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‘Well…’ Will hadn’t a clue how to dress this up and so decided to just come straight out with it. ‘The thing is…we don’t know where she is and we’re trying to trace her.’ He cringed at how it came across.
‘Oh, I see,’ said Jennifer, sounding as if she didn’t see at all. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that. You don’t think… I mean… Is she…? I’m sorry, I don’t really know what to say.’
They needed to start seriously looking for Polly, thought Will now. There was too much evidence banking up that something was wrong. She was a bona fide missing person. He shuddered at the thought.
‘Such a lovely woman. And quite a talent as well. She brought in a lovely poem about a cat…’
Jennifer was nervous-twittering now. Telling Will about a book Polly was writing and the short story about her uncle and aunt who’d died when she was young that had people crying in the class when she read it out; and the love letter and the limerick about her boss at work that made them all laugh.
‘Oh my goodness, will you let me know if you hear anything,’ said Jennifer in a very wobbly voice.
‘Of course—’Hang on.‘Jennifer, what was that you said about a love letter?’
‘I… er… set the class a fun challenge round about Valentine’s Day to pen a love letter to someone they were having an affair with. I told them to put aside all their values and morals and let rip. You’d be surprised how liberating it can be when you’re given permission to loosen your literary corsets, as it were. We had some very steamy pieces; I was quite surprised at a few of my writers, they could have given E. L. James a run for her money. Polly’s was more romantic than smutty, though. I told Polly she could have been one of the Brontë sisters with her turn of phrase. It’s always amazed me how someone with so little passion in their lives could write such fervent prose.’
Will didn’t know if she meant the Brontës or Polly.
‘How long was she coming to your classes?’
‘About a year, I think. Yes, that’s right. She started last June.’
Will’s brain was spinning. ‘You don’t happen to have any copies of things she wrote, do you?’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Could I see any of them?’
Jennifer wasn’t keen. ‘I’d be contravening group rules by doing that.’
‘Please,’ said Will, surprising himself by how desperate he sounded. ‘We’re going to have to involve the police and the more information I’ve got the better. I’m clutching at straws, I know, but there just might be something she wrote down that might help us find her.’
Jennifer sighed at the other end of the line and Will could tell she didn’t know what to do for the best.
‘Okay,’ she relented eventually. ‘If you think it might help.’
Will dictated his email address to her. Jennifer said she’d do it straight away and she was as good as her word.
Will opened up the first file: ‘Love Letter – Polly’.
My darling, I cannot live a lie any longer. I have to come to you before my soul fades away and I am nothing. I am yours and yours only. You are the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins…
He recognised it immediately. He remembered his sister reading it out with relish to a horrified but enthralled crowd on the day of the wedding.
It was nothing more than a bloody writing exercise.
Will rang his father to ask if he was in. He wasn’t, but he would be in about an hour. Will said he’d meet him at thehouse and he’d explain why he needed to speak to him urgently when he got there. In the meantime, he read the other files that Jennifer had sent through, Polly’s stories and poems. He remembered her telling him about the neighbour’s ginger cat whom she used to let into the house when her mum was at bingo and she’d feed him cheese and cuddle up to him on the sofa. And her aunt and uncle who were going to adopt her and take her to Australia but they died. Polly had a rotten early life. The synopsis of her novel told Will a lot. He was very moved to read that she’d reimagined the child she’d had when she was only seventeen was alive and travelling. Polly would have made a smashing mum and reading this, it sounded as if there was an emptiness inside her that still wanted to be filled with a baby of her own. The Sabrina character was obviously based on herself and it wasn’t hard to see where dubious Jasper had his origins. No wonder Sabrina was leaving him.
Chris had the good grace to look uncomfortable as he listened to his son’s findings. Will had also been upstairs to where Polly’s things were stored and found a folder with the physical copies of the writings which Jennifer had sent him by email.
‘Shauna didn’t say that she’d found that love letter in with all this other stuff from Polly’s classes,’ said Will, who was furious at his sister and he’d tell her so. ‘It would have cast a totally different light on everything if she had and put it in context. She deliberately kept that quiet to shit-stir.’
‘But even if that letter isn’t real, we still don’tknowthat Polly’s not with a fancy man, do we? Why was all her stuff packed up if she wasn’t going to someone else? She wouldn’t have just left me for… no one. That doesn’t make any sense.’
Will rubbed his forehead in frustration because they were going around in circles.
‘You do know people can leave their partners without going to someone else, especially if they’re really unhappy, Dad.’
‘Rarely, though,’ said Chris, who couldn’t think why anyone would leap to another lily pad unless there was another frog waiting on it. He was sitting at the table flicking through Polly’s papers.
