39. Now

Bevan stands in Jenna's bathroom, looking at the hair on the floor, the velvet spider, and I know what she's thinking.

It looks odd, doesn't it? She thinks Jenna is odd.

I thought she was just having fun, experimenting, but what if she's expressing herself – her true self?

Jenna wakes up and goes to bed under the impending doom of her black spider, hanging, waiting to drop. Does she feel watched by a thousand silent eyes? As though something heavy, black, monstrous forever hovers over her?

She hacked off her hair. Was she crying, desperate to change, to be something else?

I didn't ask.

‘Let's move on,' says Bevan as Croft peers at Jenna's posters.

After ours, there's Tristan's part of the house – six bedrooms, five bathrooms, on and on. Then there's Mother and Father's barn. And then the greenhouse and polytunnels and old stables and the grain store.

We go quickly. Croft and Bevan shine their torches into wardrobes, climb into awkward nooks, pat down curtains.

I don't feel comfortable going into my parents' house – I was surprised Father handed over the key – but I open the door for Bevan and Croft.

I show them the stables, the grain store, the rainwater tank. Croft insists on climbing up and shining his torch in. My chest aches at the sudden flash of an image: Jenna floating, lifeless in the dank water.

‘This looks pretty old-school,' Croft says.

She's not there. I nod, my arms crossed, standing at the base of the rusting ladder, weeds winding up the rungs. ‘I think it was put in in the sixties.' I stop myself from frowning and will him down the ladder. I hate that thing. I push away the nightmarish image and ignore the dark memory it tugs behind it.

As we trudge back towards the house from the garden, the sun setting behind us, Bevan points to the roof. ‘Is there an attic?'

I look at her sideways, trying not to let my anger show. She isn't here. You need to talk to Georgia.

Bevan flicks a burr from her trousers. ‘You wouldn't believe how many missing children turn out to be hiding in the attic.'

We go back into Tristan's, up the main stairs, up again to the smaller bedrooms, and I pull down the latch, releasing the stairs into the attic.

It's vast. Boxes and boxes of things from previous generations. Really, we should get someone in from a museum. Some of the boxes at the back are wooden and held together with cast-iron nails, and as far as I know no one has ever opened them.

Bevan and Croft cough in the dust and shine their torches at cobwebs and rolled carpets and broken furniture.

Nothing. There's no one here. I want to scream but I don't and take them to our more modest attic.

‘Do you come in here more often?' asks Croft as I step into the dark cavity.

I shake my head. ‘Things come up here to be forgotten.' But as I say it, I realise it isn't as musty in here as Tristan's. One of the tiny windows is open and I point it out.

I eye boxes of clothes from the nineties that I should get down, see if Jenna wants any, or sell them now it's back in fashion. I might make a profit now they're genuine vintage.

Am I thinking about this now? My daughter is missing and I'm thinking about nineties fashion?

This is how I get through things though, isn't it? I distract myself. I compartmentalise. I bury my head in the sand.

‘Does everything look how it should?' asks Bevan.

It's only then that I notice some old bean bags I'm sure I'd left in plastic sacks. ‘I think these might have been moved?' I say.

‘Anything else?'

I look around and shake my head. The shelves remain bursting with my childhood books and Jenna's. My old Disney Princess TV sits draped with a wool throw atop a media unit stuffed with VHS tapes. An entire corner remains devoted to broken clocks – intricate cuckoos with their birds hidden, novelty plastic Wallace and Grommet and Winnie the Pooh contraptions, an antique grandfather worth thousands, a carriage clock that got smashed in one of my parents' arguments.

‘No one here,' says Croft, emerging from behind a cardboard cut-out of Shorthorn Lodge that I'd had made for a wedding festival we never attended.

‘Now we can talk to this Miss Smith,' Bevan says as her phone rings. She answers it and walks over to the open window, the sky a deep indigo, pricked with stars. ‘Mmmhmm?'

My ears ring. It doesn't seem right that this woman is learning something about my daughter before me. I sit on a creaking crate.

When she turns back she glances at Croft and nods.

‘What? Have they found something? At the school?' I ask.

‘Sorry – no,' says Bevan.

Croft clears his throat. ‘Ah, Frances, did you know Jenna was being bullied?'

Are they psychic or something? ‘I told you – I just found out today, from Ash and Ava, about Rose.'

‘Rose?' Bevan asks, stepping towards me.

‘I – yes?' I suddenly realise that if she's no longer friends with Sylvie, Dinae and Devon, it's likely that something went terribly wrong – that they don't like her.

‘It looks like it's a wider problem,' says Bevan. ‘I'm sorry, but it seems most of sixth form has been involved. Apart from Rose.'

‘Ash and Ava said it was Rose,' I say.

She nods. ‘We have conflicting information. We'd better speak your niece and nephew again. Looks like Miss Smith will have to wait a little longer.'

My stomach heaves. My daughter is being bullied. By people who were once her friends. I press hard against my thigh, swallowing a sour memory of cruel laughter in wooden halls.

I follow the police officers back downstairs, my skin crawling. I catch my reflection again in the glass of a painting, my face twisted, and I try to straighten it into a smile.

But smiling won't help this time, will it? Perhaps it never has.

I thought my baby was happy. I allowed myself to think she was happy, because I couldn't bear to find out why she no longer saw her other friends.

What else don't I know?