Chapter Fifteen

Ipswich

15th August

Siobhan

I cannot stop myself from reading the articles, over and over, as though they are going to suddenly tell me something new, something that will make all of this nightmare go away. But of course, they never do. Each one makes it slightly worse.

POLICE SEARCH MARINA IN HUNT FOR MISSING BABY

Police searching for missing one-year-old Eve Grant this afternoon began the process of dredging the Ipswich marina. Eve was last seen on the night of 10th August at a flat in Woodmill Road, Ipswich, where she was in the care of a woman who was found dead at the scene. Eve’s parents, Mr Rick Grant and his wife Jenny, will tonight make an appeal on BBC One to anyone who might know the whereabouts of their daughter.

Christ, the marina. I imagine baby Eve floating, the sight of a little body bobbing beside the boats, that blonde hair dragged through the water like weeds. My stomach turns. I am filled with a sudden, bizarre urge to go out there, join one of the search parties, wade through water to try to find that little girl. How will she survive out in the world at such a young age? Defenceless, alone, or worse? Tears prick my eyes and I swallow hard, try to control my breathing. Panicking isn’t going to help anyone.

‘Mum, look.’

I glance up from my phone at the sound of my daughter’s voice, and see immediately what she’s gesturing at.

Jenny Grant’s face fills the television screen. She is younger than I thought she’d be; I suppose she’s Caroline’s age. At least ten years younger than me.

The three of us, Maria, Emma and I, sit huddled together on the sofa in our living room. Maria is holding Emma’s hand, her thumb gently stroking the back of my daughter’s knuckles in slow, comforting movements. Again, I feel left out – I have swapped Callum for Maria, usurped once again as the favourite parent. How has it happened? What is it I have done? I wish someone would stroke my hand, calm the anxiety that shifts and stirs inside my stomach day in, day out.

The street outside our house is, for once, quiet. Only two reporters remain, lingering in the hope that one of us will emerge. The rest of them are at this press conference; as the camera pans over their faces I actually recognise a few of them – they’ve been camped outside here for the last twenty-four hours. Pale, sharp faces; they remind me of racing dogs, whippets. God knows what it’s like outside the Grant home – it must be hell. I imagine being separated from Emma, not knowing where she might be, not knowing whether she is alive or not, and the thought is so viscerally terrifying that I feel my vision tip and blur. I force myself to take deep breaths, in and out. My daughter is right here, safe and sound. I am not the one having to go through this.

But then we are going through our own form of torture, aren’t we?

A couple of police officers visited this morning, told us Callum was still being held at the station, that he’d requested a lawyer. The thought made me feel worse, not better. Innocent people don’t need lawyers, do they? I wondered if I was supposed to perform some sort of wifely duty and contact lawyers for him, but they told me he’d already done it. Callum knows lots of lawyers through his work. I’ve never met any of them.

‘Mrs Dillon,’ the first officer had said this morning, a woman with short blonde hair and sharp, wolf-like features. ‘I’m DCI Gillian McVey. We apologise for cutting short your holiday.’

I’d almost laughed at her – as if that was what I cared about. But I could already see the impression they had of me, of us all – rich spoiled family, husband playing away. It was the wife in the pinny thing all over again – they’d probably even dredged up that article. I’d stood strong, back ramrod straight, whilst Maria made the officer an unnecessary cup of tea.

‘Mrs Dillon, you were at your book group on the night in question, that’s correct, isn’t it?’ the DCI had asked, and I’d nodded, swallowed hard.

‘And your daughter was here.’

‘Yes, that’s right. I checked in on Emma when I got home.’

‘And your husband, was he in when you came back that night?’

As she was speaking, Emma appeared in the kitchen, at the side of my vision. I felt my body tense up under her gaze.

‘He was working that night,’ Emma said, her voice clear. ‘He was in the studio in the garden. I was upstairs, but I heard him come in and out, the sound of the door. And the TV, for a bit. He gives himself little breaks from work. But he never left the garden. I’d have heard the gate.’

‘Is that so?’ the DCI said, and my daughter nodded. Maria handed her the cup of tea, steam curling up into the room, adding to the heat. The policewoman accepted it without much of a thank you.

‘And he was upstairs when you got in a bit later?’ Her gaze was back on me. I could feel Emma watching me too.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I got into bed alone, but – Callum came up later, slept in the spare room. I was already asleep, he didn’t want to wake me. But I heard him come in from the studio.’ The words had felt strange in my mouth.

‘Right, thank you. Well, we’ll be asking you to come to the station to answer a few more questions this week, Mrs Dillon,’ Gillian McVey had told me. ‘I’m sure you won’t be opposed to assisting our enquiries.’ She raised her voice at the end of her sentence, as though she was asking me a question, but I knew she didn’t really need my answer.

Her companion, a younger, male police officer who looked almost too young to be on the job, had been scanning our kitchen as Gillian and I talked, his eyes darting around. I don’t know what he was looking for, but I doubted he was going to find it in amongst my toaster and kettle or Emma’s stash of Haribo.

‘And we are in the process of obtaining a search warrant for your property,’ DCI McVey had continued, taking a sip of her tea. ‘We will aim to keep this as non-intrusive as we can, Mrs Dillon, but it’s necessary for us to complete a search as part of the official investigation.’ She’d paused, reached a hand into her jacket pocket. ‘If you want to talk to me at any point, Mrs Dillon, this is my direct line. I hope you’ll give me a call.’ She’d put the tea back down onto the table, barely touched. I saw a flicker of annoyance pass across Maria’s face; she’s never liked being rejected, not even in tiny ways like that. ‘We know you want to protect your husband, Mrs Dillon,’ the officer said, softening her voice a little, ‘but if you do think of anything that we ought to know about, it’s in his best interests if you ring us at once. In a case like this, time really is of the essence.’

I’d nodded at her, taken the card without looking at it. My fingers felt cold and numb, as if I’d been sitting on them for too long and got pins and needles.

‘Don’t you think you ought to be out looking for the baby?’ I asked suddenly, the words bursting out of me, too loud in our kitchen. ‘A one-year-old can’t survive all this time without her mother. You should be out looking for her, not wasting time here.’

The officers had exchanged glances, and embarrassment had flooded my face.

‘I’m sorry,’ I’d said quickly, ‘this is an upsetting time.’

My daughter disappeared after that, shying away from any more attention. I went up to see her after they’d left, stroked her hair for a bit.

‘This is all going to be over soon, Ems,’ I told her, ‘you’ll see.’ She and I haven’t mentioned Callum’s affair since the night I confirmed it – sometimes I think I dreamed that entire conversation, but of course I didn’t. My dreams now mainly consist of Eve, of that little face, those conker-coloured eyes. They haunt me. Every hour that ticks past, every minute makes things worse. I’ve seen the TV dramas. I know how these things so often end.

‘What’s going to happen?’ she asked me, and I didn’t answer, couldn’t think of the right words.

‘Did you actually see Dad in the studio that night, Ems?’ I asked her, and she paused before answering.

‘I saw the light on,’ she said, ‘which is almost the same thing.’ There were tears in her eyes. ‘I just want us all to stay together,’ she’d whispered, ‘I want to stay a family.’

‘We will,’ I promised, bending down to kiss her on the top of her head, much closer than she usually lets me get, ‘we will.’

‘Do you promise?’

‘I promise.’

‘She’s scared,’ Maria told me, ‘she’s too young for all this. She doesn’t know what to think.’ My sister had looked at me reproachfully, as if I’d been forcing Emma to stare at pictures of Caroline Harvey’s dead body for hours on end. There aren’t any, of course. I’ve looked online. I am desperate for news of little Eve.

‘God, they’re making a meal of this,’ Maria says now, and I refocus on the TV screen, where Jenny Grant is speaking, cameras flashing in front of her, distorting the image a little with white spots of light.

‘All we want,’ she is saying, her voice filling the living room, ‘is for our baby to come home.’ A picture of Eve fills the screen and I lean forward; she really is a beautiful child. That curly hair, the cherubic features. I steal a sideways glance at Emma but she too is riveted, her eyes fixed on the screen. In her lap, her phone vibrates, and I catch sight of Twitter updates along with the green roundel of WhatsApp. I don’t know whether Emma’s spoken to anyone about what’s been happening. Her friendship circle seems to have dwindled over the last few months. She goes out occasionally, but tells me nothing about where she has been or who with.

Thank God we’re in the summer holidays, I think, not for the first time. I cannot imagine Emma going into school at the moment, I cannot imagine what people might be saying. Well, that’s not true. I can imagine, I just don’t want to. I still haven’t called work back, ignored the email asking me to phone. I’ve messaged Bridget, one of the HR girls, telling her to redirect any correspondence to a senior colleague for now. She didn’t ask questions – I find HR tend not to, despite it being part of their role. Callum would say that’s me being cynical.

‘It’s as if everyone’s forgotten that that woman is dead as well,’ Maria remarks. She’s drinking vodka and tonic, the glass cupped in her free hand. She’s on her third top-up. My sister doesn’t usually drink spirits, but we’re out of wine and nobody wants to risk going to the shop for fear of being accosted.

‘It’s like being under house arrest,’ Emma mumbled earlier, then seemed to regret her choice of words. After all, Callum is under actual arrest, and with every hour that goes by when he isn’t released, the stakes grow higher.

‘Eve is the light of our life,’ Jenny is saying, tears beginning to form in her eyes. One of them escapes and makes its way down her cheek, tracking through her foundation. I wonder if they made them up especially, as though they were celebrities about to go on camera. Next to her, her husband puts an arm around her shoulders, squeezes her gently. He’s a thick-set man, not as attractive as she is, and not as attractive as Callum either. His voice, when he speaks, is strangely gruff, and his eye contact with the camera is nowhere near as good as hers. I lean forward, closer to the television, watching to see if there is any chance the noise on Twitter could be right. Could the police think the whole thing is a cover-up, engineered by the parents crying on the TV screen?

‘Will Dad have to do one of these?’ Emma says suddenly, at the same time as my sister says, ‘Do you think they give them media training before this sort of thing?’

‘No,’ I say to Emma, and, ‘I don’t know,’ to Maria.

I focus on the band of text running across the bottom of the screen, giving the details of the case once again, then find myself recoiling as a photograph of Caroline Harvey flashes up. I haven’t been expecting it – so far the media haven’t shown her picture, focusing instead on little Eve, and the sight of her takes me by surprise. Maria too stiffens beside me, and Emma gives a barely audible gasp.

‘Suffolk Police have today released an image of Caroline Harvey, believed to be the resident at Number 43, Woodmill Road. Miss Harvey was found dead in her flat on the night of August 10th, and baby Eve is thought to have been in her care when she was taken. The incident has provoked a new report on safety surrounding babysitting, with MP Nicola Roland speaking out about precautions young women should be taking when alone in their houses with children. On average, it is thought that…’

The newsreader’s voice is echoing around the room but to me it seems blurry. All I can focus on is the woman: her huge hazel eyes, the way her dark hair falls to her shoulders.

‘She looks a bit like you, Mum,’ Emma says, and Maria takes a long sip of her vodka before standing, presumably in order to get a refill.

I cannot stop the mental images from coming: Caroline and Callum, their bodies twisted together, him holding her, kissing her, whispering in her ear. The image on the TV changes to a still of the harbour, the newsreel across the bottom now talking about divers in Ipswich marina and the timeframe; about how concerns for Eve are growing by the minute. There is footage of them draining the water, of men in white suits and waders, the muddy banks of the Ipswich docks. It is nightmarish, surreal.

But all I can see is Caroline. Caroline and my husband. Have I made a mistake, keeping quiet all these years? If I’d confronted him years ago, would it ever have gone this far? Would baby Eve be missing?

Without warning, my stomach contracts and vomit rises in my throat. I clap a hand to my mouth and Emma turns to me, horrified, as sick spills from between my fingers.

‘Maria!’ she shouts, and my sister comes running, takes one look at me and rushes back to the kitchen, re-emerging with a tea towel and a bowl, the big wooden one I chop salads in. That seems like a different life now – a life in which I chopped salads and drank tea and made love to my husband. My husband who had an affair with Caroline Harvey. My husband who may or may not have killed her. My husband who may know where baby Eve is.

I vomit again, not caring when the liquid splashes onto my shirt. My sister leans over me, dabs at the mess with a wet towel, her hands gently pushing against the fabric and my skin.

‘It’s all right, Siobhan, it’s all right,’ she is murmuring gently, as sweat beads along my brow and my hands go clammy. ‘It’s all going to be all right.’

But it isn’t going to be all right. I know it isn’t. Not even my big sister can fix this one, can get me out of the hole I am in.