Moth Girls Read online

  The police’s theory had had a real ring of the truth about it. Mandy had thought about it for hours, days, weeks afterwards. She had left Petra and Tina on the street minutes before they crept into the side gate of the house. What if they had stumbled upon someone killing Mr Merchant? Might that person (or more than one person) have panicked and taken them away somewhere? Could they be holding them until they decided what to do with them?

  In the next few days there was speculation on the television news. There were press appeals. The police made several re-enactments of what they thought had happened. They had three twelve-year-old girls walk along Princess Street and then one of them walk off while the other two headed towards the house. It was dark though, and most people were at home and not in the street, so Mandy couldn’t see how anyone would remember anything. The police were adamant that it had ‘yielded fresh clues and new information’.

  Now Mandy looked at the article again. She flicked through a couple of the others behind it. She began to feel a bit irked. It was on her mind too much. Why had Tommy downloaded all this stuff? How was it relevant to a talk at a memorial service? The facts were simple. Two girls had disappeared. There was no explanation. What else did Tommy need to know in order to give a talk to the sixth form? Then she remembered he was also writing something on it for the school website. She sighed.

  When she left Tommy in the common room he was being monopolised by Toni and Leanne. She wondered if he had sat near them in sociology. She pictured them perching either side of him protectively. She wished, not for the first time, that she had chosen sociology as one of her subjects.

  She turned crossly to the back pages. Tommy had included a longer, more serious piece, perhaps from a Sunday supplement. The date at the top was June 2011, eight months afterwards. Most of the newspapers had stopped reporting the story by then, though there was one that had lurid headlines every couple of weeks or so. She remembered some of the headlines: ‘Moth Girls Abducted from House’; ‘Girls Drawn to the House’; ‘Moth Girls Besotted by Gloomy House’; ‘Mystery House Holds Its Grisly Secrets’.

  The Moth Girls.

  She hadn’t thought of that phrase for years.

  It gave her an unpleasant feeling. She hadn’t liked it at the time. She didn’t like moths. They made her shiver. They came into her room on a summer night and were sucked towards the light, sometimes throwing themselves against lampshades, making scuttling noises with their wings. They were dark and hairy-looking, and sat on walls in high-up places where they couldn’t be shooed away. They only seemed to come out when it was dark, stealthy and foreboding.

  The press called Petra and Tina ‘Moth Girls’ because they had been attracted to the house. They were drawn to it. Though Mandy hated the phrase she couldn’t dispute the truth of it. Right from the moment that she’d started to hang out with the girls, Petra had talked and talked about going into the house in Princess Street. Tina never said much about it but she usually did whatever Petra wanted her to do.

  Her eye skimmed over the Sunday supplement article but she didn’t take any of it in. She was upset. She was also a little bit angry. Why was she even reading this stuff? She packed it all away in her bag and got up and walked out of the library.

  She headed for the lunch rooms and when she got there she looked around for Tommy. He was in the far corner at a table with Toni and Leanne. Zoe was there as well with some boys Mandy didn’t know. She saw, from across the room, that Tommy was sitting smack in the middle of the group and he was talking about something. The other students were staring at him, hanging on his every word. The sight of it gave her a twinge in her chest. Tommy was popular. He was easy to get on with. That’s why everyone else liked him. People like Tommy had to be shared around.

  He noticed her standing there and got up and walked towards her. The others looked round. Their faces did not have the same welcoming look. Mandy stood where she was. She had no intention of encroaching on their gathering.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, pulling the papers out of her bag. ‘I’ve looked at these. They all seem pretty accurate.’

  She handed them to him.

  ‘I’ll show you my speech when I’ve written it.’

  ‘No need.’

  He was bristling, like a puppy. He was pleased with his task and wanted to do it well.

  ‘Zoe was just telling us about the party. You’re coming, right?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe.’

  He stepped closer to her and put his hand on her elbow.

  ‘It wouldn’t be the same if you weren’t there.’

  She felt her knees soften. His fingers on her arm were warm and she longed to place her hand on top of them.

  ‘I’ll probably be able to come,’ she said.

  ‘Great. Thanks for looking at these,’ he said and walked away.

  Six

  Late Friday afternoon, when Mandy got in, she could hear Alison Pointer’s voice from the kitchen. She was talking to her mother. Dismayed, Mandy stood in the hallway and listened for a moment to see how the conversation sounded. She had bought some new clothes for Zoe’s party the following evening. Buying them had made her feel good, but now Alison was here she found herself looking at them with a feeling of guilt. Alison’s visits were never predictable. On some days she was upset, crying, pulling tissues from a box one after the other. Other times she was fine, brisk and business-like, outlining plans for some project she was involved in.

  Mandy listened hard. Today Alison sounded upbeat. She relaxed.

  ‘Mandy, is that you?’ her mother called out.

  ‘It is. I’ll be there in a minute.’

  She went upstairs and threw her bags into her room. Then she came back down to the kitchen. Alison was sitting at the kitchen table, looking smart in dark trousers and a cream jumper. On the floor, by her chair, was a large leather handbag. It sat up on the ground like a stiff case. A leather coat hung untidily over the back of an adjacent chair. Mandy could see that Alison’s nails had been painted dark red. She looked like she’d just come from a television interview. When Mandy first knew her she dressed like her own mum except on the days when she was a receptionist in the doctor’s. Now she was usually beautifully turned out.

  Her mother was in jeans and a loose shirt. There were mixing bowls on the side and packets of flour. She was baking again. No doubt there would be a Victoria sponge or a Madeira cake for her to nibble at later.

  ‘Mandy! How are you?’ Alison said, smiling widely.

  ‘Hello, Alison,’ she said.

  It had taken Mandy a long time to be able to call Mrs Pointer ‘Alison’. She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down.

  ‘Did you see the demolition? My neighbour tells me it’s all flat now.’

  ‘I was there for a while on Tuesday morning but I’ve not been past it since. I’ve been going to school a different way so I haven’t seen –’

  ‘I deliberately didn’t go,’ Alison said. ‘I couldn’t face it. I’ve walked past that house many times over the years and sometimes I found it a bit of a comfort, knowing that it was the last place Tina had been. I was afraid, you know, that I might try to stop them knocking it down. Which is ridiculous. If ever there’s a house I should loathe and hate it’s that one.’

  ‘I saw Jason Armstrong there just as they were starting on the demolition,’ Mandy said.

  Alison’s face darkened. ‘What did he have to say?’

  ‘I spoke to him briefly,’ Mandy said, remembering his words and how they had upset her. ‘He looked rough.’

  ‘Living in a hostel, I heard, in East London somewhere. A complete loser.’

  ‘Maybe losing Petra …’

  ‘He was always a complete loser. Do you know, after the girls went missing I asked him to get involved with the campaign to help find them and he refused. Just point-blank said, “No thanks!” Can you believe that? In the last five years he never lifted a finger to help with the publicity or raising awareness. Oh, don’t get me started on J
ason Armstrong!’

  ‘They did say that the family were “known to the social services”,’ her mum said.

  ‘I always knew that. We had their notes in the surgery. I didn’t look until after it happened but I knew he had his problems. Why do you think I never let my Tina stay round there? Why do you think all the sleepovers were at my place?’

  ‘And here,’ her mum said. ‘The girls stayed here once.’

  ‘Course! I was quite happy for Tina to stay here. I knew she was safe here.’

  ‘Alison’s had some amazing news,’ her mother said.

  ‘Oh?’

  Alison always had lots of things to talk about. She was on committees that dealt with child protection and child safety issues. She’d also created a national website called Safe and Sound, which was a way of swapping information about missing children.

  ‘There have been some sightings of someone who looks a lot like Tina,’ Alison said quietly.

  ‘Sightings? Again?’

  ‘I know there’s been a number over the years but these have a real feeling of authenticity. In the last week I’ve been contacted by three people in an area of thirteen square kilometres, in France, outside a town called Bergerac. It’s very rural there. Here is the really exciting thing. One of them sent a photograph.’

  ‘A picture?’

  Alison’s eyes were shining.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ she said and rummaged about in her bag. She pulled out an iPad and tapped the screen several times. ‘Here.’

  Mandy took the iPad. Onscreen she saw a blurred picture of a teenage girl standing by a car on a garage forecourt. She was leaning on the roof of the car and staring into the distance. Beside it, slightly smaller, was a head-and-shoulder shot of a teenage girl. She had curly hair held back with pins and dimples in her cheeks. There was a similarity about the two girls.

  ‘The other picture is the computer-enhanced image of Tina. We have that done every six months. It’s a version of what she might look like now. Of course, we have one of Petra too. Actually we have updated pictures of over twenty children on the website. Hard to believe that there are so many missing. So many unhappy families.’

  Mandy looked at her mother. She appeared uncomfortable, using her nail to scratch at something on the surface of the table. These conversations with Alison always led to heavy silences. Alison’s broken heart was there in the room with them; no one could say anything to make it any better.

  ‘But these sightings have been of Tina,’ Alison said. ‘So I’m very excited. Three sightings in one week. The police are extremely interested and the French police are being helpful. I’m flying out there tomorrow.’

  Mandy nodded her head positively. She had an image in her head of Alison sitting in an aisle seat, coupling the seat belt neatly across her middle and saying to the person next to her, ‘I’m going to find my daughter.’

  ‘It could be good news,’ Mandy said.

  ‘Yes,’ Alison said.

  She picked up her iPad and stared at the picture. She raised her finger as if to slide it across the screen or tap to change the app. Instead she let it hover over the image of the girl on the garage forecourt, her ruby-coloured fingernail drooping as if it could actually touch the face.

  ‘This could be a breakthrough,’ she said, almost under her breath. ‘This could be something important. Not just for Tina but for Petra too.’

  ‘The police will follow it up,’ her mother said. ‘There’s loads of cooperation between police forces of different countries now.’

  There had been a number of days like this when Alison had come into their house and shared news with them of a false dawn. The early sightings were many. The girls had been seen in Leicester, Durham, Glasgow. They’d been seen abroad: Portugal, France, Majorca, the Canary Islands. All those places that were brimming with English tourists who looked around and fixed their gaze on any pair of girls who might fit the description. They didn’t deliberately mislead; they wanted, more than anything, to be right. They wanted to find these two sweet girls and return them to their families. Lead after lead was followed up and each proved to be false. As the years passed by the leads diminished, the case wound down, the mystery deepened. What had become of them?

  Mandy thought of the girls locked in the cellar in Cleveland, Ohio. She wondered what had gone through Alison’s mind when she’d read about that case.

  ‘I should go,’ Alison said. ‘Loads to do. I’ll let you both know about the France thing. Although,’ she said, her voice a little lower, ‘if it is Tina, well … I don’t know how I’ll be. On the other hand, if it’s not … I might be in a worse state.’

  ‘I’ll see you out,’ Mandy said.

  Alison pushed her iPad into her bag and straightened her trouser creases. She picked up her coat from the back of the chair.

  ‘Keep your fingers crossed for me!’

  ‘We always do,’ her mother said.

  Mandy walked out into the hall and opened the front door. The cold air slipped into the house.

  Alison paused for a second to put her coat on. She did all the buttons up and tied the belt. Then she turned to the hall mirror and had a look at herself. When she’d finished she took a step towards the front door. She hesitated though, making an ‘Oh!’ sound as if she’d forgotten something. Mandy expected her to go back into the kitchen to pick up some item from the table or share some last-minute piece of gossip with her mother. Instead she stepped close to Mandy and clasped her arm with her hand. She spoke quietly in her ear as if she didn’t want her mother to hear.

  ‘And you know, Mandy, I don’t blame you any more,’ she said, squeezing her arm. ‘I may have said a few things all those years ago. I may have been unkind to you then. Said things I shouldn’t have said. You were a child though. It wasn’t your fault. I don’t hold you responsible any more. Not one bit.’

  Mandy didn’t answer. She gave a weak smile and Alison went out of the house with a backwards wave. When Mandy shut the door she felt something heavy clamp across her shoulders. Her mother was always saying that. ‘It’s not your fault, Mandy.’

  But Mandy blamed herself. She always had and she always would.

  Seven

  Later that evening, when her parents were watching television, Mandy went into her room and shut the door. Alison’s comments to her had been playing round her head all night. She hadn’t eaten much and had had to fend off questions about her lack of appetite from her mother. She helped with the dishes and then had a bath. In her room, she answered some texts on her phone, three from Tommy and a couple from some other girls. She put her new clothes onto a hanger – a red top and black jeans – and hooked it onto the outside of her wardrobe door so that she could look at it. She placed the shoes underneath. They were red like the top and had high heels. She turned them over, wondering if she’d made a good choice. After a while she tidied up her bead box, sorting out clasps and wires so that she could make a necklace. She was all fingers and thumbs though and it was hard to thread the beads so she shoved them back into the box and shut the lid with a bang. Then she tried to think about Zoe’s party the following evening. Tommy’s texts had been about making arrangements to go.

  What time are you thinking of getting there?

  Are you bringing booze?

  Should we meet up?

  But she couldn’t stop thinking about what Alison had said.

  In the end she lay back on her bed and thought about her short friendship with Petra and Tina. It had lasted barely seven weeks and yet it seemed the defining thing about her teenage years.