Then She Was Gone

by Luca Veste

  For Uncle John “Murphy” Kirkham

  Thank you for the inspiration and for everything else over the years

  ONE YEAR AGO

  Tuesday 1 September

  He had no final memory of her. Only a single image. One last moment, trapped in an interminable loop, playing over and over in his mind. There, every time he closed his eyes, mocking him.

  Tim Johnson was beginning to accept that there was nothing else about his daughter he would ever remember.

  People will tell you that love at first sight doesn’t exist. That it takes time to feel all the emotions that make up the L word. Comfort, familiarity, yearning. They don’t just appear overnight.

  Those people are wrong.

  Have a child and feel that bolt of lightning when you hold them for the first time. A little face looking up at you, completely at your mercy and dependence. That’s love at first sight. When his daughter had been placed in his arms, he had fallen in love instantly. Head over heels, flat on his back in love. His whole life had led to that point. Every mistake, every misstep, it had all been worth it.

  It had taken him a couple of days to find the best route to walk around the park. The area was new to him and full of hidden surprises, nooks and crannies to discover. He had seen it only in pictures before now, the large pavilion-type structure taking up most of results when he searched for it on Google. A circular building with glass windows making up the outside structure.

  There was, of course, more to Sefton Park than that building. The park itself covered at least two hundred acres; a piece of tranquillity in the heart of the city of Liverpool, its vast green spaces surrounded by trees. He had found a cafe in the middle of the park, an old fountain nearby. The whole area undisturbed and well-kept, despite the reputation of the local youths. There were closer parks, but it was worth taking the extra time to visit this one.

  The days had seemed much longer recently. It had become more difficult to fill the quiet moments.

  ‘Feed the ducks, Molly? That’s what we’ll do today, hey, baby? Daddy take you to feed the ducks?’

  The four-week-old child he pushed around the park in front of him didn’t open her eyes, having fallen asleep before they’d even reached the park. The motion of the pushchair sending her straight off.

  ‘When you’re a bit older, we’ll find some swings in this place. You’ll like that.’

  A balding man, desperately hanging onto the last remnants of his thirties, jogged past them, his heavy breathing and the tinny dance music filtering through headphones breaking the silence.

  The jogger didn’t seem to notice him, lost in the effort of running just a little further.

  A cool breeze whistled through trees to the side of them, disturbing birds perched in the treetops. He looked up as they took flight, circled and settled once more. Autumn was drawing in. The last remnants of summer already forgotten.

  ‘We’ll have to wrap you up warmer soon, Molly. It’ll be cold this winter, I think.’

  He’d lived in the north of England for almost a decade and still wasn’t used to the subtle differences compared with the south where he’d grown up. They passed another large open space of field. A bare patch of land sitting unused. Just a vastness, opening up and then encircled by a line of trees in the distance. A small inlet of water ran beside the path, broken twigs and leaves floating on the surface.

  Silence settled back in. A contrast, he imagined, with the weekends and school holidays when the park would be bustling with life. Children of all ages being let loose by harried parents, taken for a walk to use up some energy. Football and cricket matches being organised on the spacious green land. Jumpers for goalposts and all that nostalgia.

  He imagined sitting there, a blanket underneath him and the sun on his face, hearing the sounds of laughter and raised voices. Pictured Molly running off, never too far, but enough for her to learn a little independence. Meeting friends, discovering new things and new pleasures.

  He imagined a life there. The thought of it made him smile.

  When he heard the footsteps behind him, he thought it was the jogger again, back for another lap. The hurried slaps of soles hitting the path as they headed in his direction didn’t make him flinch or turn around.

  Maybe if he had, things would have been different.

  In the pram, Molly fussed a little, so he slowed his pace and tried to soothe her. He moved the dummy closer to her face, the suckling increasing as she finally found it again and began to calm once more.

  The first blow didn’t register at first. The surprise of it, a dull thud at the back of his head, his vision blurring for an instant, was so unexpected in the peace of the surroundings.

  The second blow buckled his legs. He tried to steady himself, clutching the pushchair’s handles as his balance went. A third blow sent him to the ground.

  Not like this. Not like this.

  He crumbled to the ground, the fall not registering as his weight hit the floor. The sound of the pushchair falling with him became muffled as the blurriness returned with vigour. He tried to reach out towards it, but his hands didn’t obey. As he shifted onto his side, he saw a black boot scrape towards him. He tried to shake his head, but that just sent waves of pain through his temples. A feeling of nausea swept through him, the edges of his vision growing darker by the millisecond.

  That single image, just before he lost consciousness. The wheel of the pram, holding Molly, his life, spinning round and round.

  Not an image of his daughter. The pushchair couldn’t have fallen beside him with her facing him. No, she was facing the other way, so all he saw was a wheel. Spinning and spinning.

  As he lost her.

  * * *

  He didn’t know how long he was out for, but the sun was still beaming down when he rubbed his eyes and got to his haunches. The memory of what had happened came back slowly to him, making him rise to his feet, before falling back down onto his knees and dry heaving onto the grass beside him.

  ‘Molly,’ he tried to shout, though his throat betrayed him. He swallowed back bile and tried again. ‘Molly.’

  He turned to where he’d seen the last image. Saw only an empty path. No spinning wheel. No overturned pram.

  No Molly.

  No daughter.

  No life.

  Wednesday 2 September

  Twenty-four hours she’d been gone. Out there, without him. Scared, confused. If a four-week-old could feel those things. Wondering where he was. She knew his face. That was how it worked, he was sure of it. It didn’t matter if it was twenty-four hours, or twenty-four days. She would remember him.

  Please don’t let it be twenty-four days.

  ‘Do you not have a photo of . . . Molly, did you say?’

  He sighed for what seemed the thousandth time since the detectives had reappeared at the house. ‘I’ve told you again and again, no I haven’t. She’s only a few weeks old and I have been too busy to print any yet. I had some on my phone, but that’s been stolen, along with my daughter. What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be out there, finding her?’

  ‘Mr Johnson, I can assure you we have officers out there doing exactly that. The best way to help us is to give us as much information as possible, OK? Now, let’s start at the beginning again. Think we can do that?’

  He nodded, tiredness washing over him. He had been awake all night, unable to sleep. Once the police had arrived at the park, everything had begun to pass in a blur of questions and offers of tea.

  ‘We’ve only just moved here,’ Tim said, a sigh escaping from his mouth. ‘We were over on the Wirral before here.’

  ‘And why the move? Where’s Molly’s mother . . . Lauren was it? Yes . . . where is she?’

  He hesitated, ag
ain, as he had every time he’d told the story. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to her since we had to leave. I tried calling her, but there’s no answer. She hadn’t been well for a while . . .’

  ‘In what way?’

  He pointed to his head, his hand moving upwards slowly. ‘Mentally. During the pregnancy she was saying very strange things. She’d put on a show of being fine for the midwives, nurses, things like that. Not that she’d let me in for the appointments.’

  The detective looked up from her notepad at that. ‘Why do you think that was?’

  He bristled a little at the accusatory tone. He didn’t trust her. The headscarf wasn’t right, not with the Scouse accent alongside it. It made him wary of her. ‘She wasn’t thinking straight. She thought I was going to bring bad luck in. She wanted only women around her. Even for the birth. I wasn’t allowed anywhere near the place. Couldn’t even hand out cigars in the waiting room like a nineteen fifties dad. Had to wait at home by the phone for her to call me.’

  ‘That can’t have been easy.’

  He relaxed a little as the detective’s voice became less accusatory. Maybe it didn’t matter so much that she was one of those Muslims. Or a woman. ‘No, it wasn’t. I wanted to be there for her and Molly. To cut the umbilical cord and all that stuff. It wasn’t exactly what I had been expecting.’

  The detective leaned towards him, her coat brushing against the edge of the couch. ‘Then what happened?’

  He took a breath. ‘The first few days were fine, a struggle, of course, with a newborn, but it seemed like all the weird stuff had been forgotten. Then, I came home from doing a shop to find her setting things on fire in the backyard.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  He looked around for the glass of water he’d had earlier, but couldn’t see it. ‘All of the clothes we’d bought Molly. Photographs she’d brought home from the hospital. Molly’s moses basket and all her bedding. It was like she was trying to erase any trace of our daughter’s life.’

  The detective glanced towards her partner quickly before turning back to him. ‘Where was Molly when this happened?’

  ‘She was inside the house. She’d been left on the living-room floor. I picked her up and made sure she was OK. Lauren was still outside, just staring at the flames.’

  His mouth was dry, his whole body itching to stand up and go across to the kitchen and satiate his thirst. He waited instead.

  ‘This was two weeks ago,’ he said after a few seconds’ silence. ‘I gave her a few more days, just to see if it was a one-off. She just got worse. I couldn’t leave the house without Molly. I was scared of what would happen while I wasn’t there. I didn’t sleep much, not that you can anyway with a newborn, but it wasn’t because of that. I was worried about what she would do.’

  The detective shifted back on the couch. ‘What led you over here, to Liverpool?’

  He swallowed back dryness. ‘I had to go out and get a few bits. Molly had been crying for a while and I’d finally got her down to sleep. I didn’t want to disturb her, so I didn’t take her with me. Lauren had been in a good mood that day, so I thought it would be OK if I just went to the shop quickly and came back . . .’

  Every time he had got to this part of the story, he had begun to shake. Imperceptibly at first, before it became more noticeable.

  ‘I came back home and she was on the doorstep with Molly in the pram. They were about to leave, but she wouldn’t tell me where they were going. I . . . I persuaded her to go back inside. That’s when I saw the note on the coffee table in the living room. She tried to hide it, but I got to it first.’

  He remembered the fear on Lauren’s face, the way she shrank back from him. She was like a stranger.

  He left that part out.

  ‘It said she was taking Molly away. That she had to take her away from me. I tried to speak to her about it, but she was just babbling. It read like she was . . . she was going to do something stupid.’

  The Muslim detective didn’t speak, waiting for him to continue.

  ‘I knew I had this place waiting for me if I needed it. So, once Lauren had fallen asleep that night, I packed a few things and came over here. I thought giving her some time might be best. My aunt passed away a few months ago and my cousins are still trying to sell the place. I had a key from when she was still alive.’

  ‘We talked to your new neighbours . . .’

  He shook his head, trying to work out why the conversation hadn’t gone the same way as it had done previously. Before, when he’d reached this part of the story, there had been sympathy and concern. This was different.

  ‘We spoke to a number of them. None of them remember you arriving here, let alone with a child in your company. No one heard a baby crying, which seems odd. Why do you think that would be?’

  He opened his mouth and closed it again. Considered his answer first. ‘I don’t know. The average age around here isn’t exactly on the young side. Maybe they didn’t have their hearing aids in or something.’

  ‘Mr Johnson,’ the detective began, looking towards her colleague and then back at him. ‘We couldn’t find a Lauren at the address you gave us. We’ve had people search inside the property and they couldn’t find any signs of her. We’ve also put out a trace on her name and come up with no record of her being a resident either. We’re waiting on hospital records, but if she gave birth in the past few weeks as you say, we should find her, shouldn’t we?’

  He didn’t like the tone the detective was taking now. ‘Of course. It’s not like I’ve dreamed the whole thing.’

  The detective glanced at her colleague again. ‘We’re not saying anything right now, Tim. We just can’t find any trace of anyone who remembers anything about your movements in the past couple of days.’

  ‘Speak to the neighbours back in the other house. They’ll definitely remember.’

  ‘We have, Tim. They’re saying they thought you lived alone.’

  He made a noise halfway between a laugh and a shout of alarm. ‘That’s not possible . . .’

  Saturday 5 September

  Day five of Molly being missing and the media interest had disappeared almost entirely. What at first had been front-page news was now relegated to a small Information Wanted section on a local Facebook group. As soon as the police had decided that the most likely thing to have happened was that Molly’s mother had taken her child back, the media had moved on. Just another domestic. Another father left to pick up the pieces.

  He thought about the likelihood of him ending up in a superhero costume on top of Buckingham Palace, but decided his current luck would see him locked up with a terrorist in some cell.

  The detective – DC Hashem – continued to visit him, but seemed to eye him with more and more suspicion by the day. He was surprised she was still coming, but the questions were more confusing by the day.

  He was tired of it all. Sleep was a distant memory. He would drop off for an hour or two then jolt awake with his heart beating, stumbling off the couch to pull back the curtains once again. Every noise outside made his heart stop for a beat. He could smell his own mustiness emanating off him.

  There was no end for him. Not a happy one, anyway. He felt that with every fibre.

  A persistent banging came from the hallway. He jumped off the sofa, moving so fast he knocked over a side table, barely aware of it crashing to the floor as he flung open the front door.

  ‘Oh, come in,’ he said, making his way back to living room. He noticed the table upended on the floor and bent to pick it up. ‘Sorry, must have knocked it over.’

  ‘It’s fine if you got a little angry, Tim,’ the female detective said, looking around the room as if it were her first time there. ‘It’s a trying time, I understand that.’

  ‘Angry? No . . . I just bumped into it,’ Tim said, righting the table and then standing to face the detective.

  ‘Do you get angry often, Tim?’

  Tim was stuck for a moment, staring open-mouthed at th
e detective. ‘What? Why are you asking me that?’

  ‘I think it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Do you throw things around, maybe punch a hole in a wall, or rip a door off its hinges?’

  ‘No, I do not. I can get cross sometimes, but I’m not violent . . .’

  ‘Ah, but that’s not strictly true, is it?’ the detective said, moving past him and perching on the edge of a chair. ‘We know, for example, that you received a police caution for being involved in . . .’

  ‘That was nothing,’ Tim interrupted, but then he stopped himself. He breathed in and out and fixed the detective with a stare. ‘What has this got to do with anything? Can you tell me what you’re doing to find Molly?’

  ‘Can we go over things again? I want to make sure we have all the information on Molly as best as we possibly can.’

  Tim wanted to walk out, get away from the woman and from the house. To be back in that moment, in the park, pushing Molly along. Free and happy. Instead, he was forced to stand there and listen.

  ‘Why haven’t you been in touch with your parents?’

  ‘We’re not close,’ he said after a few seconds, trying to remain calm. ‘There’s no reason to have them involved.’

  ‘We’ve spoken to them,’ the detective said, looking at him with those inquisitive eyes of hers. ‘I don’t think they were all that happy to find out from the TV that they were grandparents. Bit of a shock, I think you can imagine. Did you not think to get in touch and let them know what was happening?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. As I said, we’re not close.’

  ‘Falling out? Temper get the better of you?’

  This time he made a movement towards the door, but the male detective standing in the doorway stopped him in his tracks. ‘Why are you asking me these questions?’ Tim said, turning back to the female detective. ‘They have nothing to do with Molly being missing. Have you found Lauren yet? That’s what you should be doing. Finding her and seeing if she has taken my daughter.’

  ‘Calm down, Tim. Come and sit down.’