LITMIR.BIZ

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to see if I could hear any sign of her stirring but everything inside remained deathly silent; no sound of sleepy footsteps on the stairs, no answering shouts from upstairs. I didn’t want the whole street to know our business if I could help it so I went round to the back of the house to see if I would have better luck attracting her attention from there. I peered in through the kitchen window, knocked on the back door and called her name again a few times. Nothing like this had ever happened with Julie before and I was puzzled. She wasn’t that deep a sleeper normally.

      None of us had mobile phones in those days, although that seems hard to imagine nowadays given how much we all rely on them, so I decided to drive down to the main road where the phone box was to give it another go. Kevin was still in the car, apparently quite contented to be driven back and forth for a while without asking any questions. He was ever so patient for a three-year-old. Once I was in the phone box, watching Kevin in the car out of the corner of my eye, I dialled her number again, not sure what I would do next if she didn’t pick up. The phone rang and rang. Still no answer.

      I was beginning to think that maybe she wasn’t in the house because it seemed unlikely the phone wouldn’t wake her after so many tries. Maybe, I thought, she had gone to stay with a friend at the last minute. She was, after all, a grown woman and might have met someone during the evening and decided to go home with them, although it did seem very out of character. But why wouldn’t she have rung to tell me where she would be? She had been so insistent about me ringing to wake her at seven-thirty, surely she wouldn’t have forgotten so easily? And why would the curtains all be so firmly drawn if she wasn’t in there? Maybe, I told myself, she had drawn them before she went out. Perhaps she had fallen asleep somewhere else and just didn’t realize the time, parked up somewhere in her van maybe. All these possibilities were going through my head, but none of them seemed very likely. There just wasn’t any explanation I could think of that seemed like the sort of thing Julie would do.

      I drove back down to the house, with Kevin still chattering happily in his car seat, and tried knocking and shouting through the letterbox a few more times before I noticed a man over the road watching me from his window. I went across to talk to him.

      ‘Have you seen our Julie?’ I asked.

      ‘No,’ he said. ‘Actually, I didn’t even hear her coming back last night. I normally hear her coming in around one-thirty when she’s working, being dropped off by someone. I don’t remember hearing anything last night.’

      You can’t usually keep much secret in a small street like Grange Avenue where so many of the windows overlook the road and night-time noises travel easily up to people’s bedrooms.

      Trying not to panic or think the worst, I drove back down to the phone box once again and called a couple of her friends in case one of them had seen her or heard from her, or in case she had gone round to one of their houses unexpectedly for some reason. None of them had seen her or had any suggestion where she might be. They were as puzzled as I was. I wanted to ring the Iranians from the pizza shop to find out whether they could tell me if she had gone home after her shift, but I knew they didn’t live on the premises and I had no other number or address for them. The shop wouldn’t be open for hours yet so I knew there would be no point driving round there.

      I went back again to bang on the door some more, unable to think of anything else to do. Kath, the woman who lived next door, came out to see what was going on.

      ‘I can’t raise our Julie,’ I told her. ‘Have you heard anything in the night?’

      ‘I never heard anything at all,’ Kath said.

      By this time there was a feeling growing in my guts that something was seriously wrong, but I had to keep calm because I still had Kevin in the car and I didn’t want to alarm him. There just didn’t seem to be any logical reason why Julie wouldn’t be in the house or why she wouldn’t respond to my calls and shouts. I couldn’t work out what was going on and that was frightening me. I wanted to share my worries with someone else in the family, hoping they would tell me I was being stupid and that there was an obvious explanation.

      I knew Gary was working as a brickie on a job nearby in Billingham, so I drove to the site to see if he had come in yet. More than anything I just wanted someone else to be with me while I tried to work out what was going on and what I should do about it. He was there when I drew up outside the site, and was obviously surprised to see me.

      ‘What’s up, our Mam?’ he asked.

      ‘I don’t know where our Julie is,’ I blurted as soon as I saw him.

      ‘She phoned last night asking me over,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t get in on time. I haven’t heard since.’

      His boss could see how worried I was and told Gary to go with me and sort it out; he said he could manage without him for a couple of hours. We drove back to Julie’s house together. Nothing had changed. The curtains were still tightly drawn, no sign of life anywhere. We went round to the back once more and I took Kevin with me this time, not wanting to leave him in the car on his own now that the street was waking up and there were more people around. We knocked and shouted and peered in the windows again, but there was no sign of life inside.

      ‘I need to get in,’ Gary said, now obviously sharing my anxiety. ‘We’ll have to break something.’

      There was a narrow panel of glass beside the back door, which Gary smashed and climbed through after pulling out the remaining shards of glass. I could see there was no way I was going to be able to get through such a small gap.

      ‘Go round the front,’ he told me, ‘and I’ll find the keys and let you in.’

      I hurried back to the front door, clutching Kevin and trying to answer his stream of questions about why his uncle had just smashed his way into his mam’s house, even though my mind was miles away, racing over a hundred different scenarios, each one worse than the one before. I was struggling to keep my rising panic under control. The front door was still shut when I got there and I waited for Gary to open it. Nothing happened for what seemed to me like an age.

      ‘What’s going on, Gary?’ I shouted, no longer caring who I might wake up. ‘Open the door!’

      A few moments later he pulled back the curtains in the front room and opened the window to talk to me. ‘There’s no keys in here, Mam,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to look upstairs.’

      I stood at the window, my heart thumping in my chest as he disappeared off to search the rest of the house. He was back a few minutes later although it seemed like hours.

      ‘There’s something wrong in here, Mam,’ he said, his face serious. ‘Everywhere’s tidy. The bed’s all made and the kitchen’s been cleared, everything’s been put away neatly. There’s no sign of our Julie anywhere.’

      Julie had always been untidy and when she got out of bed in the morning she would throw the duvet back and leave it like that until she was ready to get back into it again at night, then she would just shake it out and throw it back over herself. It was her routine and had been for years. Why would she do it all differently today? When she washed up in the kitchen she would always leave the stuff out to drain on a rack; she never dried things up and put them away. Being in a bit of a mess didn’t worry her. Sometimes if I was going down to visit her with a friend I would call first to give her some warning so she could tidy up if she needed to, but she never bothered. More times than not it would be Andrew going round with the duster when they were together, while she sat on the sofa watching him. Leaving the house like this wasn’t like her.

      ‘What about the keys?’ I asked Gary through the window, the feeling of foreboding inside me making my voice croak uncomfortably in my throat.

      ‘Can’t find them anywhere,’ he said.

      Kevin, sensing our worry was starting to cry. ‘Where’s me mammy?’ he wanted to know, in his little toddler voice.

      ‘Pass the phone out to me,’ I told Gary, cuddling Kevin at the same time and trying to comfort him. ‘I’m

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