Читать книгу After Anna - Alex Lake, Alex Lake - Страница 10

i.

You slept well. In the wee hours you brought the girl inside and then went to bed, tired from the exertions of the day – the adrenaline was pumping and it took it out of you – and fell asleep in a heartbeat. Woke at six, a little bleary-eyed, and made a strong coffee.

The story is everywhere. The girl’s photo in every news bulletin. Numbers for the public to call if they know where she is. The police were searching all night, helped by concerned locals. A local pub provided sandwiches and hot drinks. Dogs barked and yelped and sniffed their way across scrubland and through parks and forests.

They found nothing. There is nothing to find. You made sure of that.

Not a peep from the girl in the night. That was no surprise, though. She is young and the sleeping pills you’d crushed into a milkshake (bought from McDonald’s before you took her and administered as soon as you got her in the car – kids were powerless to resist sugary drinks) were powerful. She sleeps still. She’ll be groggy when she wakes, but that is no problem. You plan to keep her under sedation until the end comes – perhaps a week or so, not much more than that – after which, it won’t matter anyway.

It matters now, though. You need her asleep or sedated so that she doesn’t make a noise when you are not there. You can’t be with her all the time. You are needed – expected – to be elsewhere, and your absence would be noted. It would cause suspicion. You know that they will be looking everywhere for the girl – pretty five-year-olds who vanish are big news – and you must do nothing that invites suspicion onto you. So you must leave her, and she must be silent when you are gone.

If she isn’t? Well, even then it is unlikely anyone would hear her. She is in a safe place, hidden away in the bowels of your house, and her screams would not travel far. But maybe far enough if they happened to coincide with the arrival of the milkman or the postman. You have kept the milk deliveries up. Would the police look for people who had abruptly cancelled milk deliveries? They might, so you have maintained yours. That is the attention to detail that sets you apart from the common run.

So the girl must be silent. Just in case.

Just in case. Those are your watchwords. You examine every possibility, weigh every risk, and make your plans accordingly.

That is why you can sleep at night. Because you know you have nothing to fear. You know you have not made any errors. You know you will not get caught.

And you know you are doing the right thing. You have no crisis of conscience. Yes, you feel sorry for the girl, but her suffering is a necessary evil.

And a necessary evil is indistinguishable from something right and proper. If it is necessary, how can it be evil? If it is the only path to the right and proper outcome then it must itself be right and proper. To be deterred from doing the right thing because a little girl might undergo some temporary suffering – wouldn’t that be worse than letting her suffer? If everyone made decisions like that then nothing great would ever be accomplished. How many people died in order for the great cathedrals to be built? Or bridges? Or railways? Or for the wars of the righteous to be fought? Did their deaths matter? Were they tragedies, every one of them? Yes, of course they were. But were they to be regretted? No, they were not. Without their deaths the world would be a poorer place, and that was what mattered. Their deaths were a necessary evil.

And, as you know better than anyone else, a necessary evil can be a good thing.

ii.

Julia lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. It was four a.m. and there was a chill in the room. They’d come home and relieved Edna, then Brian had disappeared with a bottle of whisky. Somehow she’d fallen asleep, for maybe an hour, which in the circumstances was the best she could hope for. Now, in the small hours of the morning, mind racing, she knew her night was over. Sleep would be impossible.

The house was still and dark; the witching hour, as her dad had called it. He was a leather tanner and he used to come home smelling of the chemicals they used to clean the leather. Whatever they were they were powerful: the run-off polluted the local rivers and polluted her dad’s body. He died of brain cancer when he was in his early sixties. It happened quickly. A year from retirement he missed his first day of work from illness, then he missed another, and another, laid up in bed with a headache that left him unable to focus. He never went back. The cancer was behind his eye and worming its way into his brain.

Officially, it was just one of those things. Unofficially, Julia was convinced it was the solvents and acids he spent his days slopping around that stained his skin and fouled his lungs. Even after he had taken a bath – he took one every night, retiring to the upstairs lavatory with a cup of tea and a copy of the Daily Mirror, a ritual which infuriated Julia when she was teenager in a hurry to get ready on a Friday night, leading her to complain to her mum, who would frown and say leave him, love, he works hard – even after that long soak in the perfumed, Radoxed waters of the bath, he still gave off the hard, harsh smell of the tannery.

When she was a child, he used to lie down next to her, smelling of that smell, and tell her a story every night, a story he had made up during the long days at work. Many of them began It was the witching hour, and for years she had wondered what it would be like to be awake during the witching hour, what amazing events she would witness if she could just keep her eyes open … and then she would wake up and it would be light outside and she would have missed all the fun.

As she lay there now, the house creaked and groaned. They were just the sounds that a house made, but it was easy to believe that they were the night-time perambulations of the little people. She remembered running onto the landing as a little girl when she heard the stairs creak, and shouting downstairs to her parents.

I’m scared! What are those noises?

Her dad clumped up the stairs, bringing with him a whiff of cheap beer mingled with the acid stench of the tannery.

Don’t worry, petal. Houses are alive. They move around and they settle at night, same as you and me. It’s just our place resting its old bones. It’s saying good night to you, that’s all.

Anna was one when he died, so at least she’d met him, although she had no memory of it. He’d loved her, was great with her; couldn’t get enough of nappy changes and messy feedings and clip-clop horsey rides on his knees.

How she wished he was here now. She wouldn’t want him to suffer through this, but it would make it so much easier to have him here. She missed him. She missed him so much.

As she did her mum, but in a different way. Her mum was still alive but had suffered her own tragedy, in some ways worse. Alzheimer’s had corroded her brain, eaten her memories, dissolved who she was into a listless, confused shell. She was in a home nearby, in need of constant care. Julia visited often, but it was hard. Her mum rarely knew it was her daughter holding her hand.

They were effectively gone, her parents, as was Brian. She was going to have to do this herself.

She checked her phone. Maybe a call from DI Wynne that somehow – although she knew it was unthinkable that she would have slept through it – she had missed.

She reached out and turned on her bedside light.

There was a photo frame on the cabinet, split into uneven thirds. Anna had given it to her for Christmas, and they had spent an hour or so leafing through photos choosing which three to put in it. All of them featured Anna: as a newborn, in Edna’s arms on the couch in their old house, and with Brian and Julia outside the blue door of the nursery she had attended.

God, leaving her there for the first time had been awful. Julia had felt bereft, incomplete, as though she was missing a part of herself. She had cried all morning at work, and then made some excuse at lunchtime about feeling ill, and gone to the nursery. Being reunited with her daughter, smelling her, kissing her, made her whole again, and she vowed never to leave her daughter again.

But the next day she did. And the day after that, and the day after that. Eventually, she got used to saying goodbye, but she never stopped missing Anna.

Julia stared at the photo. It was taken on that first day, Anna a mere three-months-old. Julia looked drawn and tired, still carrying the baby weight, her face tear-stained. She was holding Anna close to her chest, holding the baby that she had barely been apart from for a minute since she was born, and who she was about to hand into the care of a stranger.

Even in a photo it was obvious she and Brian were in love. They were leaning into each other, his arm around her. He was not looking at the camera, but at his wife, his expression protective, caring, concerned. Loving, most of all. It was a photo of a man who adored his wife and the daughter they had made together.

When they’d left the nursery they’d hugged for a long time. It was funny what you remembered; Julia remembered the smell of the suit Brian was wearing. It was musty; odd but not unpleasant. He was starting his new job as a primary teacher, and he was wearing a suit that he’d bought from a charity store, and in the chaos of early parenthood he’d not managed to find time to have it dry-cleaned.

He was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with and, back then, she couldn’t have imagined any future in which she didn’t.

Not any more. Now he was a brooding presence, squatting in the spare bedroom.

She pulled on her dressing gown and crossed the landing to the stairs. The top two creaked and, out of habit, she trod softly on them so as not to wake up Anna, who was a light sleeper. Julia often wondered whether it was because she and Brian had fussed over her sleeping arrangements so much: at nap time and bed time they ensured that she had a dark room at the correct temperature, and then they performed an elaborate routine to get her to sleep, rocking her in a specific pattern and then, when she was nearly asleep, laying her gently in her bed and patting her back until her breathing lengthened and she could be left without fear of her waking up. They would then tiptoe around the house, terrified of waking her up.

And now she was a light sleeper: no wonder. She had only ever had to sleep in perfect conditions. All those adults who complained of insomnia would sleep like a cat on a warm flagstone if they were rocked for half an hour before bed and then given a gentle massage. She and Brian would have done things differently with a second child, Julia knew, they would have been more relaxed, both because they would have known what they were doing and because they would not have had the time to do with another child what they had done with Anna. The second child had not come, though. A miscarriage and then an ectopic pregnancy, which had left Julia unable to have more children, had seen to that. She was barren, as Edna had once put it.

Barren. It was a horrid, vivid word that Julia hated, and it was just the kind of word that Edna would use. She could pretend that it was just what people said when she was young and she didn’t know it would upset her daughter-in-law, but Julia didn’t believe her. Edna knew exactly what she was doing. She always did.

For a time, Julia had grieved for the loss of her fertility, but recently, as she realized she no longer loved Brian, she had come to be relieved. For one thing, divorce would be easier with one child; for another, she had always worried that she would not love the second child as much as the first. How could she? Anna and she were mother and daughter but also best friends. She knew that they wouldn’t be forever – or even much longer – but right now she loved taking her daughter to the movies or shopping or for lunch. They’d gone to see The Nutcracker at Christmas; Anna was open-mouthed. Spellbound. Julia understood the magic of theatre, the way it brought drama to life, in a way she had never done before. Anna asked frequently when Christmas was coming, so she could see it again.

Yes – her love for Anna was all-consuming, so maybe it was best that she have only one child.

One child who was now gone.

And, although she would not admit it to herself, part of Julia was sure Anna was gone. Of course, she still hoped that Anna would show up. She had to. Without that hope she would probably not have been able to carry on. But, however much she tried to ignore it, she was aware that she might never see her daughter again.

Might never meet – and disapprove of – Anna’s first boyfriend. Might never watch her fall in love, graduate, marry. Might never become a grandparent. There was an entire future at stake here, both for her and for her daughter and husband.

Before she fell asleep, alone in the bedroom, her only company the sound of Brian’s footsteps as he walked from the kitchen table to the booze cabinet, she’d googled ‘missing children’. It was a mistake, just like it was a mistake to google your symptoms. Persistent runny nose? Not a cold – it was brain fluid leaking out of your cranium. Always tired? Not a condition of being a parent – it was a rare virus that would gradually eat away at your muscles until you wasted away to nothing. Constipation? Bowel cancer. The difference was, these were false diagnoses. In the morning, a doctor would tell you not to worry and send you on your way.

When it came to missing children the facts – or the patterns, at least – were pretty clear.

Kids, especially five-year-old kids, were either found in the first few hours, or not at all.

Yes, there were exceptions (and that was where the hope came from) but for the most part (and please let Anna be different, please) five-year-old kids either showed up pretty soon after they went missing – at a friend’s house, or in the care of a concerned adult who had seen them alone – or they didn’t show up at all.

She had read accounts of police investigations; read about the kinds of people who abducted young girls, and the reasons they did so. She read about criminal gangs who kidnapped kids into slavery, or for rich people who couldn’t have kids of their own, she read about lone wolf predators who took kids and hid them for years, until the kids grew up and lost their appeal and were murdered. She read about paedophile gangs, who took kids and passed them around their network, filmed them being raped to order, and then disposed of their broken bodies in landfill sites in the Third World.

She’d run to the bathroom sink and vomited until there was nothing left to come out other than bile and saliva. It was funny how your body reacted to extreme emotion by emptying the stomach. She didn’t know why that would be the case; you’d think it would be better to retain the food so as to have some energy to deal with whatever crisis it was.

Even so, she wasn’t hungry now. The thought of food held no appeal whatsoever; she wasn’t sure it ever would again. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, there was a creak behind her. For a second, instinct took over and Julia thought it was Anna coming down for an early morning cuddle; her spirits rose, the gloom lifted. And then she turned to look and reality reasserted its grip.

It was Brian. His eyes were red, his face unshaven. He was one of those men who grew facial hair very quickly. If they went out in the evening he would have to shave for a second time in the day. She had found it interesting, at first. Charming. Manly. Part of the husband she loved. Now she found it off-putting, and there were plenty of other things about him that had a similar effect: all his physical imperfections, the smells and blotches and sagging muscles, now repelled her.

‘Brian,’ she said.

He ignored her. They had barely spoken since leaving the school. That was part of the reason she’d googled ‘missing children’. She’d been alone and unable to stop herself.

He walked past her to the kitchen; shoulders slumped, and flicked the kettle on. He put a teabag in a mug. When the water boiled he poured it into the mug and added milk. The milk spilled on the countertop. His hand was shaking. He’d drunk a lot when they had got home, enough to pass out around midnight, but not enough, it seemed, to stay passed out.

‘Brian,’ she said. ‘We need to talk.’

He looked at her over his cup of tea. ‘Do we?’ he said. His voice was broken and hoarse.

‘Yes. Our daughter is missing.’

‘Because you weren’t there to pick her up. You didn’t show up and now she’s gone.’

Julia wanted to defend herself, out of habit. It was how things were between them: he criticized her or she criticized him and they argued. Right or wrong didn’t come into it. Not giving in was what mattered. You didn’t give an inch. You stood your ground. Sometimes she felt like Tom Petty singing ‘I Won’t Back Down’.

But not this time. What could she say? It’s not my fault? It was her fault, at least partially, and partially was enough. Maybe she had an excuse. Maybe she’d been unlucky. Maybe she could have been late a thousand times and each time Anna would have been sitting there with Mrs Jameson, eating a biscuit, and telling the teacher about her favourite place to go on the weekend. All those things could be true, but they didn’t alter the only truth that made any difference: if she had been on time, Anna would be asleep in her bed right this minute.

So Brian was right. Cruel to point it out, but right. Perhaps if they’d been happily married, perhaps, even if they’d been unhappily married but planning to stay that way, he would have been the one to support her, to make her feel less wretched, but she had told him she wanted him out of her life, and with that she had given up any right to his support.

She reached for her car keys. Her hands struggled to pick them up. She wiped her eyes clear of tears.

‘I’m going out,’ she said.

He didn’t reply. He just leaned on the kitchen counter and looked out of the window and sipped his scalding tea.

iii.

Reminders of Anna were everywhere.

Her booster seat in the rear-view mirror. A thin summer raincoat in the footwell. Biscuit crumbs on the backseat.

Brian had told her off for letting Anna eat in the car, for making such a mess.

Who cares now? Julia thought. Who cares about crumbs or mess or late bedtimes? We spend so much time worrying about the little things, when they don’t matter. And we let the things that do matter slip.

When she turned the ignition a CD of kids’ songs came on. She sat back and listened.

Do your ears hang low?

Do they waggle to and fro?

Can you tie them in a knot?

Can you tie them in a bow?

Anna had found that song particularly amusing, and had developed a dance in which she rocked from foot to foot and mimed tying her dangly ears in knots and bows.

Julia pulled into the street. There was a light on in the house next door, and she saw the upstairs curtain twitch. Mrs Madigan: a village stalwart in her nineties, who had an opinion on everything, and who expected, by virtue of her age – as though age conferred wisdom – that people would listen to it. She was known to be both ‘formidable’ and ‘quite a character’ and widely surmised to have a heart of gold beneath her tough exterior. People often commented on how it must be ‘interesting’ or ‘fun’ or ‘quite something’ to have her as a neighbour. Julia didn’t tell them what she really thought: it was a pain. Once you got to know her you realized that Mrs Madigan’s public persona of forthright grumpiness did not, in fact, hide a beneficent and kindly old woman; it hid a sour and angry old woman. She didn’t like it when Anna was noisy in the garden and she thought nothing of shouting at her over the fence, or of complaining to Julia or Brian about their hooligan child. She would ask Brian to help when something broke in her house, and then, when he finished whatever DIY task she had assigned him, she would complain that he had done it wrong, and then ostentatiously get a tradesman in to redo the work. Above all, she complained incessantly to Julia about her two children and many more grand- and great-grandchildren, and how they were selfish and lazy and ignored her.

Julia didn’t blame them. She would have ignored her too, had she been able to do so.

The neighbours on the other side – a childless couple in their late-forties – were much better. They didn’t have much to do with them, which Julia was becoming convinced was the key to good neighbourly relations. Good fences make good neighbours, the saying went, and it was true.

Julia wasn’t sure where she was going, but she found herself heading for the local playground. It was a pretty unprepossessing place: just a set of swings, a slide, and a roundabout on a patch of grass at the end of a residential street, but Anna and she went there often when they had an hour or so to fill. The police had checked it, but it was possible that, since then, Anna had found her way there.

Possible. Not likely.

She kept her headlights on full beam and drove slowly, scanning the streets for any sign of her daughter.

At the park, she switched off the engine and the lights cut out. She was glad; she’d found that the yellow pools disturbed her. They illuminated only a portion of the world and it reminded her of the futility of this search. Anna could be anywhere, but Julia, like the beams of light, could look in only one place at a time.

She was reminded of a conversation she’d had with a friend, Prissy (short for Pricilla, a boarding school nickname used only by her intimates, and retained as the name had a certain irony: Prissy had shown herself to be anything but, a reputation sealed by an affair with a young teacher, Sarah, who lost her job over it). The conversation had taken place a year or so back, just after a teenage girl had been found in the basement of a house only a few streets away from her home in some dusty Middle-American city. She’d been there for a decade; Prissy had declared that, if her son (she had a son the same age as Anna) went missing there was no chance he could be hidden for so long so close to home, because she would search every house in the vicinity from top to bottom, whether the occupants and police liked it or not. Julia had agreed. She would do the same. It was an easy thing to say, fired by indignant parental fervour, and it carried with it an implicit criticism of the mother of the American girl. Why hadn’t she done that? A good mother would have.

A good mother would have been there to pick up her daughter, as well.

It wasn’t as easy as she and Prissy had imagined, however. Firstly, there were a lot of houses, and secondly, it seemed that the police and occupants had more say over who entered them than expected.

But at least she was doing something.

‘Anna!’ she called. ‘Anna!’

She did not have a torch, so she used the one on her iPhone and swept the park. The swings were empty, the slide a silhouetted dinosaur.

‘Anna!’ she shouted. ‘Anna!’

‘Who’s Anna?’ a voice said, the accent strong: ooze Annoh?

She jumped and pointed the beam in the direction of the voice. Two teenage boys were sitting on the roundabout. What the hell were they doing out here at this time? One of them was holding a bottle. He took a swig from it and passed it to his friend, then lit a cigarette.

She smelled the smoke: make that a joint.

‘My daughter,’ she said.

‘Is she cute?’ the boy with the joint asked.

‘Yes,’ Julia said, then realized her error. ‘I mean, no, not in the way you mean. She’s five.’

‘You’re cute,’ the boy said. ‘You’re all right, anyway. Want to suck me cock?’

‘What?’ Julia said. ‘No!’

‘Then what are you doin’ here, at this time?’ the boy said. ‘That’s why people come down here.’

As far as Julia knew people came down here to play on the swings with their children, but apparently not. When Anna was home she doubted they would be playing here again.

The other boy, the one who had not spoken, stood up. He was older than she’d thought, maybe nineteen, tall, and thin, and had a pock-marked face, the result of bad, untreated acne at some point in his early teens. He sniffed, then hawked and spit on the roundabout.

They were definitely not coming down here again.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come wi’ me.’ He grabbed his crotch and thrust it towards her, then nodded towards the bushes. ‘You can have some of this. You’ve been missing it, I can tell. Don’t get much off your old man, right? I’ve met some of your type before, not so old you’ve give up, still need your hole busted from time to time.’

His voice was flat and toneless and he was staring at her, his face drawn in a slight sneer, as though he was looking at something faintly disgusting.

He took a step towards her. It was quick, and purposeful.

‘Come on,’ he urged, ‘you’ll like it once we get started.’

And then she imagined Anna, wandering into this park and encountering the pock-marked boy and his friends, or people like them.

If that was the world her daughter was in, she didn’t stand a chance.

Julia turned and ran towards her car. Thankfully, she’d not locked the door, so she was inside in a couple of seconds. She slammed it behind her and locked it, then fumbled in her pocket for her keys.

They weren’t there.

She put on the cabin light and looked around. She checked her coat pockets again, then patted her jeans. Nothing.

There was a knock on the window. The pock-marked boy had his face pressed to the glass. He waggled his tongue from side to side in a gross imitation of oral sex.

‘Well, well,’ he said, his voice faint through the window. ‘Seems you might have a little problem, doesn’t it?’

iv.

He pulled his face back an inch from the window. There was a smear where his lips had been pressed to the glass.

‘Want these?’ He held up Julia’s car keys. ‘Dropped ’em, didn’t you?’

‘Give them to me,’ Julia said.

‘Open your door. They’re all yours.’

She picked up her phone. ‘I’m calling the police.’

The boy shrugged. ‘I’ve done nowt wrong,’ he said.

She dialled 999, her eyes fixed on the boy’s pock-marked face. She thought he would leave now that she had the phone to her ear, but whether he did or not she wanted the police there. She was not getting out of the car on her own.

The boy examined the keys. He held a Yale between his thumb and forefinger, the bunch dangling from it.

‘This your house key?’ He unwound it from the bunch. He threw the rest of the keys into a bush and put the Yale in his pocket. ‘Maybe I’ll pay you a visit.’

‘Hello,’ Julia said, when the operator answered. ‘Police, please.’

The pock-marked face disappeared. She heard laughter as the boys went back through the gate into the park.

When the police dispatcher came on the line, Julia was shaking so violently she found it hard to keep the phone to her ear.

‘I need help,’ she said. ‘I’m at Queen Mary’s Park.’

One of the police officers found the house key by the roundabout, where the pock-marked boy must have discarded it. He handed it to Julia. She didn’t like to touch it. It felt contaminated.

‘Looks like they were just trying to scare you,’ he said. ‘A lot of them are like that. Big talkers.’

He took out his notepad. ‘Can you describe them?’ he asked.

Julia had a clear picture – a picture she thought she wouldn’t forget in a hurry – of a sneering, acne-scarred face at her car window. She described it to the officer.

‘Sounds like Bobby Myler,’ he said. ‘And sounds like the kind of stunt he’d pull.’

‘You know him?’ Julia asked.

‘He’s what we call “known to the police”’, the other officer said. ‘In other words he’s a bloody yob who’s been in trouble since he first drew breath.’

‘Can you arrest him then?’ Julia said.

The officer pursed his lips. ‘What did he actually do?’ he said. ‘He was an offensive little turd, for sure, but he didn’t touch you. And you dropped your keys.’

‘So he just gets away with it?’

‘I’m afraid so. I’m sorry. I wish it were different, I really do.’ The officer folded his notebook open. ‘Just for the record,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Julia Crowne.’

‘And what brought you to the park at this time of the morning?’

‘I’m looking for my daughter.’

His hand paused mid-word and he looked at her. ‘That’s your daughter? The little girl who’s missing?’

‘Yes,’ Julia said. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

He nodded. ‘There are a lot of people looking,’ he said. ‘We’ll find her, Mrs Crowne.’

He did a good job of reassuring. Julia supposed he’d had plenty of practice. But she didn’t believe him. In between hearing that she was Mrs Crowne, mother of Anna Crowne, and his smile of professional reassurance, there was a gap. It was a fraction of a second, but it was enough for an emotion to cross his face, and it was the worst emotion a mother in her position could witness: it was pity.

So it’s you who’s going through hell, his expression said. God help you.

And then it was gone, replaced by that studied reassurance, but she’d seen it. The same thing had happened once before so she knew what she was looking for. The first time she’d been pregnant she and Brian had gone to a gynaecologist for the first scan. A nervous first-timer, she’d pressed for it as early as possible, and they’d gone at eleven weeks.

Well, the doctor, a woman in her fifties who smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke, had said, the baby is due on February 3^rd.

No, Julia replied, it’s mid-January. I got pregnant on April 24^th. I was ovulating then.

Foetal development is uniform in the first twelve weeks, the doctor said, so we can tell the age from the size, give or take a few days on either side. So we can predict the due date accurately. You probably got pregnant some other day. You can get pregnant at any time in the cycle. It’s less likely, but possible.

She was wrong. Julia knew exactly what the age of the foetus was, because it had taken over a year for her to get pregnant and she had been monitoring the dates of her ovulation and ensuring that they had sex around those dates, and then she noted it all down. On this occasion, she had left on a work trip the week after she had ovulated, so she knew precisely the day she had got pregnant.

She explained this to the doctor, and for a second the mask slipped and she saw concern on the doctor’s face, the kind of puzzled concern that meant something was wrong, and then the professional countenance reasserted itself.

Let’s plan for Feb 3^rd, she said, and if baby comes early, then so much the better.

From then on, she had a bad feeling about her pregnancy. Two weeks later, she miscarried.

And now she had the same bad feeling again.

v.

It was light when she pulled up outside the house. The parking space she’d left was taken by a red Toyota Matrix. Her mother-in-law, Dr Edna Crowne, eminent cardiologist (retired), St Hugh’s College, Oxford alumna, self-elected family matriarch and all round pain in the backside, was visiting.

Edna would never admit it – possibly not even to herself – but Brian was a disappointment to her. Edna viewed herself as one of the great and good of the country, and, by extension (since England was self-evidently the greatest country on earth), of the human race. People like Edna were superior in intellect, class, and judgement. They knew better than other people about … well, about everything. Public policy, legal affairs, moral issues: Edna’s opinion was the final word.

It was also the final word on matters such as, how to bring up a child, and, specifically, her grandchild. Edna saw no distinction in terms of decision-making authority between a mother and a grandmother. She had as much claim on Anna as Julia, and much more than Brian had. This was why Anna was at a private school in the first place: Julia hadn’t ever considered it until Edna raised it at Anna’s third birthday party.

We should think about what schools (Julia had noted the plural) Anna should attend, Edna mentioned, a slice of sticky pink birthday cake untouched on the paper plate in front of her.

The local one, Julia replied.

Edna gave a thin smile. What about private education? It’s so much more – effective.

It would set her apart from her local friends, Julia said.

That’s rather the point, Edna replied. It puts her on a different path.

I don’t know, Julia said. I need to think about it.

But you do agree private education is better, don’t you? There’s a reason why the professions – at the higher levels, of course – are filled with people who went to good schools and universities.

Not all the good schools are private, Julia said. I went to state school and I’m a lawyer.

In a small town. Which is a fine achievement, but it’s hardly one of the magic circle firms. You see my point?

Julia mainly wanted to punch her, but she nodded. I suppose. But anyway, we can’t afford it.

Edna had been waiting for this. I’ll pay, she said. I want the best for my granddaughter.

And so Julia had ended up going along with it. It was hard to argue against logic that ran thus: good parents give their children the best they can afford; Edna will pay for private education, which is better for the child, therefore you should send her to private school. Edna made it seem as though sending her elsewhere was wilful neglect.

Julia wanted to point out that an expensive education – a Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire and then Warwick University – hadn’t put Brian on a path to a magic circle law firm. He was a junior school teacher, which, as far as most people were concerned, was a fine thing to be, but it did not fit with Edna’s view of success. Edna didn’t say so, but she thought her son was soft and lacking in ambition, and she didn’t intend for her granddaughter to inherit the same vices.

For Anna was the only one she had left. Amelie and Colin, the children of Simon and Laura, lived in Portland, Oregon, where Laura had grown up. Simon was older than Brian, and had left the UK with his family the year after Jim Crowne had disappeared. They didn’t hear much from him, apart from an occasional email to Brian.

It was another thing in the family that wasn’t talked about. Julia didn’t think she had ever heard Edna say Simon’s name. She knew from Brian that Laura and Edna did not get on, and that Edna blamed Laura for Simon moving away; a defeat which must have hurt Edna deeply, not only – or even mainly – because her son was gone, but because she lost. And with Simon gone that left Edna with Julia, Brian, and Anna.

Not that Edna liked Julia. As far as his mother was concerned Brian had married badly. This was not speculation on Julia’s part. She knew because Edna had told her in a prenuptial attempt to stop the wedding taking place.

You won’t be happy. You think he’s like you, but he’s not.

We love each other, Edna, whatever our backgrounds. He doesn’t need some horsey girl with a boarding school education and BBC English. Meaning: he doesn’t need someone like you.

Oh, I’d prefer it if he married someone like that, darling, I really would. But that’s not what I’m talking about now. This is not about what he needs, darling. It’s what you need. He won’t be enough for you.

At the time, Julia had thought she was saying it because she thought it might prove effective, rather than because she believed it; now, she realized that Edna was right.

And Edna knew something about unsuitable couples getting married. Julia had never understood how she and Jim had fallen for each other. He was a warm, considerate man, charming and handsome. It was easy to imagine a younger woman falling for him; Julia had entertained a few fantasies about him herself, in the early days of her and Brian’s relationship. Edna, however, was stern and upright and cold. They did not fit together. No wonder he left.

Warm as he was, he was nonetheless a distant father. He was dedicated to his grammar school and he gave himself to his work, at which he was very good. He was loved by the pupils, alumni and, for the most part, the staff; known for his careful and even-handed treatment of all those under his professional responsibility, and for his brisk dedication to their welfare. Jim Crowne never turned away from a prospective and deserving pupil in need – whatever their situation – and would use all the resources at his disposal to help them: arguing with the education authorities for more funding if he felt that more pupils deserved a place at the school, or leaning on alumni for donations to ensure that no child missed out on the school trips to Marrakech and Kiev and Hanoi that he made a central part of the school’s wider curriculum. As he was fond of saying, he was in the business of education, which meant he prepared kids for the world and not to pass exams. Jim Crowne was not fond of buzzwords, but he ensured that his school lived out the full meaning of the modern passion for ‘equality of opportunity’. And all he asked in return was that the pupils grasped those opportunities. He had no time for those that didn’t.

It was a shame that, like so many people who devote themselves to public service, he did not find time to devote the same attention to his own offspring, and Brian had often claimed that he only ever knew his father the head teacher, and not his father the man.

Anyway, all that belonged to the past. She had plenty to deal with in the here and now.

She opened her car door. Her feet were cold and she was hungry. She had a craving for a cup of sweet tea.

Edna was in the kitchen with Brian. She looked up as Julia entered. ‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘We were starting to worry. Thank God.’

‘Here I am,’ Julia said.

‘I’m not going to beat around the bush,’ Edna said. She was proud of the lack of beating around the bush in her life, was Edna. ‘I know things haven’t always been perfect between us, but now is the time for us to pull together as a family. We can resolve any differences when Anna is back among us.’

She stood up and took Julia’s hands between hers. Her fingers were cold and white, bloodless. ‘Julia,’ she said. ‘We can get through this.’ She placed a palm on Julia’s cheek, then pulled her into a loose, but still awkward, embrace. Julia was glad when it was over. ‘We can.’

Whatever she’d expected from Edna, it wasn’t this. Her mother-in-law had not hugged her – if hug was the word – since the wedding day, and that hug was for the guests as much as it was for Julia, if it was for Julia at all. Still, Julia was glad. The last thing she needed right now was Edna telling her she was a foul and irresponsible parent.

‘Thanks, Edna’ she said. ‘I appreciate it.’

‘The police called,’ Brian said. ‘There’s a press conference at noon.’

‘So soon?’ Julia said. ‘She’s only been gone one night.’

The news is out there, The cops said it might help get more people looking. Someone might have seen something.’

‘And we have to be there?’ Julia asked.

Brian nodded, his face drawn, his eyes on her, his expression unguarded. For a moment she was looking at the man she had fallen in love with, the father of her child, and she leaned forward and put her hand on his.

He pulled it away.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They reckon that an appeal from the parents is best. It gets people’s attention.’

Gets people’s attention.

This was her life now. She was a parent whose kid was missing. Who made tearful appeals on the television. It was impossible; she couldn’t believe it was happening. She couldn’t believe that she was going to have to shower and dress and deal with a roomful of cameras and reporters. She didn’t want to; it made it all seem so real, so incontrovertible. Some part of her still hoped it was all a mistake; that she would open Anna’s bedroom door and find her daughter fast asleep in her bed, and this would all be over. That was what she wanted. Not press conferences.

She closed her eyes. She felt dizzy and sick and she pushed her tea away.

She had to do it. If it brought Anna’s return any closer, she had to do it, but she could not do it alone. She picked up her mobile phone and called the only friend who could get her through this.

vi.

DI Wynne sat on the edge of the armchair. Julia was on the sofa.

‘I apologize for this,’ she said. ‘But it is a necessity. In any case like this we have to speak to the parents. I’m not suggesting that you are responsible, Mrs Crowne, but we have to examine every angle.’

Julia looked at her and almost laughed. ‘Am I a suspect?’

‘No. But we need to interview you. Mr Crowne, too. And your mother-in-law. Anybody who is connected to Anna.’

‘Fine,’ Julia said. ‘Go ahead.’

DI Wynne nodded. ‘Take me through the events of the day,’ she said. ‘In as much detail as you can.’

Julia paused, then began to recount what had happened: the meeting that overran, the dead phone, the dash to the school. Wynne listened intently, occasionally making notes.

‘Would you say that your marriage to Mr Crowne is healthy?’ she asked.

Julia shook her head. ‘No. We’re having some problems.’

‘What kind of problems?’

‘It’s more or less over,’ Julia said. ‘We’ve kind of grown apart.’

Wynne pursed her lips. ‘Is it an equal decision?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Julia said. ‘It’s more my decision.’

‘I see.’ Wynne paused. ‘Is Mr Crowne taking it well, would you say?’

Julia sat back. She frowned. ‘Are you suggesting Brian was behind this? He was at school.’

‘No,’ Wynne said. ‘I’m not suggesting that. Just asking questions.’ She closed her notebook. ‘That’s all. Thank you, Mrs Crowne.’

As Julia left the living room she passed Brian heading towards DI Wynne.

‘Your turn,’ she said.

vii.

Thirty minutes later Gill – a red-haired Scouser with a perpetual smile and a nervous energy that was infectious – was sitting beside her on the sofa.

‘It’ll be ok,’ she said. ‘You’ll be ok.’

‘It just makes it so real,’ Julia said. ‘All of a sudden we’re those parents, the ones on the TV doing the press conference. I don’t know how I can pull it together. I can’t even think, Gill. I’m either numb or thinking of Anna, of where she could be, who might have her—’

Her voice trailed off. There were brief moments when she managed to distract herself enough to achieve a kind of blankness, but they didn’t last. Before long the panic returned. She felt as if she was standing on a stormy beach trying to beat back the waves: it was impossible, they just kept coming, wave after wave, pounding her into submission. It was all she could do to keep on breathing.

‘You can do it,’ Gill said. ‘And you have to. I’ll be there. I’ll get you through it.’

If anyone could, it was Gill. She was one of those people who believe that they can do anything, and because they believe it they make it true. Julia first met her at a postnatal Yoga class; for Julia, it was a foray into exercise aimed solely at removing the baby weight. For Gill it was a gentle re-introduction to exercise aimed solely at getting her ready to return to Body Blast Boot Camp classes and marathon training.

When Gill was ready to move on from postnatal Yoga, she persuaded Julia to graduate with her. After one of the classes, her back aching, her face blotchy and red, Julia swore that she would never go back to another. After the second, she wondered if she might try one more. After the third, she was, if not exactly hooked, at least able to muster up the enthusiasm to get out of the house and into the gym two or three times a week.

She ended up in pretty good shape, flattish stomach, toned thighs, actual biceps, but then the pressure of work and motherhood took its toll, and the gym visits became once a week then once a month then not at all.

Gill, of course, stuck with it. For her it was a way of life, one of the things that she made sure she found time for. Work (she was a buyer for a light bulb manufacturer), her twin boys, exercise, and her husband, Trevor: these were her priorities and she took care of them all. It was made easier by the fact that Trevor, a triathlete plumber, was more or less the perfect husband. He insisted that they go out as a couple for dinner once a month, a rule he had not broken even when the twins were only a month old, scooping Gill out of the door between feeds for a rapid fire meal at a sushi restaurant. Add to this his habit of bringing home flowers every Friday – so that his sons would learn good habits when it came to looking after their mum – and his refusal to let her pay for anything when they were out, which was ridiculous as Gill earned as much as him and they shared a bank account, and he was pretty much as good as it got. He was old-fashioned, and Gill teased him for it, but he was also charming and romantic and Gill adored him.

‘She’s out there,’ Julia said. ‘My little girl. Somewhere in the world. I can’t tell you how it feels to know that she might be suffering.’

‘I can’t imagine,’ Gill said. ‘I don’t want to. But she’ll come back, Julia. You have to keep believing that.’

‘And it was my fault,’ Julia said. ‘If I hadn’t been late—’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Gill said. ‘It isn’t. It was a mistake. You couldn’t have known this would happen. We all make mistakes, Julia.’

‘I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking if only. If only I’d charged my phone. If only I’d left the meeting earlier. I could have stopped this. It’s hard to live with that knowledge.’

‘I bet it is,’ Gill said. ‘But that’s not the same as it being your fault. You aren’t responsible for the actions of whatever sick bastard took your daughter. There are always if onlys, Julia, always. But just remember: this is not your fault.’

Gill believed it, Julia could see. The problem was that she found it hard to agree.

‘And now,’ Gill continued, ‘you have a chance to do something to help fix it. Come on. Let’s get ready for this press conference.’

At the police station, Julia and Brian followed DI Wynne into an office. She motioned for them to sit down.

‘Let me give you an update,’ she said. ‘Although I’m afraid that there isn’t all that much to say.’ She sat forward, her arms folded, her elbows resting on her desk. It was spotless, any paperwork filed away. ‘We had officers out all night, as well as the dog teams. I have to say that they are pretty effective at picking up a scent, but there was nothing.’

‘What next?’ Brian asked.

‘We keep looking. Something might show up – some clothing, a shoe, a schoolbook. And … ’ she paused, and swallowed, ‘we deployed the dive teams this morning. They’re searching local waterways. Canals, ponds, rivers.’

Julia felt light-headed, the edges of her vision dissolving into stars. She blinked, trying to dismiss the image of a small, muddied corpse being dragged from a silted canal. She swayed, and gripped the edge of her chair for support.