The Stolen Child

by Sanjida Kay

  I clear my throat as Collier makes his announcement. He focuses on Jack Mitchell, the last person to see our daughter, and how it’s imperative to call the police if anyone has seen him. He also gives out the number of the dedicated line for the newly created ‘Finding Evie’ campaign. When Collier’s finished, I read out my statement. It’s short and to the point: our beloved daughter has been missing since Friday afternoon.

  ‘Evie is our beautiful, dark-haired, green-eyed child,’ I say. I can hear the tremor in my voice. ‘Like many seven-year-old girls, she’s obsessed with princesses. We think she looks more like a fairy. She loves Lego and painting. She laughs easily. She has pretend tea parties in a tree in our garden and invites all her dolls. She wants to be an artist when she grows up. Please find her. Please bring her back to us. We miss her beyond measure. She is the love of our life.’

  I choke over the last words and start to cry. Ruby grips my elbow and steers me out.

  The room erupts with shouts of ‘Mrs Morley! Zoe! Evie’s mum!’ and when I don’t answer, ‘Ollie! Mr Morley!’

  Ollies stumbles behind me, like a man in a stupor. Ruby ushers us back into the room we were in earlier.

  ‘That went well,’ she says brightly. She pushes a box of tissues towards me and glances at Ollie. ‘I’ll get you both a cup of tea. DCI Collier will be in shortly. He wants to speak to you.’

  ‘Is there news?’ Ollie rouses himself.

  ‘We don’t know where Evie is, but he wants to keep you informed of our latest findings.’

  ‘Jack Mitchell?’

  ‘I’ll get your tea; he’ll be here in a minute.’

  Collier and Clegg come in. Clegg smiles at me.

  ‘Have you found Jack Mitchell?’ Ollie asks before either of them can speak.

  ‘We’ve found out who the car belongs to,’ said Collier, sitting down and dropping a case file on the Formica table in front of him.

  He looks tired too; the red veins in his nose more pronounced, the skin around his eyes is puffy. I don’t suppose he’s had much sleep either. He stretches a leg out stiffly to one side of the table; his knee creaks.

  ‘A man named Harris.’

  I knew it was Harris’s car. I told Ruby. But is it relevant? Is it relevant to finding Evie? I can’t help wondering if he was badly hurt in the crash. And then wishing I could talk to him.

  ‘Haris Agni,’ Collier adds, opening the file and taking out a photo.

  He spins it round so we can see. It’s a photo of Harris and underneath it says his full name: Haris, with one ‘r’. So he does have a surname after all. Why does he spell his name differently? And then it hits me. This is a photo of Harris – Haris – in black and white, from the front and the side. A police mugshot. I can’t take it in. There has to be some mistake. My lungs have been squeezed tight and I feel as if I will not be able to take another breath. I will drown on dry land in front of these men.

  ‘Haris Agni was sentenced to seven years in prison for aggravated GBH. He was released getting on for two years ago after serving five years. It’s suspicious – finding a burnt-out car on the moor the day after your little girl goes missing. That in itself would not make him a potential suspect, but there’s more.’

  I take a ragged gulp of air as he places a colour photo of Haris on top of the mugshot and alongside Evie’s school photo. Ollie scrutinizes it and glances at me and then Collier. Ruby returns with mugs of tea. She must have made them herself, instead of going to the vending machine in the corridor. I don’t want any more tea but I find myself taking the cup from her out of habit.

  ‘There’s a likeness, isn’t there?’ Collier says. He jabs his forefinger at Haris’s face. ‘Dark hair. Green eyes. Olive skin. The dates would match too. He was sent to Leeds Prison a month after your daughter was born.’

  Clegg hands him something and he places it on the table too. It’s Evie’s red prayer book, the one Andy found, now in a sealed plastic bag.

  ‘He’s Hunza. Muslim. Originally from Pakistan.’

  ‘So you think this man, Haris, could be Evie’s father? And he abducted her? Took her in his car and then burnt it to get rid of the evidence?’ asks Ollie.

  ‘Aye. The car didn’t crash. It was deliberately set on fire. Poured something highly flammable on it first, probably petrol.’

  ‘And how are you going to find him?’

  ‘We’ll find him,’ Collier says.

  ‘I know this man,’ I blurt out.

  Collier looks pleased, as if he’s forced some kind of confession from me before he asked.

  ‘I told DCI Collier,’ Ruby says.

  I glance from her to Ollie.

  ‘He’s an artist. My agent represents him – Jennifer Lockwood from the gallery on Brook Street. Jenny introduced me to him when I had a meeting with her in September and then I went to his exhibition, the opening night.’

  ‘That was him?’ says Ollie, sounding incredulous. ‘A thug – and he’s passed himself off as an artist? How the hell did he manage that?’

  I lick my dry lips. I want to tell them they’ve got it wrong because, if they’re right, the truth is too horrible to contemplate.

  ‘Jenny can’t have known,’ I say.

  Collier shuffles through his notes. ‘Ms Lockwood is aware of Haris Agni’s history. She didn’t want to make it public so they put together that story about his trip to the Hunza Valley.’

  ‘What?’ Haris and Jenny have both deceived me.

  Collier looks over the rim of his glasses and then takes them off. ‘She did some charity event and met him there. He was on day release. She saw his potential,’ he adds drily.

  It’s too much to take in.

  ‘What about Jack Mitchell?’ Ollie asks again.

  For a moment, Collier looks less sure of himself.

  Clegg says smoothly, ‘We’ve got police surveillance on his house twenty-four/seven. He’s due back at work on Monday, so if he returns to Ilkley, we’ll pull him in for questioning. And if he doesn’t, we’ll find him. They always screw up. Use their phones, their credit card, get caught on CCTV.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Ollie paces up and down our sitting room. ‘Jesus. A convicted criminal could have taken Evie.’

  He doesn’t say, ‘A convicted criminal could be Evie’s father.’

  It’s as if my brain has stopped functioning, I can’t think about Haris and what it all means. I have a vivid image of him placing a skull in the palm of my hand and telling me how he’d buried the animal until the flesh had fallen from its bones. As if it were waiting for me. In the darkness. Like he’d been waiting in the darkness of his prison cell for all those years. I shudder.

  The house is gloomy. The curtains are drawn to stop the journalists, still camped outside, from peering in. Bella is whining and scratching at the back door. Hannah is giving Ben his lunch. She looks tired too. She pushes a curtain of hair behind her ear and frowns. ‘What do you mean? Have the police got a lead?’

  Ollie starts telling Hannah about Haris and the car Ruby and I found on the moor. I don’t want him to tell her. I don’t want everyone to know, not until I’ve worked out how to tell Ollie about my involvement.

  ‘Ollie. Why don’t you lie down for a bit?’ I say.

  He looks at me as if I’m a stranger, his eyes hard and glazed. Then his shoulders slump and his body sags. ‘Just for an hour. Wake me up, won’t you?’

  ‘Thank you for this morning, Hannah. I don’t know what we’d have done without you.’

  ‘It’s the least I can do.’ Hannah gives me a hug. ‘Let me know if you need me again. I’ll text you tomorrow. Maybe I can come round after school.’

  She’s much shorter and slighter than me and feels fragile in my arms. She smells of lilies. I can’t imagine wearing perfume again. I cannot imagine taking pleasure in anything as long as Evie is missing.

  ‘How are you doing?’ I ask Gill, when she answers the door.

  Her eyes are red and her hair is limp. It’s the first time I’ve
seen her looking less than immaculate in years. I couldn’t bear to stay in the house any longer and I want to keep searching for Evie. But I know I have to see Andy and Gill first.

  ‘How long have we known each other?’ she asks me. ‘How many years have we been friends?’

  Her voice wobbles and tears slide down her face. I dig my nails into my palms to stop myself from saying anything I’ll regret later.

  ‘You could have called, Zoe.’ Tears drip off her chin. ‘Andy loves Evie. We both love her. You could have rung the police. Told them that Andy would never harm her. We were there for hours—’

  ‘Don’t be daft, Gill.’ Andy elbows his way past his wife, Ellen balanced precariously on his waist. ‘It’s not up to Zoe to clear my name. She’s got more important things to worry about. How are you holding up, love?’ He leans forward and kisses me on the cheek and Ellen reaches out one podgy hand to grab my hair.

  I don’t kiss him back.

  ‘See! She doesn’t believe us,’ says Gill. ‘Why don’t you come in? Search the house. The police have already gone through everything, turned the whole fucking place upside down. But you never know, you might find something, something to show your best friend’s—’

  ‘Gill.’ Andy puts his arm round his wife’s shoulder. He looks at me. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  I shake my head. ‘I’m going to look for Evie.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ he says, passing Ellen to Gill.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘I didn’t come here for that. I just came—’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to explain.’

  He picks up his boots from behind the porch door and walks to the car in his socks.

  ‘See you later, love,’ he calls to Gill.

  She retreats inside without saying goodbye to either of us. I hesitate and then get in the car. The police no longer think he’s under suspicion, do they? Three days ago I thought I could trust Andy completely, but now I don’t trust my own judgement. Andy turfs Bella onto the back seat. She’s whines and dribbles with excitement – she loves Andy. I drive to the far side of Ilkley. I have no real plan other than to walk on the opposite end of the moor to the search party. They’re still out there, above our house, north of the Twelve Apostles. I can’t face bumping into Mrs Kilvington or any of the other mums she’s friends with. And it can’t hurt to look somewhere else. Neither of us speaks.

  It’s not as foggy as it was yesterday and as we get close to the moor, I can hear the buzz of a helicopter circling overhead. I turn off at the Addingham junction and take a sharp left onto a farm track. I drive as far up it as I can and then abandon the car. Bella leaps out, delighted to be outside after being cooped up all weekend.

  ‘They found a burnt-out car on the moor yesterday. It was on the news,’ Andy says.

  ‘I found it with Ruby, our family liaison officer. It belongs to a friend of mine – an artist. Turns out he wasn’t who I thought he was,’ I say. I wonder if I’m talking about Andy as well, even though we’ve slipped back into conversation as if nothing has happened between us.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The police have just told us his real name and that he spent five years in prison for GBH.’

  ‘Jesus. He must have almost killed someone – very few prisoners actually serve a full sentence. His original sentence would have been even longer. Gill tells me this stuff,’ he adds, as if apologizing.

  I think about Haris: the suddenness of his rage when I didn’t want to have an affair with him; how he could barely contain himself. He had wanted to hurt me. Bella tugs against her lead and I haven’t the energy to tell her off. I let her pull me up the hill. It’s grey and cold; there’s a bitter wind. A grouse explodes from beneath my feet and it takes me all my strength to keep hold of the dog. Andy takes her lead from me.

  ‘I went to his preview.’

  Haris lied to me. To everyone. Everyone but Jenny, that is, I think bitterly. They reinvented him as Harris the sculptor, recently back from the Hunza Valley. It would explain how lean and hard he looks: seven years inside, working out. And why I haven’t seen him around Ilkley or on the art scene before. I remember the signed, framed photographs of apricots and chillies, snow-clad peaks. He’d even bought the artwork to make his lie complete. Or maybe he had them anyway – if he really is Hunza.

  ‘I guess it’ll be on the news. Gill said you’d just done a statement for the media? That must have been fucking awful.’

  We’ve reached a plateau and we stop and look around; I’m trying to catch my breath. Andy puts his hand on my shoulder. He’s struggling to contain his emotions.

  ‘I love Evie. I love her. I can’t imagine what you thought when—’

  ‘Don’t, Andy. Please don’t.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ He blows his nose loudly. ‘But for the record, I want to say it: I would never harm a hair on that child’s head. And I know the prostitute thing must have crossed your mind but I’m not her father. I might have fooled around but—’

  ‘I know,’ I say, although I can’t look him in the eye.

  There’s no way he could tell if he has an illegitimate child or not.

  ‘We’ll find her. We’re going to find her,’ he says.

  I screw my eyes shut. I have to believe him. Or else I’ll go mad. I turn back to scanning the ground for any minute hint that Evie has passed this way. Everything is a blur of green and brown. In front of us are the Doubler Stones. They’re silhouetted against scuds of shale-grey clouds. There are two of them, taller than a man: flat stone heads balanced on precarious stems of rock, like windswept mushrooms. They look as if they’ve been weathered by wind and ice for aeons – the sections that have been shaved away by the elements have stripes of sandstone within them.

  I climb up some rocks onto the taller of the two. On its surface is a complex pattern of rings and whorls and there are deep, round basins, full to the brim with rain water. Channels gouged in the rock lead from these strange indentations. Some say this was where Neolithic sacrifices were carried out and the grooves were to let the blood drain away. I scan the moor. It stretches before me, bleak, scoured by the wind. Nothing is moving. I cannot see a small girl, running through the heather. I jump down.

  ‘The police think Haris is Evie’s father,’ I tell Andy. ‘He was sent to prison seven years ago. She’s seven. He’s just been released. Now we start getting these cards from her dad, and there’s a likeness – same skin colour, dark hair – he’s got her eyes.’

  I can’t see her soft, child features in his chiselled face though, but maybe I’m clinging to an empty hope.

  ‘Plus he’s an artist,’ says Andy softly.

  My chest tightens. I think of Evie’s Lego sculptures; the crazy birds’ nests she builds from scraps, the naked doll within one. And I think of Haris’s work, twisted and dark, as deformed and cruel as the Doubler Stones themselves. A kestrel hovers overhead, suspended, as if from a thread, and then razors its wings shut and plummets to the earth.

  ‘Do you reckon he could have taken her? I mean, is he that sort of guy?’

  The kestrel rises slowly, arduously, something tiny dangling in its talons. I never told Andy about my meetings with Haris. Perhaps I should have done. He’d have talked me out of it. Would Haris have taken her? He’s fiercely possessive – if he thought she was his daughter, I could imagine him wanting to take back what he believed rightfully his. Or maybe it’s his way of getting revenge. But he’d know it would destroy me. Surely he wouldn’t do anything so calculated? That passion he’d shown, had it been love? Or only lust and madness.

  ‘That’s where he lives,’ I say. ‘You can’t see it – it’s where those trees are. He’s got a croft behind them.’

  Andy whistles. ‘I always wondered who lived out there. In the middle of frigging nowhere.’

  If Haris is Evie’s father – or if he has taken her to punish me – then it’s my fault. I welcomed his friendship, opened up to him, led him to believe I’d have an
affair with him... I want to drag my wrists across broken glass. I pinch the backs of my hands. The pain is insignificant compared to the suffering that Evie is going through. The suffering that I’ve caused her.

  I’ve been concentrating so hard on looking at the ground, searching for clues – a child’s footprint in the mud, a long dark hair caught on a bilberry bush – that I miss it. It’s Andy who calls me. I run over to where he’s standing with Bella.

  It’s a low stone building, partly built into the hillside. It might once have been a shepherd’s shelter, but it’s been extended so it’s about the size of a large garage. There’s a corrugated-iron roof. The rust and the patina of algae have turned it the same shade as the drying heather that’s encroaching on it. It blends so perfectly into the moor, you’d be hard-pressed to spot it even from a few metres away. There’s a bare patch of ground in front of it, and a wide, well-trodden path leading for about half a mile downhill to the back of Haris’s house. My heart starts to hammer in my chest and my throat constricts. The wooden door has a padlock holding it closed. Andy starts casting around for a rock to break it with. He scrabbles frantically in the ground to lift the stones but they’re all sunk deeply in the soil.

  I take my penknife out of my rucksack and snap open the screwdriver. The nails are rusty and deeply embedded in the door frame; when I finally get them out, the door sags open. Andy catches it. Bella starts barking. I step inside. I’m dazed for a moment and then my eyes adjust. It’s surprisingly light. There are panels of clear plastic in the roof and long, thin windows cunningly set in the walls so that the space is filled with dim, muted light. I’m not sure what I’m looking at and my fear heightens.