by King, Karen
‘But Dad’s right, no one can get in or out of the garden,’ Lily reminded her, trying to stay calm. ‘Maybe she sneaked out of the front door and has gone to the shop or park?’
‘She wouldn’t do that. You know she wouldn’t.’ Maria looked on the point of collapse.
‘You can never tell what kids will do, until they do it. Emma must have wandered off and we’ve got to find her quick before she does come to harm.’ Lily dashed out of the front door. She could see her father talking to a neighbour a few houses up and Seb knocking on a door over the road.
‘I’ll check around the back. Phone me if you find Emma.’
She pounded down the street and around the corner to the back of the block of houses, her father’s house being the end one. It was surrounded by a shoulder-high wall with a big wooden gate. The houses backed onto a field leading into the woods, along which ran a pathway to the shops. Could Emma have climbed over the wall or gate somehow and gone into the woods? It seemed highly unlikely but maybe when she swung high enough to see over the wall she spotted a dog or a cat, thought it was lost and went after it? Her little sister loved animals. It was a possibility.
She walked over to the wall surrounding the garden; she remembered trying to climb this wall when she was a child, but even standing on her tiptoes she hadn’t been able to reach the top to pull herself up. And if Emma had stood on one of the chairs, it would be a big drop on the other side. She couldn’t have gone over the wall. It didn’t make sense.
She squinted as she noticed something glistening on the grass beside the wall. What was that? Bending down for a better look at it, she realised with a sickening jolt that it was Emma’s silver butterfly hair slide.
So Emma had somehow climbed over the wall.
But how?
Had someone helped her over it?
A chill coursed through Lily as she looked over the wall into the back garden, her eyes resting on the swing. Had someone seen Emma swinging on it and called her over? Then encouraged her to stand on the chair, lifted her over and enticed her to go with them?
Was Maria right and someone had taken her little sister? Nausea swept over her and she had to clutch the wall for support.
‘Lily. Are you all right, dear?’ It was Mr Adams from a couple of doors away. He was walking towards her, a bag of shopping in his hands.
Lily shook her head, took a moment or two to gather her breath. ‘Emma was playing in the garden and now she’s gone.’ She held out the silver slide. ‘I found this on the ground by the wall. It’s Emma’s. I think someone helped her over the wall.’ Her voice quivered. ‘I think she’s been kidnapped.’
‘Oh my goodness!’ Mr Adams looked shocked. ‘Are you sure? I mean she could have thrown it over the wall herself. Children do things like that.’
Lily shook her head. ‘She’s disappeared. She was playing out in the garden and then she was gone.’ A sob caught in her throat.
Mr Adams put a hand on her shoulder, reassuringly. ‘Don’t panic, children often wander off, you know. I’ll alert the other neighbours and we’ll all search for her. I’m sure we’ll find her in no time.’
‘Dad’s going around to all the neighbours, but yes please, I think we should organise a search party.’ Lily dialled her father’s number to tell him about finding the hair slide.
There was silence on the other end as he processed the information. ‘That means she’s got over the wall somehow.’ His voice cracked a little.
‘Do you think she could have climbed it by herself?’ Lily asked, not daring to put her fear into words.
‘Maybe… I think that’s what we’ve got to pin our hopes on. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.’
Even if she could, why would Emma climb over the wall and run off? It’s not like her at all.
‘I’m going to check the fields and woods over the back,’ Lily said. ‘She might have wandered over there. And Mr Adams is rallying all the neighbours to do a search too. We’ll find her, Dad.’
‘Seb and I will come and help you,’ her dad said. ‘Oh, hang on, the police are here.’
‘You talk to them, Dad. Seb and I will check the field and woods,’ she said.
‘They’re going to want to talk to you, Lily. You’re the one who went out into the garden and saw that she was missing. You need to come back.’
Damn. She knew he was right but while she was talking to the police, she’d be wasting time. Her little sister could be lost over in those woods.
‘Lily!’ Seb came running around the corner with one of the neighbours. ‘We’ll check out here, you go back to talk to the police.’
Thank God for Seb.
When she returned to the house, Maria and her father were in the lounge talking to two police officers. After taking down the details of how Emma went missing and radioing in a description of the little girl, the police said they then needed to search the house and the surrounding area. They were interested in the hair slide that Lily had found on the ground but suggested, like Mr Adams had, that Emma could have simply thrown it over the wall.
‘We’ve called for backup officers to search the fields and woods at the back of the houses in case Emma wandered up there and got lost. Try not to worry. Most children turn up safe and sound.’
Only ‘most children’, Lily thought in horror. What about the ones who don’t turn up? She closed her eyes. Please let them find Emma.
‘Emma wouldn’t go off without telling anyone. Someone has taken her. I know they have,’ Maria butted in.
‘That’s everyone’s fear but I promise you that in most of these cases the child turns up fast asleep under a bed, in a wardrobe or in a neighbour’s back garden. So first of all we’ll do a thorough search of the house, then we’ll do house-to-house enquires.’
‘You should be out searching the streets. Emma isn’t here!’ Gareth said, exasperated. ‘She’s been missing for over half an hour now. My little daughter is out there somewhere, scared and…’ He swallowed. ‘And God knows what she’s going through.’
‘I’m sure you’ve searched thoroughly, sir, but we still need to do our own search of both the house and the garden. It’s easy for the untrained eye to miss something,’ one of the officers said kindly.
‘And if she has left of her own accord – and even children as young as Emma do – then there might be some clues that you’ve missed,’ the other officer added.
Another police car pulled up outside and two more officers got out. They pulled on latex gloves and went out into the garden while the other two began to search the house.
Oh God, please let Emma have left of her own accord, Lily thought as the police officers started their search.
44
Lily
‘You’re not going to find her in there!’ Gareth snapped as a police officer searched through Emma’s chest of drawers.
‘I know, sir, but we may find a clue as to where she’s gone. Maybe a letter from someone, a diary that will tell us if she was in contact with someone. Unfortunately there are some sick adults who join in online games, pretending to be children, befriend them and then lure them away,’ the officer explained patiently. Closing the bottom drawer, he looked over his shoulder at them. ‘Does Emma ever go online?’
‘She’s got a tablet, she plays games on it sometimes, but it has parental controls on it and we do keep an eye on her, don’t we, Maria?’ Gareth replied.
Maria nodded. ‘It’s downstairs. I’ll get it for you.’
She hurried out of the room and the police continued their search, bending down to slide open the drawer in the base of Emma’s single divan bed, pulling out all her soft toys as they searched inside.
‘I never thought to look there,’ Gareth admitted.
‘We’ve found a missing child fast asleep in the base of a bed like this more than once,’ the policeman said. ‘We’ll need to search your room too, sir.’
Gareth stood back. ‘Go ahead. I’ve already looked in the wardrobes myse
lf.’
Lily fought down her impatience as the policeman checked her father’s and Maria’s wardrobes, standing on a chair to check the top, then pulled out the drawers of the divan bed to check inside. She heard a gasp and turned around to see Maria, the colour drained from her face, clutching Emma’s tablet and staring in horror at the policewoman going through the underwear in her drawer.
‘I’m sorry, love, but we have to check everything,’ she said, closing the drawer. She stood up. ‘Is that Emma’s tablet? I’ll have to take it to the station so we can look at it closely.’
‘Do whatever you have to. Just bring my daughter back. Alive.’ Gareth’s voice broke and Lily put her arm around his shoulder to comfort him.
‘We’ll do our very best to, sir. I promise you,’ the police officer said.
‘Could you give us a recent photo of Emma, please, and details of what she was wearing?’ the policewoman asked. ‘We’ll put out an alert and get some officers over to comb the area.’
‘Most of the photos are on my phone,’ Gareth said. ‘I could print one out.’
‘There’s her school photo. It was taken only a couple of months ago,’ Maria reminded him. She went over to the sideboard and picked up the photo of Emma, smiling, in her school uniform.
A golf ball lump formed in Lily’s throat as she looked at it. ‘This is it. We’ve got a couple of smaller ones if you prefer.’
The policewoman nodded. ‘That would be helpful. And if you could tell us what clothes Emma was wearing…’ She took out her notebook.
Lily saw her father and Maria look at each other, as if trying to remember. Gareth shook his head wordlessly.
‘Red shorts and a white top with hearts all over it,’ Maria said. ‘Her hair was held back off her face with silver butterfly slides – like the one Lily found – and she was wearing white sandals without socks.’
‘Thank you. We’ll circulate this and keep in touch. We’re going to assign you a family liaison officer. Someone you can talk to who is experienced in cases like this.’
Gareth shook his head. ‘I don’t want to talk to anyone. I want to get out there and find my little girl and I want you to do the same.’
‘There are officers looking for her as we speak, sir. Be assured that we will do everything we can. The chances are that she has wandered off and we will find her safe somewhere, but if you have any idea who might want to take her, any idea at all, please let us know. Opportunistic kidnappings do happen sometimes. But often in child abduction cases, it turns out to be a relative, a friend or someone close to the family.’
‘No one we know would take Emma,’ Gareth said vehemently.
‘What about you, madam?’ It was the policewoman again. ‘I understand that you and Mr Metcalfe got married fairly recently. Can you think of anyone who might have a grudge against you? Who might have a reason to kidnap Emma?’
Maria shook her head.
As Lily watched her face, she was sure that she saw a hesitant flicker in Maria’s eyes. She knows something, I’m sure she does!
‘Maria, if you know anything, you have to tell the police. Emma’s life is at stake here,’ Lily said.
Now there definitely was hesitation on her face. Maria swallowed. ‘I’m not sure that it’s anything. But there was a woman at the summer fayre last week. She was staring at us. It felt a bit creepy to me. I’d never seen her before.’ She related how Emma had gone over to the toy stall by herself. ‘I could see her clearly all the time,’ she added. ‘Then I saw this woman stop and stare at Emma, so I called Emma back and kept her by my side. I was a bit worried but thought perhaps she was someone who knew Ruth and wondered what Emma was doing with me. The woman left then, so I didn’t think anything more of it.’ She paused. ‘Until I saw the same woman at the church fundraiser yesterday. She gave Emma a rag doll. She was holding it when she was on the swing today.’ She pointed to the rag doll on the coffee table. ‘That’s it. Lily found it on the lawn by the swing after Emma… disappeared.’
The police officer’s eyes rested on Maria’s face. ‘And you’d never seen this woman before the fayre?’
Maria shook her head. ‘Never. It might not be connected. It might be just a coincidence.’
‘Ruth is your former wife?’ the policewoman asked.
Gareth nodded. ‘She died of cancer almost two years ago.’
The police officers exchanged glances. ‘I’m really sorry, sir.’ The man turned towards Maria. ‘If you could give us a description of the woman you saw, we’ll see if anyone knows who she is. We have to follow every lead.’
Maria hesitated again. ‘I don’t remember clearly. Er… late fifties, pale-skinned, tall, dark hair peppered with grey. Grey eyes. A sort of piercing stare. I can’t even remember what she was wearing. Sorry.’ She turned to Lily. ‘You talked to her for a bit. Do you remember what she was wearing?’
Lily frowned. ‘What woman was this? I spoke to lots of people.’
‘The one who drew the first raffle ticket. She stopped to talk to you.’ Maria could hear the tremor in her own voice.
Lily looked thoughtful. ‘Oh her. She was quite nondescript, not someone you would really remember.’ She tried to visualise her. ‘Beige trousers and a blouse, I can’t remember the colour.’
‘And what did you chat about?’ the police officer asked.
‘Flowers. We were admiring all the different plants in the vicarage garden.’ Lily’s heart was thudding. Did this strange woman have something to do with Emma’s disappearance?
45
Maria
Guilt and sorrow enveloped Maria like a blanket of lead. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders, hugging herself, as she stared out of the kitchen window at the back garden. The garden where Emma had been playing so happily only a few hours ago. The police had been thorough, doing a fingerprint search of the garden, the other side of the wall, checking the lock of the gate to see if it had been tampered with, searching the wall for fibres, explaining that they couldn’t get fingerprints from brick but might find other vital evidence. One of the police officers had patiently explained the things they were doing, searching the woods at the other end of the field that the houses backed onto, checking CCTV cameras in the area, and ANPR cameras to see what cars were around at that time. Doing a check on the force’s systems to see if any known sexual offenders were living nearby – that sent a shiver down Maria’s spine. Oh God, Emma! Where are you?
She could feel herself being jolted back to the past, to another time when police had been swarming all over the place because a little girl had died. Please don’t let Emma be dead. She couldn’t bear it.
She should have told them about the letters. The writer had to be connected with Emma’s disappearance.
She wanted to say something, but she was scared. Scared that this whole new life, this perfect family that she had created for herself would come tumbling down, that the past she had tried so hard to leave behind would crash into her present. Everyone would suspect her, she knew they would. Gareth would blame her, ask her why she hadn’t told him the truth about the notes. And as for Lily…
She felt Gareth’s hand on her shoulder. She turned to him, her heart wrenching when she saw the haunted look in his eyes, the dark shadows underneath them. He had been out searching for Emma for hours. So had Lily and Seb. It seemed to have been unanimously agreed, without anyone saying a word, that Maria was the one who would stay at home in case Emma came back. She couldn’t help feeling an outsider, that the family had closed ranks, excluding her from their collective distress and terror, believing that she couldn’t possibly love Emma as much as they did, be hurting as much as them. They were wrong. She felt as if her heart was being ripped out and the pain was seeping through every fibre of her body. ‘I’m sorry – I should have been watching her more closely.’
‘You can’t blame yourself, love. The garden is secure; the gate was locked. The wall is too high for Emma to climb over. She should have been safe there.’ He
rubbed his hand across his forehead; he looked exhausted. ‘This woman though, I wish you’d mentioned her to me.’
‘I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I mean, yes, she was staring at us but then she walked out and we got on with the fayre. I thought maybe she’d mistaken me for someone else. I didn’t think of her as a threat. Then yesterday she turned up again.’
The woman’s words had been repeating in her mind all night: ‘I recognised you straight away. I’ll never forget what you did either.’ Maria hadn’t told anyone about that. How could she? If she did, she would have to explain exactly what she had done that the woman remembered.
‘I only mentioned it because the policeman said to tell him about anything suspicious…’ The knowledge that she hadn’t told the police – or Gareth – everything was eating at her. If they didn’t find Emma soon, she was going to have to confess. She loved that little girl like her own; she couldn’t let anything happen to her. She couldn’t allow another child to die because of her.
‘She gave her a doll though, Maria. She was a complete stranger and she gave my little daughter a doll. That’s pretty significant, don’t you think?’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I thought she was just being kind. You said the same.’
‘Yes, but I didn’t know that this woman had been staring at Emma last week.’ Gareth rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand and put his arm around Maria’s shoulder. ‘I don’t mean to make you feel guilty. You were feeling ill yesterday, and I guess it only looks suspicious now because Emma has gone missing.’ He switched his exhausted gaze to the police officer. ‘Do you think this woman might have something to do with Emma’s disappearance.’