I Know You

by Annabel Kantaria

  I look at the floor. He cheats – and it’s my fault for mentioning it?

  ‘It’s far more worrying that you never told me that Anna was being followed,’ Jake says. ‘That Jackie woman mentioned it?’

  I look down.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Oh, I know why,’ he says pompously before I have a chance to answer. ‘Because if you told me that, I’d never have let you go away with her! Am I right, or am I right?’

  ‘No! I…’

  ‘What? You what?’ he shouts. ‘Tell me because I’m dying to hear this one!’

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you. I…’ I break off and take a deep breath. Why should I explain myself to him? ‘The police were on it. I thought she was being a drama queen. I knew it was your last trip.’ I shake my head: why hadn’t I told him? ‘It didn’t seem that important.’

  Jake forms a fist and slams it into the palm of his other hand. ‘Not that important? If I’d known! If you’d thought to tell me she had a stalker living in her garden, we might still have our son.’ He wipes spit from the corner of his mouth and glares at me.

  My heartbeat quickens. ‘We didn’t know it was a stalker! Honestly, it looked like whoever it was was long gone. The police didn’t seem too concerned.’

  ‘There’s evidence that someone’s been sleeping in her shed and you don’t think it’s a reason for concern?’ He forces the breath out of his lungs in exasperation.

  I keep my voice steady. ‘Jake, please. Don’t be like this. She called the police. They came. They said it didn’t look that recent. It might have been before she even moved in. It might have been the last family’s gardener. And if you weren’t “too busy” to meet her before you let me fly halfway around the world with her, she might have told you about it herself.’

  ‘So all’s well that ends well, hey? Everything turned out fine, did it? Don’t try and throw it back at me. We both know you’re the one at fault here.’ Jake comes over and brings his face close to mine, glowering, and in that moment he looks like a complete stranger. ‘So where’s my son?’ Jake snarls. He springs back up, goes over to the back window and looks out at the garden. ‘He could have been in our shed, too. Right there! Sleeping at the bottom of our own fucking garden. Watching our every move. He could have seen you naked. How does that make you feel, Tay, honey? Wanking as he watched you.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘I bet it was your mate Simon.’ Jake grabs his jacket and keys. ‘He had a thing for you. Any idiot could see.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To ask him out for dinner! What do you think? Where does he live? Tell me!’

  ‘I don’t know! I never went to his house. Anyway it wasn’t him. I’m sure it wasn’t him. He just wouldn’t.’

  ‘Says the woman who let her best friend abduct her baby…’

  ‘Stop it!’ I slam my hands over my ears.

  He scoffs out loud. ‘Did it ever occur to you that your friend Anna might even have pretended she had a stalker to give us a red herring when she took our baby? Did it? How easy was it for her to put a few things in her garden shed? Would have taken half an hour max. Then there’s a convenient suspect when she and our baby go missing. God, she was a sicko.’

  ‘Of course she didn’t do that. This isn’t some American crime show. It’s our lives.’ But even as I say the words, I’m wondering if he’s right. Everything I’ve thought about Anna to date has been wrong. I can’t get past the fact that she deleted her social-media accounts. That tells me more than anything. It tells me what I don’t want to know.

  Jake and I stare at each other, each locked in our own vortex of desperation. I steady myself on the wall and try to take a couple of deep breaths. Upstairs, I hear the floorboards creak as Jackie moves around. Jake returns to his pacing. I stare at the floor, noticing the intricate details of the carpet. We remain in our positions, both of us stuck in a tableau: grieving parents of snatched baby. Jackie comes back down holding Joseph’s little hairbrush, a few of his hairs stuck in the super-soft bristles, in a sealed baggie.

  ‘DNA,’ she says. ‘If we need it.’

  ‘I’m going upstairs,’ I say. ‘I’m allowed, aren’t I? It’s not a crime scene?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Jackie says. ‘But just to warn you, CID will be over later to do another interview, and I’ll be liaising with them regarding the press release. We’ll need a photo of Joseph and, if you have it, the car seat he was in. The clothes, too, if you have a picture of him wearing them.’

  ‘But she has a change of clothes for him in the bag,’ I say.

  ‘Okay, well, the more you can give us to go on, the better.’

  I turn to the stairs and, as I climb them, clinging to the bannister for support, an irrational hope grows in me that I’ll turn the corner and find Anna in the armchair, shushing me as Joe sleeps peacefully in his cot – but of course the room is empty, and I take it like a sucker-punch in the abdomen. In the cot, the blanket in which I’d swaddled Joe last night lies abandoned, testament to my excitement to get to the airport; on the mattress, a few of his dark hairs are stark against the white sheet. I grab the blanket and bury my face in it, inhaling the smell of my son while my heart constricts, and then I lift out the mattress, put it on the floor, and lie down on it, hugging my knees and the blanket, and pushing my face against the sheet that my baby was lying on just this very morning. It’s cold to the touch now, the warmth of his little body long gone. Almost instantaneously, I feel the familiar tingle in my breasts that means my milk’s letting down. I ignore it for a minute, but it’s too uncomfortable, so I haul myself back to my feet and go back downstairs to get the sterilized bottles and tubes for the pump.

  Jake’s on the sofa. ‘What were you doing up there?’ he asks.

  I turn and face him so he can see the wet patches on the front of my top. ‘What does it look like?’

  He shuts his eyes and runs his hand through his hair. ‘Sorry. It’s just…’

  I take everything back upstairs and connect my breasts to the pump like an automaton. Then I sit in the chair and let the tears stream down my face while the rhythmic sound of the pump’s push and pull fills the room, and the milk I’ve made for Joe is sucked out of my body.

  *

  I wake much later, slumped in the chair. It’s dark outside, and the nursery curtains are still open. It takes a minute for me to come to; a moment in which my son’s asleep in his cot before my brain processes where I am and what’s happened. The heating’s gone off, my neck’s stiff where my head’s fallen sideways, and my breasts are still exposed, although the suction cups are in my lap and the machine’s off. I stretch slowly, then tidy everything up. From the landing, I see no lights in the house, just shapes highlighted in the sodium-yellow bath of the streetlights. I creep down the stairs with the pump parts and milk bottle in my hand, fully expecting to find Jake asleep on the sofa, but he’s not there and there’s no sign of Jackie either. Relieved, I switch on the light, blinking until my eyes get accustomed, then I throw out the milk as it has sat out for hours, wash the parts of the pump and leave them to sterilize, then I make some toast, suddenly aware that I’m ravenous. In the sink, a dirty bowl, spoon, plate and knife give evidence that Jake’s eaten too.

  Back upstairs, I look at him, asleep in our bed. His mouth’s slightly open, one arm flung above his head, and he looks as if he has no cares in the world. Ironic, I think, that he suffered from insomnia when he had nothing to worry about but now our son’s gone, he’s sleeping like the figurative baby. After the way he’s been today, I don’t want to be anywhere near him. I take my things downstairs, and make a bed for myself on the sofa. And then I call my mum.

  It’s one of the hardest calls of my life.

  Forty-six

  Birds wake me the next morning: sparrows so close they must be on the windowsill itself. They’re chirruping out their little lungs, loud as any alarm and, for a moment, I’m in a world where my son isn’t missing, then the memory of th
e previous day’s events floods back with a force that crushes me. I lie on the sofa for a few minutes, not moving a limb as the horror of what’s happened washes over me all over again, effectively pinning me to the sofa. If I don’t move, maybe it’s not true. But eventually I realize I have to face the truth. I reach for my phone and my heart jumps: there’s a message from Jackie telling me to call her when we wake up. Still lying down, I click her number, my breath coming fast.

  ‘Any news?’ I say the moment she picks up, and I’m simultaneously hoping for good news and steeling myself for bad news, honestly not knowing what to expect. If they had him, they’d just bring him here, wouldn’t they? Unless… An image of a tiny baby in a hospital bassinet springs into my head and I push it back out.

  ‘Some good news,’ says Jackie. ‘We’ve traced the cab.’

  ‘Okay…’

  ‘But it seems Anna didn’t go far. She asked to go to Redhill Station, which is where the driver dropped her off.’

  ‘And from there she could have got the train to…?’

  ‘Well, there’s a sighting of her on the station CCTV going onto the northbound platform.’

  ‘So she could be right here in Croydon?’

  ‘We’re studying the CCTV of every station that train went through but there’s been another development.’

  ‘What?’ I can hardly breathe. ‘Have they found Joe?’

  ‘No, not that. But we need to speak to you this morning. When you’re ready, CID need to come over and get some further detail on your relationship with Anna.’

  ‘Okay…?’

  ‘Can you be ready in an hour?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Perfect, well, we’ll see you then.’

  *

  It’s a long hour till Jackie arrives with DS Baldwin and DC White. They fill the hallway and I back nervously into the living room, where I’ve done a quick dust and tidy-up, and plumped up the sofa cushions, feeling as if I’m hosting some sort of bizarre coffee morning.

  ‘Please, sit down. What can I get you?’ I ask.

  ‘We’re fine,’ says DS Baldwin. ‘Just a few minutes of your time.’

  I pull over a couple of the dining chairs and everyone finds a place to sit – Jake and I are next to each other on the sofa, me with my hands in my lap, him with his arms folded, and then we wait expectantly.

  ‘We wanted to ask you about your relationship with Anna,’ says DS Baldwin.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Anything specific?’

  ‘If you could take us through how you met her, how long you’ve known her and so on.’

  So I go through it all again and they listen attentively, throwing in extra questions.

  ‘But neither of you had ever known her previously?’ DS Baldwin asks when I get to the end.

  ‘No. I’d never met her before.’

  ‘She wasn’t an old friend from school or anything? You know, dyed her hair, lost weight…?’

  I shake my head. ‘I honestly have never met her before.’

  ‘Long-lost relative? Old work colleague? Think hard. It’s important.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve never met her at all,’ says Jake. ‘She was her friend.’

  ‘You weren’t aware of her on social media before you met her?’

  ‘No. Why do you ask?’

  ‘We searched her house and found certain… items that lead us to believe she knew you previously.’

  My heart quickens. ‘Like what? What did you find? Not…’ They’d tell me if they’d found Joe, wouldn’t they?

  ‘We’d like you to come and take a look. Are you ready?’

  Jake and I look at each other. ‘Yes,’ I say, but I’m thinking about the times I’ve been in Anna’s house – what could it be that I hadn’t spotted? Or did she leave something since she packed for the holiday? What could it be?

  We all get up and troop outside. It’s only a walk to Anna’s but Jackie insists on driving us in her car.

  ‘What have they found?’ I ask her as she looks for a parking space outside Anna’s.

  ‘You’ll see in a minute,’ she says.

  We get out of the car and the two officers lead us up the path to the door I remember knocking on for the first time what seems like years ago. I remember Anna opening it in her blue sweatshirt; me standing there with my bags from Costa, full of joy to be helping a new friend rearrange her furniture.

  DS Baldwin opens the front door and we step inside. The familiar scent of the house brings back a visceral memory of happier times spent here: Anna and I pushing her furniture around, me playing the interior designer. On the table in the hallway is the reed diffuser I bought her, its fragrance not quite covering up the mustiness I smelled that first time I came over. I still have that ludicrous hope that Anna might be here with Joseph after all, that this is some sort of misunderstanding; or that it’s a prank – a cruel prank – that they’re going to jump out at me, shouting ‘Surprise! Ha ha! Got you!’ but I can tell from the depth of the silence that the place is empty. Even so, loyalty clings to me like seaweed: it feels wrong to be in her house without her knowledge.

  We go into the living room and I’m struck, as always, by how similar to our own living room it is, from the positioning of the furniture to the colour scheme. She really took my advice on board. I look through towards the kitchen, wondering what it is that they want to show us but there’s nothing there. It’s a home that’s been closed up for a couple of weeks while the occupant goes on holiday, everything spick and span, no taps dripping, the heating on a low constant. I shiver.

  ‘Right,’ says DS Baldwin. ‘I presume you’re familiar with the layout of the house?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I came over a good few times. As I said, I helped with the interior design.’

  ‘And you went upstairs?’

  ‘Yes. Into the bedroom. But not the nursery. She was keeping that private until her baby was born.’

  DS Baldwin nods, his lips a thin line. ‘Okay. Well, that’s the room we need you to look at.’

  ‘The nursery? I saw a picture of the cot she wanted on Instagram.’

  ‘I’d like you to see it on your own first, if you’d like to lead the way,’ DS Baldwin says. So, while Jake remains downstairs with DC White and Jackie, I walk nervously up the stairs and open the door to the nursery where I stop in my tracks, unable to take in what I’m seeing.

  It’s not a nursery at all.

  Forty-seven

  The room looked like some sort of a control centre. That’s the only thing I could think of as I stood, stunned, in the doorway. I’ll never forget that moment, not as long as I live. It was like looking at an air-traffic control centre: there was a chair, and a long desk covered in equipment. There was a huge computer screen angled towards the chair, a stack of iPads and a digital SLR camera with a long lens on the desk. On the other wall, there was a bank of bookshelves with lockable doors. The curtains I’d seen that day from the bottom of Anna’s garden were closed, and the air was stale. On the desk, there were used coffee cups, cereal bowls and plates with fetid remains of food. I was so shocked I didn’t even notice the pinboards on the wall, not to begin with.

  ‘Oh my god,’ I say. ‘What is this?’ but DS Baldwin indicates that I should go further in.

  On the floor there’s something I don’t immediately recognize. It looks like a flesh-coloured mound of rubber. I pick it up then drop it like a dead squid as I realize what it is: a prosthetic pregnancy bump. It’s not big, maybe made to look like three or four months, and is attached to a flesh-coloured body suit. My mind can’t compute it.

  ‘Why does she have this? She was pregnant,’ I say, and DS Baldwin shakes his head.

  ‘It seems she wasn’t.’

  ‘Maybe her bump was too small?’ I say. ‘Maybe she wanted to make it look bigger?’ But my subconscious is putting the pieces together and I don’t want to know; I can’t even begin to imagine. I think about the bump pictures she posted on
Instagram. They looked so real.

  ‘Have a look at those,’ DS Baldwin says, nodding towards a pile of scrapbooks on the desk. I pick one up and gasp as I flick through it. I recognize every single picture: there’s our house, our car, our road and our front yard in Croydon. Our apartment block in Santa Monica, and shots of our road there from both ends. A picture of the beach. Maps of the area. Some are my own Instagram shots; some have been taken by someone else; some look as if they’ve been taken from a distance using a long lens. One is of an empty box of pills I’ll never forget. I look up at DS Baldwin, flustered, the book between us like it’s glowing.

  ‘What is this? How does she have all these pictures?’

  ‘We were hoping you’d be able to shed some light on that.’

  ‘Well, some are social media… They were out there… in the public domain, but not all of them… Some of these are… Oh my god. Who took these? Her?’ My eyes flick to the long-lens camera.

  I put the scrapbook down and pull out a ringbinder folder, my heart thumping a rhythm so crazy I feel it might explode. DS Baldwin watches closely as I flip through the pages, and nausea rises as I realize what I’m looking at: it’s a printed record of my Twitter account. There’s me announcing my pregnancy, me chatting about where to go on honeymoon; a few pictures I Tweeted from Mexico; an exchange of Tweets between me and Renault regarding issues I had with the new car; places I’ve eaten; people I’ve seen; things I’ve done in the UK. Anna’s found and printed every single Tweet. Not just printed but laminated. I look up at DC Manning, appalled.

  ‘She’s been following me?’

  ‘It certainly looks that way. Can you think of any reason why she might?’

  ‘No… I…’

  Feet thump up the stairs and Jake bursts into the room, then stops on the threshold just as I did. I’m standing motionless in the middle of the room, the folder still in my hands.

  ‘What the…?’ he says as his eyes sweep over the room then stop on the rubber mass on the floor. He steps further into the room, picks it up and turns it the right way around.