Missing

hard her knuckles were going white.
    ‘Sibylla, do you have a boyfriend?’
    She stared blankly at him.
    ‘Do you have a boyfriend? I have a reason for asking.’
    She shook her head. He came to sit next to her on the edge of the bed.
    ‘This illness you’ve been suffering from, it can have physical causes, you see.’
    Is that so?
    ‘We’ve tested some samples we’ve taken from you.’
    Yes, I know.
    ‘The results show that you’re pregnant.’
    The last word went on echoing though her head. She had a vision of the brown checked blanket.
    She alone would be his. Only his. And he hers.
    Together.
    Anything for just a second of such closeness.
    Anything at all.
    * * *
    She glanced at her mother. Beatrice must have known all along.
    The man who wanted her to speak put his hand on hers. His touch triggered a pulse of emotion that flowed through her body.
    ‘Do you know who the father of the baby is?’
    The two of them, together. Linked forever.
    Sibylla shook her head. Her mother kept looking towards the door, her whole being longing to open it and get out of there.
    ‘Your pregnancy is already in its twenty-seventh week, so a termination is not really an option for you.’
    Sibylla put her hands on her stomach. The man who wanted her to speak smiled at her, but somehow didn’t look happy.
    ‘How do you feel?’
    How did she feel?
    ‘Your mother and I have been discussing this.’
    Somebody started screaming in the room next door.
    ‘Because you’ve not yet come of age and your parents know you better than anybody else, their views are taken very seriously. As your doctor, I fully support their decision.’
    She stared at him. What decision? They couldn’t do things to her body, could they?
    ‘We all agree that adoption would be the best thing for your baby.’

S he rarely granted herself the luxury of shopping in a 7-Eleven store, where the prices were always way above average. This time though, her usual rules had to go overboard. She needed enough food to keep going for a few days and she needed to buy it early, before the doors opened to Sofia High School. The idea was to get in as soon as possible, before the corridors filled with pupils and their observant teachers.
    Minutes after seven o’clock, she had stocked up on baked beans, bananas, yoghurt and crisp-bread. She was ready to go, the moment the school porter or whoever unlocked the doors to paradise. She would be left in peace there.
    By twenty past the school’s ‘responsible person’, whoever he was, had done his duty. When he was gone, she crossed the street, went in through the main door and simply walked up all the stairs to the corridor at the top of the building, meeting no one on the way. It was an old building and her footfalls echoed between its stone walls. Up there, the door to the attic was just as she remembered it.

    STAFF ONLY
NO ACCESS

    Underneath the sign, the responsible person had placed a handwritten note, warning that the floor was in bad repair and in danger of collapse.
    It couldn’t be better.
    The door was locked by an ordinary padlock. She sighed, missing her Victorinox pen-knife. Presumably it was part of the evidence in the case and stored in a police station somewhere. The loop in the wall was held by four screws. She rooted around in her rucksack for some kind of implement and found her nail-file. It had to work.
    It did, in fact she had barely prodded at the upper screw before it came out. She felt a small, chilly shiver of suspicion. Did somebody else know about the quiet seclusion of this attic? Still, she had no time to reconsider. The rumble of voices from the floors below was growing and she went in, closing the door behind her.
    Down a few steps. There was a handrail to hold on to. It was looking different now. She had been there six, seven years ago and since then the school had been renovated, that had been obvious from just walking up the stairs. Last time, the attic had been full of rubbish and old junk, but the dodgy floor presumably meant that they had cleared away as much as possible. All that was left were a few piles of old textbooks.
    She recalled that it had been summer back then and the heat under the poorly insulated roof had been suffocating. Maybe that was why the attic space was unused. Anyway, this time heat would not be a problem – on the contrary.
    The clock was still where she remembered it. Seen close-up, the Sofia School clock was enormous. They had rigged up two lamps to