CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Max is at the kitchen table back in Birmingham. The Buccaneer’s Daughter is nothing but a few thousand words saved on a memory card now, destined to be forgotten forever. He senses the looming headlines that, any day, will violently mushroom from the tabloids – a thrilling story in this slow news period – about a girl going missing and being found in the same hotel where Flower Girl Rosie Bowman was staying. But he ignores it and tries to breathe as his fingers fly across the keyboard, creating the thing of beauty that will be his book proposal. Ever since he recognised Hazel for who she actually is, he has had an electric current sparking through him and he shifts on his seat as he types, unable to sit still, wanting to burst through the door and run and run.

Georgie has been found, he reminds himself whenever he feels a dash of guilt that he is manipulating this situation to his advantage. The child is safe in hospital and everything he has planned for Hazel is for her own good. Underneath all of the coal of Georgie’s disappearance is the diamond that is Rosie Bowman. And he, Max, has found her after scrabbling around in the dark for all these years: wrestling storylines from flickering images that scamper through his mind on train rides, the moments just before sleep, or those luxurious seconds just after an orgasm. It’s no way to conjure up stories or ideas.

But now …

Now he can forget The Buccaneer’s Daughter. Whatever the tabloids will claim to be the truth, he is the one who has a vulnerable and lost Rosie Bowman in his palm. Since he had his epiphany in the hotel lounge, Max is clear-headed about his purpose. What he wants will not harm Hazel. It will help her.

As it will help him.

It feels almost too easy. Like one of those mythical moments he has heard other writers describe. The magical muse that sits on your shoulder and dictates the best-selling book to you; those characters that appear fully formed. Not that Max has had any experience of this but he feels it now, reaching towards him over the deep and vast boundaries of the mind.

The Flower Girls: Their True Story.

It’s too good.

Max likes Hazel, he tells himself. He feels protective towards her and, it is his view (he types), that this is the best solution for her, in order for her to move forward and go on with her life.

The problem is – and here, he reluctantly takes his hands off the keyboard – that Hazel cannot remember what happened on that terrible afternoon when Kirstie Swann was murdered, and if she can’t recall the details, then there won’t be enough information to fill a serialised run of newspaper articles, let alone the eighty thousand words required for a book.

And so – Max jerks his attention back to his proposal, mouth twisting with excitement – he has come up with the idea that the Flower Girls should be reunited.

As the words appear on the screen, his heart begins to pound. Such an idea! One that came to him after he’d left Hazel and Jonny. He had halted midway up the stairs to his room, picturing the possibility of the two women meeting for the first time since one was ten and the other six.

Max’s hands drift over his keyboard, thinking about Laurel, about what she must have experienced. Had she tried to contact her family? Had they contacted her? In his cursory research so far, he has discovered that Laurel’s lawyer was a Toby Bowman, her uncle and Gregor Bowman’s elder brother. Why had he stepped into the breach when the parents appeared to have wanted nothing more to do with her?

All this was yet to be discovered.

But it was clear to him that if he could arrange for Rosie and Laurel Bowman to be reunited, to nudge the memories in Rosie’s brain . . . it would be the story of the century. Myra Hindley meets Ian Brady. Maxine Carr goes to visit Ian Huntley.

Max presses the save button, his pulse fizzing, pins and needles in his fingers. Alison will be back from her parents’ tonight with the girls and they can celebrate. He will go to the supermarket now to buy some well-deserved champagne.

Hillier sits staring at the white vinyl floor in the hospital, imagining the millions of germs that are crawling over it unobserved. She is warmer now, at least on the outside. But despite the four plastic cups of sugared tea she has already been given, she feels as though, inside, she will never again be anything other than ice.

She runs through it in her mind over and over again, like rain pouring off a drainpipe into a bucket. The heavy weight of the child, the pinch in her shoulders where Georgie’s fingers grasped like iron. The numbness in her toes, the shivering and trembling. And the terrible stillness in Georgie’s face while she lay rolled up in blankets, dying right before their eyes. The previous twenty-four hours have been so centred on the fixed point that is Georgie that it seems impossible she might soon no longer exist. She looms so large in Hillier’s head that even now the physicality of her remains. She had felt Georgie. She was alive in Hillier’s arms. She had a pulse, faint and tricksy under the fingertips, but it had been there.

Hillier looks at her fingernails, at the dirt collected under them, the red of her knuckles, swollen with cold. She will never come to terms with this job if she’s honest. The swing and shift of it from a dark blanket of nothing for months and months only to be thrust into a tunnel of blazing adrenaline that, when you exit, disappears behind you as if it had never been there in the first place. They’ll be wanting her to go for counselling, she thinks with rueful resignation. Especially if the girl is dead.

Dead.

If a child dies, what’s the point? Hillier thinks. If she’s dead, what’s the point of the five years she lived? Because it’s not this. It’s not any lesson that they’ve learnt from this miserable episode. All today carries with it is sorrow: dragging, weighty sorrow. And Hillier doesn’t know if she can cope with that in the days to come. She can’t let herself think about Georgie’s parents. Her mother, who bore her from her own body. Who held her in her arms when she was born. Did she know then? Hillier wonders fleetingly before pushing the thought away. Did she know then that she would only have her daughter until she was five?

Hillier feels faint, her legs weak, but she forces herself up from her chair, to walk along the hospital corridor, to breathe in the disinfectant, the smell of stew or whatever foodstuff it is they’re boiling the nutrients out of. She walks towards a door at the end of the corridor beyond which shapes converge and dissipate in patterns of urgency. Mr and Mrs Greenstreet are tucked away from her, in another room, cushioned by police officers who will catch them when they fall.

From behind her comes Detective Sergeant Gordon’s voice.

‘She’s out of the woods.’

Hillier whirls round. ‘What did you say?’

‘She’s going to be OK. They’ve stabilised her. Her temperature’s up. She might lose her right big toe and the tip of a finger, but she’s going to live.’

Hillier drops, her knees buckling, her open mouth making no sound.

‘Here, here, I’ve got you,’ Gordon says, bending to grab her under the arms, hoisting her over to a chair. ‘Come on, put your head between your knees.’

Hillier does as she is bidden, pushing her face down, watching the tears drip onto the floor.

‘It’s all right,’ Gordon says gruffly. ‘No one can see. Here you go,’ he says, handing her a tissue.

Hillier sits up and blows her nose, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Fuck,’ she says. ‘Sorry, Sarge.’

Gordon nods, looking straight ahead.

‘Ah,’ Hillier says, exhaling and leaning back. ‘Thank God.’

‘It was dodgy there for a while. Thank the coastguard for the chopper ride to the hospital.’

‘Was she in that cave? The one I could see?’

‘They don’t know for sure. It’s certainly possible. She must have sheltered somewhere. She would have died otherwise.’

‘Would being in a cave have been enough to keep her warm? It was bitter outside. Minus four the coastguard said.’

Gordon exhales, staring at the ceiling. ‘Maybe she had a blanket or coat?’

‘She didn’t have one when I found her.’

‘Perhaps she left it behind? You said she was gripping on to the bodies of the kittens. If she dropped it, though, it’ll have gone out with the tide by now.’

Hillier is silent, considering this. After a minute she asks, ‘Can she speak?’

‘No – it’ll be a day or so before she can. But she will eventually. We’ll have to take it easy, though. She’s so little.’

Hillier sets her chin. ‘Yes. But then we’ll know.’

‘What happened?’ Gordon asks.

‘Who did this to her,’ Hillier says.

A flicker of respect flashes over Gordon’s face. ‘You don’t think she just got lost? Wandered off with the kittens and couldn’t find her way back in the storm?’

‘No, I don’t,’ Hillier answers. ‘No, I don’t. Someone is behind this, Sarge. Someone took her. And I intend to find out who.’