The Family Account

They let us take my case, my coat and the sandwich I hadn’t finished. There was something awful about carrying lunch out of the house.

Ben’s contractor arrived while we were leaving. He was a large man in a fleece jacket, with a pencil behind his ear. He looked from the police car to me.

“I’ve come for the keys.”

“There won’t be any work,” I said.

He nodded, not asking the question in his face. Then he said, “Probably as well, given what’s under there.”

“What?”

“The old pit. Your brother kept changing the plan. First it was make it sound, then fill it, then he wanted the whole slab broken up and taken off site. We hadn’t agreed a price.”

I went back to the officer and asked the contractor to repeat that to him. For once, I did not apologise for making someone late.

In Tamsin’s car, my phone began to light up. Ben, three times. A number I didn’t recognise. Then Ben’s former wife, Louise.

I answered hers.

“Have you seen him?” she asked.

“Not since yesterday.”

“He picked Kit up from school. It’s not his day, but he said there’d been a change. He’s not answering.”

My throat tightened.

“Has he said where they’re going?”

“Just for something to eat. Anna, what’s happening? He was strange on the phone.”

I looked at Tamsin.

“Something’s happened at the house,” I said. “The police are looking into Evie’s disappearance again.”

Louise was silent.

“I need you to call him,” she said. “Please. He answers you.”

He usually did. It had once seemed proof that we were close.

I told Shah about Kit before I called Ben. I told her where we were going: Tamsin’s house, the same one I had slept in eighteen years ago. Her mother had moved into a flat nearby. Tamsin had bought the house and kept the wallpaper in the smallest bedroom.

Ben answered on the first ring.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Kit and I are having a drink.”

“Louise is worried.”

“I sent her a message.”

“Where?”

“At the petrol station near the bypass. There’s a café.”

“Put Kit on.”

A rustle. Then my niece’s voice, cheerful and muffled with food.

“Auntie Anna, are you sad about Gran?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Dad said we should come and see you.”

“I’d like that.”

“Can I have a hot chocolate?”

“Yes.”

“With the little things?”

“Marshmallows.”

“Yes, those.”

Ben came back on the line.

“Where are you?”

“At Tamsin’s. Louise is meeting us here.”

“I’d rather it was just family.”

“I know.”

He waited. For once, I had not offered to arrange things to his liking.

“I’ve read Mum’s letter,” I said.

His breath changed.

“Then you know.”

“I know what she wrote.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Bring Kit to her mother.”

“You make it sound as though—”

“Bring her here, Ben.”

He hung up.

I gave Shah the petrol station’s location. She said she would arrange for someone to meet us at Tamsin’s and try to contact Ben herself. I didn’t ask what that meant. I was beginning to understand how much of an investigation consisted of not being entitled to know everything at once.

At the house, Tamsin filled the kettle. I sat on the bottom stair. There was still a nick in the banister where we had tried to carry a second-hand sofa up to her bedroom when we were sixteen. It had been too wide. We had slept on it in the hall for three nights before her mother lost patience.

“You didn’t make him do whatever he did,” Tamsin said.

“I haven’t said that.”

“You don’t have to. I know your face.”

I pressed my thumb into the nick in the wood.

“She asked me not to go that night. Evie. On the Thursday. She said she needed to talk to someone. I thought she meant about Ben, and I didn’t want to hear it.”

“So you went to mine.”

“Yes.”

“And at seventeen you should have known that leaving your adult sister in her own home would put her in danger?”

I looked away.

“You don’t get to borrow their responsibility just because it fits the way you already feel,” she said.

The kettle clicked off.

“That was very good,” I said.

“I’ve had eighteen years to think about it.”

Louise arrived before Ben. She had left work without her coat and wore a blue lanyard over her blouse. I told her what I could. She listened with her hands flat on the kitchen table, then asked to see the photograph.

I showed her the copy on my phone.

“She looks like Kit,” she said.

I had been trying not to notice.