’clock and then she would call the police.
She wondered how long it would take them to discover the brutal truth about her family history and if they would agree to keep it from her husband and daughter.
Catherine cradled her mug and watched the flames lick the glass of the log burner. Having a daughter had always been a risk. A son might have been different. Provided some distance. But in Honor, she glimpsed the shadows of her own childhood, the parts of herself – and her older sister – she despised. She found herself wondering if an instinct to kill was hereditary, woven into one’s DNA, like eye colour or height.
A petal from the poinsettia plant on the coffee table fell, landing on the glass like a splash of blood. She breathed deeply. One. Two. Three. Four. Counting, her old strategy.
Once – and only once – had she come close to telling Edward everything. Honor had been no older than a month or two. Catherine had been so young herself, nineteen and exhausted, wrung out by a colicky baby who never seemed to sleep. Edward had taken the day off work, sent his wife of three months to bed and taken over, changing nappies and organizing bottles.
At twenty-seven, he had matured into a thoughtful young man. She had seen a different side to her new husband, his face lit with love for them both. How glorious it had been to hand over the responsibility of their daughter for a few hours. How grateful to him she had felt. Having Honor had deepened their relationship in ways that had surprised her. So tempting, then, to imagine the relief of unburdening the horrors of her past onto his shoulders.
When she had woken up, the house was silent. She had gone downstairs and Edward was dozing on the sofa, Honor nestled into his chest.
She had watched him sleep, peace settled into the lines of his face, and she knew then that she would never tell him about the murder of her parents. It would do nothing to lighten her load. All it would mean is that he would carry it too – and its weight was heavy. Too heavy. The pressure might break her precious new family of three, and she couldn’t risk that.
As far as Edward and Honor were concerned, her parents and sister had died in a house fire. All photographs, all belongings, had burned with them. No culprit was ever found. She had told the lie so many times she almost believed it herself. Her husband accepted – with reluctance – that she did not wish to talk about it.
Twelve years ago, in that giddy flush of new love, when they were still unwrapping each other’s truths, he had peppered her with questions, probing her tragedy with gentle but insistent fingers: in the corner of the sticky-floored basement club where they’d danced with each other that first night, eyes catching like silk on roughened wood; over the guitar riffs of a band they’d both loved, sipping pints, bodies pressed up close against the bar; amongst tangled sheets in a suite he’d booked for her nineteenth birthday, her first stay in a hotel and the night their daughter was conceived.
But his concerned interest had the opposite effect. Catherine, finding her way in the world as an adult, shut down and refused to talk about it, preferring to lose herself in the visceral pleasures of sex instead of confronting the brutalities of her personal history. This baffled Edward, who had risen rapidly to become the chief executive of an environmental charity and was used to persuading others to behave as he wished, albeit in a charming way. But because he was also a sensitive man, he had learned, over time, not to push her. For that, she was grateful. The past was a distant place, peopled by strangers, and she no longer visited it.