Missing Presumed Dead.

Now that I am nearing my end, I suppose it is finally time to tell the truth of what really happened. 

I was born in 1960. My childhood was happy until 1965, the year my mother died giving birth to the sister I never got to meet. My father never recovered. He surrendered to the bottle, lost his job, and eventually turned his grief into violence. By the age of five, I learned the geography of fear. If I wasn’t through the front door by 3:40 p.m., exactly ten minutes after the school bell, he would be waiting with his belt. 

In 1970, I began keeping a diary. We had no money for notebooks, so I used the only paper available: the backs of old bills, junk mail, and scraps of advertisements. I recorded every blow, every insult, and every bruise. 

One memory stays as sharp as broken glass. I was in the bath, using washing-up liquid because we couldn’t afford bubbles. On the edge of the tub sat my mother’s old portable radio. I was listening to Kenny Everett, laughing at his antics, when the sound of my joy had snapped something in my father. He lunged into the bathroom, grabbed the radio, and smashed it against the wall. 

For the first time in my life, I found my voice. I stood up and swore at him. He swung, his fist catching my jaw with such force that I spun around, cracking my head against the tiles. As blood began to pump from the wound, I grabbed a towel to stem the flow. He simply turned and walked away. 

That was the moment I began to hatch my plan. 

By January 1976, I was fifteen, eleven months, and two weeks old. I was ready. For years, I had been skimming coins from the kitchen jar and lifting pound notes from his wallet while he lay in a drunken stupor on Friday nights. I had over two hundred pounds stashed in a rucksack hidden in the shed, alongside a few changes of clothes. 

The day before I vanished, I began "decorating" the house. I planted breadcrumbs of a sinister fate: blood-stained t-shirts tucked into crevices, and pages of my scrap-paper diary left where they would eventually be found. I left the old towel, one crusted with my blood from the night of the radio, hidden under the bath, knowing also it would be found. 

Before I went to school, I placed the final entry of my diary, written on the back of a gas bill from March '74, under a loose floorboard in my bedroom. In a jagged, trembling hand, I wrote: “He says he’ll kill me if I scream again.” It was a lie, or perhaps just a truth he hadn’t gotten around to saying yet. I knew the police would believe it once they saw the state of the house. 

The next day, at 3:30 p.m., I didn’t turn toward home. I walked straight to the bus station. I bought a ticket to Carlisle, the first leg of a journey that would take me to Scotland, then Fort William, and finally to the Isle of Skye. 

I went to Skye because of Auntie Julie. She wasn’t a blood relative, but my mother’s best friend, and the only person who felt I wanted to be with. She lived on a smallholding with free-running sheep, pigs, and hens. I knew I could disappear there. 

As the coach pulled away, I imagined him walking through the door at 3:41 p.m., his belt already unbuckled for the daily ritual. He would find only silence. Then, he would find the "clues." I had tipped red ink onto the cellar floor to look like a scrubbed-out stain; I’d left one of my shoes floating in the local pond and tucked the other behind his car’s spare wheel. 

He was arrested three weeks after I vanished. Between the blood-crusted towel, the diary entries, and the evidence planted in his car, the jury didn't need a body. They saw a monster—and they weren’t wrong, even if he hadn’t committed the specific crime for which they jailed him. 

My father breathed his last behind iron bars in 1994, clutching a hollow plea of innocence until the very end. He spoke the truth to a priest about the beatings and the abuse, but it was too late, and there was no one there to forgive him.