Stolen

by Tess Stimson

  The night Luca flew out, I couldn’t sleep. Our marriage was in deep trouble and I knew we couldn’t go on the way we were. Luca wasn’t in Rio alone. He’d had flings before, but none of the others had lasted more than a few weeks. Juiliana was different. He hadn’t troubled to hide this indiscretion, for a start.

  I’ve never been a jealous person, appreciating the distinction between sex and love, but the disrespect hurt. It was becoming painfully obvious to me I couldn’t keep looking the other way over Luca’s infidelities; I had to make a decision, and soon. Lottie adored her father and I hated the thought of subjecting her to the back-and-forth of divorce and two homes. But what kind of feminist role model was I if I tolerated a man who treated his wife like this? Mum’s argument that he was ‘just being Italian’ had long since worn thin.

  My response to stress, as always, was to throw myself into work. The next morning I was at my desk at Muysken Ritter, head down, trying to make sense of a risible response by the Crown to our objections over deportation when my secretary knocked on my door around lunchtime. It was closed; Jade knew that meant I was only to be disturbed if the building was on fire.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Jade said. ‘But there are two policemen to see you.’

  Looking back, it was like a macabre rehearsal for what was to come. A year later, almost to the day, two different police officers arrived at my office to break the news that Luca had died in the Genoa bridge collapse.

  Oddly enough, on neither occasion did the sudden appearance of the police at my place of work cause me to panic. I hadn’t yet learned to fear the ambulance that passed me on the way home or the unexpected knock at the door.

  I can’t remember what I thought when I looked up and saw them standing behind Jade, their faces grave. I probably just assumed it was something to do with one of my clients.

  It never occurred to me they’d come to arrest me.

  eight days missing

  chapter 23

  alex

  The room is small and grey and bland. Two hard plastic chairs have been placed either side of a large square table, on which sits an oddly old-fashioned machine with dials and graph paper and a long stylus. The polygrapher stands in front of the table, his arms by his sides. His posture is a study in neutrality, neither alert nor relaxed.

  ‘Ashton Hyatt,’ the polygrapher says, extending his hand to me. ‘I’m sorry to be meeting you in such circumstances.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Lieutenant Bates says.

  Hyatt shuts the door behind her and motions for me to take one of the two chairs. He’s a thin man, mid-forties, beige in every way: the kind of person you’d struggle to remember five minutes after meeting him, if not for the striking blaze of white hair in the centre of his cropped brown curls.

  He tells me to place my feet flat on the floor, with my hands on my knees. I do so, my stomach fizzing with nerves. He loops cables around my chest and I stiffen self-consciously as he attaches sticky pads to my pulse points. The room is stuffy and airless, despite the noisy conditioning unit in a solitary window high up one wall.

  Just routine, Bates said yesterday, when she called me into the precinct and asked me to take a lie-detector test. As if she was simply dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s, when we both know her discovery of what happened in Kirkwood Place has changed everything.

  I’ve liaised with American lawyers on a number of client cases over the years, and I’m aware polygraphs are much more common in the US, particularly in situations like this. But it’s never routine when it happens to you.

  ‘I won’t ask you to relax,’ Hyatt says now. ‘If you didn’t find this stressful, then we’d worry. Your heart rate’s likely up a notch. That’s normal.’

  He takes a seat opposite me and pulls a legal pad towards him, making a couple of notations before switching the machine on. Immediately, the needle begins to scratch four blue lines across the graph paper.

  ‘Some of these questions will seem obvious,’ Hyatt says. ‘And I’ll likely repeat some. I’m not looking to trip you up, OK?’

  I swallow. I should have nothing to fear, but my palms are sweaty and my heart feels like it’s going to burst out of my chest.

  ‘OK, then. Here we go. Is your name Alexa Martini?’ Hyatt asks.

  I nod.

  ‘I need you to give me a verbal answer.’

  ‘Sorry. Yes.’

  He glances at the scratch marks on the graph paper and makes a note. ‘Is your birth date January first, 1990?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The mundane questions continue. Were you born in the United States?

  Is London, England, your place of residence?

  Are you age twenty-nine?

  Do you work as an attorney?

  ‘No,’ I say.

  The needles instantly leap across the page, a massif of blue spikes. Hyatt peers at them and writes something on his legal pad. ‘Is the legal firm of Muysken Ritter in London your place of employment?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll ask the question again. Are you an attorney?’

  ‘I’m a lawyer,’ I say.

  His expression clears. ‘Ah. Yes. Of course. Two countries divided by a common language.’

  The tone of his questions starts to change as he asks me about Lottie and I dig my fingernails into my palms. I can’t take my eyes from the stylus moving across the graph paper.

  Is Lottie your only child?

  Have you ever regretted having children?

  Have you ever physically punished Lottie?

  Have you ever harmed her?

  The needles spike across the graph paper again. Hyatt studies the page, writes in his notes. ‘No,’ I repeat.

  By the time we are finished, I am drenched in sweat. Hyatt removes the sticky pads and cables and I bury my face in my hands, struggling to control my breathing. He has reduced the infinitely complex grey shades of motherhood to binary black and white, leaving me disorientated and confused.

  Bates told me to just tell the truth, but I’m not sure what that is any more.

  Doesn’t every mother wish at some point, if just for a fleeting, guilty moment, that she was child- and responsibility-free? Does that mean we regret having them? I love the very marrow of my daughter’s bones, but there’ve been times I’ve found the burden of raising a child crushing.

  And how do you define harm? Lottie’s hair colour was determined by genetics, but how she turns out – the emotional baggage she carries with her into adulthood – is on me. I don’t even have Luca to share the load.

  The responsibility is overwhelming.

  My parents are waiting for me in the precinct reception area when I emerge. I’ve splashed water on my face in the bathroom, but I can see from their expressions that my distress is obvious.

  ‘This is harassment,’ my mother says, loudly. ‘That Lieutenant Bates is just looking for an easy target because she’s run out of ideas!’

  ‘Mary,’ Dad says.

  ‘Please, Mum,’ I say. ‘I just want to get out of here.’

  We took precautions to avoid the press but, the second we go outside, a feral pack of at least a dozen journalists surges towards us, shouting questions and shoving their cameras and microphones into my face. Not one single police officer comes out to help us deal with the attention. I realise I’ve been thrown to the wolves.

  Dad forges a path through the scrum to our hire car, roughly pushing away a TV camera as I duck inside the vehicle. The paparazzi surround us, pressing their cameras to the windows, still yelling their questions. As we drive away, they run back to their own cars so they can follow us.

  In the days since Lottie vanished, I’ve become almost numb to the relentless media scrutiny, the constant presence of cameras every time I step foot outside. Before the hotel manager moved us to the penthouse suite, one enterprising muck-raker even disguised herself as a chambermaid and ambushed me as I came out of the shower. But the attention has never been hostile or aggressive like thi
s before. What can you tell us about Kirkwood Place?

  ‘Ignore them,’ Mum says. ‘They’re vultures. They don’t care about Lottie. They just want a good story.’

  It was naive to hope no one would find out. I’m only surprised it didn’t come to light sooner. After a lengthy investigation, the police in London dropped all charges against me, but that doesn’t mean the slate was wiped clean. These days, it’s almost impossible to fully expunge your history from the internet.

  And even I can see that, in this instance, my record is particularly pertinent.

  chapter 24

  alex

  Lottie had been unusually accommodating that morning. It was as if, in her father’s absence, she’d taken pity on me.

  She ate her yoghurt and Cheerios without protest and for once she didn’t stiffen like a board when I tried to get her arms into the sleeves of her T-shirt. She even threw me a tolerant smile when I put her flashing blue trainers on the wrong feet, and had to take them off and start again. Perhaps the novelty of spending more time with each other had worked its charm on her, as it had on me.

  Nonetheless, it’d already been seven-twenty by the time I got her buckled into her car seat, and I had an eight o’clock meeting on the other side of London I was never going to make.

  I texted Jade frantically every time we hit a red light, and managed to get the meeting delayed till eight-thirty, but then I had to circle the block twice before I finally found a place to park four streets from the Tube station, and I sat in a tunnel for twenty minutes just outside London Bridge, unable to call or email anyone.

  My stress levels were sky-high by the time I got to work. I shut myself in my office and told Jade I wasn’t to be disturbed unless it was life or death. She’d worked with me long enough to know I wasn’t kidding.

  But I hadn’t meant it literally.

  Wilful exposure of a child to risk of significant harm. That’s what the police officer said when they arrested me. As if I’d deliberately set out to hurt my daughter.

  I’ve never pretended to be a perfect mother, but until that day I’d always prided myself I was at least a competent one. I frequently checked the straps of Lottie’s car seat, adjusting them if they’d stretched a little loose, just like you’re supposed to. I put her to sleep on her back when she was a baby and installed plastic protectors on all the wall outlets, even though it meant breaking my fingernails to get them off again whenever I wanted to plug something in. I looped blind cords out of reach and put up stair gates, ensured she was vaccinated on schedule, never covered her food with BPA-laden plastic wrap, cut her hotdogs into lengths (on the rare occasions I allowed her to have them) so that she wouldn’t choke and covered her in Factor 50 even on cloudy days. Every time I drove on the motorway, I’d lock the car doors in case one of them malfunctioned and sucked Lottie out of the car, like a movie in which a plane door is opened mid-flight.

  When Luca, carefree and eternally optimistic, asked, ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ I always had an answer.

  It never occurred to me that I was Lottie’s greatest danger.

  I have no excuse for what happened. I was tired and overworked and stressed, but so are tens of thousands of other mothers. I doubt I was the only one preoccupied with the fact her husband was having an affair, either.

  It was the reliably appalling British summer that saved Lottie’s life. The temperature that day was only 18°C, cool for August; but even so, Lottie was sweating and dehydrated by the time a passerby spotted her, forgotten where I’d left her in the back seat of my car.

  The name of the street where I’d parked was Kirkwood Place.

  twelve days missing

  chapter 25

  alex

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ Mum says. ‘It’s not too late to change your mind.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I say.

  Mum presses her lips together, holding back the words with a visible effort as she tucks a stray strand of hair behind my ear. ‘You look lovely, darling. Good luck.’

  I look far from lovely: my face is shadowed and drawn, and this olive linen shirt drains my skin of colour. But that’s the point. Let your pain show, Marc said. You have to look the part.

  People aren’t interested in how I really feel. My grief is so intense it’s settled in my heart like permafrost and I realise that makes me come across as unfeeling. But I can’t help it. It’s so intolerable to be me, even for a moment, that I’ve walled myself off from my own feelings, because it’s the only way I can survive. Half the time, it feels like I’m outside my own body, watching myself from a distance. And yet, even second-hand, the pain still takes my breath away.

  I have grave reservations about giving this interview but, as Marc pointed out yesterday, I don’t have much choice now.

  ‘We’ve got to change the narrative,’ he said. ‘This is the only way. And it has to be television. It’s much harder to misrepresent you on TV than if you did a newspaper interview. This way, no one will be able to misquote you. You’ve got to connect with people, get them on your side again.’

  Dad and Zealy both agree with him. Mum’s the only holdout. I don’t need to explain myself, she says. Every mother out there understands what it’s like to make a mistake, to drop the ball: there but for the grace of God. She says it’s only chance this terrible thing happened to me and not them. Any one of us could have fallen asleep in bed during a night feed and smothered our baby, or left a second-floor window fatally unlocked, or forgotten our daughter was sleeping in the back of the car.

  I don’t care if people think I’m a bad mother. I only need them to believe I had nothing to do with Lottie’s kidnap. I have to get everyone looking for her again.

  The backlash over Kirkwood Place has dominated the news cycle for four days now. Every aspect of my parenting is being viewed through its lens: the day I forgot to pack Lottie lunch for nursery; the time I left her in the supermarket trolley while I nipped into an adjacent aisle and returned to find her in the arms of a concerned shopper. People are crawling out of the woodwork with their stories, hungry for vicarious celebrity.

  A woman who was on the plane when Lottie and I flew out two weeks ago has come forward, claiming I hit my daughter when she spilled her drink. She even has phone footage of me shaking Lottie’s shoulder as she lies crumpled in the aisle.

  It plays on every channel. Again and again, I watch myself yank my daughter to her feet, and I don’t see a fraught, exhausted mother struggling to match wills with her stubborn child, and be a good parent. I see what everyone else sees: an angry, violent woman who looks as if she can’t wait to be rid of her child – a child who is now missing.

  Did I mean to leave her in the hot car that day on Kirkwood Place? I honestly don’t know any more. Maybe I abandoned Lottie in that car because I wanted her to be taken from me.

  Maybe all those people who think I’m wicked are right.

  It feels as if no one is searching for my daughter any more, including the police.

  The case is still officially open, of course, but there’s no more talk about the thin man. No one stops to ask why on earth I’d cut off my daughter’s hair. I’m now the prime suspect. The Florida tourist board must be thrilled.

  This TV interview is the very last thing I want to do, but Marc is right: I have to change the narrative.

  ‘Turn that up,’ Dad says suddenly, pointing at the muted television screen in my hotel room.

  Zealy reaches for the remote. A sweating, overweight man in a white suit is standing at the top of a flight of steps in front of a municipal-looking building, facing a bank of microphones. A ticker-tape runs along the bottom of the screen: Mayor accuses mom in Lottie Martini case.

  ‘Mayor Eagleton, is Mrs Martini gonna be arrested?’ a reporter calls, off-camera.

  ‘That’s a matter for the police,’ says the mayor.

  ‘But do you believe she’s guilty?’

  ‘This is a beautiful city,’ the mayor says,
spreading his arms. ‘It’s a real safe place. A real safe place. We have thousands of families visit our city every year and enjoy our beautiful beaches, and I’m tellin’ you, it’s a safe place.’

  Another voice calls out: ‘So do you think Mrs Martini killed her daughter?’

  ‘Listen. All I’m saying is, we have a little girl disappeared in the middle of a weddin’, and none of the folks there saw or heard a thing, which seems mighty strange to me.’ He shakes his head. ‘Mighty strange. My little girl, she’d holler like all get-out if somebody she don’t know tried to take her some place she don’t want to go.’ He jabs a pudgy finger in the air. ‘And we have a lady left her baby in a hot car, a workin’ woman off takin’ her important London meetings and who knows what all, while her baby baked in the sun. Y’all seen the film of her assaultin’ that innocent child on the airplane. We’re gonna find the truth and we’re gonna find that poor baby. Now if y’all will excuse me …’

  Zealy turns off the television with an exclamation of disgust. ‘Jesus Christ. What is this?’

  ‘This is small-town America,’ Marc says. ‘Which is why you’ve got to do this interview, Alex.’

  He accompanies me downstairs to the second floor where the INN television crew have set up in one of the hotel suites.

  It seemed smarter to go with a British network; as Marc said, they have less skin in the game politically than the American stations, who make no pretence of impartiality.

  Quinn Wilde is the reporter doing the interview. I know her by reputation through my work in human rights law: she’s covered numerous conflicts in places like Syria, whose refugees my firm has represented. I’ve seen her at press conferences over the last two weeks – she’s hard to miss, with that piratical eye patch – but I’m a bit surprised she’s covering this story. I thought she was a war correspondent; when I hear her name, I picture her standing in front of bombed-out buildings pockmarked with bullet holes. Maybe she lost her nerve after she got blown up by that IED a year or two ago.