The Missing Girl

After uttering his last words, he closed his eyes and never opened them again. His mouth was still open, as if he had run out of energy halfway through closing it. He inhaled the tiniest bit of air, savored it one last time, and after letting it escape, he was gone

There lay my father. Or rather, there now lay his body - a vessel of flesh that had housed his immortal soul for the past eighty-seven years. What had been a strong and solid home at first had grown fragile with the passing years, until in the end it was nothing but a decaying uninhabitable shell.

It was the end of July, and we were baking in a 30-degree heatwave - I was at my father’s farmhouse in the village of Fiveoaks, Cambridgeshire where he had lived his entire life. Even with the curtains drawn the room was too warm, and I knew I had to move fast before the heat did too much damage to the fragile lifeless frame he had left behind. The undertaker would be waiting for my call, all arrangements had already been made.

Before reaching for the phone, I allowed myself to sit in silence just a moment longer. I had been keeping watch in the large armchair next to his bed for the last three days. I had barely slept waiting for the inevitable, determined to ensure he would not be alone in his final moment, perhaps even hoping to catch a glimpse when it came. Something to reassure me of what came next. I am not a young man myself and the thought of death made me nervous. 

I had seen nothing of the great beyond and instead was now paralysed by an oncoming wave of grief, as well as shock that came with my dying father’s last words: 

"I killed her. I killed Maureen Chapman.” 

***

In 1975 when I was sixteen years old Maureen Chapman disappeared. 

Through most of our early childhood she and I had gone to the same primary school. We were never particularly close but as children of similar age living in a small village we spent much time together, mostly as part of a larger group but sometimes on our own. When we were fourteen our schooling went in different directions - as the other local children I too went to the village Grammar while Maureen was sent to a fine private school some distance away. 

Her brother Michael, who was in the same year group as my little sister Sarah, followed Maureen’s footsteps; Sarah, who was born with mild Down Syndrome and struggled in regular school was accepted to a private special-ed school. Sarah died five years ago in a freak car accident; her life was long, healthy and fulfilling thanks to the school that gave her the support she needed early on in life.

Maureen and Michael had been raised by a single mother. Nancy moved to the village with two small children and no husband many years before her daughter’s disappearance. She made no secret of the fact that the children’s father was not actively involved in their lives and while normally this would have set tongues wagging, Nancy was so charming everyone here fell in love with her instantly. 

Nancy worked as a secretary at an investment firm based in Cambridge, had done so for many years. When Maureen was eleven and Michael nine, the founder of the firm Reginald Lawson died. A rather unremarkable event given his advanced years but when his will was read it transpired that Nancy had been his mistress for the best part of two decades, and that he was the father of both her children.  

In his will he claimed to have loved them all very much and to make up for his failures in life, he left them his entire fortune. The will also disinherited his lawful wife and grown son, both of whom Reginald had a falling out with years prior, and had not spoken to since. 

The two of them contested the will and it took Nancy and her children two years to finally receive their share of the estate by which time the entire county knew her name and face, as well as those of her children. Nancy remained dignified through the unpleasantness, and the village stood by her the entire time. The case was eventually settled, and Nancy emerged a wealthy woman, yet made very few changes to her old life except for sending the children to best private schools in the county. 

***

The last time anyone saw Maureen was Saturday at her boarding school. She had stayed behind for the weekend as her mother and brother had gone to London to see a play and she did not want to be bored on her own at Fiveoaks. Her roommate at school was also away and Maureen’s disappearance went unnoticed until the following morning. After receiving a call from school on Sunday, Nancy alerted the police. 

The grounds and nearby woodlands were searched thoroughly, the river and two small lakes dragged. Maureen’s schoolmates were questioned, especially those who were present over the weekend, as were locally known criminals, particularly those known for bothering young girls. There were police everywhere but no sign of Maureen. 

A week passed with no meaningful leads until a ransom letter arrived at Nancy’s house. It had been held up by a postal strike of all things! The letter demanded £100,000 in exchange for the girl; the date of the swap was to be the very same night. Nancy was distraught but also now more hopeful that her daughter was still alive. 

The letter instructed Nancy to drop the money in a bag behind a red postbox near the supermarket parking lot at 11pm - after the kidnapper has successfully retrieved it her daughter would be returned. She was to come alone. Nancy took on the task of dropping the money while two policemen set up near the back of the dark parking lot to catch the kidnapper in action and thus ensure the girl would be found. 

Nancy arrived at the drop-off alone as had been instructed. She dropped the money behind the postbox and left. After she had gone a car pulled into the parking lot, and the people in the car were immediately arrested – they were Jake Malone and Cindy Travers, two teenagers from the village on a rendezvous. The kids, looking rather sheepish, were let go after a short interrogation; when the police went to check on the money it was gone. The kidnapper had taken it in the middle of the chaos and left in the dark without anyone noticing a thing. 

Hours passed, and then days, but there was no sign of Maureen. Then a week went by, a month, and eventually a year. The ongoing active investigation which included several interviews with both Reginald’s scorned wife and disgruntled son, yielded no results, and eventually the case went cold. It was however never officially closed and every now and again, even decades later the police would follow up on new leads or take a fresh look at the old ones. 

It has now been more than forty years. Michael lives in Canada with his family, Nancy passed fifteen years ago from cancer, having never learned what happened to her daughter. She died hopeful that perhaps Maureen, having grown tired of the tabloid circus that surrounded her life, simply chose to disappear, and that whoever had demanded the ransom money was nothing more than an opportunist.

In the end she convinced herself that her daughter was out there somewhere, living in peace and perhaps married with a family of her own. In her final moments, dosed up on morphine, she hallucinated that Maureen was by her bedside, and died with a weak smile on her face. 

I however now knew the truth. 

***

"I took her from her room - the windows faced outside on the ground flood, and she was a slight girl, so it was not very difficult. I climbed in, and I waited until she came back from the bathroom which was in the hallway. I covered her mouth with tape so she couldn’t scream and then I dragged her outside. I was fast, she had no time to react and there was no mess in the room - you see, that’s why Nancy thought maybe Maureen ran away because it was so tidy in there. When we got in the car that was hidden behind the hedge, I dropped her on the back seat and drove away. I saw her face in the rearview mirror, she was so confused when she recognised me. She had known me most of her life, and she didn’t understand why I was doing what I was doing, the poor girl. I explained it, I kept telling her we needed the money - for Sarah. Sarah was doing so badly in that school - no one gave her the care she needed. She was such a bright girl, and she deserved so much more. We couldn’t afford that special-ed school, and we had the farm so we couldn’t have the scholarship either. We needed to help Sarah, and we needed money for that. I think she understood, you know. Maureen did. I swear, she understood, and she wanted to help. Maureen was such a good girl; she was so kind, and she was always so nice to Sarah. Michael too - he helped her with her homework, you know. I had prepared everything for Maureen in the disused stables, she had blankets, books, and I got her food every day. And then when I got the money and came back to let her go home, she was dead! I didn’t hurt her, I swear. She had been on the upper ledge, where the old stacks of firewood used to be. She had slipped down and couldn’t get up from there, and the ropes that I had used to tie her... well, she had strangled herself with them by accident. I swear it was an accident. I did not mean to kill her. I swear!” 

I stared at my father in disbelief as he came to the end of his deathbed confession. His speech was just whizzing now - he used up all his energy to tell me what happened, and I held my breath the entire time as if me using less air somehow allowed him to have more. 

“God forgive me. I killed her. I killed Maureen Chapman.” 

***

The week between his death and the funeral were harder than I had expected. I suppose that is normal but not only was I burying my father whom I had loved all my life, all sixty years of it, I was also coming to terms with the man I may have never really known.  

The evening after the funeral I sat on the front porch of his farmhouse, and for the first time since the confession, I allowed myself to have a truthful conversation with my conscience whom I had kept at bay until then.

Was it true what my father had said? Could he have hallucinated it all - like many people do when they are dying? Did he make it all up just for the hell of it?! That didn’t make sense. False death bed confessions were not unheard of either, especially with very old people. But if it was true, did he do it for the reasons he said he did? Was it for Sarah or was it for something else? Sure, Sarah did go to the special school in the end and none of us questioned how dad had made it happen. From then on Sarah’s life had run a beautiful course, better than anyone in her condition could have expected. Things are better now for people like her, but this was the 70s in rural England, she had little chance. But a chance is what my parents had given her. My parents... Did my mother know? And if so, how much? And did Maureen really die the way he had said, or did he kill her intentionally, maybe right after he kidnapped her? After all, she had seen his face, would he have risked letting her go after that? It made no sense. Or did he make that part up? But I couldn’t also see how my father, the gentle and kind soul I had known, did any of it. Maybe it is true - no one ever really knows the people they love. And where is Maureen now? Dad never got a chance to tell me what happened after she died. In the end I was left with more questions than answers.  

I debated with myself. He was gone now. My mother went long before him. Sarah was gone too. I never married nor had children so there was no one left to protect in my family. But Nancy was also gone. Only Michael was out there somewhere, living his life in Canada, far away from Fiveoaks and all the sadness this place would have meant for him. Yet even that far away he would no doubt be still wondering what happened to his big sister, and his heart would always be broken from the pain he had witnessed his mother endure. He was now the only living link to Maureen, other than me. We were the only two people left, and our lives would always be intertwined even if we had not seen each other, not even thought of each other for forty years. 

I stood up and looked down from the porch to the rose garden in front of it. It was in full bloom and the beautiful scent was overpowering in the warm summer evening. This was my father’s garden - he had almost obsessively tended to it since it was planted close to my 17 birthday. He loved it deeply and I didn’t need to dig it up to know this is where Maureen was buried. 

The next morning, I booked a flight to Toronto.