by Nicci French
Alexei was wearing new trainers, new jeans, a new T-shirt. He was tugging at his father’s hand, and Josef pointed at the city that felt almost like it was at their feet.
‘You see that crane?’ He was speaking in their native language, trying to take his son’s mind off Reuben’s attack. ‘You can count them from the left. It’s the third.’
Alexei didn’t reply but he saw him counting them out.
‘Papa worked on that job. It’s a big project. We dug down twenty-five metres, thirty metres.’
Josef told him about the mass excavators, the bulldozers, the dumper trucks, the cement-mixers, the pile-drivers. Alexei looked up at his father with his mouth open. ‘I’ve driven the bulldozers. I drove a dumper truck. But mostly I work with my hands: drills, electrics.’
He hadn’t finished saying what else when Alexei noticed the zoo. He saw it and heard it and then he spoke. ‘What animals are there?’
Josef stopped. His son had spoken at last; he had asked him a question. He knew he shouldn’t make too much of it, but a smile was tugging at his mouth. ‘All kinds of animals,’ he said.
‘Like tigers?’
Josef paused. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘The two of us, we’ll go to the zoo. We’ll do it soon. We’ll make a proper plan.’
They walked down the stone steps that led to the canal. Alexei slowed. His eyes were bright with a new curiosity and Josef suddenly felt overwhelmed. He had forgotten about this. Now he imagined a future of doing what fathers did, walking in the park, going to the zoo, teaching Alexei to be a craftsman, the way Josef’s father had taught Josef. His heart felt swollen, tender as a bruise; he was both happy and sad at once. He looked down at his little son, who seemed so delicate and who had been through so much in his short life and squeezed his hand tighter.
They arrived at Camden Lock, which Josef slightly disapproved of, but Alexei, though he didn’t say anything, seemed excited. It had everything. They wandered between the stalls and the smells: roasting meat, bubbling soups, salads, ice cream, multi-coloured juices. Josef said: ‘Later. We’ll eat later.’ And then there were the clothes, the leather jackets and the frilly dresses, the Gothic and the Edwardian. Josef felt Alexei’s hand slip through his fingers. His son had stopped, staring at a stall of vintage cameras. Then they drifted away again, Alexei darting this way and that, as something caught his eye. Even more exciting, Camden Lock was a building site as well. Alexei pointed at an excavator.
The crowd was thicker now. Josef’s mobile rang and he answered.
‘Josef?’
‘Yes.’ He watched Alexei out of the corner of his eye. Was his son too thin? Too pale? Was he looking after him properly? He’d make poppy seed cake later, build him up.
‘It’s Jeannie.’
‘Jeannie.’ For a moment, Josef’s mind was blank, and then, of course, he remembered. She was pretty, bright, talkative. She had a husband who ignored her and a job she didn’t like, and she had been lonely until she met Josef and then, almost alarmingly, she had been happy. But that was all before he had brought his son home. Everything had changed and he had no time for such things now. He was a father – a father who was also the mother – of a son who had been through a war and a death and needed care.
‘You haven’t called me.’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘I cannot,’ said Josef, softly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I cannot. I am father again.’
‘What?’
‘I am sorry,’ said Josef.
‘But –’
‘You are nice,’ he said. ‘But this is the end. I wish you fortune.’
He ended the call and turned towards the sudden blare of a trumpet from the direction of the canal. Always with the trumpet or the saxophone or even the bagpipes. People threw coins into the open case. Could you really earn enough from that? When he turned back, he couldn’t see Alexei. But there was a falafel stall and a coffee stall in the way. The flow of the crowd would bring his son into sight.
It didn’t.
Josef sighed. Something must have caught his eye. He walked round the other side of the stall. He still couldn’t see him. There was a walkway that led away from the canal towards the high street. But Alexei couldn’t possibly have taken that. Unless something had caught his interest. Josef ran along the walkway, looking left and right. He saw a security guard in a yellow high-vis jacket.
‘I lose my son,’ said Josef. He held his hand up. ‘So high. Hair dark. T-shirt. Jeans.’
‘I’ll keep a look out, mate. He’ll just have wandered off.’
But Alexei had barely left his side since Josef had arrived to take him to London. He was his anxious shadow, his miniature double. Just in case, Josef ran all the way to the high street. He looked around desperately, as if the boy might suddenly appear. Nothing. He ran back into the market and up some stairs so that he could look down at the crowd. It was so thick that the movement was slow, a sluggish current. There were so many children. Josef saw a dark flash of hair and experienced a moment of hope. But the child was hand in hand with an elderly woman and wore different clothes.
Josef took out his phone. He would give it ten minutes. No. Five minutes had already passed. Five minutes. He ran down the steps towards the canal. Right by the water, a rubbish collector was pushing a trailer along, festooned with shopping bags. The man shook his head. Josef wasn’t entirely sure he had made himself understood.
‘If you see, tell me. I come back,’ he said.
He turned left down the canal and approached a couple coming towards him from the east. Had they seen a little boy on his own? They shrugged and said no. He turned and made his way back through the market. Progress was now horribly slow, however much he tried to push himself forward. And always he had to keep looking. On the other side, he turned east up the bridge that led towards Regent’s Park. He stopped a woman in running gear, jogging towards her. Laboriously and resentfully she detached her MP3 player from her belt, switched it off and removed one earpiece. Had she seen a boy on his own? She didn’t think so. People didn’t seem to realize how urgent this was.
He pushed his way back, asking the rubbish collector again, and the security man. He ran back out on to the high street. He was looking in the places he’d already looked. That was it. He took out his phone. He dimly knew that he should call the police but, almost without his thinking about it, his fingers moved a different way.
He called Frieda.
‘Stay there,’ she said.
21
It wasn’t that it felt like time was moving slowly. It didn’t feel like it existed. Josef was in a fog. He wanted to do anything for his son but he couldn’t see or move. He wanted someone to come and make all this go away. He wanted to die. That was all he deserved. His little son, whose hand had been in his just minutes ago. He should have kept hold of that hand. It hurt to breathe; his chest was sore and his throat felt almost closed with terror.
And then from somewhere he heard the lacerating sound of a police siren, the flashing lights, the improbably bright and cheerful blue and yellow colours. The police car came to a halt, then moved out into the wrong side of the road, snaking its way towards him. He held his arm out. He was so scared and guilty and ashamed. It was like he was saying: ‘It was me. I did it.’
The car bumped impudently right up on to the pavement. An interested crowd immediately formed. A young officer stepped from the passenger seat. She looked like a child herself.
‘Is me,’ said Josef. He didn’t recognize his own voice.
‘How long?’ said the officer.
‘Fifteen minutes. Less. Please.’
She pulled a face at the officer who had come round from the driver’s seat.
‘He’s probably wandered off,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Josef. ‘I no think so.’
A signal came from the man’s radio and he stepped to one side, having a conversation Josef couldn’t hear.
After just a few moments, he was back.
‘The chief said don’t …’ he paused and looked at Josef ‘… mess around. This is a top priority.’
‘Do you have a picture?’ asked the woman. He did. She showed it to the man, then gave it back to Josef.
‘Stand right here,’ she said. ‘Show it to anyone who comes.’
The two of them walked into the market, separating immediately. Josef just stood there by the empty police car, uselessly clutching his phone with the photo on its screen, surrounded by a crowd that couldn’t quite make up its collective mind to disperse. Josef felt a hand on his shoulder. It couldn’t be Alexei. He couldn’t reach that high. He looked round.
A middle-aged woman was smiling at him. ‘My kid does that all the time,’ she said. ‘He probably doesn’t even realize you’re looking for him.’
Josef just wanted to howl, to hit her, to hit anyone, to lie on the ground like a dog. But he just said: ‘Yes. Maybe.’
Then he said, to everybody and to nobody, ‘Please. Please help. He is my son.’
Another car was approaching, and then another. They were now forming a row. Karlsson got out from the back seat of the second, followed by Frieda. Josef saw her before she saw him.
He had experienced terrible things with Frieda and he knew that Frieda had experienced worse things on her own. But he had never seen her look like this. Her face was like death, but her eyes were terrifyingly alive, looking here, there, sharp as a lash. She caught sight of him and stepped forward towards him. He couldn’t speak. He had lost everything. He put his arms round her and started to cry, sobbing and sobbing in a way he hadn’t since he was a child. He just couldn’t stop himself and he never would be able to. He felt Frieda’s hands on his shoulder blades and a reassuring soft pat from them but then she pushed him away. ‘You can’t do this now.’
He couldn’t stop the tears. He couldn’t stop the retching tears.
‘Josef!’ she said more loudly. And then she slapped him.
A police officer stepped forward.
‘Fuck off,’ said Frieda.
‘What?’ said the officer, so surprised he couldn’t say anything more.
Frieda took the photograph from Josef’s hands. ‘You’re no help to Alexei like this.’
‘My blame,’ said Josef.
‘We can talk about blame later,’ Frieda said. ‘But I can tell you it won’t be you. What we do now is to think clearly and do what we need to do.’
‘You do this,’ said Josef. ‘You find that boy before. Now find Alexei. You do that, right?’
For a moment Frieda seemed less composed, as if she had been punched unexpectedly.
‘We’re all going to do what we can. But every minute counts.’ She looked round at the officer. ‘I’m sorry I shouted at you.’ The man started to speak but Frieda interrupted him. ‘Please take Mr Morozov to one of the cars. He needs some quiet and some privacy.’
Josef tried to protest but Frieda insisted. When he had gone, she turned to Karlsson. ‘Now what? Throw a cordon around the area?’
Karlsson was almost as pale and shocked as Frieda. ‘What area?’
‘The market. It’s pretty contained.’
‘It’s not contained. There must be thirty exits and thousands of people.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Whoever took him would have him in a car by now or on the Tube or they could have walked a mile or more and then got on a bus.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We look.’ Karlsson glanced around. Another police car arrived. Officers were running into the market. ‘How old was he?’
‘Is he,’ said Frieda. ‘We need to keep talking in the present tense. He’s eight.’
‘He’s eight. He hardly speaks a word of English. He’s in a strange part of a city he doesn’t know. Why would he go off with a stranger?’
‘Perhaps he was forced. Except this is a crowded public place.’
Karlsson thought for a moment. ‘It was what Dean Reeve used to be good at, persuading little children to get into a car with him,’ he said. ‘He used to work with a woman. Children trust women.’
Frieda shook her head. ‘But not here. In the market, in London, with his father ten yards away.’
‘But he’s gone.’
‘Yes, he’s gone.’
Frieda knew how this story played out. She had seen it before. For an hour, two hours, there was still hope that it was all a terrible mistake. She had heard of little boys suddenly deciding to play a game of hide and seek and disappearing for hours, maybe even falling asleep under a table somewhere. But was that really credible here in the middle of the busiest market in London? After another hour Frieda saw a group of men carrying some heavy equipment, cylinders, heavy duffel bags from the high street in the direction of the canal.
‘He can’t have fallen in,’ said Frieda. ‘There were thousands of people. The towpath is packed.’
‘It takes just a second,’ said Karlsson. ‘The surface closes over a body very quickly.’
Nothing was found. By nine o’clock the story was on the news. Frieda sat beside Josef on Reuben’s sofa and the photograph that Josef had shown to the police officer stared out of the screen at them. When, hours later, Frieda said he had to try to sleep Josef looked at her in disbelief.
‘He is there in the dark. How can I sleep? How can I sleep ever?’
Frieda had been feeling exactly the same. ‘There’s going to be a press conference tomorrow at ten o’clock. You have to be there.’
Josef had a glassy unfocused stare.
‘People need to see a grieving parent. They will identify with you and that will help them to remember.’
Frieda led him upstairs and got him into his bed. Then she took off her shoes and, still in her clothes, lay on top of the bed beside him and held his hand. Frieda thought that Josef might have slept for an hour or two. She thought of Alexei in the garden with her earlier that day, sliding his hand into hers with trust, and she didn’t sleep at all.
22
The next morning Josef sat at the press conference in a tie; he was freshly shaved and washed. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t. His face was lumpy and his eyes red. Petra Burge read out a statement that Frieda and Karlsson had put out, which represented what Josef would have wanted to say if he had been able to formulate any kind of thoughts or words.
There was a cluster of reporters. Petra spotted Liz Barron, fresh-faced and eager, looking as though she’d just returned from a holiday in the sun, her face tanned and her eyes bright with curiosity.
Reporters asked if there were any leads. Petra said that a blurred image from a CCTV camera under the railway bridge had been recovered. An officer tapped at a laptop and an image appeared on the screen behind them. It was indeed very blurred.
‘That,’ said Petra Burge, ‘may or may not be Alexei Morozov. And that may or may not be Dean Reeve.’
‘Do you know which direction they took?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have any witnesses?’ This was Gary Hillier, another of the journalists who had interviewed Frieda. He’d shaved off his goatee and now had a very thin moustache, like a line drawn in felt-tip pen above his mouth.
‘We’re hoping this press conference will encourage people to come forward.’
‘Do you think,’ said a man at the back in a carrying voice, ‘that Dean Reeve is taunting you?’
‘I have no comment.’
‘That he is always one step ahead?’
Afterwards Josef and Frieda were driven back to Reuben’s house. Josef went up to his bedroom with a bottle of vodka, his eyes red and dull. Frieda sat with Reuben. Neither of them said anything: what was there to say? They didn’t put on the TV or the radio or look online. If anything happened, they would be told. ‘You can find him,’ Josef had told Frieda, pathetically. It was true that she had found a boy before. But now she had nothing to go on.
She felt as if she were looking for a finger-hold in an entirely smooth, hard surface. B
ut still she thought and thought, went over everything she knew, and the morning turned to afternoon and they had heard nothing. When her phone rang, it was like being woken from a slow and ghastly dream. She looked at its screen. Karlsson.
‘It’s seventeen minutes past four,’ he said. ‘Or it was, two minutes ago. That’s the time Josef rang you. Yesterday. You know what that means?’
‘I knew what it meant when they started searching the canal.’
‘You know what I’m saying. You should prepare Josef. Or start preparing him.’
‘All right.’ She broke off the call and walked slowly upstairs.
The next morning the sun rose at five forty-five. Jemma Cowan was on the canal at Bow about two minutes later with her little Jack Russell terrier, Seamus. She loved this time of the morning. It was never entirely deserted: there was always the occasional fanatical cyclist. Even today, a runner, shaded against the sun, hooded against the early morning, passed her and ran up the steps.
Seamus snuffled around. He was as enchanted as she was. She sometimes saw cormorants and kingfishers, and other birds she couldn’t identify, fish rising and spoiling the clear metallic surface with a slow burp. It was like a country stream, but a country stream in a post-apocalyptic landscape, and that was even better. Other people ran and cycled and walked wearing headphones. How could you possibly do that? She loved the unexpected sounds, chirps and barks and screeches. They were as important as the smell of baking bread from the warehouse across the water.
She walked under a low bridge. The curve was so sharp that she had to lower her head and when she emerged on the other side, she saw something that she couldn’t quite make sense of. It was a shape on a bench ahead. But why was the shape so small? And why so still? She looked around with a certain unexpected tremor and then she moved closer.