The Sham

Shakespeare's grave or How running from a missing girl can uncover a missing boy

           

            Everyone seemed harmless, at first.

            It had been Jack’s idea to get out of town on a rare day off. Somewhere we could escape, lose ourselves for a few hours.

            “Welcome to Stratford.” Jack threw his arms around Holy Trinity church where we were sheltering from record snowfalls. “William Shakespeare’s hometown.” We were giggling at the groups of old people. They looked so ancient, like they needed to be driven straight to a hospital or morgue. He shrugged his shoulders; there were lots of them at least. “Shakespeare’s always bigger than a missing girl,” he said.

            I nodded. The last thing we needed was more attention.

            The police were keeping their suspicions to themselves but the pressure to find Kitty, to blame Jack, felt constant. At the beginning, Jack and I had joined the huddles at the community centre, drinking free tea to warm us up before being assigned a path or riverbed to wade through in the snow. But the only thing we uncovered was dirty grass and a flu epidemic. No one found a shred of evidence to suggest Kitty had been anywhere, except outside her house.

            So a company round the corner offered to make bracelets to advertise the search, to keep her in everyone’s mind. Except her mum chose to make them in Kitty’s favourite colour, black, which meant the whole town was walking around with what looked like funeral bands on our arms, like finding her dead was a given. So much so, a local businessman was forced to offer a £10,000 reward for information to find her alive, to make sure we were all certain that that was actually the purpose.

            Four weeks into the search, there was a new offensive: Kitty hadn’t seen her Dad in years, but he’d emerged from under someone’s shoe to make an appeal for her safe return; the churches began to hold vigils every night; and an advertising board had been erected in the town square,

MISSING: KITTY JELFS,

like our previous exertions had been a dry run. As if we could will her back if we made more of an effort.

            In the old days we might have crowded round the square to watch people get hung or stoned to death. Last summer, just after I arrived, we were watching movies on a big screen using makeshift chairs made from market crates. Now we huddled against the cold like Emperor penguins, continually moving around the group, rotating who was receiving the Siberian wind that had blown through for the party. Sharing information on our resident serial killer. Watching her name for weeks at a time while she lay under the snow to be found. Waiting to be rescued from her prince, like a reverse Sleeping Beauty. There was never much to report. A hairgrip found here, a report on Kitty’s two best surviving friends, there. We were desperate for information. Budgetary cuts forced the library to close, but no one cared about books. A local comedian joked our literacy rates were at an all time high because we were avidly reading the news; the local paper enjoyed it’s highest ever circulation.

            People were still turning up in their wellies and ski jackets to take part in the investigation but they began to search more invasively in people’s roofs and cellars, digging deeper and deeper and moving further and further afield from Kitty’s house. January is always a slow month, but even so, Kitty was bigger than Jesus, which I figured – on my meanest days – must be pissing Becky and Rebecca right off. We saw them less. They sort of retreated onto our telly screens and into the papers, which was kind of surreal. Stevie delivered bread, jam, veg and vodka to both their houses on a daily basis and they were allowed to come and go from their classes for a while as if school was a buffet from which they could pick and choose.