They searched all night. As the snow fell, the police teams followed the route from Brian Baxter’s house to the sweetshop, looking under hedges and in gutters, tramping through allotments and forcing open the doors of outhouses. At midnight the warrant came and Edgar, accompanied by Bob and PC McGuire, searched every inch of Sam Gee’s house and garden. They found nothing but, when they left, with Sam’s threats of legal action ringing in their ears, they found a small group of vigilantes standing outside, ankle-deep in snow.
‘Go home,’ Edgar told them. ‘We’ve got no reason to suspect Mr Gee.’
‘You searched his house though,’ said someone.
‘Go home to your families,’ said Edgar. ‘They need you now.’
Maybe this veiled warning worked, or maybe it was just the snow, which was falling heavily by then, but after a few minutes the knot of men dispersed and were soon lost in the swirling whiteness.
Edgar sent Emma back to look after the Francis family. Partly this was because he could see that she had formed a relationship with them, partly because he just wanted to spare her the freezing hours of fruitless searching. Bob worked alongside him, tireless and uncomplaining. At first light they walked back to Bartholomew Square. The streets were once again transformed by snow, every sharp edge rounded, every dark corner suddenly frosted and glittering. And, once again, Edgar saw absolutely nothing beautiful in the sight. They walked in silence until they reached the police station. In fact, Edgar felt as if he was almost too cold to speak; every muscle in his face seemed to be in spasm.
The night sergeant let them in, his craggy face sympathetic.
‘I’ll make you both a nice hot cup of tea.’
As they descended the stairs to the CID rooms, Edgar said, ‘I’ve got a fresh team coming in at nine. We’ll start again on the park.’
‘I’ll help,’ said Bob.
‘No,’ said Edgar, ‘you go home and get some sleep.’
Edgar walked up to the incident board. The photographs of Annie and Mark looked down on him, Mark smiling shyly, Annie staring challengingly into middistance. He remembered the picture in Daphne Young’s flat: Annie, Mark and Betty.
He was surprised to feel Bob’s hand on his arm.
‘She could still be alive, sir. Don’t give up now.’
Edgar turned away to hide his sudden tears. He was sure that Betty was dead.
Emma woke up on the Francises’ sofa, conscious of a comforting warmth beside her. She opened her eyes. Someone had covered her with a blanket but the warmth was coming from Richard, who was cuddled up next to her.
She touched his shoulder. ‘Richard?’
He muttered, not opening his eyes, ‘I didn’t like it in the room without Betty.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Emma. ‘You stay here.’ She pulled the blanket over him.
She looked at her watch. Five o’clock. She should let Richard sleep for a bit longer. The doctor had come last night and administered a sedative to Sandra. So she at least would know a few hours of forgetting. Jim had refused to take anything. As far as Emma knew, he was still out with the search team.
It was odd. Emma was an only child. She had no young cousins and none of her friends had had children yet. She didn’t think that she had ever held a younger child in her arms. Richard’s acceptance of her as a place of refuge seemed an almost miraculous thing. She thought of Annie, who, at thirteen, was already an experienced big sister. She never thought that she would envy Annie but now, curled up on the sofa with Richard as the morning light filtered in through the curtains, she did.
She heard boots in the hallway. Emma got up, careful not to wake Richard, and padded to the door. Jim Francis stood there, shaking the snow off his jacket. He didn’t seem surprised to see Emma but she was acutely conscious of her untidy hair and crumpled clothes.
‘I was sleeping on the sofa,’ she said. ‘Richard’s there too.’
Jim grunted. ‘Poor little sod.’
Emma didn’t have to ask if there was any news. One look at his face was enough.
‘I’ll make you some tea,’ she said.
She walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on the hob. Jim followed her and stood there awkwardly for a moment before edging past her and going out through the back door. Emma realised that he was going to the outside lavatory. She thought of her own pink-tiled bathroom at home. She would certainly put off going to the lav until she got to the station.
She made the tea as strong as she could and when Jim came in again, they stood there drinking in silence. He was such a big man that he made the tiny kitchen seem like a dolls’ house. There was a force about him too, something strong and slightly dangerous. Emma could see why Sandra Francis had married him.
Eventually she said, ‘I’ll get back to the station in a minute. DI Stephens will be sending new men to search.’
‘He searched Gee’s house last night. Didn’t find anything.’
‘I know.’
Jim looked at her, his heavy brows knitted together.
‘If it’s not Gee, then who is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Emma, ‘but we’ll find him, whoever it is.’
Now Jim was looking at her almost pityingly. ‘You don’t believe that, love. Any more than I do.’
Jim Francis went out again as soon as he’d had his tea. He didn’t even wait for breakfast. With Sandra still deeply asleep, Emma thought that she should wait until Richard had woken up, at least. Should she make the family some breakfast? The kitchen was extremely tidy but there was no fridge or twin-tub or any of the gleaming paraphernalia that made Cook’s lair at her parents’ home so mysterious. In the awful limbo after school, Emma had actually been on a cordon bleu cooking course but she couldn’t really see herself rustling up oeufs en cocotte or kedgeree in this utilitarian sliver of a room. Opening the back door, she found a small pantry outside, cold enough to contain milk and eggs. There was a packet of porridge too. Should she make some for Richard? She was still standing, uncertain, in the doorway when a voice said, ‘I don’t like porridge.’
It was Richard, flushed from sleep, hair standing on end, determined to be difficult.
‘What about a boiled egg?’ said Emma. Surely she could manage that after six weeks with Madame Duvalier? Richard didn’t actually say no, so Emma fetched an egg from the pantry, shut the door (the kitchen was now freezing) and found a small saucepan. She also grilled some rather stale bread for toast. She was desperate for coffee but made do with black tea.
The egg was too runny (‘I like the yellow bit hard’) but Richard consented to eat. As he did so, Emma asked, ‘You know the play you were going to do?’
‘The Stolen Children.’
‘Yes. The Stolen Children. Was there a script?’
Richard finished his mouthful. He was a neat but thorough eater. ‘What’s a script?’
‘Something with all the words the actors say written down.’
‘Annie told us what to say.’
‘But did Annie have it written down somewhere? Mr Baxter, Uncle Brian, he said that Betty had taken over with the play. Did Betty find a book of Annie’s with the words written down? Mrs O’Dowd, Kevin’s mum, said something about Betty finding it with Annie’s things.’ Richard pondered. ‘There’s a box under Betty’s bed. It could be in that. She doesn’t let me look in it.’
‘Could we look now, do you think?’
‘Will it help us find Betty?’
‘It might,’ said Emma, trying to sound confident. ‘It really might.’
Richard led the way upstairs. A few minutes earlier Emma had heard the baby crying and Sandra moving about but her door stayed shut and Emma didn’t want to disturb her. There were only two rooms upstairs and the children seemed to have the bigger room, at the front of the house. Even so there was hardly room to move, as it was crammed with a double bed and a single, so close that they almost touched. The only other piece of furniture was a chest of drawers. Emma thought back to her childhood bedroom, the white-painted bed, the desk, the bookcase. How had the clever Francis children ever managed to work in this house? Why wasn’t she, with all that privilege on her side, a brain surgeon at the very least?
Richard bent down and pulled a wooden box out from under the double bed. Very carefully, Emma lifted out the contents, one by one. A broken doll (‘Her name’s Amelia’), a pink teddy bear (‘I had a blue one but I lost it’), three books, worn with rereading—Little Women, Good Wives and Black Beauty—and a small pile of exercise books. One was tantalisingly labelled ‘My Dairy’ (Betty clearly had trouble with ‘ai’ and ‘ia’) but, when Emma looked inside, it was empty apart from the words ‘Ellie Blackmore will always be my best friend’ written in green ink. But the next book was covered with swirls and turrets and the title was The Stolen Children.
It was an extraordinary little play. Like The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, the play Annie had been working on with Miss Young, it was laid out like a proper script, with stage directions (‘Star jumps up in surprise’) and descriptions of scenery (‘The forest can be Uncle Brian’s rubber plants with a green screen behind them’). The play began with children playing, chanting their sinister little rhyme.
Children, children, say your prayers.
Children, children, stay upstairs.
Children dear, don’t stay out late,
Or the Wicked Witch Man will be your fate.
Star is playing on her own. She tells the audience that she has an imaginary little brother. Later her mother is impatient with her, ‘You can’t imagine things all your life, Star. You have to get on with real life.’ Had Sandra ever said this to Annie? But Star, like Annie, is resourceful. She ventures into the Dark Wood and finds a little boy called Leaf. The boy says he was stolen away from his real parents by the Witch Man. Star and Leaf prepare a trap made out of sweets for the Witch Man, hence Betty’s trip to Sam Gee’s shop. There was a very good scene where the children are waiting for the Witch Man and wondering what he’ll be like. But when the Witch Man is caught in the trap, he turns out not to be the villain they imagine. He rescued Leaf when he was lost in the forest and has been secretly feeding him ever since. It turns out that Leaf is Star’s brother but their mother (played, Emma remembered, by Betty) had abandoned Leaf because she didn’t want a little boy. The policeman arrests the mother and the children live happily ever after with the Witch Man as a kind of live-in nanny. On the last page, Betty had written, with her distinctive green pen: ‘They join hands and sing a song, “Brothers and Sisters, Friends For Ever”.’
Emma sat back on her heels. The song was like the jig that was meant to have been played at the end of all Shakespeare’s plays. It was to remind the audience that this is all make-believe and that evil mothers and Witch Men don’t exist in the world. But what if they did exist?
Richard was reading over Emma’s shoulder. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it’s very good.’
The song had a jaunty end-rhyme that reminded Emma of songs that she used to sing in the Brownies.
Brothers and sisters,
Friends for ever.
Brothers and sisters,
Friends together.
Let’s form a ring
And play and sing,
Friends for ever, friends together.
What did it all mean? Why was Betty so determined to perform this play and to invite the ‘lady policeman’? Emma stared at the exercise book, willing it to give up its secrets. The round green handwriting stared back up at her.
There was one other item in the box, a photograph. Emma held it up to the light. It was the same photograph that Daphne Young had kept in her fairy-tale book. Annie, Mark and Betty. The three faces smiled at her. Three children, two dead and one missing.
Richard looked at the photograph without interest. ‘I’m not in it.’
Thank your lucky stars, thought Emma.
Max heard the news from Kenneth Neil (Wishy Washy), who had digs in Freshfield Road.
‘There were coppers everywhere when I got back from the show last night. They say another kid’s gone missing.’
‘It’s the sister of the first one,’ said Ron Hunter-White (Chief of the Peking Police). ‘That’s what I heard.’
‘There’s a child-killer out there,’ said Annette with a shudder. ‘I won’t be able to sleep tonight.’
‘Well, you’re hardly in danger, dear,’ said Denton, whisking past on the way to his dressing room.
Max thought about Edgar starting another desperate hunt in the snow. He wouldn’t rest until this child was found, alive or dead. Could it really be the sister of one of the other children? He couldn’t imagine how a family could survive something like that. Plenty of families lost children in the war—Diablo’s mother had lost two sons—but somehow that was different. They were adults and you could kid yourself that their sacrifice was worthwhile, but this . . . this felt like punishment from some sadistic God.
He saw Nigel Castle hovering on the edge of the gaggle of actors.
‘Did you hear the news?’ he asked.
‘Another child’s gone missing,’ said Nigel. ‘It’s just too horrible.’
Nigel really did look upset, thought Max. His skin, always pale, now had an almost greenish tinge.
‘Is it true,’ said Nigel, ‘that it’s the sister of the girl, Annie?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Max, ‘but I think I heard something like that.’
‘Another one of Daphne’s pupils then,’ said Nigel.
Max hadn’t seen it quite like that. He supposed that the loss of his friend could account for Nigel’s haggard look.
‘Daphne’s death must have been a terrible shock for you,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Nigel, ‘it was. I spoke to her parents, said how sorry I was, but they’ve gone back to Shropshire. I don’t think I’ll ever see them again. I won’t even be able to get to her funeral.’
Again, that seemed a rather self-centred way of looking at things.
‘Well, let’s hope they find this little girl,’ said Max.
He hadn’t heard the director approaching. Roger Dunkley was looking even more distracted than usual.
‘What’s everyone doing?’ he said. ‘Overture and beginners in ten minutes.’
‘We were talking about the girl that’s gone missing,’ said Nigel. ‘They’re saying it’s Annie’s sister.’
Roger seemed not to have heard him. ‘The show must go on,’ he said, shepherding his cast along the corridor. Somehow he made it sound more like a threat than a promise.
‘Go home and that’s an order.’
‘I’m not tired. I can carry on.’
Frank Hodges sighed. Edgar wondered if he was going to threaten, once again, to bring someone in above his head. But instead, the super just looked at him steadily. If it had been anyone else, Edgar would have thought that he was trying to be kind.
‘DI Stephens,’ said Hodges. ‘You’ve been up all night. You’re going to fall asleep on your feet in a minute and that won’t help anyone. Go home, get a few hours’ sleep and you can come back here in the evening.’
‘But I need to coordinate the search . . .’
‘I will personally take charge of operations while you’re away. Does that satisfy you?’
God help the team, thought Edgar. But he could hardly argue. He didn’t feel tired but he had started to enter that dreamy fugue state where nothing seemed quite real. He had sent Bob and Emma home but he knew that they’d be back later. Maybe he should go back. He could do with a hot bath too. He hadn’t been dressed for snow last night and his shoes were still drenched. His left foot, which was missing a toe after frostbite in Norway, was completely numb. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back by six.’
The walk home was hard going. The snow didn’t seem quite as heavy as last time but his feet were frozen and his face stiff with cold. He’d wear his Russian hat tonight. Halfway up Albion Hill he could see the teams working on Freshfield Road, tiny black figures against the white. Frank Hodges could at least be trusted to keep the search running smoothly. If there was any news, though, Edgar must be the one to break it to the Francis family. For a second he allowed himself to imagine the sensation of sharing good news. ‘She was here all along . . . Yes, staying with a friend . . . She ran to her grandparents’ house . . . Just wanted to get away for a while.’ Sadly, none of these scenarios were likely to come true. Officers had visited the grandparents last night and again this morning. Neither set had seen Betty. They had visited all her known friends, everyone in her class at school and everyone involved in the play. They had searched Brian Baxter’s house and found nothing. Baxter himself seemed on the verge of nervous collapse. Now they were back to trawling the streets.
Thank God the hot water was working. Edgar made himself a sandwich while the bath was running. He wasn’t hungry but he supposed he had to eat. The sensation of lowering himself into the steamy water was amazing. When he had heard that Betty was missing, he had, for one brief but heartfelt minute, wished that he were dead. But he supposed that he was thankful to be alive, able to feel hot and cold, grief and happiness. He lay there until the water cooled, then he got out, dried himself, dressed in his warmest clothes and lay down on the bed. He wouldn’t sleep, just rest for an hour and get back to the station.
He was woken from a deep, dark sleep by a pounding on the door. Who the hell could that be? He would bet on one thing: it wouldn’t be good news.
A smartly dressed woman stood on the doorstep accompanied by two boys in duffle coats and woolly hats.
‘What a journey!’ she said. ‘But at least we’re here now. Say hallo to Uncle Edgar, boys.’