The Flower Girls

by Alice Clark-Platts

  Hillier shakes her head. ‘Georgie’s disappearance doesn’t meet the criteria for an alert. At least not at the present time,’ she answers. ‘Realistically, someone from outside the hotel would have struggled to get up to Balcombe last night, let alone remove a child in that weather.’ She looks at Declan’s expression. ‘I’m not ruling anything out,’ she says. ‘But a child rescue alert is only used in specific circumstances where the public can help us find a missing child. We haven’t established that Georgie has left the perimeter of the hotel as yet. We need to rule out the beach and the surrounding land which the coastguard is doing right now. The relevant public are the guests here, the staff, not anyone in a wider vicinity. Please trust me,’ she says again. ‘We know what we’re doing.’

  Jane Greenstreet pushes her hair out of her face and looks searchingly at her. ‘You promise?’ she asks desperately.

  ‘I swear,’ Hillier says, before turning and leaving the room.

  Upstairs, from her bedroom window, Hazel has watched Hillier and the other policemen and women arrive. She sits winding her arms around herself and shivering. Jonny and Evie have gone down to breakfast but she can’t stomach a thing. Seeing the police has brought back the fear, visceral and hot. She feels panic rise in her, tries to swallow it down but can’t. Her eyes are fixed on the horizon, at the place where the cliff edge meets the sky, the white of the snow almost indiscernible from the pale grey above. Down there, past the snow-covered heather, is the marled sea, bottle-green and angry. Is that where Georgie is? she thinks.

  Oh, Georgie, come home, she pleads. Come back and then all of this will be over. Where are you, Georgie? Where are you?

  Tears begin to fall from Hazel’s eyes and she whirls round, her open suitcase the first item she sees. She hefts it onto the bed, and starts to throw things in. Some hers, some Jonny’s, it doesn’t matter. If she can just get out of here, she can work this out. She can drive away, back into civilisation where there is noise and the snow has melted and gone and she can think about what to do. She’s got everything now, she estimates, and slams the case shut, drags it onto the floor. And then she’s opening the door and is out in the corridor. She’s boiling, sweating underneath her jumper and jeans, the case running along awkwardly behind her on its wheels. She’ll call Jonny later, tell him where she’s gone. Some travel inn on the motorway where no one can find her, where no one will know who she is.

  The case bumps along the carpet until she reaches the top of the stairs that lead directly to reception. Hazel pauses, breathing hard, straining to hear whether anyone is down there. She has the car keys in her other hand and their car is parked five spaces away from the front door. For some reason, she counted them when they arrived the day before yesterday. It’s as if she knew she would have to escape at some point. That nowhere is ever safe for her, that eventually she will have to resume running.

  But now she just has to make it to the car and then pray that they’ve cleared the driveway of snow so that she can get out. They must have, it occurs to her sharply, otherwise how would the police have got up here? Once she’s beyond the hotel grounds, she can make it.

  Hazel begins to pull the case down behind her as she descends. Why has she brought it? she thinks. So stupid. She doesn’t need clothes. She just needs her purse and the car keys. Too late now. She carries on, trying to make as little noise as possible. She rounds the bend on the small landing in the middle of the stairs, and halts as sounds emerge from below. She waits until she sees a guest leave the reception desk. She can hear the receptionist tapping on her computer. Does that matter? Will the girl stop her? Ask where she’s going with her case? So idiotic to bring it, she tells herself again. Should she just leave it here on the stairs? Walk down casually without it, and out of the door to freedom?

  ‘Hello there,’ a voice says softly in her ear.

  Hazel freezes.

  ‘Checking out early, are you?’

  Hazel is too terrified to turn around; to see what she imagines – what she knows – is a policeman, standing behind her. What will she say? How can she get herself out of this nightmare? She swallows, tears springing once again to her eyes.

  ‘I wouldn’t leave if I were you,’ the voice continues. ‘It wouldn’t look good and you know it …

  ‘. . . Rosie.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1997

  The baby has stopped crying for the moment. Her face, which for the last hour had been scrunched up and covered in snot, has flattened, exhausted by her yelling. Her little chest still heaves, though, as she hiccups in oxygen, her eyes wide as she stares at Laurel and Rosie.

  The girls gather the baby like hens rustling a chick to one side, pushing her into the bushes, squashing themselves into the space only they know, where only they have been before. The movement makes the baby cry again, but Laurel and Rosie wear exhilarated expressions, their hearts big in their chests, thumping from the heat and the repeated realisation that the baby is with them.

  It was never said out loud, the game of taking the baby. It was just there one day in that unspoken way they have between the two of them. A charm or a spell that, once it had been cast, was as binding as the bell at breaktime or their repeated refusal of broccoli. Skipping in their garden, opening the gate and dancing towards the playground on their toes, Laurel and Rosie had known in their bones that soon a baby would come, a round, chunky baby with a delicious smile and open hands. The baby would want to play with them, that was also certain. And they would go to their secret place, down into the gully scored through the grass where the canal used to run under the willow tree. There, the earth was dark and dank and the leaves made a bower perfect for hiding in.

  The game was usually ‘schools’, or sometimes Laurel wanted to play ‘Saturday Night’, which Rosie didn’t really understand but pretended to. This involved a sequence where Laurel feigned putting on make-up and then got upset with ‘Dad’ (who was Rosie) and stormed off, hips waggling, declaring that she would ‘never be back, not even if the baby is crying until morning’. That was what they’d started to play this afternoon. Except the baby wouldn’t cry. So Laurel had pinched her hard on the arm, just above her elbow. And then the crying wouldn’t stop.

  Soon, though, Rosie felt hungry and a bit bored and began to look around for something else to do. Laurel was busy looking in the ‘mirror’ on the tree trunk and applying ‘mascara’. The baby was still sobbing and a smell came from her that reminded Rosie of the school toilets. The sun dipped fractionally and something had changed. It felt as if the energy of the afternoon had been whisked away, along with the excitement, the pleasure of just being there in the dappled light under the trees without any adults.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ Rosie said.

  But Laurel ignored her, murmuring, her hands enacting all manner of things known only to herself.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ Rosie insisted. ‘I’m bored.’

  The baby was sucking its fingers now, soothing herself, her eyes still big and wet. She began rocking back and forth, her legs stuck out in front of her.

  ‘The baby’s boring,’ Rosie said. ‘I want to go home.’ She stamped her foot, grabbing a low branch and pulling it down to the ground, letting it ping back up with a loud thwacking sound so that the baby stopped moving for a moment and stared upward, her mouth open in surprise.

  Laurel turned to Rosie then, her face dark with a sulk. ‘You always spoil everything,’ she said. ‘I want to play.’

  ‘No,’ Rosie retorted.

  Laurel got to her feet, her chin low. ‘I want to play,’ she repeated.

  ‘I want to go home,’ her sister replied.

  And then the baby began to cry again. Rasping, heavy sobs that seemed to scratch the very soul of their special place. She was ruining it for them.

  It was a sickening, desperate sound that, in the end, had to be stopped.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It had taken place in 1997, in the drowsy, innocent summer before Princess
Diana was killed. That’s what always placed it in the public’s mind. The widespread disbelief and shock that had been felt after the murder. And then, six weeks later, after a car accident in Paris, when the grief of the nation was compounded as life became tinged with unreality and everything that was accepted before seemed to disintegrate, leaving people floundering, not knowing what to believe in any more.

  Kirstie was the only daughter of Debbie and Robert Swann. They lived in Grassington in North Yorkshire, in a terraced house on the edge of the Dales. On 15 July, a five-months-pregnant Debbie took Kirstie to the local playground, a short walk from their home. There, she met her friend Christine and the two women chatted by the trailer café beside the play area. Debbie had watched while Kirstie busied herself in a tiny maze just inside the playground fence. She had ordered a coffee and turned away to pay when it had arrived. When she circled back to look at the play area, Kirstie was gone.

  Debbie had been at the park for less than half an hour.

  At first, she thought she was panicking unduly. She checked the maze and walked quickly over to the other side of the playground where the mouth of the old canal had been, looking underneath benches, the see-saw, the roundabout, calling Kirstie’s name. When the toddler failed to appear, Debbie began to cry. She raced out of the playground and down to the line of oak trees, shouting for her daughter, desperately searching for a flash of her blonde hair. Christine had run the other way to look, behind the café, and soon all the other mothers had joined in the search, Styrofoam cups dropped, abandoned on the asphalt.

  Then the police arrived and fanned out across the grasslands bordering the park. Kirstie’s father, Robert Swann, was contacted, haring to the playground to kneel before his wife, breathless and pale in the face. Paramedics were called for Debbie, to force her to sit and rest, for fear her distress would endanger her unborn child.

  The search continued for two days. The sound of Kirstie’s name echoed through the village as people shouted for her while they searched. Journalists descended on the community. For the first twenty-four hours, Debbie refused to leave the playground, sitting huddled on an aluminium chair beside the café, willing her daughter to appear, making bargain after bargain with a god she had never believed in, promising anything just to be able to see her little girl again. In the end, she agreed to move after the paramedics told her flatly that the heart-rate of the baby inside her was weakening and, if she didn’t allow herself to be hydrated, he could die.

  Rigid with grief, Debbie was driven by ambulance to the local hospital whilst Rob stayed, walking endless miles over the wine-coloured heather of the Dales. Scores of policemen and women accompanied by hundreds of volunteers from the village inched forward in sombre lines, looking for any evidence of the missing toddler. As daylight faded, a soft and unrelenting rain began to fall.

  On the second day of the hunt, they found Kirstie’s body. She had been covered by a sodden mound of branches and leaves in a grass-covered gully half a mile from the playground. She had died from blunt trauma to the head. She had hundreds of tiny scratches all the way up her arms and down her legs. Half of her left earlobe was missing and her left arm was broken. Police detectives gave a statement to the press, stating in shocked and disbelieving tones that in their view Kirstie had been tortured for several hours before she was murdered. Torture that involved deliberately slicing her arms and legs and biting off part of her ear.

  The following day ten-year-old Laurel Bowman was arrested for the toddler’s kidnap and murder.

  Laurel and her six-year-old sister Primrose – known as Rosie – had been seen by numerous people at the playground. After the investigating officers had interviewed all those present, it became horrifyingly apparent, from several eye-witness reports, that they had led Kirstie away. The story screamed from every front page. The Flower Girls the tabloids called them, fair-haired Laurel and dark-haired Rosie.

  The sisters came from what police described to the press as a ‘normal’ family. Their mother was a dental receptionist; their father the manager of a small travel agency. They weren’t rich but lived in a respectable household and nothing in their lives would have led anyone to predict that their child would commit such a heinous crime.

  St Michael’s Primary School, which the girls both attended, issued a statement saying they were not considered troublesome in class, that they had friends. They were just ordinary children. Much was made of the fact that Laurel had squeezed her pet hamster to death some months before Kirstie’s murder. Amy Bowman, her mother, had shakily explained to the police that this was not, in fact, the case. The animal had escaped its cage, crawled underneath Laurel’s pillow one night and she had slept on it, unintentionally suffocating the creature. But by that stage, nobody was interested in the truth. Laurel was the personification of wickedness and she must pay for her crime.

  The girl insisted she was innocent, saying to the police and the social workers that they had just wanted to play with Kirstie, taking her from the playground and down to the old dried-out canal. But that wasn’t wrong, was it? Their mother often left them to play down there. Laurel said she had liked ‘the baby’, as she described Kirstie. She wouldn’t have wanted to hurt her. But, as they’d trundled down the bank, the little girl had stumbled and fallen and hit her head. Laurel and Rosie were frightened then, scared of the trouble they would be in, and so they abandoned her there and ran home, going upstairs to play until Amy called them down to the kitchen for their tea. Laurel didn’t know how the marks on Kirstie’s arms and legs had got there, or what had happened to her ear. Maybe it was animals, she had suggested. Or a man who came along later to hurt her.

  When the police questioned Rosie, she wouldn’t speak. One of the officers present, who was interviewed years later for a book on the case, described her state as catatonic, her eyes ‘big as saucers’ while she sat on a chair with her legs dangling, not yet long enough to reach the ground. During the interview she merely shook her head repeatedly, her mouth pinched tight. Only after an hour of cajoling by the social workers and her mother, who was allowed to sit in with her, did Rosie reveal that she remembered nothing. She could recall going to the park with Laurel, but after that, the whole afternoon was a complete blank.

  At the time, Laurel was ten years old and thus considered fit to stand trial for Kirstie’s murder. Rosie, on the other hand, was not. At six, she was below the legal age of criminal responsibility. One year and four days after the body of Kirstie Swann was discovered, Laurel Bowman was found guilty of her abduction and murder and sentenced to detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure, with a recommendation made by the trial judge that she should be eligible for parole only when she turned eighteen. Rosie and her parents were given new identities and moved out of Yorkshire to a secret location kept hidden from the press and all who had known them before.

  Joanna has lived with the impact of this crime ever since. It stretches like a conduit from Kirstie, through her sister Debbie, and into her work. Even once Laurel was imprisoned, the girl’s punishment has never felt weighty enough, not in comparison with the devastation her crime has wrought. In 2005, when she was eighteen, Laurel came before the parole board for the first time. Joanna didn’t sleep during the campaign she mounted to keep her niece’s killer behind bars. She was interviewed with Debbie and Rob on national television; on radio; in every newspaper, arguing that Laurel should never be allowed to leave prison.

  The final decision was covered worldwide. In light of the nature of the torture that Kirstie had suffered; Laurel’s continued denial of any culpability; and the public outcry to the possibility of her being freed after serving only seven years, parole was denied. Laurel was moved from the young offenders’ institute where she had been detained to date, to an adult women’s prison.

  Bang to Rights were tireless in their lobbying. In 2000, when the European Court of Human Rights denied the then Home Secretary the right to fix tariffs for public interest prisoners, they instead petitioned the Attor
ney General to keep Laurel incarcerated. When she was found to have been granted permission to study for a BTEC in Childcare Development inside prison, they ensured that this was plastered all over the tabloids, which meant Laurel was quickly reassigned to a less contentious study programme. BTR continued to campaign against her release, and in 2010 she was denied parole for the second time.

  Debbie had given birth to her son Ben four months after Kirstie was killed. He was now nineteen and as committed as his parents and aunt were to the campaign to ensure Laurel Bowman would never be allowed to leave prison. Every anniversary of Kirstie’s death saw Joanna and BTR and at least one parent on morning television or giving a press interview, describing how the life they had known previously had ended on the day that Kirstie was murdered. If Laurel were allowed to leave prison before serving a minimum term of at least thirty-five years – the normal tariff for a violent child murder – it would be as if she had got off scot-free, they argued. Where was the justice for Kirstie – for all of them – in that?

  Now Joanna stares over the desk at Will, while chewing her fingernail down to the quick. ‘We’ll argue it’s unreasonable,’ she says after a long pause. ‘I’ll get on to the Attorney General’s team right now.’

  ‘Yep,’ he answers, turning his eyes back to the BBC website on the screen. ‘But . . .’

  Joanna leaps to her feet and marches to the window where she looks down on the narrow street below. Normally there is a fruit and vegetable market bustling beneath them, the smell of fried okra floating in the air. On New Year’s Day, though, the street is bare and disturbed only by a pigeon waddling down the centre of the road. She watches it move, thinking back to those first days after Kirstie’s body was found. How it was all she could do to keep Debbie breathing and calm, contain her hysteria for the sake of her unborn child.