nodded, and dragged herself to her feet. ‘Has Oliver gone?’
‘About ten minutes ago. He didn’t want to disturb you. He left a note.’
Sally’s body felt hot and heavy. In the bathroom she washed her face and dragged a comb through her hair. In the mirror her face confronted her: a haggard stranger, pale and puffy-eyed, no make-up, hair in a mess.
In the living room, Yvonne was standing by the window, her head bowed, an anxious smile on her face.
‘This is Chief Inspector Maxham. Mrs Appleyard.’
A small, thin man was examining the photographs on the mantelpiece. He turned round, a fraction of a second later than one would have expected.
‘Mrs Appleyard.’ Maxham ambled towards her, hand outstretched. ‘I hope we haven’t disturbed you.’
‘I wasn’t asleep.’ His handshake was dry, hard and cold. She noticed that the hands were a blue-purple colour; he probably suffered from poor circulation. ‘Is there any news?’
‘I’m afraid not. Not yet.’ He gestured to a tall man standing by the door to the kitchen. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Carlow.’
The sergeant nodded to her. He wore a chain-store suit, a dark grey pinstripe whose sleeves and trouser legs were a little too short for him. His skin, his hair and even his eyes looked etiolated, as if he spent too much of his waking life staring at a computer screen under artificial light. His jaw was so prominent that the lower part of his face was broader than the upper.
Maxham nodded to one of her chairs. ‘Do sit down, Mrs Appleyard.’
She remained standing. ‘Have you found anything, anything at all?’
‘It’s early days.’ Maxham had a plump face, the skin criss-crossed with red veins. Behind black-rimmed glasses the eyes were pale islands, neither grey nor blue but somewhere between. The accent was Thames Estuary, very similar to Derek Cutter’s. ‘As far as we can tell, Lucy just walked out of the back door. She –’
‘But she wouldn’t do that. She’s not a fool. She’s been told time and time again –’
‘It seems that she and Ms Vaughan had had a bit of a disagreement. Lucy wanted Ms Vaughan to buy her something, a Christmas present, and Ms Vaughan said no. Then Ms Vaughan went upstairs to the bathroom. She left Lucy sulking behind the sofa. Five minutes later, maybe ten, Ms Vaughan comes down again, hoping Lucy had calmed down. But she was gone. The other little girl and boy hadn’t noticed her going – one was watching TV, the other was upstairs with Ms Vaughan. Lucy’s coat’s missing. And so’s Ms Vaughan’s purse. Big green thing – it was in her handbag on the kitchen table.’
The little madam, Sally thought: she’s not getting away with that sort of behaviour; just wait till I get my hands on her. In an instant she lurched back to the reality of the situation. Her legs began to shake. She sat down suddenly. Maxham sat down, too. He looked expectantly at her. She found a tissue in her sleeve and blew her nose.
At length she said, ‘I thought Carla always locked the doors, put the chain on.’
‘So she says,’ he agreed. ‘But on the back door she’s only got a couple of bolts and a Yale. We think Lucy may have pulled over a stool and climbed up. The bolts had been recently oiled and the catch might have been up on the Yale – Ms Vaughan said she went out in the yard to put something in the dustbin earlier that afternoon, and she wasn’t sure she’d put the catch down when she came in.’
Sally clung to past certainties, hoping to use them to prove that this could not be happening. ‘She couldn’t have got out of the yard. The fence is far too high for her. And there’s a drop on the other side – she doesn’t like jumping down from a height. There’s a gate, isn’t there, into some alley? It’s always locked. I remember Carla telling me.’
‘The gate was unbolted when we got there, Mrs Appleyard.’
‘It’s a high bolt, isn’t it?’ Sally closed her eyes, trying to visualize the yard which she’d seen on a sunny afternoon in the autumn. Dead leaves, brown, yellow and orange, danced over the concrete and gathered in a drift between the two dustbins and the sandpit. ‘Was the bolt stiff?’
‘As it happens, yes. Would you say that Lucy is a physically strong child for her age?’
‘Look at me, Mum.’ Lucy was standing on the edge of her bed in her pyjamas, holding Jimmy up to the ceiling. ‘I’m King Kong.’
‘Not particularly. She’s a little smaller than average for her age.’
Sergeant Carlow was sitting at the table and writing in his notebook. The cuffs of the trousers had risen halfway up his calves, exposing bands of pale and almost hairless skin above the drooping black socks.
A soft hiss filled the silence: Maxham had a habit of sucking in breath every moment or so as if trying to clear obstructions lodged between his teeth; and as he did so he pulled back his lips in the mockery of a smile. ‘We’ve talked to the neighbours all along the street. We’ve talked to the people whose gardens back on to the alley. No one saw her. It was a filthy evening, yesterday. No one was out unless they had to be.’
Sally shouted, ‘Are you saying that someone opened that gate from the outside?’
Maxham shrugged his wiry little body. The plump face looked all wrong on such a scraggy neck. ‘I’m afraid we’re not in a position to draw any conclusions yet, Mrs Appleyard. We’re just investigating the possibilities, you understand. Gathering evidence. I’m sure you know what these things are like from your husband.’
The condescension in his voice made Sally yearn to slap him. He sat there smiling at her. He was going bald at the crown and the grey hair needed cutting. He wore an elderly tweed suit, baggy at the knees and shiny at the elbows, which gave him the incongruous appearance of a none-too-successful farmer on market day. She did not like what she saw, but that did not mean he was bad at his job. Once more he hissed. Now that she had noticed the habit, it irritated and distracted her. She thought of protective geese and hostile serpents.
‘What about dogs?’ she asked, her voice astonishingly calm.
‘We tried that. No joy. Doesn’t prove anything one way or the other. All that rain didn’t help.’
‘And how can I help you?’
Maxham’s head nodded, perhaps as a sign of approval. He took off his glasses and began to polish them with a handkerchief from the top pocket of his jacket. ‘There’s a number of things, Mrs Appleyard. Most of them obvious. We’ll need a good up-to-date photograph of Lucy. We’ll need to talk to you about what she’s like – not just her appearance, what she’s like inside. We’d like to find out exactly what she’s wearing. Everything.’ He inserted a delicate little pause in the conversation. ‘Also, any toys she may have had with her, that sort of thing. Ms Vaughan said she wanted them to go to Woolworth’s and buy a conjuring set. Can you confirm that?’
‘Yes. Lucy and I had an argument about it on the way to Carla’s yesterday morning. My daughter can be very persistent. If she wants something, she’s inclined to go on and on about it until she gets it. And if she doesn’t get it, which is what often happens, she sometimes throws a tantrum.’
‘So you’d agree that
