PHILIPPA EAST grew up in Scotland and originally studied Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. After graduating, she moved to London to train as a Clinical Psychologist and worked in NHS mental health services for over ten years.

Philippa now lives in the Lincolnshire countryside with her husband and cat. Alongside her writing, she continues to work as a psychologist and therapist. Philippa’s prize-winning short stories have been published in various literary journals. Little White Lies and was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2020.

Little White Lies

Philippa East

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Philippa East 2020

Philippa East asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008344023

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For Dan

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.

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Extract of Safe and Sound

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

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.

Chapter 2

Monday 27th May:

Day 1

JESS

I heard their car outside, the growl of the engine turning over in our road. ‘They’re here!’ I said. We’d been sitting, waiting, bolt upright for what felt like hours.

I didn’t wait for my aunt to ring the doorbell. I couldn’t wait indoors any more, I had to go out, never mind the gloom and the drizzle coming down. A grey, rainy May half term. I hopped in the hallway tugging on my trainers and got outside just as Uncle Robert was pulling up next to the kerb. Mum and Dad were right behind me.

My Auntie Anne and the twins got out first, Sam and Laurie, my seven-year-old cousins. Her half-brothers, only babies when she’d gone missing. It hit me right then – they were almost the age that Abigail was then. She had been eight and I had been eight, but that was seven years ago now. Now I and my cousin would both be fifteen.

The boys stood clutching their backpacks like parachutes, their hair getting wet in the rain. ‘Thank you,’ Auntie Anne said to Mum – her sister – pushing them towards her. ‘They said we couldn’t all go at once. Even family.’

Now Uncle Robert got out of the driver’s side, levering his square frame up. He wasn’t Abigail’s real father, only her stepdad, but I knew he loved her the same as any of us.

‘Of course,’ said Mum, reaching out an arm to the twins. ‘They can stay here as long as you need. Fraser and I will do everything we can.’

‘They thought it would be too much,’ my aunt went on. ‘They said she was agitated and—’ She broke off, glancing down at the pale faces of the twins. My uncle stood with the engine turning over and the rain falling on his wide shoulders. He gave a reassuring smile. ‘She was just confused,’ he said. ‘They meant at first. When they had to explain everything to her.’

The car was lit up inside, shedding its glow onto the ring of our faces. Agitated, confused – I couldn’t understand what my aunt and uncle meant. I wrapped my arms around myself and jigged on the pavement. I only had a T-shirt on and it was unseasonably cold. ‘What about me?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t I come with you?’

‘I’ll come back here to collect the boys,’ Uncle Robert was saying. He hadn’t heard me over the engine. ‘Once Anne and I have driven back home with Abigail.’

My cousin. Back home.

‘They’re driving her up from London now and opening a victim suite specially. ETA is ten-thirty p.m.’ It didn’t answer my question though.

‘What about me?’ I said again. I hugged myself. I imagined hugging her. ‘She’ll want to see me.’ I was remembering when we were six and Abigail broke her arm. A slip on a wet climbing frame, wood chips hard as tarmac from that height. Uncle Robert scooping her up, zooming her to the A&E in Lincoln, and she came home with a bright pink cast on. Then for the whole two months it took for her arm to heal, my arm ached from elbow to wrist. It had always been like that between us. Thinking what each other thought. Feeling what the other felt.

My cousin Laurie was rummaging for something in his backpack. Mum stepped forward. ‘You have to wait, Jess. One thing at a time.’

‘When, then?’ I looked again at my uncle, his stocky frame, his big, shaved head. In the shadows, his expression was all mixed up. I chafed my bare arms where they prickled with a damp chill.

Dad checked his watch. ‘You’re going straight there?’ he said, keen as always to know every detail. ‘To this place – this victim suite?’ It was barely a quarter past nine.

‘We have to, Fraser,’ said Auntie Anne. ‘If they brought her and we weren’t there!’ Another car came growling up the street. ‘There was a man,’ she continued. ‘A man had her all this time.’

For a moment the approaching headlights blinded me. I had to cover my eyes from the glare. A man? But they’d got her away from him now. They were driving her home, she was perfectly safe now.

‘What else do you know?’ said Dad. ‘What else did they tell you?’ Even with the twins there, it was all coming out.

Auntie Anne turned back to the car, digging in the footwell of the passenger seat. ‘Only to bring something,’ she said. ‘Something she might know, that we could talk about. Something she would remember.’

She held out a slim packet, the kind you rarely saw these days. Inside, a handful of photographs.

‘Daddy, my book!’ Laurie was still rummaging in his bag, but nobody seemed to be paying attention.

As my aunt lifted the flap, the glossy prints almost slipped from her grasp. ‘We chose the best ones,’ she said. ‘The happiest ones.’

‘Daddy!’ Laurie’s small voice was shrill. He was getting upset that no one was listening. ‘I haven’t got it.’

My aunt held the pictures out to show us, but it was too dark to see properly and the streetlights made everything look orange.

‘This too.’ My aunt drew something else from the car, something small and soft and blue. My heart did a tuck jump. Of course. I recognized it at once – Abigail’s flopsy. With it, another swarm of memories came: us running races neck and neck, every grazed knee she ever had. Running, playing, sleeping like reflections of each other. Dad was always amazed at how vivid my memories were and I’d tell him, because there was nothing that came after, because for me there’s been nothing between then and now.

‘We kept him,’ my aunt said. But of course, I thought. What else would you have done?

‘Daddy,’ said Laurie, ‘the one you were reading me—’ We were all so preoccupied and he was so little, unable to understand the enormity of this.

The little blue stuffed rabbit looked so small in my aunt’s hands, smaller than I remembered as I reached out to touch it. Auntie Anne wrapped her hands around mine, pressing the soft toy between us. ‘Jess – do you have something, anything else we could take with us? I think the more we can take, the better.’

I stared at her. Better for what? We were all here, Abigail’s family, ready and waiting. Why would she need any more than that?

‘Daddy! I’ve forgotten our book!’ Laurie’s words seemed to get swallowed up in the rain.

Now Uncle Robert came round the bonnet of the car. Dad met him with a kind hand on his shoulder. ‘Thanks, Fraser,’ my uncle said. Auntie Anne was still looking at me, her question hanging and the thrum of the car engine was going on and on. ‘Jess,’ she said again, ‘can’t you think of anything?’

The fur of the rabbit suddenly made me feel shivery, like someone was running a finger up the back of my neck. Mum was standing, watching us all.

And then Laurie’s hand slipped on the strap of his backpack and all the contents went tumbling to the pavement.

‘Laurie,’ moaned Sam, ‘look what you’ve done!’

Mum reached out, too late to catch the clothes as they fell. The pavement was wet, everything was getting soaked. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dad, ‘it’s fine, it’s fine.’ Both my cousins looked so desperate. But Uncle Robert smiled, a hero’s smile, and crouched to scoop up the pyjamas, the toothbrush, the little pair of socks. ‘It’s all right, Laurie, we can read it tomorrow.’ Mum helped him slide it all back into the bag. He lifted Laurie off the ground, then Sam too in his strong arms. ‘It’s all right. Everything’s all right. Be good, boys, and I promise we’ll see you very soon.’

My aunt was still looking at me. I still had the flopsy in my hand.

‘Anne, love,’ said my uncle, ‘we have to go.’

She nodded but she still didn’t move. Mum reached out to the twins – ‘Come on, come inside’ – and now Uncle Robert was re-opening the car door. Dad touched my elbow. ‘All right, Jess. Come inside.’

I pressed the flopsy back into my aunt’s hands. ‘You don’t need any more things,’ I told her. ‘You’ll be there. She’ll have you.’

It should have been enough. She should have known it was enough. Instead my aunt looked past me, her eyes searching out Mum’s face in the dark. ‘But Lillian, what do I say to her? What on earth am I supposed to say?’

Chapter 3

Monday 27th May:

Day 1

ANNE

In a puffy chair with a heart-shaped tea stain on the arm, my hands shaking, I tried to study the printed pages the detective had given us, one for me, one for Robert: Reunification. Remain calm and speak in a soothing voice. Remain calm, remain calm, but I kept thinking we should never have come so early because now we’d spent nearly an hour in this claustrophobic suite with a detective who put my whole being on edge, and for every minute on the clock that we sat here, I felt the past crawl one step closer and my anxiety rise yet another inch.

‘She’s already been interviewed and had a medical assessment,’ the detective was saying, ‘so you’ll be able to take her straight home.’ He was young and neat, had a long, oval face: DS McCarthy, Lincolnshire Police, brand new to the case and assigned at the request of the team down in London. It was completely irrational of me not to like him; there was nothing wrong with the way he looked, with how he spoke or anything he said, and all the officers before had been so kind and understanding, going to the ends of the earth to help us, so why should it be any different with him? And yet every time his grey eyes gazed at me without flickering, all I could think was, you don’t trust what anyone before might have said.

‘Will that be all right?’ The grey eyes came to rest on me. ‘We’ve assumed you’re ready for that?’

I forced myself to hold my gaze steady and not lose my courage. I’d done my best to make the house look perfect, prepared her room and put framed pictures of her everywhere, but now I thought, what does it matter how neat the couch cushions are or how her room looks and whether or not I’ve hoovered the stairs? If a bomb is about to go off, what good will any of that do?

‘Yes,’ said Robert. The clock on the wall read twenty past ten. ‘But the medical assessment – do you know if she’s all right?’

The detective reordered the notes in his lap, as though all the answers about Abigail were in there. I pressed my wrists against the rough chair arms. I didn’t want him to talk about my daughter. I wanted to tell him myself: she’s mine and she’s perfect, and I’ve loved her from even before she was born and I’ve loved her exactly like that ever since.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Overall, physically, she’s okay.’

Physically. But what about all the other ways to be hurt? The typed words on my sheet ran on: Follow the child’s lead. Don’t assume s/he wishes to be touched straight away. The page detailed nothing about what a child might say, what accusations they might blurt out.

I made myself look back at the detective. ‘But what about the man? Where is he?’ It sounded as though I was accusing him, but it was only because his grey eyes kept fixing on me, or on Robert, as though he was peering into every corner of our lives. I thought again, you don’t know how I feel about my daughter and you can’t judge the mistakes I’ve made. I didn’t say it though, I just squeezed the flopsy in my lap.

Robert echoed me. ‘Do you know where he is?’

The clock on the wall ticked: twenty-five past ten. DS McCarthy shook his head. ‘We’re looking, but we haven’t found him yet.’ A car crunched on the wet gravel outside. ‘Now,’ said the detective, ‘they’re here.’

When the door of the suite opened, we all stood up. The photographs went sliding from my lap and I didn’t even try to pick them up. I was still holding her flopsy though – I had that at least. I drew on all my strength to stand there and just keep holding it out to her so she would know it was us and that we loved her – to stand there and not to burst into tears. There were so many phrases Robert and I had rehearsed, but overrunning all of these was the avalanche of words I was suddenly desperate to say, words I’d been living with all these years, wondering if I’d ever have the opportunity to say them. Finally, here and now, was my chance – before she could possibly say anything herself, what if I could put right what had happened, make it okay, and if I could do that, then nothing else would matter but that she was home now, rescued and safe and everything else would be forgiven.

They came together down the long aisle of the room. The police officer escorting her was pretty and graceful and had such a kindly face, and then next to her: my daughter. Robert reached for my hand, and I knew he was also shocked at the sight of her because, my God, she looked so different. All these years I’d pictured her the way I’d remembered: light and lithe as a ballerina, her golden skin, her rosy mouth, her plaited hair the loveliest blonde. Happy, shining, brimming with love – that was the version of her I remembered. Instead now her hair was dull and ragged and there was a pudgy thickness to her shoulders and thighs. Her face was so pale that all her freckles had gone – our family trademark completely disappeared. Now it was such a different Abigail I saw, like a side of her that I had pushed away or forgotten, or like a different person entirely.

Yet all of those physical changes I could have accepted, overlooked and not minded; it was what happened next that threw everything off, tearing up my script and all my good, brave intentions. The escorting officer didn’t even touch her – she would have known better than that – the kind hand was only there to usher her forwards, but Abigail wrenched her arm from that kindness with a movement so brutal that even Robert flinched.

And with it, every word in my throat dried up.

They stopped in front of us. ‘It’s all right,’ the female officer said, but then she seemed to fade into the background, along with all the others in the room – DS McCarthy and the blurred figure of some appropriate adult – and we were there alone, the three of us, a triangle of the most complicated love.

Abigail hitched the trousers she was wearing – dark purple jeans I had never imagined for her. I was so aware of Robert beside me and the fact that he wasn’t holding my hand any more.

When she opened her pale, chapped lips it felt as though my whole world stood still and I thought to myself: here is where it all falls apart. Here is where the tidal wave comes, the force I never knew how to deal with and that I never managed to outrun.

With her free hand, she reached out and took the flopsy, almost idly, from my hand.

‘So I’m going home with you now?’

The words were so innocuous, so devoid of emotion, so exactly the opposite of what I’d been expecting. It was as though a vacuum opened up in the room, sucking out everything I’d been bracing myself against and it left me frozen, ears ringing, completely lost as to what came next. It was only when DS McCarthy stepped forwards that I saw the aching mistake I had made:

That was the moment – the exact moment – when I should have hugged her.

She sat in the front seat of the car and we made sure the heater was on so she wouldn’t get cold. All the way home, my heart scrabbled like a rabbit trying to escape its hutch.

‘Are we going to the same house?’ Abigail strained against the seatbelt, craning to see every road and turn-off we passed. In the wing mirror I glimpsed fragments of her face: her mouth, the discolouration around all of her teeth, and I thought, what on earth has done that? Later I discovered it was the cigarettes he’d given her, the ones she’d grown addicted to.

Robert nodded. ‘The very same.’

She continued to crane, as though she couldn’t believe him, and I thought, does she still not understand she’s come home? At our front door, in the rain, I fumbled the lock and inside it felt as though we all tangled in the hallway, not enough space for us all. She put a white hand on the wall to steady herself, and stared up the stairs and through the doorways as though she feared something would leap out at her. I was so glad when we finally brought her into the clean living room, with the familiar coffee table and TV and a couch that we might sit her down on.

She stood in the middle of the room, her hands at her sides in tight little fists. ‘Where are Sam and Laurie?’ she asked. ‘The twins?’ So she remembered her brothers, even though they’d been so tiny when she last saw them, no more than babies. But she asked as though we were playing a trick on her, bringing her into this house without them.

‘Don’t worry,’ Robert said. ‘They’re with Auntie Lillian and Uncle Fraser.’ He smiled. ‘They’re seven now, did you know?’

She didn’t answer and I jumped to fill the silence, silting up the room with words: ‘Are you hungry? Do you want something to drink? Tea or juice or a biscuit?’ Anything to make this more normal, because that’s all I ever wanted for us, to have her home, to start again, to be the happy family we always should have been.

She sat down with a jerk on the couch and ran her hands over the soft leather as though it confirmed something to her: perhaps that this was really her home. ‘This furniture is the same.’ Her feet jutted out onto the rug and I could take in her shoes as well now: plain white trainers, like old-fashioned plimsolls. She was pushing her heels into the carpet. A few inches from her foot was a crushed rose petal I’d missed and the water stain still shadowed the hearth. Anything could still happen, hadn’t I seen that? My heart was beating so quickly it hurt.

Robert sat down carefully in the armchair nearby, as though trying not to startle a wild, skittish creature. His gentleness had always steadied her, but who knew if it would still be like that now? ‘Abigail? Is there anything at all we can get you?’

She sat there, her eyes seeking mine and her very presence demanded so much of me, her mother, a million words I should have been able to say; the little flopsy was slipping from her grasp but I felt freeze-framed, unable to move, unable to reach out and do anything to correct it. Then in a strange slow motion, Abigail slumped backwards into the cushions, her rough hair rubbing up against the leather. Her eyes were closing like a baby’s, her head tilting, her voice already muffled with sleep.

‘I don’t need anything,’ she said. ‘Thank you. I’m just very, very tired.’

We found her one of Robert’s old T-shirts and a clean pair of my leggings; we didn’t have anything else for her yet. She got changed in her bedroom, behind the closed door, then crawled straight into bed without even pausing to brush her teeth. When we knocked gently, only minutes later, she was already asleep. She was gone.

Shortly before midnight, Robert left to fetch the twins and I went into our chilly bathroom and counted long breaths to slow my skipping heartbeats. When I had a hold of myself, I wiped my eyes, blew my nose and went back into her room.

I had promised Robert I wouldn’t wake her and he needn’t have worried; she was in a deep sleep, her breathing slow and steady. The cave of her bedroom was musty from all the books and toys we’d brought down from the loft; the dust we’d disturbed was scratchy in my throat. I questioned suddenly if we’d done the right thing, putting her room back like this. I had always been like that, so different from Lillian: making choices and then never being sure; and if there was ever a time I trusted my own judgement, since Abigail went missing, I hadn’t seemed to be able to at all. In the soft light that followed me in from the landing, I moved aside the tangle of clothes she’d left on the low chair at the foot of the bed. I could make out the purple jeans, underwear, the plain blue acrylic jumper. Careful not to make a sound, I sat down.

In the quiet and dark, it felt so much easier. Asleep, she looked so gentle, so peaceful: the sweet, lovable Abigail I remembered. I’d been so afraid of what she might blurt out, but in the end there’d been nothing. Could I tell myself then that she’d simply forgotten? Should I make myself try and forget then too? I laid a hand on the bottom of the duvet, my fingertips finding the smooth buttons a hand-span from her feet. My daughter had found her way back to us, to a happy home, a happy family, and Lillian’s advice years ago made more sense now than ever: if she had forgotten, why confront her with it now, and if the three of us made sure to say nothing, couldn’t it be like it never even happened? Abigail stirred beneath the freshly washed sheets and on the pillow the little flopsy slipped sideways again, its long ears tilting over the edge of the bed. Abigail needed us, her family, to be strong for her – no doubts, no questions. Speaking about it could only risk ruining everything. Better to leave it then, bury it, unmentioned; better for everybody that way.

On the night-stand, Abigail’s little clock glowed as the minute hand stepped gently over the hour: one day over and a new one begun. Still without waking her, I settled the little toy back in beside her, smoothed the blankets and stood up.

Chapter 4

Wednesday 29th May:

Day 3

JESS

I had to wait two whole days before I was allowed to see her. Two whole days. I badgered Mum all round the house, but all she could say was, it’s complicated, like a bad status update. It maddened me the way Mum’s rules were so rigid, the way her opinions were always right. Because what could be simpler than Abigail and me? Ever since we were tiny it had been that way.

I roamed upstairs, downstairs, hardly knowing what to do with myself. I couldn’t even get hold of Lena – out of reach on a last-minute half-term holiday with her mum, a family package with her mum’s new partner too, some Mediterranean island where mobiles barely worked. Without her, without Abigail, I had to hold all my excitement like a fat balloon in my chest.

Then finally, that Wednesday, we were on our way, Mum and Dad in the front seats of the car, me folded into the back. Driving all the way through town, seeing places and shops I passed all the time: Costa, Oxfam, WHSmith, estate agent, hairdresser, a new bridal boutique. They were the same but everything was different.

On her lap, Mum was holding the card we’d bought. So formal. Like we’d been invited to a birthday party. Mum’s idea, but all three of us had had to go to choose it. I’d watched Dad thumb through all the ready-made messages: ‘Congratulations.’ ‘With Sympathy.’ ‘New Home.’ No one makes cards for an occasion like this. In the end Mum chose one labelled, Blank inside for your personal message. What were we supposed to write? I’d told Mum to just put: With love from us all – cousin Jess, Auntie Lillian and Uncle Fraser. Now Mum was running her fingers round the edges, giving the envelope a turn each time she reached a corner. The seams were sharp enough for paper cuts.

I closed my eyes. Behind my eyelids, my cousin rose up, the bright flick of her hair. So real, so close I could practically feel her. The memories came sweeping like a tide. Scraped knees, bug bites, skipping ropes, cartwheels. Her face, close up, like a copy of mine: same nose, same freckly forehead, same mouth, only the frame of her hair different between us, hers butter yellow and mine dark brown. Hand in hand and breath for breath, the pair of us at three, five, eight years old—

I opened my eyes. In the front seats, my parents were skirting an argument.

‘We should have left earlier. You knew there’d be traffic.’ That was Mum.

And Dad: ‘I know. But we’ll be there by five-thirty at the latest.’ We were past the church now and heading round the one-way system.

‘Yes, Fraser. But they said five. I saw you write it down.’

Dad’s hands tightened on the wheel. ‘Lillian,’ he said. ‘Not now.’

‘You know it might upset her. Arriving late.’

‘Listen-’ Dad switched on the windscreen wipers, smearing wet across the glass. ‘I don’t know anything except that we’re her family and they’ve asked us to come. I for one will be so damn happy to see her and there are bigger things to worry about than being a few minutes late.’

He pulled the handbrake as we stopped at the south-side traffic lights. Thank you, Dad, I wanted to say.

But even he had told me to prepare myself, his face all kindly and solemn when he’d knocked on my bedroom door last night. Dad was like that, always wanting to talk about things, always wanting stuff out in the open. I had to understand, he’d said, Abigail would look different, would be different now. Was I prepared for that? I couldn’t just go running up to her, jumping on her, hugging her. She would need time.

I’d nodded, pretending to agree. But he had never known Abigail like I did.

The lights were green now and we were moving again. But in the front, my parents had both gone quiet. Mum was looking away out of the passenger window. I couldn’t see her expression, only the angle of her head, the stiffness in her neck.

We took the turn-off onto Springfield Road and I craned forwards to look out of the front windscreen. Up ahead, my aunt and uncle’s little patch of front garden was surrounded by a huddle of men and women. I recognized the set-up at once. Journalists, their collars raised against the untimely spring rain. For weeks, months, they’d reported her missing. Now they would write the best headline of all, the perfect ending to our story. I wondered what Lena would make of all this. She’d refused to believe it would end this way. That argument we’d had when we were thirteen, when I’d yelled that her parents’ divorce was stupid and she’d flung back, Jess, don’t you get it? Real life isn’t happily ever after. In real life, my parents are getting divorced and your cousin is never coming back! It took me weeks to forgive her for that but what did it matter now? I’d been right.

The seatbelt was tight around my shoulder. The journalists looked as keen as bloodhounds. ‘Go round the back,’ I said to Dad. He nodded silently and heaved the wheel. As the car jounced over a speed bump, Mum put a hand to the dashboard to steady herself. She didn’t have to say anything – the gesture was enough. ‘Sorry,’ said Dad.

We parked on the narrow, pot-holed road behind. Here the street was empty, just a dog barking somewhere with a steady, grinding bark. We got out of the car. Through the misty air, I could see up to where the road became a dead-end, to where a scrubby path led off through lopsided railings. Off to the sleek tracks of the railway line, where the fast trains didn’t stop, just thundered through. I remembered how Abigail had always wanted to go up there. We weren’t allowed though, Auntie Anne had been adamant – a girl had once fallen from the bridge down there. Still, Abigail used to stand and stare until I’d grab her arm and yank her back, off up the road to the corner shop or playground.

The envelope in Mum’s hand was crumpled, creases running across the creamy paper. She handed the card to me and looked up at the house, the brown brick walls and white-framed windows gazing back down at us. She dug in her pockets like checking for loose change or bus tickets. ‘What are you looking for?’ said Dad.

‘I’m not – nothing.’ Mum took the card back.

Dad drew a hand down the bristles of his cheek, as if to smooth things out between them.

‘Let’s just go in,’ I said.

I pulled down the sleeves of my jumper and tucked my thumbs in the cuffs, a move that always annoyed Mum. But for once she said nothing, just hitched up the zipper on her coat and headed through the little wooden gate at the bottom of the Whites’ back garden. I followed behind and Dad brought up the rear, careful to drop down the latch of the gate after him as if there was something inside that might want to escape. On the slippery decking, Mum rapped on the whorled glass of the back door. We could hear sounds from inside and I could see wavering shapes. We waited.

‘Knock again,’ said Dad. ‘Maybe they didn’t hear us.’

‘Annie knows we’re coming to the back. I texted her from the car.’

‘Well, just knock again.’ He was reaching past her to bang once more when the door swung open and there was Auntie Anne.

I’d expected her to look filled up with happiness. Instead there were muddy circles under her eyes and a restless flush on her cheeks, like someone with a brand new baby – hair a bit rumpled, skin a bit pale. I tried to look past her, to catch a glimpse of Abigail.

My aunt ushered us in through the doorway and into the fug of the kitchen. Dad stepped on the back of my heel and mumbled another apology, and I was pressed up against the scratchy wool of Mum’s coat. We stood crammed in with them between the blue kitchen units and shiny wall tiles. Mum held out the card to no one in particular until Uncle Robert reached out and took it. The twins stared at me, wide-eyed. In the background a kettle came to the boil, thrummed and thrashed then clicked itself off. There were fresh mugs laid out and a full jug of milk, but no one got up to pour the hot water.

I undid the Velcro fastening on my jacket, the sound a huge big scrape in the room. It was hot in here, way too hot. I pushed my fringe up off my face. Next to Auntie Anne, framed by the doorway to the hall, was a figure.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her. But still nobody moved.

They’d said she’d look different, but she didn’t to me. All right, so her skin was pale and she was heavier than me now but shorter. Her hair was an odd colour and she was wearing a weird combination of clothes. In bunched leggings and one of my uncle’s huge T-shirts, she was wrong-shaped, wrong-sized, coloured in all wrong, but all that was like a costume I could see right through. I pushed forwards past Mum, past the chairs and the table and the waiting kettle.

I came to a halt in front of her. I could hear the sighing of her breath as it drew in and out – in time, it seemed, with mine. I held her gaze and she held mine.

‘Welcome home, Abigail,’ I said.

Across the great chasm of time, it was like the years were winding up, rethreading themselves. There was the tiniest pause, then, ‘Hello, Jess,’ she replied.

I smiled and summoned the magic words from long ago, when we were best playmates. Words that worked just the same for our fifteen-year-old selves.

‘Come on then,’ I said. ‘Let’s go up to your room.’

The house smelled the same as it always had – a scent of pine from some cleaning product, and the smell of oil and sawdust from Uncle Robert’s overalls. Behind me, as we climbed the stairs, words floated, my aunt’s hushed voice: ‘… the house was empty and the police haven’t traced him…’ I let the words fall away behind us.

On the landing, we came to a halt. Sam and Laurie’s bunk beds showed through the open door to the left and next was my aunt and uncle’s bedroom. Opposite that, the bathroom, and at the end of the hallway a spare room, for guests. Abigail gestured to the door nearest on the right. ‘Here’s my room.’

She was right. It had always been hers. But I hadn’t expected the transformation.

She pushed the door wide and led me through. Pictures, teddies, board games, books. Skipping ropes, rosettes, the blue flopsy at the head of her bed. The articles, paperwork, search posters all gone, and all the belongings of eight-year-old Abigail laid out once again.

I stood in the doorway, on the threshold, as if by entering I’d break some spell. Then softly as I could, I stepped into the room and stood beside Abigail at her childhood dresser. On the polished wood a little glass frog squatted on a lily pad, its bulging eyes crossed and goofy.

‘Albert McCroak,’ she said. I made him take a few hops across the dresser and landed him gently beside her. As she slid a finger down the smooth curve of his back I noticed the tip was stained nicotine yellow, like our granddad’s used to be. ‘Ribbit,’ she said. I grinned.

She looked up at me, as if waiting for what I might do next. Above her bed was the volume we used to always read. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I pulled it down and sat on the bed, opening the book across our laps as she sat down next to me. I could smell the tang of her teenage sweat and I listed towards her as the mattress dipped. I knew she didn’t want to be hugged, not just yet, but I let our shoulders touch, let the clumped mess of her hair tickle my cheek. As we turned the pages in a hypnotic rhythm, whole worlds passed before us, stories we’d lived within, once upon a time. I’d never let myself forget them. I could feel the heat of her against my arm. ‘We used to read these to each other,’ I said.

She ran her hand over the pictures – beautiful watercolours I knew so well. ‘The Frog Prince,’ she said. ‘Hansel and Gretel.’

So she did remember. The relief was like little bubbles in my chest. I leaned across and helped her flip forward. ‘You always liked this one – with the donkey and the cat. The Bremen Town Musicians.’

‘Yes. With the robbers.’

I turned more pages, searching for other stories she’d know, other ones to make her smile. ‘Some of them were scary,’ I said, ‘but you were never scared.’

Abigail let the book slide from her lap and suddenly uncurled herself from the bed. I had to steady myself as the mattress shifted. What was it? It was like some word of mine had pinched her somewhere, snagged on something. She went to the window and folded back the curtains, peering out into the street, that narrow street we’d parked on. It was like she was still wondering when we’d arrive. Or waiting for someone else entirely.

The bedroom door creaked, and I jumped.

‘Girls?’

Mum, come to check up on us. On the nightstand, the clock read ten to six. We’d have to be leaving before long, I knew. Mum had said we shouldn’t stay too long. We didn’t want to stress Abigail or tire her out. Or ourselves. I could read in Mum’s eyes how she wanted to reassure me: Don’t worry, it will get easier, she’s still adjusting, try not to mind…

Don’t you get it? I wanted to say back. Nothing is different between us. I haven’t changed and neither has she. But Abigail wasn’t saying anything, just standing with her forehead pressed against the window. In that moment, I saw my cousin as Mum did – like a stranger, awkward, not knowing where to put herself, even though she was right here, home, in her own room.

Silently, I got up and put the book of fairy tales back on the shelf. I felt hollow. I couldn’t even find my voice to say goodbye, just swallowing empty mouthfuls as my cousin turned around, pressing the heels of her hands on the sill behind her. There’s no way Mum expected what Abigail said next, and she even caught me giddily off-guard. It was just the kind of announcement she used to make when she was eight:

‘Auntie Lillian, please, can Jess stay the night?’

We sat up in her room like little mice while downstairs the adults argued, trying to decide what to do. They hadn’t planned for this, there was no protocol. What if it was too much too soon – but then if Abigail herself had asked? Upstairs I rolled my eyes and my cousin giggled, with that funny hiccupping laugh I remembered so well.

Finally, Uncle Robert put up a camp bed in Abigail’s room and Auntie Anne made up the guest bed for Mum and Dad. She found us spare toothbrushes, and I could sleep in my T-shirt. As so we did, we stayed the night. All of us under one roof.

Sitting crossed-legged on the squeaking camp bed with her Mickey Mouse lamp on the floor between us, I didn’t need to think of where she’d been, or who with, or what had been done to her there. I only needed to see her here. When my aunt brought the twins up to say goodnight, they hovered in the doorway, twining themselves round the frame. They’d been so little when she disappeared, only nine months old, too little, I imagined, to remember anything. Me though, I remembered everything. We listened to the thumps and bumps of the adults making their ways to bed. When at last the house fell quiet, it was just the two of us alone.

‘All your stuff is here,’ I said, looking round. It was like I was only taking it in properly now. I knelt on the camp bed and ran my fingers over a row of frilly rosettes pinned to the wall. Now, close up, I could see the Blu Tack marks from where Anne and Robert had had their notes, their pictures.

This rosette was for second place in a dancing competition, aged seven. I laughed. ‘You hated ballet.’

She rubbed her cheek. ‘I know. But Mum liked me to go.’

I sat back down. ‘You loved reading, stories, that was your thing. And you were good at drawing. But mostly we made up our own games.’

She nodded, sliding down into the cocoon of her duvet. ‘I remember. Tell me again, Jess, how it was between us.’

So I did. I told her about the games we’d played, the ones we’d disappear into whenever she was upset. Dress-up, make-believe, once-upon-a-time. The thousand imaginary worlds we created, the nights we wouldn’t let each other fall asleep because we didn’t want to say goodbye. As I talked, other scraps of memory flickered: arguments, tantrums, Auntie Anne losing patience. Our games, though, had made everything all right.

‘It can be the same now,’ I told her. ‘Just like before.’ I’d been waiting to say that to her all this time. Now we were together and nothing could hurt us. Just like catching each other in the game of Do-you-trust-me? I didn’t say the rest, but I think she knew. I’ve only been waiting for you.

I snuggled down in the warmth of my sleeping bag. My eyes grew heavy, I was so warm, so happy. I could hear her breathing, steady and deep. After a while, I switched off the lamp, and we went on lying there in the soft dark. Maybe I dozed off in that darkness, just for a moment, because when I next looked over she was sitting up in bed, staring at the far wall like it was a TV screen or a stage. I could see her – just – in the light from the landing, filtering under the bedroom door. She didn’t look like Abigail in that moment. I didn’t quite feel like myself. Something had shifted in the space between us, something had entered the bubble I’d made.

Maybe that was what made me ask, made me shape the question. A sudden need to fill a blank, a hole. My skin tingling like when we’d tell ghost stories, torches under our chins, my words came out slow, dreamy, as I whispered:

‘Abigail – what was it like?’

At first she went on staring at the wall, not moving. I wondered if she hadn’t heard me or whether she was pretending. I suddenly wondered if she was even awake. But I could see her eyes glistening in the dark. She leaned towards me, turning her head.

‘It isn’t like anything,’ she said.

Chapter 5

Friday 31st May:

Day 5

ANNE

Abigail slept so much more soundly that night. I knew because I stayed up, haunting the landing, listening, checking long after Robert said, come to bed. I pictured them in there, our family’s two daughters, sleeping together as they used to as children. It had always been like that between them; calming each other like no one else could. There had been something unbreakable between them, something that hadn’t broken, even now. Listening to Jess’s whispers, finally my heartbeats slowed and I could slip away to my own room across the hall, leaving the door open, knowing she was only calling distance away.

By the morning, I had made a decision; I had woken with one bright thought in my head. Beside me, Robert was still asleep, his hefty, lion-like shape a mound under the covers. I thought of Jess, asleep in Abigail’s room, of Lillian and Fraser next door, all of us gathered together. Why not take the opportunity? What better chance to show what she meant to us? Careful not to wake my husband, I eased back the blanket and slipped out from the warmth, and at first I pulled a jumper on over my nightdress, then took both off and got properly dressed. No one else up, the house fizzing with cold, I went downstairs.

In the kitchen, I opened every cupboard and took out bowls, plates, side plates, knives and spoons. All the boxes of cereal we had I pulled out: Shreddies, Weetabix, Coco Pops, Frosties. We had five flavours of jam in the cupboard: strawberry, apricot, blackcurrant, raspberry and the one that had always been Abigail’s favourite: cherry. I set them all out so she could choose anything she wanted. I dug out a butter dish from the back of the cupboard – an old wedding present we never used – and unpeeled a hard block of butter from its wrapper. In the fridge I found orange juice, apple juice, milk; I laid out yoghurts with individual spoons. When the kettle boiled, I made a heavy pot of tea, and even folded eight napkins from a roll of kitchen towel.

I heard the footsteps on the stairs; soft light footsteps and I straightened up, a rush of love thrumming through me. ‘Mummy?’ I was so ready to welcome her, my beautiful daughter. When the kitchen door pushed open, I saw blond hair, thin shoulders, bare feet.

‘Mummy?’ The shape wavered and blurred. ‘What’s going on?’ Not Abigail. Sam.

All right then. I made myself smile. ‘Come on, sit here.’ I pulled out a chair. ‘Doesn’t it look lovely?’

Sam rubbed at his eyes, a tiny frown-crease lining his forehead. ‘Is this for Auntie Lillian?’

I shook my head. Why say that? Just because I’d made it all look so perfect? ‘No. It’s for Abigail. A welcome home breakfast.’

I pushed him forwards and settled him into the chair. The clock on the microwave clicked over. Sam leaned his elbows on the table, his feet scuffing at the bare kitchen floor. ‘I was sleeping, Mummy. You woke me up.’

Outside it was only just growing light – too early for any reporters to have gathered – but already I could hear birds singing: blackbirds and the croak of jackdaws. The kitchen felt chilly though; I couldn’t understand why the boiler hadn’t come on. Sam fiddled with the knife at the side of his plate, his thumb making a smudgy print on the blade.

‘Sam,’ I said. ‘Leave that.’ He set the knife back down. The clock on the microwave blinked again: 5:41, ridiculously early, I know. Sam shivered, his fingers sliding from the knife, from the table. ‘Mummy,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m going back to bed.’

It was three hours later when the whole family finally appeared – Lillian and Fraser, Robert and the boys, Abigail yawning in the dressing gown I’d lent her, and a sleepy Jess by her side, pulling her jumper sleeves down over her arms.

Abigail sat down to eat with the rest of us and heaped up her share of cereal and toast. From where I sat at the other end of the table, she seemed happy enough – busy with milk and butter and jam – and I set to my own breakfast with a grateful sense of relief. It was only when I came to clear the plates that I realized, my heart twisting. She had hardly eaten a thing.

She spent the rest of the day wrapped in my thick pink dressing gown, watching TV, dozing. She was tired after the Bradys’ visit. From the couch, she received all my yes-or-no questions – Do you want a drink, have you had enough sleep, do you remember your flopsy, can you work the remote? – with a steady expression. I knew I was hovering, crowding her, but it was as though seven years of everyday mothering was now desperate to come out. She replied, yes, yes, yes to each one of my questions, but always with a pause beforehand, a tense little pause.

It was the same when she replied yes to Robert’s suggestion.

He had been set on the idea all week, ever since the first headlines got out. I knew what it meant to him. He wanted the chance to say: here we are, the family who never gave up, the family who never stopped trying and thank you for bringing her back to us at last. It wasn’t as though I didn’t understand. Hadn’t my breakfast been about the same thing? When he came into our lives, he’d made a promise to protect her. Hadn’t that been a condition of our love? And hadn’t he spent these last seven years wracked with guilt at how this promise was broken? Now she was found and safe and at home. He had every right to be overjoyed at that.

The twins crowded round him as he broached the subject with Abigail, clambering next to him on the armchair in the living room, and I watched them all from the doorway.

Under the dressing gown, she was still wearing the T-shirt and leggings she’d slept in last night. They needed a wash but we hadn’t got anything else for her yet. My daughter, home, and we didn’t even have clothes.

Robert looped an arm around Laurie’s shoulders and he spoke so gently and calmly to Abigail, explaining, reassuring – we’d only need to be out a few minutes, let them take a few photos, and she wouldn’t even need to say anything, he would prepare a statement for us all, one even DS McCarthy would approve of. He could arrange it all with one quick call.

‘What about it, Abigail? What do you think?’

Hugging a cushion, she looked at him. The little tense hesitation, a breath through her nose, a glance up at me and then: yes. Surely it was better this way, said Robert. It would stop them hounding us, get them off our front step, and yet I woke up the next morning with a pain in my stomach.

That afternoon, I sat on our rumpled mattress turning up a pair of my smart black trousers while Robert shaved at the corner sink. His electric razor was humming and the sound of it usually comforted me, but right now it felt like a needle against my teeth.

The trousers had been so long on her when she tried them on, whole inches pooling at her feet no matter how high up she hitched the waist. I’d measured the amount they’d need taking up but now the needle in my hand kept slipping, the thread twisting and tangling, making a knot that refused to pull through.

‘Some of the reporters will be the ones from before,’ Robert was saying over the buzz of his shaver. ‘I’ll never forget how they tried to help.’

I remembered too: how he had gone on and on calling up the news stations – at home and in London – begging them to provide fresh coverage, fresh appeals, even when the soundbites of information shrank to crumbs and every single lead dried up. He had done everything. He had never given up.

‘I’m not sure.’ When he didn’t hear, I had to repeat myself. ‘I’m not sure.’

Now Robert paused his shaving, looking at me through the mirror, the razor hanging in the air. ‘But I thought you were all right with it. All we’re doing is sharing good news.’

I wiped the damp pads of my fingers on my knee, rethreaded the needle. Lillian had tried when we were younger to get me to copy her own perfect efforts: stitches in rows like soldiers, each one alike, but mine had never come out like that.

‘I am – I was, but don’t you think we should wait? Why do we need to go out there right now, when we’ve barely even just got her back?’

‘Anne, this is a good thing. All we’re telling them is how happy we are. All they want is to write their happy ending. That’s the only reason they’ve been standing out there. The sooner they’ve got that, the sooner I think they’ll let us alone.’

I tugged at the trousers, pushing the needle through again, shaking my head. Robert set the shaver down on the shelf. The buzzing vibrations whined worse than ever. ‘What is this, Anne? What is it you’re so worried about?’

But how could I explain when I hardly knew myself, just had this feeling, a cold stone in the pit of my stomach, making sweat bead on my palms. How could I explain that it all felt so fragile, as though the slightest misstep would break everything apart?

In my panic, I found myself saying, ‘Why do we have to be all on show? Why does it have to be shared with everyone? Just what is it that you’re trying to prove?’

Straight away as the words came out, like catching my fingers in the slam of a door, I knew it was absolutely the wrong thing to say. In the mirror, it was written all over Robert’s face.

‘Robert,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I pinched at the hems of the trousers, trying to press the stitches flat. ‘I didn’t mean that at all.’

He reached out and carefully turned off the shaver. The silence flowed in like a cool sluice of water. He came and sat along from me on the bed, in a patch of May sunlight. I reached out my hand, a gesture we’d done a hundred times over the years: our olive branch that had got us through the very worst of times. As always, he took my hand in his but this time, in his fingers, I felt the tension.

‘Anne, it’s not like that. I’m not trying to prove anything. But why are you acting like we’ve something to hide?’

When I held up the trousers, miraculously the hems stayed in place. I gathered them up and went to give them to Abigail. Robert was right, we had nothing to be afraid of. I had read his statement, it made everything clear; it would give the journalists exactly what they wanted and if Abigail hadn’t said anything before, why should she now? All right then – as soon as she was ready, we would go.

‘Abigail?’ Her door was ajar, her bedroom empty, and her bed was made with uncanny precision. It was as though she had vanished into thin air or climbed out of her window or run straight out the front door. ‘Robert,’ I called out, ‘where is she?’

‘I heard her go into the bathroom,’ he said from our doorway. By now he had his shirt on and was doing up the bottom button. ‘Just knock for her while I sort out the boys.’

Of course. After all, hadn’t we told her to get ready? At the bathroom door, I listened for her with the trousers bunched in my hands. She’d closed the door tightly and I couldn’t hear anything – no sound of taps running or a brushing of teeth. How long had she been in there? Five minutes, ten? A sickly thought rose up, like something with claws climbing up my throat. Wild thoughts, paranoid thoughts, but I couldn’t stop them stretching and thickening as I thought of the razor blades beside the bath, a dressing gown cord to loop from the shower rail and a whole box of painkillers in the cabinet over the sink.

I knew the lock on the door was loose and I lifted the handle up with a twist and shoved the door open – and there she was.

At first I couldn’t make out at all what she was doing. She jerked back from the mirror and out of some instinct thrust her hand behind her back. Still, I glimpsed what she was holding: something small, black, circular.

‘Abigail? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have barged in.’ I told myself to keep my voice steady.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have asked first.’

‘But what are you doing?’ Her forehead was pale where she hadn’t swept the colour yet and the front of my dressing gown was scuffed with powder. I told myself, you remember this from before, the way it can go, if she’s challenged, if you get angry.

She looked at her nose, her cheeks in the glass. ‘I’m just so white.’

The trousers slipped from my hand and I fumbled to catch them before they fell. I couldn’t escape it as my mind fitted the pieces together, showing me suddenly what this meant: so pale, so white because of how she had lived, in conditions no child should ever have to live in. The thought was sickening.

I shook my head. ‘Don’t apologize. You don’t need to apologize. Of course you can use my make-up if you want, I can even show you if you like, how to do it, how to get it right.’ It was the kind of thing a mother would do for a daughter, another of the thousands of things we’d missed out on. But somehow this time an edge had crept into my voice; I’d glimpsed that look I knew so well, the bottom lip pushing out, the stubborn flare of her nostrils and I’d felt the old, old feeling: that raw, painful discord between us. She set the compact down on the lip of the basin. It wobbled for a moment and then fell in, scraping down the enamel. I was ready for it; I knew what came next. I remembered her this way, this other Abigail; I remembered it and I braced myself.

Instead she turned away, a quarter turn back to the mirror, as though all the fight had gone out of her, or as though she’d had no fight at all to begin with. Seeing it drained my heart. Whatever I had expected, this was worse: this disconnect, this hollow gap. This closed-off, silent turning away.

I held up the trousers, right-sized now, filling up the space with my words. ‘I’ve taken these up now so they should fit, and come through to the bedroom when you’re done and I can quickly measure you for the rest.’

After a beat, she looked at me. ‘You don’t need to do that. I know my size.’

She must have seen the red climb my cheeks. She did. Of course she did. ‘Okay,’ I said when I could get my voice even. ‘Just give me a minute.’

She stooped to wash the make-up off.

Downstairs, Robert was pulling out shoes for the twins. He didn’t ask any questions as I went out of the back door and yanked open the bag by the wheelie bin. That’s what I’d done with them, on her very first night; she must have wondered. The clothes were inside, safely nestled in the clean plastic – the clothes he had bought for her. Of course the size was on the labels. I carried the whole bundle back upstairs with me, including the neat white bra. Up in her room, she took them from me and placed them carefully on the bed, right next to the trousers I’d laid out. I took hold of myself. They’re only clothes, I told myself, and she had to wear something. You needed the measurements and now you have them: size 14 and 36C.

Once she was dressed – in the black trousers and white bra and the blue acrylic jumper – we finally made our way up the road. As we walked, Abigail in between me and Robert, and the twins on either side, I thought to myself, we’re all right, we’re fine. We’re a family reunited, and it’s wonderful, a miracle that all five of us are here, walking down a sun-filled street together. Why should anyone think any different? Laurie slipped his small, hot hand into mine and I tugged him a little, to make him keep up.

We heard them before we even reached the hall, and when we rounded the corner, the grass was beetling with reporters, more of them than I think even Robert had expected. Beside me, Abigail fell back a step. The journalists had seen us now and were jostling for position. ‘On the steps? If you stand on the steps?’ The press officer, a petite woman with blonde hair in a bun, was coming towards us, all smiles. She reached for Abigail, curling one hand about her elbow, and this time Abigail let the woman handle her just fine.

She positioned Abigail on the top step and Robert climbed up to stand beside her. He was clearly waiting for me to get up there too.

‘And your boys?’ Against the sun, I could make out the faces of our neighbours and friends, this tight-knit community that had accepted me and Robert, a community that had supported us through the ordeal of all these years.

‘Mrs White? Anne?’ The press officer was gesturing to me: come along, stand here, your sons will be fine. I looked up at them: my husband and my daughter. They looked nothing alike, never had, but he’d been more of a father than her real dad ever was. From the start, their bond had been so loving, so strong, and there’d been a naturalness, such an ease in his relationship with her; I’d envied it and I’d loved him for it, the joy that he’d brought to both of our lives. Then all through this ordeal, we’d been a team together. He’d never allowed himself to be pushed to one side. Now he reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out his crisp sheet of paper. He smiled down at me and I felt myself smile back as I climbed up beside them. We were still a team here today and suddenly I wanted everyone to see it.

With a deep breath, Robert read out the statement and it was perfect. I put my arms around both twins and I managed to say my bit too. Abigail stood there all the while, bravely, and didn’t speak or add anything. The May sun was glinting in my eyes; I could hardly make out the reporters in front of us. It was only when the sun disappeared for a moment that I made out the cameras with their local and national and international logos, nothing at all between us and them, nothing hiding us at all. And suddenly I realized why I’d balked at bringing her here. Suddenly all the knotted ropes in my stomach made sense. All the eyes of the world were on us and like a bloated cloud passing over the sun, the thought bloomed across my mind:

He will see this.

Chapter 6

Friday 31st May:

Day 5

JESS

They aired the story on the evening news. They started with the other girl: Tonia Dillon, six years old, taken by a man with chin-length blond hair. The same man, they said. Then about the teenager who’d brought her to Southwark Police Station, who said the child had been brought to her house.

I gestured Dad to move up on the couch, make room for me between him and Mum. I’d already seen coverage all over Twitter, but Dad had wanted us to watch this together. For Abigail White’s family, just being together again is a joy, said the news anchor, and there they were – Auntie Anne, Uncle Robert and Abigail, up on the steps in front of some building, the twins cuddled in at my uncle’s side. Five days in and it still sometimes felt like a dream. I squeezed my arm, checking the tender, sharp spots. Making sure I wouldn’t wake up and find her gone again, like all those other times I’d dreamed she’d come back. But this news broadcast was true, the real deal.

You could catch the flash of cameras, sense the dozens of reporters. It was like in the beginning, when Uncle Robert had to keep calling the papers, making sure they covered her story. I knew the guilt he felt for not being there. Because he’d stayed at the hospital instead. He’d gone over that story with us a million times in the months after Abigail went missing, like he couldn’t stop punishing himself. But even despite that, it didn’t make sense to him – why there weren’t witnesses with all those hundreds of people right there? He wouldn’t let the media give up. They’d even staged a reconstruction. A Tube platform, overflowing with rain-soaked commuters, all these people pushing, pressing to get home. The train carriages bursting, a crush for anyone to get on or off. They showed us a woman with infant twins in a buggy, trying to keep her eight-year-old in tow. And then a tide of passengers pushing to get out of the carriages, and how, in a split second, Auntie Anne and Abigail got separated – bodies buffeted, hands wrenched apart. And they said how in her confusion, my cousin left the platform, made her way up and out of the station. And then there was that shot. The one where it wasn’t an actress, it wasn’t the reconstruction, it was the CCTV footage of my cousin herself, holding the hand-rail and standing on the right, just like you’re supposed to, people packed in all around her. On the footage, they used a bright spotlight to pick her out. You know, in case you missed her. In another two shots, she drifts through the barriers and up the steps to the exit, and then that was it.

Dad turned the volume up on the TV. ‘Where are they?’ I said. ‘What building is that?’

Mum lifted a hand to say, shush.

The camera pulled back and now I saw the lettering above them: the village hall. Uncle Robert read from a sheet of paper, his voice fuzzy on the TV speakers. Our daughter has been returned to us after an eternity. We are overjoyed. It is a miracle to have her back with us, safe and sound.

Mum rubbed at the skin between her forefinger and thumb, making Dad shift awkwardly.

‘What?’ I said. But Mum just shook her head.

To a clatter of camera shutters, Uncle Robert passed the paper across to Auntie Anne. We ask for privacy at this time. Abigail has been through a great ordeal. But she’s safe now and we will do everything to help her.

A last shot, zooming in on Abigail. And that was that.

‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘That’s all they have to say?’

Dad scraped a hand down the stubble of his chin. Mum’s lips were tight.

‘They really didn’t think it through, did they?’ she said, ignoring me.

‘I don’t see how it can do any harm.’

‘Really, Fraser? Drawing all that attention? Parading her like that, like a provocation? Putting the whole of themselves on show?’

Dad closed his mouth. Without another word, he switched the TV off.

I wished I could crawl under the cushions of the couch, into the warm, soft, silent space below. I knew, I always knew. I could read it, the atmosphere between them, clear as a weather forecast. But why, why did it have to be now when everything was supposed to be finally all right? Very carefully I stood up, the air as heavy as before a thunderstorm, and when I left the room, I made sure to close the door tight shut behind.

Upstairs in my room I pushed my ear buds hard into my ears. I didn’t want to hear them, I didn’t want to know. I felt like a kid again, fingers jammed in my ears, tears jamming up my eyes. They could go months, half a year and I’d think they were done, over it now, until the air would go tight again and just like that, I’d know. The pressure that would build to one of their rows. On my phone, I pressed the volume as high as it would go.

I almost missed it, I had my music on so loud – my phone screen flashing with Lena’s pixie face. My phone pinged, and pinged again. I paused my track and swiped for her texts.

Oh My God! I saw on the news!

Tom texted me too, the message right after said, and I felt the familiar ache in my chest, the distance between us nothing to do with miles. I went to lean against the cool of my bedroom window.

Another text: Jess, can you believe she’s back?

Outside, down the end of the garden, the wind caught the blue ropes of my old childhood swing, setting the plastic seat swaying. Nearby the grass was ragged from where Dad had been digging at something. Lena and I had been best friends since we were ten, but these last couple of years, ever since her parents divorced, we’d grown further and further apart. The two of us used to do everything together, but now there was Tom and other girls she hung out with, now there were parties she got invited to, without me. She’d got so busy with growing up, while all I’d done was try to keep things the same. Sometimes, like now, I felt the stab of it. The aching sense of how I’d fallen behind.

My fingers slow, I texted back.

Always knew she’d come home.

Because why else had I been waiting, stalling all this time, putting the whole of my life on hold?

Need all the deets! A pause. Then: Can’t call, Mum barely letting me text. Home Sunday but really late, but see you at school??? Then a row of smiley-face emojis.

She was reaching out, so happy for me, so friendly. There was so much I wanted to tell her. I typed a reply, deleted it, tried again. But nothing I wrote explained how I felt. I just didn’t know how to share Abigail with her.

Eventually, from the icons on my phone, I found a smiley face to send back.

School. I hadn’t even thought about it, but half term was almost over, May was almost over, and school would start on Monday, in three days’ time. In the morning, Saturday, when I came down to breakfast, Mum and Dad were both standing at the sink with their backs to me.

‘I know anyone can read a newspaper,’ Mum was saying, ‘I know anyone can follow the news. But seeing her, Fraser.’ Her tone was made even more bristly by the scourer she was rubbing over the draining board. ‘He never gave her up.’

They still were picking at the edges of their argument, like fanning a flame instead of blowing it out.

‘What are you saying? That he’ll try to… when the police are—’

‘The police have no idea where he is!’

‘Seen who?’ I interrupted. ‘Try what?’

They both turned around. I sat down heavily at the kitchen table.

‘Hey, Munchkin,’ said Dad. ‘Are you wanting some breakfast?’

I didn’t say anything, just waited for one of them to finally explain. Instead, Mum pressed the button to jump the bread out of the toaster, and handed it to me. Like everything in our world was so normal.

I set the plate down on the table: two pale slices. ‘When are we going to see her again?’

Dad sat down opposite and handed me the butter. Mum had already gone back to her scouring. ‘Jess,’ he said, ‘you have to be patient.’

I looked at him silently. But you saw how happy she was to see me, I wanted to say, and I’ve been patient for seven whole years.

‘You went to bed early last night,’ Mum cut in. She did that, had a way of hauling up a question, putting me on the back foot. I was used to it, but it still worked.

‘Yes,’ I said. The toast on my plate wasn’t properly done and the bread split when I tried to spread the butter. ‘Anyway,’ I pressed the knife down hard, ‘you two were busy.’

Dad frowned, a sad frown, and opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, the doorbell rang. Mum turned from the sink and my parents looked at each other, not moving, just letting whoever it was stand out there on the step. What was wrong with them?

‘I’ll get it,’ Mum said eventually.

She went down the hallway and I heard her open the door. I picked up my toast, dropping crumbs, and followed her out. A lady stood on our front step, an older neighbour I recognized from a couple of doors down. Mum ran errands for her sometimes, but I could never remember her name. She was beaming at Mum. ‘…like a miracle!’ she was saying.

‘Yes,’ Mum said. ‘On Monday night.’

The neighbour shook her white head like she still couldn’t believe it. ‘And you’ve seen her? How is she?’

‘We saw them on Wednesday.’ Mum glanced behind at me. She didn’t say anything about my crumbs.

‘Oh! How did that go?’

‘She asked for Jess to stay over. In fact, we all stayed.’

‘Well, isn’t that lovely!’

The neighbour’s beam reached me over Mum’s shoulder. She looked like she wanted to hug me. I swallowed a dry piece of bread and smiled back. But we haven’t made a single plan to visit again, I wanted to tell her. Don’t you think that’s unfair, don’t you think that’s stupid?

‘So – will she be coming here at all?’ the neighbour went on. ‘Will we be able to meet her too?’

Mum’s hand tightened on the edge of the door. I couldn’t tell if she realized she was doing it, but bit by bit she was edging it closed.

‘No. Not until—’

The neighbour’s face was so shiny, so expectant. I listened for Mum’s next words very carefully. Waiting for her to answer all my own questions too.

‘Not until we know it’s safe.’

Chapter 7

Saturday 1st June:

Day 6

ANNE

My sister was right – DS McCarthy too for that matter – it had been a bad idea to do the TV appearance. He might be desperate, wrote Lillian in her barrage of texts. Reckless and unpredictable. Who knew what he was capable of, this man who had abducted my daughter, what lengths he’d go to to get her back? The police were looking for him but he’d vanished and they couldn’t say where, so don’t go parading her around, my sister said. Until he’s found, we all need to be very, very careful.

Because the thing about it, the thing that was so hard to understand, was that Abigail’s discovery didn’t happen the way you see in films. She wasn’t ‘rescued’ and she didn’t escape. She’d simply walked into a South London police station. Holding six-year-old Tonia Dillon by the hand.

We’d seen the news about Tonia, of course we had; we followed every missing child case. It was two days before that Mrs Dillon had reported her child missing. ‘Kidnapped in plain daylight!’ she’d cried to the 999 operator. The girl had been playing in their back garden, even though it was drizzling. Mrs Dillon had needed her out of the way; she was dealing with Tonia’s father who’d come to demand his visiting rights. It was a neighbour who’d spotted the man from her window – early thirties, with longish, light-coloured hair. He’d chatted to Tonia and offered her something – sweets, probably, the police had said. Then he held out his hand and off they went. The neighbour watched them walk down to the end of the road and turn the corner. She waited, but they didn’t come back.

Over five minutes had slipped past by the time the neighbour went running next door. Did Mrs Dillon have a friend, a relative with pale blond hair? She’d just seen Tonia going off with a man. The three of them roamed the wet streets for an hour but by then there was no trace of her.

So we’d heard Tonia’s story. And that was where it all began for us.

Officers questioned the teenager who’d returned the lost child. She gave her name – said she was Abi – and her age, and an address a twenty-minute walk from the station. And how and where did you find Tonia? they asked.

The teenager said: the little girl was brought to the house where she lived. The officer read out the address she’d been given. Who else lives there? Presumably some adults? The teenager described a man: blue eyes, blond hair. When the officer asked, and… is this your father? Abigail, we were told, stayed quiet a long time. Then: No. I don’t think so.

Then she said she needed to get back. He won’t cope without me, she said. He won’t cope. Instead, the officer asked her to repeat her name, her full name please, this time. She did, eventually, reluctantly. It was only then that anyone realized who she was. That she was my daughter. That’s when they began to ask a lot more questions. But during that whole interview, they admitted, not once did Abigail ask to come home to us.

So now our house was like a bunker, as though we were waiting out a siege with Abigail at the centre of it all. Every move she made was like a pinch to my heart – if she yawned, if she coughed, if she changed TV channels – and at the same time within these stifling walls, I couldn’t seem to stay still. I was as afraid as anyone about the man they were hunting, and yet there was something else that so unnerved and troubled me, something happening within these four walls. I kept remembering the look on Abigail’s face when I’d stumbled across her in the bathroom, an avalanche of history I’d tried to keep at bay. Aged six, aged seven, I’d been so proud of her, seeing her behave herself so well, and it was so much of what Lillian approved of – the decent family Robert allowed me to create, but it hadn’t always been that way and now more than ever, I couldn’t stop thinking about the contrast: how Abigail had been and how I was, all that time in the years before.

The missed call I’d received last night and the voicemail sat like a lead weight on my phone, a few short phrases, threatening to unravel everything. Annie, you know I have a right. Annie, please, I just need to know how she is.

In the end, I had to get out. I tried not to think what it said about me that I needed to get away, that I had to leave her, my long-lost daughter, not even a week after she had come home. I was going out, and it was Robert who would stay, my husband who had always been so good with her. From the start, he’d brought out the best side of her: a child quick to laugh who came running for hugs, who let herself be kissed. And I became so much more patient with her, so much more competent, able finally to shower her with love.

When I told Robert what I needed, making up my reasons, he didn’t question me or chide; he just nodded his big head as though to say, I completely understand if you need to get some air.

‘An hour,’ I told him. ‘An hour and a half at most.’ I just needed time to decide what to do, time to decide how best to protect her.

I dug my anorak out from the forest of coats by the front door and pulled out my walking boots from the wardrobe upstairs. Downstairs, Abigail sat cross-legged in my dressing gown on the floor of the living room where the twins had set up a board game. I’d expected them to be shy, cautious around her, but it was quite the opposite: they were so keen to be with her, to sit next to her, to play with her, it became overwhelming for her at times. I had to remind them to give her space. By now we had settled into some semblance of a routine: she slept late, ate a little breakfast, and spent most of the afternoon hours with TV. Yet it all felt so temporary, as though we were all on hold. All still pretending, acting, or waiting for the real show to start. Her physical presence seemed to be everywhere in the house, but I could look at her, my daughter, my child, and feel that she hadn’t returned to us at all.

I crouched down beside them as though they were all tiny children, the fuzz of the rug bristling through my socks. On the floor, there were clue cards they weren’t supposed to peek at, but Abigail had spread them all out, not following the rules.

‘I have to go out for a little while,’ I said to her. I picked up the cards and set them correctly. ‘There’s a project I volunteer at and I can’t let them down. I can get you anything you need though, while I’m out?’ I would have fetched her anything in the world.

She looked up at me with a face brighter than I’d seen these last six days, her gaze this time steady and direct. Wide awake, no traces of the way she had been last night, when I’d heard her from the landing, and then again when I’d stood at the foot of her bed, mumbled sounds because she was fast asleep and sleep-talking, a stream of words I couldn’t decipher at all.

‘Any food you’d like? I could pick up pretty much anything at Asda.’ On the summit of her cheeks her teenage skin was dry and I wanted to place a cool hand on it, soothe away every tiny thing that hurt. I had touched her so little since she’d come home. ‘Abigail?’

‘Maybe I can come with you?’

My knees were numbed from crouching down and I couldn’t seem to move. Yes, yes, yes, I thought, you can come with me anywhere and it means so much to me that you asked, but really, how could I take her with me, the whole point was not to involve her in this, to keep everything simple, everything separate – happy home, happy family – and so all I could mumble was, ‘Not today, Abigail. Not to this.’

She nudged a blue disc from one empty square to another, the ragged curtain of her hair slipping down across her face.

I got to my feet with my legs burning, and left the house thinking, shit, shit, shit.

I’d never expected it to be like this. For years I’d imagined how it would be if she returned; that I would do nothing but cling to her, talk to her, sit with her for hours. I had pictured my daughter, her eyes, her smile, I had longed for the shining Abigail I remembered. I’d never thought it would feel like this: like being dragged back to the worst parts of myself.

All the way along the busy road to the canal, I fingered the phone tucked in my pocket. I’d never deleted his number though I told Lillian I had, and now it turned out he’d never deleted mine. I needed him to stay away, I had to find a way to keep the past in the past. If I opened a door I had worked so hard to jam shut, how much would I be risking then? From the road bridge I pushed my way through the scrubby grass down to the towpath; it was the first of June, officially the beginning of summer, but it had been a raw, cold spring and the banks were still a muddy tangle. As I headed downstream, ducks came scattering out of the reeds, setting up a wild quacking as they skittered away, a fan of ripples spreading out behind them. The slow water helped me to draw my breath. It felt as though I hadn’t breathed since Abigail came home.

Just keep walking, I told myself, until you know what to do. Call him, don’t call him, but you have to decide. The towpath was long enough; it ran all the way to Nottingham. I knew where I’d get to though, long before that. Soon enough I could make out the figures in bright yellow jackets, the work team dotting the canal banks in this project I’d signed up for last year: the renovation of the old lock. I’d thought it would help, and in some ways it had. We’d never spoken about Abigail here; the pain, the grief. This was a world apart from everything – from past, from present, from family, from loss. Here I was Annie, plain old Annie, and not the mother of the girl who… Sometimes, I’d just needed to escape. I’d never thought I would still need to escape now. Voices carried downwind on the breeze and I could hear the ring and chock of tools. I longed to be among them and get my hands dirty with a simple task, repetitive and focused. What had started out as an excuse – a lie to Robert about needing some air – perhaps would turn out to be true.

One of the volunteers straightened up as I got near them, a boyish figure, seventeen, eighteen, looking up at me from the uneven bottom of the lock. I undid my anorak; I hadn’t needed it – no rain. ‘How is it going?’ I called. The volunteer – Cory was his name – smiled up with his face so friendly and open, looking like the kind of person who only wanted to help, the sort who would never do harm to anyone. I pulled my hands out from my pockets and zipped my phone away.

‘We’re good,’ he called back and stooped to pull another staff of rotted wood from the sides of the lock. ‘Have you come to help?’

They would have heard, all of them here, they must have, but even now they were good as their word, not mentioning anything. I nodded, blinking wind-blown strands of hair from my eyes. ‘Can I? I just need to feel useful,’ I said. Half an hour, I told myself, and then I’ll decide and go home.

‘Sure.’ His smile was doing me the world of good. ‘All right, wait here.’

He climbed up nimbly and headed to an older man across the little stone bridge. I could smell the canal water, deep and earthy, and I took in big lungfuls. ‘Martin says you can help to take down the hut bricks.’ Cory pointed to a structure that must have once been a little house. For the lock keeper? I headed across to them.

‘We’re preserving the bricks,’ said Martin, handing me a hi-vis jacket. ‘They can be recycled. It’s an easy enough job though to pull them down and stack them.’ His smile made sun rays in the corners of his eyes. Here I could pretend there was nothing but sunshine.

The bricks of the little hut were loose, the mortar around them crumbling, and Martin was right, I could pull them off with a quick sharp tug. Under my anorak, I could soon feel the sweat building and when the sun came out from behind the scudding clouds, it heated me from the outside too. With each brick I pulled, I seemed to gain courage, a belief that maybe I was stronger than I’d thought. Perhaps after all I could do this – return his call with no harm done. My thoughts, always so fast and so scrambled, fell into a slow order and I hid my face behind my hair, wiping my cheeks and nose on my sleeves, hiding my tears in the currents of the wind as I lowered the walls brick by brick.

I could only imagine how he, her father, would be feeling, knowing she was found, knowing she’d come home. He would have so many questions, ones the police could hardly answer: what exactly she looked like, how exactly she was, those myriad details that meant so much. Didn’t he have a right to that at least? Surely it need be only one short conversation, telling him what he’d want to know but no more. And what if I didn’t call and he simply turned up – emotional, demanding, volatile, high – wouldn’t that be so much worse for Abigail? Wouldn’t that reignite the worst in us all?

The volunteers were breaking for lunch; I straightened up and brushed the mortar dust from my hands. ‘I can’t stay,’ I said, handing the yellow jacket back to Cory. ‘Abigail’s waiting for me at home.’

‘See you soon?’ Martin said and I nodded, and they both hugged me to say goodbye.

Even so, I’d stayed longer than I meant to and I walked back quickly, already feeling a thin chill as my sweat dried. A few minutes from home, in a place where the muddied path narrowed and was hidden from the main road by a copse of trees, I pulled my phone from my anorak pocket. My sister’s voice was buzzing in my ears: don’t call him, Annie, don’t let him back in, but I ignored it. I wanted to call him, I realized now, it felt like a chance to set everything right. I could ring him, just once, and never tell anyone. I clicked the phone open.

Three missed calls from Robert, one text:

Come back.

Sick with guilt, I made myself run the rest of the way home.

When I got there, Robert met me at the front door, a finger to his lips.

‘What is it? Is she all right?’

‘DS McCarthy called. They’re showing it.’

‘What?’

‘On the news, now. They’ve released his photograph to the press.’

My legs were like lead as I kicked off my boots and the sleeves of my anorak tangled as I twisted my arms free. In the living room, the BBC news was on the TV, but Robert had muted the sound. He pointed a finger to the ceiling: to the twins’ and Abigail’s bedrooms. ‘I think it’s best right now if she doesn’t see.’

On the screen, there were shots of a house, a street, a car, nothing I recognized.

Wanted in connection…

Police are tracing…

Appeal for information…

The inevitable picture of her flashed up, our eight-year-old daughter frozen in time, but now the reporter was sounding another name out, and now came the shot of a man with blond hair and pale eyes.

‘That’s him,’ said Robert. ‘John Henry Cassingham.’

Six syllables that sounded so painful in my husband’s mouth and I took each one, turning it over and over in my mind, trying to find any answer, any clue. But it was a stranger’s name, a complete and utter stranger, and when I looked at Robert he shook his head too.

Gently, he took my hand in his. ‘DS McCarthy is on his way.’

It had come to this: DS McCarthy in our house with his shiny shoes making divots in the living-room carpet.

Abigail sat opposite him, her big frame half sunken into the cushions of the couch; Robert sat beside her, a foot of space between them, and I stood in front of the mantelpiece, filling the gap where Robert’s roses should have been.

‘Do you remember the address,’ the detective was saying to her, pushing his fingertips into the leather of our chair, ‘that you gave us at the start?’

Abigail gazed across at the detective without blinking. ‘Fifteen Martin’s Road, in Southwark, in London.’

I swallowed. She reeled it off like a schoolchild reciting by rote, as though it was her home. This address, this place in South London, so little distance, I realized now, from where she’d gone missing; just a walk through the rain from London Bridge.

‘All right, well. On Monday afternoon we sent officers to the address.’ His voice was soft, like suede, designed for gentle handling. ‘The trouble is, there was no one at home.’

Abigail continued to gaze at him, childlike, open-faced. It had come to this: the detective here, struggling for leads, looking to my daughter to give him the answers and I thought, what on earth is this like for her? What sense is she making of any of this? Here we are, all gathered round her, piling her with questions as though she has the answers when she still hardly seems to understand that she’s home.

‘We know from a neighbour,’ DS McCarthy went on, ‘that Mr Cassingham came home mid-morning. And left again, with a duffel bag, about fifteen minutes later.’

‘What are you saying?’ I said. ‘What are you trying to ask my daughter?’

His grey eyes came to rest on me and I made myself hold my own gaze steady. He said his next words to Abigail very quietly. I thought I had misheard him.

‘Do you know anything about this, Abigail?’

I stayed right where I was. I was afraid if I moved, I’d slap him. The insinuation, the accusation in his tone as though somehow we were the ones under suspicion, as though my daughter were somehow responsible for this. ‘Why should she?’

My daughter’s fingers were picking at each other as if she couldn’t keep them still, and I wanted to reach over and make her stop.

‘Abigail?’ The detective’s voice was a soft murmur.

She slowly slid her gaze up to me, then away again to the window, to outside. She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh.’

‘There was a dark blue car,’ DS McCarthy pressed on, his fingers pushing right into the arm of our chair. ‘Like the one seen near Tonia Dillon’s house. We got his details from the registration plate. We contacted the school where you said he worked. He hasn’t been there since Monday morning.’

Abigail’s shoulders hunched up to her ears, a shrug. I knew the detective was only doing his job: gathering information, piecing together clues. It was the way Abigail seemed so uncaring, so complacent, as though she couldn’t see what the fuss was about, why the police were so desperate to find him; as if she didn’t think her abductor had done a single thing wrong. For a blind moment, something slipped in me again and I had the sudden urge to grab her and drag her up from the couch, march her upstairs, and shake the answers out of her. Explain yourself! Explain yourself!

The detective looked as though he was bracing himself for what he’d say next and automatically I braced myself too. He leaned forwards.

‘Abigail. Do you know where he is?’

Then the detective was gone and we were alone again. Robert put an arm around our daughter. I stood up. ‘I’m going to check on the twins.’

As I climbed the stairs, I could hear Abigail’s voice below me in the living room. ‘I told them all this. They went over and over it in London.’ Then Robert: ‘It’s all right. If you don’t know, you don’t know.’ Even now, his simplicity allowed him to steady her: no sharp corners, no edges to get in the way. I knew it was something I should be grateful for, something that could only be good for my daughter; it was just that it brought an ache to my heart because I only wished I could be the same way.

The boys were sitting in their bedroom propped against Laurie’s bunk; they’d been so good, keeping out of the way. On the carpet beside them, an abandoned iPad game blipped, a message flashing, Restart game? ‘What’s happening?’ said Sam. ‘What’s going on?’

But I was looking at the mess on their desk: a whole pile of papers with her face on each, dozens of pictures of her: Abigail White, missing, missing, missing. All those posters that Robert had kept printing, more than he could use, the extras that had sat in boxes in her room. ‘Why have you got these? What are you doing?’

Laurie jumped to his feet. I felt the sharpness of his elbows as he pushed up beside me, his voice shrill as he pressed his hands to the pages. ‘We rescued them! When we were clearing her bedroom. We wanted to keep them.’

The computer game suddenly stopped pinging. I breathed in hard. I mustn’t shout, I mustn’t be angry. ‘She’s home now,’ I said. ‘We don’t need any of this. You were there when we put all this away.’ I scooped the accusing posters up, catching the ones that fell to the floor. I crumpled them, the paper unyielding, and crammed them into the bin by the door. When I was done I let out my breath. ‘You can come downstairs,’ I said. ‘We’re finished.’

Slowly, Sam uncurled himself from the floor. As he headed past me, I caught at him and Laurie too, hugging them to me. ‘I love you,’ I said, but their faces were sullen and as soon as I let them, they wriggled away.

I listened to their feet bang down the stairs, with something cold and hollow in my chest. I sat down on Laurie’s bunk, the rockets and spaceships so innocent and familiar, symbols of everything I should be fighting to protect. I took out my phone, scrolling through my contacts to the old profile, stored simply as ‘P’. The choice was gone; I knew I couldn’t call him now. My hands heavy, I deleted his voicemail.

After a moment I deleted his phone number too.

Chapter 8

Sunday 2nd June:

Day 7

JESS

On Sunday I made Mum let me call them. When the phone rang it was Auntie Anne who picked up. ‘And Abigail?’ I asked. ‘Can I speak to Abigail? Can she come to the phone?’

But Abigail was sleeping, Auntie Anne said, even though it was the middle of the day. ‘The detective was here yesterday and it tired her out. I’m sorry, Jess.’

‘Well, and how is she?’ said Mum. ‘Any dissociation, any nightmares?’ She had been reading up on ‘trauma symptoms’.

‘No,’ said Auntie Anne. ‘Nothing like that.’ She paused. Something hung there, unsaid. ‘But I’ll get her to call you, shall I, Jess – when she wakes up?’

But Abigail must have slept right through because come eleven that evening she still hadn’t called, and then it was Monday and I had to go to school.

I woke with a thick head, a shivery fever, like coming down with ’flu. Mum held the back of her hand against my forehead, not even checking with the thermometer, and said I’d be fine. I got her to drive me to school at least. I couldn’t face the bus. She wrote me a note too, for my teachers. Explaining everything that had happened.

When she dropped me off at the top of the road, it felt like I’d been away for years, not a week. Maybe that’s what was making me feel so ill, the flip from one world straight into another. Lena was there though, waiting for me by the high green school gates. Standing by herself, and I was properly grateful for that. Around me, pupils off the bus shoved past, eyes on me, knowing about me, knowing what had happened. I didn’t listen. I didn’t look at any of them, only Lena. Her fair hair – that used to remind me so much of Abigail’s – looked peroxided, so sun-bleached from her holiday. I stopped in front of her.

‘It’s really happened then?’ she said.

She had a new piercing high up on her ear, the skin inflamed and red. Had she got that done abroad? I didn’t know. She did all kinds of stuff on her own now, without telling me. Things she knew I wouldn’t want to do. ‘Yes,’ I said. So you see I was right – said the voice in my head – to hope, to wait, to refuse to move on.

‘Wow. Okay. And, you know – how is she?’

Her words seemed unreal, like her disbelief was rubbing off on me. I tugged at the strap on my bag, tightening it. ‘She’s fine. She’s good.’

A shadow weighted Lena’s expression. ‘Really?’ She had this thing about her these days, a skepticism I kept pulling away from. ‘But all that stuff they said on the news…’ She reached out to take my arm and I flinched back.

She stared at me. ‘What?’

I looked back at my best friend, the heavy liner round her eyes. We used to be two kids together. So what if Lena’s parents had blazing rows, so what if my aunt and uncle still cried? Forget it, I’d say, let’s play hide-and-seek. Then at thirteen, her parents separated, got divorced. And since then, she was always seeing the cracks in things, like she couldn’t just let anything be pretty any more.

But I wouldn’t let her be like that about Abigail.

‘It’s nothing.’ I slid my arm behind my back. ‘And everything is great with Abigail. You’ll see.’

In the form room, I gave Mum’s note to Mr Chalmers. He read it, then asked if I wanted him to let the class know. I said yes. Probably most of them had seen on the news, and better someone told them than they whispered behind my back. I sat down next to Lena and let him announce it. And then everybody knew for sure. Mr Chalmers told them not to trouble me with questions, but then he got called away to another classroom and then there was no one to stop them talking. I sat there with Lena, so glad she was next to me, choosing me over the other girls she got along with so easily these days. Somehow I’d never known how to fit in in groups – without Lena, I didn’t have other friends.

Their questions came in a hungry swarm.

Seven whole years?

What’s she like? Does she talk?

Bet she’s got PTSD. Does she? Does she have that?

They wanted horror stories and gory details. I had nothing like that to give them, and what did I care if they were disappointed? I rubbed my arm absently where little patches still ached under the skin. She wasn’t their cousin, Abigail was mine, and I knew her better than anyone. I answered their questions with a shrug of my shoulder, repeating, she’s fine, she’s happy, she’s glad to be home. Like a record on repeat. The man, I said, they had dozens of police looking for him, and they’d find him, arrest him and it would be done. Their questions buzzed like wasps and I flicked them away.

But behind the buzz, something else was going on, a scuffle in the background, stifled giggles, a phone passed from hand to hand. Lena slipping out from our desk, sliding her way to the knot of girls in the corner. Snatching the mobile from them, glancing at the screen, her face drawing fierce. But just as our eyes met, the bell rang – time up – and she went to her class and I went to mine.

Just before the end of school, Lena texted me: Meet me after in the usual place?

For a while, I stared at my phone, the handset hidden under the desk, a glow filling up my chest. The usual place. Not far from the school and halfway between mine and Lena’s houses, there was a play park, a sorry affair with a dented slide, peeling climbing frame and creaky swings. Little kids didn’t go there much, but for years Lena and I had met there whenever we had something important to talk about, too big to bring up at home or at school. These last couple of years, we’d hardly gone there – so much felt different and only because she had changed. But the park, our park, was still there.

When the last bell rang, I headed straight out, ahead of the swarming crowds. I got there first. I swept the grit from a swing and sat down, the ridges of the rubber pressing through my skirt. The rest of the playground was empty, except for two small children playing in the concrete tunnels bored into the slope at the top of the park. A boy and a girl, about seven and four. Brother and sister, I guessed, but I couldn’t see their parents anywhere. It put me on edge a bit, them being out alone like that.

I rocked the swing, its rhythm a comfort. While I rocked, I thought about another play park. Until she was five, Abigail’s dad still had contact and she’d gone to see him every other Saturday. At his house, she’d sit in a room with drab brown curtains and watch repeats of some car programme, his favourite. Then he’d take her out to the park so he could have a cigarette, leave her to push herself on the swings. I’d asked her once: don’t you mind? She just shrugged, like she didn’t know any better. But after each visit there was always an argument, a tantrum, something. If not with her mum, then between Auntie Anne and him. It was my mum who’d put her foot down in the end. He lived abroad now, Spain or somewhere, and hadn’t had contact with our family for years.

The park gate clanged. Lena was coming through the railings with her pearly hair catching the sharp sunlight, the same sunlight that was making me squint. I dug my toes into the wood chip as she came up. ‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’

She sat down with a bump beside me. ‘Weird day, huh?’

I leaned back on my swing, hanging off the chains. ‘A bit.’

We didn’t say anything for a while. I was just glad she was here. I cocked the swing and lifted my feet, air rushing against my face as I swooped forwards. Times like this, we felt back to normal. Same as when we were ten, same as when we were twelve. Then Lena got hardened and it all started to change. Now, instead of swinging, she was fiddling with her bag, digging something from a zippered pocket. She pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. ‘I wanted to show you this.’ She unfolded it and held it out to me, making me bring my swing to a halt. ‘They were making stupid jokes about it, but I thought you’d want to see.’

I took the page from her and smoothed it on my lap. A printout of an old news article with a picture of a teenager, a boy, grainy and blurred, a woman next to him.

‘I printed it out in the library,’ she said. ‘Tom said the page might get taken down.’

‘Why? What is it?’

Lena twisted her swing, leaning over to point at the tight-printed text below. I scanned the lines. Something about a school football star, scoring three goals to win a local championship. Pictured here with his foster mother and soon to sit his GCSEs.

Football. Foster mum. ‘I don’t get it. Who is it?’

‘Don’t you recognize it?’

I looked again at the grainy photo, printed out in black-and-white. The boy looked fifteen, maybe sixteen. Handsome, I could tell – shiny fair hair, a wide mouth. He was looking right into the camera. His eyes, they sort of drew you in.

Lena stopped twisting, made her swing completely still. ‘You really don’t recognize him?’

‘No.’ And the shameful thing was, I didn’t.

She pointed at the caption. The print was tiny, blurred. ‘Look at the name.’

I did. And froze.

‘And look at the date,’ Lena carried on. ‘I worked it out. If he’s fifteen in that photo, say, he was only twenty-five when he kidnapped your cousin. Twenty-five. I mean, that’s young, right?’

I stared at the photo, his face clicking with that other image, shown daily, shown multiple times a day on the news. She was right. It was him, the name matched. Cassingham.

‘Right?’ Lena repeated. She pushed her swing back up against mine and I could almost feel her breath on my neck.

‘Why are you showing me this?’ My thumbs had turned white where I was pressing the page. ‘I don’t want to look.’

‘This is the man who took her. Don’t you care?’

‘Of course I care!’

Lena’s mouth went tight. ‘But you act like nothing happened! You were just the same at school. “She’s happy”, “she’s fine”. Have you any idea how weird you sounded?’

‘She is happy! She is fine!’ I crumpled the page and stuffed it in my bag. ‘I don’t have to look. This isn’t my job.’ I stood up. I just wanted to go.

She caught me by the sleeve of my blazer. Her nails, black-varnished, were cold against my wrist. ‘So, what is your job? Pretending nothing’s wrong?’

My swing clipped my knee. I hated it – the way Lena was talking like Abigail was some freak, some victim. She was my cousin and I needed her to be fine. I tried to pull away, sick of my friend’s words. As I did so, Lena’s grip dragged my sleeve up.

She stared. Everything in my chest went tight.

‘Jess. What is that?’

‘It’s nothing.’ I wrenched away, trying to pull my sleeve back down. ‘She was asleep. Having a bad dream.’ I pushed away the images that came flashing – Abigail’s eyes glistening in the dark, Abigail reaching for me from her bed.

Lena stared at the bruises. Five yellow fingerprints.

Then she said everything I didn’t want to hear, words that summed up the chasm between us. ‘Stop acting like nothing has happened to her. Stop pretending that nothing has changed. The stuff she’s been through – you can’t just ignore it. For your own sake, Jess, you need to grow up.’

I got home late and exhausted to find Mum and Dad in the study. There were papers, folders, ring binders everywhere. When she saw me, Mum got up off her knees, dusting invisible lint from her jeans. ‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘We’re having a clear-out. You’ll need to sort through your stuff too, so get changed and come and help.’

A clear-out? It was like Mum was trying to change everything too, when all I wanted was for it all to stay the same. Familiar, safe. I didn’t want anything else. I wanted everything to be how it once was. I wished I could have said that to Mum, I wished I could tell her what had happened with Lena. But I knew how she got when she was on a mission, and the ragged edges of my parents’ last argument still filled the house, just waiting for one of us to snag on.

In my room, I stripped off my rumpled uniform and hauled on a clean pair of jeans. In the study, I knelt on the floor as Mum pushed a tall cardboard box over to me. ‘Here. This is mostly your old primary school stuff. Have a look through and give me everything you want to throw away.’ The box was heavy, hard to pull towards me.

Dad was sitting at the desk, turning over pages in a tattered folder. Mum craned over his shoulder. ‘Those are just old water bills. We don’t need to keep them.’

‘Wait. There are other documents in here too.’ He went on turning the pages.

Mum stretched up to pull more stuff down from the shelves. She held out a fan of old dental journals. ‘Throw or keep?’

Dad barely glanced up. ‘Keep.’

‘Really?’

‘Keep.’

Mum dropped them into a pile beside him on the desk, the space already nearly full. I reached into the cardboard box and lifted out a few jotters.

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep her indoors the whole time,’ Mum said, like it was a natural follow-on.

I knew at once she was talking about Abigail. She and Dad had probably been talking about her all afternoon. I kept my eyes on the rough jotters. Between the scuffed covers, my old childish handwriting clambered across the pages, sliding up and down the ruled lines. Every other story was about my cousin. Ever since I could remember, I’d been frightened of things: starting school, new people, the smallest changes in routine. But in my worlds with Abigail, it was never like that.

Dad put his ring binder down on the desk. ‘It’s hard to know, Lillian. There’s still a lot for her to adjust to. Maybe it’s good to let her get used to just being in the house-’

‘Her house.’

‘-first. And they still need to find him.’

I kept my head down, kept turning over the smudgy pages. On the top half of the space, left blank for pictures, I’d crayoned in drawings of flowers, starry landscapes, rainbows. Magical worlds I could never quite capture in pencil and crayon.

Mum shook her head. ‘That could take weeks – months.’

‘Not that long, surely,’ said Dad.

But Mum had already changed her mind about Abigail. Her rules could shift and morph in a moment, keeping the rest of us running to catch up.

She lifted a stack of papers – they looked like old study notes, lines of her neat handwriting and streaks of highlighter pen. ‘I’m throwing these out. Pass me the bin bag.’

Dad held up a black plastic sack. Mum tipped them in, then held the sides open towards me. ‘Have you got stuff to put in here too?’

I looked at the spread of jotters on my lap. All my old stories. Worlds I’d never wanted to leave. ‘I don’t know yet. I haven’t really looked.’ I turned another page in the jotter. Me and Abigail in bright-coloured crayon. How old were we meant to be here – six, seven?

Mum lifted another armful of papers into the sack, tipping them away with hardly a glance. ‘She was cooped up, Fraser, for years and years. Not just cooped up. Trapped. Held hostage. Don’t you think she needs to know that it won’t be like that now? And another thing… I really think they need to redecorate her room. How is she supposed to move on in a time warp like that?’

Dad stood up from the desk. ‘Look, I don’t know what’s best. Maybe you need to let Anne and Robert decide. Maybe, for a change, we should leave it up to them.’

It felt like a whole set of windows had been suddenly slammed shut.

I stared down at the pile of jotters in my lap. Abigail stared back at me, her hair swirled in bright yellow, crayoned fingers entwined in mine. I needed her, I always had done. Ever since I could remember, I’d been frightened of this too. The intangible tensions I’d always felt in our house. But our happiness together had made everything safe.

Mum held the bin bag out to me, its mouth a gaping hole. ‘Well?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m keeping them all.’

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