The Temple House Vanishing Read online

  ‘It was mentioned in a documentary that was on a few weeks back. A repeat. Check it out. There was a detective, retired, interviewed on it. He might talk to you,’ my editor said, standing at my desk.

  The intern came over.

  ‘Can I do anything for you on it?’ she said.

  I tried to like her but always failed. It required time to actually make any use of her and I couldn’t be bothered. I liked working alone.

  ‘Maybe later, not yet,’ I said.

  She looked pissed off and left.

  That afternoon, as research, I watched back the programme my boss had referred to. It was a late-night show dedicated to unsolved crimes, hosted by an earnest-looking lady with bobbed blonde hair and an air of professional compassion. She wore a bright red dress and had a charm bracelet on her wrist that moved a lot when she gestured with her hands. She spoke to the retired detective; he was grey and dishevelled in appearance. It all looked vaguely incongruous.

  The last shot of the TV programme was of the locked black gates of the school. A light mist enveloped the screen as the camera panned out. The house was scheduled for demolition, text across the bottom of the screen read. A telephone number and an email address flashed up after this, as it always did. But for more than twenty years, no one offered to provide anything useful or new to the police. The anonymous crime hotline lay silent. The pair stayed missing. Only the ghoulish liked to remember. The ones whose lives had some kind of a vacuum that they filled with stories of serial killers and abducted children.

  I stayed late in the office. The blue screen of my phone delivered more information. I browsed old articles about the disappearance and watched video clips on YouTube. There were reports on how people had closed ranks after it. There were old news clips of girls scurrying up the steps of the school, avoiding eye contact and covering their faces from journalists. A woman in a red Mercedes and wearing a camel-coloured coat and sunglasses poked an umbrella at a photographer before claiming things of this sort didn’t happen in a school like this. It was darkly comical.

  There were interviews with Louisa’s mother as she sat redeyed in what must have been their living room. She failed to make much sense and was strangely unsympathetic. She had held up the girl’s report card at one point, instead of her photo. There was old footage of police scouring fields in the sleet and rain, and standing at the side of a beach. Vaguely confused-looking people stood in the background, and one even waved at the camera. Perhaps they thought the student and teacher had sailed away in a rowing boat together and it was something to celebrate. Like the owl and the pussycat. She was sixteen and he was twenty-five; it was not unheard of. Perhaps they were now living in the south of France. Far away from the street we grew up on.

  I felt tired, my eyes hot from all the screen time, but then a Wikipedia page popped up so I kept going. The entry took the conspiracy slant in its retelling, claiming the nuns in the school had something to hide. There were rumours of complaints made about the teacher; he had been seen as being a little too friendly with some of the students. It was said he had also been a fantasist, with a pretend foreign accent and a fake degree in art. But he was very good-looking, with exciting new ideas on how to teach, and he looked well-off so no one checked anything out about him. A more innocent time.

  The question it posed was, had the nuns been aware of any of this; how culpable were they, if at all? Less than a year later they had closed the school, selling it to a property developer who had never been able to get planning permission. Hence the broken, decrepit state of the house. The nuns too had disappeared, it seemed.

  I showed the Wikipedia page to my editor at his desk.

  ‘This might work, looking into the nuns. I mean, some of them must still be alive. Maybe they would talk now?’ I said.

  It was dark outside. The man I had seen in the building opposite earlier was still there in his office. All lit up. His back to the window now.

  My editor looked at me blankly.

  ‘I think we might stick more with the underage sex with a teacher angle, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘Find her classmates, that’s what we want.’

  Of course.

  ‘Don’t you have another article to finish, for tomorrow?’ he called after me.

  I went back to my desk. It was after seven.

  I watched a short interview from the news at the time with the head girl of the school. She looked like a Pre-Raphaelite, with white skin and red hair. A nun stood behind her, with her head down, threading rosary beads methodically through her fingers. The student held a piece of paper in her hand and said Louisa hadn’t been in the school very long and had been somewhat troubled. It was difficult sometimes to adjust, she said. She looked up as she said this and stared directly at the camera. There was a slight, almost imperceptible pause, before she finished. They were all most concerned for Louisa’s welfare.

  The Wikipedia article also mentioned the missing student’s best friend, Victoria, and included a link to more information about her. They had been inseparable, an intense and much speculated-about relationship. Afterwards, it was said she had some kind of a breakdown and refused to speak. Supposedly, she had spent some time in a hospital. It noted her family had a tendency to sue newspapers. They were important people.

  A few clicks more and Victoria peered out of the screen, as she was today. Airbrushed and well-coiffed. She was standing on what might be the roof garden of an office, or perhaps on a balcony, in a black trouser suit. Lots of sky and clouds behind her. She looked like the kind of woman the publication I wrote for would interview as their business person of the month.

  One of the links beside the article led to a random piece about teenage friends in the US who had murdered one of their teachers. They claimed a man in the woods had made them do it. Another article referenced teenagers who said the Virgin Mary was appearing to them in a local shrine, telling them secrets about death and the possibility of miracles. I was Alice falling down the rabbit hole of alternative youth. A channel dedicated to the weird and the excluded and their hidden, ritualized worlds. A tribe of outsiders, who were no longer stoned by the villagers but just ridiculed and judged.

  My editor was leaving for the evening and as he passed my desk I showed him the screen.

  ‘I’ve heard of that, the Slender-Man. They think he’s real,’ he said, shaking his head.

  I nodded and smiled.

  ‘Who’s she?’ he said, pointing to a picture of Victoria.

  ‘The best friend,’ I said.

  ‘Make sure to get her photo in,’ he said, walking towards the door. ‘And, I need that other piece, tomorrow. . .’

  There was something alluring about Victoria, a wildness or defiance that had been tamed by a black suit, but might escape again at some point. Her eyes were alive and intense.

  I made more coffee, a giant stewed cup. I spent the rest of the evening on the internet tracing Victoria’s life, chapter after chapter of it opening up with each new random link. Events she was photographed at, conferences where she delivered a paper of note, her professional profile information all unfolding before me. She would age and then become younger in front of my eyes. A life in reverse. It was strangely mesmerizing.

  I had googled my own life before. One is only ever pictured when one has done something notable. Make-up on, hair done. Your story compressed into one small achievement after another. Bits left out, gaps. Like where you grew up.

  There was one photo of Victoria in her school uniform; she had won a debate. I wished there had been videophones in those days. I was missing gestures, quirks, a sense of character: the things that give you away. Standing beside her was a nun and Louisa, the missing student.

  I clicked in and out of the trail, scrolling through sidebars and links to nowhere. So much had been written, but none of it added up to anything. A scholarship student goes missing with her art teacher a few months after starting at a prestigious school in the middle of nowhere. No trace ever found of eithe
r.

  I spent a short time finishing the other article. It was already half written. A woman who once had everything no longer did, due to her own stupidity and bad choices. But she had survived, come through it. Was not a victim.

  The stories we told were ancient. But we acted like they were new.

  I left to catch the nine o’clock bus home. There was no one else at the stop. It was a new part of the city, reclaimed from the sea and reshaped for capitalism. All shiny glass buildings and steel coffee shops. It buzzed in the day but emptied quickly at night. I pulled the collar of my coat up and took my headphones out of my ears.

  Uneasy under yellow street lights.

  Louisa, Louisa. Always the whisper and warning on the side of my narrow, suburban life. The girl who got above herself and came to a bad end. What lessons did we take from this?

  All of us, the bright girls, who followed in her footsteps.

  I couldn’t sleep when I finally got home. I was trying to remember anything I could about Louisa, anecdotes my mother might have told me, gossip about the family, something, anything that could add colour and create more interest to the piece. I would need to talk to her about it, and some of the neighbours. I heard my flatmate come in around 2 a.m. In the distance there was the vague sound of cars from the motorway that encircled the city. I could only hear it if the wind blew a certain way.

  I thought about my childhood home on the other side of the city, my mother alone now and asleep in the house that faced Louisa’s. Her slippers resting at the side of the narrow bed. The tiny garden out her back window, mostly concreted over so she wouldn’t have to cut any grass. How long would she have searched for me? Would she have walked the streets at night looking for me, scoured the beaches and the woods, chased the nuns down? Would she have handed out the perpetual spellingbee trophy in my name?

  As the dawn began to creep through the gap in the curtains, I knew what I had to do. I would start by putting out a small advert, like the kind people use to announce engagements and births. I conjured up the words as the first of the cars drove out of the underground car park beneath me. The advert would be discreet and suggestive of privacy and some kind of a faded sense of preppy elitism. Very nineties analogue with a PO Box number that would redirect post to my apartment and an email address.

  I would get in to work early.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was like turning over a rock.

  First came the emails.

  Conspiracy theorists with claims of paedophile rings, and stories of priests visiting the school in the middle of the night and choosing their prey; a clairvoyant who said she could see the girl, she was buried on her side, and there were yellow flowers all around her. A man who said he was Mr Lavelle’s half-brother and that he had only been trying to help the girl, but something had gone wrong in the escape and she had drowned. He was now living in Africa, he said, with a new name.

  An amateur historian who claimed Temple House was of architectural interest and should not be demolished. A petition had been signed. A great collector had lived there once.

  A woman who said she had also been taught by Mr Lavelle and had borne his child. He had been fragile, she wrote, and she never felt the situation was abusive. She remembered him fondly, and her child, a son, had his blue eyes. They were the colour of the sky on the most perfect of cloud-free, summer days. His hair was yellow, like a cornfield. She included a picture of him. It was an image of Kurt Cobain. She asked me to pass on her email to Mr Lavelle, if I was successful in my endeavour.

  I encountered many links to lesbian porn involving teenage girls in school uniforms.

  Some prayers and several pictures of the Sacred Heart. His skin fair, his light brown hair flowing over his shoulders and his burning red heart. Underneath one of the images was the line, ‘My love is unfathomable.’

  A link to a short, poor-quality video of a priest standing in a circle of girls giving some kind of a talk. The image kept shuddering and the sound was distorted and patchy. His audience looked vacant and in a trance of boredom. At one point he raised his hands and said, looking up to the ceiling, ‘We are born in sin and die in sin.’ I was about to delete when something about the uniform made me look again. It was that of Temple House. I paused the video anytime it landed on one of the girls, to see if one of them might be Victoria or Louisa. But I didn’t recognize any of the faces.

  I also received several images of the Slender-Man, a faceless, dark figure who looked like a stick-man drawing that had been stretched. His limbs an exaggeration. In most of the pictures he was standing on the edge of a forest, while children played in the foreground, happily unaware of the spectre behind them. The Pied Piper.

  I had stepped through a crooked mirror in a fairground and things were jumbled up and fractured.

  Feeling like I needed to look beyond the reach of the advert, I called up a favour from a college mate and did an interview with a late-night radio show where I talked about the case. The producer said any messages that had come in were from the usual crackpots and nothing she would even pass on to me. The intern told me my voice sounded very different on the radio, high-pitched.

  The next night I was invited to talk to a psychic live on air who might be able to help. I declined the offer.

  My mother asked me if I knew what I was doing. She looked concerned. A few days into my research and I wasn’t sleeping, had dark circles under my eyes. When I closed them I could almost feel the outline of the sockets, like the skin was stretching thinner and thinner.

  I told her I was fine and not to worry. All part of the job.

  She was making tea in the kitchen when she turned to me and said, ‘You know, sometimes there are no reasons. Things just happen and they have no meaning, really.’

  I was surprised by her nihilism.

  ‘I don’t expect to solve the case, it’s not about that,’ I answered, laughing in an attempt to lighten the mood. ‘I’m just writing about it.’

  She was drying a cup before putting the teabag in.

  ‘And it’s not stressful, it’s interesting, which makes a change from what I have been writing,’ I said. ‘You know I can do more and my editor is really supportive. . .’

  She must be shrinking, I thought, standing beside her. She had always been taller than me but she no longer was.

  ‘I know, of course you can do more,’ she said.

  I stirred the tea.

  She looked weary of me. I had that effect on people.

  I sat down at the table.

  ‘You know she minded you once,’ she said, ‘Louisa.’

  ‘Really?’ I replied.

  This had never been said before. I felt the pull of a connection again.

  ‘I had to go to your grandmother’s, she’d had a fall. Louisa was tying her bike up in her front garden so I just ran across the road and asked her. It was just for half an hour or so,’ she said.

  ‘When was this? What age was she?’ I asked.

  She looked at me with surprise; my words were rushed, agitated.

  ‘You were about four or five so she must have been fifteen, I suppose,’ she said. ‘It was before her parents split up. I remember her mother came out of the house as I was talking to her. She said she would keep an eye on you too.’

  ‘And what did Louisa do with me?’ I said.

  ‘She minded you, of course, read you some stories. I can’t remember exactly but you seemed happy when I got home,’ she said.

  She left the room then. As if I had insulted her approach to child-rearing.

  It was eerie, disconcerting somehow, to think of Louisa here in the house.

  Just as well no one can see the future. It was a thought I always had whenever I saw pictures of people who had died young or suddenly. Best not to know what lies ahead.

  I opened the laptop.

  I started to describe the street Louisa and I had lived on. And it felt urgent and real.

  The narrow houses; the grey rippled concrete on th
e road; the uneven kerbs; the bins standing at the corner of the street so the bin truck didn’t have to reverse down the road; the way the trees were planted too close together outside Louisa’s house and had started to unearth the low stone wall in front of her front door; how a lone plastic bag was trapped in the branch of one of the trees outside their house. And how it must have been there for years, because it was tattered and frayed; how it must have got caught in a random gust of wind before being trapped in the branch that tapped on the window that might have been her room. The room that had been empty for so long.

  I wrote until it was dark.

  I wanted to make people feel as though it could have been them.

  Your ordinary, average life could be interrupted.

  Wasn’t that what we had all learned? Don’t stray beyond the corner of the road.

  Make sure your ambition isn’t too big. It could lead you elsewhere.

  It was late when I finished. My mother had already gone to bed. I turned off the lights in the kitchen and walked to the hall door. I thought about Louisa, sitting on the floor of our sitting room reading me stories. And for a second I felt like maybe I did remember it. Maybe I had remembered it, all along.

  I took the bus across town. When I opened the door to my apartment, there was a letter lying on the hall floor.

  Chapter Twelve

  She was sitting on a couch in front of the fireplace. The grate was empty and in place of a lit fire there was a large arrangement of dried flowers. The hotel was plush, with thick carpets and heavy curtains on the windows. Staff in waistcoats, with their hair pulled back in tight buns, stood behind doors and carried silver trays noiselessly between the overstuffed chairs and couches. A group of Asian businessmen were crowded around one low table in the corner.