black T-shirt and jeans talking to a woman in a khaki waterproof with a Daunt Books shoulder bag. She imagined a Crimewatch reenactment of these moments. Who would they cast as her? Hanna, probably. They were almost the same height these days. And a red-haired female police officer togged up in an ugly green coat, pretending to be Noelle.
“Were you there,” Nick Robinson would say afterward, eyes narrowed at the camera, “on the morning of Thursday the twenty-sixth of May? Did you see a middle-aged woman with red hair talking to Ellie Mack? They were outside the Red Cross charity shop on Stroud Green Road. It was about ten forty-five a.m. You might remember the weather that day; it was the day of an electrical storm over London. Did you see the woman in the green coat walking with Ellie Mack toward Harlow Road?” The screen would shift to some grainy CCTV footage of Ellie and Noelle walking together up Stroud Green Road—Ellie would look tiny and vulnerable, turning that last corner, heading toward her fate, like a prize idiot. “Please,” Nick would say, “if you remember anything from that morning, if you saw Ellie Mack on Harlow Road, please get in touch. We’re waiting for your call.”
But nobody had seen Ellie that morning. No one had noticed her talking to a woman with red hair. No one had seen her walking with her toward Harlow Road. No one had seen Noelle Donnelly unlock the door of a small scruffy house with a flowering cherry tree outside and turn to Ellie and say, “Come on then, in you come.” No one had seen Ellie walk through the door. No one had heard the door close behind her.
12
Paul and Laurel buried the partial remains of their daughter on a sunny afternoon at the tail end of an indolent Indian summer. They buried her femurs, her tibias, and most of her skull.
According to the forensics report, her daughter had been run over by a vehicle, her broken body then dragged some distance through the woodland, buried in a shallow grave, and left for animals to take her bones and scatter them through the woods. For days dogs had swarmed through the woods where she’d been found, looking for more pieces of their daughter, but they’d found nothing else.
The police trawled local garage records for cars that had been brought in with damage commensurate with hitting a body. They also leafleted the surrounding areas, asking if anyone remembered a female hitchhiker, a passenger on a bus, a young woman with a navy-blue rucksack; had she stayed in your hostel, your home; did you come upon her sleeping rough; do you recognize this face, this girl of fifteen years old, this computer-generated woman of twenty-five? Photos of Laurel’s candlesticks were circulated. Had anyone sold them, seen them, bought them? But no one came forward. No one had seen anything. No one knew anything. After a twelve-week flurry of activity everything went still again.
And now Ellie was dead. The possibility was gone. Laurel was alone. Her family was broken. There was nothing. Literally nothing.
Until one day, a month after Ellie’s funeral, Laurel met Floyd.
PART TWO
13
Laurel hands the young girl who washed her hair a two-pound coin. “Thank you, Dora,” she says, smiling nicely.
Then she gives the hairstylist a five-pound note and says, “Thank you, Tania, it looks great, it really does. Thank you so much.”
She eyes her reflection one more time in the wall-length mirror before leaving. Her hair is shoulder-length, blonde, shiny and swishy. Her hair is entirely unrepresentative of what lies beneath. If she could pay someone in Stroud Green eighty pounds to give her psyche a shiny, swishy blow-dry, she would. And she would give them more than a five-pound tip.
Outside it is a blowy autumn afternoon. Her hair feels light as silk as it is whipped around her head. It’s late and she’s hungry and decides that she can’t wait to get home to eat so she pushes open the door to the café three doors down from her hairdresser’s and orders herself a toasted cheese sandwich and a decaf cappuccino. She eats fast and the cheese pulls away from the bread in unruly strings that break and slap against her chin. She has a paper napkin to her chin to wipe away the grease when a man walks in.
He is of average height, average build, around fifty. His hair is cut short, gray at the temples, receding, and darker on