Down to Earth

‘You don’t have to go straight away, Kaela. Maybe you should sit a while to get over the shock.’

‘I thought you wanted me gone.’ I was angry now, my head reeling from his revelations.

He pressed his fingertips to his forehead and shook his head. ‘I never wanted you gone, Kaela. There was a time I’d have given anything to have you back, to feel your body against mine again. I just can’t get my head round the fact that you’ve been out there, alive and well all this time; that your parents were right all along.’

‘I didn’t leave any of you on purpose.’ I was furiously sniffing back the tears. ‘I cared about you, Calum. I adored you from the first moment I met you.’ I lowered my voice an octave. ‘Do you remember you were wearing that strange quilted waistcoat under your jacket like Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Diary? I still feel like that about you. As far as I’m concerned I climbed out of your bed only yesterday morning. I don’t know where the last six years have gone.’ I sighed wretchedly. ‘And I’m having trouble assimilating everything you’ve told me.’ I gazed miserably into space feeling almost totally numb.

He lowered his hands and stared at me again as if trying to decide whether I might be telling the truth. I returned his look as calmly as possible, though the tears were still running down my face.

‘If you truly believe that, then as I said earlier, you need to see someone, Kaela. And the police should be informed that you are alive and well.’

I found I could barely think, but made a supreme effort to pull myself together. ‘Matt and Kevin have given me two hours before they call the police. I insisted on seeing you first.’

He bristled again at the mention of Matt’s name, but then seemed to give in.

‘And I haven’t been very hospitable. I think I’m still in shock. Do you still want to see Abbey before you go?’

Tearing my thoughts away from the plight of my parents I tried to stay focused. ‘What will Abbey make of me being back?’

‘At the moment she’s not in any state to say anything. She’s still sleeping off the effects of last night.’

‘And when she wakes up?’

‘She’ll probably hate you,’ he said with the beginnings of a sympathetic smile. ‘She seems to hate everyone at the moment, but deep down she really misses you. I think she thought you’d left because of her behaviour towards you.’

‘Have you taken her to see anyone, to get professional help?’

Calum looked at me blankly and I assumed he hadn’t. That poor child, I thought. First losing her real mother and then being left to think I’d abandoned her because of something she’d done.

At that moment the door to the sitting room opened and a strange apparition appeared in the doorway. The creature was dressed in a long, black, jagged hemmed skirt, which ended above the ankles, revealing what looked like army issue boots. Her top half was barely covered by a skimpy black and purple top. Her hair, part of which was piled high on her head in a messy fifties bee-hive, was dyed jet black with purple streaks. But it wasn’t so much the hair or the deathly make-up and eyebrow and nose piercings that made me stare, but the terrible self-inflicted scars and tattoos which were etched into both her arms.

‘Abbey?’

Her eyes rested on mine beneath their thick kohl liner and widened in shock. Her already chalk white face blanched even further, and clutching one hand to her mouth and the other to her stomach, she turned and threw up all over the carpet.

Chapter Eleven (#ulink_2ae18d3f-2d66-56fe-9113-f7be93a0759c)

The mop and bucket were exactly where I’d kept them when I’d lived here a day – or was it six years – ago.

After helping Calum hoist Abigail to her feet and over to the couch, where she watched me in shocked silence, I set to cleaning up the mess on the floor. Presumably because she’d already had her stomach forcibly emptied at the hospital, it didn’t take too long before the only evidence of her sickness was nothing more than a damp, rather brighter patch on the otherwise filthy carpet.

Once I’d washed my hands in the kitchen sink, I went over to the girl and squeezed down beside her as she lay on the couch with her knees drawn up to her chest.

‘Abigail?’ I ventured.

She turned her head away, ignoring me.

‘I want you to know that I didn’t mean to leave you,’ I tried. ‘I was happy living here with you and your father. I would never have done that to you on purpose …’

With shaking hands she picked up the TV remote control, turned the box on and flicked through the daytime channels, cranking the volume up high.

I sighed, realising that attempting to reason with her was a losing battle.

‘Abbey!’ Calum strode over to his daughter and tried to snatch the control out of her hand, but she evaded him deftly. He tried once more then turned to me defeated, and shrugged helplessly over the noise, ‘Shall we go to the kitchen?’

I could see from that short exchange that Calum had definitely lost the battle to keep control of his daughter. Following Calum to the kitchen, I realised that my one-time family need no longer be my business. In the space of a day my mature hero-figure had turned into a stranger. His daughter, my one-time nemesis, was in the throes of killing herself. Pausing in the passage, I glanced towards the front door. All I had to do was walk through it to be out of their lives forever.

Glancing back through the open living room door to where Abbey was slouched weakly on the sofa, I caught her watching me. As soon as she realised I’d seen her, her eyes flicked back to the television, but not before I’d seen the pool of stark despair in them.

I thought of yesterday morning when I’d woken her up with a glass of orange juice and told her that her father would be taking her to school as I had to leave early for my journey down to Kent – and her shrug of feigned indifference as she’d turned over to go back to sleep. But minutes before I’d climbed into my jeep, she had appeared at my elbow in the driveway with her homework diary in her hand.

‘Will you sign it, Kaela?’

I’d been nervous about the jump and a little short with her as I’d thrown my bag and fleece jacket onto the passenger seat. ‘Can’t your father do it?’

She’d shrugged. ‘My friends’ mums all sign theirs.’

I’d narrowed my eyes as I searched her face, which was fresh and innocent from sleep, hope filling my heart with her words. Had she accepted me at last? But time and the promise of adventure were pressing.

I’d smiled at her as I’d scribbled my signature, thinking that maybe at last we had the foundations of something we could build on. ‘I’ll see you later, off you go and finish getting ready or you’ll be late for school.’

She’d stood for a moment, watching my car creep down the long narrow drive, and then I was out into the traffic, forgetting everything but the adventure that lay ahead of me, never thinking that I would return anywhere but here to the two people I had intended to remain with for the rest of my life.

It was unbelievable that Dad was gone and Mum was languishing in a nursing home somewhere. As soon as Calum and I had thrashed out whatever was left between us, I would go to see her, though what I would say, I didn’t know.

As it happened I didn’t have the chance to continue where Calum and I had left off. I was halted in my tracks halfway across the passage by an urgent pounding on the front door. The noise even surpassed the racket Abbey was listening to in the room behind me. Rooted to the spot, I watched as Calum hurried past me and threw the door open to reveal two burly uniformed police officers standing, fists raised, on the front step.

‘Mr Calum Sinclair?’

I watched as Calum took an involuntary step backwards. ‘Yes.’

A slim blonde woman, wearing a plain grey skirt suit swept past the two officers, brandishing an identification card. ‘DI Sandra Smith,’ she announced. ‘We have reason to believe you are holding a young woman on the premises …’ She stopped in mid sentence and peered at me through the gloom of the hallway, a note of surprise creeping into her voice. ‘Michaela Anderson?’

I nodded and the woman blinked behind a pair of rimless glasses as if having to reassess the situation. Frowning she held out her hands in a placating manner, palms down, neatly manicured fingers splayed. ‘Don’t be afraid, Michaela. We have come to help you.’

‘How did you know I was here?’

‘The Kent police received a tip off from a member of the public early this morning. Because your disappearance was originally handled jointly by both forces and is now considered a cold case, they handed this end of it to us.’

I pictured the friendly barman waking up and suddenly realising where he’d seen me before.

‘It took us a while to authenticate the report and look up your file, but I personally decided that after all this time it might not be another hoax sighting.’ She lowered her voice, presumably to make it less intimidating. ‘You are safe now. We need you to come with us, Michaela.’

The two uniformed officers stepped into the hall and confronted Calum, who was standing with his mouth slightly open. ‘We’d like you to accompany us to the station please, sir.’

‘What?’ Calum was spluttering and despite everything, I felt desperately sorry for him. The last six years had not been kind to him. It was obvious he’d had very little sleep the night before while Abbey had been in the hospital, then there had been the shock of my reappearance, and now it seemed he was under arrest.

‘He had nothing to do with this,’ I told the DI. I had no idea what ‘this’ was exactly, but I did know that I didn’t want Calum getting the blame. ‘I’ve only been here an hour. This has nothing to do with him.’