by Tess Stimson
It doesn’t take long to find the café, which, judging from the lone car parked outside, is as deserted as the pub. South Weald is a summer village; its population increases tenfold in the months of July and August, during which time it makes enough money from holidaymakers to see it through the year. On a wet Sunday in November, the only patrons are locals.
I prefer it out of season, windswept and desolate. It matches my mood.
Unlike the pub, the café is warm and welcoming. Mismatched but inviting armchairs and sofas take up the bulk of the space with a small children’s section in the corner filled with shelves of battered picture books and boxes of Lego. A small boy is kneeling on the floor beside two women sharing a squishy cinnamon sofa, writing his name in the condensation on the window with his finger.
Behind a counter, a young man with surfer hair is doing something complicated with a coffee steamer, all chrome pipes and frothing milk. He fills two thick-rimmed, chunky mugs with foaming liquid and takes them over to the two women.
There are no other customers and, when he returns to the counter, I order a thick wedge of homemade cheddar and asparagus quiche as much out of pity as hunger.
He doesn’t recognise the photo of Ellie, and neither do the two women.
‘You should ask Louise,’ one of them says. ‘She knows everyone. She’s swimming now, but she’ll be back soon to close up.’
I cast a glance at the pewter sea. The woman laughs. ‘She swims in all weathers. Part seal, if you ask me.’
The quiche is surprisingly good and I wolf it down. By the time I finish, it’s dark outside. I can’t imagine swimming in this weather. I hope Louise turns up soon. I’ve got a long drive back to London.
The bell over the door rings as a woman comes in with her dog. The surfer kid crouches down beside the animal, a beautiful Irish setter, roughhousing with him for a few moments, to the dog’s obvious delight.
The woman holds the door open, letting in an icy draft. She’s clearly another customer, not the Amazonian swimmer Louise; her hair is dry and she’s not alone.
‘Come on, Flora!’ she calls to the child behind her. ‘Stop dawdling. We can get you another Squishmallow.’
‘I want Henry! We have to find him!’
A little girl of about six erupts into the café. She’s wearing an old-fashioned purple bobble hat, the kind a grandma might knit you for Christmas. I can’t see her hair, but I don’t need to.
She stops dead when she sees me.
‘Mummy?’ she says.
chapter 54
alex
The little girl backs towards the woman holding the café door open, taking refuge in the safety of her skirts.
‘Mummy?’ she says again, pulling the woman’s hand. ‘Can we go home now?’
I’ve frightened her. The intensity of my hunger must show in my face, but I can’t look away. It takes every ounce of self-control not to run towards her and sweep her into my arms.
The world is full of girls who look like Lottie. A thousand girls, a million girls: girls the same age, the same height and weight. The mind plays tricks, I know this; the mind is not to be trusted; as everyone keeps telling me, you see what you want to see. You spot a girl turning the corner of the aisle at the supermarket, and you drop the glass jar of mayonnaise you were holding and don’t even notice as it smashes on the ground. You shove shoppers out of the way as you run towards her, desperate to catch her before she disappears like a mirage. And then she turns round and you realise it isn’t her. It hits you like a punch to the gut and you heave breath into your lungs as you back away, mumbling apologies. It isn’t her.
She’s just ten feet away. It’s her. She’s so tall and thin. She has cheekbones now, and her legs are long and rangy in jeans and a pair of navy wellington boots covered with tiny red printed hearts.
Her blue eyes meet mine and I know this is Lottie. Not a mirage, not a dream, not a girl-who-looks-like-her.
Lottie herself.
Real, flesh and blood.
I drink her in. I’m afraid to blink, in case this miracle vanishes. Lottie. My Lottie.
Not a dream of her. Her.
‘Go and sit with Toof,’ the woman says, giving the girl a little push. ‘I’ll get you some hot chocolate.’
‘Can I have a biscuit?’
‘May I. And I didn’t hear you say please.’
‘Please,’ the girl says.
She’s close enough for me to reach out and touch her as she goes over to the dog. She drops to her knees beside him and wreathes her arms around his russet body, laying her cheek against the top of his head.
There’s something unfamiliar about her, something different that I don’t remember and can’t place; the tilt of her jaw, perhaps; the expression in her eyes. It’s been two years, I remind myself. Of course she’s changed.
I know she won’t remember me. Memory is plastic, even in adults; explicit memories, the conscious recall associated with a time and a place, a person, don’t start to form until a child is six or seven. Before that, memory is implicit, an unconscious, emotional recollection. Lottie was three when she was taken from me; she’s spent a third of her life, the most recent, vivid third, without me. But I’m her mother. Deep down, surely she recognises that?
‘Sit down properly, Flora,’ the woman says. ‘On a chair, please.’
The girl sighs and scrambles into a chair. She tugs off her purple bobble hat and I see her hair has been cropped to her shoulders. It’s darker than it used to be; darker, even, than I remember from the train.
The woman she called Mummy is not the same woman I saw on the Tube. She’s at least thirty years older and has severe, salt-and-pepper hair. Biologically, she can’t be this child’s mother. She’s too old. I have no idea who she is or what her relation to Ellie might be.
I slide my phone out of my pocket and pretend to be checking my emails as I surreptitiously take a photograph of the two of them. The police will have to believe me now. They’ll be able to use facial recognition to identify the little girl as Lottie and that’ll be enough for them to get a warrant for DNA to prove it. I text the picture to Jack, along with our location.
The surfer kid brings over their order – hot chocolate and a great wheel of shortbread for the girl, black coffee for the woman – and puts a bowl of water on the floor for the dog.
Lottie wraps both hands around her thick china mug, but the woman cautions her that it’s hot and admonishes her to wait. Lottie puts the mug down again. That’s what’s different, I realise suddenly. The old Lottie would have ignored the instruction and burned her tongue.
Her gaze returns to me. Something about me is nagging at her, I can tell. Her brow creases, her nose crinkling. She knows me, but she doesn’t know why.
The woman sees the girl staring and turns to look. It suddenly occurs to me that if she recognises me, if she realises who I am, all is lost. I could grab Lottie, here, now, but I can’t physically escape with her. If I try, the woman and the surfer kid will stop me, and the police will be called, and, no matter what I say, there’s a risk they’ll return Lottie to this woman while they untangle the truth.
I have no credibility left after what happened in London. By the time the police establish Lottie is mine, my daughter will be gone. The woman will run with her and I may never find her again.
But the woman doesn’t recognise me. ‘Finish your hot chocolate, Flora,’ she says, turning back to the girl. ‘We need to get home.’
I leave a couple of pound coins on the table beside my plate and go out to my car. I wait for them to come out, glad of the concealment afforded by the darkness and heavy rain. Jack still hasn’t responded to my text, and I’m not letting Lottie out of my sight. I’ll sleep outside their house if I have to.
Fifteen minutes later, the café door opens, spilling a wedge of golden light into the gravel car park. I assume they’ll get into the only other vehicle parked in the lot, an old Volvo estate, but they walk past it, onto the main road
, and I realise with a flicker of alarm they’re walking home. I don’t know why I assumed they’d driven here and parked before taking a walk along the beach. How can I follow them now?
After a few moments’ hesitation, I get out of my car and head after them on foot. I don’t want to get too close, but there are no streetlights along this section of the coast road and I can’t risk losing them. I do my best to hug the shadows, terrified the sound of my breathing will give me away.
I’m soaked to the skin within minutes, my feet sloshing around in my thin plimsolls. I can hear Lottie up ahead, stamping and splashing in the puddles, clearly enjoying the inclement weather.
There’s a dangerous moment when I nearly run into them as I round a corner, where they’ve stopped to wait for the dog to complete his business. I shrink back into the hedge, my heart thumping, but the rain and the sound of the waves crashing on the shore below covers any noise I make.
Less than fifty metres later, they stop in front of a small stone cottage beside the road. The woman unlocks the front door and turns on the porch light. Lottie sits down on the thick stone step and starts to pull off her wellingtons. She stops, midway, and stares intently into the darkness, and for a second I think she’s seen me.
The woman calls her name. She jumps and finishes taking off her boots, before running inside.
I edge closer to the cottage, watching from the other side of the road as a light goes on in the kitchen, and the woman puts on the kettle. I stay there even after she draws the curtains, blocking my view.
I can’t believe I’ve found her. I can’t trust the reality of this moment, because it’s too incredible to be true. My daughter. In a café in Devon, four thousand miles from where I let her go. Lottie, splashing through puddles in her wellington boots. Lottie alive.
There’s so much I want to know. Has she been here the whole time? Does she believe this woman is her mother?
Does she remember me?
I spot something pink lying in the dirt by the side of the road and pick it up between thumb and forefinger. It’s a stuffed toy: the Squishmallow she lost.
My pulse racing, I cross the road and put the pink toy on the front step. It’s wet, but clean; a few hours in a warm kitchen and it’ll be good as new.
As I step back from the threshold, I see a movement out of the corner of my eye.
It’s her. She’s pulled back a corner of the curtain and is kneeling on a kitchen chair, looking directly at me.
Not daring to breathe, I lift my finger to my lips: ssssh.
For a long moment, she is motionless. Then, slowly, she presses her finger to her lips, too.
chapter 55
quinn
Quinn doesn’t believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt. Nine times out of ten, in a case like Lottie Martini’s – abductions, murders – the perp is someone close to the victim. She went hard at Alexa Martini in the beginning because she was trying to get at the truth. She’s not going to feel bad about it now.
OK, maybe a bit bad.
But that has nothing to do with why she’s committed to this story. Obsessed, according to Marnie. Which is fine with Quinn: she can live with obsessed. What she can’t live with is failure.
She flips her six-month AA chip in the air and catches it again, slapping it on the back of her hand. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Christ, she wants a drink.
She makes herself a cafetière of strong Panamanian Hacienda La Esmeralda coffee (£90 a pound, but a girl has to have some vices) and settles into a large, comfortable armchair with her laptop. She’s set aside the weekend to re-read all the original police interview transcripts from the wedding guests in the light of everything she knows now.
Everyone lies in a police investigation. About who they were with, what they were doing, how much they’d drunk. Rarely does it have any bearing on the case. But now and again, one small white lie has the power to change the course of an investigation. If Ian Dutton hadn’t lied by omission, maybe the police wouldn’t have been chasing their tails for the last two years.
She begins with the transcripts of the interviews with the members of the wedding party: the tabloids’ ‘twelve apostles’. She’s got no idea what she’s looking for, but she’ll know it when she sees it.
Two hours later, the only thing she’s learned is that Alexa Martini’s a lousy judge of character. Apart from Dutton, Paul Harding and Catherine Lord clearly can’t be trusted either, and Marc Chapman’s not much better, in love with another woman on his wedding day. Alexa needs to pick better friends.
She grinds some more of her gold-plated Panamanian beans and brews another carafe of coffee. It’s in here somewhere, she can feel it. The key to everything, buried in pages of banal details about wedding favours and who sat where.
Several wedding guests mention seeing Lottie talking to the bride’s mother, the last verified sighting of the little girl, but when Quinn gets to the transcript of Penny Williams’ interview, she’s surprised to find the woman makes no mention of the conversation.
Mrs Williams recounts verbatim the discussion she had with her daughter’s hair stylist and a last-minute panic over whether teal nail varnish on the bride’s toenails counted as ‘something blue’. And yet she doesn’t even mention her conversation with a child who went missing less than an hour after she spoke to her.
Quinn’s interrupted by the sound of her phone buzzing on the side table.
Fuck.
Much as she wants to ignore the call, when the editor of INN phones you from her personal mobile on a Sunday afternoon, you take it.
‘Dubai?’ Christie exclaims. ‘What the fuck, Quinn?’
‘Before you flip out, this is entirely on me,’ Quinn says. ‘Phil had no idea the trip wasn’t sanctioned by the News Desk—’
‘Never mind that you made an end-run around the News Desk to pursue your own personal agenda,’ Christie interrupts. ‘You’re our senior UK correspondent, Quinn! You fucked off without a word to anyone, leaving a bloody intern to cover for you, and we got caught with our pants down. The Cambridge explosion led the bulletins on Friday, and we had a twenty-two-year-old kid stammering his way through a two-way on the early evening news. Fucking unprofessional.’
‘I’m sorry about that, but if I’d told you what I was doing—’
‘I know why you didn’t tell me, Quinn. I took you off the story for a reason. Now I’m telling you, once and for all, as your employer and as your friend, to back off.’
Quinn knew there would be a price to pay for playing the lone wolf, but she didn’t expect it to feel like this. Christie is right: it was beyond unprofessional to leave the UK bureau without proper cover. She should have come clean to her weeks ago, when it became clear her investigation was actually going somewhere. Christie would’ve taken her off-roster and let her see how far she could get with the story. Now, it’s too late.
She’s already had more final warnings than the rest of the reporters’ desk combined. If she’s fired, she won’t be able to get a foot in the door of a local free paper, never mind an international news network. Her reputation precedes her and not necessarily to her advantage. She gets results and has the Emmy to prove it, but journalism is a small, incestuous world and she hasn’t made friends on the way up.
There won’t be many hands to catch her on the way down.
She hurls her phone against the wall in fury and frustration. It smacks to the floor, screen down, and bounces twice, before landing neatly at her feet.
Quinn shoves it in her pocket, grabs her denim jacket and heads for the door.
The kid behind the bar is new since she was last here. He looks about sixteen.
Quinn puts her AA chip down on the bar and pulls up a stool.
The kid looks at the chip, and then at her. ‘Sure you should be here?’ he says.
‘Jack Daniel’s,’ Quinn says. ‘Neat. No ice.’
He shrugs and pours her a single measure.
‘Double,’ Qu
inn says.
She finishes it before he’s even racked the bottle.
‘Again,’ she says, rapping the bar with her AA chip.
In her pocket, her phone buzzes. Quinn switches it off without even glancing at the screen.
chapter 56
alex
It’s impossible to keep watch on the cottage from the road. The house is on a bend, with uninterrupted views in both directions, and there’s no cover: the road hugs the coast here and on the opposite side of the road from the cottage is a steep rock face, with no tree to hide behind, no hedges or stone walls. As soon as it gets light, anyone glancing out of the window will see me.
I weigh up the risk. Do I leave now and trust I can get the police to take action before this woman disappears with Lottie? I’ve no idea if this is a rented holiday cottage; they could be gone tomorrow.
Or do I stay and chance them recognising me and running again?
The front door opens suddenly and I shrink back into the shadows, heart pounding, thankful for the darkness cloaking me. The woman lets the dog out and he sniffs the air, and then immediately runs towards me, barking.
‘Toof! Come here, boy.’
The woman comes out onto the porch, silhouetted against the light from the hall. The dog stops running and barks again. He’s less than six feet away from me. I should’ve left when I had the chance. If she sees me now, she’ll know I followed them from the café. She’ll know I know—
‘Stop it, Toof! It’s just a rabbit!’
He gives a final bark and then reluctantly turns back. The woman lets him into a small garden to the side of the cottage, where he presumably does his business, and the two of them go back inside.
I don’t realise I’ve been holding my breath until the door shuts behind them. I close my eyes and exhale as my heartbeat slowly returns to normal.
My car is still parked outside the café. I pull out my phone as I walk back to it and call Jack. I need him to get hold of the police and get things moving. If I call them, they won’t take me seriously, not after the debacle in London. They’ll say I’m seeing what you want to see. They’ll delegate to the local plod, who may or may not get around to coming out here this week. Or maybe next. They’ll sit down with my daughter’s kidnappers over a cup of tea and shortbread and admire the view of the sea. We have to check these things out, you understand. Well, I wouldn’t mind another cup, if you’re sure it’s no trouble.