by Heidi Perks
The silence was cold until Angela broke it. “Can I get you a cup of tea, Mrs. Reynolds?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No thank you.” My voice was little more than a whisper.
“Maybe it would help if you could tell Harriet and Brian what happened,” Angela said softly. “What was going on when Alice went onto the Jungle Run?”
I nodded. I could sense Harriet and Brian both tensing, and my own muscles ached as I hunched uncomfortably in the chair. I had no idea how to start.
“I, um—” I broke off and swallowed loudly, inhaling a large gulp of air that hissed through my teeth. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know nothing I say will mean anything.” I paused again. Brian’s eyes continued to bore into me as if he could see right through my skin, but still Harriet wouldn’t look over.
The skirt of my dress was damp beneath me. I shifted on the leather chair, the wetness of my thighs making it squeak, though any extra embarrassment wouldn’t show on my already blotchy face.
“I’m sorry—” I started again.
“Sorry is not going to bring back our daughter,” Brian interrupted, his voice quietly controlled. “So we don’t want to hear your sorries. We want to know what happened today. How you lost Alice.” His fingers continued to unfurl and then clamp back around Harriet’s hand. Beside him she took a deep breath.
Brian leaned forward, moving his weight toward the edge of the sofa. I could see his eyes more clearly now, red lines creeping out from the edges. He must have been crying, but now he just looked angry.
“What happened?” he growled. “Because we need to know how you lost our daughter.”
I felt my breath stagger in my chest. “I’m so sorry, Brian. I don’t know what happened.”
“You don’t know?” He gave a short laugh, one of his hands flinging into the air, which made Harriet jump. Brian moved his body, wrapping himself around Harriet more tightly, and despite how awful I felt for him, I wished he would get out of the way so I could see my friend.
“I don’t mean it like that,” I said. “It’s just that everything happened so quickly. It was a split second. Alice went around the back of the inflatable with Molly and Jack, but then she didn’t—” The words caught in my throat, making me gulp down another large breath. “She didn’t come off it. And as soon as I knew that, I went on it looking for her myself. The children came with me, but”—I shook my head—“she wasn’t there.” I knew I sounded too shrill and my excuses hung awkwardly in the air as I waited for Brian to answer.
But it was Harriet who spoke, her voice rupturing into the room like it had no place being there. “How long had she been gone before you noticed?” Still she continued to stare out the window. It was a question I’d expected.
“I think it was maybe five minutes,” I said quietly, willing her to look at me around her husband’s shoulder. I inched forward in the seat, the squeak of leather making another unpleasant noise. My hand flinched as if it wanted to reach out for her, but almost by instinct she withdrew farther into the sofa. Eventually she turned her head and found my eyes.
“Five minutes doesn’t seem very long,” she said. “She can’t have gone far in five minutes.”
“I—well, maybe it was a little longer. I’m not sure exactly, but it wasn’t long, I promise you.”
Harriet turned away again, staring out the window once more.
“I don’t know where she went; I’m so sorry,” I said. “We looked everywhere and—”
“And what exactly were you doing?” In contrast to the softness of Harriet’s voice, Brian’s was fiercely powerful. “When she went missing, what were you actually doing that meant you weren’t watching my daughter?”
“I was waiting for them at the front.”
“But I want to know what you were doing,” he said. “Because it wasn’t what you should have been.”
“I was with Evie,” I said. “I was just waiting.”
“Were you on your phone?” he barked. “Did you get distracted?”
“I, erm, well, I looked at my phone, but only for a moment. I was still keeping an eye on the children and—” I stopped. Of course I hadn’t kept an eye on the children or none of us would be here. If I had, Alice would be asleep in her bed upstairs.
“But you weren’t watching her, were you?” Brian’s words felt like they had been screamed at me, but in reality they were tense and quiet as they hissed through his teeth. He’d moved forward until he was almost hanging off the sofa. His face was now only inches from mine, and as much as I wanted to recoil, I couldn’t move. “And you didn’t see a thing,” he said, and all I could do was shake my head again, while tears now sprang out of my eyes and slid down my cheeks. His gaze was drawn to them trickling down and I rubbed at them roughly with the back of my hand. He looked like he was about to comment, when Harriet spoke timidly from behind him.
“How was she?”
Brian inhaled a large breath through his flared nostrils.
“Sorry?” I leaned to one side so I could see past Brian.
“How was Alice? Was she happy?”
“Yes, she was perfectly happy.” I tried a weak smile. I knew Brian had every right to be there, but how I wished I could take hold of Harriet’s hand and speak to her alone. Just her and me. “She was playing with Molly,” I said. “She seemed absolutely fine. She wasn’t upset about anything.”
“What did she have to eat?” Harriet asked.
Brian swung around to look at her. “ ‘What did she have to eat?’ ” he repeated.
“Yes,” she said quietly, her gaze drifted up to meet his. “I want to know what Alice ate at the fair. Before she—” Harriet stopped.
“She had some cotton candy,” I said quickly. The tears continued to run down my face. I stopped bothering to wipe them away as I remembered how carefully Alice had picked at her treat.
“Oh!” Harriet threw her hand to her mouth. “She’s never had cotton candy before.”
My heart plummeted. Harriet’s eyes were wide and wet with tears. I wanted to tell her that Alice had enjoyed it; I was sure she would want to know that, but already Brian was speaking again.
“You mean you didn’t give her lunch—” he snapped, suddenly cut off by the sound of an eerie, painfully long wail filling the room.
Harriet slumped forward, her hands gripped tightly to either side of her head. “I can’t bear this anymore. Get out, Charlotte!” she screamed. “I need you to go. Please, just get out of the house.”
Brian immediately grabbed her rocking body in his arms, whispering words I couldn’t hear. “Please just leave, Charlotte,” she sobbed.
I stood up, my legs shaking. I couldn’t bear this anymore either.
In the doorway Angela held out a hand as she stood to one side. Numbly I edged toward her. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, tears now cascading down my cheeks unchecked.
“Don’t tell me you’re sorry again,” Brian said over his wife’s head. His cheeks were blotched in patches of fiery red. “You can go back to your children now. You managed to take them home safely.”
“I think you’d better go,” Angela said as she led me into the hallway.
“I’m going to do everything I can,” I sobbed. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get Alice back. Can you tell them that? I’ll do anything.”
NOW
And you hadn’t heard from Harriet at all after that evening you went to their house?” Detective Rawlings asks.
“That’s right.”
“Not until this morning,” she says. “Thirteen days later.”
“No.” I feel my chest getting tighter. “Not until she called me today.”
I can feel the ground start to soften beneath me and the air feels heavier. I expect her to ask me more about the call but she doesn’t, and I realize there’s no point in me trying to second-guess why.
“You said you would have liked the chance to talk with Harriet on her own. Why?”
I shift uneasily. “I guess
because it’s Harriet who’s my friend and I didn’t know Brian. I wanted—” I break off and slump in my seat, looking up at the clock. Its bright red digits blur in front of me. “I wanted the chance to tell her on her own just how dreadful I felt,” I admit eventually.
“I hoped that if I could talk to Harriet, just the two of us the way we used to, then I could get her to see I hadn’t done anything wrong, like Brian was implying. Yes, I’d let them out of my sight and I wished more than anything I hadn’t, but I was still there, I was a few yards away, and Alice really did just vanish. I wanted Harriet to understand I was looking after her like I’d promised, only—” Tears prick at my eyes. “Only I also knew I wasn’t.”
Detective Rawlings looks at me, confused.
“If I had been looking after her properly, then she wouldn’t have disappeared,” I say. “But I also knew I didn’t do anything any other parent wouldn’t have done. Yet no one else saw it like that. Already I was being blamed. People were saying I wasn’t responsible.” I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand.
“Who was blaming you?” Detective Rawlings asks as she pulls a tissue sharply out of a box and passes it across the table. I take it from her and dab my eyes, keeping the tissue scrunched in my hand.
“Friends. Strangers,” I say. “Everyone jumps on the bandwagon, don’t they? They think it’s their right to comment on what I’m like as a mother, even if they’ve never heard of me.”
“The power of the internet,” Rawlings states.
“It was the people I thought of as my friends, though, they’re the ones whose reactions sting the most. In the days after the fair, their silence became deafening.”
“And Harriet’s reaction must have been difficult to handle too?” the detective asks, steering the conversation as if I have no right to feel sorry for myself. “Her silence must have left you wondering what she was thinking.”
“It did. I wanted her to shout at me and tell me she hated me, but she didn’t and that made it worse. Harriet refused to see me.” I look Detective Rawlings in the eye. “And that was so much harder,” I admit. “I watched her crumble in that living room and there was nothing I could do to make it better.”
“But Brian was more forthright?” she says. “Is that the reaction you expected from him?”
“I didn’t know what to expect. I’d only met him a few times, and hardly at all in recent years.” I always suspected Harriet felt like she couldn’t bring Brian along after Tom and I had split up, even though I’d assured her he was welcome.
“So even though you became such good friends with Harriet, you never got to know her husband?” Detective Rawlings asks, leaning forward in her seat. Her eyes are unnervingly still as she stares at me.
“No. Our friendship didn’t involve him or my ex-husband when we were together.”
“That’s unusual.” She continues to look me in the eye as she lays her hands out flat on the table. “Don’t you think?”
I open my mouth to respond that I didn’t think it was, but instead I say, “Can we take a break now, please? I’d like to use the toilet.”
“Of course.” Detective Rawlings pushes her chair back and gestures toward the door. “And help yourself to a tea or coffee too,” she adds, and for a moment I’m grateful for her kindness. It isn’t until I walk out of the room I realize she’s really just telling me there’s still much more she wants to know.
BEFORE
HARRIET
That first night Harriet did not sleep, or if she did it was only minutes before she woke, soaked in sweat and disturbed by images she couldn’t shake.
She lay on top of the covers throughout the interminable dark hours, staring at the ceiling, all the time thinking of Alice’s empty room next to hers. Not one night had passed when she hadn’t tucked her daughter into bed, kissed her goodnight, and crept in to check on her before she went to bed herself. It was no surprise she couldn’t sleep.
Earlier in the evening, while Brian was still downstairs, Angela had come up to Harriet’s bedroom, offering to call the doctor to see if he could prescribe some sleeping tablets. Harriet shook her head vigorously—she definitely did not want pills. She would rather be awake all night torturing herself than knocked out, miles away from reality.
“Thank you for staying so late,” she said to Angela, grateful she was still there.
“Of course.” Angela brushed off her gratitude. It was her job, after all, Harriet thought sadly, but still she was comforted by Angela’s presence in the house. It took her mind off Brian pacing the floorboards below.
“I promised Alice I’d always keep her safe,” Harriet said quietly. “But I haven’t been able to, have I?”
Angela leaned over and touched her arm. “Try not to do this, Harriet. This is not your fault.” Harriet wondered if Angela could tell Brian that too, because she could feel his blame hovering over her, his confusion that she’d left Alice with Charlotte. He knew Harriet would never have let Alice out of her sight.
Were her anxieties about Alice innate? she wondered. Would Harriet have been a different kind of mother if her dad had still been there, smoothing the path of parenting for her mum? With only her mother to learn from, was it any wonder she’d become overly protective?
“I see flashes of Alice’s face.” Tears pooled uncomfortably in the crook of Harriet’s neck, but she made no move to wipe them away.
“Guilt is a very destructive thing,” Angela said. “You mustn’t let it take hold. You couldn’t have changed what happened. No one can foresee something like this.”
No matter what Angela said, the guilt would continue to bury itself deep into her skin, scratching away until one day soon she would be driven mad by it. She was sure of that.
But when Harriet wasn’t thinking of Alice, unwanted thoughts of Charlotte filled her head. Charlotte in her warm, large bed in the cozy bedroom with the deep teal walls and fluffy cushions. She wondered how Charlotte felt, knowing her own children were safely asleep in their rooms; whether she derived comfort from that, even if she wouldn’t admit it.
Charlotte’s friends would rally around her. They’d line up outside her house with warm casseroles in Le Creuset dishes and Tupperware boxes of homemade muffins. It was no surprise Charlotte had so many friends, but it widened the trench between them now. That Harriet had not received one call from a worried friend was evident. Angela must have noticed she had no one else in her life.
She wondered what Angela thought of Charlotte. Did she feel sorry for her? Harriet knew her tears were real, but she couldn’t bear to look at them. If she’d looked into Charlotte’s eyes, she would have seen her pain and she couldn’t bear to take that on too. “Charlotte feels guilty,” Harriet murmured to Angela. “I can’t tell her not to.”
“Of course you can’t. No one expects you to.”
“Do you think she wasn’t watching the children properly?”
“I’m sure she was,” Angela said. “But she could never have expected this to happen.”
Harriet rolled over on her bed. She hated to think that Charlotte hadn’t been looking after her daughter, yet none of that really mattered anymore. Nothing but Alice’s safety mattered.
“Brian said something earlier,” Angela said. “Something about this not being the first child she’s lost.”
Harriet inhaled deeply and shook her head as she nestled into the pillow. “It was nothing like that,” she said, and despite everything else she was feeling, Harriet was still ashamed that she’d betrayed Charlotte by telling Brian.
How she wished she hadn’t listened to Brian about Charlotte coming to the house. It wasn’t a good idea like he’d insisted it would be. If he did it again she would have to refuse. There was no way she could bring herself to see or speak to Charlotte again.
Angela eventually left, and when Brian came up to the bedroom, he found Harriet lying in semidarkness. The only light that filtered into the room was from the moon, slicing through the small gap in the blinds. Harr
iet preferred it that way. Suddenly, the ceiling light flooded the room with its harsh white bulb as Brian flicked it on and slumped onto the edge of the bed.
Neither of them spoke until he got back up and paced to the window, where he peered through the slatted blinds onto the street below. “The journalists are still outside,” he said. “Is there nothing I can do to get rid of them?”
Harriet said nothing.
“There are two of them right outside our wall. What the hell do they think they’re going to get doing that? Angela told them we had nothing to say. They just want to look at us, like we’re animals.”
Harriet buried herself deeper into the covers, hoping he would either turn off the light and get into bed or preferably go back downstairs. She didn’t want to talk.
Brian remained a while longer and then let the slats flick back, running a hand through his hair that now sprang out wildly from his scalp. Then he strode into the bathroom, leaving the light on. Every sound he made echoed harshly through the walls. Harriet covered her ears but could still hear the splash of him urinating into the toilet, the toilet flushing, faucets being turned on, water violently splattering into the basin.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the class?” Brian reappeared in the doorway.
Harriet held her breath until her throat burned. She didn’t want to have this conversation. “I thought I had.”
“You definitely didn’t. I would have remembered something like that. Why a bookkeeping class, of all things?”
“So I could do something when Alice starts school,” she said. If he went on to ask why, she would tell him she knew they could do with the money. She’d seen the final notices hidden in his bedside drawer in the hope she wouldn’t come across them.
“Did Charlotte put you up to it? Tell you that you needed to earn some extra money?”