The First Version

Ben arrived with takeaway and the expression of a man who had come to sit with an unreasonable person until she improved.

He put the bags on the kitchen table. Curry. Naan. The little tub of red sauce our father used to refuse on principle, although he had never tasted it.

“You’ve hardly eaten, have you?”

I set the photograph in front of him.

He looked at it for a long time.

“Could be the wrong date.”

“It could.”

“Mum’s handwriting was getting—”

“It’s the same handwriting she had twenty years ago.”

He sat down. There was a pale crescent on his finger where his wedding ring used to be.

“What are you asking me, Anna?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He opened a carton, closed it again.

“She came back,” he said.

The kitchen made a small sound around us: a pipe knocking in the wall.

“You knew?”

“I saw her when she came back on Friday evening. I thought you did.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because Mum told you everything.”

This was so far from my experience of our mother that I almost laughed.

“She told me Evie had gone. She told me Dad was worried people would think he’d driven her away. She told me to say I saw her leave.”

“Which she did.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“No. But she left. It wasn’t as though Mum was asking you to say something completely—”

“Completely what?”

He pushed the carton away.

“All right.”

“Was she here when I got home on Saturday?”

“No.”

“When did she go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who saw her?”

“Mum said Dad drove her to the station.”

“Then why did the police think she caught a bus on Friday morning?”

“Because Dad didn’t want them knowing they’d had a row.”

“Enough of a row to lie to the police?”

“You remember him.”

I did. I remembered the silence that formed at the dinner table when he put his cutlery down. I remembered his disappointment, which he employed more often than anger and to better effect. I remembered learning to predict a man’s mood from the way he closed a drawer.

It was possible to make our father responsible for almost anything. That was one of the advantages he had left us by dying.

“And you let me keep telling it,” I said.

Ben rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“I was trying to keep everybody going.”

“You were twenty-three.”

“And you think that made me capable?”

For a moment I saw him as he had been then: badly shaved, wearing shirts too smart for his job, owing money to people whose names he wouldn’t tell us. Ben had always looked most adult when he was least able to manage.

I put Evie’s note beside the photograph.

“Who was she talking about?”

He read it once.

“Dad, probably.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know, Anna. There were things. He was difficult with her.”

“She wrote ‘he hasn’t told them’. Who was them?”

“Could be anyone.”

“But you think he was Dad.”

His face changed then, just a little. Not fear. Irritation at being made to notice the shape of his own answer.

“You’re good at this,” he said.

“What?”

“Making a person sound guilty for not remembering eighteen years ago.”

I stood up and went to the sink. Outside, the security light came on. Rain silvered the top of the digger’s tarpaulin.

“I’m going to call the police.”

He didn’t tell me not to. That would have been easier to resist.

“Of course,” he said. “You should. But maybe we ought to establish what we’re telling them first.”

I turned around.

“That’s what Mum said.”

He looked down at the photograph.

We ate the curry. I don’t know why this seems important, but it does. We sat at the same table at which my sister had eaten her last photographed meal, and Ben passed me the rice, and I said thank you. Horror does not remove the things you have been taught to do.

When he left, he took the takeaway bags out to the bin.

“Don’t stay up going through everything,” he said. “You’ll make yourself ill.”

I watched him walk to his car. He paused beside the garage, looking towards the washhouse. Then he got in and drove away.

Upstairs, I found the old missing-person appeal on my phone. It was still there, a low-resolution image on a page that hadn’t been updated for years.

Last seen by her younger sister leaving the family home at approximately 7.15 a.m. on Friday, 14 November.

I enlarged the photograph until Evie’s face broke into squares.

Then I found the number for the police and made the call.

“I have information about a missing person,” I said. “And about a statement I made.”