‘Briefly.’ No surplus information there. Dad had a tendency to miss out the bits that other people added to conversations without being asked. The bits that kept things flowing and meant you didn’t spend the whole time feeling off-kilter. I couldn’t remember the last time Mum and Dad had spoken. Dad and Gran had never liked one another, and he hadn’t come to her funeral. I felt out of my depth – the kid who didn’t understand her parents’ conversations.
‘You know what my work’s like.’ The very thought of managing both Dad and the new case threw me into a panic. ‘We’re swamped. And I’ve just taken on a case that could be big. You’ll barely see me if you come soon. When were you thinking?’
There was a moment of silence. I’d learned with Dad not to fill these gaps. You got more out of him if you waited.
‘I thought maybe tomorrow,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re busy, I can amuse myself.’
‘Tomorrow? As in the day after today?’ I pictured my spare room, the bed piled high with books, the floor covered in old paperwork, the spiders lurking in the corners with long-term tenancy rights.
‘Is tomorrow all right with you?’
I couldn’t very well say no, but this didn’t feel normal. ‘It’s fine. Just don’t expect to see a lot of me. I can’t take time off work at such short notice. If you arrive before me, you’ll have to let yourself in and make yourself at home. The key’s in the key-safe on the left side of the front door, and it’s the first four digits of root 3.’
I cursed his unwillingness to tell me what the hell was going on. Because clearly something was. There was no way this was a social call.
Meg – Present day
Tuesday
I woke early and flicked on the bedside light, trying to remember how much wine I’d had the night before. At least I was calculating glasses rather than bottles, which was promising. I’d stayed up late talking to Hannah about Gran. Not a sensible move in the circumstances.
Violet was still missing. With each hour, the chances of finding her alive notched down. I crawled out of bed, pulled on my dressing gown, headed downstairs and stuck the kettle on. Hamlet emerged from a cardboard box by the door and stretched a front leg at me. He gave a supportive and rousing commentary while I sorted him out a breakfast of fine fillets of horribly slaughtered animal.
While Hamlet tucked in with enviable guilt-free gusto, I plonked myself down at the table and opened my laptop. Dawn was shining through my grubby kitchen window and suffusing the room with golden pink light, the summer continuing to hold a hot, dry finger up to climate change deniers.
If Violet’s birth mother was this woman Bex Smith, who turned out to be alive after all, could Violet be with her? But why not contact her family or friends? It seemed inconceivable that someone so connected wouldn’t get in touch with anyone.
I wanted to get a feel for Violet. Who she’d been before she became a case. A few years ago, missing people were like shadows. All the information about them came from others. Hearsay. We didn’t see them talking and, unless they wrote diaries, we never heard from them directly. This had all changed. The murdered and the missing were amongst us still, with their blogs and vlogs and social media presence. Violet had taken this to a new level. There was so much online, you could practically resurrect a virtual version of her, like an episode of Black Mirror. And since everyone interacted online anyway, it would be almost as if she’d never gone, although she might not be making any new bikini videos.
I went to the Great Meat Debate website and clicked through to one of Violet’s YouTube videos. She was cooking chops, wearing the trademark skimpy swimwear and the pelican brooch on a slim silver chain around her neck. Flat stomach, cellulite-free thighs. The evening sunshine cast a rose glow on her lightly tanned skin. I wondered what it would feel like to look like that. She probably took it for granted, like I did my uncanny ability to pass exams. I prayed to the imaginary friend I kept in my head for these purposes – please let her still be smooth-skinned and beautiful, not seething with maggots in a vat of pig guts.
Violet flashed a bright smile at the camera and chucked a sausage on the barbecue. She might not be contributing greatly to the sum of human knowledge, but she’d notched up several million views.
I clicked on another video, dated a week later. It was just as well we’d had a good summer – Violet was cooking again, in another bikini. Burgers this time. Music blared in the background and Violet danced along as she tended the barbecue. Halfway through, she reached for a vest-top and slipped it on over her bikini. It was bright pink, with the caption, This Sexy Bod was Built by Meat. The comments under the video were mainly enthusiastic, if on the sleazy side. Lower down the thread was the aggression. The assertions that she was a stuck-up bitch. The suggestions that she should try having her throat slit in an abattoir.
Other contributors to the Great Meat Debate website received less attention. Anna had recorded earnest videos about how it wasn’t meat as such that was an environmental disaster but the quantities consumed and the way it was currently produced, in low-welfare systems where animals were fed grain instead of grass and straw and other foods which didn’t compete with humans. Gary had a few videos in which he showed off his muscles, Daniel explained the design of the abattoir, and Kirsty Nightingale, Tony Nightingale’s daughter, talked rather provocatively about the high carbon footprint of free-range farming methods.
I went through everything carefully. Gary did indeed make snide jokes about weedy vegans, and there was a spirited debate in the comments, in which the words game changers cropped up with some frequency. Kirsty also came in for plenty of criticism. Anna’s videos and posts were thoughtful, scientific and detailed, and nobody commented on them, which pretty much summed up the internet.
Daniel talked about the curved walkways and rubber matting in the abattoir with great passion. Having read the comments – If anyone ever slits your throat, let’s hope they do it on rubber matting – I understood his nervousness.
I leaned back and closed my eyes. Was this really about meat? Bad stuff was usually more personal, the culprit a family member or boyfriend. Or the person herself. I of all people knew that.
But recently, tempers had been rising. People were angry. About appalling animal welfare in farms and abattoirs. About carpets of pig manure from intensively kept pigs being spread over the countryside (it being particularly tragic when an animal’s waste products saw more daylight than it did). About rainforests being incinerated to provide grazing for cattle. People were asking questions. Why should your desire to eat meat every day jeopardise my child’s right to a planet that’s not an uninhabitable fireball? Meat producers had become fair game. Could one of those angry activists have decided to make an example of Violet Armstrong?
I sighed. My money would still be on a boyfriend or family member. I navigated through to Violet’s personal website and clicked on a video that looked different from the rest. Violet was fully clothed. She spoke to the camera like a professional. ‘In the village of Gritton in the Peak District, there have been strange sightings over the last thirty years. Of a mysterious girl …’
That was weird. I wondered if this was the Pale Child that both Anna and Daniel had been so unwilling to talk about. I took a swig of tea and switched to full screen. Violet carried on speaking: ‘The child is thin and light-skinned, and dressed in white, Victorian clothes. Locals call her the Pale Child.’ Violet leaned closer to the camera and lowered her voice: ‘Stories of strange, silent children are common in urban myths and creepypasta. This one is supposedly the ghost of a murdered child who lived in the beautiful manor house that was drowned under Ladybower Reservoir. People in this village don’t like to talk of the child, and are scared of her. The rumour goes that if she sees your face, you’ll die.’
How strange. I wrapped my dressing gown tighter around me, even though it wasn’t