'We often used to head up country - the Peak District, the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales. Caroline and I love the open spaces there. London suffocates you after a while. We started taking Meg up north as soon as she was old enough to walk.'
'Do you think she could have gone to one of those places?'
He shrugged. 'I don't know whether she would have gone north when I don't know why she left in the first place.'
I'd asked them both about boyfriends the day before, but I wanted to ask them again individually. What you learned quickly in missing persons was that every marriage had secrets — and that one half of the couple always knew more than the other, especially when kids were involved. 'As far as you know, she didn't have a boyfriend?'
'As far as I know.'
'What's your gut feeling?'
'My gut feeling is it's a possibility she met someone.' He moved a little in his seat, coming to the edge of it. 'Do you think that's our best hope?'
'I think it's worth pursuing. Kids Megan's age tend to disappear for two reasons: either they're unhappy at home, or they've run away with someone - probably someone their parents don't approve of. It doesn’t sound like she was unhappy at home, so that's why I'm asking about boyfriends. We may find out Megan hasn't run off with someone.' I paused, looked at him. 'Or we may find out she has.'
'But if she'd run off with someone, wouldn't she have seen the press conferences we did? The Megan I know wouldn't have ignored them. She wouldn't have ignored the pain she was putting us through. She would have called us.'
I looked at him, then away - but he'd seen the answer, and it wasn't the one he wanted. It was the one where she didn't come home alive.
Megan's room was beautifully presented and had barely been touched since her disappearance. A big bay window looked out over Hampstead Heath, wardrobes either side of it. A three-tiered bookcase was on the right, full of science textbooks. Opposite the window, close to the door, was a small desk with a top-of-the-range MacBook sitting on it, still open. Photographs surrounded the laptop: Megan with her friends; Megan holding Leigh when he was a baby; Megan with her mum and dad. There was also a rocking chair in one corner of the room, soft toys looking out, and a poster of a square-jawed Hollywood heart-throb on the wall above that.
I booted up the MacBook and went through it. The desktop was virtually empty, everything tidied into folders. Homework assignments. Word documents. University prospectuses as PDF files. Clicking on Safari, I moved through her bookmarks, her history, her cookies and her download history — but, unless you counted a few illegal songs, nothing stood out. There was a link to her Face- book profile in the browser — the email and password automatically logged — but the only activity in the last seven months was the creation of a group dedicated to her memory. Judging by the comments, most people were assuming she wasn't coming home.
Both wardrobes were full of clothes and shoes, but the second one had a couple of plastic storage boxes stacked towards the back. I took them out and flipped the lid off the top one: it was full of pictures. The younger Megan got in the photographs, the less like her father she became. As a young girl, she was a little paler with strikingly white hair, and without any of the similarities that were so startling in more recent pictures. Later pictures were less worn by age, her parents older, her face starting to mirror some of the shape of her father's.
I opened up the next box.
A digital camera was inside. I took it out, switched it on and started cycling through the photographs. There were twenty-eight in all, mostly of Leigh. A couple near the end were of Megan and what must have been her friends, and in the final one she was standing outside what looked like the entrance to a block of flats. I used the zoom and moved in closer: the entrance doors had glass panels in them that reflected back the day's light in two creamy blocks. A sliver of a brick wall on the right-hand side. Nothing else.
I returned to her MacBook and booted up iPhoto, hoping to find a bigger version — but none of the pictures on the camera were on the computer. She hadn't got around to downloading them. I checked the date on the camera: 6 March. Twenty-eight days before she disappeared. Zooming in again, I studied the photo a second time, but the reflection in the glass would have been the most useful identifier of where she was and it was full of light. Then, when I came back to her face, I noticed something.
Her smile.
It was a smile I hadn't seen in any of the other pictures of her. For the first time, she didn't look like a girl. She looked like a woman.
'Find anything?'
I turned. Carver was standing in the doorway.
'I'm not sure,' I said, and held up the camera and the storage box. 'Can I take these?'
'Of course.' He came further in. 'I've been through those pictures hundreds of times. So have the police. Some days you feel like you've missed something. You think you've let something slip by. Then, when you go back, you only find what you found before. But maybe this whole thing needs a fresh pair of eyes.'
He moved further in and picked up an early photograph of Megan. I watched his eyes move across the picture, soaking up the memories. When he finally looked up, I could see he was trying to prevent his eyes filling with tears.
'Do you know where this is?' I asked him, handing him the camera.
He looked at the picture and studied it; shook his head.
'No.'
'You didn't take it?'
'No.'
'Any idea who might have?'
He shrugged. 'Maybe one of her friends.'
The phone started ringing downstairs. Carver apologized and disappeared. After he was gone, I went through the rest of the box. More photos, some letters, old jewellery.
Every trace of a life Megan had left behind.
It was almost lunch by the time I left. The sun had gone in, clouds scattered across the sky. In the distance I could see rain moving up from the heart of the city.
I opened my old BMW 3 Series, threw my pad on to the passenger seat and turned back to Carver, who had walked me out.
'I'd like to speak to your wife,' I said.
'Of course. It's just, I'm out on a site visit tomorrow…'
'That's fine. I'd like to keep things moving if possible, so if you can tell her that I'm going to call in, that would be great.'
'Sure. No problem.'
Afterwards, as I drove off, I watched him in the rear- view mirror disappearing back through the gates of his house. He looked like he'd had the wind knocked out of him. Give it a few weeks, and it might look like he'd had his heart ripped out too.
Chapter Three
There was a diner half a mile down the road from Megan's school. I sat at the window, ordered a bacon sandwich, then took out Megan's Book of Life. The previous night, when I'd glanced at it, it had been difficult to gain any kind of clarity. It was just sixty pages of random notes. The book was sectioned alphabetically, but none of her entries corresponded to the relevant letter. Where names should have been, there were phone numbers. Where phone numbers were supposed to be, there were names.
I flipped back to the start. On the first page she'd written her name and
