Local Girl Missing Read Online Free

pass what was once the outdoor lido, where we spent most of our summers as kids. It was where my dad taught us to swim. It’s now boarded up; abandoned and sorry-looking, like a lover who has been stood up on a date. The Grand Pier, further along the coast, has hardly changed, with its opulent art-deco facade and bright red lettering.
    Rearing up on the other side of the road, facing the sea, are the Victorian terraces of hotels and guest houses. I pass what was once our hotel, the one I grew up in, its candy-pink walls now a more refined powder blue.
    The centre has been gentrified a little – a few upmarket cafés and smart restaurants have popped upamongst the discount shops and greasy spoons – but for the most part the town is unchanged, as if time stopped somewhere in the mid-1950s. Unfortunately the amusement arcades are still here, with their loud, grating music and garish, flashing lights. We loved them as kids. We would spend all our pocket money on those ten-pence machines.
    I imagine in the summer the town is bustling, just as it used to be, full of tourists; couples strolling along the front, kids building sandcastles, pensioners squashed on benches and gazing out to sea with their flasks of tea and home-made sandwiches, teenage lovers clasping hands as they ride on the big wheel. Today it’s like a ghost town. Today it brings back every unwanted memory of the past that I’ve ever had.
    I drive away from the centre of town and follow the coastal road around to the left. And then I see it. The Victorian relic rises out of the turbid sea like a decaying monster with steel legs that look as though they’re about to buckle under its weight. The old pier. The place where you disappeared. You were fond of the pier but I hated it. And I hate it even more now. It’s obvious, as I drive closer, that it has become even more dilapidated since I left. If I drive further on, I will reach the sprawling estate where you and Daniel grew up. It’s all still so familiar to me, as though I have a map of this town tattooed on my brain.
    I pull my Range Rover into a lay-by, turn off the engine and sit and stare at the pier, letting the memories wash over me of all the times we went there, asteenagers with Jason and later with Daniel and his friends. It closed to the public in 1989 but that didn’t stop us. It was a great place to hang out away from the main town, somewhere we could sit and drink our Red Stripe lagers in peace, listen to Blur and Oasis on my portable CD player. We made sure never to venture too far onto the pier and certainly never as far as the old deserted pavilion at the end. We had heard whispers of ghost stories bandied about in pubs: the builder who had fallen from the pavilion and now roamed it at night; the woman dressed in Victorian nightwear who threw herself and her new-born baby into the sea after her husband left her. We doubted any of these stories were true, but we liked to scare ourselves nonetheless.
    Now the pier is cordoned off and deserted, with a large, red DANGER: DO NOT ENTER sign at the entrance, although it would still be easy enough to climb through the makeshift fencing; if it had been there in our day, I’m sure that’s what we would have done.
    I sit for a while longer, listening to the rain tap-tapping on the roof and windscreen, watching the waves whipping themselves into a fury like rabid dogs frothing at the mouth. On the journey down I stopped at the petrol station on the outskirts of town. It’s no longer an Elf garage like it was in our day, Soph – it’s now Shell. Newspapers lined the entrance. HUMAN REMAINS WASHED UP ON BEACH was emblazoned across the front page of the local rag. It seemed soimpersonal somehow, so wrong, to talk about you in that way.
    I’ll never forget when you first went missing. The next day your mum raised the alarm after realising that you had never been home. To begin with she thought you might have stayed with me or Helen, so she waited and