Page 60 of Worse Than Murder

‘No. It’s not,’ I say, sceptically. I take the box file from her and open it. I bypass the newspaper cuttings and take out a plastic folder of all the sightings Alison had made a record of.

I read the first page and put it back in the file.

‘There are so many others, and they all say a similar thing. In the early days, he was wearing the same clothes Dad was on the day he disappeared. It’s not a coincidence, is it? I mean, I know I want him to be alive and you’re probably going to say something like I’m wishing this to happen, but it’s not me who’s made these sightings. These are real people who have no connection to us.’

‘Why was there no CCTV at the bank?’

‘I don’t know. It was a long time ago, nobody can remember. There’s another thing as well,’ Alison says. She sits next to me on the sofa. She takes the file and begins spreading out the sheets of paper with all the recorded sightings of her father. ‘Look at this: Christmas Eve 1995, he was spotted outside High Chapel. March 12, 1996, and over the page, March 12, 1997.’

‘What’s so special about March 12?’

‘It’s my birthday. He came back to the village to see me on my birthday.’ She looks at me hopefully. She’s willing me to agree with her.

‘What about subsequent birthdays?’

Alison deflates. ‘The sightings do become fewer and further between as time goes on, but the sightings are nearly always around the time something’s happened. My first day as a police officer, he was spotted in the grounds of Gilpin Hotel. The day Mum and Uncle Iain got married, he was spotted in Storrs. There’s a pattern.’

‘What do you think happened to your dad?’

Alison sits back on the sofa. Her face softens. She swallows her emotion, and it’s a while before she braves herself to talk. ‘He was depressed. He couldn’t cope with losing his girls, and he walked away. I can understand that. I only… I wish… I wish I’d been enough for him,’ she cries.

I should put my arm around her. Alison needs a hug and I’m the only one here, but I’m the last person to be offering support right now. I hitch up closer to her. I put my left arm around her shoulders. Maybe to her it feels comforting. To me, it feels alien, and I don’t know why.

‘The fact he’s been spotted around important events in your life shows that you were enough for him, more than enough. He couldn’t cope with what life had thrown at him and he needed to get away, but that didn’t mean he stopped loving you. What happened was something neither of us can understand. It killed your dad. He couldn’t cope with life, and he wanted to step away from that. I bet he would have loved to have taken you with him, but he knew the best place for you was with your mother.’

‘You think he’s still alive?’

I remove my arm. It feels plain awkward now.

‘Twenty-six people can’t be wrong, can they?’

She shakes her head. ‘Why doesn’t he make contact, then?’

‘I don’t know.’ I shrug. ‘Maybe he’s ashamed.’

‘What of?’

‘Maybe he thinks he’s failed at being a father for walking away. Maybe he’s worried you’d hate him for leaving.’

‘I’d never hate him.’

‘He doesn’t know that. And, as time has gone on, the hurt and the fear and the horror has mutated in his mind. He’s been living with it all non-stop for almost thirty years. He doesn’t need you to hate him, because he’ll hate himself.’

I know exactly how he feels.

Alison makes us both a cup of tea. I look out of the kitchen window at the field at the back of the house.

‘Was that where your sisters disappeared from?’

‘Yes.’

Alison unlocks the back door, and we step out into the coolness of the evening air.

The ground is soft under foot after the deluge of rain in the storm. We go onto the field and take in the expanse of space.

‘It’s smaller than I remember it as a child,’ Alison says. ‘When we were kids, this seemed to stretch on forever. There weren’t many children living here then. Celia and Jennifer, me and Claire, it was like this was our own private garden. Just for us.’

I turn back to the house. ‘Your mum said she was baking. So, she would have been at the window looking out.’