by Alex Lake
‘That seems pretty thin,’ Brian said. ‘Could just be a coincidence.’
‘Could be,’ Julia agreed. ‘But the police are treating it as suspicious. And it fits, right? Lone male, sixties, moves around the country. I hate to rely on stereotypes, but … ’
Brian nodded. He was more alert now, more present. ‘I guess. So what next?’
Julia shrugged. ‘We wait. But I think this might be it, Brian. I really do.’
‘You might be right,’ Edna said. ‘And I hope to God you are, and that Anna is back here soon.’
There was a long silence as the news sank in. After a few minutes, Brian put his knife and fork down beside his plate. It was still full but it was clear he had finished eating. He looked at Edna, then Julia, then back to Edna. ‘I got a phone call today,’ he said. ‘From Simon.’
Simon. The name echoed around the room.
‘Did you?’ Edna said, the forced nonchalance in her tone doing little to disguise the tension that rolled off her. ‘What did he want?’
‘I sent him an email to let him know what happened. He’s flying over. He’ll be here tomorrow.’
Edna’s expression did not change. ‘It’ll be nice for you to see him.’
Brian didn’t reply; he didn’t seem to know what to say. Julia broke the silence.
‘Is Laura coming?’ she asked him.
Brian shook his head. ‘She’s staying home with the kids.’
‘Thank Heaven for small mercies,’ Edna said. ‘The last thing we need now is her showing up.’
‘She’s not that bad,’ Julia said. She’d only met Laura twice – both early on in her relationship with Brian – and she’d quite liked her. She was funny and irreverent and bursting with self-confidence. She was also very honest, and believed in saying what she thought. She had shared with Julia that she did so on the advice of her therapist, who had told her that holding it in was just stacking the shelves of your closet with problems for the future.
‘She’s worse,’ Edna said. ‘She’s poison.’
Despite the situation, Julia laughed. ‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘She’s not that bad. You and she didn’t see eye to eye, that’s all.’
‘Julia,’ Edna said. ‘I suggest you refrain from commenting on things about which you know nothing.’
‘So what did she do that was so bad?’ Julia asked.
Edna leaned back in her chair. ‘She convinced my son that he should leave me. That I was a – how did she put it? – a source of negative energy in his life. And, even worse, she shared this opinion with others. People outside the family.’
‘She has a right to her opinion,’ Julia said. And her opinion was probably right, she thought.
‘Maybe,’ Edna said. ‘But I have a reputation to uphold, and the problem is that shit sticks.’ Edna rarely swore; it was a sign of how angry she was. ‘Especially to clean surfaces,’ she added. ‘Not that you would know too much about that.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Julia said, her own anger rising in opposition to that of her mother-in-law.
‘People think highly of me,’ Edna said. ‘But you hardly have a spotless reputation, do you? At least among those who know you well.’
‘Are you talking about Chris?’ Julia asked. ‘Still? That was before Brian and I got married. Well before. We’d hardly started seeing each other. But you know that already.’
While at university Julia’d had a brief affair – if you could call it that – with an older man, an accountant called Chris. It had taken place about two months after she and Brian had met and she still wasn’t sure why she had done it. He was married, with two children, so it wasn’t going anywhere, and at the time she was falling in love with Brian. Perhaps that was it; she knew that she and Brian were probably in it for the long haul – at least, it had seemed so then – so she had gone looking for one last fling, maybe as a way to test the strength of her feeling for Brian. Anyway, it had all come out when a friend of Chris’s wife saw her and Chris together in a pub. The friend told Chris’s wife, who told everyone she knew, then left her husband a few days later. At first Chris wasn’t too bothered – he thought it meant he was free to carry on his relationship with Julia, with whom he turned out to be deeply in love, much more so than Julia had ever suspected – like many British men of his age, he kept his feelings hidden beneath a carapace of cynicism and constant joking – and was heartbroken when she told him that it really was over.
Brian, after a few weeks of haughty silence, forgave her, and things went back to normal. Not for Chris, though: he hit the bottle and ended up losing his job.
‘Look,’ Julia said, suddenly weary. ‘Why are you bringing this up now, Edna? What has it got to do with anything?’
‘I’m just saying that I have a reputation to lose, and people like Laura put it in jeopardy. You might be careless with your reputation; I am not. Your reputation is like your virginity, Julia: you only get to lose it once.’
‘I think I have a perfectly good reputation,’ Julia said.
‘Maybe,’ Edna said. ‘But would anyone be surprised if it turned out that Chris was not the first married man whose family you wrecked? Or the last?’
Julia pushed her plate away from her. For a second she considered throwing the contents over her mother-in-law. She had no idea why Edna was being so deliberately offensive. Perhaps it was simply that now the marriage was over she was unable to restrain her true feelings from rising to the surface, however inopportune the moment.
Julia stood up. ‘We’re all under a lot of strain,’ she said. ‘But that’s no reason to be rude.’ She looked at Brian. ‘I’m going to have a bath,’ she said. ‘Enjoy your meal.’
5
The Third Day
i.
The girl is awake.
The girl is screaming.
She should be neither of these things.
You cannot let this happen. You cannot make mistakes. But how did you? You calculated the dosage correctly. Weight, age, amount of the drug already in the system. You administered it at the right time. You are sure you got it right. You could not have made a mistake.
But you did, and now the girl is screaming.
The screaming is not a problem. No one will hear her. There is no one to hear her. It is what it signifies. It means she is awake. And it means she is aware. If she is screaming she knows she is not where she should be.
Which means more memories; memories of her captor, memories that she cannot be allowed to keep. But the drug for fixing that is dangerous for children, and she has had it once already, the day you took her. You don’t want to give her more. You don’t want to hurt her.
You can’t hurt her. Soon her time will come and you need her perfect for that. Flawless. Unhurt. That is the only way it can be. The only way it can work.
But she cannot have memories, so the drug it will be. It has to be. You have no choice. You recognize that. You don’t like it, but you accept it. That is one of your strengths. You are adaptable. Pragmatic. You manage. You make do. The world would be a better place if more people were like you.
So the drug it will be. There. You have made up your mind. This is your decision.
This is life, is it not? Decisions, decisions. You are good at decisions. You made the most important one after all: to take the girl. That was risky. That took courage. After that, this is nothing.
Do it. As soon as possible. Right now, in fact.
You know you have to, so you go to the hidden place – so well hidden, no one could ever find it, even if looking for it – and fill a syringe with liquid.
Then you go to another hidden place. The house is full of them; it has been hiding secrets for centuries. That is why you feel so at home here, and this, this is just one more secret in a long line of them. You like to remember that. It makes you feel better about what you have done and about what you plan to do.
You open the door and step into the darkness.
Shhh, you say, and take the
girl’s arm in yours. Before she can protest you clamp it between your knees and find a vein with the point of the syringe.
I’m sorry, you say, and you mean it.
But you have no choice. She can have no memories.
ii.
Midnight. Maybe one a.m. Or two a.m. … Julia had no idea. She sat on Anna’s bed, hugging her knees.
Anna was gone. She had to face it. She was gone. She studied Anna’s room. Her Mr Men and Little Miss books, the stuffed elephant she clung to at night, the chest of drawers full of her clothes, the top left drawer open, a pair of red dungarees hanging over the lip of the drawer.
She’d always thought that the stories about people keeping a bedroom as a shrine to a loved one were a bit morbid, but she understood them now. She couldn’t imagine moving a single thing in this room. The room – the books and toys, the slight mess, the smell – was an expression of Anna’s personality, of her interests, of her developing character.
The covers were kicked down to the far end, just as Anna had left them when she got out of bed and came into her parents’ room those three long, long days ago. There was only one parent there that morning, only a mother for her to snuggle against; her father sleeping in the guest room.
Where’s Daddy? She’d said.
I think he already went downstairs, Julia replied, an inkling of how hard it was going to be to explain the divorce working its way into her mind as she wrapped her arms around Anna. That could wait, though. For now she was going to enjoy cuddling her daughter.
That was pretty much her last memory of Anna. After a few minutes they had got out of bed and gone downstairs. Julia had an early meeting so she had got herself ready for work and left; Brian had dressed and fed Anna.
On her way out she’d kissed Anna on the top of the head.
Goodbye, darling, she said. Have a good day.
Bye, Mummy. I’ll miss you.
I’ll miss you too.
Now, as she stood in the silence, looking at the empty bed, she wondered if that would turn out to be the last time she saw her daughter; if that had been, unknown to her, goodbye for good.
It must happen all the time. All around the world, every day, in every county, people must say a cheery goodbye or au revoir or auf wiedersehen to a loved one, with no inkling that it was the last time they would be able to do so. It was probably a good thing; if we knew how close disaster was, if we worried that each goodbye would be the last, we would never do anything. We’d be paralyzed by fear.
She couldn’t remember who’d said it – Orwell, maybe – but a famous wit had once pointed out that there is one anniversary we pass each year without celebrating, or even knowing it is there: the anniversary of our own death. There were other such unknown and unwished-for anniversaries, it turned out: she had not expected that a particular date would become the anniversary of her daughter’s disappearance.
The anniversary of the day Julia ceased to be a mother. Was that what she was, a former mother? Was Anna already dead? Was motherhood over for her now? Would she no longer feel the worries and frustrations and above all the elation, the moments when she gazed at her sleeping daughter and felt the purest, most overwhelming sense of love and wonder at what she had created? It couldn’t be over: it was unthinkable. She clenched her hands, dug her fingernails into her palms, tried to focus on the pain to divert her attention.
It didn’t work. An Anna-less future spooled out in front of her. A bleak, colourless, joyless future.
She lay in her daughter’s bed and waited for it to pass. It took a long time.
Downstairs, Julia made a coffee. There was no milk in the fridge; she grabbed her car keys and purse. The activity might take her mind off Anna, if only for a few seconds. She looked at the clock on the oven. Just gone five a.m. The petrol station up by the motorway would be open. She grabbed the car keys.
Driving did take her mind off Anna, at least partially. True, she scanned the hedges and gardens and fields on the way to the petrol station for any sign of her daughter, but some part of her mind was occupied in controlling the car, in registering red lights and other vehicles and reacting accordingly. It helped, a bit.
She pulled into the forecourt. The car was low on petrol so she decided to fill up. When the tank was full she walked into the shop. She took a carton of milk from the chiller and approached the counter.
The cigarettes behind the till caught her eye. It had been years since she smoked, but suddenly she craved the rush of nicotine, craved the occupation of smoking.
‘Pump three,’ she said, and hesitated. Then she added: ‘And a pack of Marlboro Lights.’
The attendant was a girl in her early twenties. She looked at Julia with a blank, early morning expression, which changed, as she recognized her customer, first into curiosity and then – Julia was surprised to see – dislike.
The girl’s face clouded over for a second, then she glanced at a pile of newspapers on the counter. When she looked back at Julia, she looked guilty, as though she’d been caught taking money from the till and stuffing it into her purse, and then, in an attempt to move on, grabbed the cigarettes and rang them up on the till.
‘Fifty-five nineteen,’ she said.
Her diversion didn’t work. Julia looked at the pile of newspapers. They were all copies of a national tabloid, newly delivered and still wrapped, a narrow blue plastic tie forming cross hairs on the front page.
And in the centre of the cross hairs was her face.
The picture had been taken as she and Brian left the press conference. It was a close up of her, and he was just visible, a blurry presence in the background, which, she thought, suited his presence in her life. It wasn’t that which had caused the attendant’s discomfort, however.
Julia read the headline with a sense of mounting disbelief. When she reached the end, she grabbed the counter, suddenly dizzy.
She read it again.
BROKEN BRITAIN: VANISHED ANNA’S MUM ACCUSED OF NEGLECT
She grabbed the top paper and pulled. It would not come free of the plastic tie, so she tore it, taking half of the front page out, then the other half. She put them side by side on the counter.
It emerged yesterday that Julia Crowne, mother of disappeared child Anna Crowne, failed to pick up her daughter after school. She also failed to notify the school that she would be late, so no one knew to keep Anna back. Little Anna would have left the school on time and been alone, alone and vulnerable to predators.
Yesterday, Mrs Crowne was the target of some criticism from other parents. One, who asked not to be named, claimed that Anna’s mother, a lawyer, had been late before.
‘If you keep on not showing up then this kind of thing is bound to happen,’ the parent said. ‘I feel for her, I really do, but you have to ask yourself whether this could have been avoided. I mean, what’s more important? A meeting or your child?’
Mrs Crowne arrived thirty minutes after the end of the school day, which was when it emerged that Anna was not there. Subsequent efforts to locate the five-year-old have proved fruitless, and it is feared she has been abducted by a criminal gang engaged in child trafficking, or by a lone-wolf child predator.
Henry Collins, a former major in the Army who specializes in abduction cases, said that in these circumstances thirty minutes is a lifetime.
‘Thirty minutes is thirty miles,’ he said. ‘And a search area with a radius of thirty miles is big. To be honest, the people who do this kind of thing would think that five minutes is enough. Worse, once out of the immediate vicinity, a child could be transferred to another vehicle, and in a matter of another hour or two potentially be out of the country.’
‘Oh God,’ Julia said. ‘It’s not like that.’ She looked at the girl. ‘That’s not how it happened. I swear!’
The girl didn’t say anything. She stood behind the till, staring at Julia. Next to her the screen showed the price of the milk and petrol.
55.19
Julia passed her a credit card. He
r hands were shaking.
The girl nodded at the torn paper.
‘You can have that,’ she said. ‘For nothing.’
iii.
It got worse.
When Julia arrived home she was in a daze and did not notice – or did not pay attention to – the man standing a few yards up the road. It was only when she had her key in the front door that she became aware he was walking towards her.
‘Mrs Crowne!’ he said. ‘Mrs Crowne! I’m from the Daily World!’
Julia stared at him, unable to believe that he was outside her house, waiting for her. He was tall, in his fifties, with a bouffant hairstyle she thought might have been a wig, and a beak-like nose. He had a London accent and looked tired, as though he’d driven all night to be there. He smiled at her, revealing yellowed teeth. The front two overlapped, giving him a beaverish look.
‘Mrs Crowne,’ he went on. ‘Is it true you were late to collect Anna? Just a word, Mrs Crowne.’
‘Go away,’ Julia said. ‘Get away from my house.’
‘Just a couple of questions, Mrs Crowne. Were you late for Anna? Do you regret it?’
‘I said go away,’ she repeated. ‘Leave me alone, you vile man.’
He did not appear to have heard. ‘Do you feel responsible, Mrs Crowne? Like it was your fault? Do you wish you could go back and change things?’
How could he be so cruel? If she said yes, there would be an innocuous line in a story: Anna’s mum said she felt responsible for what happened, and that she wished she could go back in time and be there to pick up her daughter. Across the country people would read it over their cornflakes and nod and say I’ll bet she does, and then they’d forget all about it and leave the house and get on with their lives.
They would never know what was behind that line: a dishevelled, amoral man accosting a desperate mother on her doorstep and peppering her with questions that could serve no purpose other than to wound her. Was this how the press operated? Was this the cost of a story? Was there no less callous way to fill their rags?