As for the street itself: there had been no blood. No sign of a struggle. All they had found was one of Matilda’s earrings, a pair of diamond solitaires her parents had given her on her sixteenth birthday. It hadn’t been torn from her ear (at that note in the file, Watson had shuddered); it looked more like it had fallen naturally.
Her father, George Wilkes, had reported his daughter missing at dawn. By the morning, he was at the police station, hounding detectives for information. He was followed by Theo Harding, followed finally by Matilda’s mother, at nearly noon. The latter had taken longer because she’d driven straight back to Kensington—their wealthy London suburb—and returned with a bag of Matilda’s things “that might be important in the investigation.” This had struck the officer as extremely odd; the bag was full of class notes and diary entries that suggested nothing more than your bog-standard teenage girl. When questioned, George said that his wife was “a very nervous woman, not quite right, but desperate to do what she can to help” and soon after provided a letter from his wife’s psychologist and a pair of prescription slips substantiating his claim. CCTV footage of the street outside their hotel showed that she had left when she’d said and not before. The detective chalked up her aberrant behavior to nerves and cautioned her against driving in such a state again.
(“She didn’t go back only for Matilda’s things,” Watson asked, reading over my shoulder. “There had to have been something else. What was she picking up?”
“Or,” I said, “what was she taking home to hide?”)
CCTV wasn’t any help in identifying who else could have been on Waterbury Lane that night. A raucous group had left a venue a few blocks over after an “’80s vs. ’90s” club night, and many of them had taken the same path as Matilda as they left only fifteen minutes later. When tracked down and questioned, none reported any sight of her.
Oxford had a higher crime rate than many other British cities, but those offenses ran more toward bicycle theft than kidnapping, and in the weeks after Matilda’s disappearance students stopped going out after dark. Especially young women. The newspapers had a field day, interviewing Matilda’s friends back home, her distant family (her parents refused to answer questions), splashing the same haunting photo of her across their front page. Matilda, her lips pressed together, her hand raised as if swearing an oath, her face a mask of fury: it was a stage shot, her in character, but it made her look dangerous, electric.
It made her look alive.
As time passed, the consensus changed. No ransom was asked for, no new information came to light, and ultimately, despite DI Sadiq’s best efforts, the case had gone cold. It was decided officially that Matilda was either a runaway, or dead, though there was still suspicion on her tight-knit group of friends, whose stories about the night she disappeared were so uniform that they seemed rehearsed. I searched again for anything interesting in the interrogation notes, but Theo and Rupert and Anwen and Sebastian Wallis’s interviews all read the same: Matilda had been fine when they left her. They’d all gone home together and found out she’d disappeared the next morning. Anwen had sobbed through her interrogation, something I couldn’t quite square with the composed girl I’d seen so far. Rupert had called every day asking for updates. And Theo haunted the police station for the weeks up until his flight home, bringing coffee to the detectives, doing his schoolwork in their waiting room. Desperate, it appeared, for answers.
I read through his transcript a second time. A third. I should have walked to the hotel, he’d said, over and over. What kind of boyfriend am I?
He’d never told the police that they had broken up.
(Watson nodded when I pointed it out. “It makes sense,” he said. “Messy breakup, and then your girlfriend goes missing? You’d be their prime suspect.”
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“This is not me sympathizing with him,” he protested. “Criminal psychology! I’m getting into his head!”)
And though my father’s training taught me to begin with facts and not with theory, I couldn’t help imagining it. Theo, in The Bell and Book with his friends, watching his ex-girlfriend sitting next to another boy. Putting a hand on his shoulder. Stealing sips of his drink. Sebastian? Rupert? A stranger? Them leaving at last call, Matilda splitting off with a wave—and Theo staring after her. Telling the rest that he’d forgotten something at the pub. He’d see them in the morning.
Running after Matilda. Grabbing her by the elbow, wheeling her around. The two of them arguing—I knew the sorts of things this Theo would say, you should know better, and making a fool out of me, and then—
There were many ways for a girl to disappear.
And for his friends, the next day, to circle their wagons, to insist to the police that they walked Theo all the way home. The alternative was unimaginable.
Of course, I had a very precise imagination.
As I flipped through the file once more, looking for anything else I’d missed, DI Sadiq returned. “Thoughts?” she asked. “Questions?”
“Theo Harding,” I said. “He’d split up with Matilda right before she’d disappeared.”
Sadiq sighed. “We did learn that eventually,” she said. “But only weeks later, when speaking to some of the other theater students. When we returned to Theo, he categorically refused it. This is the sort of thing I’d like for you to look into—you’re in a position to earn his trust.”
“Noted,” I said, while Watson made an actual note. “Do you remember anything about George Wilkes? The note here said he was frantic, and despite that, still uncooperative.”
Sadiq frowned. “The girl’s father, yes?” When I nodded, she said, “Parents can be like that when their child is hurt or goes missing, especially ones with money. They treat us like we’re their personal security force. I’d be more upset at the idea if we hadn’t utterly failed him.”
Watson flipped his notebook shut. “You sound pretty upset.”
“I am,” she said, straightening her blazer. To avoid looking at us straight, it seemed. “I don’t like unsolved cases, particularly when it’s a child gone missing.”
I filed that information away. I wasn’t sure if Sadiq had children—she was far too precisely done up for me to read any clues on her clothing, and I disliked looking for such signals on a woman’s body. It wasn’t immediately important. Either way, the moment of vulnerability from her was endearing, and I found myself doing something uncharacteristic: asking for permission. “I’ve taken down George Wilkes’s phone number. I’d like to follow up,” I said. “Perhaps he’s remembered something since last summer. Something his daughter said. Something to help keep this from happening again. Can I use the phone here?”
But Sadiq was already waving me off. “Whatever you need,” she said. “I need to wrap up, get back to my own business. It’s nice to meet you—Charlotte, Jamie.”
“Likewise,” Watson said, shaking her hand, blushing a little the way he did whenever he met an attractive woman.
I called George Wilkes from the telephone on Sadiq’s desk, but he didn’t answer the number listed for his house, or his mobile. On the latter I left a message: “This is Charlotte Holmes, following up from the Thames Valley Police Department. If you could give me a call back at your earliest convenience . . .”