Free Losing You by Nicci French Page A

thoughts.
    Charlie had taken a few possessions with her so she must have run away from someone or with someone or to someone. She could have gone to stay at a friend’s. The worst possibility was that, whatever Rick had said, she had up and gone alone, hitched a lift, left with no plans and no destination, just heading away. I thought of Charlie standing by a road, thumbing a lift, getting into a stranger’s car, leaving us all behind, and felt a stinging in my eyes. For the first time in my life I thought of killing myself and then I thought of Jackson and Charlie and put that idea away for ever.
    What was most likely was that she would be with a friend, or that a friend would know of her plans. If I could find someone to put me in touch with Charlie, I could talk to her and she could tell me what had gone wrong between us. Where to start? At some point before the party had begun, while I was out having my car fixed, Charlie had returned to the house, retrieved what she needed and gone. Her decision to leave, or at least her decision to leave today, before going on holiday, must have been sudden or she would have taken her purse and washbag to Ashleigh’s. One guest after another at the party had told me how Charlie had organized it. I knew my daughter was a wonderfully strange and chaotic girl, but would even she organize a surprise party for her mother on the day she was going to run away from home?
    Now a thought occurred to me. Could it have been that something had happened at the sleepover to provoke this crisis? I wondered what could have made her run away instead of coming to me. I couldn’t think of a scenario that made sense but it was clear I had to start with the sleepover. I reached for the phone book, then remembered I didn’t need to: Joel’s home number was on my mobile. Another life, another story. I clicked on it and rang the number but it was engaged. A voice asked me to leave a message but I couldn’t say to a machine anything of what was needed. Rather than wait, I decided to drive over – his house was only a couple of minutes away. I left a scrawled note to Renata on the kitchen table and got into the car. I drove along the front and turned right into Flat Lane, which led inland. I pulled up outside Alix and Joel’s whitewashed thatched cottage, a tasteful anomaly in a road of terraced houses that could have been in the suburbs of any large English city.
    I rang the doorbell, then rapped hard with a heavy wrought-iron knocker. Alix opened the door with the phone at her ear, gave me a look of puzzlement and gestured me inside. I hovered on the threshold while she continued with her conversation. She turned away from me, as if to keep her privacy, but I could hear she was having a professional conversation with someone at her practice. It sounded like a routine discussion about a rota because someone was ill. This was ridiculous. I took a deep breath and tapped her shoulder. She looked round, frowning. Was I really telling her to get off the phone, as if she were a garrulous teenager? Yes, I was.
    ‘It’s urgent,’ I mouthed at her.
    ‘Sorry, Ros,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to call you back. There seems to be some sort of emergency.’
    Alix put a sarcastic emphasis on the word ‘seems’ but she hung up. ‘Karen’s not too bad,’ she said. ‘I just got back from the hospital. She was seen at once because of the bleeding. She’s had some stitches and the break in the arm was quite nasty. She’ll have to stay for the night at least. Rick’s stuck there with her, poor man. It’s a greenstick fracture. Do you know what that is? It’s like when you get a twig and snap and it doesn’t break off –’
    ‘It’s not about that,’ I said. ‘Charlie’s missing.’
    Alix looked at me quizzically. ‘Missing?’
    I gave her a rundown of the events of the morning. I saw a familiar expression of disbelief appear on her face. ‘But it’s only been a couple of hours.’
    ‘Not a normal