by Tess Stimson
‘Everyone was taking photos,’ Zealy says. ‘She’s bound to be in quite a few of them, at least in the background. They’ll be time-stamped—’
‘We’ve already asked everyone to give us what they got,’ Bates says. ‘Trust me, Zealy, we’re on it.’
Her phone buzzes and she mouths an apology, then steps away out of earshot.
I dig the heels of my palms into my eyes, exhausted and frightened beyond reckoning. Lottie’s been missing all night. I’m so tired I can barely stand, and yet I’m consumed with a restlessness I can’t seem to control. I feel very cold, and my hands keep twitching, a physical manifestation of my urge to search.
I realise I can’t put off calling my parents any longer. This will shatter their world. They adore Lottie; she’s their only grandchild and the light of their lives. Ever since Luca died, I’ve taken her home to them most weekends. I dread to think what this news will do to them. But I have to tell them before they find out from someone else.
Just saying the words out loud to Mum and Dad makes the nightmare real.
When Mum starts to sob, I break down completely, and have to hand the phone to Zealy.
She asks Dad to tell my sister and Luca’s parents, Elena and Roberto. I’ve never been close to my in-laws; they made it clear from the start they wanted their only son to marry a nice Italian girl who’d stay at home and have babies, not an ambitious career woman. They tolerated me while Luca and I were together, but after our divorce I became persona non grata. They haven’t spoken to me, or seen Lottie, since his funeral. But they’re both old and frail: Roberto has serious heart problems and Elena is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, one of the reasons Luca travelled back to see them so often. They deserve to hear this news from family, not to wake up and read it in the papers.
‘Your dad says he and your mum will be on the next flight out,’ Zealy says.
‘What about Harriet?’
‘He’s going to call her now.’
‘They shouldn’t come out,’ I say. ‘Mum hasn’t been well. And by the time they get here, we’ll have found Lottie, anyway.’
‘Of course we will,’ Zealy says, stoutly.
We go back downstairs to find Marc, but Bates intercepts us in the lobby. ‘I’d like you to look at something,’ she says, handing me her phone.
‘What is it? Is it Lottie?’
‘Please.’
The screen is paused on a grainy black and white CCTV image at a petrol station. It’s from last night: the timestamp on the bottom of the screen says 23:42. Bates plays it for me. An overweight, middle-aged man in cargo shorts, flip-flops and a sleeveless T-shirt comes out of the petrol station and heads towards a four-door pickup truck. He leans in through the window of the front passenger seat, as if talking to someone, and then thumps his meaty fist on the vehicle’s roof.
I glance up at Bates. ‘What is this?’
‘Please, just keep watching.’
The man walks around the truck and gets into the driver’s side. Suddenly, one of the rear doors opens. A child starts to get out; a little girl in a full-skirted dress rendered grey by the security camera. Her feet are bare.
Then the child is yanked back inside the vehicle, and the person in the passenger seat – it’s impossible to tell if they are a man or a woman – reaches across the car for the rear door handle and pulls it shut from inside. The car drives off.
The whole scene has taken no more than a few seconds.
chapter 13
When I beckon, she comes to me, her eyes bright with curiosity. She should know better, but she’s evidently one of those children who likes breaking the rules.
I spin her my story and then turn as if to leave, knowing curiosity will be her undoing. I’m right. She catches up to me and slips her hand in mine, because she trusts me. We walk together in plain sight along the beach, past dozens of people. No one even tries to stop us.
I can’t believe it’s this simple. This is the moment of greatest risk, the only period of time when, for all my careful planning, events are largely beyond my control. If someone sees her with me and challenges us, I have my excuse ready. But no one even notices. We are made invisible by our very ordinariness, the child and me.
I walk a little faster. The clock is already ticking. The child may be missed at any moment. Time is of the essence.
I turn onto a stony path leading away from the shore. She’s barefoot, though she doesn’t complain. But she is slowing us both down as she hops gingerly from foot to foot, so I pick her up and she doesn’t protest.
We reach my rental car, which I’ve parked in a church car park chosen because it has no security cameras. The ID I gave the car hire company is obviously false; you’d be shocked how quickly you can obtain a fake driving licence online. The ‘dark web’ is not some distant, sinister land in Middle Earth; it’s right there, Mordor at your fingertips, just a click away.
I used the same ID to rent a cheap hotel room. I didn’t even have to deal with a human being; a security key code was sent to my burner phone.
The child frowns for the first time when I open the door to the back seat of the car. ‘Where’s my car seat?’ she says.
‘Aren’t you too old for that?’ I ask, although of course she isn’t.
‘Yes,’ she says, pleased.
She doesn’t ask questions as we drive to the hotel. I’ve been careful to pick a route with few traffic cameras and no road tolls. We’ve been driving for more than forty minutes when she requests the bathroom, but I tell her we’re nearly there. I have no intention of making any unscheduled stops anywhere I haven’t had a chance to reconnoitre first.
I park behind the hotel. I will abandon this car soon, but there’s something I have to do first.
Opening the car boot, I take out a generic navy holdall.
Inside it is a roll of black plastic rubbish bags, some wire ties and a large pair of scissors.
chapter 14
alex
Another false alarm. The child in the back of the pickup truck at the petrol station isn’t Lottie. It looks like her. The little girl is the same age, the same build. She has long fair hair like my daughter, though I can tell, even from the grainy, grey CCTV footage, that it isn’t the same Nordic shade of platinum as Lottie’s.
It could be my daughter. But it isn’t.
Lieutenant Bates presses me to be sure. The little girl in the CCTV film appears to be under some sort of duress. She’s wearing a stiff, formal skirt that strongly resembles Lottie’s bridesmaid dress, unusual clothing for a trip to the beach. Am I absolutely sure—
I am.
The sudden hope, and then the vicious disappointment, devastates me. My fear and powerlessness reach breaking point; I feel like a caged, demented animal. This is, without doubt, torture of the cruellest kind. I don’t know I’m screaming and smashing my fists against the marble-topped reception desk until Marc wraps his arms around me, physically restraining me so I don’t hurt myself. I collapse against him, keening my agony in harsh, raw sobs. It’s as if my heart has been ripped from me. I didn’t realise, until this moment, that the child I never wanted to have has become my reason for living.
Zealy and Marc beg me to go upstairs to get some rest, but I know sleep is impossible. It’s only when Bates points out that I must be coherent for the press appeal this afternoon that I agree at least to try.
Zealy helps me change out of the pale blue cocktail dress I’ve been wearing since yesterday afternoon. It’s unrecognisable now: ripped and stained by hours of searching through brush and scrubland.
I dump it straight in the bin and Zealy selects a clean white T-shirt and pair of taupe linen drawstring pants from my wardrobe. She tries to persuade me to shower before putting them on, but I refuse. I don’t have the patience.
I lie down in the darkened bedroom while Zealy dozes in an armchair, refusing to leave me alone, but I can’t sleep. I can’t imagine sleeping again until my daughter is found. I have to keep vigil w
ith my daughter.
I drift in and out of an exhausted, fitful twilight, haunted by nightmarish images of my daughter’s mottled body lying cold and still on a marble slab, her face bloodied and bruised. I wake, my heart pounding, clothes soaked in sweat. Even when I get up and change my T-shirt, I can’t rid myself of the images dancing behind my mind’s eye. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to close them again.
Bates and her colleague, Sergeant Lorenz, want to talk to me before the press conference. In the last few hours, the police have taken over the business centre overlooking the pool. Two small suites are being used as interview rooms, while in the main conference room the photo of Lottie I gave them has been blown up and taped to a glass display wall.
Smaller headshots of the principal players in this drama – me, Marc, Sian, the bridesmaids and ushers, even an old picture of Luca, presumably downloaded from social media – are tacked in a semicircle around Lottie. Colour-coded arrows connect us in ways I cannot decipher.
They’re putting together a detailed timeline now. Filling in the gaps, piecing together Lottie’s last known movements from eyewitness reports and photographs from people’s phones.
As I follow Bates through the conference room to one of the interview suites, she tells me that they think the last person to speak to Lottie was Sian’s mother, Penny; several guests saw Lottie chatting to her just as everyone trooped up from the beach to the hotel. But Penny has nothing useful to add. She doesn’t even remember the encounter.
After that, the trail goes cold.
The police can’t find a single person who recalls talking to Lottie after the wedding ceremony ended. There isn’t one photo of her at the reception, despite the fact so many of us saw her – or thought we saw her – flitting back and forth between the buffet and the ice-cream station.
My head swims with nausea. I have been clinging like a drowning man to the hope she was at the reception, even if I didn’t see her; that she wasn’t missing for hours before I raised the alarm.
It’s possible, of course, that she just doesn’t happen to be in any of the photos. But given the volume the police have obtained from the phones of dozens and dozens of guests, not to mention the official photographer, the chances are vanishingly small that she wouldn’t be in the background of at least some of them. Far more probable is the terrifying truth that all those apparent sightings of a blonde girl in a pink dress weren’t Lottie after all.
We all made the same mistake Paul did: one little girl in a frothy pink frock looks much like another.
Even, unforgivably, to her mother.
While I’ve been upstairs, trying to sleep, the police have sequenced the photos. The last one they have of her was taken at 18.33, by Flic Everett, who was taking a picture of Olivia.
Bates shows it to me, pushing it across the Formica table between us. Lottie is sitting on her gilt chair at the end of the front row on the beach, her head turned away from the camera as if something – or someone – has caught her attention just out of shot. If we knew what, or who, that was, perhaps it would tell us where she is now. They’re cross-referencing all the photographs they have, Bates says, trying to find the object of Lottie’s attention, but it’s a slow, laborious process, and in the meantime, my daughter is still missing.
18.33.
Nearly four full hours before I reported her missing.
Before I even noticed she was gone.
I realise now why the tenor of the questions from Bates and Lorenz has subtly changed, and why I’m in an interview room, rather than sitting on the sofa in reception.
I understand the logic: statistically, I’m the person most likely to have harmed my child. But while they’re probing for cracks in my story, quizzing me about what Lottie was like as a baby or whether I find it difficult to cope as a single mother, they’re not out there, looking for her.
‘You let a three-year-old kid make her way back to the hotel on her own?’ Lorenz says. This is the third time he’s asked the same question, albeit in different ways. ‘You were fine with that?’
‘She wasn’t on her own! All the bridesmaids followed Sian and Marc down the aisle together, and then all the guests went back in a big group. It was a wedding!’
‘But you didn’t go find her once you got to the reception?’
‘She’s a really smart little girl,’ I say, and even to my own ears I sound defensive. ‘She doesn’t need me checking in on her every five minutes.’
And then Bates asks me what I was doing in the crucial window between 18.33, when Flic Everett took that last photo of Lottie, and 22.28, when the police logged the first phone call reporting her missing.
I tell her the truth: I was having sex on the beach with a stranger.
It didn’t take long: we took advantage of the privacy afforded by the hooded sunloungers, and Ian was an athletic lover. I orgasmed twice, in hard, sharp succession, before Ian came with a grunt of his own. Twenty minutes, start to finish.
We spent another twenty minutes, half-an-hour at most, gazing up at the stars and talking. I was away from the party less than an hour.
I’m not ashamed of the sex: I’m single, with as much right as any man to enjoy a fling with no strings attached.
But I’m also a mother, and it’s clear to everyone in the room I prioritised myself over my daughter. I didn’t go and find her once the wedding was over because I was too busy drinking champagne and flirting with a stranger.
Even if I had nothing to do with her disappearance, I’m culpable.
‘What do you know about Ian Dutton?’ Lorenz asks.
‘He’s a friend of Marc’s. I’d never talked to him before last night.’
‘Was it his idea to go to the beach?’
‘No, mine.’
I stare at the photograph of Lottie lying between us on the table. ‘Ian couldn’t have had anything to do with this,’ I say. ‘He was with me when she disappeared.’
‘You’re assuming only one individual is responsible,’ Bates says.
Her words conjure images I don’t want in my head. Sex trafficking rings, paedophile circles, men working in concert to spirit children away to dark basements and stained mattresses.
‘I understand why you have to ask these questions,’ I say, trying to hold my voice steady. ‘But I didn’t hurt Lottie, and nor did any of our friends. I told you about that man I saw talking to her on the beach. Have you checked into him?’
Lorenz leans back in his chair. ‘We’re looking at every possibility.’
‘You say Lottie is a smart kid,’ Bates says.
‘She is. She didn’t wander off or get lost. She’d never have gone near the water. And she’s not the kind of kid to be fooled by stories about lost puppies. Someone took her.’
‘A stranger?’
‘Obviously!’
‘See, this is what confuses me,’ Bates says. ‘Lottie disappeared into thin air in the middle of a wedding, and yet no one seems to have noticed. No one saw anything, no one heard anything.’
Blood roars in my ears. Suddenly I understand what she’s saying, the realisation slamming into my stomach with the speed and force of a train.
If a stranger had snatched Lottie by force in broad daylight it would have attracted huge attention. My daughter may be only three, but just getting her into her car seat is like wrestling with an alligator. She’d have screamed, lashed out, created such a scene no one could have ignored it.
Abducting her from the reception under cover of darkness and loud music might have been easier. But access would have been far more difficult. The beach is public, but the reception area by the pool was restricted to wedding guests, enforced by hotel security. And the lack of any photographs or genuine sightings of my daughter at the reception lends weight to the theory that she never came back to the hotel.
‘It’s possible she left the beach under her own steam, of course,’ Bates muses. ‘But if not, it seems more plausible to me that she was with someone she knew and tru
sted.’
I don’t know if that makes it worse.
‘We will find her,’ Bates says.
But we both know time is running out. No one has seen Lottie for nearly twenty-four hours. I don’t have to be told that if she isn’t found in the next forty-eight, she may never be found at all.
Lottie, three, snatched as her mother attends wedding
FLOWER GIRL STOLEN
THE distraught mother of missing three-year-old Charlotte Martini was clinging to hope she was still alive last night.
As the desperate hunt continued in Florida, her mother relived the terrifying moment she discovered her daughter had vanished from a wedding reception at the upmarket Sandy Beach Hotel on a private barrier island off the coast of St Pete Beach, while she was chatting with guests just yards away.
Alexa Martini, 29, a human rights lawyer, has told family and friends she believes her daughter was snatched just moments after performing her duties as a flower girl at the wedding of family friend Marc Chapman.
Desperate
The child’s grandmother, Mary Johnson, 59, who flew out with her husband, Anthony, 65, to be with Mrs Martini yesterday, described the frantic phone call she received after her daughter discovered her child was missing around eleven o’clock on Saturday night. ‘It’s the call no mother ever wants to make or hear. She said: “Lottie’s been taken, Lottie’s been taken.” She was hysterical. ‘She only took her eyes off her for a split second. It was broad daylight, they were at a wedding. Lottie is the apple of her mother’s eye.’
Florida police yesterday sealed off the beach and patio area by the pool where the wedding reception was held, and forensic specialists combed through the area, looking for clues. An Amber alert – a nationwide appeal to find the missing child – was issued, and all airports and ports have been notified.