Page 6 of Will You Stay Another Day?
‘We were advised not to look at it,’ said Shirl. ‘So we never got to see her face one last time.’
‘That must have been incredibly hard… You could still easily identify her, though? Sorry… you don’t have to answer that.’ But please do.
‘It’s okay,’ said Shirl. ‘One year on and most family and friends are still too scared to mention her name around us. That call from the police… I’ll never forget it. No idea how we got to the hospital. We didn’t recognise the pile of her drenched clothes a nurse gave us and most of her body was under a sheet. But she had that tattoo of a dolphin on her wrist.’
‘And that large freckle on her other arm.’
‘I just knew, by the look of her,’ said Shirl. ‘We both did. That’s all we needed to identify her and we didn’t want any tests done on her body. She’d suffered enough.’
Em wouldn’t have cared what she looked like after any drowning… only in terms of it upsetting her parents. She took pride her in outfits, her hair dye and accessories, but not in a vain way. Even though she was going to be stuck with it for ten years, Em couldn’t stop laughing at her dreadful passport photo that had made her look as if she’d been hauled into a police line-up.
All the evidence pointed to the body being Em’s and yet… Dolphin tattoos were really common, as were freckles and…
No, no, no. Keep your head, Lili. And neither of Em’s parents had mentioned getting strange texts.
But why did it niggle that Colin and Shirl hadn’t seen their daughter’s face? That the dental records or DNA hadn’t been verified? After the accident, the houseboat party company had been investigated. Its safety standards were well below par and there was no record of exactly how many guests had been on board that night. The body could have been anyone.
‘I was just thinking about Em’s passport photo – how she looked like a convict.’
‘I’m her mother but yes, that wasn’t a look even I could love,’ said Shirl, and her eyes twinkled for a second.
‘Did you get to keep it?’
Colin shook his head. ‘No. We thought about it a few months ago, when we went to Spain. Her passport wasn’t in with her stuff. We really should contact the passport office.’
‘It’s not like me to miss something like that,’ said Shirl. Her voice hitched and a small, unexpected sob escaped. ‘I should have cancelled it but it’s so very final, ending someone’s citizenship.’
So the phone wasn’t found. Nor the passport. And Em’s face wasn’t actually identified.
Lili put down her mug and leant forwards. ‘I’m sorry to ask this…’ Her voice wavered. ‘I don’t want to cause either of you any pain but… have you ever considered that Em might not be dead?’ she blurted out.
They both frowned.
‘You see, just before I came into yours, on Friday, I… I sent Em a text. A silly one. To do with a joke and…’ She explained about the replies she’d got back and why the number couldn’t have been passed on to someone else; told them only Em knew to jump straight to the punchline in any case, and to send the green nauseated face emoji. ‘So I did some research, trying to work out what’s going on.’ She shoved the creased list into Shirl’s hands, who then showed it to her husband. ‘These are the four possibilities. Have either of you received any odd texts this year? That could have been pre-programmed or…’
Colin and Shirl stared at the list. Then gave it back to Lili. Shirl slipped her hand into his. He squeezed her fingers. The two gazed at each other, sad smiles crossing their faces momentarily, and then they nodded. Lili’s mum and dad used to exchange looks like that sometimes, back in the day, when they got on, as if married couples shared a secret language.
‘Lass, you know we love you like one of our own,’ said Colin. ‘We respect your opinion. We know how much you miss Em.’
‘What Colin’s trying to say is… we haven’t received any texts, love. We don’t believe in psychics.’
‘Right. So that means?—’
‘Em isn’t alive, love,’ continued Shirl firmly. She placed a hand on her heart. ‘I’d know. I wish so very much that there was a chance she’d walk back into our lives, but as soon as I saw my girl in that part of the hospital they call Rainbow’s End… Don’t torture yourself like this.’
Colin’s face turned red. ‘This is just someone who’s found Em’s phone and is playing a prank. You let me know who it is if you find out and I’ll…’
Shirl patted his arm.
‘But why would anyone do that?’ Lili asked. ‘I never told anyone about Em and me jumping straight to punchlines or about the emoji. They were our things. If Em had told a friend, why would they play such a cruel joke? It doesn’t add up.’
‘Leave it, love,’ said Shirl.
‘When we got the news about Em, those first few hours, before we saw the body, we doubted what the police had told us,’ said Colin. ‘Even on the way to the hospital we ran through a thousand reasons as to why Em could have gone missing. It was a dark, dark place to be in and I never want to go back there again.’
Shirl let out a juddering sigh.
‘Then when we came out, denial hit harder,’ he continued. ‘We told each other that was not our daughter. But our eyes didn’t lie.’
