‘WHERE IS SHE, EMILY, MY BABY?’
DEREK AND JENNY, EMILY BLACK’S DISTRAUGHT PARENTS, sat side by side on the settee, hands clasped together, wrapped together in tear-streaked misery and despair.
‘Where is she, where’s my baby?’ Jenny wailed again; a plea made at regular intervals between sobs. She continuously twists a tear-soaked handkerchief about her fingers, twisting clockwise and then anticlockwise about the fingers of her left hand.
Derek Black is a solid-looking man, thinks Suzanne Fillmore, as she perched on the edge of an armchair, pulled as close to the distressed couple as she could, as if her proximity might give comfort, but she knows that there is nothing she can do or say that can relieve their anxiety and despair.
Earlier, together with PCs Keith Balderstone and Alan Edgely, she had broken the news to the Blacks that their daughter had gone missing from the hospital. Then, whilst Suzanne sat with the parents, the other two coppers had carried out as discreet a search of the Black home and garden as possible. They searched the garden shed and all around the garden, looking for signs of recent digging in case the little girl had been buried; they looked in the attic, opening up two suitcases and a tea chest full of old books stored up there, under the beds, wardrobes, and cupboards, under the stairs, the coal cellar (thankfully, there was only a little coal in the cellar, so it was easy to ascertain that she had not been hidden beneath a pile of coal); they looked anywhere that a four-year-old girl, alive or dead, could have been hidden.
However, it seemed clear to Suzanne that the parents’ distress was so overwhelming it could not have been faked. Then Balderstone and Edgely left to go and join in the main search at the hospital, leaving Suzanne to comfort and reassure the Blacks that the police were doing everything possible to find their daughter.
She made tea, noting inconsequentially that the kettle was missing its whistle, so she had to stand and watch until the water bubbled and steamed. She then tried to convince Jenny to eat something, to keep up her strength, but she would not. Derek chewed tastelessly at a cheese sandwich but left most of it on the plate. He would get up from the settee, walk around the house in a daze, return to the settee again for Jenny to cling to him as if she were drowning.
‘Where is she, Emily, my baby?’
‘I’m sure we’ll find her soon; she probably just went to the toilet and got lost, you know how big and complex the hospital is. Even I get lost there,’ Suzanne responded, in her heart of hearts not believing it; she would surely have been found by now if that were the case.
‘See, love,’ Derek comforted his wife, ‘She’s just got lost, wandering around in a dream as usual,’ shooting Suzanne a look that said, I know you’re trying to reassure her, but we both know different, don’t we?
Jenny wiped her eyes again, eyes that were red and swollen from unstoppable tears. ‘We call her our miracle baby because that’s what she was. We’d tried for so long; I’d already had four miscarriages and we’d almost given up hope. I wasn’t getting any younger. Well, neither of us were, but it doesn’t matter for a man, does it? But for me, I was thirty-six by the time she came along, and the doctors said I’d probably never conceive again, could never have another child.’
Suzanne, not knowing what else to do in the face of such torment, sat down beside Jenny and patted her ineffectively on the arm. She felt entirely useless, totally incapable of bringing any sort of comfort to them, inept and totally out of her depth.
Jenny sat up straight and cried out again, a deep, wrenched sob from the depths of her soul, as if she knew she would never see her miracle baby alive again. ‘This is her,’ she said, handing Suzanne a photograph of the missing girl she had been clutching to her breast in between bouts of sobbing and tears. ‘My baby! She’ll be five next month, on the 14th.’
The photo, which looked as though it had been hand-tinted, was set in a silver frame with a scalloped edge and showed a pretty little girl with large blue eyes, a cheeky grin, and a mass of bubbly blonde hair.
Suzanne could not hold back her own tears any longer, and the two women clung to each other as Derek got up to pace around the room again. The pall of despair had deepened, a heavy shroud of wretched desolation wrapped around the neat house as hope seemingly seeped out through the gap beneath the door.