Then She Was Gone - Lisa Jewell Page 0,56
pine shelves full of books and the sun-bleached prints on the walls. “So all this,” she says, “the furniture, and the books, this is all Noelle’s?”
“Yeah, yeah. All of it. I mean, upstairs, in the wardrobes, all her clothes are still there. Seriously. All her underwear and her bits and pieces.”
“And no one ever packed anything away? It’s all as she left it?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
Laurel feels a shocking urge to run upstairs now and rifle through everything, to upend drawers and search through paperwork. For what? she wonders. What is it she thinks she will find?
“What do you think happened to your aunt?” she asks instead.
“I genuinely don’t have a clue. I mean, she was supposed to be coming over to Ireland, that’s what I was told. And she took her things: her passport, her cards; she packed a bag, some photos. She was clearly going somewhere. But wherever it was it looks like maybe she never got there? Her passport was never used. She hasn’t used her cash card for years.” He turns his hands palms upward and then places them on his knees. “Strange shit.”
“You know,” Laurel says lightly, “my daughter disappeared.”
“Oh yeah?” Joshua sits forward, his interest piqued.
“She disappeared in 2005. And the last place my daughter was seen alive was there.” She points toward Stroud Green Road. “Just there. Opposite the Red Cross shop. On CCTV.”
He narrows his eyes at her and they sit in silence for a moment.
Laurel wonders how far she can push this personable young man before he goes on the defense. “Poppy,” she says, “your cousin. Have you met her?”
“No, none of us has. She’s the only cousin we haven’t met. And it’s a shame because I have another cousin about her age, Clara—she’s a laugh, she really is, such a character—and maybe they could have been friends. But that guy, the writer guy . . . ”
“Floyd?”
“Yeah, that’s the guy. He keeps himself to himself and he keeps her close to home. He didn’t want to know when we suggested we could help him out with her care. I think one of my uncles went round there, you know, about a year after Noelle disappeared, tried to make a friendship.” He shakes his head. “Apparently he was quite sharp with him, made it clear that we weren’t wanted.”
Laurel wonders if Poppy even knows about her Irish family.
“How do you know them then, Poppy and Floyd?” asks Joshua.
“I’m . . . well, I’m in a relationship with Floyd, actually. He’s my boyfriend.”
“Oh.” He raises his brow. “Right.”
“And funnily enough, Noelle used to tutor my daughter, Ellie. In fact, she was tutoring her in the weeks before she disappeared.”
“What—here?” He points at the floor.
“No. Noelle came to my house. About half a mile from here.”
“Right,” he says. “Right.”
Laurel gazes at him for a moment, willing him to provide her with the strand that will unfurl the knot of threads in her head.
“So, are you saying that something untoward happened?” he says eventually. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know,” Laurel says. “I really don’t know.”
“It does sound a bit odd,” he says. “I’ll grant you that.” He puts his elbows on his knees and stares at the floor for a moment. “You’ve got me thinking now, got my brain ticking over.” He circles his temple with his fingertip. “You have a mystery, and I have a mystery, and you think that maybe the two mysteries are connected?”
“Have you ever been through Noelle’s things?” she asks. “Her private things? Diaries or such?”
“No. I never did. But there was . . . ” He pauses. “There was one thing. A really strange thing. We could never quite fathom it.” He looks toward the door and then back again. He sighs. “Shall I show you?”
“What?”
“You’ll have to trust me, because I’m a stranger to you and I could be anyone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s in the basement.”
“What is?”
“The strange thing. The thing we found. In the basement.”
Laurel feels a surge of adrenaline. She looks at the boy with the sweet face sitting opposite her.
“I’d totally understand if you don’t want to go down. I wouldn’t if I were you. Probably seen too many scary movies—you know, the ones where you go don’t go down into the basement, you bloody idiot!”
He smiles and he couldn’t look more like a nice young man over from Ireland to do a degree.
“I could just describe it if you like. Or I can go down and take a photo on my