Missing, Believed Crazy Read online

  JADE

  Don’t get me wrong, but I do think Trix had to take some responsibility for what happened.

  Maybe Holly and I should have owned up to the Griffon but here’s the way I saw it: as the leading model, I had made the biggest sacrifice for her precious African village. I was the person who was laughed at, who was made to feel stupid. It was my Karen Millen dress that got stained when things started going downhill. I had been punished already.

  You know what? She never actually said sorry. All she went on about was how the evening had made only thirty-eight pounds. I admit it’s not much, given that we were totally humiliated, but Holly and I agreed on one thing. It was time to move on. Those African kids had thirty-eight pounds more than they would have had if we had not taken the trouble to put on our designer clothes. Trix was our best friend and all that but she should have had the decency not to mention that village in Africa for a few days.

  Instead, on and on she went.

  And get this. She went on seeing Wiki. They were suddenly buddies – nothing more, thank goodness, that would be full-on weird. But Trix and Wiki Church? It was a strange one, no doubt about it.

  Two days after the great catwalk disaster, we saw them chatting away at lunch. As we watched them from across the dining hall, Holly pointed out that we were now best friends with someone who was best friends with Wiki Church, which made us virtually best friends with Wiki Church ourselves.

  A serious reputation crisis was looming.

  HOLLY

  She strode about the school in her uniform, making everyone feel guilty. Nothing at Cathcart is ever fair but, even by the school’s low standards of justice, it was tough that the one person (two, if you include Wiki) who had wanted to do good was punished because a group of sad boys felt the need to show off.

  I should have said something in the hall. I was going to, but suddenly the Head was gone and somehow I had said nothing. Neither Trix nor Wiki ever made a fuss about the fact that Jade and I had kept our heads down, but it’s fair to say that for a few days we didn’t feel great about ourselves.

  WIKI

  Trix was in a bad way. It takes a lot to knock her off track but, during the days that followed that weekend, she became really withdrawn. It was as if she felt that she had personally failed the children in that village in Mali.

  At first, Holly and Jade tried to cheer her up and talk about the holidays but I think Trix wanted to stay angry. That was why she spent more time with me. I let her talk about the African village, which now totally obsessed her.

  She told me she had to make things right. It was almost as if she saw the world divided into Cathcart College and Africa. We had a choice – to go one way or the other.

  Africa had taken a hit from Cathcart. Now she wanted revenge.

  MISS FOTHERGILL

  I was in something of a quandary. I am not a rich person and there was quite a serious possibility that, after the fashion show, I would be, as the Head put it, ‘relieved of my position’.

  Of course, I was concerned about Trix. I had her in for tea several times during those last two weeks of term and we discussed how best to make things better after recent disappointments.

  ‘Use your anger, Trix,’ I used to say. ‘Channel it into your work next year. Being miserable doesn’t help anyone.’

  Sadly, she was no longer listening to me. She was polite enough, but sometimes I caught her looking at me in a way that was almost judgemental. It was as if I had failed some sort of test.

  EVA JOHANSSON

  Trix rang several times towards the end of that term. Something about Africa, was it? A fashion show that had gone wrong?

  I like to be there for my daughter but, when it comes to these little teen crises, my attitude is simple: that was why I sent her to Cathcart College. Boarding schools are good at dealing with children. I’m hopeless when it comes to discipline – too nice for my own good, Jason says.

  Between you and me, I would have preferred her to be at a day school but, for her sake, I thought a boarding school would be a good thing. After I had divorced her father, the Drunk (he doesn’t have a name as far as I am concerned), I had moved in with Jason Everleigh, the well-known sports agent.

  I’ll be honest. Jason and Trix were chalk and cheese. Jase is a successful and good-looking person who appreciates the importance of earning a decent living. Trix looks fine (she’s my daughter, I would say that!) but it’s no secret that she’ll never be a model or an actress. Plus, she has inherited her father’s attitude to authority. I like spirit but Trix is not just independent-minded and feisty, as a young girl should be. She is a rebel. Quite often, in the early days of my marriage to Jason, she would talk to our friends about the most unsuitable things – how children are dying of AIDS in Africa and all that.

  Now, if you’re out for a nice dinner party with a well-known actress and her millionaire husband, you don’t want some funny little thing sitting at the table talking about death and disgusting diseases. It’s not polite and it’s not nice.

  So this is what Jason said one night: ‘That child needs space and we need space. Boarding school is the answer.’

  The Drunk objected, of course. Trix was not crazy about the idea either. But sometimes one has to be firm as a parent.

  With Trix’s little crisis that term, Jase and I agreed that we had made the right decision. The best place for her was among people who knew how to handle these things. It’s called tough love.

  WIKI

  Trix became weirdly interested in the case of a disappearing girl.

  The child’s name was Michaela Parry.

  I don’t read the newspapers much but you had to be deaf, dumb and blind not to have heard of Michaela. She was seven, the daughter of a couple who lived near London. During the Easter holiday, she had been playing in the garden of the family house while the Polish au pair was bathing her baby sister inside.

  Michaela disappeared. One moment she was there, the next she was gone.

  The papers went mad. It was like this great detective story only it was real. Some blamed the parents for putting their jobs before their family. Others thought the Polish au pair was a bit dodgy. There were stories about Mrs Parry’s first marriage, sightings from around the world.

  Of course, it was all very sad, but I couldn’t quite see why Trix had suddenly become so obsessed about the case of a child she had never even met.

  It was one afternoon, a week after exams had finished, when I began to understand what was going on.

  I was in Trix’s room, chatting, keeping her company, when she pulled this cardboard box from under her bed. She turned it upside down on her bed. Newspaper cuttings tumbled out. Every one of them was about the case of Michaela Parry.

  She riffled through them angrily. ‘Its obscene,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yeah.’ I decided to humour her. Trix in this strange mood could go ballistic at the slightest excuse. ‘Who do you think did it?’

  She looked at me, surprised. ‘I don’t care,’ she said.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Don’t you see? That’s not the point.’ She began searching through the cuttings, then handed me the front page of an evening newspaper. The headline read, ’MICHAELA STILL ALIVE, SAY POLICE.’

  ‘Look at the bottom of the page.’ Trix stabbed the paper with a finger. There was a small additional story.

  RESCUE FUND CLIMBS HIGHER

  The plight of little Michaela Parry has touched people across Europe and America, it was revealed yesterday. The Find Michaela fund has now reached a staggering £600,000, thanks to generous donations by supporters across the world. One donation, by a city businessman who wished to remain anonymous, was for £100,000. ‘The Parrys are deeply touched by the help they are getting,’ a family spokesman said. ‘Every penny improves the chance of reuniting Michaela with her family.’

  Do you want to help find little Michaela? Make your donation online at findmichaelaparry.com.

  ‘Obscene,’
Trix repeated.

  I was confused. ‘Isn’t it a good thing that people want to help?’ I asked.

  She looked at me as if I were completely mad.

  ‘Think about it, Wiki,’ she said. ‘A child in Africa dies from hunger every five seconds. No one even thinks about it. There’s nothing in the papers. When we tried to raise money for dying children, it was like this big joke. But when one little white girl goes missing, it’s a big international story. The whole country has a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘It’s a bit nearer home, I suppose.’

  ‘Six hundred thousand pounds, Wiki. Have you any idea how many African children that could save? It costs UNICEF seventeen dollars to inoculate a child against the six major diseases – to save their lives. So think how many lives could be saved with six hundred thousand pounds.’

  I did the calculation. ‘Nearly fifty-four thousand,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said with a slightly surprised look in my direction. ‘But just because their parents don’t have a nice job and a big house, no one cares.’

  I began to see what she was on about.

  ‘To be fair, people are giving money out of kindness,’ I said. ‘It’s just that their kindness is a bit blind. They don’t see things the way that you do.’

  Trix was staring into the distance. ‘Well, maybe they should be shown how to,’ she said grimly.

  ‘Of course they should,’ I said quickly. Then, more to head off another lecture than anything else, I murmured, ‘If only there were a way we could use that Michaela Parry type of generosity to help the right people.’

  ‘How do you mean, Wik?’

  ‘If only we could show people that it’s not just children from their own little world who need help.’

  ‘Like some kind of demonstration, you mean?’ Trix was looking at me with a worrying intensity. ‘Turn people’s generosity around?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Well, sort of.’

  She looked down at the newspaper cutting. ‘You’re right,’ she said quietly. ‘Wiki Church, you are a genius.’

  Then she did something truly scary. She hugged me. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Thank you so much.’

  I was just about to ask her what she was thanking me for when the door opened.

  JADE

  Ugh, please.

  Holly and I walked into Trix’s room and she was in this clinch with, of all people, Wiki Church. It was the most disgusting thing I have ever seen – ever.

  HOLLY

  ‘Oh,’ I said, trying to be cool about the whole thing. ‘Is this a bad moment?’

  Wiki leaped back as if someone had given him an electric shock. His glasses had misted up and his chin was going up and down like he was a goldfish that had just been taken out of its bowl.

  ‘It’s a very good moment,’ said Trix.

  ‘Are you really, really sure about that?’ said Jade, who can always be relied upon to say the wrong thing. ‘I mean, Wiki? Not being funny but, Trix, maybe you should see a doctor or something.’

  Trix stood up. ‘Let’s go out for a walk,’ she said. ‘Wiki has just had the most brilliant idea in the history of the world.’

  WIKI

  I had? Just what was my brilliant idea?

  Trix crammed the newspaper cuttings back into the box and put it under her arm. Without another word, she walked out of the door.

  Holly, Jade and I followed.

  JADE

  Picture it. Trix was marching ahead of us, carrying this cardboard box. Holly and I were tagging along out of curiosity. Speccy Boy was there too, still looking as if someone had just hit him on the head with a plank.

  Trix headed for the park, a bit of woodland which is part of the grounds where Cathcartians are meant to look at the birds and the trees and do the whole joy-of-nature thing.

  She knows what she’s doing but the rest of us – even, I swear, Wiki Church – have one thought on our minds.

  It goes: Uhhhnnn? What the – ????

  WIKI

  The four of us were walking down this path between two rows of rhododendron bushes when we saw Mark Bliss and his friend Tom Parkinson coming towards us.

  Trix walked straight up to them. ‘Lighter,’ she said.

  Mark and Tom looked confused for a moment. Then Mark (a well-known smoker) reached into his pocket.

  ‘Cheers.’ Trix took the lighter and brushed past the boys.

  ‘Hang on,’ Mark called out, but Trix was on her way.

  ‘What’s up with her?’ he asked but, because none of us knew the answer to the question, we walked past trying to look as if we knew what was going on.

  Deep into the park, Trix led us into this clearing. She put the box down, crouched beside it and set fire to the newspapers. Soon there was a nice blaze going.

  We four stood watching it for a moment.

  ‘What exactly was this great plan?’ Holly asked.

  Trix’s face was more alive and happy than it had been for weeks. She looked up at us, the flames reflected in her sparkling eyes.

  ‘We’re going to commit a crime,’ she said.

  MARK

  Hey, I needed that lighter.

  At least, that was what I told Tom a few moments after Little Miss Save-the-World mugged me for my lighter in the park.

  The truth was that I sensed that something interestingly freaky was coming down with those three girls and Church. So I doubled back on my own and followed them.

  When I found them, they were standing around this little fire. Trix was talking and whatever she was saying was so interesting that I was able to sneak up on them and hunker down behind a bush.

  JADE

  There’s only one thing scarier than Trix when she’s angry and that’s Trix when she’s happy. A weird grin settles on her face. Her eyes sparkle as if, at any moment, she’s going to break down and cry with excitement. She’s like some religious wacko who thinks she’s seen a miracle and wants to tell the world about it.

  ‘Er, crime?’ This was me. ‘Any danger of your being a tad more specific?’

  ‘It’s simple,’ she said. ‘One day there’s this fourteen-year-old girl at the start of her holidays. The next day there isn’t. She vanishes. Because –’ She paused like someone about to give the punchline to a joke – ‘she’s been kidnapped.’

  HOLLY

  ‘Kidnapped?!’

  The word came blurting out of my mouth more loudly than I had intended.

  Trix put her hand to her lips.

  ‘What exactly are we talking about here?’ I whispered. ‘You’re speaking in riddles, Trix.’

  ‘OK, so here’s the broad outline,’ she said. ‘You guys kidnap me. There’s this big fuss when it’s discovered I’m missing – daughter of famous actress, yaddah yaddah. Money is raised to find me. At a certain point, the kidnappers – that’s you – say you’ll release the victim – that’s me – if the money is sent to Africa.’

  ‘Broad outline is right,’ Wiki muttered.

  Jade gave a panicky little laugh. ‘You have some serious issues, dude,’ she said.

  Trix held up a hand. ‘So now we get down to the details,’ she said.

  MARK

  I listened. At first I thought that Trix was telling some sort of story but that was hardly her style. Someone said the word ‘kidnap’. As they huddled together, I looked at the faces of Jade, Holly and Wiki.

  This was no story. Whatever that little gang was planning, it was for real.

  WIKI

  We were now in the dying days of the summer term, a downward spiral of true madness. People got drunk, fell in love, played tricks on teachers.

  Just briefly, it seemed as if Trix’s plan was another bit of end-of-year wildness. I thought that by the time the holidays rolled around, our conversation in the park would be no more than an embarrassing memory.

  But something worrying happened over the days following our meeting in the park. Trix seemed to be taking it seriously. At every possible o
pportunity, she would take me aside to discuss how the plot would work. She lost interest in lessons. The only people she talked to were Holly, Jade and me.

  Her face changed. It was as if the sun had come out in her life at last – as if she had a reason to live. She was scarily happy.

  People talk about ‘Living the dream’. Trix could do more than live the dream. She made other people believe it. Gradually, the craziest scheme in the history of crazy schemes began to seem almost possible.

  Not that it was all talk. Trix quickly moved into action, cancelling the holiday she had planned to spend with Holly and Jade in Italy. Then she enrolled at some kind of summer camp – a summer camp that she would never see.

  Her mother and stepfather just nodded this through.

  EVA JOHANSSON

  Towards the end of term, while I was in Los Angeles, I received a slightly odd call from my daughter. She told me that she had changed her mind about the summer holidays.

  All right, I shall put my cards on the table now. I was not thrilled. I had agreed with Jason that I would come back to England at the end of July to see Trix off to the villa Holly’s family had rented in Italy. Then I would return to LA.