THEN
Ellie had not thought too much about Noelle Donnelly since their final lesson.
According to her mother she had been a “bit arsey” about it, said that had she known her time with Ellie would be cut short, she might not have taken the job and now she had a slot she could not fill, and it was not really the done thing blah blah blah. Her mother had brushed it off when Ellie had said she felt bad.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I think she’s just the type to take umbrage. She’ll be OK. And she’ll definitely find someone to take that slot so close to the exams. Some last-minute panicking parent will snap her up.”
Ellie had felt reassured by this and removed Noelle Donnelly from the bit of her brain that concerned itself with the here and now. The here and now was oversubscribed as it was.
In fact it had taken her a moment to place Noelle Donnelly at all when she saw her on the high street that Thursday morning during the May half-term. She was on her way to the library. Her sister had a friend over who had a really loud, really annoying laugh. She needed some peace and quiet. And also a book about the workhouses in the nineteenth century.
So, in retrospect, she could have blamed her sister’s friend with the loud laugh for her being there at that precise moment, but she really didn’t want to do that. The blame game could be exhausting sometimes. The blame game could make you lose your mind . . . all the infinitesimal outcomes, each path breaking up into a million other paths every time you heedlessly chose one, taking you on a journey that you’d never find your way back from.
Noelle’s face formed a complicated smile when she saw Ellie. Ellie scrambled around in the back rooms of her brain for a nanosecond, retrieved what she needed, and then returned the smile.
“My best student!” Noelle said. “Hi!”
“How’s it going?”
“It’s fine! It’s great! The maths is going really well.”
“Oh, well, that is grand.” She was wearing a khaki-green waterproof coat in spite of a forecast for warm, dry weather. Her red hair was clipped back from her face with tortoiseshell clasps. She had on cheap black trainers and was clutching a cream canvas bag to her shoulder. “All ready for the big day?”
“Yes, totally,” she overstated, not wanting to give Noelle an opportunity to chastise her for stopping her tutoring sessions.
“Tuesday, yes?”
“Yes. Ten a.m. Then the second paper the week after.”
Noelle nodded, her eyes never leaving Ellie’s. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been using a practice paper with my other students. They all say it’s been superhelpful. And from what I’ve heard through the grapevine it has a lot of crossover with this year’s paper. If you like I could give you a copy?”
NO, Ellie screamed at herself from beyond the beyond. NO. I DO NOT WANT YOUR PRACTICE PAPER. But the here-and-now Ellie, the one who wanted to spend her summer paragliding and losing her virginity, the one who was having pizza tonight and seeing her boyfriend tomorrow morning, that Ellie said, “Oh, right. Yes. That could be good.”
“Now let me see,” said Noelle, touching her lips with her forefinger. “I could drop by this evening. I’ll be close to you then.”
“Great,” said Ellie. “Yes, that would be great.”
“Or . . . you know, maybe better still”—she looked at her watch and then briefly behind her—“I’m just here.” She pointed at a side road. “Literally four houses down. Why don’t you pop in now? It’ll take ten seconds.”
It was busy that Thursday morning. People passed on either side of them. Ellie thought of those people afterward, wondered if they’d noticed, wondered if somewhere in someone’s head there lay an untouched memory of a girl with a rucksack, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans talking to a woman in a khaki waterproof with a Daunt Books shoulder bag. She imagined a Crimewatch reenactment of these moments. Who would they cast as her? Hanna, probably.
They were almost the same height these days. And a red-haired female police officer togged up in an ugly green coat, pretending to be Noelle.
“Were you there,” Nick Robinson would say afterward, eyes narrowed at the camera, “on the morning of Thursday the twenty-sixth of May? Did you see a middle-aged woman with red hair talking to Ellie Mack? They were outside the Red Cross charity shop on Stroud Green Road. It was about ten forty-five a.m. You might remember the weather that day; it was the day of an electrical storm over London. Did you see the woman in the green coat walking with Ellie Mack toward Harlow Road?” The screen would shift to some grainy CCTV footage of Ellie and Noelle walking together up Stroud Green Road—Ellie would look tiny and vulnerable, turning that last corner, heading toward her fate, like a prize idiot. “Please,” Nick would say, “if you remember anything from that morning, if you saw Ellie Mack on Harlow Road, please get in touch. We’re waiting for your call.”
But nobody had seen Ellie that morning. No one had noticed her talking to a woman with red hair. No one had seen her walking with her toward Harlow Road. No one had seen Noelle Donnelly unlock the door of a small scruffy house with a flowering cherry tree outside and turn to Ellie and say, “Come on then, in you come.” No one had seen Ellie walk through the door. No one had heard the door close behind her.
