Stolen

by Tess Stimson

Her phone pings with a news-feed alert and she leans in to talk to Phil, whose eye is glued to his camera viewfinder. ‘Can you stay with this till they’re done?’ she says. ‘I need to call the Desk.’

  ‘Want me to toss the mother any questions?’

  ‘She isn’t taking any. I won’t be long, anyway.’

  Quinn hits speed dial before she’s even out of the conference room. ‘Sandy, did you just see what dropped on the wires about Raqqa?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Quinn. Terry’s on it.’

  ‘Fuck Terry. I should be there.’

  ‘No one’s going there while the Russians are bombing the shit out of the place,’ the assignment editor says. ‘Least of all you.’

  ‘Come on, Sandy,’ she presses. ‘Terry doesn’t have the contacts on the ground like I do. He’ll never get inside the city. You know I’m the right person for this.’

  ‘Have they found the missing kid yet?’

  She sighs impatiently. ‘I can hand this story over to Daryl or Anya. They don’t need to sit on Biden and Warren every minute of the day. Or you can fly someone out from London.’ She hates having to beg, but she’s literally given her right arm for this story. ‘Please, Sandy. I can go directly to Raqqa from right here, I’ve got all my personal shit with me. I’ll swing through the Beirut Bureau and pick up—’

  ‘Forget it, Quinn. Christie would have my balls.’

  Christie Bradley, the first female editor in INN’s history, and possibly the only person, other than Marnie, who Quinn respects. She’s been Quinn’s inspiration since she first joined INN as an entry-level desk assistant fourteen years ago, one of an elite band of fearless reporters like Christiane Amanpour and Christina Lamb who blazed a trail for women like Quinn to follow.

  ‘You want me to sign a waiver?’ Quinn tells Sandy. ‘No one’s going to sue you if I get killed. Come on, Christie will be fine with it—’

  ‘You’re on speakerphone,’ a voice says. ‘And I bloody well am not fine with it, Quinn, so quit pushing.’

  Christie sat by Quinn’s bed in the ICU all night after she was medevacked out of Syria, waiting for her to regain consciousness, and the first thing she said when Quinn came round was, ‘Your story led the bulletins.’ Quinn thought Christie would get it.

  ‘You know I’m right,’ Quinn says. ‘No one knows that story like I do.’

  ‘And when I think you’re ready for it, it’ll be all yours.’

  Quinn takes another slug from her bottle. The vodka isn’t sitting well with her.

  Maybe skipping lunch was a bad idea.

  ‘You’re not being sidelined, Quinn. This missing kid is a lead story. I want it done properly, no shortcuts. Once it wraps up, then we’ll talk about Raqqa.’

  Quinn seethes as she slips her phone back into her jeans. Lead story or not, Daryl or Anya could easily handle it. It’s a waste of firepower to keep her here when she could be in Syria.

  The press conference has finished by the time she returns to the business centre and everyone bar the TV crews has left. The room dims abruptly as the powerful lights are turned off and Quinn picks her way around producers coiling cables and packing equipment away.

  ‘Can you go out and get me some shots of the beach?’ Quinn asks her cameraman. ‘They’re not going to let us get too close, but you should be able to get some long shots from the shore. And the gate from the beach to the hotel. Give me something moody. Maybe a tracking shot along the alley round the side of the hotel, too, if you can get it.’

  She ducks out onto the terrace behind the conference room and lights a cigarette. The area in front of the pool where the reception took place is sealed off with police tape, but she can still get a sense of the key locations in this story, and how they relate geographically to one another.

  She inhales a deep hit of nicotine as she walks from the hotel to the beach. Lottie Martini disappeared in more or less broad daylight, under the noses of a hundred wedding guests. Surely the kid would have screamed and yelled if some weirdo she didn’t know had grabbed her off the beach? Even in the chaos of a crowd, you’d think someone would’ve noticed.

  Of course, it’s conceivable he – or she – lured the kid away with some plausible story, but odds are she went with someone she knew.

  Quinn unscrews the cap of her Evian bottle again. This whole thing is such a fucking waste of time. It’ll turn out to be the mother, or a boyfriend. It always is. She could be on her way to the Middle East right now, and instead she’s stuck babysitting a seedy domestic drama.

  As she tilts back her head to drain the bottle, Alexa Martini comes out onto the balcony a floor above her. The woman stands for a long moment with her hands on the railing, staring out to sea like a ship’s figurehead. Quinn can’t see her face, but her posture is ramrod straight. It’s like she’s carved out of ice.

  Someone comes out onto the balcony to join her. A man; too young to be her dad. Quinn edges forward to get a better view. It’s the bridegroom. Marc something-or-other. Good-looking guy.

  He puts his arm around the small of Alexa’s waist, and she leans back against him. She’s not made of ice now. They look like newlyweds – except this isn’t the woman he just married.

  Interesting.

  Quinn screws the top back on the empty plastic bottle and dumps it in the nearest recycling bin. Her spidey senses are tingling again.

  Every good story begins with a loose thread.

  five days missing

  chapter 18

  alex

  At sunrise on the fifth full day since Lottie’s disappearance, I go down to the beach where I last saw my daughter. The police tape has finally been removed, the wedding arch dismantled and the gilt chairs stacked and put away. It’s as though the last traces of my daughter are being deliberately erased.

  Despite all the police activity, the helicopters and divers and searchers on the ground, despite the Amber alert and the press appeal, it feels as if I’m the only one still looking for Lottie. The rest of the world already wants to move on.

  I walk along the shoreline, scanning the sand in front of me, as if looking for clues. I’m not sure what I expect to find: the missing pink ballet shoe, a ribbon from her hair, some message scrawled in the sand that only I can decipher?

  There isn’t a minute in the day when I don’t go back to the moment I last saw my girl, cradling the image like fine china in my mind’s eye. Lottie sits on her chair, her head turned away from me. Her hair escapes from her plait, an unearthly, silvery nimbus around her head. Her plump arms are crossed over her chest.

  With each return to the memory, there is a sharper clarity, a new detail summoned from my subconscious: a lengthening shadow falling across the sand behind my daughter, a black skimmer flying over the shallows, looking for fish. Lottie swings her legs and I think – no, I’m sure – that she’s already kicked off her pink shoes. She’s perched on the edge of the gilt chair, which is too high for her, so she can dig her bare toes into the sand. Another minute, and she’ll slide off her seat.

  Except I know I couldn’t see her feet from where I was sitting, four rows behind her. The angle of sight from my chair afforded me a partial glimpse of my daughter from the shoulders up, nothing more. Sifting through my memories may prove as futile as my search along the sand.

  Bates now seems convinced we’re dealing with a stranger abduction, but I know my daughter would never have gone with someone she didn’t trust. If the ‘thin man’ Catherine saw is connected to Lottie’s disappearance, he wasn’t working alone. Someone Lottie knew persuaded her to leave the beach and led her to him. Someone with whom she felt safe.

  It was Lieutenant Bates who first pointed this out, but she’s now pivoted away from her own theory.

  Because of the hair.

  They couldn’t be sure it was Lottie’s, Bates said, when she handed it to me. They hadn’t had time to run the DNA tests. But the tangled hanks of hair in the bag were the same white-blonde as my daughter’s, the same length and textu
re. The ends were blunt where they’d been hacked from her head.

  I only just made it to the bathroom in time. I vomited into the lavatory until there was nothing left but bile, consumed by the thought of the terror my daughter must have felt. Be feeling.

  If the lieutenant’s intention was to make me emotional and sympathetic for the TV appeal, it backfired. The difference between the British and American response to crisis, I suppose. I’ve seen footage of myself at the press conference, which took place just ten minutes later. It is clear to me I was in shock, barely able to function. I read Bates’ prepared script like an automaton. But to anyone watching, I must’ve looked like I didn’t care.

  This isn’t a popularity contest: my child is missing and it shouldn’t matter whether I’m liked. But if people are suspicious of me, if they think I had something to do with my daughter’s disappearance, they won’t be out there, looking for her.

  It’s as if Lottie has vanished into thin air. Despite dozens of reported sightings all over Florida, not one has turned into a definitive lead. Forensic teams have combed every inch of the motel room where her hair was found, but they’re looking for a needle in a haystack. There are hundreds of fingerprints from previous guests they have to rule out, even supposing the kidnapper was careless enough to leave his own. Unless he’s been caught before, they won’t be on the police database anyway.

  Five days since my baby was stolen from me, and the police are no closer to finding her than when they started.

  I reach the end of the beach, where it gives way to a wide drainage culvert, and turn back. The crenellated, primrose-yellow hotel rises like a tiered cake against another azure Florida sky. It’s a little cooler today, less humid, and a soft breeze lifts the hair on the nape of my neck. A perfect, bucket-and-spade beach day.

  Lottie’s photo has been on the front page of newspapers across Florida and at home in the UK, and the local TV stations have been running her disappearance as their top story for days. But the media is already starting to lose interest. We’ve had virtually no uptake from national networks, which means if Lottie’s been taken out of Florida, no one’s looking for her. I know Bates and Lorenz think she’s dead. Even my parents are trying to prepare me for the worst.

  But Lottie is alive. My daughter is alive. She’s tenacious, determined, ferocious. She couldn’t be extinguished without creating a disturbance, a rent in the fabric of the world that I would feel. We’re not looking in the right places, that’s all.

  Somewhere, buried in the back alleys and dark hallways of my memories, is the key to all of this.

  I just have to find it.

  six days missing

  chapter 19

  alex

  I’m on the beach again, following what has now become a familiar route, when my sister calls me. I’m aware I’ve become a local curiosity, like a Victorian fisherman’s widow haunting the wharf; I feel the eyes follow me as I walk along the sand. There are pictures of me in the local papers: grieving mother’s lonely vigil. But I can’t stay away. I feel close to Lottie here.

  I watch the flaming sun sink into the glittering silver sea. Sunset: the golden hour, beloved by photographers for its warm, flattering light.

  The hour my daughter disappeared.

  ‘What time is it where you are?’ I ask Harriet.

  ‘I don’t know. Late. Or early, I suppose. I couldn’t sleep. How are you doing?’

  ‘Not good.’

  ‘I wish I could be there,’ Harriet says. ‘I just don’t want to get in the way. I thought I could do more good here, trying to keep the press interested.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, and almost mean it.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ she says. ‘What about money? Do you—’

  ‘I’m good. The hotel says I can stay here as long as I need. Mum and Dad, too.’

  Lottie and I should have been checking out today. Our flight home is scheduled this afternoon. One of the senior partners at Muysken Ritter called me the day after the press conference to tell me that the resources of the firm are at my disposal; I only have to ask. I’m not to worry about work. They’ve redistributed my cases to my colleagues and put me on paid leave. I feel as if I’m letting my clients down.

  ‘I’ve told Mum and Dad to stay as long as you need them,’ Harriet says. ‘I’ll cover their expenses every month till this is over. Mungo can afford it. We want to do it.’

  I can’t imagine another week of not knowing where Lottie is, never mind another month.

  As I say goodbye to my sister and pocket my phone, I see Marc coming down the beach towards me. My brain reflexively processes this as I do everything now, through the prism of Lottie’s disappearance: he isn’t running, so she hasn’t been found. My parents have done their best to look after me, but supporting them through their own grief depletes what little reserves I have. Marc is the one who’s held me together.

  He hasn’t left my side since Lottie went missing.

  He’s a small man, Marc, short and wiry, like a jockey. His features are irregular, unremarkable. But he’s constantly in motion, filled with barely suppressed energy. He’s set up a website and GoFundMe account for Lottie, and become our de facto media liaison officer. He can’t stay here forever, but I have no idea how I’ll manage without him.

  I know what Sian thinks. She’s always felt there’s more to our relationship than either of us will admit. Perhaps she’s right.

  He’s holding his phone out to me now, turned sideways so I can see the video paused on the screen. I can’t tell from his expression if it is good news or bad.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he says.

  For a moment, I wonder why he’s showing me footage of the president of the United States fielding questions about China from the steps of his Florida estate at Mar-a-Lago. I wait impatiently for the next story, the one about Lottie.

  And then suddenly the president interrupts his own press conference.

  ‘This kidnap, this Lottie Martini, did you hear about that?’ he says. ‘Here, in Florida, in this great state. Did you hear about it? It’s a horrible thing, a horrible thing. A girl, a little girl, I mean, British. She’s British. I love England. We have a great relationship, they love me over there. I have a mother born in Scotland. And as you know, Stornoway is serious Scotland. You don’t get any more serious than that. It’s so beautiful. My mother loved Scotland. My mother also loved the Queen.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I breathe.

  ‘This is going to change everything,’ Marc says.

  ‘That’s good, isn’t it? Everyone’s going to be looking for her after this!’

  ‘Yes, but it also means the police are going to be swamped with calls and sightings from Alaska to Honolulu,’ Marc says, as we turn and walk briskly back towards the hotel. ‘They’re going to have to check out every single one of them. It’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack. They don’t have the manpower for this. We need to help triage the calls, so they can focus their attention on the ones that could be genuine.’

  ‘Us? How are we supposed to do that?’

  ‘It’s easy enough to weed out the time-wasters with a few simple questions. Bates says at least half the tips coming in are sightings of kids who aren’t even close to the right age. Teenagers, some of them. But the calls clog up the lines. That’s something we can help with.’

  He stops by the gate from the beach to the hotel. A makeshift shrine has developed there over the past few days: flowers wilting in the Florida heat, cheap teddy-bears made in China, bobbing Frozen helium balloons. Those who leave them mean well, but I can’t bear it; it’s like Lottie is already dead.

  ‘This is going to explode now,’ Marc says, turning back to me. ‘We’re going to have the world’s press on our doorstep. Alex, they’re going to find out about Kirkwood Place.’

  THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD

  COMMENTARY by Lisa Jenkins

  TIME and again over the last few days we’ve heard it: ‘
I would never have left my child alone like that.’ We shake our heads, our faces grave, and reassure one another such a tragedy could never happen to us, because we would never take such a terrible risk.

  But as we cling to the hands of our own sons and daughters just that little bit tighter this week, an uneasy voice inside us calls us out for the hypocrites we are.

  It’s so much more comfortable to think that someone’s at fault, and point the finger at Alexa Martini.

  The truth is, there but for the grace of God go all of us. Lottie’s mother only did what all of us have done in some form or another.

  Alexa Martini is now living an unspeakable nightmare, blaming herself for allowing her daughter to walk a hundred yards from a beach to a wedding reception with four other young bridesmaids, instead of taking her child’s hand herself.

  Random

  Sometimes dreadful things happen completely at random. The mother we saw this week pleading to whoever had taken her daughter could just as easily be you or me. And that’s what terrifies us, and, in our fear, we look for someone to blame. When is a child old enough to use a public bathroom alone? To get the bus to school? What age should you let them stay in the house without a babysitter when you have an evening out? Ten? Twelve?

  We’ve all left a child in the car while we nipped into the post office, or allowed them to walk down to the corner shop for some sweets, telling ourselves we can’t wrap them in cotton wool forever.

  We know the risk of anything happening to them is statistically small, and yet we can’t help breathing a sigh of relief when they come back safe and sound.

  It’s tempting to blame Lottie’s mother because we want to believe we can stop awful things happening to our children. We have a desperate need to feel we can control our lives.

  Lottie wasn’t snatched from a rough council estate, while her drug-addled single mother entertained her boyfriend. This happened in a luxury resort to a professional, educated woman. And that’s why we’ve been so busy protecting ourselves by saying: ‘I’d never have done that.’ Alexa Martini wasn’t neglectful or thoughtless. She made the kind of decision every parent does on a daily basis. She shouldn’t be condemned for that.