After Anna

by Alex Lake

Today is the day.

  You take your time getting ready. You have to. There is no way you can allow a mistake now. Not when you are so close. You run a bath, hot and soapy. Wear surgical gloves, disposable clothes – you can burn them later – a mask – Tony Blair, a nice ironic touch – just in case she sees you.

  You open the door. The girl sleeps, drugged a little more heavily than usual. You carry her upstairs. She’s heavier than she looks, especially when so unresponsive. You strip her and put her in the bath. Her clothes go in a plastic bag to be disposed of. They have traces of you on them.

  You wash her carefully; scrubbing her skin until it is pink, working a lather of shampoo into her hair. All through it she sleeps. When you are done you lay her on a towel. Unwrap the brand new clothes. Dress her, making sure your skin does not touch hers.

  The towel goes in the plastic bag.

  You carry the girl downstairs and into the garage and into the car. Not your car. A new one. Bought for cash seventy miles away, nearly on the other side of the country. No questions asked. You can dump it when the job is done, when the girl is gone. Maybe set fire to it. Maybe leave it with the keys in, in one of the rough parts of town. Let people who have experience in making things disappear get rid of it.

  Either way, it will be gone.

  Same as the girl.

  And once the girl is gone, it is time to turn your attention to the real target.

  The mother.

  ii.

  Julia had not slept. Not even fallen asleep for a minute. Now, at nine in the morning she was sitting on the couch with a mug of coffee and wondering how she would stop herself unravelling. It didn’t help that she could not stop reading what the world was saying about her.

  ‘I don’t care how busy you are, you don’t leave a child alone and unattended in this world full of predatory paedophiles, constantly on the lookout for fresh victims. It is the height of irresponsibility to do so.’

  Or, another theme, one that reoccurred:

  ‘Mrs Crowne is representative of a certain type of person, the type who cannot do anything other than put themselves first. Never mind the damage to her family, she wants a divorce. Never mind the risk to her child, she has something better to do, so poor Anna can wait until her mother is ready to take her home. If she was having an affair – and who would be surprised to find out she was – never mind who got hurt, never mind if her lover had a wife and a family who would be torn apart. No, none of this matters, as long as Julia Crowne is happy, as long as she gets her sordid moments of fleeting pleasure.’

  It was unbearable. Julia didn’t think she was perfect, but she was not this person, this amoral, self-interested, irresponsible monster that the press was making her out to be. Yes, she wanted a divorce, but that was hardly news these days, and in any case, most of the journalists condemning her were hardly paragons of virtue. She didn’t know the facts, but she would not have been surprised to find out that the number of divorced or adulterous or alcoholic or drug-addicted people working on Fleet Street was well above the national average.

  Yes, she had been late for her daughter, and for that she needed no help in feeling guilty. The quiet of the house, the silence between her and Brian, the constant reminders of Anna – the child’s cereal at the back of a kitchen cupboard, the Lego piece lodged between the cushions of a sofa, the small step stool by the bathroom sink – made sure that the guilt was a permanent fixture, outbid for a claim on her emotions only by the constant, throbbing pain of missing her daughter.

  Worse than missing: it was pure loss. There was nothing else. Just loss. The loss of her daughter, the loss of the future she had imagined for them both.

  It was the little things that hurt the most. There was a picture of a whale playing with a dolphin that Anna had drawn on the fridge door; it reminded her of the day Anna had brought it home and Julia had asked her what it was before complimenting it. That in turn reminded her of when Anna had shown her one of her early drawings, a drawing that looked uncannily like a horse, and which made Julia wonder whether her daughter was a gifted artist.

  What a lovely horse, she said.

  A frown.

  Mummy. It’s not a horse. It’s a turtle.

  So now she asked for identification early, and the picture reminded her of that, which reminded her that she may not be the recipient of one of her daughter’s unrecognizable drawings ever again, and that was simply too painful to bear.

  And it never stopped. All she wanted was for it to stop, for just a few hours, so she could get some kind of a break, have some rest, some sleep.

  Julia pushed her coffee away. She needed something stronger, even at nine in the morning. And why not? What else did she have to do? She stood up and opened the drinks cabinet. There was a bottle of vodka. She stood looking at it. Imagined drinking it all, just so she could pass out. But drink wouldn’t do it. She’d just wake up even more paranoid than before, and with a hangover to boot.

  She reached for it and took a long swig anyway. What did a hangover matter in the scheme of things? Her marriage was over. Her reputation was in tatters. There was one photo of her doing the rounds in which she had been Photoshopped to look like Myra Hindley. It was everywhere, and it had come to define how she was seen.

  Myra Hindley.

  Myra-fucking-Hindley.

  It didn’t get much lower than that. Lower than a snake’s belly, as her dad, her dear, beloved father, and oh, how she missed him, missed his warmth and strength and love, would have said. If there was a proxy for female evil in the British mind it was Myra Hindley. And Julia Crowne was being put in the same bracket.

  And worst of all, Anna was gone. Gone for good, Julia was sure about that. The police were getting nowhere and she could tell from the tone of her conversations with DI Wynne that they were giving up hope. Anna could literally be anywhere. Every year thousands of kids disappeared like this, and few, if any, were found.

  God, she wanted a break from these thoughts. Needed a break. Needed some sleep, just a few hours of dreamless sleep. Perhaps she could ask her doctor for sleeping pills. Maybe later in the day, though. Better wait until the smell of the vodka was gone.

  Or she could take some of Brian’s. There were some in the bathroom cabinet, or at least, there had been before he left. She could take one of those. Or two.

  She got unsteadily to her feet. She hadn’t eaten much in a week and the vodka was burning a hole straight through her stomach to her brain. Upstairs, she opened the bathroom cabinet.

  There it was: a small yellow plastic bottle of sleeping pills.

  She took the bottle downstairs and emptied the pills onto the coffee table. Nineteen left, nineteen little white pills. How easy to swallow them and end the suffering. How easy to put a stop to all this here and now. It would take a few seconds to consume them. That was all that stood between her and relief. A few painless seconds.

  But no. Not while there was a chance Anna would be found. Not while there was a chance Anna was alive. If they told her she was dead, then she would take the pills. But not before. She wanted sleep, not endless oblivion.

  She read the dosage on the side of the bottle. One before bedtime. One wouldn’t do it. She cupped her hand around two of the pills and lifted them to her mouth. She placed them on her tongue. They were bitter. She swallowed them, then washed them down with a large slug of vodka.

  Only a few minutes passed before she felt herself losing consciousness. God, these things were strong. For a moment she wondered in alarm whether she had taken too many, then she surrendered to the chemical embrace.

  Then her phone rang.

  She opened an eye and glanced at the screen.

  She recognized – just, through the incoming fog – DI Wynne’s number.

  She let it ring out. She was sick of speaking to the cop, sick of hearing her reports that nothing had changed.

  It rang again. DI Wynne again. She picked up.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, her voice slurred.
/>   ‘Mrs Crowne, I have some news.’

  DI Wynne had a strange, high tone to her voice.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What is it?’ It came out as wharisit?

  ‘Mrs Crowne, we’ve found Anna.’

  Julia shook her head. ‘What did you say?’ Whadyasay?

  ‘I said, we’ve found Anna.’

  Through the fog, Julia could not quite grasp the meaning of the words. ‘This a joke?’ Shajoke?

  ‘No,’ DI Wynne said. ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘She ok?’ Shokay?

  ‘She’s fine, Mrs Crowne.’ Wynne sounded uncomprehending, as though she couldn’t believe what she was saying. ‘She’s totally unharmed. She just walked into a newsagent and said hello.’

  Julia barely understood what she was hearing before she fell asleep, but she understood enough.

  As she slumped onto the couch she was smiling for the first time in a week.

  PART TWO: AFTERWARDS

  10

  Back Home

  i.

  It is done.

  You took the girl to a quiet lay-by on a dual carriageway about fifty miles away. You chose it a few days back, attracted by the line of trees that screen it from the road and the fields that stretch out on the far side. It pays to plan ahead. That way you can think things through, examine all the angles. And this was the best place to do it.

  The lay-by is on a straight section of the road, so you can see a mile or two in either direction. When you were sure nothing was coming in either direction, you lifted her limp body from the back seat and deposited her in a bus shelter.

  You left the girl sleeping in the corner of the bus shelter. She was stirring as you departed, not far from consciousness. That was good; it would not be long before she awoke and wandered into plain sight, where she would soon be found.

  You pulled out and drove away, unseen again. You are not surprised by this. You have a talent for this kind of thing, a talent you have used before, when it has been necessary. It is a combination of planning and nerve, both of which you have in abundance.

  There is one thing you feared, one thing left out of your control. What if the person who found her was not as honourable as you? What if they saw a lone girl – a girl who was already missing, and therefore could be taken without risk – and did not return her to the authorities? Unlikely, for sure, but possible. There are some disgusting people out there.

  Not everyone is like you. Not everyone can be trusted to do things for the right reasons. It might appear to the outside world that you and they are the same; that you are both kidnappers or murderers, but that is not the case. They are crude, base criminals. What you do is different. It is great. It is necessary. It is right. But you can’t expect others to understand.

  You considered staying in the vicinity so that you could ensure the girl’s safety, but that would have been too dangerous. No, you had to let her take her chances. It was a risk, but a calculated one. At that point all you could do was hope.

  And hope you did. Because you need her home, safe and unharmed.

  Because although this part is done, it is not over yet. You are not finished.

  The important part is just beginning.

  ii.

  Julia was woken by a throbbing in her head. It felt like someone had set up a bass drum inside her skull and was kicking it with a steel-toed boot.

  What the hell happened? Julia thought. Why do I have this foul hangover?

  And then she remembered. The vodka and the sleeping pills. And then another memory, of a phone call. A phone call about Anna. From DI Wynne.

  A phone call telling her that Anna was alive, that she’d been found.

  She caught the rising excitement and held it in check. She’d been here before, dreaming that Anna was home. This time the memory was very clear, hardly dreamlike at all, but that was perhaps the result of the combination of alcohol and sleeping pills and her frantic wish for her daughter to be with her.

  She glanced at the window. It was light outside, maybe late morning. So the pills had knocked her out all night. She closed her eyes against the light and tried to remember what had happened.

  She was in bed. She had not been in bed when she had taken the pills, which meant someone had brought her up here. It also meant that there was water nearby, in the en-suite bathroom. It would be nice to have water. Clear, cool, life-giving water.

  She’d get it in a minute. As she lay there images came back to her. Broken memories. The bitter taste of the pills. The burn of the vodka. The phone ringing, then ringing again.

  DI Wynne’s voice.

  Mrs Crowne, we’ve found Anna.

  The dream again. She pushed it away but it was persistent. Fuzzy, clouded by the booze and pills, but persistent. And it felt real. Specific, tangible.

  She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling.

  It was real. Anna was alive. She knew it somehow. Something in her body felt different.

  Anna was alive.

  She pushed back the covers and swung her feet onto the carpet. She stood up too quickly for her hangover to handle and the blood rushed from her head. Faint, she sat back down.

  Downstairs she heard a laugh. It was man’s laugh, a laugh she knew well. It was her husband, Brian. The laugh came again. And again.

  Brian was laughing, and there was only one reason for that.

  ‘Anna!’ she called. Her voice was high and croaky. She cleared her throat. ‘Anna!’

  There was a silence, then she heard fast, heavy footsteps on the stairs. She recognized the footsteps; it had always amazed her that someone so light and delicate as her daughter could tread so heavily, as though she was stamping instead of walking.

  ‘Anna,’ she said, to herself. ‘Oh God, Anna. Is it you?’

  She didn’t believe it – couldn’t believe it – until the bedroom door was flung open and there she was, fresh and smiling and beautiful and Anna, so perfectly Anna, her daughter, her child, the love of her life, there, in the doorway, then running across the carpet towards her and then, finally, in her arms.

  Her daughter was in her arms.

  It was like nothing she had ever felt before. Everything – the smell of Anna’s breath, the heat of her body, the taste of her tears, the sound of her repeated cries of mummy, mummy as she ran from the door to the bed – was hyper-real. It was as though Julia’s senses did not trust what they were presented with, and so had turned themselves up to a new, more intense level that allowed them to see and smell and taste more deeply so that they could not be deceived. She saw the cracks and valleys in Anna’s lips as they quivered, picked out individual hairs on her head, saw the tiny flakes of skin on her ears. And she loved every detail.

  The closest she had come to this sensation was on the day Anna was born, when the midwife had placed this tiny, mewling, blood-and-mucus-coated, alien creature onto Julia’s newly empty abdomen, and Julia had fallen instantly in love with it. She could bring it back to mind still, as though the memory was minutes and not years old. It was the clearest, most significant, happiest memory of her life.

  But it was nothing compared to this.

  Back then, she had rejoiced in the gaining of something wonderful; now, she was regaining something wonderful. She had been as low as it was possible to be; had lost everything, had known the heights of being a parent, and fallen to the depths of having lost a child, a loss made worse by the fact it was her fault. She had been so low she had been in the process of killing herself, and now she had her daughter back. The swing from utter despair to rapturous joy was incredible. She was aware, as she held Anna, that she was one of the very few people to have known such extremes; one of the very few unfortunate enough to have known them.

  She tugged her daughter against her chest and pressed her lips to her cheek. Anna was thin, her shoulders sharp and the bones in her face more prominent, but she was smiling as she hugged her mum; she was ok, she was alive and here and that was all that mattered.

  ‘I�
�ll never let you go again, Anna,’ she said. ‘I promise. I’ll never let you go again.’

  iii.

  ‘Julia?’ Brian’s voice came from outside the bedroom. He had not – at least, as far as she knew – crossed the threshold of their former marital inner sanctum since Anna had disappeared.

  ‘Daddy,’ Anna said, lifting her head from Julia’s chest. ‘Come in and cuddle. We can all cuddle together.’

  There was a long pause. ‘I don’t know,’ Brian said. ‘I—’

  ‘Come on, Daddy!’

  Brian stepped into the room. His eyes were still sunken and surrounded by dark circles, but there was a lightness in his expression that had not been there since the day Anna disappeared.

  ‘It’s ok,’ Julia said. She shifted herself to one side of the bed. ‘Sit down.’

  Brian took a few hesitant steps across the room, then lay on what had been his side of the bed, propped up on his elbow. He reached out and put his hand on Anna’s hip; she turned from Julia and flung her arms around his neck.

  ‘I love you, Daddy,’ she said.

  ‘I love you too,’ he murmured. ‘So much.’

  For a moment Julia wondered whether she had judged him too harshly, whether he was a better, kinder, fuller, husband and father than she had given him credit for. Had she expected too much of him? Had she been blinded by the glare of what she wanted him to be, left unable to see the muted light of Brian’s qualities, qualities that might have found – might find, still – a fuller expression away from the sunless undergrowth around his mother?

  She put her hand on his forearm and smiled at him.

  ‘Brian,’ she said. ‘She’s back.’

  He turned his shoulders so that his forearm twisted away from her.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing. Like a dream.’

  ‘Where was she?’

  ‘They don’t know. She woke up in a bus shelter this morning and walked into a newsagent in Tarporley. No one saw her until she was nearly there.’

  This morning. While Julia had been drinking on the couch her daughter had been returning to the world. She looked at the alarm clock. Three p.m. So she’d been out six hours.