by Tess Stimson
Whatever the reason, Marc thinks it’s a good thing she’s doing the interview; he says she’ll give it credibility and gravitas. I hope he’s right.
A skinny kid with a quiff of ginger hair ushers me across the INN suite to two armchairs in the centre of a web of cables and lights. Three cameras have been set up on tripods, one pointing towards each chair and a third with a wide-angle view of the entire set.
A cameraman is checking each viewfinder in turn and making adjustments to the height of the tripods. On a table behind the chairs are two small monitors, currently showing a rainbow of vertical bars. Two labels identify them as ‘preview’ and ‘live’.
The skinny kid points to the nearest armchair. ‘We’re a bit tight for time, so if you could sit here, Phil can get you miked up and check for levels,’ he says. ‘Um, Marc, is it? You can wait in the edit suite next door, if you like. There’s a monitor, so you can watch the interview live with me when we go on-air.’
A jolt of panic hits me. ‘Live?’
‘This was supposed to be pre-recorded,’ Marc says. ‘There was never any discussion about a live interview.’
‘The editor’s given you the PrimeTime slot,’ the skinny kid says. ‘We’re on-air in five minutes. There’s no time for a pre-record. Don’t worry, Mrs Martini, you’ll be fine. You won’t know the difference once the cameras start rolling. Quinn’ll help you through this. And you’ll reach so many more viewers on PrimeTime. Everyone will be watching, which is what we want, isn’t it?’
Marc frowns. ‘This isn’t what we agreed—’
‘It’s OK,’ I say.
The cameraman hands me a small microphone attached to a slender cable. ‘If you could thread this up the front of your blouse,’ he says. ‘Just clip it on your lapel. Yep, that’s perfect.’
He reaches behind me and fastens something to the waistband of my khaki jeans. I’ve lost so much weight in the last two weeks they hang off me, so he has to prop the device against the cushions.
Suddenly the room is filled with a purposeful urgency that reminds me of the operating theatre when I had my appendix out at sixteen: the same brisk efficiency of people who know what they’re doing and have done it a thousand times before. The cameraman asks me what I had for breakfast so he can check his sound levels, while the skinny kid coordinates with someone on the phone.
Quinn is the last to enter the room. She whispers something in the cameraman’s ear and then settles in the seat opposite me, attaching her own mike with her left hand. Her right arm is stiff and immobile.
‘Two minutes to on-air,’ the kid announces.
The cameraman adjusts the camera pointed towards Quinn, angling it so that it captures a three-quarter profile of her good side on the preview monitor behind her. It’s hard to see beyond the defiant eye patch, but she must have been beautiful before the accident. Her remaining eye is an intense, Elizabeth-Taylor violet-blue, and her choppy, jaw-length black hair dips to a dramatic widow’s peak before falling in a thick wedge across her damaged face.
‘One minute!’
Quinn pins me like a butterfly beneath her singular gaze. She hasn’t lost her nerve, I realise suddenly. She’s spoiling for a fight.
The kid holds up his right hand. ‘Coming to you in five … four …’
chapter 26
alex
Quinn doesn’t even glance at me as the skinny kid silently closes his fist to signal we’re on-air. Instead, she studies the sheaf of papers on her lap as, over her shoulder, the live-feed monitor shows Andrew Tait, the presenter of PrimeTime back in London, introduce INN’s evening bulletin.
‘A beautiful three-year-old little girl, baby Lottie, snatched from a glamorous destination wedding,’ the newscaster says. ‘Her mother drinks and parties at the reception a hundred metres away, leaving little Lottie on the beach alone. Tonight, the mystery continues.’
I tense. This is the interview that’s supposed to rehabilitate me and refocus attention back where it belongs, on Lottie. Tait just made it sound like my daughter belongs in care.
The newscaster introduces a pre-recorded piece from Quinn and his face is replaced by footage of a white sandy beach.
‘This is the last place Lottie Martini was seen alive, the Sandy Beach resort in St Pete Beach, Florida,’ Quinn’s recorded voice says, as the camera zooms in to the gate between the hotel reception area and the beach, left moodily ajar. ‘Lottie was a flower girl at the wedding of a family friend. Lottie’s mum, Alexa, says her little girl had been looking forward to being a bridesmaid.’
Quinn efficiently recaps the facts of the case. There’s nothing antagonistic in her reporting and I wonder if I’m imagining her hostility. Surreptitiously, I wipe the palms of my hands against my jeans.
‘According to police, the wedding ceremony ended just before sunset, which that night was at six fifty-eight p.m.,’ Quinn’s voice continues. ‘Several witnesses saw Lottie talking to various wedding guests on the beach, including the bride’s mother, Penny, but after that, the trail goes cold. Alexa Martini has admitted leaving her three-year-old daughter to walk back to the hotel alone. And in this tropical climate, it gets dark quickly once the sun goes down.’
The camera wobbles and jerks as it follows the fateful path from the beach up to the hotel gate. The footage has been shot three feet from the ground: a child’s view of the world. It’s sickeningly effective.
Quinn lets the journey play out in real time without comment. I had no idea a hundred metres could be so far. The room starts to close in on me, and black spots dance before my eyes. What was I thinking, letting my baby find her way back to the hotel alone?
Suddenly I hear my own voice being played back to me, a clip from the press conference the day after she disappeared. ‘Lottie’s a smart kid,’ I say. ‘It’s not like she was on her own. Lots of people were around.’
Even to my own ear, I sound careless and indifferent. I was in shock when I said that, but no one will think about that now. They’ll only see a woman who comes across as defiant and defensive; a neglectful, deadbeat mother.
I glance at Quinn, feeling ill. She’s a respected, serious journalist. She’s simply reporting the facts. So is this truly how I appear to the outside world?
Is this who I am?
‘A waiter at the hotel that night told INN Alexa Martini had drunk several cocktails with friends before the wedding ceremony even began,’ her voiceover continues. ‘She was then seen drinking a number of glasses of champagne at the reception itself. At about seven-twenty p.m., the maid of honour, Catherine Lord, saw a thin man walking away from the resort carrying a small child wrapped in a blanket. Alexa Martini insists it was the kidnapper, but in the light of the revelations from London, police here are questioning her account.’
On the preview monitor next to the one carrying the live-feed, I see my own face, white and hunted, as I leave the police station after the polygraph.
Mum was right: I should never have agreed to do this interview. Simply by being here I’m opening the door to debate, invading my own privacy and putting my fitness as a mother at the heart of the story, when all that should matter is finding my daughter.
‘Despite extensive police investigations, there hasn’t been a single confirmed sighting since this photograph was taken –’ the camera cuts to the wedding photo of Lottie, sitting on the end of the row of gilt chairs ‘– at six thirty-three p.m. But Alexa Martini didn’t raise the alarm for nearly another four hours.’ She pauses to let that sink in. ‘Police didn’t receive the first call, which came from the hotel staff, not the little girl’s mother, until ten twenty-eight p.m.’
I’m shocked to see Mum’s face suddenly appear on screen. ‘Lottie’s not the type of little girl to wander off,’ Mum says. ‘She knows about stranger danger, we’ve drilled that into her. She’d never go off with someone she didn’t know.’
I close my eyes. I didn’t know Mum had spoken to the press. I know what she meant, but that’s not how it sounds
. The insinuation is clear: It had to be someone she knew. And I can’t argue with that, because I don’t know how my daughter vanished in front of dozens of people without anyone seeing or hearing a thing. I’m starting to doubt my own version of events myself. I feel like I’m going mad.
‘Nearly two weeks later, Lottie is still missing,’ Quinn’s voice says. ‘No one knows if she’s alive or dead. Her story has captured the world’s attention, the ear of the US president, even a papal blessing.’ The tone of her voice suddenly changes. ‘The level of interest in the case has not been without controversy, not least because some community leaders have suggested a child from a poor, non-white family wouldn’t have received so much attention.’
The camera cuts to a wall filled with photographs of smiling Black children and then to a man seated at a desk laden with thick, overflowing files.
I glance at Quinn, who’s studiously sifting through her notes while the pre-recorded piece airs. Where’s she going with this?
The on-screen tag identifies the man as Terrence Muse, of the Black and Missing Children Foundation. ‘There are so many families of colour who are desperately searching for their missing loved one. They are just asking for a couple of seconds of media coverage and it can change the narrative for them,’ he says. ‘But the decision-makers don’t look like us. These large-scale searches, they’re always for white children.’
Quinn’s voiceover resumes as a young Black woman appears on screen. She’s holding a large portrait of a bright-eyed, smiling young boy.
‘Shemika Jackson’s son, Jovon, disappeared in December 2016,’ Quinn says. ‘He was just nine years old.’
I recognise the unquantifiable grief in the woman’s eyes.
‘It makes me angry to see y’all reporting on somebody else’s child,’ Shemika says. ‘I had to fight to get Jovon on local news and this white baby’s on national news with the FBI overnight. I’m tired and I’m frustrated and I’m mad.’
The camera follows Shemika into her son’s bedroom, clearly untouched since his disappearance. She sits on the edge of his bed and bows her head in grief. For the first time since Lottie vanished, I’m yanked out of my own suffering. This woman has endured the same hell as me for almost three years, and she doesn’t even have the fragile comfort of knowing that the world is out there looking for her son.
I’ve spent my working life giving voice to those who would otherwise be unheard and yet I never gave a thought to mothers like Shemika Jackson, who don’t have my contacts and resources, who can’t afford to take indefinite time off work. I feel ashamed.
I’ve lost track of what Quinn is saying and I jump when I hear my name again. ‘Alexa Martini escaped tragedy once before, when she left her baby daughter in a hot car,’ Quinn says in her voiceover. ‘She insists she’s being framed, the victim of a bungled investigation. Rumours are rampant, facts scarce. Those hours of the evening of October the nineteenth remain a mystery, except to the person or persons who harmed Lottie Martini.’
The live-feed monitor abruptly switches to me, trapped like a rabbit caught in the headlights in my plush hotel armchair. I have no idea if I’m about to be eviscerated or finally given my chance to set the story straight.
Quinn leans forward, her blue gaze alight with malice. She’s out for blood. She’s cloaked it in journalistic impartiality, but this whole thing has been a set-up from the start. The interview with Shemika Jackson was deliberately included to make me look even less sympathetic, if that were possible. A privileged white woman in her five-star luxury suite, who at best is guilty of reckless neglect, at worst something far more sinister.
‘INN has received leaked details of the results of the recent polygraph you took, Alexa,’ she says. ‘Would you like to know what they say?’
chapter 27
quinn
The tide has turned. Public opinion can change on a dime, and Quinn has a spooky ability to sense the tipping point and stay one step ahead of the curve.
Like everything else these days, public sympathy is a popularity contest, and Alexa Martini is too self-contained and guarded to win any prizes. She could be falling apart on the inside, of course, but people don’t give a shit about that. The generation raised on I’m a Celebrity … and Love Island is used to a diet of high-octane drama and vicarious emotion. They want Alexa’s grief obvious and in-your-face so they can get a kick out of her suffering. It was only a matter of time before they turned on her for not giving them what they wanted.
Quinn wonders what the woman is thinking as she watches the footage of her daughter’s last known journey play out on screen.
Phil did a masterful job with the camerawork: retracing the little girl’s steps from a kid’s-eye view was inspired, and he shot it just after sunset, the time Lottie disappeared, with shadows already lengthening eerily across the dimpled sand. Alexa’s face is grey, her skin suddenly taut across her cheekbones and jaw, as if she’s been shrink-wrapped.
This isn’t personal. Quinn is simply going after the story. She introduced the Shemika Jackson angle because the idea of this woke, do-gooding human rights lawyer coming face-to-face with her own white privilege appealed to her sense of irony.
There’s a hierarchy even for the parents of a kidnapped child. At the top of the pile: articulate, well-connected, white middle-class parents like Kate and Gerry McCann and Alexa Martini. And at the bottom, people like Shemika Jackson.
Shit, who’s she kidding? Of course it’s personal. There’s something about Alexa Martini that’s really got under her skin.
As the pre-recorded piece comes to an end, Quinn leans forward. This is the moment she lives for, the high that almost makes her forget how much she wants a drink: when her quarry is cornered and she moves in for the kill.
‘INN has received leaked details of the results of the polygraph you took four days ago, Alexa,’ she says. ‘Would you like to know what they say?’
Alexa blanches. ‘How did you get them?’
‘We’ve verified them as genuine,’ Quinn says, ignoring the question. ‘Were you aware, Alexa, that you failed that lie-detector test?’
She lets the silence bleed. Alexa grips the arms of her chair with whitened knuckles, glancing around the makeshift studio as if tempted to flee.
‘Your polygraph shows a “probable lie” to one or more answers,’ Quinn presses. ‘Can you explain that for us?’
‘I don’t know—’
‘Did you lie?’
She waits for the protestations of innocence, the accusations of fake news and media bias.
‘Maybe,’ Alexa says.
Quinn isn’t often surprised, but she is now. ‘I think you need to explain that,’ she says.
Alexa slumps in her seat, a marionette whose strings have been cut. ‘The questions on the polygraph were so confusing,’ she says. ‘They asked if I hurt Lottie, and I didn’t, not on purpose, but I let it happen, didn’t I? So does that make a liar out of me?’
‘You tell me, Alexa.’
‘Which questions did I fail?’
‘Our source didn’t go into details.’
There’s a flash of defiance in the other woman’s eyes. ‘So, for all you know, I could’ve just been fibbing about my age,’ she says.
‘What were you doing when your daughter disappeared, Alexa?’
The woman looks down at her hands.
Quinn waits her out. After twenty seconds of dead air, the intern moves into her (single) eye-line, signalling for her to move things along. She turns her head so he’s presented with her eye patch.
‘I was having sex,’ Alexa says, finally.
Quinn already knows exactly what Alexa Martini was doing when her child was abducted; the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office leaks like a sieve. ‘You were having sex?’ she repeats, prolonging the moment. ‘So, who was looking after Lottie?’
‘I was at a wedding! I thought she was safe!’
‘So you didn’t make arrangements for someone to watch her?’
‘I know I’m not a perfect mother,’ Alexa pleads. ‘But I love my daughter. I do the best I can. I support both of us, I look after her and make sure—’
‘You left her in your car,’ Quinn says.
‘I made a mistake!’
‘And then you abandoned her to have sex with a stranger. You can see why some people might question your ability as a parent.’
‘Would they question it if I was a man?’ Alexa asks. ‘I didn’t abandon her. I was at a wedding with my friends. I told you, I thought she was safe! Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone?’
‘That isn’t the—’
‘If I was her father, not her mother, would my sex life be an issue?’ Alexa demands. Suddenly, she’s sitting up straighter. ‘Why am I held to a higher standard? If her dad had got drunk and had a one-night stand, everyone would accept it was a mistake, not a moral failing, wouldn’t they? They’d say losing his daughter was its own punishment. But because I’m her mother, because I’m a woman, I’m expected to be perfect. I’m held to a different standard. How is that fair?’
Quinn realises this interview is running away from her, and she can’t quite understand why. ‘It’s not about your sex life,’ she says, in an attempt to wrench it back on course. ‘You left a three-year-old wandering around in the dark, and it’s clear you prioritise your work over your daughter. What kind of mother are you?’
Too late, she realises she’s gone too far.
Alexa Martini may be the poster child for bad parenting but, unless she’s actively involved in her daughter’s disappearance, she’s still a bereaved mother who’s lost her child.
Quinn could kick herself. She let her personal bias take over, and she’s just given Alexa what she needed: the sympathy of her audience.
‘Do you think I somehow deserved this?’ Alexa asks.
‘This isn’t personal, Ms Martini.’
‘Of course it is! Do you think I shouldn’t care about my work because I have a child?’