Safe and sound, p.29
Safe and Sound, page 29
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Read on for the first chapter…
For the longest time, the police could only find fragments of her, despite all our search posters, all our appeals; a few seconds of grainy, jerky CCTV footage, the tiny handful of frames they retrieved from the hundreds of thousands they trawled. An image of a little girl who stands on the up-bound escalator of a Tube station, her pointed chin raised towards the top of the staircase, her face tilted towards the bright lights.
For years I had hardly anything but those fragments. Those fragments, our memories and a bruising gap. As a family, we floundered in a stubborn, hopeless hoping, with jobs and school and birthdays and Christmases all waterlogged with her loss.
That’s how it was before at least, for those seven years that she was missing. It was when that was over that all the rest began, all that led up to that night on the bridge.
When I had to account for everything I had done.
And, ultimately, everything I had not.
Chapter 1
Monday 27th May:
Day 1
ANNE
They discovered me in my daughter’s bedroom, elbow-deep in boxes. It had been twenty-five minutes from that single, surreal phone call to the moment my husband and the twins arrived home: plenty enough time for me to go wrong. I heard the front door bang and them pound up the stairs, Robert’s heavy boots kicking the carpet and the twins’ feet scrambling behind.
‘Anne?’
‘Mummy?’
‘I’m so sorry about the vase,’ was the first thing I said, before they could even say anything about the miraculous news. ‘It slipped, a complete accident.’
In the doorway the boys stood breathless and wreathed in chlorine. They had been swimming but now their swim had been cut short.
‘The vase?’ said Robert.
‘Downstairs,’ I managed, unable to tell him straight the awful thing I’d done. With the officer’s voice still ringing in my ears, I’d picked up the roses – the crystal vase of glowing red flowers, my husband’s nine-year anniversary present to me – lifting them to sit on the living-room mantelpiece. Perhaps I’d been in shock, still hardly thinking straight, but the one idea in my head was to place them there as a glowing symbol to welcome her home because this was everything I had ever wanted, everything I had dreamed of and hoped for, ever since she was eight, ever since she went missing, through seven long and painful years. Now my heart was bursting and all I wanted was a beautiful sight for her, all I’d wanted was for it to be perfect. Instead the vase had snagged on the lip, and one moment I’d had the precious flowers in my hands and the next there’d been a crash, an explosion of glass and rose stems strewn all over the hearth.
Now the pieces were in the bin and the bruised roses in the sink, but all that mattered was that Robert was coming forward to hug me, kneeling down on the floor and taking me in his arms, an outpouring of happiness and relief that she was found.
The twins pushed in beside us, all anxious, curious blue eyes. ‘But what are you doing?’ Laurie said. Gently Robert released me. Now he could take in the papers scattered at my knees. The phone call had come when I was alone, so out of the blue, so completely unexpected, a voice I didn’t recognize, a local officer I didn’t know telling me this information that was so impossible, unbelievable, that I’d had to ask him again and again to repeat it, with that single, impossible fact.
Dead? She isn’t dead?
No, Mrs White. No…
Kneeling in her room I must have looked a mess – flushed and unravelled, my hands grimy with dust from the papers – but I was so sure of what I wanted. I scraped my hair behind my ears. We hadn’t been in this room for months but all the evidence was in here, a paper trail leading all the way back. ‘Can you help me?’ I said. ‘I can’t have her room looking like this. Please, Robert, not this way.’ I wanted a home, a sanctuary, not a display of everything that had gone wrong. I couldn’t let it be like that now.
Sam and Laurie knelt on the floor beside me too. ‘But are you sure she won’t want these?’ Sam was saying. I leaned forward to bring blood to my head; there was so much crammed into this small space. For so long we hadn’t known what to do with her room. Change it, leave it, even my sister Lillian hadn’t been able to say, my sister who always had the answers to everything. To begin with, we’d tried to leave everything untouched, ready for her to come back to, but it was so hard to see her room like that, the toys, books, clothes a constant reminder that she wasn’t here. I think it started with the photos the police needed for the posters and news bulletins, the school portraits we’d laid out on her bed. Small changes at first, small additions. Over time though, year after year, we’d hoarded so much in here that by now it resembled an incident room: the cork board above her desk cluttered with the small, flat cards the officers had kept handing over at the end of every meeting saying, If there’s anything you need, anything else you think of, just call; the walls covered with newspaper articles about her own and other abductions that might somehow shed light; then the computer composites of how she might have looked, at nine, ten, twelve, my beautiful daughter; the boxes and boxes of posters Robert used to print up every year, all symbols of our search for her.
But I didn’t want her to be faced with all this, so much pain and desperation and loss. It was a home she needed, her family to welcome her: normality, happiness, the hurt over now.
I steadied myself with a palm against the floor and looked up at Robert, my husband, standing upright again now. ‘Please can you bring her things down from the loft?’ I asked him. All the things we’d put away up there. ‘I want her to see, I want her to have them.’ Without saying anything, without questioning me or hesitating, my husband went to unclip the loft ladder. The thought of his goodness almost closed up my throat and I had to swallow my mouth dry to make it pass. This was all we’d ever dreamed of and Robert had stood by me all the years in between, so why was I terrified that it might all change now?
Laurie bumped my arm with a stack of papers he’d collected up and I added them to the almost-full box beside me. Did they really understand what we were doing here? How much had Robert been able to explain? Their sister who they had barely known was coming home – had they really grasped that fact? To them she’d been little more than a name, photographs, memories, but now their missing sister would be here, in the flesh. I looked down at them, my sons, the children Robert and I had made together, creations that had cemented our relationship. How good our family had been like that, and now we’d be five again, our whole family rejoined. And her room, my daughter’s room, would be filled with her presence.
My phone shrieked; my shoulders jerked. I dragged my mobile from my pocket, Lillian’s name flashing on the screen. Lillian, my sister, whom I’d called even before I’d rung Robert. The person I always called in my life, six years older, my sister who knew me, who helped me, who always, always knew what to do. I had left her a message – a garbled, frantic, delirious message – and now she was calling me back. My hands slipped on the screen as I swiped to answer. Above me, I could hear the loft floorboards creaking.
‘Lillian?’
‘Annie.’
‘The police, down in London. They’ve found her.’
‘I know, I heard. I got your message. But Annie, are they sure?’
‘It’s her, Lillian. They said she’d been… that she’d been—’ But I broke off. There was so much that it threatened to overwhelm me; I had to focus on what mattered, all that counted: she was coming home. Right now she was still with police in London but home – Lincolnshire – was no more than three hours’ drive away.
‘We’re going to come over,’ I told Lillian. ‘In just a few hours, is that still all right? If we come over and leave the twins with you?’
‘Of course, Annie. We can make whatever arrangements you’d like.’
There were so many fears that were crowding my brain, but she made it all sound so simple and it should be simple; why couldn’t it be? We would make this perfect, we would make everything right. As I fumbled the phone to hang up, already Robert was coming back down from the loft.
‘Do you want these?’ he was saying as he appeared in the doorway. His arms were heaped with clothes – a pile of tiny skirts and dresses. We had kept them, but hidden them away: a missing child’s clothes. But she wasn’t missing any more.
‘Yes, yes, put them in the drawers.’ I stood to open the dresser for him, wrenching the tendon of my knee.
‘All right, Anne. Steady.’
But I had to be ready. ‘What do you know? What did he tell you?’ I had asked the detective to call my husband too; I had needed Robert to know everything I did – I couldn’t trust myself to relay the facts to him myself.
‘As much as he could. Everything they know.’
‘So did he say,’ I couldn’t seem to stop the shaking in my legs, ‘about how she just walked into the London police station, and about the house, and the little girl Tonia, and that she didn’t – that Abigail never…’
I caught myself, stemming my words, glancing down at the twins, busy on the floor picking Blu Tack off newspaper clippings, so small and innocent in the face of this news. Robert laid the pile of clothes in my arms and I pushed them into the empty drawer. There was no way she would fit them now, but I didn’t know what else to do with them, and all I wanted was to get this right. And it would be all right. Robert was here, beside me, helping me. I made myself slow, I made myself breathe, taking in Robert’s scent, the woody, musky deep smell of him, this man I loved and who loved me, who had brought such goodness into my life. We were a family, we had survived these seven years: me, my husband and our beautiful twins. But even as I held her clothes, knowing in a matter of hours she’d be here with us too – real, alive, home – I couldn’t stop other words, other images coming. ‘But the man, Robert—’
‘I know.’
‘Robert,’ my breath snagged in my throat, ‘they don’t know where he is, he’s still out there, somewhere, he could be anywhere—’
The drawer stuck on its runner and gave a shriek as I tried to push it closed. Robert caught my hand, his strong grasp steadying mine.
‘Anne.’ He turned me towards him so that I was looking directly into those warm, straightforward, honest eyes. I forced myself to hold his gaze and for the millionth time I wanted to tell him. He believed in me, he always had.
‘Anne,’ he said. ‘I understand, I’m overwhelmed too, but they’ve found her, she’s safe. Whatever has happened to her, you and me, we’re in this together, and all of us are going to be just fine.’
I wanted to fall, to sink into his words and let them embrace me, hold me, make everything okay.
But he could never have said that, if he knew about the lie.
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Philippa East, Safe and Sound
