by Tess Stimson
The UK is one of the most surveilled nations on the planet, with more CCTV cameras per head of population in London than anywhere in the world, except China.
And the woman who has stolen my daughter managed to avoid all of them.
In the last week, the police have trawled through hundreds of hours of footage from the Tube and haven’t found a single frame of a young blonde girl matching my description boarding a train.
Not at Victoria; not anywhere on the underground system.
No witnesses who saw either her or the woman in the fleece, despite extensive appeals. We have no proof either of them were ever on that train, let alone that the child I saw was Lottie.
It’s clear the police think I imagined the whole thing, and I’m starting to wonder if they’re right. Maybe the Valium messed with my head, taking fragments of memory and longing and jumbling them together. Wishful thinking. When you think of the strain she’s been under …
Jack Murtaugh is the only person who doesn’t question my account or my sanity. ‘Don’t start second-guessing yourself now,’ he says when we meet at his office. ‘Trust your gut. The woman you saw must have known where the cameras were and avoided them, which is why she didn’t show up in the footage. No one gets that lucky otherwise.’
‘Why was she in London with Lottie?’ I ask. ‘How did they get here?’
‘We may know the answer to that soon,’ Jack says.
As improbable as it seems to look at him now, shambling and rumpled as he is, Jack was in the SBS before he became an MP. His special ops unit was responsible for intelligence gathering and maritime counter-terrorism operations, and he still has friends in dark places.
He fiddles briefly with his phone and then turns the screen towards me. It’s paused on the opening frames of a grainy black and white video. I’ve seen it a thousand times since it was first shown to me in Washington, but I still don’t know if it’s my daughter in the man’s tattooed arms.
‘This man was your friend,’ Jack says. ‘I need you to be sure you want me to do this, Alex.’
‘He was never my friend,’ I say coolly.
When the video came to light, my friend fled the jurisdiction of both British and American law enforcement without even attempting to clear his name. In my eyes, that makes him guilty until proven innocent.
I don’t care about the niceties of the law any more. How he’s connected to the woman in London, to Lottie, I have no idea, but if he knows something about my daughter, where she is, I want that information.
And I don’t give a damn how we get it.
chapter 39
alex
Jack may believe in me, but I don’t. For my own peace of mind, I need to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating; that I really saw Lottie on that train.
At the weekend, I go down to my parents’. The logo I thought I saw on the woman’s fleece came to me from somewhere. I just have to find it.
‘Why don’t you let the police handle it, love?’ Mum says, as I kneel beside the bookcase in my parents’ living room. ‘They know what they’re doing.’
I pull another photo album off the bottom shelf. ‘Mum, I told you, they don’t even believe she was on the train.’
‘Alex, love. It’s no reflection on you. But—’
‘It was Lottie,’ I say.
‘You’re certain, are you?’ Dad says. ‘Certain enough to shut down the rest of the investigation and throw everything you have at this?’
I pause at that. Memory plays strange tricks on us; I know that better than anyone. In the last two years I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Lottie’s reflection in a shop window or glimpsed her blonde head ahead of me in a crowd. You see what you want to see.
‘There is no “investigation” any more,’ I say. ‘Unless we get more government funding, it’s over anyway.’
Mum watches me sadly as I flip through the pages of the album. She thinks I’m on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She says she believes I believe I saw Lottie, which means she doesn’t think I saw her at all.
‘Darling, you’re not making any sense,’ she says.
‘None of this makes any sense,’ I say.
She and Dad spend the weekend tiptoeing around the subject, treading on eggshells, clearly afraid of setting me off. I put aside my agnostic convictions and go to church with Mum on Sunday morning because she asks me to, but it doesn’t bring me any peace. Sitting in the pew, I feel raw and exposed, as if I have a target on my back. Afterwards, fellow parishioners come up and tell me how sorry they are about the ‘false alarm’ in London.
When we get home, Dad hands me a shoebox filled with loose photographs that didn’t make it into the albums. ‘Might as well be sure,’ he says.
My throat tightens. ‘Thanks, Dad.’
I sit down at the dining table and sift through the pictures. We returned to Devon year after year throughout my childhood and there are photographs of me and Harriet at every age from toddlers to teens. During those holidays at South Weald House, when we only had each other for company, we shared a sisterly rapport that never quite translated back to normal life. The two of us used to watch TV together in the hotel bedroom when Mum and Dad had gone to the pub nearby and we were supposed to be asleep. We’d take it in turns to be lookout at the window and as soon as we saw them walking back up the hill to the B&B, we’d turn off the TV and jump back into bed. In those moments of complicity, we were as close as we ever came to being friends.
I scoop the photos into a neat heap and put them back in the box. Most of them are rejects, either out of focus or marred by a finger across the lens. God knows why Mum even kept them—
And then there it is.
At my shout, Mum hurries in from the kitchen, her hands dripping water and soapsuds. She leans over my shoulder and peers at the photo in my hand.
Harriet and I are sitting cross-legged with another little girl on a lawn somewhere, ice-cream cones melting in our hands. We look to be about seven and nine years old. Behind us, a woman in her late forties is laughing, her hand raised to shade her eyes against the sun. She looks familiar, but I can’t place her.
‘See her T-shirt? That’s the logo I saw on the train,’ I say.
‘Mrs Garton,’ Mum says, remembering. ‘She was the housekeeper at South Weald House. Lovely woman. Harriet was friends with her daughter; that’s her, sitting next to you.’ She turns to Dad as he puts down his paper and gets up from his chair. ‘What was the girl’s name, Tony?’
‘Buggered if I know.’
‘Katie … no, Cathy, that’s it. But it can’t have been Mrs Garton you saw, love. She died years ago.’
‘It wasn’t her,’ I say impatiently. ‘But it was the same logo. The woman I saw was wearing a fleece, not a T-shirt, but it was definitely the same design.’
I didn’t imagine it. I’m not going crazy.
A South Weald House logo did exist. There was a staff uniform, of sorts.
Whoever the police spoke to, that retired member of staff they traced, was wrong.
Or lying.
The photograph itself doesn’t prove anything. I could be mixing up childhood memories with something I wanted to see, something that was never really there. But this will give detectives something tangible to work with. The fact I can prove the logo was real gives my story credibility on some level, at least.
‘The police should be able to trace the manufacturer of those T-shirts,’ Dad says. ‘Find out who bought them. Oh, love.’
I wasn’t imagining it. It was Lottie I saw. And for the first time in two years, I have actually done something to help her.
The doorbell rings and I get up from the table. ‘I’ll go,’ I say.
‘It’s probably just Wendy from next door,’ Mum says, already heading into the kitchen. ‘She said she’d drop by to borrow some cinnamon. Tell her I’ll be right there.’
I tuck the photograph into my bag on the console in the hall so that it doesn’t get lost, an
d open the front door.
‘Hello, Alex,’ Marc says.
chapter 40
quinn
Danny parks the car nose-in to the kerb beneath a palm tree and turns off the ignition.
‘It’s the second block from the left,’ the investigator tells Quinn, pointing towards the row of high-rise apartments across the street. ‘Al Dhafrah 1. His place is on the fourth floor, apartment E.’
‘What time does he usually get home?’
‘It varies. But he should be there by now.’
‘You stay here,’ Quinn says to Danny. ‘I don’t want to go in mob-handed. There may be more than one exit, so text me if you see him come out. Phil, just bring the handheld camera for now. If he agrees to a sit-down, we can come back for lights.’
Phil hitches his camera bag onto his shoulder. ‘How does a bloody tennis instructor afford to live in a place like this?’ he asks as they cross the road and skirt neatly manicured box hedges. The building isn’t flashy, but it’s a nice neighbourhood, and the cars parked along the street are Mercedes and BMWs.
‘It’s Dubai,’ Quinn says. ‘No income tax, remember. And he’s probably making a fortune off bored expat housewives at the country club. He’s a good-looking guy.’
‘I’m in the wrong business.’
‘You and me both.’
She leads the way up a shallow flight of steps into the air-conditioned marble lobby. There’s no doorman or security. Quinn presses the button for the lift and the door immediately opens, but then closes again. She hits it a second time and the same thing happens. There’s something jammed in the narrow gap between the elevator and the lift shaft.
‘Fuck,’ Quinn says. ‘We’ll have to take the stairs. I’ll see you up there.’
The damage to her spine makes stairs particularly challenging. Phil is waiting for her when she finally reaches the fourth floor, his camera already out and on his shoulder.
She’s surprised to see the door to apartment E ajar. ‘Did you knock?’ she asks.
‘It was open when I got here.’
She pushes it wider. ‘Hello?’ she calls.
There’s no response. She throws Phil a warning glance. A lothario tennis instructor may not seem like much of a threat, but he’s been on the run from the FBI for almost two years. Who knows what he’s capable of if he’s backed into a corner.
As they step into the hall, Phil points to a pink doll’s pushchair on its side in the hall. Her heartbeat quickens. Officially, this man doesn’t have kids, but Danny’s intel is right: there is a little girl living here.
Quinn buzzes with adrenaline. If they find Lottie Martini it’ll be the biggest scoop of her career. She’s already had Danny set things in motion so they can spirit the kid out of the country on a false passport, via Bahrain and Cyprus. She has no intention of playing by the rules and taking Lottie to the British embassy, only to have some government jobsworth slap her with a court injunction before she has the chance to tell the story. Once Lottie’s on British soil, no one’s going to give a shit how she got there.
They edge warily down the hall towards the open-plan living room, but it’s deserted. Quinn glances out onto the balcony and checks a couple of doors leading off the kitchen, but there’s no one in the bathroom or walk-in pantry, either.
She touches a half-drunk mug of coffee on the kitchen counter: still warm. Someone clearly left in a hurry, and not long ago.
‘Do you think he was tipped off?’ Phil asks.
She shrugs. ‘It’s possible—’
There’s a muffled thud from the back of the apartment.
Phil is nearer. He flings open the door to a bedroom just off the hall. The blackout blinds are down and it takes a moment for their eyes to adjust to the gloom.
A figure looms out of the darkness. Phil ducks, cursing, and throws himself at the man’s legs, dropping his camera as he brings him down. There’s a brief tussle, but Phil grew up in the roughest part of Manchester’s Moss Side. By the time Quinn finds the light switch, he has the other man pinned in an armlock beneath him on the floor.
The man struggles, but the fight has gone out of him.
‘Jesus,’ Phil pants. ‘Keep the fuck still and I’ll get off you.’
The other man stops squirming. Phil lets him go and the man wriggles awkwardly into a sitting position against the bed, breathing heavily.
‘What the fuck did you do to him?’ Quinn demands.
Phil snorts. ‘Give over. That wasn’t me.’
He’s right: there’s no way the brief altercation she just witnessed caused these injuries. Clearly someone got to the man before they did. His face is pulped to a bloody mess. One eye is already swollen shut and his nose is mashed almost sideways against his cheek. He’s not going to be breaking many hearts at the tennis club anytime soon.
He coughs painfully, and spits out blood and bits of teeth.
‘Christ almighty,’ Phil says. ‘What happened to you?’
The man swivels his good eye towards the door.
‘There’s no one else here,’ Quinn says. ‘You’re OK, for now.’
Phil picks up his camera and shakes it. It rattles ominously. ‘Fuck.’ He throws the man a dirty look. ‘Asshole. You sure this is the right guy, Quinn?’
She crouches down beside the man and grabs his right hand, turning it over so they can both see the inside of his wrist. A tattoo of a compass rose, identical to the one in the infamous video.
‘Are you Ian Dutton?’ Quinn asks.
The man sucks in a breath and then nods.
‘What happened? Do you know who did this?’
The man glances towards the door again. He’s not worried about someone lurking in the hall, she realises suddenly: he’s looking towards the wardrobe.
Phil sees it, too. At Quinn’s nod, he flings opens the closet door.
Cowering on the floor of the walk-in wardrobe, tangled amongst the trainers and tennis rackets, is a little girl.
chapter 41
alex
Much as I might want to, I can’t leave Marc standing on the doorstep. I’ve been caught out too many times by paps with long lenses and, with the Foundation’s funding on the line, I don’t need any more scandal.
‘I’ll be right there, Wendy!’ Mum calls from the kitchen. ‘I wasn’t sure if you wanted the ground cinnamon or the—’
She stops dead as she sees Marc standing in the hallway.
‘Actually, I think I’ll just take this over to Wendy now,’ she says stiffly. ‘Save her a trip. Nice to see you again, Marc.’
‘You too, Mrs Johnson.’
She doesn’t tell him to call her Mary, as she has done every time they’ve met since I left college. She can’t even meet his eye, in fact, as she hangs her apron on the newel post and goes next door.
‘Come into the study,’ I tell Marc. I don’t want Dad to know he’s here. He’s not as forgiving as Mum.
Marc hovers awkwardly by the door. I gesture impatiently towards the sofa. ‘You’re here now. Sit down.’
‘I know you don’t want to see me,’ he says. ‘But I had to come when I heard the news. I was in South Africa last week or I’d have come sooner.’
‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’
‘Do you really think you saw Lottie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Alex, that’s incredible,’ Marc says. ‘It’s only a matter of time, now. The police will be able to track—’
‘We both know you don’t believe it was her. Let’s drop the act. Why are you really here?’
He stares down at his hands, which are loosely clasped between his knees. No wedding ring, of course. His hair is thinning on top, I notice, and he’s lost weight since I last saw him, almost a year ago. I know it’s not fair to blame him for everything that happened, but I’ve long since lost the capacity to shoulder anyone’s pain but my own.
‘You know why I’m here,’ he says.
‘Nothing’s changed,’ I say.
He lo
oks up, his expression hunted. There are bags beneath his eyes and his skin has a grey pallor. ‘Alex, it was just a kiss.’
‘We both know that’s not true,’ I say.
I’m not such a delicate flower that I can’t cope with a man who crosses the line and presses his suit where it’s not wanted. I swim with lawyers. I’m used to sharks.
And it was ‘only’ a kiss. I was never in any physical danger; Marc backed off the second I slapped him down. If it’d been anyone else, it would barely have registered.
But it wasn’t anyone else. It was Marc.
We’d both been working late on a new marketing campaign at the Foundation. The rest of the team had left the office and, when we’d finally finished work, drained and exhausted, Marc had offered to give me a lift home as he had so many times before. Why wouldn’t I accept? We’d been friends for more than a decade. There had never been a question of anything more between us. Marc was married.
And then, as he parked outside my house, he’d leaned across and kissed me.
Even as I shoved him away, he confessed he was in love with me and had been for years. As if that made it better.
An impulsive kiss, a clumsy pass: that I could have forgiven. But Lottie was abducted from his wedding. And now he was telling me it was all a mistake, because he’d been in love with me the whole time.
He should never have married Sian.
Lottie should never have been in Florida.
A photo of Marc’s unwelcome kiss, taken by a nosy neighbour, had ended up in the papers that weekend. Sian threw Marc out and I had the epithet home-wrecker to add to unfit mother and whore. Donations to the Foundation dropped off sharply and, even though Marc left the board, they’ve never really recovered.
Marc couldn’t have known the butterfly effect of his choices. But, God help me, I still can’t forgive him. I’ve tried to get past it, but I can’t. Every time I look at him, I see a wedding that shouldn’t have happened, a lie that cost me my daughter.
