Does he see Lucy often? Would Lucy go round there?’
Jane shook her head. Suzanne couldn’t stay quiet. ‘Lucy always saw Joel here.’ Suzanne wouldn’t refer to Joel as Lucy’s dad. He didn’t deserve the title. He was hardly ever there. He devoted his time, as far as she could tell, to his undefined business interests around clubs and warehouse parties. When he did see Lucy, he took all the icing for a while – bringing presents sometimes, playing with her sometimes, but never consistent, never there when she needed him. When he let Lucy down – which he always did, in the end, forgetting her birthday: It’s only a date on the calendar. Loosen up, Jane; promising to come to her party and not turning up: I can’t stand an afternoon of screeching kids; saying, ‘Of course I’ll come and see you in the play, sweetheart,’ and never arriving, so Lucy cried and refused to perform and said, ‘We can’t start yet, my daddy’s not here’: Look, something cropped up. Stop nagging, Jane – when he let Lucy down, Jane always made excuses for him, always made him look good in Lucy’s eyes. But how to explain it? She tried to sum it up briefly and thought she saw a glimmer of amusement in the man’s eyes. ‘Joel wouldn’t kidnap Lucy.’ she added. ‘He’d pay a ransom for someone to take her off his hands.’
Jane put her face in her hands, then looked up. ‘Joel doesn’t live in Sheffield.’ she said wearily. ‘Lucy won’t be there.’ Suzanne intercepted a quick look between DI McCarthy and Hazel Austen. She flushed. She could have told them that straight away. Jane forestalled the next question. ‘Leeds,’ she said. ‘He lives in Leeds. And he’s in London at the moment, working.’ Her face, normally pale, was white, and she looked exhausted. The words were beginning to spill out as though this was her last defence, and when the words were gone there would be nothing left. ‘She’ll be hungry. She hasn’t had any lunch. She’s small – it’s the asthma. She’s very brave, Lucy, but she does get frightened in the dark. She’s got to be back before it gets dark. She’ll be frightened on her own.’ She looked at the man who was listening impassively to her words. ‘I need to go and find her.’
McCarthy looked at Jane for a moment and seemed to relent. His voice was gentler. ‘There are people out now looking for her.’ Suzanne caught his eye for a second, and read there his belief that Lucy was one of the few. She felt a terrible sense of helplessness.
Lucy crept round the bushes and listened. The sounds were changing. There had been footsteps before, soft on the old leaves, backwards and forwards in the bushes. She’d stayed quiet as anything. She’d heard the whoosh of a bike on the muddy path, but she hadn’t looked. She’d run away from the Ash Man, but there were monsters in the woods.
She’d found places between the stones, places where she could hide and no one would find her. She’d heard someone calling once: ‘Lucy! Lucy!’ But it wasn’t a voice she knew, so she’d kept quiet, like a mouse, she’d whispered to Tamby in her head. But now she could hear children calling in the playground. Maybe it was safe now. She scrambled through the bushes and found her way down to the path again. She didn’t go to the playground. She wanted to go home. She wasn’t supposed to walk through the woods by herself, and most of all she wasn’t supposed to cross the roads. She wished that Sophie was there. Sophie knew what to do.
She hopped down the shallow steps that led to the stream and balanced on the stones that marked the edge of the path. She jumped from one stone to the next, from one foot to the other, moving quickly before she lost her balance. Then she was at the place where the path divided, and she climbed quickly up to the dam. Sometimes people were there fishing, and Lucy and Sophie used to watch them. Lucy liked to look at the boxes with wriggling maggots in. Once, Lucy saw one of the fishermen eating them, but Sophie said that was disgusting. ‘He really was,’ Lucy had said. ‘Really. I saw them in his mouth.’ Disgusting. Lucy looked round. Emma wasn’t there. There were no fishermen. There was no one at the dam, no one anywhere. She wanted Sophie. She wanted her mum. She wanted to go home. Her chest felt sore, and she didn’t have her medicine. Emma had her medicine. She walked further along the path to the end of the dam. She was tired, as well. She was at the cottages now and the long steps that led back down to the stream. She scrambled down them, being careful to step on each step just once, and not put her foot on the cracks. If you weren’t careful like that, the monsters would get you.
Suzanne looked at her watch and realized with a jolt of guilt that she should be at the school waiting for Michael. She should have been there watching him singing in his class concert. She’d promised. And she’d promised Dave. She looked at Jane. She didn’t want to talk about collecting children from school, remind Jane that she should have been collecting Lucy now. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she said.
She ran down the hill to the school gates, fortunately only five minutes away. She thought about Michael waiting on his own in the playground, maybe setting off by himself to find her. It could happen so easily, one slip, one moment of inattention and … 7 hold you responsible for this, Suzanne! She was suddenly aware of the air she was breathing, feeling it insubstantial in her lungs as though all the oxygen had been leached out of it. Her face and hands were tingling and she had stabbing pains in her chest. She was in the playground now, outside the pre-fab that housed Michael’s class. She made herself stop, leant against the low wall and concentrated on getting her breathing under control.
It used to happen all the time. As soon as she found herself alone and responsible for Michael she would panic. She remembered Dave’s look, first of sympathy, then concern and finally exasperation and anger. ‘Postnatal depression,’ her doctor had said, airily. But it had never got any better.
All her earlier sense of well-being had vanished into a black pit of fear and guilt and tension. She realized that she couldn’t do it. Not now, not with Lucy gone, not with all the things that the weekend might bring. That decision helped her to calm down, and she was able to step through the classroom door and be there for the end of the concert.
She waved to Michael whose face brightened when he saw her. Lisa Boyden, Michael’s teacher, slipped across to her with a whispered query about Lucy. Of course, the police would have checked the school. She shook her head to indicate that there was no news, and waited impatiently for the concert to finish.
It was gone four by the time she got Michael out of the school gates. He was full of chatter, pleased to see her, looking forward to his weekend, full of his day, full of the concert, ready to forgive her lateness as she had turned up in the end. She smiled, though her face felt frozen. She said, ‘Did you?’ and ‘Did they?’ and ‘That’s good,’ as they walked up the road, concentrating on keeping her breathing under control, not hearing a word he said. She felt his talk fading away as he became aware of her inattention, saw his face go puzzled and unhappy. She wanted to pick him up and hug him and tell him she was sorry. Instead, she said, ‘We’re going to Dad’s first.’ He looked at her and nodded, a resignation on his face that hurt because it seemed a little too worldly, a little too knowing. Responsible!
Dave lived on the other side of the park and, preoccupied, she turned them both through the park gates. ‘Look at all the policemen!’ Michael was suddenly delighted. ‘There’s been a robber,’ he said.
Suzanne looked around her. There were two patrol cars parked by the playing field, and men in uniform were talking to people, showing them pictures. There was a van, a police van, with dark lettering underneath its standard insignia. She screwed up her eyes to read it. UNDERWATER SEARCH. The dams. Her chest tightened. ‘Yes, I expect they’ve caught him,’ she said, trying to keep her voice under control. ‘Come on, let’s get to Dad’s. Let’s see what he’s doing.’
‘I want to watch. I want to stay.’ Michael began to force tears into his voice, dragging on her hand. He could tell she was in a hurry.
She swallowed her impatience. They had to get out of the
