Items Excluded

Tamsin brought lunch to the house and ate it standing up.

“Not at that table?” I asked.

“Not today.”

She handed me a sandwich in greaseproof paper. Cheese and pickle. Evie used to say cheese and pickle was what people ate when they’d stopped believing lunch could be good.

I told Tamsin that, and she laughed. It surprised us both.

“I’d forgotten she was funny,” she said.

“I keep remembering she was difficult.”

“She was nineteen.”

“Yes.”

I ate the sandwich.

We had come to collect my equipment and look for Evie’s ordinary papers: school reports, employment records, names of friends. Shah had asked for anything that might help fill out the weeks before she disappeared. The rest of the inventory could wait.

Mother had filed the papers for her missing daughter in a biscuit tin labelled CHRISTMAS RIBBON.

I carried it down from the airing cupboard. Inside were birthday cards, a certificate for a lifesaving course and a passport application that had never been sent. On the bottom, beneath a sheet of tissue, lay a folded bank letter.

It was addressed to Evie. The name was hers, the house number ours. It concerned missed repayments on a loan of four thousand eight hundred pounds.

Someone had written across it in red ink:

B. to sort. Do not involve M.

My father’s writing. B for Ben. M for Mother, probably. Not certainly. I photographed it without annotating the image.

Tucked into the letter was a copy of a form. The signature was a reasonable imitation of Evie’s, except that Evie crossed the centre of her capital E like a sideways fork. This E belonged to someone who had looked at her signature without noticing it.

“He used her name,” I said.

Tamsin pulled out a chair but did not sit down.

“Send it.”

I did.

Then I tried the little key Mother had left me.

I had taken it back from the station after Shah photographed it. We hadn’t known what it opened. Now I remembered a blue document box Mother kept in the linen chest. It held the things she described as important: house papers, insurance policies, our father’s death certificate. It had a cheap little lock of the kind intended to keep out children rather than thieves.

The key turned.

Inside, the papers were clipped into bundles. Beneath them was a brown envelope marked For Anna to read alone.

I handed it to Tamsin.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

“I know.”

It was the first of Mother’s instructions I had disobeyed without an argument in my head.

Tamsin opened the envelope and passed the pages back to me. There were three, closely written. The handwriting was recent, the letters occasionally running into one another.

Your father said there was nothing to be done. I was not there when it happened. By the time I understood, he had made the arrangements.

I read the first paragraph three times before I could move on.

It was in the old inspection pit, under the washhouse. He had the cover concreted. I never went in that part of the house again. You will know now why I would not let you keep your bicycle there.

I stood up. The chair caught on the edge of the rug and tipped backwards.

Tamsin was beside me before it hit the floor.

“Sit.”

“No.”

“All right. Then hold the counter.”

I held the counter.

The letter continued in smaller writing.

Benjamin did what he was told. You must remember the sort of man your father was. He had a way of making decisions before anybody had the chance to disagree. Ben has lived a good life since. He has a little girl. I do not see what good can come of taking her father away.

There was no sentence that said Evie had died. Mother had managed to describe where her daughter was buried without allowing her to become the subject of a verb.

On the last page:

Do not mistake one terrible night for the whole of a life.

Tamsin took my phone because my fingers weren’t doing what I asked. She called Shah. She gave the address again, although Shah already had it. She said we had not gone into the washhouse.

When she handed the phone to me, Shah’s voice was steady.

“Anna, I want you to leave that area alone. We’re coming to secure it. Is anyone else there?”

“Just Tamsin.”

“And where is your brother?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t contact him about this. Stay together.”

I stood in the kitchen until the first officers arrived. One of them walked with me to the door that led towards the washhouse. I stopped several feet away.

The lock on it was new. The green paint around it was not.

All through the years I had looked for my sister in other women. At railway stations. On an escalator. Once on a crowded beach, where I had abandoned my bag to run after someone with the right walk.

Behind me, Tamsin put a hand against my back. She didn’t rub it. She just left it there.