There’s been a breakthrough! DC Cherry arrives mid-morning to tell us that the newly circulated photographs have prompted a flurry of fresh sightings, one in particular placing Avril and Daisy together on a regular basis just a few miles along the coast.
‘It was actually one of your local shop-owners in Freshwater who gave us our first lead. We went in to follow up after Avril’s call to you was traced back to the call box outside the store.’ Cherry is smoking in the back doorway of the kitchen, while I fill the kettle and let Emily and James ask all the questions. ‘Apparently Avril has been a regular customer there over the past couple of weeks, but they never suspected her because she didn’t look like the woman in the original photograph.’
James shakes his head. ‘Of course she didn’t. That photograph was so out of focus, it could have been anyone.’
‘She seemed completely normal, they said, which is encouraging. And then we got a call from the bus company that runs the service from Alum Bay, telling us that one of the drivers thinks he’s picked her up – her and Daisy – on a number of occasions, which led us to suspect she must be staying at a holiday property in that area. We’ve had the entire team on it since the early hours, phoning round all the property agents.’
‘And?’ Emily asks, taking the coffee mug from me.
DC Cherry smiles, and I realise I’ve never seen him so animated, never heard him speak with such fervour. Perhaps he’d rather be out there investigating, instead of stuck here with us.
‘You’ve found them?’ James gasps.
‘No, no – not yet,’ Cherry replies, reverting to his safer expression of seriousness. ‘But we have found the house. It’s a remote coastguard’s cottage, tucked away right up near the Needles. DCI Jacobs is over there now with forensics. Apparently there’s no sign of them in the property itself, but we’ve found her car and – there are signs that they’ve been there recently.’
‘What signs?’ Emily demands, fear pulsing in her voice. ‘What signs?’
‘Nothing alarming, don’t worry. Baby clothes, a makeshift crib, jars of baby food, that kind of thing. And Mrs King’s personal belongings are still there, so we don’t think she’s gone far.’ DC Cherry puts his hand on James’s shoulder. ‘Don’t look so worried, please. We think this is good news. All those things – the clothes and food – they all indicate that Daisy’s being well looked after.’
One after the other I reach out to embrace Emily and James, and I’m so overjoyed at the news that I want to shout it from the rooftops. ‘We’re going to get her back, Ems! Oh, God, I’m so relieved!’
And then she slaps me with her words.
‘What do you mean, we? You’re not her mother, Jess. I’m her mother. You don’t have any right to feel relieved.’
DC Cherry and James look stunned.
‘I just meant – you know how much I love Daisy, I just –’
But she doesn’t let me finish. ‘You have no idea what this has been like for me, Jessica. No idea at all. Because you’ve never been a mother, have you? You haven’t got a clue.’
DC Cherry has left now, instructing us to stay put and wait for news. But it’s impossible. None of us can stay still. James has been pacing the ground floor, phoning Chloe, telling her to come home, checking the BBC headlines every five minutes to see if there are any updates. Emily is wide-eyed, and I know she’s taken extra tablets this morning because she has that glassy look about her as she sits in her corner seat, staring at her own hands, turning them over this way and that. It’s strange to see her so helpless; she was always the strong one, the decisive one. The leader. Look at her now, the way she just waits for life to happen to her, waits for others to sort things out, to bring her the solutions she wants. It’s as though the loss of her child has disabled her; or perhaps rather it has given her permission to opt out, to give up all control. If I were Daisy’s mother, I think, I’d be in the car right now, driving like the clappers to reach that house, to scour the coast and paths that surround the place, to find my little girl. If I were Daisy’s mother, I wouldn’t leave a thing to chance; I’d do everything in my power to get her back.
As though she can hear my thoughts, Emily tilts her head a fraction to appraise me. It’s a tiny stand-off: me propped against the island unit, her balled up in her armchair in the corner of the dining room. Our eyes are locked in silent combat. She hates me just for being here; I hate her for her hatred. ‘Wake me up when there’s news,’ she says to no one in particular, and she heads for the staircase and is gone.
There’s something of an ending in those few words, and without warning James stops his pacing and rests his head on my shoulder, wrapping his arms up around me, at once strong and needful, and I don’t want to let him go. Even when Chloe lets herself in through the back door, we don’t move, but wait for her to join us, to join us in our tangled pillar of care and grief and relief and yearning.
‘Shall we drive there?’ I whisper, and the pair of them pull back, all eyes conferring.
‘To the Needles?’ James asks. ‘But DC Cherry said –’
‘I don’t care what DC Cherry said!’ I exclaim, pushing between them and snatching the car keys from the hook. ‘Well?’
And then we’re in the car, the three of us, hurtling along hedge-lined lanes with the windows rolled down and the sharp January air rushing in at us – and the sense of anticipation is exhilarating. We’re going to find Daisy, I know it, and Chloe knows it and James knows it, and we’re doing it together.
At the foot of the winding approach to the Needles we find the road blocked with police tape and we’re forced to park in the Alum Bay car park, where we abandon the car, rushing past the glassblowing centre and the sand shop and the games kiosk with its Tin Can Alley and Hook-a-Duck and traditional Isle of Wight rock sticks – and James’s phone rings, bringing us all to a sliding halt. He answers it.
‘Jesus – Jesus, no,’ he says, and I know it’s Emily because I can hear her hysterical cries even from several feet away. ‘Emily, calm down – please – I’m here now, I’m at Alum Bay. It’s a mistake, Ems. The journalists are always getting these things wrong. It’s got to be a mistake! I’ll call you back.’
He cuts off the call, and he’s suddenly so shock-pale that I don’t want to ask him what she said. I don’t want to know. He looks around, turning in circles as though searching for the nearest exit. ‘Chloe, what’s the quickest way to get down the bay?’
‘Alum Bay?’ she replies. ‘The chair-lifts, I guess.’
And we’re running again – sprinting at speed towards the old-fashioned ski-lift that ferries holidaymakers down to the coloured sands below – and Chloe’s begging James to tell her what Emily said. But he refuses; he won’t tell her and I know it’s got to be bad. To our agony, the young man operating the lift raises a flat hand as we approach, pointing to the sign at the turnstile: The chair-lift may not operate in conditions of high wind.
‘Please,’ Chloe begs. Long strands of her copper hair swirl around her head, cruelly reinforcing the turbulent weather conditions. ‘It’s an emergency!’
‘Sorry, the wind’s up at the moment. Might be OK in half an hour or so?’
James runs his hands up over his face, the panic in him mounting. In our rush to leave the house he hasn’t shaved, and I notice how crumpled he looks in his unironed shirt and scuffed shoes. Emily once told me that the rigidity of his routines drove her a little mad: shoe-shining on a Sunday, ironing on a Monday, car wash on a Friday. Perhaps this change in him will please her. ‘Please,’ he begs the young man, ‘it really is a matter of life or death.’
An older man arrives, hands on slow hips, and he nods at the younger chap. ‘What’s the panic?’ he asks and his casual manner is excruciating in the face of James’s turmoil.
‘Just tell him,’ I urge James, clutching my jacket tight at the neck, willing the wind to drop from the sky. ‘Just tell him!’
‘It’s my daughter,’ he says, finally, and he turns his back on Chloe and says slowly and quietly. ‘She’s the baby who’s missing – and they think a body has washed up in the bay below.’
Emily’s words, ‘you’ve never been a mother’, ring in my ears, rushing me back to a time I wish never to revisit, a time of secrets and lies, of another infant taken too early.
I think I knew I was pregnant almost immediately. Something shifted inside me, but it was so fundamentally connected to my terrifying loss of memory that night, and the physical marks left on me, that I failed to acknowledge it until my period was two months overdue. My breasts swelled painfully; tiredness would come upon me like an assault; my appetite changed, ranging from ravenous to sickened. I locked it away, hid it beneath layers of fear and self-loathing, until one day I caught sight of my reflection as I dried from the shower, and I was shocked at the thickening of my waist, at the rivulets of fine veins that converged across my taut stranger’s breasts. A baby, I said quietly into the dense steam of the room, and cautiously I let my fingertips rest on the curve of my stomach, the slightest of curves, imperceptible to anyone but me. Would it be a monster, born out of violence? Somehow, I knew it would not. Already I could feel the heat of the infant, the warm, belonging glow of a nestled secret. No one need know, I told myself, but of course I was being naïve. Because Emily already knew – she’d known before I had – and before I even had the chance to think about how it might be, how my future could be a different one, she took that secret away.
I want to scream into the howling wind, Please, not Daisy too! Please, God, don’t take away another child!
Chloe falls against me, a groan rising up through her juddering torso, and without another word the man at the chair-lift opens the turnstile, refusing our money and helping us into our chairs. James takes the first seat; Chloe and I sit side by side in the next. A body washed ashore. A dead baby.
‘It can’t be,’ I tell Chloe firmly, as I grip her hand in mine, our knotted fingers turning white with the pressure of it. I fix my eyes on the vertical cable ahead. ‘It can’t be her.’
At first, as the chairs descend, all we can see are tree-tops below us, but when the wind whips beneath us, rocking our carriages like swings in a playground, my terror kicks in. There’s the feeblest of bars securing us; the cable above looks ancient and salt-rusted. The carriage swings and tilts, shudders and bucks. My heart pounds, my breaths grow shallow and I think, please, not now, please give me the strength to remain in the moment, to keep it together – and then the trees drop away, along with my stomach, and we see them below. There on the desolate winter beach, a huddle of men and women, arranged around a dark mass of flotsam and weed, their fascinated formation concealing the central object as photographers rush down the coastal steps, clicking away, shouting for news. James’s chair reaches the landing point and he jumps, hitting the sand at a run, quickly followed by Chloe and me, running, running, pushing through the assembled bodies to see the horror we know awaits us at the water’s edge.
It’s a doll. A limbless, sightless doll, pink and grubby, with oil-streaked blonde curls that lift and flourish on the incoming tide. Chloe drops to her knees, her forearms and face pressing into the cold sand, and she sobs with such force and volume that the gathered witnesses step away, frightened at the sight of her unbridled grief. When James and I help her to her feet, she is wet with dark sand and she forces us away, refusing our comfort.
‘Chloe, sweetie, it’s not her,’ James says, holding his hands out beseechingly. ‘It’s not her.’
Chloe shakes her head and takes another step back. ‘You don’t understand,’ she says between racking sobs. ‘It’s all my fault. It’s my fault she got into the house and took Daisy. Avril. It’s because of me she got in.’
‘Of course it wasn’t,’ I tell her, but she waves her hands in front of her face, batting my words away.
‘Yes, it was! Don’t you understand? It was me who left the back door unlocked! Me and Max went back to the house when you were asleep, Jess! We came in the back when you were sleeping on the sofa – to nick some of Dad’s booze – but then you started to cough and wake up so I just grabbed a couple of bottles and we legged it. And I know I didn’t lock it again. We just pulled the door shut and ran.’
‘It’s not your fault, Chloe,’ James says.
Chloe hangs her head and weeps. She looks tiny and broken and covered in sand, and I want to sweep her up inside my jacket and make it all disappear. ‘Yes, it is, Dad. Yes, it fucking is.’