Paul searched Sanderson’s house, on high alert for sounds of him arriving home. He imagined spotting Freya’s school blazer hanging in a cupboard, a long blonde hair shimmering on the carpet. Breathing hard, he hurried up the stairs. The rooms were soulless, nothing particularly personal or sentimental anywhere. Yet little touches of luxury suggested Sanderson had some money. A flatscreen TV in the bedroom; a super-king-sized bed, which looked slept-in on one side only. Perhaps he still had part of the appallingly huge payoff they’d been forced to award him. But nobody, it seemed, to share it with.
The attic staircase was steep and narrow, like climbing up a dim, dusty tunnel. Different from the gentle curve of the wooden steps up to Freya’s attic room. When Paul reached the top of Sanderson’s, he hesitated before groping for a light switch.
Then he staggered backward.
She was in here. She was everywhere. Photos of Nathalie papered the walls: smiling, biting her lip, hiding from the camera, walking away and toward. The expressions on her face were achingly familiar, yet at one remove in their age-faded colors, like seeing somebody who vividly resembled her. Her wide green eyes, the fall of her hair, the pucker of the skin above her nose.
Paul flinched away as sadness barreled into him. But other images took shape, took on a life of their own, filling in the parts the photos couldn’t show. Nathalie smoking alone outside the tower block; Paul approaching her for the first time, walking another man’s walk, offering a light. The hurt she always seemed to carry in her posture, the dreams that would trouble her eyelids as she slept. Yet her openness, too: always so openhearted and hopeful, despite everything.
Paul’s eyes went to a photo of her and Sanderson. Sanderson seemed to glare out of the picture, wary and possessive, his arm clamped tight around Nathalie.
And suddenly Paul couldn’t actually think of him as Sanderson anymore, the way Glover and other colleagues had referred to him as they’d hovered at the edges of the operation. He couldn’t stay detached enough from the feelings of hatred and guilt and confusing nostalgia that were stirred up when he looked into Daniel’s eyes.
He’s just an overprotective big brother, Nathalie used to insist. Especially after everything we’ve been through.
There was only one photo of her daughter up here. Daniel’s niece was framed separately from the rest, a miniature Nathalie with long dark lashes and unraveling pigtails. Billie. Her young eyes seemed to plead with Paul, and to reproach him, and to speak in desperate harmony with Freya: Find me.
Paul fought to control his breathing. White spots blotted the darkness behind his eyelids. If he could just keep them still, stop them swirling . . . He flailed to the rear window and pushed, relieved when it opened and fresh air burst in. Paul held his face to the coolness, but when he opened his eyes he got another shock.
Because he hadn’t realized. Hadn’t got his bearings, hadn’t remembered the geography of the area well enough.
You could see the woods from here. A few miles behind the house, they stretched out like a dense carpet, the twilight casting them in a violet glow. The trees seemed to huddle closer together than ever, as though closing ranks, protecting their secrets.
Nobody goes near the woods anymore, Nathalie had once told Paul.
And it wasn’t so hard to understand why the locals had steered clear ever since what had happened, or how they could believe, in the absence of any other explanation, that the black spaces between the trees had swallowed the little girl who’d never been found.
In truth, Paul had no idea what had happened to five-year-old Billie in those woods, almost twenty-five years ago. A day that had changed his own future, though he couldn’t have known that as he’d watched the story unfold on the news. The only witnesses, Nathalie and Daniel, said Billie had strayed too far in while playing. The search of the woodland had lasted months. The wider search for Billie had continued indefinitely—along with the stream of donations to the search fund Daniel had set up in aid of his niece.
From the moment Billie’s disappearance hit the news, Daniel Sanderson had had everyone in his pocket. The public were all behind him. The press ran campaigns to Find Our Beautiful Billie, always featuring quotes from her distraught uncle. Nathalie had shied from the limelight, would duck her head behind Daniel’s shoulder as the press photographed them leaving their block of flats. Paul still remembered thinking at the time, when he was just an ordinary police officer in south London: There’s something about her, about the two of them. But mostly: There’s something about him.
And, as he’d later discovered, the Nottinghamshire police had thought so too. Except they’d found it impossible even to question Daniel as a suspect—such was the power of the public’s support, the press’s attention. Daniel had built a narrative around Billie as a working-class child, claiming that people never cared about kids like her, that deep down everybody believed her family must have brought it on themselves. Donations poured in from individuals anxious to show they weren’t like that.
The donations had soared each time the police had interviewed either Daniel or Nathalie too. The papers went to town on police prejudice, victimization of a suffering family. Daniel had managed to secure a forcefield around himself and his sister, strong enough to make the police back away.
They never took their eye off Daniel, though. Never stopped attempting to monitor his Find Our Beautiful Billie fund, wondering what all that cash was really being used for, whether Beautiful Billie had suffered something terrible at the hands of her doting uncle. Several years on, when Paul had finished his undercover training, he’d been approached by DI Tom Glover about a job he’d thought Paul would be perfect for.
Not drugs or gangs or activists, like most UC assignments. This was a missing-child case that couldn’t be solved with traditional methods. It involved getting close to a family, and it was sensitive, needed to be handled just right . . .
Now a noise broke Paul’s thoughts, making him leap back from the attic window, then freeze in place.
A car door slamming out front. Footsteps and the jangle of keys.