As the train edges past, I see what they’re trying to shield. At first it looks like cast-off clothing or a dead animal, but then I recognize the human shape: a body, trapped beneath the ice like an insect locked in clear amber.
Charlie sees it too.
“Was there some sort of accident?”
“Looks like it.”
“Did they fall from a train?”
“I don’t know.”
Charlie presses her forehead to the glass.
“Maybe you shouldn’t look,” I say. “You might have nightmares.”
“I’m not six.”
The train shudders and picks up speed again. Snow swirls like confetti from the roof. For a brief moment, the world has tilted out of true and I feel a sense of growing disquiet. There is a void in the world… somebody not coming home.
I ’m here.
I want to shout it.
Scream it.
I’m here.
I’M HERE
I’M HERE!
Three days. Something has gone wrong. Tash should be back by now. Maybe George caught her. Maybe he hit her over the head with a shovel and buried her in the forest, which he always said he’d do if we escaped.
Maybe she’s lost. Tash doesn’t have a great sense of direction. Once she managed to get lost at Westgate Shopping Center in Oxford when we were supposed to meet at Apricot to spend my Christmas money on a beaded belt and a pair of dark wash jeans.
That’s the day Tash got into a fight with Bianca Dwyer and threatened to stab her with a pen because she was flirting with Aiden Foster. She would have done it too. Tash once stabbed me with a pen, right through my school tights. I have the world’s tiniest tattoo as evidence. She was angry because I lost the friendship ring that she gave me for my twelfth birthday.
Anyway, Tash has a terrible sense of direction-almost as bad as her taste in boyfriends.
I’m so cold it’s unbelievable. I’m wearing every piece of clothing-and some of Tash’s stuff too. I know she won’t mind.
I pull the blanket over my head. Smell my stale breath. Sweat. Every little while I poke my head out and take a few gulps of clean air and then duck under again.
Maybe I will die of the cold before they find me.
It was different those first few weeks. It was summer and the attic room was hot under the tiles. We had a proper bed, decent food and could watch the TV. George told us we’d be going home soon. He didn’t seem like a monster. He brought us magazines to read and oversized chocolate bars.
I don’t know if George is his real name. Tash came up with it. She said it suited him because he looked like a younger, fatter version of George Clooney, but I think we should have called him Freddy like the guy in Nightmare on Elm Street or that other sicko who wears a hockey mask and carries a chainsaw.
In the beginning George talked a lot about a ransom.
“Your parents are rich,” he told me, “but they don’t want to pay.”
“That’s not true.”
“They don’t want you back.”
“Yes, they do.”
It was another lie. There was never going to be a ransom demand. How can you pay for something if nobody knows the price?
Chained together on the bed, we watched the TV, waiting for news. Meanwhile, the country watched their TVs and waited for news. Everybody had an opinion. Every rumor was dissected. We were kidnapped by an Internet pedophile, according to one story. He’d met us online in a chatroom and made us take off our clothes. As if!
A clairvoyant from Bristol said we were dead and our bodies had been dumped in water. The police dragged the river at Abingdon and searched dozens of wells and drainage ditches.
Mrs. Jarvis, our next-door neighbor, told police she saw a man peering through her bedroom window when she was undressing. Tash laughed at that one. “Jarvis leaves her bedroom curtains open every night, hoping someone might look.”
A London cabbie claimed he’d seen us outside a cinema in Finchley. And a motorist in High Barnet reported seeing two girls in the back of a white van pressing their hands against the windows.
Why is it always a white van? Nobody ever sees kids being snatched by people in purple vans or yellow vans.
Tash’s brother Hayden told reporters that he’d seen a man acting suspiciously in a field not far from Bingham. He took them back to the scene, pointing out the exact place. When he talked about Tash he almost cried, wiping his eyes and threatening to kill anyone who hurt her.
It’s amazing how the truth can be stretched so thin that if people turned it sideways it would probably disappear. It’s like they invented a fantasy version of our lives and pretended it was real.
The Sun offered?200,000 for information leading to our recovery. Suddenly, there were “sightings” in Bristol, Manchester, Aberdeen, Lockerbie and Dover-surges of hope and then despair.
The Oxford Mail revealed there were 984 registered sex offenders in Oxfordshire. More than three hundred lived within a fifteen-mile radius of Bingham. Who knew there were so many perverts living so close?
One of them was old Mr. Purvis, who has a house opposite the green. He’s a creepy old guy who hangs around the train station telling girls they remind him of his daughter.
Police dug up Mr. Purvis’s garden but they didn’t find anything except the skeleton of his dog Buster. By that time, people had marched on the house, calling him a child killer and a pedo.
The police had to rescue Mr. Purvis, taking him away with a blanket over his head. You could just see his baggy trousers and his brown shoes with one sock hanging down. Somebody pulled the blanket away and he looked like a frightened old man.
Things just got worse after that. Tash’s Uncle Victor drew up a list of people who were new to Bingham-foreigners mainly. Outsiders. He had a mate who was a plumber and they put together a posse of “concerned locals.” Then they drove from house to house, saying someone had reported a gas leak and they had a legal right to enter.
The police arrested Victor, but not without a scuffle. He told the TV cameras the police weren’t doing enough. They should never have closed the local police station, he said. I didn’t know Bingham had ever had a police station.
The same people who were quick to weep were quick to hate… and to criticize. The police were accused of making mistakes. They reacted too slowly or rushed ahead or searched blind alleys or ignored the obvious or kept families in the dark.
When the chorus grew loud enough, the police pushed back. Rumors began circulating. We weren’t the angels we’d been portrayed as being. We were promiscuous. Feral. Delinquent. Tash was a wild child who had been expelled from school. Her father had spent time in prison. My dad had taken obscene bonuses while taxpayers were bailing out his bank.
Almost overnight Bingham went from being a quaint, sleepy village to being the heart of darkness-full of teenage sex, drugs and binge drinking. The same well-wishers and do-gooders who had searched for us and written sympathy cards and donated money were tut-tutting and shaking their heads. The whole town hummed with disapproval and the country followed.
Flowers rotted in their cellophane, balloons sagged to the ground, soft toys grew damp and the handwritten notes began leaking. The gloss began wearing off Bingham like cheap nail polish and underneath was something ugly and rank.
2
Oxford is blanketed by snow, surprised by its own silence. Mounds of dirty ice have been plowed to the sides of the roads or shoveled from driveways and footpaths. The dreaming spires look particularly pensive, shrouded by mist and guarded by gargoyles with beards of ice.
I’ve spent the morning preparing my conference speech, sitting on a sprawling armchair in the lounge of the Randolph Hotel. There is a Morse Bar-named after the fictional detective-with photographs around the walls of the lead characters.
Charlie has been shopping all morning in Cornmarket Street. She’s standing in front of the open fire, warming up.