slid out of bed and went to look for his trousers. He found them near the door and put them on. He didn’t bother looking for his shirt. The heating must be on; it was warm inside the house.
He glanced back at the bed but Abby hadn’t moved. The skin of her back was white in the darkness, like dead flesh. He could make out the individual bones of her vertebral column through the papery flesh. Her shoulders were so narrow that she could have been a child lying there on the mattress, sleeping uneasily in her parents’ bed.
He opened the door and left the room, closing it gently behind him. He padded across the landing and paused at the top of the stairs. There were two other rooms up here – one must be the bathroom. He moved further along the landing and tried the first door. It opened onto the second bedroom. This must have been where Tessa had slept. There were posters of ponies and fairy tale characters on the walls. The bed was covered in a pink duvet. There was a small TV, a stereo, an Xbox, and all the books on the shelf above the headboard were storybooks about princes and princesses and faraway lands.
Abby must have kept the room exactly how it had been when her daughter went missing. He was again reminded of the small table-top shrine in the living room. At the centre of the bedroom there was a large, roughly triangular pile of what at first he took as random objects. Then, when he moved further into the room to take a closer look, he realised what the objects were. Broken toys, the pages from what might have been her favourite books, stuffed animals that were missing an arm or a leg, and in one case even a head. There were doll parts, oversized jigsaw pieces, fractured board games, foreign dolls in national dress, and the remnants of a destructed playroom: all the sad parts from the broken toys that nobody ever got around to fixing.
The pile of discarded playthings formed a small pyramid, the apex of which was level with Marc’s mid-thigh. He stood before it and wondered how long it had taken to build. Had Abby created it all in one go, or had she added to the mound gradually, forming a kind of homemade monument to her memory over the past five years since her daughter had disappeared?
He put out his hand and let it hover above the totem. That was how he’d begun to think of the weird construction: with each layer of toys representing a period in the girl’s life. The older toys were nearer the bottom – baby things, the mobile from above her crib, perhaps even her first stuffed toy – and the newer stuff was at the top.
As he stepped around the mound, he noticed a photograph attached to the top of the pyramid. A small monochrome portrait of the girl, possibly taken not long before she’d gone away: her last school photograph, or maybe one taken by Abby on their final family holiday? The background was a greyish blur, so he couldn’t make out where the picture had been taken. It wasn’t even clear if the girl had been indoors or outside in the open air.
When he looked closer he realised that her eyes were shut. What he’d at first assumed were the girl’s eyes were in fact drawn on; somebody had sketched false eyes onto her eyelids. He bent down to inspect the photograph closer, to try and understand what it was he was looking at.
Was it an image of a dead girl, like Victorian post-mortem photography? Or was she simply asleep, and whoever had drawn the eyes had been playing a joke? There wasn’t enough detail to be sure, but the image disturbed him. Perhaps if the photograph had been in colour, he might have been able to discern more detail. As it was, this was just a girl with eyes drawn onto her closed lids.
He backed out of the room slowly, trying not to make a sound. He could not turn away from the grim totem, and now that he’d seen the photograph he was unable to think of anything else. Even when he closed his eyes, he saw that face: the drawn-on eyes stared at him from the red-tinted
Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg