Lorna Kersey leaned towards him. Close-up, Karlsson could see the creases and lines on her face.
‘We’ve got three daughters. Beth is the eldest. She’s nearly twenty-two now. Her birthday is in March. Her sisters are younger. They’re still at school, and I don’t think that helped much.’ Karlsson saw her swallow, saw how her fingers pressed against the rim of the desk. ‘She’s always been a troubled girl, from the moment she was born, you could say. A worry to us.’ She glanced at her husband, then back again. ‘She was unhappy, you see, and angry. She just seemed made that way.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Karlsson. ‘Where is your daughter now?’
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘We don’t know. I’m trying to explain things, how we got here. What I’m trying to say is that she was always troubled. School was a problem for her, though she liked things like art and practical subjects, things she could do with her hands. And she was strong. She could run for miles and swim in the coldest water. She didn’t make friends easily.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear about all of that. What’s relevant is that she had a wretched adolescence. She thought she was ugly and stupid and she was lonely and very needy but hard to help. We did everything we could, but it just became worse as she got older. It was tearing us apart as a household. Then she started getting into trouble.’
‘What kind?’
‘The trouble that teenagers get into. Drugs, probably, but there was always an anger, an unhappiness. She could be violent, to other people and to herself as well.’
‘Was she arrested?’
‘No. There were police sometimes, but she was never actually arrested. We took her to see people. Doctors. Psychiatrists. She was referred to a counsellor at the hospital and then we went to someone private. I don’t know if it was doing any good. Maybe we were just making her feel even more of an outsider and bad about herself. You don’t know until it’s too late if what you’re doing is right or wrong, do you? There’s no magic answer to things like this – you just hope that bit by bit something may change. It was all so – so mysterious. Baffling. We didn’t know what we’d done to make her like this and – oh, it got so bad, we didn’t know where to turn.’ She blinked and Karlsson saw her eyes were full of tears. ‘I’m making this too emotional,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘It’s probably not relevant. Sorry.’
‘Then she met this man.’ They were Mervyn Kersey’s first words. He had a faint Welsh accent.
‘The man you knew as Edward Green?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did she meet him?’
‘We’re not sure. But she used to spend time just walking, sometimes all night. I think she met him then.’
Karlsson nodded. This sounded like Robert Poole.
‘We didn’t know about him at first. She didn’t tell us. She just changed. We both noticed it. At first we were glad: she was calmer, less volatile with us and her sisters. She went out more. We were just so relieved.’
‘But?’
‘She was very secretive – furtive is the word, really. We started suspecting that she was stealing money from us. Not much, but there’d be cash missing from our wallets, stuff like that.’
‘And her sisters’ savings,’ put in Mervyn Kersey. He spoke as if he could hardly bear to squeeze the words out. Karlsson thought he was ashamed.
‘Did you meet him?’ asked Karlsson.
‘Yes. I couldn’t believe it,’ said Lorna Kersey. ‘He was so – what’s the word? – polite, personable. He was sweet to the girls and lovely with Beth. I should have liked him more than I did. This will sound awful. I didn’t trust him because I thought he could have had anyone so why would he choose Beth? I loved my daughter, but I couldn’t see why a handsome, successful young man like him would go for a plump, unhappy, unglamorous, under-achieving and angry young woman. It didn’t make sense. Does that sound callous?’
‘No,’ said Karlsson, untruthfully. ‘So, what did you think?’
She looked at him unflinchingly. ‘I won’t say that we’re rich …’ she began.
‘We are,’ said her husband. ‘By most people’s standards.’
‘The point is,’ she continued, ‘that he would have known we were comfortably off.’
‘You thought he was after your money?’
‘I worried.’
‘And now she’s gone.’
‘She stole my bank card, emptied my current account, took a few clothes and went.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. She left a note saying we had controlled her for too long and tried to make her into someone she didn’t want to be, and now she was free at last.’
‘Did she go with Robert … Edward Green?’
‘We assume so. We never saw him again and we haven’t seen her.’ She shut her eyes for a moment. ‘We haven’t seen our daughter for thirteen months. Or heard from her, or heard anything about her. We don’t know if she’s alive or dead, happy away from us or wretched. We don’t know if she wants us to find her, but we’ve tried and tried to. We just want to know if she’s all right. She doesn’t need to come home, she doesn’t need to see us if that’s what she wants. We contacted the police but they said there was nothing they could do about a twenty-year-old woman who had gone of her own free will. We even hired someone. Nothing.’
‘Did she have a mobile phone?’
‘She did, but it doesn’t seem to be operational.’
‘And this Edward Green looked very similar to this man.’ Karlsson pointed at the poster of Robert Poole tacked to the board beside him.
‘It looks just like him. But if he’s dead, where’s our daughter?’
She stared at Karlsson. He knew she wanted some kind of reassurance, but he couldn’t give it. ‘I’m going to send two officers home with you. They’ll need access to any documentation you have, the names of doctors. We’ll be taking this seriously.’
When they had gone, he sat in silence for several minutes. Did this make things better or worse?
Beth Kersey started with the photographs of her family. She had taken them with her when she’d left, on his instructions, but she hadn’t looked at them. It was too painful and stirred up feelings in her that only confused and distressed her. He had looked at them, though, for a long time, when he’d thought she was asleep, and then he had wrapped them up in plastic bags and stowed them away with his other bags.
Now she laid them in front of her, one by one. She had a large box of matches that she had taken from the deck of the boat up the path one night, and she lit a match for each picture, letting it flare and then die down over a face, a group, a garden in spring. They were all lies, she thought bitterly. Everyone smiles for a photograph; everyone poses and puts on a public face. There was her mother with her camera expression, head a bit to one side, all tender and caring, butter wouldn’t melt. And her dad, plump and sweet when everyone knew he was a bully who’d made money by taking it from other people. Edward had explained it to her, why it was wrong, why the money didn’t really belong to her father. She had forgotten the details, but they didn’t matter. And her two sisters. There were days when she could barely remember their names, but she could remember how they’d been such goody-goodies, good at school and good at home, sucking up to their parents, coaxing money and favours out of them with their winning smiles. She knew that now. Once she had simply thought them better than her at belonging in the world, easier in their skins than her, blessed where she was cursed. Now she stared in the leap of flame at Lily’s narrow face grinning between two tight plaits, Bea’s solemn gaze. Then she was looking at herself. Elizabeth. Betty. Beth. She wasn’t that person any more, sloppy and angry, anxious to please and knowing she wouldn’t. She was thin now, muscle and bone. Her lip sneered under its gash. Her hair was short. She had passed through fire and come out purified.