AT ten o’clock the next morning, Anita entered the press briefing room in front of a couple of hundred reporters. Those who had arrived earliest were on chairs, the rest of us were pressed around the edges of the room. As she climbed the three steps to a podium and took a seat, the room was silent except for the soft clatter of camera shutters.
She was flanked by women: Veronica Mann to one side of her, Sheryl to the other, her hand holding Anita’s tightly, her head bent so low that I could not see her face.
Mike was nowhere to be seen, and neither was Jacqui. All of which seemed to me to be ludicrous. To have the father of the missing baby absent was to raise questions with a screaming red light. And where was the missing baby’s older sister?
I watched Veronica Mann’s face, hoping for an indication of what was going on. When I first met Veronica she was a lowly police constable, and she wore volcanic orange and reds. With promotion had come gravitas. She wore a pin-striped trouser suit and a white shirt. I could see the toll that Christopher’s disappearance was taking on her. The skin under her eyes was puffy and creased with lack of sleep, and the whites of her eyes were pink. She murmured a word in Anita’s ear and gave her a comforting pat on the arm. Anita sat for a moment behind the forest of microphones as a man farther along the podium identified himself as Inspector Mitford, introduced her, and asked her to say a few words.
Then Anita lifted her face, and again the rustle of camera shutters sounded impatiently as her huge startled eyes gazed out at us. The tremble of her lips, the rigidity of her jaw, would be immortalized in that second, whatever happened later.
“I haven’t seen my little baby for a long time.” Anita’s voice was disappointingly dead, and she was making no attempt to disguise the fact that she was reading from a script. “Every minute apart from him is torture for both of us. I kissed him good night, and in the morning he was gone.”
I looked at Veronica. If not a lie, this was perhaps a reinterpretation of history. By Veronica’s own mouth, it was Jacqui who had put the baby to bed, Jacqui who had picked up the bundle of blankets that had fallen away empty. But Veronica’s face was inscrutable.
“He’s tiny, and he needs me. Please, if you know anything about his whereabouts, telephone Inspector Mitford or his team.” Anita stopped and looked toward Veronica, and her agitated voice was carried by the microphone. “You said there’s a number. Where’s the number?”
Veronica stepped in smoothly, repeating the request that anyone with information should speak to the police and reading the number slowly and clearly. When she had finished, Inspector Mitford ran through the bare facts in a slow, heavy voice that suggested this would be a long, thoughtful, and painstaking investigation. He gave the approximate time Christopher had been put to bed, the hour at which he had been found to be missing. Then he named the person who had called in the police as Mike Darling.
I was surprised when Inspector Mitford said that Anita would take questions. I had expected the police to shield her, but of course the questions were not unfriendly. Had there been credible ransom demands?
“Well . . .” Anita looked from the reporter to Veronica. “What do you mean?”
“Has there been a letter, a demand of any sort, either verbal or written?” the journalist clarified.
“A demand?” She shook her head, a small smile on her lips. “No, there are no demands.”
There was a moment’s silence in the room, journalists expecting more, waiting for a fuller answer that never came. Veronica gazed into the middle distance, and Mitford twisted his head to exchange a word with an assistant.
“Mrs. Darling . . .” Another journalist stood up, the microphone in his hand. “Was there any clue as to how your son was removed from the house?”
Anita did not seem unsettled by the question, nor did she seem to have any sense that time was passing, that people were waiting.
“I don’t know,” she said eventually, turning to Inspector Mitford, “was there?”
“Christopher,” Mitford said carefully and ponderously, “slept on the ground floor. So far we have no evidence showing how an intruder came into the house, or left with the child. But some of you have seen photographs of the house—as you can see, it is being extensively renovated. There are doors and windows that do not have locks. Indeed, there are windows and doors that do not have windows or doors.” For an instant, light laughter ran around the room, then was extinguished as the journalists remembered why they were there. “Ordinarily, because of the porous nature of the building during renovation, and because of the kind of security concerns that we all share, there is an alarm system in place. However, because the ground floor was occupied, and people were moving about on this level inside the house, it had not been switched on. Elsewhere, there were spotlights at front and rear programmed to come on if an intruder approached. They may have done so, but these particular lights do not emit an alarm, so if an intruder was sufficiently brazen, he or she could simply continue to approach the building in the glare of the light.”
For more than a day now, he said a hunt had been under way, throughout the woods at the rear of the property, as well as through the neighboring gardens and the streets within walking distance.
“We believe,” Mitford said, “that there is more than one person who knows what has become of Christopher. No matter what good care is being taken of him, he will be upset. He is a baby, and there’s nothing he wants more than to be home with his mum. There’s nothing any of us wants more than for him to be home. We understand there are many reasons why people feel moved to take a child, and we can talk through those needs and provide help when someone comes forward with Christopher. But for now the most urgent thing is for him to be returned safe and well. That will show us that whoever took him has only the best of intentions toward the baby.”
The inevitable question then came:
“Mrs. Darling, can we ask you where your husband and daughter are today?”
But it was Inspector Mitford who stepped in to answer smoothly.
“Mr. Darling has been advised by his doctor to rest, and I believe Jacqui Darling is out looking for her brother even as we speak,” he said.
While I was listening to Inspector Mitford, I was watching Anita’s face. I had expected, somehow, that her pain would be so raw that it would be almost too much for me to bear. Several times in the night I had awoken with my heart pounding and my chest tight, the sense of a child missing from his bed, vanished, unreachable, so real that I could hardly breathe. But I could not fathom this on Anita’s face. I saw confusion and unhappiness. But I have seen the parents of dead or missing children before, and always it has seemed to me that they have become a personification of fear. If Anita did not look like them, did that mean she knew something that we did not? I could sense that the journalists around me were frowning at Anita as if they too were wondering what was going on here.
I asked around and eventually found Justin at St. George’s Hospital and in physiotherapy, sweating to move a prosthetic leg, lurching his upper body along metal bars that supported him. I found Jacqui there, too, standing silently in the corner, her eyes swollen almost shut from crying. She was clutching Justin’s sweatshirt in shaking, nervous hands, her eyes following every movement of his muscles as they bunched and stretched, dwelling on the stump, her jaw tightening as his body fought for balance and lost it. I went over and stood next to her, touching her shoulder.
“I couldn’t bear to be at home,” she muttered. “There’s nothing I can do there. We’re going to drive around as soon as he’s finished and take another look.”
Justin’s face, gray and damp with effort, had aged ten years. In the twenty minutes that I watched him working, it seemed that the naiveté had gone for good, to be replaced by the knowledge that sheer willpower was the only thing that would save him. At first he didn’t see me, he was concentrating so hard. When he did, he raised his hand briefly in greeting, then carried on doing as he was told until the physiotherapist dismissed him.
Leaning on crutches, his prosthesis removed, he came over to stand next to Jacqui, and I saw her hand go to his good thigh and pull him close to her, so that the side of her face was resting against his shoulder. Clearly, Justin’s fear of rejection and his suspicion that his love was unrequited were unfounded.
“How are you doing?” I asked him.
“It doesn’t matter how I’m doing,” he said, “what matters is Christopher.”
He rested his hand on Jacqui’s head and started to stroke her hair.
“We’ve got to get going. We’re going to look for him. We thought we’d try house to house, and we’re going to make some posters.”
Jacqui buried her face in Justin’s shoulder, and her hand snaked up inside his T-shirt. I heard her sob.
“I can’t bear it.” Her face emerged, tears swelling. “The police aren’t going to find him, and Mum’s worse than useless. They can’t see what’s in front of their eyes.”
“What’s that?” I asked her.
But Justin’s hand had moved from Jacqui’s head, and it was resting lightly across her mouth.
“Don’t listen to her,” he said with a forced smile, “she’s upset, she’s imagining things.”
Jacqui swiped his hand away. “I don’t need to imagine anything,” she said, “and neither do you.”
“Come on, she wouldn’t magic Christopher away.”
“Who are you talking about?” I persisted. Jacqui would have said, I think, but she had one eye on Justin, who glared at her.
“Well, does Mike have any ideas?” I asked in exasperation.
“What do you mean, does he have any ideas? We’ve all got the same idea, but no one will say it.”
“Jacqui, let’s get out of here,” Justin said. “You want to look for him, we should go.”
He gave her a look that told her to move, and then he turned toward me. “Leave her alone,” he said to me, but it was more of a plea than an order. I stood aside as they left, Jacqui head down, Justin clumsily following.
When I returned to the office, Sal was emerging from the editing suite, arguing with Penny. They had, it appeared, been watching a feed of the press conference at the same time as editing tape.
“The mother knows something, don’t you agree?” Sal turned to me for support.
Penny was shaking her head. “You’re mad,” she told him. “Why would any mother kidnap her own child?”
“Or kill,” Sal corrected her. “Let’s not look on the bright side. Anyway, all I’m saying is that she knows something. Her son is gone, yet she showed so little emotion. Goldilocks, you understand women, unlike Penny.”
Penny let out a breath of exasperation.
“Penny, don’t huff like that, you know yourself you are an honorary man,” Sal told her. “You have dedicated yourself to the cause of hard news; there is no subtlety to you anymore, no more nuance, you might as well be a man dealing in the pseudocertainties of black and white. Your jaw too set. I, meanwhile, a man of some sensitivity . . .”
“And idiocy . . .” Penny managed to interject.
“Of some sensitivity despite the coarseness of the profession I find myself required to pursue—am appealing to Robin, the mummy-meister.”
Penny rolled her eyes at me and made murderous gesticulations behind Sal’s back.
“You’re stirring, Sal,” I said sternly.
“Well, of course I’m stirring. Do you think I’m serious?” He turned to Penny, who glared at him. “We disagree, so naturally I have to be offensive to you. Goldilocks, you agree with me, I can tell, so I adore you.”
“I have problems with the concept of Anita knowing what day of the week it is, let alone who kidnapped Christopher,” I said.
“The police think she knows something,” Sal taunted. “Sources, my dear girl, sources. They are our lifeblood. You should be sleeping with a police officer. Oops, I forgot, you are.”