The Temple House Vanishing Read online

  She was pale. Her hair was still noticeably red but must have faded a bit and was now gold in tone. Her nails were the same colour. A large diamond flashed on her hand and she was clothed almost entirely in shades of cream and fawn. Everything about her was coordinated and expensive. She stood up as I approached and shook my hand, gesturing for me to sit down. With a single nod of the head she summoned a waitress.

  ‘Ms O’Neill, Helen, thank you for agreeing to meet, for responding to the advert,’ I said and took my notebook out and put it on the small marble table between us. It knocked against the sugar bowl as I laid it down and some cubes tumbled out. She raised her eyebrows slightly as I attempted to pick them up and leave them on the edge of the coffee tray.

  She flicked something off her scarf.

  ‘We have had every kind of person contact us over the years. As I am sure you can imagine.’ Her voice was slow and measured.

  ‘Yes, it must have been so difficult at times. I am trying to do something quite different, though; I am really trying to understand the impact it had on all of you, the trauma it must have been to lose a friend and a teacher in such mysterious circumstances,’ I replied.

  Was that it? Their trauma. Or more my own sense of danger. The phantom child we never knew but who was mentioned every year when the nights got dark and the Christmas lights were put on.

  She raised her eyebrows very slightly again as I spoke.

  ‘Much as I would love to get any new information on the case from you that might help, I just really want to try and understand what it must have been like, being there, the impact it had,’ I said once more.

  She sat a fraction more upright in her chair.

  ‘I feel like it’s this moment in time, this huge loss, and you have all been sort of frozen in it and I wonder what that has been like. . .’ my voice trailed off.

  I was talking too much and possibly stretching empathy too far.

  ‘Are you a therapist or a journalist?’ she answered, taking a sip of coffee from her cup.

  So she wasn’t dumb.

  She set her cup down gently on the table between us and folded her arms. Her eyes were grey, not just a pale blue, but actually grey.

  We sat in silence for a few seconds.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘and thank you for meeting me. I thought. . .’

  The waitress arrived with my coffee.

  ‘I am in touch with many of my class and those in Louisa’s too. We face this kind of tabloid interrogation every year or so. Our lives get hijacked, letters in the post, pictures in the paper and that kind of thing.’

  The coffee was good, proper, not like the rubbish I drank in the office.

  I took another sip and thought about saying to her, I know it’s such a drag, isn’t it, living in a democracy, with a free press.

  ‘I know there was a lot of rumour, insinuation about the school, your relationships with your teachers, with him. It’s been a feeding frenzy for a very long time. I have read a lot of the reports from the past; they can be lurid and not helpful,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, not helpful. That’s one way of putting it,’ she said, looking not quite at me but over my shoulder. ‘They all wanted to know about us, the girls on the hill. I believe that was one of the headlines. One of the less offensive ones.’

  And would I be adding to this tally of sensationalist press? No, however tempting. Louisa alone deserved better.

  Helen looked around as she finished speaking. A man sitting nearest us did not stir behind a copy of the Financial Times.

  ‘What do you think happened?’ I asked, leaning forward in my chair. My best expression of earnest interest painted on. She sighed heavily and shook her head.

  ‘My name better not appear anywhere,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘They ran away together. Everybody knows, or at least presumes that. They were always together, everyone knew it would end in some kind of a mess. They were obsessed with him. . .’ Her voice quietened and she looked down at her hands.

  Her face was so white. There were cracks where the make-up was sitting in the lines around her eyes. Powdered and dry. It was the only evidence of decay, of imperfection.

  ‘They?’ I said.

  ‘Louisa, I mean,’ she answered.

  ‘I don’t think most people think Louisa ran away. They think something happened, he abducted, murdered her,’ I said.

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘People don’t just vanish, when they have no money or passport or anything,’ I continued.

  ‘Don’t they? If they want to?’ she answered, shrugging her shoulders slightly.

  ‘I am sorry for bringing it all up, I really am, but surely you must know that this kind of a case, it resonates with people, it’s a mystery they want to solve, and you were all there with her, you knew him. I don’t think it’s ever going to end for you until people find out what happened,’ I said.

  More silence. Helen was staring at the dead flowers in the grate.

  ‘People don’t just vanish into thin air. Part of the interest all these years later is the silence from those who must have known more. Maybe I can help start the process of closing it down now, help get closer to the truth, explain more about what might have occurred or at least why and how it affected you,’ I said.

  She reached under the table to retrieve something from her bag. She was bored. I hadn’t even managed to irritate her.

  ‘Truth. Like that is ever a motivation. What even is the truth at this stage?’ she asked me, checking her phone in a distracted manner.

  ‘Well, the truth is finding out what happened, not just that but also finding a way to explain what it’s like to be defined by something that you couldn’t control,’ I replied.

  ‘I was never defined by this, why would I be?’ she answered, looking straight at me.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, of course not. I just mean, it’s like seeing an accident happen or something, or getting sick; you were this person before, and after you are something different,’ I said.

  I felt my throat drying. I got the attention of a waitress, who went to get me water. Helen made me slightly nervous. A depth of coldness to her.

  She looked at me as if I was ill. I was losing her, had never had her, really. She didn’t seem to have been changed by the tragedy of a lost classmate. I would try a new track.

  ‘Edward Lavelle, did you sense that he was not what he seemed in any way; he must have appeared charismatic, unusual?’

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘I don’t remember much about him, he was nothing special anyway. . . Charisma,’ she spoke the word as if it was poison, ‘what even is that? We were sixteen, seventeen; even the gardener seemed of interest, to some of us anyway.’

  That’s a good way of putting it, I thought to myself.

  The waitress returned, laying a small white doily on the table before putting the glass down. It was filled with ice and lemon with a sprig of something green in it.

  ‘It was a great school, you know, and he played no part in that history. It educated women who went on to make a difference in this world. Do you know that? No, of course not. No one cared about what had been ruined or the way it had been before. We became these grotesque headlines. It broke the nuns; everything they had worked for was gone, covered in shame. They came out of it as evil and he. . .’ She didn’t finish the sentence.

  It was the first time she had seemed authentic throughout. A slight red glow on her neck and cheeks. The nuns and their world had meant something to her, Louisa had not.

  ‘They are all gone now, the nuns. I mean passed away?’ I said.

  ‘Really, I must ask you to leave it now and let it go. There is nothing to be gained by going back and dredging it all up for the sake of some article filled with your perhaps well-intentioned but amateur psychological insights.’

  ‘Why did you agree to meet me?’ I asked.

  She didn’t answer but stood up then.

  �
�Are you still in touch with Victoria?’ I pressed.

  She stopped, just for a moment, and I watched her stare at her face in the gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace. For a minute it seemed like the hard, brittle energy had drained away.

  She turned back to me then, fixing her bag on her shoulder.

  ‘Of course,’ she answered. ‘Victoria and I were always very close. She feels the same about this endless game of cat and mouse that people like you play.’

  Outsiders. Onlookers.

  She, by contrast, was an insider. Smug but in an elegant, dismissive way. And strong as a result.

  I told her I had emailed Victoria directly and was looking forward to hearing from her.

  ‘I know she was closest to Louisa,’ I said, hoping that I would be able to get Helen to stay or at least give me more of her story.

  ‘I think you’ll find that was much exaggerated in the media coverage,’ she replied.

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘Well, I will ask her that myself,’ I said.

  ‘She won’t speak to you,’ she said finally. ‘None of us will.’

  She was still head girl, the guardian of reputation. That was why she’d met me.

  ‘I’m sorry again for bringing it all up,’ I continued. ‘But about Louisa – can you tell me who she was really, what she was like? I grew up opposite her, she used to babysit me. I mean, I didn’t know her but I went to the same school as she did. She is this tragic, lost figure to me.’

  I was grasping for something, anything. One last shot at empathy.

  She looked at me and I saw contempt pass over her face.

  ‘Louisa didn’t fit in. She misunderstood everything,’ she said, walking to the door.

  I called after her, the silence of the hushed and expensive room broken by my voice.

  She turned, her eyebrows raised, eyes darting from one side of the room to the other, checking if anyone had noticed.

  ‘I meant to ask you, when was the last time you saw Louisa alive?’ I asked.

  Her face went red and she strode out of the lounge then. Her heels were sharp, pointed and loud on the floor beyond.

  I rang my editor on my way back to the office.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Not good,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why she met me. I think maybe to warn me off a bit.’

  ‘Look, it’s something, keep going,’ he said.

  It was starting to rain.

  ‘I will,’ I said.

  ‘There is a touch of the pioneer about you,’ he said.

  ‘You mean desperate,’ I said.

  ‘We got a response from the mother. She doesn’t want to do an interview.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  ‘We can print the response, though,’ he said.

  ‘What does she say?’ I asked.

  The rain was getting heavier. I took shelter in the porch of a church.

  An elderly man was sitting behind a small desk; there were magazines on the table in front of him and a collection box. He smiled at me, his anorak too big for him and damp in places.

  ‘Well, the most interesting part is. . .’ my editor said.

  I could hear him fumbling with paper on the desk.

  ‘My daughter was let down by her school and the authorities. In those first few hours of her disappearance, no call was made to the police or to us, her parents. This made all the difference. . .’

  ‘That’s not news, really; she has said that before,’ I said.

  ‘It’s something,’ he said. ‘Write to her again, you should be able to coax her out. She hasn’t spoken in a few years to anyone about it.’

  ‘Maybe she has finally given up,’ I said, ending the call.

  I smiled at the old man and dropped a coin into the box and picked up a copy of the magazine; it was called The Good News. He gestured to the doors of the church.

  I pulled open the heavy door. It was semi-dark within and almost completely empty. A few elderly people, their backs to me, sat in the pews ahead, heads bowed. The candles wavered and danced in the gloom.

  The nuns and their world. It had vanished too, and that’s what Helen mourned.

  Beside me there was a small side altar, with purple tea-light candles on it.

  I thought about Louisa and how possibly you need to ask permission to tell someone’s story, and so I lit one.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘You won’t have enough for a series. Maybe a long read at the most,’ the intern said.

  She was sorting through photo files beside me.

  I drank some coffee and kept typing.

  ‘I think they ran away,’ she said, holding one of the images up to the window behind us.

  ‘Based on what?’ I said, turning to her.

  ‘Well, everyone says they were really close and he is kind of attractive. Like it could have been a crush that went too far,’ she said.

  I pulled up the picture of them on to my screen. They did look good. If they had been less attractive would anyone have thought this a likely explanation? Or if she had been from a better place, a richer family?

  ‘People don’t usually run away with their teachers,’ I said.

  ‘It happens, you hear it in the news from time to time. . . all that repressed emotion in the classroom,’ she said.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I responded.

  She raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Though, I mean, it would have been a total abuse of his position and all that.’ She sounded embarrassed then.

  We worked on together in silence.

  ‘Are you coming to the drinks on Friday?’ she asked.

  ‘I doubt it, might have to go away this weekend,’ I said.

  ‘No one thinks you will come.’

  ‘I am predictable.’

  I stood up from my desk and grabbed my coat.

  ‘Can you keep an eye on social media for me, see if anything is coming through that side?’ I asked.

  The first article had yet to run but already there had been some crossover from the advert, a few threads and conversations online. I recognized some of the names, people who had emailed me directly and were now sharing information. The advert too had been shared.

  ‘Where are you going now?’ she said.

  ‘I’m meeting the detective who was on the case.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘They stuck together; that was the thing we all remember most from it.’ He drank some tea from a large mug and as he did so he slurped slightly.

  He looked as tired as he had on the TV show.

  ‘Every case has some sort of a feature that stands out. In this one it was the communal silence, like they had a kind of lack of curiosity about what had happened. We felt we were intruders, rather than people there to solve something. There was no urgency, on their part, to get to the bottom of it all.’

  ‘Even Victoria, her friend?’ I asked, pushing one of the old press articles with her photo across the table to him.

  ‘Yes, she was no different; if anything she was more closed off than the others,’ he answered, holding the paper up and at a slight distance, as if he had trouble reading.

  ‘She was odd, almost mute, in the first days of interviews, with her father beside her and a priest, if I remember rightly,’ he said. ‘All she would say was that they had been in the art room together cleaning up. She had then left for evening prayers and Louisa said she would follow her. The next thing she knew she was being woken up, it was close to midnight and the bell was ringing in the house. It had been discovered that Louisa was not in her room.’

  He rubbed his eyes; they were red and watery. I took some notes.

  ‘But people react in odd ways to a shock, they don’t always say or behave as you imagine. I have learned over many years not to judge them on this alone. She was young too. They had obviously been involved with the teacher in some way that was outside of the norm and she knew i
t was all going to come out. She wasn’t going to talk and get herself into any more trouble. She just repeated the same line over and over.’

  Victoria, I had to make her talk to me.

  My phone beeped on the table in front of us.

  ‘I knew she was lying, though,’ he said. ‘The last sighting of Louisa had been in the village; she never made it back to the school. The bike did, though; it was found at the side of the school and I always felt Victoria had been with her at his house in the village; she cycled back without Louisa, left her with Mr Lavelle.’

  ‘Did Victoria seem devastated, shocked?’ I asked.

  ‘I think alarmed is the best way to describe her. Like a game had got out of control. She was in a kind of retreat when we interviewed her. Daddy was going to fix things as best he could.’ He dipped a gingernut biscuit into his tea.

  ‘Why do you say a game?’ I asked, stirring my coffee.

  ‘I don’t know, really; it just didn’t feel real. There was a sense of artifice in her, like she played roles, parts.’

  ‘So you think she was complicit, helped Louisa to run away with him or to be with him that night?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, Louisa was last seen near his cottage; she must have been meeting him, but I don’t think she ran away with him,’ he said, shaking his head.

  He looked out the window then.

  ‘There was a delay, wasn’t there – the school, they didn’t call the police until the next day?’ I asked.

  I thought of her mother’s letter. The sense of her daughter lost and no one even knowing for almost twelve hours.

  ‘They didn’t raise any alarm until about twelve the next day,’ he said, wiping some crumbs from his lap.

  ‘Was that not really unusual?’ I asked.

  ‘The nuns must have known from early evening but I’m sure they figured they were just on a night out and would creep in by dawn. It had probably happened before,’ he answered.

  Nuns, who were they really? I had never been taught by them, our school was secular. We celebrated all religions. We were tolerant and welcoming, according to the sign over the principal’s door. But the nuns were interesting in their own way. They were powerful businesswomen, educators, medics. Admired and ambitious, yet now viewed only as cruel fanatics.