It was all back. As if the whole intervening period had been wiped clean away. The moment she’d been led out of the police van into the building. No, not led. Invited, this time. But it was the same. Why did nothing in offices like this ever change? Even the smell of plastic was the same. And the insanely dry mouth was back, the weakness in her legs that she hated so much, the panic deep in her belly like an ugly, brutal dog that had just woken up and was about to slobber, bite, rampage its way up through her. It was after midnight now. She’d had to wait, been questioned briefly, had to wait again and was now in the interview room with the policeman and the parents.
‘Since when has Sarah been with you?’
‘I can’t remember exactly. Early September, I think.’
‘Why didn’t you contact us?’
‘Why should I have done? Is there a law against offering someone a room?’
There was a pause. The policeman looked at her. Sally’s parents looked at her. They looked normal. Her father had looked normal too. They always looked normal. Did she look normal herself?
She tried to pull herself together. It was hard because her thoughts and her emotions were racing. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Or had she?
‘Where is Sarah?’
Sally’s father leant over to her. He looked pale, and his breath smelt sweetish, as if he hadn’t brushed his teeth today.
‘I don’t know.’
Sally’s father was shouting now: ‘So why have you got her things in your house? How can you not know? You do know where she is. Where is she? Have you got her locked up?’
All at once he didn’t look the least bit normal. Liss inhaled deeply and pressed her hands into her sides as if doing so could stabilise her. She wanted to shout in turn: what was he thinking, did he believe she’d killed her, or abused her, or hurt her in any way – but she held herself back. Of course he thought that. Of course. Everyone thought that.
‘I don’t know,’ she said tautly, ‘because she doesn’t tell me where she goes. She was staying with me. That’s all.’
The policeman looked disbelievingly at her.
‘And of course you never asked her where she’d come from. Why a girl her age wasn’t at school during termtime. Where her parents were.’
He wasn’t asking questions. He was enumerating. Liss didn’t know what she should answer. She saw that nobody there understood why you don’t ask questions if you can see that you’re not going to get answers.
‘I don’t know where Sarah is.’ She finally forced the words over her lips. She’d have felt dirty saying Sally. ‘She ran away when she saw you. She’ll have gone on. Maybe she hid. What do I know?’
‘You’ve done something to her,’ the mother said quietly. ‘Four weeks. Four weeks Sarah’s with you and doesn’t get in touch, and you claim not to have had a clue that she was ill, even though the girl’s walked right out of a clinic. You … you’ve done something to her.’
Liss felt the red rise up inside her. The dog inside her barked hoarsely.
‘I gave the girl a bloody home,’ she shouted, and jumped up and would have loved to have slapped them around the faces with it, but she just clenched her fists, trembling, seeing everything through the veil of rage. The mother stood up too.
‘Who even are you? Her mother? You’re … just some random person. You’re a criminal. You do not give my daughter a home! How can you … Who do you think you are?’
Her voice had still been quiet, but full of hate, and the policeman raised his hands.
‘Sit down, please. Both of you. Sit down! And calm down. We’ll clear this up. We’ll clear it up.’
Why did he always say everything twice? Liss sat down reluctantly, although the anger inside her was now much stronger than the fear. She only knew that she had done something right, something that everyone else called wrong. Just like before.
‘I would like to go now.’ She got the words out with an effort.
‘Won’t you just tell us where the girl is?’ asked the policeman. ‘Just take a look at her parents. If it were your child…’
That brought Liss to her feet.
‘Don’t you speak to me about that. Don’t you dare!’ she shouted, all self-control gone. ‘I’m walking out of here now, and I don’t give a shit whether you find Sally or not. I haven’t hidden her. I did nothing more than give her a room, and if you want to hunt her, go ahead. You go ahead, find her and break her. You people are good at that kind of thing. Find her and break her!’
She tried to open the door, but it was locked. Obviously. It was a police station. She whirled around.
‘Open it,’ she hissed. ‘Open it!’
The policeman pressed the buzzer, and Liss yanked the door open.
‘You’re surely not just letting her go?’ the father asked incredulously. ‘But she knows where our daughter is. You can’t just…’
Liss didn’t look back as she went down the stairs. Her whole body was trembling. She missed a step and almost fell.
As she left the station, she started to cry uncontrollably with rage, and she beat her fist against the rough plaster of the building, again and again, until it started to turn red.