After Anna

‘Nothing?’ he asked.

‘Not yet, Mr Crowne,’ she replied. ‘You and Mrs Crowne should go home. Try and get some rest.’

‘I’d prefer to stay,’ Julia said. ‘I can go out and look myself.’

‘If anything changes I’ll call you immediately,’ Wynne said. ‘The best thing you can do is to preserve your strength. Tomorrow will be a busy day.’

‘If you don’t find Anna tonight,’ Brian said.

There was a long, uncomfortable, pause, then DI Wynne nodded. ‘If we don’t find her tonight,’ she said. ‘That’s right. But go, and get some rest.’

Julia was pretty sure that rest would be an elusive quarry, but she nodded. She took her car keys from her pocket. She looked at Brian. ‘I’ll drive,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

They climbed into the car, silent. There was nothing to say. For the first time in a long time they were both feeling exactly the same things. Fear. Worry. Dread. Panic. One after another in a horrific spin cycle.

Julia turned the key in the ignition. She almost expected the car not to start – everything else was broken, so why not that, too? – but it fired and the engine came to life. It was a short drive home – maybe a mile – but to Julia it felt like the most important journey she had ever taken; as if she was crossing an invisible border into a new land, a land in which everything had changed.

3 (#ulink_155160f3-de52-5324-8aa5-93506833cacd)

The First Day (#ulink_155160f3-de52-5324-8aa5-93506833cacd)

i.

You slept well. In the wee hours you brought the girl inside and then went to bed, tired from the exertions of the day – the adrenaline was pumping and it took it out of you – and fell asleep in a heartbeat. Woke at six, a little bleary-eyed, and made a strong coffee.

The story is everywhere. The girl’s photo in every news bulletin. Numbers for the public to call if they know where she is. The police were searching all night, helped by concerned locals. A local pub provided sandwiches and hot drinks. Dogs barked and yelped and sniffed their way across scrubland and through parks and forests.

They found nothing. There is nothing to find. You made sure of that.

Not a peep from the girl in the night. That was no surprise, though. She is young and the sleeping pills you’d crushed into a milkshake (bought from McDonald’s before you took her and administered as soon as you got her in the car – kids were powerless to resist sugary drinks) were powerful. She sleeps still. She’ll be groggy when she wakes, but that is no problem. You plan to keep her under sedation until the end comes – perhaps a week or so, not much more than that – after which, it won’t matter anyway.

It matters now, though. You need her asleep or sedated so that she doesn’t make a noise when you are not there. You can’t be with her all the time. You are needed – expected – to be elsewhere, and your absence would be noted. It would cause suspicion. You know that they will be looking everywhere for the girl – pretty five-year-olds who vanish are big news – and you must do nothing that invites suspicion onto you. So you must leave her, and she must be silent when you are gone.

If she isn’t? Well, even then it is unlikely anyone would hear her. She is in a safe place, hidden away in the bowels of your house, and her screams would not travel far. But maybe far enough if they happened to coincide with the arrival of the milkman or the postman. You have kept the milk deliveries up. Would the police look for people who had abruptly cancelled milk deliveries? They might, so you have maintained yours. That is the attention to detail that sets you apart from the common run.

So the girl must be silent. Just in case.

Just in case. Those are your watchwords. You examine every possibility, weigh every risk, and make your plans accordingly.

That is why you can sleep at night. Because you know you have nothing to fear. You know you have not made any errors. You know you will not get caught.

And you know you are doing the right thing. You have no crisis of conscience. Yes, you feel sorry for the girl, but her suffering is a necessary evil.

And a necessary evil is indistinguishable from something right and proper. If it is necessary, how can it be evil? If it is the only path to the right and proper outcome then it must itself be right and proper. To be deterred from doing the right thing because a little girl might undergo some temporary suffering – wouldn’t that be worse than letting her suffer? If everyone made decisions like that then nothing great would ever be accomplished. How many people died in order for the great cathedrals to be built? Or bridges? Or railways? Or for the wars of the righteous to be fought? Did their deaths matter? Were they tragedies, every one of them? Yes, of course they were. But were they to be regretted? No, they were not. Without their deaths the world would be a poorer place, and that was what mattered. Their deaths were a necessary evil.

And, as you know better than anyone else, a necessary evil can be a good thing.

ii.

Julia lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. It was four a.m. and there was a chill in the room. They’d come home and relieved Edna, then Brian had disappeared with a bottle of whisky. Somehow she’d fallen asleep, for maybe an hour, which in the circumstances was the best she could hope for. Now, in the small hours of the morning, mind racing, she knew her night was over. Sleep would be impossible.

The house was still and dark; the witching hour, as her dad had called it. He was a leather tanner and he used to come home smelling of the chemicals they used to clean the leather. Whatever they were they were powerful: the run-off polluted the local rivers and polluted her dad’s body. He died of brain cancer when he was in his early sixties. It happened quickly. A year from retirement he missed his first day of work from illness, then he missed another, and another, laid up in bed with a headache that left him unable to focus. He never went back. The cancer was behind his eye and worming its way into his brain.

Officially, it was just one of those things. Unofficially, Julia was convinced it was the solvents and acids he spent his days slopping around that stained his skin and fouled his lungs. Even after he had taken a bath – he took one every night, retiring to the upstairs lavatory with a cup of tea and a copy of the Daily Mirror, a ritual which infuriated Julia when she was teenager in a hurry to get ready on a Friday night, leading her to complain to her mum, who would frown and say leave him, love, he works hard – even after that long soak in the perfumed, Radoxed waters of the bath, he still gave off the hard, harsh smell of the tannery.

When she was a child, he used to lie down next to her, smelling of that smell, and tell her a story every night, a story he had made up during the long days at work. Many of them began It was the witching hour, and for years she had wondered what it would be like to be awake during the witching hour, what amazing events she would witness if she could just keep her eyes open … and then she would wake up and it would be light outside and she would have missed all the fun.

As she lay there now, the house creaked and groaned. They were just the sounds that a house made, but it was easy to believe that they were the night-time perambulations of the little people. She remembered running onto the landing as a little girl when she heard the stairs creak, and shouting downstairs to her parents.

I’m scared! What are those noises?

Her dad clumped up the stairs, bringing with him a whiff of cheap beer mingled with the acid stench of the tannery.

Don’t worry, petal. Houses are alive. They move around and they settle at night, same as you and me. It’s just our place resting its old bones. It’s saying good night to you, that’s all.

Anna was one when he died, so at least she’d met him, although she had no memory of it. He’d loved her, was great with her; couldn’t get enough of nappy changes and messy feedings and clip-clop horsey rides on his knees.

How she wished he was here now. She wouldn’t want him to suffer through this, but it would make it so much easier to have him here. She missed him. She missed him so much.

As she did her mum, but in a different way. Her mum was still alive but had suffered her own tragedy, in some ways worse. Alzheimer’s had corroded her brain, eaten her memories, dissolved who she was into a listless, confused shell. She was in a home nearby, in need of constant care. Julia visited often, but it was hard. Her mum rarely knew it was her daughter holding her hand.

They were effectively gone, her parents, as was Brian. She was going to have to do this herself.

She checked her phone. Maybe a call from DI Wynne that somehow – although she knew it was unthinkable that she would have slept through it – she had missed.

She reached out and turned on her bedside light.

There was a photo frame on the cabinet, split into uneven thirds. Anna had given it to her for Christmas, and they had spent an hour or so leafing through photos choosing which three to put in it. All of them featured Anna: as a newborn, in Edna’s arms on the couch in their old house, and with Brian and Julia outside the blue door of the nursery she had attended.

God, leaving her there for the first time had been awful. Julia had felt bereft, incomplete, as though she was missing a part of herself. She had cried all morning at work, and then made some excuse at lunchtime about feeling ill, and gone to the nursery. Being reunited with her daughter, smelling her, kissing her, made her whole again, and she vowed never to leave her daughter again.

But the next day she did. And the day after that, and the day after that. Eventually, she got used to saying goodbye, but she never stopped missing Anna.

Julia stared at the photo. It was taken on that first day, Anna a mere three-months-old. Julia looked drawn and tired, still carrying the baby weight, her face tear-stained. She was holding Anna close to her chest, holding the baby that she had barely been apart from for a minute since she was born, and who she was about to hand into the care of a stranger.

Even in a photo it was obvious she and Brian were in love. They were leaning into each other, his arm around her. He was not looking at the camera, but at his wife, his expression protective, caring, concerned. Loving, most of all. It was a photo of a man who adored his wife and the daughter they had made together.

When they’d left the nursery they’d hugged for a long time. It was funny what you remembered; Julia remembered the smell of the suit Brian was wearing. It was musty; odd but not unpleasant. He was starting his new job as a primary teacher, and he was wearing a suit that he’d bought from a charity store, and in the chaos of early parenthood he’d not managed to find time to have it dry-cleaned.

He was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with and, back then, she couldn’t have imagined any future in which she didn’t.

Not any more. Now he was a brooding presence, squatting in the spare bedroom.

She pulled on her dressing gown and crossed the landing to the stairs. The top two creaked and, out of habit, she trod softly on them so as not to wake up Anna, who was a light sleeper. Julia often wondered whether it was because she and Brian had fussed over her sleeping arrangements so much: at nap time and bed time they ensured that she had a dark room at the correct temperature, and then they performed an elaborate routine to get her to sleep, rocking her in a specific pattern and then, when she was nearly asleep, laying her gently in her bed and patting her back until her breathing lengthened and she could be left without fear of her waking up. They would then tiptoe around the house, terrified of waking her up.

And now she was a light sleeper: no wonder. She had only ever had to sleep in perfect conditions. All those adults who complained of insomnia would sleep like a cat on a warm flagstone if they were rocked for half an hour before bed and then given a gentle massage. She and Brian would have done things differently with a second child, Julia knew, they would have been more relaxed, both because they would have known what they were doing and because they would not have had the time to do with another child what they had done with Anna. The second child had not come, though. A miscarriage and then an ectopic pregnancy, which had left Julia unable to have more children, had seen to that. She was barren, as Edna had once put it.

Barren. It was a horrid, vivid word that Julia hated, and it was just the kind of word that Edna would use. She could pretend that it was just what people said when she was young and she didn’t know it would upset her daughter-in-law, but Julia didn’t believe her. Edna knew exactly what she was doing. She always did.