by Alex Lake
‘Why?’ Julia said. ‘I can help.’
‘Mrs Crowne, it’s better if you stay here. In case Anna does show up. She could be quite distressed.’
‘I’d like to go.’
‘I think it’s better if you don’t.’
Why was this woman obstructing her? Julia thought. Why would she not let her look for Anna?
‘I’m her mum!’ she said, all of the emotion of the last few hours finding an outlet in righteous anger. ‘I have a right to go! If I want to go, I can! What if she’s in one of those houses? She needs me to be there!’
‘Mrs Crowne, we don’t think that she is in one of the houses. We’re just asking for information.’
‘But what if she is? You need to search them! All of them!’
‘We can’t just barge into someone’s house without a warrant.’
‘Why the hell not? If my daughter might be there, why the hell not?’
‘I fully understand your frustration, Mrs Crowne, but we are not allowed to enter a member of the public’s house without a warrant to do so. It’s not something we have any control over. It’s the law.’
‘Fuck the law! If you won’t do it, I will!’ Julia stood up, her knee banging on the underside of the table. Her china coffee cup rattled on its saucer, bitter liquid spilling over the desk. She marched to the door, pushing between the two police officers, and turned down the corridor. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but she was going to do something; she couldn’t just sit here and wait, not while Anna was out there. Doing that was accepting her powerlessness, and she wasn’t able to do that, not by a long chalk.
Behind her she heard DI Wynne’s footsteps on the tile floor.
‘Mrs Crowne!’ Wynne called. ‘Mrs Crowne! Where are you going?’
‘Out!’ Julia shouted. ‘I’m going out!’
‘Mrs Crowne, it’s not a good idea to do anything rash. We need the goodwill of people in the vicinity.’
Julia knew that the police officer was correct, but she didn’t care. She was beyond reason, in the grip of something animal and irresistible. It was the same thing that drove a mother to protect her young in the wild; that drove an eland to defend her calf from a lion, or an elk to fight a wolf to save hers, even when this came at the cost of the mothers’ own lives.
When she was a few feet from the front door, it swung open. Brian stepped inside. He was pale and his eyes were red. It was clear that he had not found Anna. He looked at Julia, and then transferred his gaze to the police officer.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked, and looked back at his wife. ‘Why’s she shouting at you?’
‘She’s trying to stop me looking for Anna,’ Julia said. ‘I want to go and look for Anna. I want to knock on people’s doors and ask them if they’ve seen her. Look them in the face. She could be in one of these houses.’
‘Then go,’ Brian said. ‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Mr and Mrs Crowne,’ DI Wynne said. ‘Could we talk for a minute, before you go?’
Julia turned round. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘A minute.’
‘In the office?’
Julia shook her head. ‘Here.’
‘We have police officers going door to door,’ Wynne said. ‘They have experience in the right questions to ask, and if anyone has seen anything concerning your daughter then they will find it out and follow that lead wherever it takes them. At this stage we need to be systematic in our search for Anna.’
‘What if one of them has her?’ Julia said. ‘How will they know that?’
‘It’s unlikely.’ Wynne shifted uncomfortably. ‘I have to be honest with you. At this stage there are two main possibilities for your daughter’s whereabouts. Either she wandered off on her own – in which case she can’t have gone far and someone will almost certainly have seen her – and is now hiding in some place we haven’t found or … ’, she paused and looked away for a second, before looking back at Julia and Brian, ‘or someone took her.’
‘Took her where?’ Brian asked, his voice hoarse.
‘We don’t know yet, Mr Crowne,’ Wynne said. ‘But for now, we have to focus our efforts on the immediate vicinity, in case Anna is out there, cold and frightened and hurt, and that means that we have to be as methodical as possible to ensure that we miss nothing.’
‘She’s out there,’ Brian said. ‘I know she is. I can’t believe anything else.’
‘And we will have officers searching all night for any sign of her. Clothing, footprints, her belongings.’
‘I want to be part of it,’ Brian said. ‘I’ll help. We have friends who’ll help as well.’
‘Excellent,’ Wynne said. ‘We’ll set up a base in the community centre. Call around and get as many people as you can.’
Brian’s hands were clenching and unclenching on his thighs, bunching his chinos up and exposing his paisley socks. Anna had bought them – or chosen them, at any rate – for him last Christmas, Julia recalled, along with a pair of Homer Simpson socks. Brian had worn one of each, Homer on the left foot, paisley on the right. He had told Anna he loved them both so much he couldn’t choose between them. Anna had made sure that he kept them on all day.
The memory of her daughter checking that her dad was wearing the mismatched socks she’d bought him overwhelmed Julia. Her hands started to shake and then she started to cry. She had not cried like that – uncontrollably, her chest heaving – since she was seventeen and she had been dumped by Vincent, the first love of her life. She had believed, as teenagers will, that he was the one, the only one, and when he had told her it was over – it’s not you, he’d meant to say, it’s me, except the prepared lines had come out wrong and he’d actually said, in a moment of unwitting honesty, it’s not me, it’s you – she had cried for days. It had felt like the end of the world, like nothing would ever be the same again. After a while, though, it had passed, and she’d seen that maybe life would go on without Vincent.
And now, for the first time since she was seventeen, she had that feeling again, only this time she was thirty-eight, and old enough to know that it was for real, and that it would not pass.
She pushed her chair back, suddenly weary beyond belief. ‘Come on,’ she said, looking at her husband’s expressionless eyes. ‘Let’s go home and get ready.’
vii.
The search was organized quickly and efficiently. The police knew what they were doing, and they set about it calmly.
They’ve done this before, Julia thought. This is the kind of thing that happens, which means this is real.
The local community centre – a wood and glass structure built a few years previously with lottery money – was the base of operations. A large, detailed map of the area was stuck to a wall, lines made with marker pens delineating the streets that volunteers had been assigned to search.
And there were a lot of volunteers: friends of Julia and Brian, other parents, concerned locals. Julia had rung through her address book; many others had called the police asking how they could help and had been directed to the community centre, and then out to their search areas.
Alongside them, police officers pointed torches into alleys or knocked on doors or quizzed the homeless. Dog teams roamed the parks and copses and fields and woodlands. If none of these things worked, in the morning divers would search the waterways.
It was a thorough search. They were searching places that Julia knew Anna could not have got to on her own.
Which meant she had been moved by somebody, and that somebody would not want her to be found.
Brian was out with the searchers; Julia waited in the community centre with DI Wynne; waited for the triumphant smile as the detective heard that Anna was lost and cold but alive and well. But as the night wore on the volunteers came back with their news that there was no news, then went home to their beds and dreams of the poor parents who they had left behind. Julia thanked them for their effort, accepted their well wishes, their don’t worry, I’m sure she’ll turn ups.
&
nbsp; But there was no sign of Anna, so how could she not worry? She was that woman, the mother whose child was lost, who was at the centre of a storm of sympathy and community spirit. So how could she not worry?
It was around midnight when the door opened and Brian came in. He looked at DI Wynne.
‘Nothing?’ he asked.
‘Not yet, Mr Crowne,’ she replied. ‘You and Mrs Crowne should go home. Try and get some rest.’
‘I’d prefer to stay,’ Julia said. ‘I can go out and look myself.’
‘If anything changes I’ll call you immediately,’ Wynne said. ‘The best thing you can do is to preserve your strength. Tomorrow will be a busy day.’
‘If you don’t find Anna tonight,’ Brian said.
There was a long, uncomfortable, pause, then DI Wynne nodded. ‘If we don’t find her tonight,’ she said. ‘That’s right. But go, and get some rest.’
Julia was pretty sure that rest would be an elusive quarry, but she nodded. She took her car keys from her pocket. She looked at Brian. ‘I’ll drive,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
They climbed into the car, silent. There was nothing to say. For the first time in a long time they were both feeling exactly the same things. Fear. Worry. Dread. Panic. One after another in a horrific spin cycle.
Julia turned the key in the ignition. She almost expected the car not to start – everything else was broken, so why not that, too? – but it fired and the engine came to life. It was a short drive home – maybe a mile – but to Julia it felt like the most important journey she had ever taken; as if she was crossing an invisible border into a new land, a land in which everything had changed.
3
The First Day
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 knee
s.
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.
