Joanna sits by the window in a café, a chipped white mug of brown tea slowly cooling between her hands. She takes no notice of it, nor the pieces of toast dripping with butter on the plate in front of her. Her eyes are fixed on the block of flats opposite, still visible despite the steam rising up the window which, every so often, she wipes away with a sleeve.
Days later and she still can’t get the image of her sister out of her head. She hasn’t slept and every thought in her brain feels like a hammer. Added to which, it’s been over a week since she had the fight with Will and she still hasn’t spoken to him. The sadness she feels that her oldest friend has betrayed her is incalculable. So she does what she always does when she feels overcome. She buries her feelings.
She has been in the café for nearly an hour. As she has sat there, the number of photographers and journalists across the street from her, outside the flats, has steadily increased. There are now at least twenty of them, chatting and smoking; frowning at the faint drizzle which drifts down from the sky.
Other punters in the café have noticed the throng on the other side of the road and periodically gesture over to it, clearly wondering which celebrity is staying in the flats. She has already heard the Eastern European waitress state with utmost certainty that she saw Keira Knightley go in there earlier. But Joanna knows this isn’t true. She knows the flat belongs to Rosie Bowman.
In her handbag is yet another copy of the Sun with Rosie’s photograph on its front page. It seems fated that Rosie should appear like this – pop up in the world after being hidden for so long – just as Laurel may finally be close to achieving her freedom. After everything that has happened in the last week – the court hearing; the fight with Will; seeing Debbie – the lure was irresistible. Joanna had called an ex-boyfriend who works in communications for the Met Police. She hated herself for it, had avoided the mirror this morning, but she had done it. It had cost her six pints of bitter last night, a considerable amount of flirting and the promise of dinner next week, but she had managed to get him to drunkenly look up Hazel Archer’s address.
As she arrived at the block of flats, she realised she has been unusually naive. The press pack have zeroed in on the youngest Flower Girl like snipers. They hover around the door, cameras flashing whenever a delivery arrives or another inhabitant braves the throng in order to leave their flat.
She’s not sure why she’s here, why she wanted Rosie’s address in the first place. She’s been trying to work that out as she sits here in the fug of the café. She isn’t even sure what she’d say to the woman, if she met her face to face. She has imagined countless conversations where she confronts Laurel Bowman, makes her realise what she’s done, makes her cry heavy, heartfelt tears over Kirstie’s grave. Makes her finally say how sorry she is, over and over again. But Rosie has always remained a shadow. Six years old, too young – according to the system – to be cognisant of a crime. Too on the cusp of what it is to be human to be able to have developed a mind that desires harm, that actively seeks it out.
Joanna has read a great deal of criminal psychology, particularly in connection to young children. She has read Jean Piaget, scoured books on the mental development of children. She has sought to understand what drove Laurel Bowman to commit the atrocity that she did. There are more child murderers than perhaps society likes to acknowledge, she has discovered. The famous ones: Mary Bell; Robert Thompson; Jon Venables. The lesser-known: Jesse Pomeroy, Barratt and Bradley, Hannah Ocuish. Children who have come from broken homes, from situations of horrific abuse, but also those – like Laurel – who have committed an aberration, travelled so far out of character and what would be considered normal with regard to their background, that their behaviour seems alien: it becomes inexplicable.
Joanna presses her fingertips into her eye sockets, shutting out the noise of the café chatter, the clinking of cutlery. She breathes in the smell of soap from the shower she took this morning, washing off the hangover from the night before. She thinks about Rosie and her development levels aged six. The ego is rampant at that age. The world turns around, and according to, the child.
A truck rumbles past, disrupting her thoughts. Joanna pushes away her tea and gets to her feet. As she does, she sees the door of the building opposite open slowly, inch by inch. Hazel tries to keep her head down, a hood covers her dark cap of hair. But the cameras flare and flash as she emerges and she has to lift her head to find her way. Joanna freezes as she watches, unable to move, to do anything, her mouth open as if ready to call out Hazel’s name, call her back, as she jumps quickly into a car that pulls up at the kerb. Joanna follows her with her gaze, taking in everything about her as the car swerves away, its tyres spinning fast and splashing water over the paparazzi as they snap endless footage of the second Flower Girl leaving her home in the rain.