Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © C.J. Cooke 2017

Cover design by Heike Schüssler © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover Photograph © Josephine Pugh / Arcangel Images

C.J. Cooke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of 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, down-loaded, 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.

Source ISBN: 9780008237530

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008237547

Version: 2020-03-12

Dedication

For Summer

Little lover of horses

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Girl on the Beach

17 March 2015

17 March 2015

17 March 2015

18 March 2015

18 March 2015

18 March 2015

19 March 2015

18 March 2015

20 March 2015

18 March 2015

11 April 1983

23 March 2015

23 March 2015

24 March 2015

24 March 2015

24 March 2015

25 March 2015

21 January 1986

28 March 2015

27 March 2015

29 March 2015

29 March 2015

Red Wool

14 November 1988

31 March 2015

31 March 2015

1 April 2015

24 April 1990

2 April 2015

2 April 2015

31 March 2015

2 April 2015

1 April 2015

2 April 2015

1 April 2015

2 April 2015

2 April 2015

2 April 2015

2 April 2015

2 April 2015

2 April 2015

The Light That Moves Inward and Outward

3 April 2015

3 May 2015

25 June 2015

Three Years Later, 17 October 2018

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

About the Publisher

The Girl on the Beach

17 March 2015
Komméno Island, 8.4 miles northwest of Crete

I’m woken by the sounds of feet shuffling by my ears and voices knitting together in panic.

Is she dead? What should we do? Joe! You know CPR, don’t you?

A weight presses down against my lips. The bitter smell of cigarettes rushes up to my nostrils. Hot breath inflates my cheeks. A push downward on my chest. Another. I jerk upright, vomiting what feels like gallons of disgusting salty liquid. Someone rubs my back and says, Take it easy, sweetie. That’s it.

I twist to one side and lower my forehead to the ground, coughing, choking. My hair is wet, my clothes are soaking and I’m shaking with cold. Someone helps me to my feet and pulls my right arm limply across a broad set of shoulders. A yellow splodge on the floor comes into focus: it’s a life jacket. Mine? The man holding me upright lowers me gently into a chair. I hear their voices as they observe me, instructing each other on how to care for me.

Is that blood in her hair?

Joe, have a look. Has the bleeding stopped?

It looks quite deep, but I think it’s stopped. I’ve got some antiseptic swabs upstairs.

My head starts to throb, a dull pain towards the right. A cup of coffee materialises on the table in front of me. The smell winds upwards and sharpens my vision, bringing the people in the room into view. There’s a man nearby, panting from effort. Another man with black square glasses. Two others, both women. One of them leans over me and says, You OK, hun? I nod, dumbly. She comes into focus. Kind eyes. Well, Joe, she says. Looks like you saved her life.

I don’t recognise any of these people. I don’t know where I am. Whitewashed stone walls and a pretty stone floor. A kitchen, I think. Copper pots and pans hang from ceiling hooks, an old-fashioned black range oven visible at my right. I feel as though all energy has been sucked out of me, but the woman who gave me coffee urges me to keep awake. We need to check you over, sweetie. There’s an American lilt in her voice. I don’t think I noticed that before. She says, You’ve been unconscious for a while.

The younger man with black glasses tells me he’s going to check out my head. He steps behind me and all of a sudden I feel something cold and stinging on my scalp. I gasp in pain. Someone squeezes my hand and tells me he’s cleaning the wound. He looks over a spot above my eyebrow and cleans it, too, though he tells me it’s only a scratch.

The man who hoisted me into the chair sits opposite. Bald, heavy-set. Mid to late forties. Cockney. He takes a cigarette from a packet, plops it into his mouth and lights it.

You come from the main island?

Main island? I say, my voice a croak.

From there to here on her own? the younger man says. There’s no way she’d have managed in that storm.

I think that’s the point, Joe, the bald guy says. She’s lucky her boat didn’t capsize before it hit the beach.

The woman who served me coffee brings a chair and sits at my right.

I’m Sariah, she says. Good to meet you. Then, to the others in the room, Well, she’s awake now. Why don’t we stop being rude and introduce ourselves?

The guy with glasses gives a wave.

Joe.

George, says the bald man. I’m the one who found you.

Silence. Joe turns to the thin woman at his right, expectant. She seems nervous. Hazel, she says, her voice no more than an exhalation.

You got a name? George asks me.

My mind is blank. I look over the faces of the others, fitting their faces to these names, and yet my own won’t come. I feel physically weak and battered, but I’m lucid and able to think clearly.

It’s OK, sweetie, Sariah is saying, rubbing my shoulders. You’ve had a rough time. Take it easy. It’ll come.

You holidaying on the main island? George asks again.

My head feels like someone is pounding it with a hammer. I’m sorry … what is the main island?

Crete, Sariah answers. Whereabouts were you staying?

You staying with family? A group of girlfriends? the guy with glasses asks. Hey, she might have come from one of the other islands. Antikythera?

I don’t think so, offers the tiny woman with red curly hair – Hazel – in a low voice. The currents between here and Antikythera are worse than travelling to Crete. And Antikythera is further.

I’m sorry, I say. Did someone say I’m in Crete?

See? George says.

No, no, I try to say, but Joe cuts me off.

She asked if she’s in Crete, Joe answers. This is Komméno, not Crete.

Well, we’ll need to let whoever you’ve left behind know that you’re still in one piece, George says. You got a number I can ring?

He pulls a small black phone from a pocket and extends an antenna from the top. Crete. Was I staying there?

I can’t remember, I say finally. Sorry, I don’t know.

The kind woman, Sariah, is holding my hand. We’ll call the police on Crete the second we get a signal on the satellite phone. Don’t worry, sweetie.

The big guy – George – is still watching me, his eyes narrowed. Where are you from, then?

I’m light-headed and nauseous, but I think I should know this. It’s ridiculous, but I can’t even call it to mind. Why can’t I remember it? I try to think of faces of my family, people I love – but there’s a complete blankness in whatever part of my brain holds that information.

George is leaning on one hand, taking slow, thoughtful drags from a fresh cigarette, studying me. The others are halfway through cups of tea. I have no recollection of anyone putting cups out or boiling a kettle. Time lurches and stalls. I rise from my chair and almost fall over. My legs are jelly. Sariah moves to hold me up.

Easy now.

The large window at the other side of the kitchen frames a round moon in a purple sky, its glow bleaching fields and hills. A burst of light crackles across the ocean, lighting up the room. A few moments later thunder pounds the roof, rattling all the pots and pans. I am disoriented and weak. I begin to shake again, but this time it’s from shock.

Sariah wraps an arm around me. We’re going to move you into the other room, OK? Deep breaths.

But before we have a chance to move, I hear a deep voice say, Maybe she’s a refugee.

Sariah hisses, George!

He gives a loud bellow of laughter. It makes me jump.

I’m joking, aren’t I?

Pressure builds and builds in my head until I’m gasping for air and clawing at my throat. The two women lean forward and tell me to breathe, and I’m trying. They ask me to tell them what’s wrong but I can’t speak. Someone says,

We need to think about getting her to a hospital.

17 March 2015
George Street, Edinburgh

Lochlan: I’m having afternoon tea with a client at The Dome when my phone rings. It’s an important meeting – Mr Coyle is interested in setting up a venture capital fund to invest in some new technological companies – and so I pull it out of my pocket and hit ‘cancel’.

‘Sorry about that.’

Mr Coyle arches an eyebrow. ‘Your wife?’

It was, actually. Right before I hit ‘cancel’ I saw her name appear on the screen.

‘No, no. Anyway, what were we saying?’

‘Google glass?’

I pour us both some red. ‘Ah, yes. This company’s creating something similar, only better. It integrates seamlessly with new social media platforms and user trials have rated it at five stars. The first product is scheduled to retail for around five hundred pounds in September.’

My phone rings again. This time Mr Coyle gives a noise of irritation. ‘ELOÏSE’ appears in white letters on the screen. I make to hit ‘cancel’ again, but Mr Coyle gives a shooing gesture with his hand and says, ‘Answer it. Tell her we’re busy.’

I stand up and walk to the nearest window.

‘El, what is it? I’m in a meeting …’

‘Lochlan? Is that you, dear?’

The woman at the other end of the line is not my wife. She continues talking, and it takes a few moments for me to place the voice.

‘Mrs Shahjalal?’

It’s the Yorkshirewoman who lives opposite us.

‘… and I thought I’d best check. So when I opened the door I was surprised to see – are you still there?’

From the corner of my eye I see Mr Coyle hailing a waitress.

‘Mrs Shahjalal, is everything all right? Where’s Eloïse?’

A long pause. ‘That’s what I’m telling you, dear. I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘It’s like I said: the man from the UPS van brought the parcel over to me and asked if I’d take it as nobody was in. And I thought that was strange, because I was sure I’d seen little Max’s face at the window only a moment before. So I took the parcel, and then an hour or so later I saw Max again, and I thought I’d best go over and see if everything was all right. Max was able to stand on a chair and let me in.’

I’m struggling to put this all together in my mind. Mr Coyle is rising from his chair, putting on his jacket. I turn and raise a hand to let him know I’ll be just a second, but he grimaces.

‘OK, so Max let you in to our house. What happened when you went inside?’

‘Well, Eloïse still isn’t here. I’ve been here since three o’clock and the little one’s mad for a feed. I found Eloïse’s mobile phone on the coffee table and pressed a button, and luckily enough it dialled your number.’

The rustling and mewling noises in the background grow louder, and I realise Mrs Shahjalal must be holding Cressida, my daughter. She’s twelve weeks old. Eloïse is still breastfeeding her.

‘So … Eloïse isn’t in the house. She’s not there at all?’ It’s a stupid thing to say, but I can’t quite fathom it. Where else would she be?

Mr Coyle glowers from the table. He straightens his tie before turning to walk out, and I lower the phone and call after him.

‘Mr Coyle!’

He doesn’t acknowledge me.

‘I’ll send the fact sheet by email!’

Mrs Shahjalal is still talking. ‘It’s very odd, Lochlan. Max is dreadfully upset and doesn’t seem to know where she’s gone. I don’t know what to do.’

I walk back to the table and gather up my briefcase. The brass clock on the chimneybreast reads quarter past four. I could catch the four thirty to London if I manage to get a taxi on time, but it’s a four-and-a-half-hour train ride from here and then another cab ride from King’s Cross to Twickenham. I’ll not be home until after ten.

‘I’m heading back right now,’ I tell Mrs Shahjalal.

‘Are you in the city, dear?’

‘I’m in Edinburgh.’

‘Edinburgh? Scotland?’

Outside, the street is busy with traffic and people. I’m agitated, trying to think fast, and almost get knocked over by a double-decker bus driving close to the kerb. I jump back, gasping at the narrow escape. A group of school kids on a school trip meander across the pavement in single file. I wave at a black taxi and manage to get him to stop.

‘To Waverley, please.’

I ask Mrs Shahjalal if she can stay with Max and Cressida until I get back. To my relief she says she will, though I can barely hear her now over Cressida’s screams.

‘She needs to be fed, Mrs Shahjalal.’

‘Well, I know that, dear, but my days of being able to nurse a baby are over.’

‘If you go into the fridge, there might be some breast milk in a plastic container on the top shelf. It’ll be labelled. I think Eloïse keeps baby bottles in one of the cupboards near the toaster. Make sure you put the bottle into the steriliser in the microwave for four minutes before you use it. Make sure there’s water in the bottom.’

‘Sterilise the breast milk?’

I can hear Max in the background now, shouting, ‘Is that Daddy? Daddy, is that you?’ I ask Mrs Shahjalal to put him on.

‘Max, Maxie boy?’

‘Hi, Daddy. Can I have some chocolate, please?’

‘I’ll buy you as much chocolate as you can eat if you tell me where Mummy is.’

‘As much chocolate as I can eat? All of it?’

‘Where is Mummy, Max?’

‘Can I have a Kinder egg, please?’

‘Did Mummy go out this morning? Did someone come to the house?’

‘I think she went to the Natural History Museum, Daddy, ’cos she likes the dinosaurs there and the big one that’s very long is called Dippy, he’s called Dippy ’cos he’s a Diplodocus, Daddy.’

I’m getting nowhere. I ask him to put me back on to Mrs Shahjalal, who is still wondering how she is to sterilise the breast milk, and all the while Cressida is drilling holes in my head by screaming down the phone.

Finally, I’m on the train, posting on Facebook.

I don’t usually do this but … anyone know where Eloïse is? She doesn’t seem to be at home …

Night falls like a black sheath. The taxi pulls into Potter’s Lane. We live in a charming Edwardian semi in the quiet suburb of Twickenham, close to all the nice parks and the part of the river inhabited by swans, frogs and ducks, and close enough to London for Saturday-afternoon visits to the National History Museum and Kew Gardens. A few lights are on in the houses near us, but our neighbours are either retired or hard-working professionals, and so nights are placid round here.

I pay the driver and jump out on to the pavement. Eloïse’s white Qashquai is parked in the driveway in front of my Mercedes, and my hearts leaps. I’ve been on and off the phone to Mrs Shahjalal during the train ride from Edinburgh, checking in on the kids and trying to work out what the hell to do about the situation. Mrs Shahjalal is very old and forgetful. More than once El has climbed through the window to open the front door because she locked her keys inside. In all likelihood this is a big mistake; I’ve lost a client while El’s been upstairs having a shower or something. I ran out of battery on my phone some time ago and all the power points on the train were broken. Mrs Shahjalal hasn’t been able to contact me. But the Qashquai’s here. Eloïse must have arrived back already.

I turn my key in the door and step inside to quietness and darkness.

‘El?’

I head into the playroom and see the figure of old Mrs Shahjalal sitting on the edge of the sofa, rocking the Moses basket where Cressida is lying, arms raised at right angles by her tiny head.

‘Hi,’ I whisper. ‘Where is she?’

Mrs Shahjalal shakes her head.

‘But … she’s here,’ I say. ‘Her car is outside. Where is she?’

‘She isn’t here.’

‘But—’

Mrs Shahjalal raises a finger to her lips and looks down at Cressida in a manner that suggests it has taken a long time to settle her to sleep. Cressida gives a little shuddered breath, the kind she gives after a long paroxysm of wailing.

‘Max is upstairs, in his bed,’ Mrs Shahjalal says in a low voice.

‘But what about El’s car? The white one in the driveway?’

‘It’s been here all the time. She didn’t take it.’

I race upstairs and check the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the attic, then switch on all the lights downstairs and sift the rooms for my wife. When that proves fruitless I head out into the garden and stare into the darkness. In that moment a daunting impossibility yawns wide. I barely know Mrs Shahjalal, save a few neighbourly waves across the street, and now she’s in my living room, gently rocking my daughter and telling me that my wife has vanished into thin air.

I take out my phone and begin to dial.

17 March 2015
Komméno Island, Greece

Somehow I find myself in a rocking chair with a thick orange blanket around me, next to a crackling fire. My right sleeve is rolled up and someone’s tied a belt tight around my bicep. The tall skinny bloke with glasses, Joe, is standing next to me with a cold instrument pressed to my wrist. The room smells funny – like seaweed. Or maybe that’s me.

‘Only a couple more seconds,’ he says.

‘What are you doing?’ I say, though it comes out as a strangled whine. The inside of my mouth feels like sandpaper.

‘Checking your blood pressure.’

There’s a heated discussion going on amongst the others in the room and I sense it’s about me. I still feel queasy and limp.

Eventually he removes the belt from my arm. ‘Hmmm. Your blood pressure is a bit low for my liking. How about the tightness in your chest?’

I tell him that it seems OK but that I’m weak as dishwater. He reaches forward and gently presses his thumbs on my cheeks to inspect my eyes.

‘You’re in shock. Little wonder, given that you rowed across the Aegean in a full-blown storm. Let’s get your feet raised up. And some more water.’

The woman – Sariah – lifts my feet and supports them on a stack of cushions.

‘How’s your head?’ she asks.

‘Sore,’ I say weakly.

‘You don’t feel like you’re going to pass out again?’ Joe asks, and I give a small shake of my head. It’s enough to make the pain ratchet up to an agony that leaves me breathless.

‘It’s after midnight, so getting you to a hospital has proved a little tricky,’ Sariah says, folding her arms. I notice she has a different accent than the others. American, or maybe Canadian. ‘There’s no hospital or doctors anywhere here,’ she says. ‘George has contacted the police in Heraklion and Chania.’

‘Did anyone report me as missing?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

She must see how this unnerves me because she lowers on her haunches and rubs my hand, as though I’m a child. ‘Hey, don’t worry,’ she says. ‘We’ll call again first thing in the morning.’

Nothing about this place feels familiar. It feels like I’m seeing everything here for the first time.

‘Do I live here? Do I know any of you?’ I ask her.

‘We saved you,’ George says flatly. I can’t see him, but sense his presence behind me.

‘There was a storm,’ Joe adds, though something in his voice sounds uncertain, hesitant. ‘Big sandstorm coming across from Africa, no doubt. George and I went out to check that our boat hadn’t come loose from its moorings. And then we saw you.’

‘Where was I?’

‘On Bone Beach,’ Joe says.

‘Bone Beach?’

‘The small horseshoe beach with white rocks that look like bones. Down below the barn.’ He grins. ‘Crazy that you managed to survive all that. Someone up there must like you.’

‘You were in a boat,’ Sariah explains. ‘You don’t remember if you were with anybody?’

I have a terrible feeling that I should know all of this, that I should know all about the boat and the beach and where I’m from. And I have no idea, absolutely no clue, why I don’t know these things.

‘Why did you come to Komméno, anyway?’ George asks, moving to the light as he reaches for a pack of cigarettes. ‘I mean, it’s not like there’s anything here.’

‘What’s “Komméno”?’ I say.

‘It’s the name of this place,’ Sariah says, a note of sadness in her voice, as if she’s addressing someone very stupid, or ill. ‘Komméno Island.’

I hesitate, hopeful that an answer to George’s question will surface in me automatically and provide an explanation for all this.

But it doesn’t.

18 March 2015
Potter’s Lane, Twickenham, London

Lochlan: It’s after midnight. My wife is officially missing. I’m trying to get my head around this.

The facts are as follows: (1) I Facetimed Eloïse on Monday night shortly after seven while she was making pancakes in the kitchen and our two kids were playing happily in the family room, and (2) sometime between ten and one today, while our children were asleep in their beds upstairs, she disappeared from our home. Also, (3) there is no indication that anyone has been here, Max didn’t see anyone come in and (4) Eloïse’s clothes, passport, credit cards, car, driving licence and mobile phone are still at home. She has therefore no way of making contact and no way of paying to get anywhere: not the tube, not a taxi, not a flight, and no way of paying for food or drink. Lastly, (5) no one seems to have any clue where she might have gone.

We have run out of expressed breast milk. I’m so out of sorts that Cressida shrieked for an eternity until it dawned on me that she was probably due another feed. An hour ago I phoned a taxi company and paid them fifty quid to go and buy some formula milk at a supermarket and bring it here. Cressida was a little confused at first, both by having to suck a plastic teat again and by the weird taste of formula, but finally she relented and drained it in one sitting.

Mrs Shahjalal has gone home. She lives alone at number thirty-nine, across the road. She has offered to come again in the morning and help in any way she can. Right now, I’m mired in bewilderment and can’t think straight.

On the train from Waverley I set about contacting Eloïse’s friends to see if anyone had heard from her. Of course, they’d seen neither hide nor hair of her since yesterday or the day before. My Facebook post was met with weeping emojis and well-wishing; in other words, nothing of any use. With great reluctance, I texted Gerda, Eloïse’s grandmother, to ask if El had gone to their place in Ledbury. It was a long shot, of course, given that the kids were still here, but I had quickly run out of possibilities.

I’ve searched the whole house four or five times in total. Wardrobes, the bathroom closet, that weird space under the stairs, even under the beds and in the loft, then running around in the back garden with a torch, checking all the bushes and the shed. I guess I thought she might have got stuck somewhere. I felt like I was going insane. All of this whilst Max was running around after me asking if we were playing a game and could he hide, too, and whilst Cressida realised she was being held by someone other than her mother and wanted half of London to know all about it.

Gerda rang back to say no, she hadn’t seen El since last week, though she spoke to her on Sunday night. She started to ask questions and I stammered something about El not being home when I got back this afternoon. There was a long pause.

‘What do you mean, El’s not home? Where are you, Lochlan?’

‘I’m back in London.’

‘And where are the babies?’

‘They’re here.’

‘Lochlan, are you saying Eloïse has left?’

‘I’m saying she’s not at home. Her car is still there, her keys and her mobile phone. Everything.’

‘Call the police.’

‘I’ve already done it.’

I checked El’s mobile phone, examining all her messages in case there was some unforeseen emergency she’d been called away for, but all I found was an eBay enquiry about a high chair, emails from Etsy, Boden, Sainsbury’s and Laura Ashley, as well as Outlook reminders about Max’s parent-teacher meeting at nursery next Friday and Cressida’s jabs at the health clinic.

At eleven o’clock Max came downstairs, bleary-eyed and wrapped in his Gruffalo robe, his blond hair longer than I remembered it being, dandelion-like with static.

‘Hi, Daddy,’ he said, yawning.

‘Hey, Maxie boy. How are you doing?’

He padded across the room and climbed up on my lap. I kissed his head, flooded with a sudden tenderness for him.

‘Is Mummy back?’

How much it pained me to tell him that she wasn’t.

He curled into me. ‘Did Mummy have to go to the shops? Did she forget that me and Cressida were in the house?’

‘I don’t think so, Max.’

‘Did she get lost coming home?’

I shook my head, and he started to grow upset.

‘Want Mummy, Daddy. Where’s Mummy?’

When I began to feel overwhelmed at my inability to console him – and by the thought that he might well wake Cressida – I told a fib.

‘I think maybe she’s gone to take her friend some flowers.’

‘Which friend?’

‘Uh … the lady with the long black hair from playgroup.’

He straightened. ‘Sarah?’

‘Yes, Sarah.’

‘No, it can’t be Sarah, ’cos Sarah got her hair yellowed.’

‘Niamh, then.’

‘Why is Mummy taking Niamh flowers? Is Niamh sad?’

‘I think so.’

‘What kind of flowers?’

‘I don’t know, Maxie.’

‘Can you call Niamh on your mobile and tell her that we need Mummy to come back to us now, please?’

‘Soon, darling, soon. Let’s go back to bed.’

In a fleeting moment of clear-mindedness I remembered the high-spec baby monitors that El had installed when Max was born – seriously, they’re like surveillance cameras – and checked El’s phone to see if any footage had been recorded. But no, the recording facility had been switched off ages ago. Of course it had.

I bribed Max to go to sleep without Mummy bathing him and reading him his favourite story by promising to take him to Thomas Land. Even so, he insisted on staying downstairs with me and cried himself to sleep.

It’s almost two in the morning when a police car pulls up outside and two uniformed police officers appear at the door, a man and a woman. I show the officers into the living room and attempt to console Cressida so that I can actually hear what they say. Her face is beetroot-red, tears rolling down her cheeks, and she punches the air with her fists. Max has fallen asleep on the sofa, holding the quilt Eloïse made for him up to his chin and murmuring occasionally.

‘When did you last speak with your wife, Mr Shelley?’ the male officer asks as I rock Cressida back and forth.

‘I already gave all this information on the phone,’ I say. I want answers, resolutions, for the police to wave their magic wands and materialise my wife.

‘Sorry, but there’s some information we’ve got to confirm. We’ll ask a few additional questions before we begin enquiries.’

‘I’ve been in Edinburgh since Monday but I spoke to her around seven on Monday night via Facetime,’ I say with a sigh. ‘Sometimes I call during the day as well, but it’s been really busy at work. I didn’t get a chance.’

‘Where do you work?’

I shift Cressida into a different position, away from my ear. She’s still tiny at three months so she fits along the length of my arm. I bounce her there and she lets out a huge belch. I say ‘Good girl!’ but she starts to cry again.

‘I work at a company called Smyth and Wyatt. Four days a week I’m based in Edinburgh, the rest of the time I’m at the London branch on Victoria Embankment.’

The male officer jots this down as ‘Smith & White South – a bank’.

‘It’s not a bank, it’s a corporate finance firm.’

He scores out his note. ‘OK. Did you and your wife have any disagreements? Anything that might have made her leave?’

‘Look, I’ve already explained this. My wife has not left. Cressida’s only twelve weeks old. El’s still breastfeeding.’

I’m mad as hell, frustrated, but above all I’m anxious. I can’t help but feel that El must be worried, wherever she is, because she’s fought to breastfeed Cressida after some difficulties with Max and ensures she feeds on demand. This is hard to put across – my wife hasn’t left, you see, because she wants to breastfeed. They ask about El’s line of work, and I explain that she’s a stay-at-home mother but still goes on TV to talk about her work.

‘She set up a small charity some years ago for refugee children and it’s become quite successful,’ I say. ‘She gets asked to do the occasional media event. I guess I’m worried that, maybe … I don’t know. A lot of nutcases out there.’ I know I’m clutching at straws, but my mind is racing, my body buzzing with adrenalin. I keep glancing at the front door, waiting for her to walk in.

‘Did she mention anything of that nature? Threatening letters, stalkers, that kind of thing?’

‘No, nothing.’

He gives me a moment in case something comes to mind, but it doesn’t.

‘Can you describe what she was wearing when you last saw her?’

‘I think she was wearing grey yoga pants and a pyjama top. Like I said, it was seven o’clock at night. I should have called her this morning but I was running late …’

He writes this down, asking for more of a description. Does she have any tattoos or visible scars? No. Any jewellery? I tell him she would likely be wearing her wedding band and engagement ring. I’ve not found them anywhere in the house.

‘Have you asked your neighbours if they saw anyone come into the house?’

I nod. ‘Mrs Shahjalal from across the road was the one to find out she was missing.’

More writing, slow, slow, slow, as if he’s taking orders for a takeaway. ‘We’ll follow up with Mrs Shahjalal. What about your bank accounts? Any withdrawals? We might be able to trace her last steps if we have that information.’

I’ve already checked our bank account on my mobile phone. We have a joint account and no money has come out today, with the exception of direct debits for the water bill and council tax. Of course, I’ve said all this. It was one of the first things I checked.

‘Tell me a little about Eloïse,’ he asks. ‘Age? Height? Weight? Personality?’

Cressida begins to squawk so fiercely that the female police officer rises to her feet and holds her arms out.

‘May I?’ she says.

‘Please,’ I say, handing Cressie to her. The female officer holds her cheek against Cressida’s and speaks softly to her. Ten seconds later the screaming stops. It’s only then that I realise that most of the noise is coming from inside my head.

‘How old did you say she is?’ the officer asks.

‘Twelve weeks. Max turned four in January.’

The officer smiles at Cressida, who gawps back. ‘I have a little boy, he’s ten months old. And he’s huge. But you, you’re dinky!’

‘She was slightly premature,’ I say. It is a huge relief not to be screamed at. I sink down into the sofa beside Max and rub my temples. The male officer is looking at me expectantly.

‘Eloïse is thirty-seven. She’s about five foot six, fairly slim. Not sure what she weighs, exactly. Maybe ten stone. She just gave birth.’

‘Is that a recent photo?’ he asks, glancing up at the new studio photograph mounted between two thick slabs of glass on the wall behind me.

Cost a fortune, that photo, but we all look so happy and I’m glad I deferred and had it taken. Eloïse is holding Cressida, who’s a scrawny sparrowy thing at three weeks old, and although I know she felt self-conscious, begging me to kneel slightly to the right so my head would cover her swollen stomach, Eloïse looks amazing. Buttery blonde hair hanging loose by her shoulders, that lovely smile and perfect skin of hers, as though her veins contain LED lights – luminescent, that’s the word. I know I married a looker, miles out of my league.

‘Is Eloïse the sort of person who would just up and leave?’ the male officer asks. ‘Has she done anything like that before?’

‘No, no, no. Absolutely not.’

The officer stares, blank-faced. ‘No problems with drugs, alcohol, anything like that?’

I shake my head. ‘Nothing like that. She stopped drinking when she became pregnant with our son. She maybe had the occasional glass of wine. She’s … Look, I can’t emphasise enough that Eloïse is the last person on earth who I would expect to go missing like this. She’s quiet, reserved. You know, a home bird.’

‘So she wouldn’t have, say, popped out to pick up a message? For five minutes or so?’

I can feel myself losing patience, almost on the verge of tears, which freaks me out. ‘Our kids were here. She wasn’t expecting me back from Edinburgh until tomorrow night. There’s no way she’d leave our children on their own. El won’t even leave Cressida downstairs when she’s taking a shower. We’ve a car seat in the bathroom and a baby rocker in the kitchen.’

The police officer nods. ‘OK. When you came home were there any signs of someone having been here? Any signs of an intrusion?’

I shake my head. ‘Everything was locked up.’

‘What about the back door. It was locked?’

I think back. Was it?

My hesitation prompts him to glance around the room. ‘What about any other entrances to the house? Windows? Back doors?’

‘We have had a problem with the back door, now that I think about it. The lock froze and it’s not been closing properly. I meant to get it fixed, but …’ I’ve been so busy. I close my eyes and sigh, speared with panic. How careless could I have been to leave the back door accessible?

He rises and walks to the back of the house. I follow. It’s dark, however, and the view from the window isn’t helpful.

‘What’s behind your garden?’

‘A back alley, then the gardens of the street behind us. Larkspur Terrace.’

He writes this down. ‘You keep any money in the house? Any valuables, expensive items?’

‘We’ve a couple of hundred quid in a box in the kitchen. For emergencies.’

‘Is it still there?’

I nod. ‘So is all of El’s jewellery.’

‘Are you sure?’

The doorbell cuts me short. I stride into the hallway to answer it and find Gerda and Magnus standing there, both angry and worried. I tell them that the police have arrived.

‘She’s still not returned?’ Magnus barks. Magnus is Eloïse’s grandfather, bull-ish, well-dressed, and immortal, like Clint Eastwood – the man’s had I don’t know how many triple bypass surgeries and cancer treatments and yet he only seems to grow more robust with age. Not quite as po-faced as Gerda, a little more down-to-earth, but still not the sort of man I’m ever likely to get drunk with.

‘Did you come from Herefordshire?’ I ask. They have properties all over the place – Switzerland, Greece – and I had wondered whether El had gone to one of them. But they’re all completely remote and impossible to get to. And besides, El would have no reason to go there.

Gerda ignores me, having swept into the living room and spotted Maxie asleep on the sofa. ‘The children aren’t in bed? Isn’t it rather late?’

The police officers make brief introductions in sober tones. Gerda sits down beside Max, pursing her lips as she tucks the blanket around him. Magnus walks around the room as if trying to identify something out of place.

‘This is Gerda and Magnus Bachmann,’ I tell the officers, remembering how I would always add fresh from the crypt under my breath when I was referring to them. El would give me a slap on the arm, though she’d always laugh. ‘Gerda and Magnus are Eloïse’s grandparents. Naturally, they’re very concerned.’

I don’t explain that they’re the world’s most interfering in-laws. Gerda flips open a gold mobile phone and dials a number with a manicured finger. ‘Eloïse, darling, it’s Mamie. This is the twentieth time I’ve called you, and I won’t be stopping until you reply. Please can you call one of us soon to let us know you’re all right?’

Gerda’s accent is elocution-English with clipped Swiss tones. It reminds me how El occasionally sounded foreign from the years she spent in Geneva as a teenager. She speaks French and German fluently, as well as conversational Italian, and has been teaching Max. I go to tell Gerda that Eloïse’s mobile phone is sitting on the dining table next door, but right then it rings loudly. For a faint moment Gerda’s eyes light up, as though she’s found Eloïse, and then the penny drops.

The house feels deathly still, hollowed out. In a daze I pour Magnus a whisky and make cups of tea for me and Gerda. Then the five of us sit in the living room, bewildered and lost for words. Despite how late it is my mobile phone continues to bleep with texts and Facebook messages, and although I check every one of them I find nothing that tells me where my wife may have gone.

‘Have you spoken to her friends?’ Gerda asks.

‘Of course he’ll have done that,’ Magnus snaps.

I give a weary sigh. ‘I’ve contacted the baby groups she sometimes goes to. I’ve spent all afternoon on the train phoning libraries, cafés, the swimming pool, our GP, the dentist … until my batteries died. Everyone I can think of.’

Magnus sits down, then stands again. ‘That’s good. Someone’s bound to have come into contact with her.’

I say, ‘I made a list of people who saw her yesterday, but no one saw her today. Except the kids.’

‘What did Max say? He must have seen something,’ Gerda says for the hundredth time.

‘He said they made gingerbread men in the morning and then he had a nap. When he woke up he searched the house and garden but couldn’t find her. That was when Mrs Shahjalal came over.’

I stand and begin to collect everyone’s glasses and cups. ‘Well, I best be getting the children to their beds. I’ll call you both in the morning, shall I?’

Gerda looks affronted.

‘Oh, no. We’ll be staying. I’m sure Eloïse will be back soon but until then the children will be needing us.’

18 March 2015
Komméno Island, Greece

I wake to find myself in bed in an attic room. Dust motes visible in the air, picked out by bright sunshine streaming through a porthole window. The ceiling is criss-crossed with ancient wooden beams and spiderwebs in the corners. Hewn stone walls and a cloying stench of dust and damp make the room feel like a cave.

I pull myself upright, gasping from the pain in my head and from a series of aches that announce themselves in my right shin and ankle, my upper back, all the muscles in my neck and forearms terribly strained. It feels like I got in the way of an elephant stampede. I reach around and touch the spot where my skull had been cut open. No fresh blood, but I can feel where the bleeding has matted my hair.

The events of last night turn over in my mind like stones. The people I met, the ones that saved me from a boating accident on the beach. They were writers, weren’t they? Here on a retreat? I try to summon my name to mind. It doesn’t come, so I say it aloud. My name is … My mouth remains open as though the sound of my name will find its way inside of its own accord. I have the strongest sensation of having left something behind somewhere, and although I pace and try to will it to surface, it won’t reveal itself.

Water. I need water. I move my legs to the edge of the bed and drop my feet to the floor. Cold. I’m wearing a T-shirt with a faded pineapple print on the front and baggy black swimming trunks.

I hobble like a foal towards the door, but when I turn the door knob I find it is shut tight. I tug at it, one hand on top of the other, wrapping my fingers around the knob and twisting with all my strength. The knob turns and turns but the door won’t budge. For a moment I really think I’m going to lose consciousness. With a hand pressed against the wall I let myself sink slowly down to the floor and rest my forehead against the door, taking long, trembling breaths. A large grey spider taps across the floor by my bare feet. I flinch, and in a second the spider is gone, darting into one of the dusty crags in the walls. I’m left with enough adrenalin to lift a fist against the heavy wood of the door, banging it once, twice, three times. I can hear a low murmur of voices somewhere in the house.

Eventually, the door pushes open, knocking into me. Someone swears and squeezes through the gap before helping me to my feet.

‘The door was locked,’ I say, trying to explain.

‘Locked?’ Joe’s voice. He inspects the door quickly and says, ‘Not locked. Always jams, this door. Come on, let’s get you something to eat.’

After shouting downstairs for one of the others he slips a hand on the back of my head and the other firmly on the small of my back. Soon one of the women is there, too, and I recognise her as the kind one from last night, the woman who looked at me with such concern. Sariah. She helps Joe lift me to my feet and, very slowly, we all head down a winding stone staircase, one, two floors, Joe in front of me, Sariah behind, in case I fall.

The architecture of the house suggests it was once an old farmhouse, with remnants from its past hung on the wall as vintage ornaments – old breast ploughs, some fairly mean-looking pitchforks, and the wheel of a chaff-cutter, as well as cow or goat bells. A room at the bottom of the stairs features a rocking chair – I remember sitting there last night, hunched over and trembling – and a beautiful inglenook fireplace that smelled of burnt toast.

The kitchen looks different in daylight – long and brightly lit, with a large range oven, refrigerator, white granite worktops, and a wooden table in the middle surrounded by four wooden chairs. A little decrepit and dusty, but nowhere near as creepy as it seemed last night. The room has an earthy odour about it, as though it’s been unused for a long time, though as I head towards the cooker it gives way to the rich smell of grilled tomatoes and fresh pitta. Sariah says, ‘Let’s get you something to eat,’ and makes for a pan on the hob.

Joe walks me slowly to a chair by the table, then makes for the sink. He’s a good deal younger than I’d placed him last night. Maybe early twenties, a whiff of the undergrad about him. Long, pale, and thin, his black hair standing upright on his head in a gelled quiff, black square glasses shielding his eyes.

He hands me a glass of water, which I gulp down. Sariah fills a plate with the contents of a pan. Dressed in a red skirt and floaty kimono patterned with orange flowers, she looks magnificent: long dark fingers ringed with gold bands, heavy strands of colourful beads looping from her neck, ropes of black hair coiled on top of her head and tied with an orange scarf. She sets a plate of food in front of me – fried cherry tomatoes, olives, pitta bread.

‘Thank you,’ I say, and she grins.

‘Mind if I take a little look at your head?’ Joe asks.

I feel his hands gently touch the wound through my hair at the back of my head.

‘How does it look?’

‘Clean. Some bruising around the area. How’s the neck?’

His fingers brush the sides of my neck gently and he tries to move my head from side to side.

‘Stiff.’

‘I’ll find some painkillers.’

A kettle whistles to the boil on the hob. Sariah walks towards it and begins to make coffee, asking if I’d like milk. It all feels so strange and disorienting. I say yes to the milk but even that seems odd, the sound of my voice distant and distorted. I dart my eyes around the room, willing it to make sense, to become familiar. It doesn’t.

The other woman – Hazel, I hear Joe call her – scuttles in from somewhere else, rubbing her hands and muttering about tea. She’s short and thin, orange curls leaping on her head like springs, an oversized black woollen jumper pulled over a bottle-green skirt. She holds something in the crook of an arm. A notebook.

She stops in her tracks when she spots me, as though she hadn’t expected me to be here. ‘Hello,’ she says warily, and she sits down, placing the notebook carefully on her lap. Her accent is English, like Joe and George.

‘Hello.’

‘Are you going to stay with us?’ she asks.

Sariah answers from the sink. ‘We’re still working out how to get her to see a doctor.’

Hazel glances from me to Sariah. ‘Joe’s a doctor, isn’t he?’

‘I do first aid,’ Joe corrects from the other end of the room.

‘I found these,’ he says. ‘Paracetamol.’

‘Thanks.’ I press a couple of tablets out of the foil and take them with a swig of coffee.

I feel Hazel watching me, her small grey eyes absorbing every inch of me. ‘You were in quite a state last night,’ she says. ‘It was all very exciting. Do you remember what happened?’

I suspect she means if I remember what happened before I ended up in their kitchen. There’s a smile on her face, as if the sorry state of me amuses her. It makes me wary.

‘And you still don’t remember how you ended up here?’

‘I don’t think so …’

‘What about your name?’

I open my mouth, because this should be right there, right on the top of my tongue. But the space in my mind that should be bright with self-knowledge is blank, closed, emptied.

Hazel’s eyes blaze with excitement at my hesitation. I see Sariah giving her a look of caution, and instantly she looks away, shame-faced.

‘Don’t sweat it,’ Sariah says. ‘You’ve had a rough night, a bump on the head. Give it a few hours. It’ll all come back.’

The sound of heavy footsteps grows louder at the back door. Moments later, George appears, glistening with sweat and exhaustion, his grey vest soaked through. Hazel fidgets in anticipation as he heads towards us.

‘Did you find it?’ Sariah asks.

George shakes his head, too worn out to speak. He’s very overweight and so red in the face that I brace myself for the sight of him falling to the ground with a tremendous thud. He pulls a towel from the shelf above the sink and wipes sweat from his brow and face.

‘You mean, the boat?’ Hazel says in a shrill voice. ‘We’ve lost the boat?’

No answer. Hazel and Sariah watch George as he leans back in the chair and catches his breath. Both of them look worried. The mood in the room has plummeted.

‘What boat?’ I ask, and my voice is small and hesitant. It sounds odd to me, as though someone else is speaking.

‘We rented a powerboat from Nikodemos so we can travel back and forth to Crete for supplies,’ Sariah says in a low voice.

‘The only reason we found you was because Joe and I went out to check that the boat was moored properly during the storm,’ George pants, pulling off his wet boots, and then his socks. The sour smell of sweat hits me instantly. ‘And then we came across you. But the boat’s gone.’

‘I thought Joe said it would likely be washed up on one of the beaches,’ Hazel says.

George tilts his head from side to side, emitting loud cracks from his neck. ‘I’ve checked everywhere, trust me. Boat’s gone. Sunk, most likely.’

‘What will Nikodemos say about his boat sinking?’ Hazel says. ‘He’ll be cross, won’t he? Very, very cross.’

‘What will Nikodemos charge for his boat sinking?’ George corrects. ‘That’s the question.’

‘We’re covered by insurance, aren’t we?’ Sariah says, turning back to the hob to crack eggs into a pan. Her movements are rough, erratic.

George scratches a rough belt of stubble under his chin. ‘We’ll need to work out another way to get supplies from the mainland. Not to mention delivering our guest back to wherever she came from.’

I feel that this is my fault. I don’t belong here. I shouldn’t be here, and I feel helpless and awkward. George and Hazel acknowledge this with a quick glance in my direction, which only confirms that they feel I’m to blame. ‘I’m so sorry about your boat,’ I say.

‘We’ll work it out,’ Sariah mutters without turning, and I wonder if she’s detected that I’m feeling pretty awful. Joe is at the back door, a bundle of peaches gathered in the hem of his black T-shirt. George opens his mouth and begins to tell him about the boat situation, but Sariah cuts in.

‘Want some breakfast, Joe?’

Joe dumps his peaches on the worktop. He rubs his hands and glances at the pan on the hob. ‘Thanks.’

‘George, you want some?’ Sariah asks.

‘Okey-dokey.’ He glances up at me. ‘Sariah’s the cook in this operation, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘And what am I in this operation?’ Hazel pipes up from the table.

‘The cleaner,’ Joe says through a mouthful of omelette. He looks at me. ‘Hazel likes to clean and tidy everything in sight. She’ll take a glass out of your hand before you’ve even finished drinking to wash it.’

Hazel shrugs, clearly bristling. ‘Nothing wrong with being clean, is there? Next to godliness.’

‘Still, I’d hold on to your plate,’ Joe tells me. ‘She’ll take it off you.’

‘And what about you?’ I ask Joe. ‘What do you do?’

He tosses a cherry tomato in his mouth. ‘First aider.’

‘She means, what do you do here, dumb-dumb,’ George says.

‘Oh. Well, I tagged along, didn’t I?’ Joe says. ‘I’m the – provider of medical attention?’

‘House first-aider,’ George interprets.

‘George is the fixer,’ Hazel tells me.

‘And what does that mean?’ George asks.

‘It means you fix things, George,’ Joe says. ‘Unless “fixer” is Mongolian for “grumpy old git”.’

‘I’ll fix you in a minute.’

‘See?’ Joe says to me, arching a thick black eyebrow.

Sariah brings the last of the food, a plate of chopped figs and tomatoes. She removes her apron and slings it on a hook by the oven, then sits at the table beside me while George cups water on his face and armpits at the sink. Despite how terrible I feel, I’m incredibly relaxed in their company, as though I’ve known them for ages. It makes an otherwise alarming situation quite bearable.

‘So, if you can’t remember your name, how come you can remember how to talk?’ Hazel asks.

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Joe tells her. ‘It’s called amnesia. It doesn’t stop people’s ability to function.’

She purses her lips. ‘So, you can’t remember if you’ve got any weird fetishes?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I tell her.

She looks thrilled, a sudden energy sweeping through her. ‘I want to study you for my new book. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?’

I go to say that I don’t mind, but Joe interrupts.

‘Look at you, such a busy-body,’ he tells Hazel, throwing her a wry smile.

She shoos his comment away with a wave of her hand. Then, to me: ‘Do you know what you like to eat?’

‘I guess I liked what I just ate.’

But Hazel isn’t satisfied. She tosses question after question at me: who’s the current President of the United States? What year it is? What’s the name of my primary school? When was I most embarrassed? And so on. I’m still too foggy-headed to answer most of these, though I’m relieved that I’m aware of what year it is. But not who I am.

‘You could be anybody,’ Hazel says, at once exasperated and curious. ‘How do you have a sense of who you are if you don’t remember anything?’

‘Well, how do any of us have a true sense of who we are?’ Joe interjects, making quotation marks with his fingers. ‘We’re all of us many people in a single skin.’

‘I’m not,’ George says. ‘Cripes, you make it sound like we’re all … what are those Russian dolls called?’

‘They’re called Russian dolls,’ Hazel says drily.

‘Identity is performance,’ Joe says. ‘Ask any psychoanalyst and they’ll tell you the same.’

Hazel lifts an eyebrow. ‘Well, next time I bump into a psychoanalyst on this uninhabited island, I will!’

I’m shocked by this. ‘“Uninhabited?”’

Joe nods.

‘This whole island is uninhabited?’

‘An uninhabited paradise,’ Sariah says dreamily. ‘Just this old farmhouse and a few Minoan ruins. And us.’

I glance out the window and see a patch of dry earth rolling down to the ocean, nothing but blue all the way to the horizon. Hazel starts to tell me that the nearest island is Antikythera, which is eight miles away, but this sparks a debate with Joe about whether Crete is closer. I’m no longer listening. Eight miles of ocean to the nearest town. I’d assumed that there would be other people on the island, people we could speak to in order to provide answers to my situation, or who might help locate the missing boat. That I would be able to contact the authorities and find out where I came from.

‘But – how do you get supplies?’ I ask.

‘There used to be a big hotel on the south side,’ Hazel tells me, as if in confidence. ‘There was a restaurant, a few shops, even a bowling alley. But they closed it down last year. The recession, you know. That’s where we got our supplies before. Nikodemos – the man who owns the island – well, he loaned us a powerboat this time round …’

‘… which seems to have sunk,’ adds George.

‘There’s no Internet here, either,’ Joe warns.

No Internet means I can’t use social media or Google to search for reports of a woman of my description going missing from Crete.

‘Nikodemos gave us a satellite phone,’ Sariah says, observing my unease. ‘And thank goodness. With the boat gone, we really would be stranded.’

This, I do remember. The satellite phone that George pulled from his pocket last night. The phone they said they’d use to contact the police on the main island.

‘Have the police been in touch?’ I ask quickly.

‘I called them again first thing,’ George says, and for a moment I feel relieved. But then he adds: ‘No one’s filed a missing person’s report. I asked them to correspond with some of the stations in the other islands and they said they would.’ He shrugs. ‘Sorry it’s not better news.’

‘Maybe we could call the British Embassy?’ I suggest. ‘Anyone looking for me is likely to leave a message there.’

‘Okey-dokey.’

He pulls the phone from the pocket of his jeans and extends the long antenna from the top. Then he rises sharply from the table, dialling a number and heading towards the window, apparently to get a better signal.

‘I need to be connected to the British Embassy, please?’ I hear him say.

My heart racing, I stand and make my way towards him, full of anticipation.

‘Athens, you say?’ He holds the phone away from his mouth and tells me, ‘There’s no British Embassy on Crete. The closest is Athens.’

When I ask how far Athens is, the answer is depressing: about sixteen hours from here by boat, which of course we don’t appear to have.

George turns back to the phone. ‘Hello, yes? Yes, I wish to report a missing British citizen. At least, we think she’s British.’ He glances at me, expectant, but I have no answer to give. I don’t know whether I’m British or not. He turns back to the phone. ‘She’s turned up here on Komméno and can’t remember much about anything. Yes, Komméno. We’re about eight miles northwest of Crete.’

He gives a description of me and nods a lot, clicks his fingers for a piece of paper and a pen and jots something down. Then he says goodbye and hangs up.

‘No one has contacted them about a missing British woman,’ he sighs. ‘Though of course it would help if we knew your name.’

Sariah frowns. ‘They’re based in Athens, though,’ she says. ‘Maybe we should try the police in Chania?’

George looks reluctant but dials a number. After a few moments he begins pacing the room, looking up at the ceiling. ‘No signal,’ he says. ‘I’ll try outside.’ He goes out the back door but returns a few minutes later shaking his head, and I can’t help but feel stricken. No one has reported a missing person. No one has reported me.

Despite all their efforts to make me feel at home, the news saps what small amount of my strength had returned. My head and neck begin to throb again, and – bizarrely – my breasts are sore and hot; they feel as though someone’s injected molten lead into them. As Sariah begins to clear the table I pull my T-shirt forward subtly and peer down. My senses prove right: my breasts have swollen into two hard white globes, blue veins criss-crossing them like maps.

‘Are you all right?’ Sariah asks.

I let go of the neck of my T-shirt, embarrassed. ‘I’m not feeling so good. Would you mind if I had a lie-down?’

Sariah tells me of course it’s fine, and Joe is already on his feet, offering to help me to my room.

‘Are you sure you don’t need me to check you over?’ he says, helping me up the stairs. I tell him that I’m fine, but the pain across my chest is alarming and bizarre: a strange tightening sensation that wraps right around my back. It feels like someone has rammed hot pokers through my nipples.

By the time I get to the bed I’m in tears, unable to hide it any longer. I can’t decide if I’ve torn some muscles in my chest or if I’m having a heart attack. Sariah is suddenly there by the bed, Joe on the other side, both of them asking me what’s wrong, why am I crying.

I just want to sleep.

18 March 2015
Potter’s Lane, Twickenham

Lochlan: I don’t sleep all night. Gerda and Magnus decamp to the spare bedroom and I carry Max up to his bed and settle Cressida in her cot after another bottle. Then I turn one of the armchairs around to face the window, overlooking the street, and pour myself a glass of gin.

For hours I lurch between incredulity and devastation. Amazing how you can almost convince yourself of conversations that didn’t happen, of realities and explanations that promise to restore balance and bat away anguish. For a good half hour or so I almost manage to persuade myself that Eloïse told me she was going away for a conference and that I had simply forgotten. Desperation grows possibilities where none are usually found. I play out mental scenarios involving El falling down the stairs and banging her head, becoming disoriented and stumbling out into the street, a burglary gone wrong. Or maybe she became suicidal and couldn’t do it in front of the children. Each possibility is as bonkers as the other.

The thing is, Eloïse is absolutely the last person you would worry about doing something out of the ordinary. She’s the person who keeps us all together. If I lose my keys, a file, a document, Eloïse will intuit its exact location. She’s like a satnav for lost objects. No, more than that: she’s steady. I know, it sounds boring, but it’s true. Countless times I’ve come home to find someone in the house being consoled, counselled or geed up by Eloïse. She’s the sort of person people gravitate towards for reassurance.

Around five, the fear that accompanies thoughts of an abduction or burglary gone wrong makes me hold my head in my hands and force back tears. Finally, when exhaustion kicks in and my body shouts for sleep, I reach the absolute bottom of the well of self-questioning. She has left me. It’s the only answer to this most complicated of riddles, the only piece that fits the puzzle. As punishment for all the times I’ve put work before her and the kids, for all the times I’ve not listened or exploded over something small, she has left me, and most likely for someone else. It is why her phone and credit cards are all here. She’s been using another phone to talk to him. He has money. They’ll come back for the kids.

My vigil propels me through the spectrum of emotions. Anger, self-pity, sorrow, paranoia, a surreal kind of acceptance. Around six I hear Cressida begin to wail. I get up and make up a bottle, then take it upstairs to Cressida. Gerda is already stooping over the cot, trying to quiet her. She mutters to her in German.

‘It’s OK, Gerda,’ I say wearily. ‘I’ve got what she wants.’

Gerda turns and, without meeting my eye, takes the bottle from me. Then she lifts Cressida out of the cot and settles in the nursing chair to feed her.

‘There, there,’ Gerda says. ‘Mamie’s here. Take your milk, meine Süße.’

I lean against the cot woozily and watch Gerda as she feeds Cressida. I feel I ought to say something to her but don’t quite know what. After a moment Gerda says, ‘Seems only five minutes since I was feeding Eloïse like this. Cressida is the image of her.’

She looks up at me with narrowed eyes.

‘I need you to be very honest with me, Lochlan. Has Eloïse left you?’

Even though I’m well used to my grandmother-in-law’s thinly veiled contempt for me, her question – or rather, the sudden hardness of her tone – catches me off guard.

‘I don’t know,’ I mumble. ‘I’ve no idea where she is.’

She purses her lips and beholds me with that arrangement of her features which I’ve come to understand is designed for me and no one else.

‘You were one of the last people to see her, Lochlan. Did she seem …’

‘What?’

‘Well, I don’t know. You’re her husband. Have you been fighting again?’

‘No,’ I say, and I feel a spike of anger towards Eloïse for divulging our problems to Gerda. I know Gerda’s family, that she raised my wife, but I have had not unpleasant daydreams about Gerda kicking the bucket. And following swiftly on the heel of rage is the re-realisation that El’s missing. My wife is missing. Like people you see on posters, or on Crimewatch. And I have absolutely no answers, no map, by which to find her.

Gerda is pacing behind me, her arms folded.

‘Surely she must have said something.’

‘Like?’

She gives a hard sigh. ‘Eloïse would hardly just leave the children behind.’

‘I know that.’

She stops pacing.

‘Unless …’

‘Unless what?’

‘Well, unless you gave her some reason to leave the children behind.’

Her voice – nasal, clipped, withering – lands me back in the night El and I announced our engagement. Eloïse’s mother is out of the picture, having dragged El around England for most of her formative years in pursuit of heroin. She died when El was twelve. At that point, Gerda and Magnus stepped in and raised Eloïse, giving her a fantastic education and a strict home life. I had only met Gerda once by the time I asked El to marry me, and clearly I had somehow made a very poor first impression.

We were in the dining room of their home in Geneva, El switching between French and German as she showed off her engagement ring to a roomful of family friends and distant relatives. I was in a corner, fiercely attempting to abate my social inadequacies with gin, when I spotted Gerda taking Eloïse by the elbow and leading her into the kitchen. I followed, but when I reached the door I heard Gerda speaking in a tone of voice that suggested I’d better not interrupt. I hid behind the door and leaned towards the sound. She was speaking in English, presumably so none of the other guests would understand. But I did.

Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Eloïse?

What do you mean?

Well, you’ve only just met. Couldn’t you wait a little longer?

Eloïse laughed. We’ve been dating for a year …

Your grandfather and I courted for three years before we even thought of marrying. It’s a serious thing, you know. Very serious …

I know how serious it is, Mamie—

What does his father do?

I think his father is retired now. He used to work in the mines.

In the mines?

Does it matter?

A long sigh.

I’m sorry.

Sorry? For what, dear?

That you’re not as happy for me as I thought you’d be.

I stepped back, thinking that the conversation was over. But then Eloïse said:

This is about my mother, isn’t it?

Gerda straightened, affronted, and when she spoke her voice was louder.

Just … be careful, OK? I love you so, so much, meine Süße.

I love you too, Mamie.

Gerda comes back into focus, the bottle of milk almost finished and my daughter beginning to fall asleep in her arms. I clench my jaw, bracing for a row.

‘There isn’t someone else in the picture, is there?’ Gerda says slowly, still not quite looking me in the eye.

‘Someone else?’

She shrugs, as if this is an entirely reasonable thing to be asking me. ‘Another man. A lover.’

I bristle. ‘I hope not.’

‘And she definitely left all her belongings behind. Her credits cards, passports …’

‘Passports?’ The word is barely out of my mouth when I realise what she means: El has two passports. Her British one and her Swiss one from long ago. Gerda eyes me expectantly, so I say, ‘Yes’, though I haven’t located the Swiss passport. I’d forgotten that one. It’s bright red with a white cross on it, so shouldn’t be too hard to find. I make a mental note to ransack the house for it immediately, though El’s not used it in ages. I should think it’s out of date.

Gerda’s gaze skitters from mine. ‘You must have given her some reason to leave.’

Her words are like shards, designed to wound, but I refuse to rise to it. It’s precisely what she wants. Instead, I turn on my heel and walk out of the room.

Max is asleep in his pirate ship bed, surrounded by yellow Minions and clutching his quilt, thumb stuck firmly in his mouth. He’ll be bursting with questions when he wakes up, and I have no idea what to tell him. I can hardly tell him that his mother is still away taking flowers to a friend.

I check the filing cabinet in the spare room in which El keeps things like birth certificates and baby books, but there is no sign of her Swiss passport. It’s not in the drawer under our bed either. I can’t think of anywhere else to look. I have a brisk shower, and my mind turns to my emails and text messages, as well as Eloïse’s Facebook page and Twitter account. Both are full of queries, stickers, emojis: El, are you OK? Sad face. DM me! Shocked face. Where are you? I heard something’s up? Gravely concerned face. Hey, El, are we meeting up for lunch today? A heart.

I have text messages from our friends asking if they can do anything, and I scroll through them all, willing one of them to say something to the effect that Eloïse has been found.

I check my voicemail for the millionth time but there’s nothing from Eloïse. There is, however, an urgent message from my boss, Hugo, about an account – one of our biggest clients is furious about an admin error and is threatening to take his thirty million quid elsewhere. I send a quick email to Hugo, asking for clarification, and his reply pings back. Basically, I need to re-send a bunch of paperwork by special delivery to the Edinburgh branch, pray for a miracle, and Mr Husain and his millions should stay put.

Gerda pads downstairs in a grey cashmere robe, a cigarette and a lighter in one manicured hand, heading for the back garden. She stops when she sees me and looks oddly penitent.

‘Look, Lochlan. If Eloïse really is missing then we need to be devising a plan of action for her return.’

I continue rifling through the cupboard by the stairs for my briefcase. ‘That’s precisely why I’ve already spoken with the police.’

‘The police in this country will do nothing,’ she tuts. ‘We need to be proactive about this, Lochlan. We need to put a plan in—’

‘I am being proactive.’

She cuts me off: ‘—place to ensure that she’s not gone any longer than is necessary. Unless, of course, that’s what you want?’

What I want is to slap her. And in the same moment as I feel that ugly, tantalising impulse, I recall an argument with Eloïse that I ended by telling her she was just like Gerda. She asked me what the hell I meant, and I told her the truth: she had a tendency to twist my words and corner me with her own. Or she’d stonewall me. There’s no winning with passive-aggressive fighters. You’ve got to ignore them, for all you want to gouge their eyes out.

‘Will you be all right getting Max and Cressida their breakfast?’ I say calmly. ‘Cressie’s bottles have to be sterilised, and I think there are a couple of cartons of formula in the fridge. Max takes Weetabix and milk heated in the microwave for thirty seconds.’

‘You’re leaving?’ Gerda says, following me across the room. ‘Where on earth are you going?’

I grab my keys from the kitchen island. ‘Work, I’m afraid.’

‘Work?’

Gerda’s got a face like a bad ham. Good. I stride towards the front door, jump into my car and drive off as fast as I can.

Eloïse and I met eight years ago at a charity event in Mayfair to which I’d begrudgingly gone to wave the company flag. I’d already been to one too many of those sort of things, and although I’ve spent much of my life in London there’s enough Weegie in me yet to find the whole canapés and air-kissing malarkey worse than sticking needles in my eyes. Not only that, but I’d been informed that my ex-girlfriend Lauren was going to be there and I desperately wanted an out.

But then this beautiful woman got up on the platform. She was unassuming and sweet, a hand drawn across her waist to clasp the elbow of the other arm. She spoke quietly into the mic, introduced herself: Eloïse Bachmann. She was starting a crowdfunded project for refugee children who had wound up in the UK. The more she talked about the causes behind this project, the more she seemed to come alive. Her voice grew louder, her posture changed, and suddenly people were paying attention. When she finished, everyone applauded. Even in the bright spotlight I could see that she was overwhelmed.

It’s not that Eloïse isn’t beautiful – she’s slim, blonde and gorgeous – but back then, she wasn’t my type. She’s sensible and quietly confident, probably the smartest person I know. Back then I tended to be drawn to theatrical, insecure women who embarrassed me in the company of friends; the type that tended to slash my tyres after an argument. My relationships were like social experiments. I’d become cynical about love, saying it didn’t exist, that I didn’t even want it, when really I was a blithering idiot with an addiction to sociopaths. And then I found myself two feet away from the girl who had captivated a roomful of millionaires with her earnest passion, and I felt like I’d come home.

She took persuading. None of my old tactics worked. Eloïse wasn’t into fruit baskets or restaurants with dress codes. Neither am I, but I’d been moving in certain circles for so long that I’d assumed these things would woo her. In desperation I cornered a colleague who was friendly with Eloïse and asked her what I should do. ‘Take her to Skybright,’ she said simply. I had no idea what Skybright was. Turned out to be a café run by volunteers, where people could pay what they wanted for the food, enabling the homeless to eat there. I invited Eloïse and she accepted. Three months later, I proposed. She very sweetly said no. A month later, I tried again, on both knees. I knew that I had never, ever felt about another human being what I felt for her, and I wasn’t giving up. Luckily, this time she said yes.

We had two weddings – a real one, attended by the two of us, the priest and a couple of friends in one of Magnus’ properties, and one for our families back in England a couple of weeks later. We spent the next few years backpacking and sailing around the world. El’s a fantastic sailor. Magnus taught her – it was the thing that kept them close, much closer than El and Gerda. We lived in a little beach hut in Goa for months, waking up to the sunrise and swimming in the warm ocean before breakfast. Making love under the stars. We travelled down the Amazon, spotting anacondas and tribes washing in the river. We hiked along the Great Wall of China, then made our way to Australia, where we spent a month sailing around the Whitsunday Islands. I thought I’d struggle, coming home from all of that, but I was so much more in love with Eloïse after that time spent together that I’d have been happy anywhere, doing anything.

I must stress that I adore my children. I really do. I know that I’m a lucky man. But.

The life that we’d lived before Max came along drew to a screeching halt the morning he came into the world. Our spontaneous weekend breaks in New York or Venice: gone. A full night’s sleep: gone. Mental faculties: vamoosed. Whereas El and I had spent the previous four years of our relationship in a state of contented, loved-up bliss, now we only ever seemed to see each other at our worst. I learned that there was actually a spectrum of exhaustion, and I always seemed to have fallen off the far end. We started having fights about things like housework and money. We had more fights during Max’s first year than we’d had in our entire relationship.

I remember about six months into parenthood, both of us demented from sleep deprivation, I was standing in the kitchen making up a bottle and I said to Eloïse, ‘How does any couple stay together after having kids?’

It must have been about two in the morning. Eloïse had crazy bedhead hair and was wearing an old black T-shirt of mine stained with baby sick. It felt like all we did in those days was mop up – or occasionally, catch – bodily fluids, sometimes with our bare hands. ‘I don’t know how anyone stays sane after having kids,’ she said.

Of course, this was all par for the course. We had a group of friends over for dinner one night not long after and shared this story with them, and it turned out that it was a conversation every single one of them had had. Matt reached across the table, took Eloïse’s hand, and said: ‘Every woman thinks about leaving the father of her children. All it takes is for him to stay asleep while you deal with a screaming baby at three in the morning a few times and – boom! Divorce courts.’

I park in one of the staff spaces at the back of the building – it’s so early and yet there’s only a few spaces left. Some of my colleagues work literally a hundred hours a week, every week. They’ll take a fortnight off when it’s quiet and rent a yacht in the Caribbean. Few of them have young families, or if they do, they’re concealing the fact. I know two female colleagues are married but leave their wedding bands at home. Family is seen as a distraction in corporate finance.

The Smyth & Wyatt building on the Victoria Embankment is like something from Star Trek – Dean Wyatt spent ten million on revamping the place a couple of years ago so that the whole place would be made of glass and titanium, with leather couches imported from Italy and commissioned sculptures in the corridors. I get Dean’s ethos: if you spend every day here, from six in the morning until midnight, the place has to be pretty damn nice, and nice it is.

I race upstairs and unlock my office. I can hear someone calling my name, but I ignore it and log on to my computer. The thing loads up as fast as a tortoise on weed.

‘Lockie, boy,’ a voice calls. It’s Paddy Smyth. Paddy’s a Weegie, like me, though my accent has softened considerably: I’ve worked hard to graduate from Billy Connolly to Ewan McGregor. The London clients like it better.

‘You coming out for drinks, later?’ he asks.

‘Can’t, sorry. Got a bit of a crisis on my hands.’

He stuffs his hands in his pockets and ambles into my office, looking over the photos of my children on the cabinet opposite. ‘Yeah, I heard about the Dubai thing. I thought Raj was dealing with that?’

By ‘crisis’, I mean the fact that my wife is missing, but I don’t say anything more. ‘No, I’m not involved in the Dubai thing. I’ve got to sign off this paperwork for the Husain account ASAP.’

My computer finally loads. I type in my passcode and scroll through a list of folders. I see ‘Husain’ and click on it.

‘Oh, I saw you posted something on Facebook last night. Something about your wife. Eloïse, isn’t that right?’

I find a new folder in the one marked ‘Husain’, one my secretary has overlooked. I click on it and hit ‘print’. The printer whirrs into action.

‘Yeah,’ I answer, moving to the printer. ‘She’s … she didn’t come home last night.’

Paddy is standing right next to me, his eyebrows raised. ‘She didn’t come home?’

The crushing feeling in my chest is beginning to return. I wish he’d go away.

‘The police are involved.’

The printer screams out a sound and bright white text runs across the screen. OUT OF TONER. REPLACE IMMEDIATELY. It takes all my composure not to kick the machine.

‘Always running out of ink, these things,’ Paddy says. ‘You got another cartridge thingy?’

I glance at the office opposite where my secretary normally sits. She’s not there. It’s barely seven a.m. She doesn’t come in until nine. I am apoplectic.

‘Use my printer,’ Paddy says. ‘Email the file to yourself and open it up on my screen.’

‘I can’t,’ I say, tugging my tie loose. ‘These files have that new security thing on them that means I can’t email them forward. They’re locked into the computer.’

Which means, of course, that I have only one option: to unhook and unplug my enormous desktop and carry it all the way to Paddy’s office on the next floor. My phone is ringing and buzzing and chiming again, and by the time I set up the computer next to Paddy’s printer I have twelve missed calls, eleven voicemails, twenty-seven Facebook notifications and thirty-four tweets.

‘And a partridge in a pear tree,’ Paddy adds. ‘So tell me, has your wife left you?’

Paddy has had five wives and numerous girlfriends. He treats break-ups as inevitable and women like cars, trading them in every couple of years for a younger model. He’s sixty-three and is dating a twenty-four-year-old.

‘No, she has not left me,’ I say, plugging in the computer and flicking switch after switch. ‘We simply don’t know where she is.’

‘Didn’t she recently have a baby?’

‘Yes. A girl.’

‘So … who’s with the kids now? The nanny?’

I don’t have time to answer his questions. I finally get the thing hooked up and find the ‘Husain’ file. I click it and hit ‘print’, then silently beg God to let the document print. It does. I shove it in an envelope for the company courier and bring up my inbox to inform Mr Husain that all is well. I stop mid-email, and ask Paddy:

‘What time does the courier come?’

Paddy glances at the clock. ‘About eight. Why?’

We’ve recently had some new hires, and one of them was some knuckle-dragging kid covered in tats for company deliveries. Last week my secretary had to call him back because he left behind two packages marked URGENT. For the sake of forty-five minutes I could ensure that the form is picked up and sent off. I could even slip the guy a twenty-pound note and ask him to make this his first drop-off. I’m flapping. Before I realise it, I’m dialling my home number.

It barely rings before Gerda answers.

‘Eloïse?’

‘Hello? No, it’s Lochlan.’

A disappointed sigh on the other end.

‘Look, Gerda, I’m really sorry about this …’

‘And well you should be, Lochlan. I can’t imagine what kind of emergency forced you to go into work when your wife is nowhere to be found. What is going on?’

‘I’m coming home soon. I’ve got to get something sent off and then I’ll be there, OK?’

A pause. ‘Magnus is already driving around the area to see if he can find her. What time are the police coming?’

‘I’ll ring them shortly to update them, don’t worry.’

A resigned sigh. ‘All right.’

‘Bye.’

Eight o’clock comes and goes. Eight fifteen. I walk down to the foyer and pace, envelope in hand. Eight thirty. When the guy comes, I swear I’m going to ram the envelope down his throat. Forget a twenty-quid bribe. By the time it turns nine I am sweating bullets, my heart racing. Two of my colleagues have already walked in and asked if I’m ill. I nod. Yes, yes I am ill. It dawns on me that I expected this place to shake me back into competency, to prompt enough mental clarity to enable me to solve the mystery of my wife’s disappearance. The only clarity I’ve acquired is that I’m an idiot.

At nine fifteen I race back upstairs, intent on arranging a private courier. I should have done this in the first place. My secretary Ramona is at her desk. I go into her office. Ramona is a genius. She’s Chinese, raised by a Tiger Mother, plays the oboe at diploma level and can solve a Rubik’s cube in under five minutes. She’ll fix all of this.

‘What are you doing here?’ she says in a low voice. ‘I thought – didn’t I see something online about your wife?’

I nod and flap the envelope at her before explaining the situation with Mr Husain and the courier.

‘The courier left a message with Joan fifteen minutes ago,’ Ramona says. ‘He’s not coming in today. I was in the process of trying to find a replacement.’

I thrust the envelope into her hands. ‘Please, Ramona. Deliver this for me. I’ll pay you anything.’

She takes a step back and looks puzzled. ‘You want me to deliver it?’

I move to her computer and start looking up directions to the Cauldwell Building in Edinburgh. ‘Here, I’ll email you the fastest route. Did you bring your car?’

She shakes her head. ‘I always come by bike …’

‘OK, book a flight. Use my credit card.’ I take out my wallet and press a Visa card into her hand. ‘Just … whatever it costs, OK?’

Ramona looks a little dazed. I catch a ghostly reflection of myself in one of the glass panels opposite and realise I look like a madman. My tie is gone, my collar is open by three buttons, my hair is sticking up all over the place and I’m shining with sweat. Plus, I’m gripping my secretary by the upper arms.

A knock on the door, the tall, lanky figure of Dean Wyatt visible through the glass.

‘Everything all right in here, Lochlan? I heard shouting …’

I let go of Ramona and smooth down my hair. ‘Everything’s fine, Dean. In light of the fact that we’re down a courier, Ramona’s offered to hand-deliver a very important form this morning.’

He looks grave. ‘The Husain account?’

I nod. He raises a silver eyebrow at Ramona. ‘Good. This has been a very serious matter for the company.’ He flicks his eyes at me, a trace of disapproval there. ‘See you at the meeting in a half hour.’ He turns to leave, but I call after him. I step outside Ramona’s office and collar Dean in the passageway.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to take some time off,’ I say.

He turns slowly and looks deeply confused. ‘I’m sorry, Lochlan, but I’m not quite sure what you mean.’

I explain the situation at home, and I mention the police, but he simply shakes his head as though none of this is possible.

‘What about the Edinburgh branch? You can’t simply up and leave at a time like this.’

I make to answer, but there’s an LCD screen on a wall beside us and the noise is starting to rattle my head. The news comes on, and from the corner of my eye I spy my wife’s face. Both Dean and I turn to see a headshot of Eloïse enlarging on the screen until it is filled.

And in local news, charity campaigner and mother-of-two Eloïse Shelley went missing from her home in Twickenham yesterday. Her family and friends are desperately urging anyone with information to come forward.

Gerda pops up on screen. There’s a microphone in her face and she’s standing in the doorway of my house looking drained and wild-eyed. Her voice shakes.

‘She hasn’t been seen for over twenty-four hours. This really is extremely distressing and urgent. We’ve got two grandchildren, the youngest only twelve weeks old. We plead with anyone who has seen Eloïse to contact us immediately.’

19 March 2015
Komméno Island, Greece

It’s morning. The sky outside the porthole window is grey and brooding. It’s so cold that the bedsheets feel damp to the touch. It takes a few moments to get my bearings. Sleep seems to have made a huge difference to how I feel. The terrible pain in my breasts has stopped. My head isn’t as sore, either. Still, when I move across the floor of the attic to the door, I find it locked, or jammed. Either way, it won’t budge, and it takes a minute or two of pounding my fists against the wood for Joe to come and open it. He explains that the wind must have caught it and offers to help me down the stairs, but I refuse. I cling to the old wooden banister and take each step very carefully.

Eventually I find the bathroom, close the door, testing the lock several times before sinking down to the ground. There’s no shower in here, just a sink and an old tin bathtub with rusty taps and a cobwebbed window. The water doesn’t seem to run any other temperature than ice cold. Sariah tells me they get their water from a cistern out by the hay barn so it’s not particularly plentiful.

I peel off the pyjamas that Hazel lent me and study the naked woman in the small shaving mirror above the sink. This woman who is me. She is Caucasian, slender, somewhere between thirty and forty, with thick honey-blonde hair to her shoulders. A long face, skinny arms and round hips, the chest streaked with blue veins. Her shoulders are defined, and beneath a layer of loose skin around the belly button is a firm six-pack. Lines fan around the eyes. A small, irregular nose, light green eyes and ears that stick out a little. No tattoos or scars. Her nails are unpainted and short, filed into neat ovals. Her left cheekbone and forehead are horribly bruised, and there are aubergine-coloured splodges on her shins, her right hip, and both arms.

Why don’t I recognise myself? Why isn’t my body familiar? Where do I live? Do I work? Do I have kids? The white space in my mind is luminous, unyielding. Why don’t I know my own name?

Gingerly I stretch out the arm that doesn’t hurt as badly as the other and touch the mirror to confirm that this is my reflection. I want her to talk back to me, to tell me my secrets. I read this body like a puzzle, a remnant of a larger story.

There’s a groove around the base of several fingers, as though I was wearing rings that have since vanished – the third and fourth fingers of my right hand, my wedding finger. Was I married? I rub my thumb up and down the faint circular indentations in my skin, willing myself to remember the ring that has vanished, if not the person who gave it to me.

I find a bar of soap on the side of the bath and slowly scrub the sour smell of brine off my skin and out of my hair, careful not to touch the cut at the right side. It stings so badly. Hazel told me she washed the clothes I was found in yesterday – a bra, pants, yellow T-shirt and jeans – and that she put them on the washing line outside to dry. She also lent me some of her clothes.

Wrapping a towel around me, I stagger painfully to the kitchen and out the back door to the stone steps that lead down into the grassy patch at the back of the house. I find my jeans, T-shirt, bra and pants all swaying on the line alongside the life jacket. I finger it, pulling at the straps.

A wave of dizziness forces me to sit down on a patch of dry grass. I can’t bear to think that someone else died on the trip to this place. Someone I loved, perhaps. After a long while I force myself to focus on my surroundings. George asked me before why I came here. There must be a reason. I must know this place.

I sit for a while and study the farmhouse, pitched as it is on a sudden incline, subjecting it to buffeting winds. It’s bigger than I expected, given how small the rooms seem inside: a tall stone building with patches of crumbling masonry, a spatter of orange tiles on the ground indicating that the roof is in disrepair, too. Metal balconies jut out from two of the upper windows that are crowned by explosions of vibrant pink flowers, lending the place a certain rustic charm. Part of the roof is flat, and there I can make out something that looks like a flat-screen TV with a huge battery attached to the top of it. Perhaps a solar panel – that would explain how the farmhouse has electricity.

A number of outbuildings are visible at the bottom of the hill, rusting and overgrown farm machinery indicating the property’s former purpose. After a while, a feeling of familiarity stirs in me, a small nudge from the recesses of my mind telling me I’ve seen this place before. It’s enough to get me to my feet to have a look around.

The island isn’t what I expected. It looks neglected, abandoned, with stone relics visible in the distance of what appear to be unfinished houses. The earth is dry and parched, and the nearby trees are gnarled and overgrown and filled with thorns. There’s a sense that everything here has to work very hard to survive.

I wonder how anyone would even begin to walk around the island – there’s a narrow dirt path leading from the farmhouse to the trees below, but I don’t imagine there could ever have been vehicles here. It’s a bit of a wilderness. Beautiful, yes, but a savage beauty – not the sort of place anyone would come for a holiday.

I make out three buildings on the north side, the closest one clearly a house that someone didn’t bother to finish. On the west side there are a handful of small beaches strung along the coast, but they appear rocky and treacherous. The ocean wraps itself around the island like a blue cloth dotted with the blurry outlines of boats and landmasses.

Did I really travel that distance across the sea alone? If I was drunk, did I really have the presence of mind to wear a life jacket? Did someone else accompany me? Did they drown?

It is daunting to think that the island is uninhabited. I can’t fathom how Joe, Hazel, Sariah and George don’t feel marooned out here. Or maybe they do, now that their boat is gone.

I check that no one is watching before stepping into my knickers and jeans, then slip the towel to my waist and twist awkwardly into my bra and the yellow T-shirt, my muscles shrieking with the slightest movement. Both the T-shirt and jeans are good quality, both with designer labels. Am I the sort of person who would buy a designer T-shirt? It doesn’t strike a chord. But then, nothing does. I have the sense of being reborn, wiped clean. The ghost of someone else.

When I turn to go back inside I see movement between the house and the outbuilding that looks like a small barn. Panic spears me, until I make out who it is: George, lurking in the shade. Did he see me get dressed?

‘Hello?’

He ambles down the hill towards me, a cigarette in one hand. He looks different in the clear light. Quite tall and portly, his head shining bald. Dressed in a tatty white polo shirt and tracksuit bottoms. Mid-forties, perhaps more. He throws me a salute.

‘Hello.’

‘Hi.’

‘You feeling any better?’

I try to smile. ‘A little.’

He wiggles the cigarette at me. ‘You want one of these bad boys?’

I shake my head, then pause, wondering if an automatic urge will take over. It doesn’t. I’m not a smoker, then.

‘Thanks for the offer.’

‘You’re welcome.’

A moment passes. ‘You’re not writing?’ I ask.

He takes a long drag before answering. ‘Today’s the day I usually head over to Chania for supplies. I might go take a look at the beaches on the west side, see if our boat turns up.’

‘I’m sorry about your boat,’ I say. ‘If it turns out I’m rich, I’ll buy a replacement.’

George offers a laugh. ‘Hardly your fault. Pretty sure the insurance will cover it.’

This brings a great deal of relief. Maybe I misread his mood before – I felt he was irritated with me, that he blamed me for their boat sinking. He seems less brooding in this light, less intimidating and not as tall. I’m about to ask about getting to Crete, when he says:

‘I contacted Nikodemos half an hour ago.’

‘Nikodemos – the man who owns the island?’

He nods. ‘Well, I spoke to his wife. She says he’s out of town for the next couple of days but she’ll get him to come out here and pick you up on Monday evening.’

I give a gasp. ‘Thank you so much. That’s fantastic news.’

George grins. ‘And he’s bringing food. You ever tried mizithropita?’

I shake my head, only half hearing what he’s saying, but he persists.

‘Gorgeous. Ah! No food like Greek food, I’m telling you. It’s why all the Greeks live so long. I’ve put in a special request for him to bring squid, too. Sounds disgusting, doesn’t it? Squid. Not something I’ve ever tried in England, but here, you don’t want to miss it.’

He’s still talking but I’m thinking about this man, Nikodemos, trying to figure out if his name sounds familiar or not. I decide that it doesn’t, and so I wonder if he will help me contact the embassy and explain to them what happened. From there we can work out how I ended up here, and more importantly how to get back to whoever may be going crazy looking for me.

‘You’re sure you want to leave this place?’ George asks. I notice he’s standing closer, studying my body language. The wind carries a sharp smell of his body odour. I turn my head but he doesn’t notice, pointing at the hills ahead. ‘Paradise, here.’

The island is more of a wilderness than a paradise.

‘Yeah, yeah, I know, a bit shabby,’ he says, as though reading my mind. ‘Well, there are some interesting ruins around. Trust me, you’ve hit the jackpot, coming here.’

‘Have I?’

‘Mmmm. Archaeological treasure trove, this place. Real mythology to it.’

I give him a look that says I have no idea what this means, and he grins, pleased that he gets to fill me in.

‘You see that?’ He leans towards me and points at a cave in the distance. ‘Apparently, that there’s the actual cave that King Minos used to send boys and girls into as food for the Minotaur. Thousands of years old, that is.’

I glance at him. ‘Minotaur?’

‘Ah, forgotten your Greek myths, too, then?’ He chuckles. ‘They say King Minos had a son who was half-human, half-bull. Instead of killing him, he built a network of caves, a labyrinth, and put the kid at the end of it to make sure he never got out. Then Theseus, the hero, said he’d go in with a ball of wool to help him retrace his steps. And he found the Minotaur.’

It crosses my mind that he’s telling me this to unnerve me, and if I’m honest it does. Perhaps I sense that this place has been abandoned for a reason.

‘They found some helmets not so long ago, couple of swords, I think,’ George says when I don’t react to his myth. ‘Bigwigs from the museums came over, took the lot.’

He’s still trying to convince me not to leave. I say, ‘Thank you, and it’s tempting, but no. There must be people who are going frantic without me.’

He sniffs, glances down, like a rejected schoolboy. ‘Well then, you’ve got a little while to enjoy this place. Six miles square. That’s how big the island is. Or small, depending how you look at it. The dock’s about a fifty-minute walk in that direction, by the old hotel.’

A small flicker of hope stirs in me. ‘Hotel?’

‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ he says. ‘Went bust a while back, so it’s nothing but a shell. Investors stripped it bare. The recession hit this place very hard. There are derelict apartment buildings to the east side, too. Money ran out. Builders packed up and left before they got finished. Now the carcasses are just sitting there, empty. Shame.’ He nods ahead in the distance. ‘Some interesting things to see round here, though. Loads of interesting flora and fauna, if you’re into that sort of thing. Sariah can tell you all about the plants and flowers. Animals, too. All sorts here. You got your geckos, your tortoises, rabbits, hedgehogs, snakes …’

I shudder. ‘Snakes?’

‘Not fond of snakes?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Pretty harmless round here. It’s the spiders you want to watch out for. Oh, and wild goats. I reckon they keep to the hills over there to the right, near the hotel. Wicked things, they are. Kri-kri goats. More ibex than goat. Big looping horns.’ He makes the shape of the horns with his hands, swooping from the base of his skull to his chest. ‘According to folklore, they’re the offspring of the Minotaur.’

‘I’ll take that with a pinch of salt.’

He winks. ‘Stay well clear if you see them.’

I squint into the distance at the hills veiled with blue mist. ‘I will.’

‘Hey, guys.’

I turn to my left and see Joe coming down the steps from the kitchen door, a laptop under his arm. He is tall, thin as a string, and walks with a loping gait.

‘You off to find a writing spot?’ George asks him. Then, to me: ‘Joe doesn’t like writing in the same place every day. Weirdo.’

Joe stops next to us and looks out. ‘Think I’ll try one of the beaches.’

I ask if I can come with him, if I can see the beach where my boat landed. ‘Perhaps we might even spot the boat that got unmoored,’ I say, turning to George.

Joe frowns and looks me up and down. ‘I mean, I guess. It’s a fair walk, though. Are you sure you’re feeling up to it?’

I nod, though I’m not sure I am. I can’t quite believe that the whole island is uninhabited. Sariah – or maybe it was George – said it was only a couple of miles long. I can make that if I take it slowly.

We veer off the path towards a bank covered in tall reeds, stiff and unyielding as horse whips, then pick our way through an overgrown lemon grove. I suspect Joe is keen to march a good deal faster, but he waits patiently for me to keep up, holding back the branches and vines for me to pass through. This part of the island resembles a jungle, all tangled branches and rotting citrus fruit underfoot. I reach up and pluck one of the fruits that looks like a small green plum. It has a sour taste, and when I bite into it a walnut drops out. There are mounds of cacti with spiny paddles, and despite all my efforts to give them a wide berth I end up getting pricked in the legs.

I’m still barefoot – my shoes must have been lost at sea – so I have to tread carefully across the soil, which is surprisingly warm. What I do wish for, though, is a pair of sunglasses. The sun is piercingly bright out here, with virtually no shade.

‘Do you think you’ll publish a book after this?’ I ask Joe, more to keep up the conversation than anything else. ‘Is that what the retreat is for?’

He shrugs and tosses the rind. ‘I don’t know.’ He stops and looks down at me, then removes his sunglasses. ‘Here,’ he says, handing them to me. ‘You seem bothered by the light.’

‘Are you sure?’ I say, reluctant to take them.

‘Absolutely.’ He plucks his spectacles from a pocket and puts them back on his face. ‘Can hardly see without these on, anyway.’ He surveys the coast behind me. ‘I think I’ll try one of the caves to write in today. I won’t need them in there.’

He stops and points at an inlet on the west side of the island. ‘You might not see them, but if you look past the Cyprus trees there’s a row of black dots. They’re ancient caves. Pretty cool. Atmospheric. I can take you, if you like.’

I’m already feeling a lot weaker than I expected, so I tell him that maybe I will in a day or so.

‘Well, we’re close to Bone Beach,’ he says.

‘We are?’

A nod. ‘It’s a bit of a climb down. I’m not sure you’re well enough to manage it.’

I tell him I can manage, but he insists on my taking his arm before negotiating a narrow pathway that leads down to a rocky outcrop. A few moments later, I’m gazing down at calm, azure waters, gently lapping at the rocks below.

‘The tide is in,’ I say, straining to see any sign of a boat.

He grins. ‘No such thing as a tide here.’

‘No tide?’

‘Not really. Something to do with the Mediterranean not being affected by the Atlantic.’

I think back to the other night. ‘I definitely saw waves crashing against the rocks.’

He nods. ‘Yeah, it’s the currents between Crete and Libya. We get big cruise ships passing by every now and then, too. Causes waves. Or it might have been the storm. Here, take my arm again.’ He crooks a pale elbow at me. ‘Bone Beach isn’t much further.’

He reveals a path to the right of the outcrop that drops down to another level. He tells me to be careful and follow behind as he presses against the rockface and moves along. Finally, he stops and turns carefully.

‘There is a faster route, but I don’t think you’d make it today. Some climbing involved. Look down to the right.’

I see a chalky beach about twenty feet below. The name of the beach is immediately clear – the rocks do resemble bones. They are muscular and ribbed, the colour of old teeth. From here it looks as though a giant is pushing upward out of the ground, two white rocks the shape of shoulder bones on either side of a strip of small rocks mimicking a spine. And there, right at the edge of the water, is a wooden boat, two long masts jutting from the centre. Red sails splay out across the milky sand like the huge wings of a Jurassic butterfly.

‘Does that help you remember?’ Joe asks.

‘That’s the boat I came in?’ I say, and his silence confirms it. Astonishment doesn’t even begin to cover how I feel. I have no memory, nothing, that indicates a link between me and that boat. It may as well be a spacecraft as a boat.

‘Are you all right?’ Joe asks.

I tell him that I’m fine, but I feel scared and dazed. I guess I’d expected everything to come together upon seeing the boat. The fact I feel nothing, remember nothing, despite being able to see the very vessel that brought me here, is deeply troubling.

I turn and look up at the cliff path that leads back to the farmhouse. It looks treacherous.

‘How on earth did I get up there?’

‘George carried you,’ Joe explains. ‘I gave you mouth-to-mouth.’ He shrugs. ‘Like I said, you were lucky.’

Further out to sea are shadows of other islands, boats, a cruise ship. The possibilities for my origins are daunting, endless. I feel panicky again, like I can’t get my breath.

‘I’m glad Nikodemos is coming,’ I say. ‘I need to find out where I’ve come from. Who I am.’

‘Still no memory of your name, then?’

I shake my head.

‘Have you considered that perhaps you don’t want to remember?’

I turn and try to read his expression, the tone of his voice, but I don’t know him well enough to work out whether he’s joking.

‘That sounds dramatic. Why wouldn’t I want to remember?’

He shrugs and looks back down at the boat, unaware of how stricken I am.

‘I’d say that the fact that you were on a boat in the middle of nowhere suggests you were running from something. Or sailing, rather. And there’s no other island nearby that you might have been headed for. Why would you come to this island?’

I think about this for a long minute, willing the answer to come to mind.

‘I really don’t know.’

‘Can I make a suggestion?’

‘Of course.’

A smile. ‘Why don’t you try writing?’

‘Writing?’

He nods. ‘It really does stir up the subconscious. As therapy, for want of a better description. It’s helped me with a lot of stuff. Childhood stuff.’ He bites his lip and looks down, a shadow passing across his face. ‘Anyway. It might help you remember your name.’

‘I’ll give it a go,’ I say with a shrug.

He brightens. ‘I’ll give you a notebook and pen. Get you started. Come on, then. Let’s get you back on higher ground.’

The climb saps the last of my energy. By the time I reach the top, I’m so out of breath that I want to be sick.

‘Sit down,’ Joe instructs me. ‘Lean forward, like this.’

He sits beside me and demonstrates. I copy him but still feel awful. My hips and shins ache and I’m weak from thirst. I decide to head back to the farmhouse and tell Joe to go on, but he insists on accompanying me. This time I head for the other route past more trees and shrubs surrounded by grass. Grass is easier on my joints. The ground rises up sharper than I’d realised, affording me a view of an elephant-shaped headland on the west of the island, a clean cleft of shimmering white rock.

A rhythmic gust of wind keeps me from feeling like I might drop to my knees. Joe steadies me.

‘Keep back from the cliff,’ he warns, though the wind is so strong his voice sounds far away.

I sit down again, pressing my hands behind me and lifting my face to the sun.

‘You don’t look well,’ Joe says. ‘Why don’t you stay here? I’ll run up to the farmhouse and bring you some water. Maybe I can get George and we can carry you, save you walking?’

I shake my head, but even this small movement makes me feel woozy. My vision is beginning to blur at the edges. Joe doesn’t wait for any further prompting but gets to his feet and begins to run up the hill.

It’s then that I hear it: a raw, desperate cry, almost human. It’s coming from the other side of the cliff. I crawl on all fours to the rocky edge and look over. The sea is below, licking the rocks. Dozens of nests dot the narrow ridges of the rockface at either side of me. Black birds with white faces sway against the wind, wings impressively wide, attending to white fluffy chicks bobbing in the nests, ravenous.

The shrieking rises to a clamour, a piercing wail. The sound of a cat or perhaps an infant. I sit back on my hips and all at once there is a burning sensation in my breasts, a sudden pain searing through them. I am alarmed – it’s as though the noise is causing it. I have no idea what is happening.

I pull my T-shirt forward and peer down, expecting to find blood there. There’s a slight wetness around my breasts, but no blood. A sugary smell rises up. Sweet and milky.

I turn and stagger back up the hill, hot, sharp stones digging into the soles of my feet and my breasts leaking, soaking my shirt. Something is terribly wrong, and I barely know how to describe it.

18 March 2015
Potter’s Lane, Twickenham

Lochlan: When I pull into our driveway with a screech of tyres there is already a police van on the kerb opposite, and a silver Mercedes facing me has a man and a woman in the front seats who jump to attention when they see me emerge from my car. I stride towards the front door and they race after me with that surprising paparazzi speed, calling out, ‘Mr Shelley! Mr Shelley!’ And I say ‘not now’ and shut the door in their faces.

Inside I can hear Cressida screaming and Magnus barking at someone down the phone. There is a man in the front room in my favourite armchair and a woman wearing a crisp white shirt and trouser suit. She rises to her feet when she sees me, and I hold up a hand to tell her to wait a second while I search out my screeching daughter in the kitchen.

Cressida is in Gerda’s arms, fighting off a bottle. I pluck the bottle from Gerda’s hand – it is ice-cold – and toss it in the microwave.

‘It has to be warm, otherwise she won’t take it,’ I say. How much I’ve learned in the last twenty-four hours.

‘Well, it would have been nice to know that before you left,’ Gerda snaps.

I take Cressida, struck by a sudden affection for her, so small and fragile in my arms, her cries turning to whimpers when I hold her. She roots at my chest, as though expecting to find a nipple there. Not finding it, she’s back to shrieking within seconds.

The microwave bleeps. I take out the bottle, give it a vigorous shake and place the teat into Cressie’s mouth. She sucks greedily, making piglet noises and bunching her fists tightly against the bottle. The milk foams against the sides of her mouth and her eyelids flicker, as though she’s spent all her energy railing against cold milk and is now about to fall into a cloud-cushioned coma of satiation. She drains the bottle in about five minutes, but as soon as she’s done she starts to cry again.

Frustrated, I pass her back to Gerda, who kisses the crown of her head and manages to console her. I head back to the living room to speak with the police.

The male detective leans forward and offers his hand. He is tall, serious-looking and broad-shouldered, early to mid forties, pale-haired, dressed in a grey suit with a navy tie. He reminds me of Archie Sims, one of the posh kids from Year Ten who used to throw wet paper towels at me in the playground. He doesn’t smile but gives me an iron handshake.

‘Detective Sergeant Roy Canavan. I’m the OIC. Officer in charge. This is my colleague, DS Welsh.’

The female detective is young: mid-twenties, soft face, light brown hair wrapped up in a bun. She extends her hand and nods out the window. ‘Seems we’ve already got some attention from the press.’

‘Yeah.’

I’m not quite sure where to sit, and it occurs to me that my own home has become rearranged by the situation, this thing that shouldn’t be happening, by these people who I shouldn’t be encountering. It’s like I’m visiting a place that reminds me of my house, and I’m waiting for someone to tell me where to put myself and how to act. I almost offer Detective-Sergeant-Canavan-the-OIC a stiff drink, and only as the words are about to tumble from my mouth do I realise this is probably not wise. He and DS Welsh sit on the sofa and each pulls out a notepad, ready for business. I take a seat in the armchair adjacent to them.

‘Mrs Bachmann – your grandmother-in-law? – said that some of the neighbours came forward this morning,’ DS Canavan says. ‘Mrs Shahjalal’s the one who raised the alarm, is that right?’

I nod. ‘She called me at work yesterday afternoon. She’d thought to check in on Eloïse after a delivery couldn’t be made. Good job, too, otherwise Max and Cressida would have been alone all night and I wouldn’t have known.’

It’s the first time I’ve said this aloud. What would have happened if Mrs Shahjalal hadn’t spotted Max? Cressida’s so young that she could have become dangerously dehydrated in a matter of hours. Max is too young to know how to contact anyone. He might have tried to feed himself and Cressida. I can’t bear to think of it. The tragedies that might have unfolded are too great.

‘She mentioned that UPS tried to make a delivery here,’ he continues. ‘We’re trying to locate the driver involved in case he heard or witnessed anything. One of your other neighbours from this side of the street – Mr McWhirter – said he saw a car pull up outside your house yesterday around eleven o’clock in the morning.’

I straighten. ‘Did he get the registration details?’

‘No. He said it was a white saloon, not sure of the make or model. He’s certain it mounted the pavement and remained parked for ten or twenty minutes. We’ll make enquiries with local taxi companies. Another neighbour, Mrs Malvern from number twenty-nine, said she thought she heard a shout sometime in the morning but couldn’t be sure.’

‘My colleague noted that you had a faulty lock on the back door of this property, is that right?’

I nod, crushed. I should have fixed it. ‘Yes.’

‘There’s been a couple of incidents over the last month in this area, so we’ll make enquiries about that.’

‘Incidents?’

‘Burglaries. You said no valuables were taken, correct?’

‘As far as I can tell.’

He searches my face, so I add: ‘I work away Monday through Thursday. So I suppose I’m not completely up to speed with everything in the house.’

‘We’ll do a sweep of the door for prints.’

DS Welsh tells me they want to ask me a few more questions, although a ‘few’ in this case means so many I lose count. Medical numbers, insurance company details, schools we went to, everyone and anyone we have contact with. They want to know more about my job, about Eloïse’s job, and I tell them that eight years ago she set up Children of War, a charity that offers emotional and educational support for refugee children. The detectives are deeply interested in this and take copious notes. When she set it up, what kind of work it involves. Their questions make me realise how much I don’t know about the charity.

‘Any colleagues holding a grudge against her?’ DS Canavan asks. ‘Anyone who owes the charity money?’

‘I’m afraid I have no idea.’

He lifts his eyebrows. ‘She didn’t talk about her job? The people she worked with?’

‘I guess that Eloïse was so good at her job that everything looked to be very smooth.’ Even to my own ears I don’t sound very convincing. Right before I go dig out my Bad Husband sackcloth, I remember that she really did make most things look effortless. That’s why I didn’t tend to ask. If anything was good or bad, I expected that she’d tell me. And of course, she’s currently at home full-time with the kids.

He taps the pen against the page. ‘Even so, it’s important that we get a complete picture of the events leading up to her disappearance. Any media interviews she might have given, anything work-related at all, could prove extremely useful.’

‘What about her mental state?’ Welsh asks from the other armchair.

‘Eloïse’s mental state?’ I say. ‘What about it?’

‘Well, she gave birth recently. Sometimes women can experience mood swings and depression.’

I shake my head. ‘She was fine.’

‘Has she ever had any signs of depression or emotional instability in the past?’

A memory rises up. ‘Well, she saw a counsellor for a while after Max was born, but other than that she was fine.’

‘What counsellor?’ Canavan says, and I can see he’s writing down everything I’ve said and underlining it.

I rub my face, trying to think. ‘I honestly don’t remember the name. I mean, it was over four years ago. A health visitor kept going on about El’s moods after our son was born. Despite El saying she was fine, a bit tired, she had to go talk to someone. But she was discharged very swiftly. It was nothing.’

‘We’ll look into that,’ Welsh says, throwing a look at Canavan.

‘I really don’t think this has anything to do with her going missing,’ I say, fearful that they’ll waste time looking into something completely irrelevant. There’s no way this has anything to do with El having a bad day.

‘We need to rule this one out,’ Canavan says firmly. ‘We see a lot of cases where a loved one goes missing because they don’t want to admit that they’re struggling and don’t know where to turn to for help.’

‘I’m pretty sure my wife doesn’t fall into that category.’

He ignores me. ‘Anything else you can think of? Anything missing, any personal belongings gone? Even a single credit card can make a huge difference to the investigation.’

I shake my head, but then an image jumps into my mind: the Swiss passport. I tell Welsh and Canavan that it’s gone, but that I haven’t seen it in a long time anyway. ‘She never used it,’ I say. ‘More a token of her heritage than anything. Besides, if she’d used it to travel overseas I’d see it on the credit card statements. But I thought I’d mention it.’

Both Welsh and Canavan react to this a lot stronger than I’d have anticipated. ‘She could have used cash to travel. You don’t keep any at home?’

I tell him we do, but it’s all still there.

Magnus and I begin to draw up a list of everyone El’s ever had any association with, while Canavan writes up his notes. He interrupts Magnus and I to ask more questions: addresses and telephone numbers, a list of Eloïse’s support network. I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t recall the names of many of her friends and have no idea where they live. I promise to get the information off Facebook, but he tells me there’s no need: they’ll do their own investigation of my wife’s social media activity and check out her emails. For this, they require every device she has access to: her laptop, tablet, and mobile phone. They’ll check our bank accounts, Eloïse’s charity, and they’ll be speaking to our GP.

‘So, what happens now?’ I ask as the interview comes to an end. I feel wrung out.

‘There are a number of steps in cases of missing persons,’ Canavan answers. ‘Eloïse is what we call high risk, given that she may not be fully recovered physically from the birth of your daughter. First, we’ll need to do a search of the property.’

I stare at him. ‘A search of the property?’ Is he insinuating that I’ve murdered my wife and buried her under the gladioli?

DS Welsh must spot whatever crosses my face because she jumps in to explain. ‘We’re aware that two small children are without a mother right now, and that Eloïse recently gave birth. Both things combined make this case a high priority. We really want to make sure we can locate her as fast as we can. Searching the property is standard procedure.’

Welsh is convincingly sympathetic, and her role in this partnership becomes clear. She has a soft manner, the kind I usually associate with early years’ teachers and childminders.

Once I’ve ascertained that I’m not about to be dragged from my children in handcuffs, I step away from the doorway, granting them entry to the stairs. Swiftly and efficiently they move throughout the house, peeling back the layers of our lives.

The search takes most of the afternoon. After some debate over whether or not I should send Max to nursery, Gerda and Magnus drop him off on the basis that his routine ought not to be too disturbed. Then they pack a baby bag and take Cressida to the park while I pace back and forth from the playroom to the kitchen, listening to the noises of strangers upstairs trawling through our cupboards and drawers, emerging every now and then with a box of toys or paperwork.

In the kitchen, I go through our family paperwork in the oak dresser to find anything that might indicate a reason for all of this, something concrete and reasonable. Receipts, birth certificates, Max’s paintings from nursery. Still no sign of the Swiss passport, and so I phone our bank to make sure that there aren’t any payments pending, no airline tickets booked. Then I turn yet again to El’s laptop and phone, before the police have a chance to take them away. It takes me a while to work out her email password, but finally I crack it: MaxJan11. I spend ages searching carefully for train or flight tickets, but there’s nothing. I sign into her Facebook account. Her most recent status update hardly suggests anything out of the ordinary:

Big smiles from Cressida all morning! Love this girl

She had sent text messages to her friends Rachael, Mimi and Niamh about meeting up for coffee and the park and an eBay offer for a toddler bed. She’d made recent calls to the dry cleaner’s, Gerda, and me. Her phone contains hundreds of photographs, a vast percentage taken by Max, it seems – these images are mostly of Max’s nose, hand, and the carpet, with a few blurry shots of Cressida in various states of discomfort. There are several blurry ones of Eloïse, too, and on seeing these images I can’t help but fall into a chair and wrestle with the urge to turn into a big mushy puddle of emotion. It’s more out of frustration, or perhaps a concoction of extreme emotions, that I find myself with tears running down my face.

Max must have taken these. El seemed unaware that they were being taken. In one she is asleep in Max’s bed, his Thomas the Tank Engine bed covers visible. In another she is sitting cross-legged on the floor by his Peppa Pig set. In another she is captured from behind as she stands at the back door, her head turned to the right. I flick to the next image, then go back.

She is holding something in her hand.

I zoom in to it. The image is blurry, and at first I dismiss the small white object as a pen, but on closer inspection I can determine that the ghostly white spiral above her hand is smoke winding upward like a thin white ribbon. A cigarette.

The date stamp is 7 February 2015. This year. A month ago. I study it for a long time, wondering if it is Eloïse in the picture or someone else, maybe one of her friends. El has never smoked. She was staunchly opposed to the whole concept of smoking, would choke and wave her hands if anyone lit up close by. It was actually embarrassing how vocal she’d get about it. I quit soon after we got together because she threatened to dump me if I didn’t.

If for some reason she suddenly decided to take it up, surely she would have told me, of all people? And why when Cressida was barely eight weeks old? Eloïse decided to become more or less vegan to ensure that Cressida got the best nutrition while being breastfed – so, smoking? I’m amazed. It doesn’t seem to fit the picture, and yet here she is. Smoking. I almost want to laugh, it’s that bizarre. I have no way of even beginning to interpret what this discovery means.

I flick through all the images, studying them for any signs of anything equally mis-fitting. One of the videos shows El laughing and clapping as Cressida kicked her legs on the play mat. This is consistent with the woman I know and love, and so I give a big sigh of relief, as though I’ve found her again. Another clip shows her in the living room sleeping as Max tells the camera to be very quiet and not wake Mummy up.

I make a mental note to think carefully about how to ask Max about Mummy smoking.

As I’m figuring out how to work the dishwasher, DS Canavan comes into the kitchen holding out a baby monitor. ‘We’re going to have our technical team look over these, if that’s OK?’

I nod. ‘Yes, of course.’ I tell him I’ve already checked them in the hope that they might tell us where she’s gone. He perks up at this, and I feel gut-kicked all over again when I tell him they were turned off.

‘Have you the one set of monitors, or are there any more around the house?’

This, I can answer.

‘We have four. A camera in each of the kids’ bedrooms, one in the playroom and one overlooking the landing upstairs. They’re wireless.’

‘And did you link up the babycam to any online account?’

‘My wife had them synched to her phone. I’ve already checked. She had the monitors switched off.’

Canavan nods.

‘We’ll get our tech team to check it out.’

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