‘We’ve got officers out looking for your daughter now,’ DI Manvers said. ‘She may well have wondered off, looking for you, when Miss Watson went to the office.’
‘My mum had a fall, she was at the hospital,’ I said softly. ‘And then I got snarled up in traffic from an accident. There was nothing I could do.’ I looked at DI Manvers. ‘Did you go next door?’
‘Yes, I spoke to your neighbour and his mother. He’s been at home all day with her. They were very helpful actually.’
I bet they were. I pushed thoughts of Colin being upstairs in my bedroom swiftly away.
Harriet Watson took a breath, her eyes owl-like behind her glasses. ‘If only we’d had a contact number for you, we would have known what was happening.’
Four pairs of eyes turned to me then and I saw a conclusion had been reached; it was plainly etched on their faces.
They had made their minds up. This was all my fault.
58
Present Day
Queen’s Medical Centre
The nice nurse comes into the room and closes the door behind her. I can smell her subtle perfume and listen as she mutters to herself under her breath as she verbally ticks off her jobs.
‘So, how are we today?’ she asks me as always. ‘Did you miss me? I had a couple of days off.’
I did. I did miss you.
‘My son, he lives down in Devon with his wife and my grandson, Riley. They came up to see me and we had the loveliest time. Have you got children or grandchildren?’ She comes close to the bed. A big smudge of white and blue, right at the corner of my eye. ‘Sorry, I should talk to you here, so you can see me.’
Her face appears above me. She has dark hair and blue eyes. She smiles and I see that her front teeth are very slightly crossed. Her eyebrows need waxing and her temples are flecked with grey. Her breath smells faintly of coffee and maybe smoke.
She looks slightly familiar, but this is the first time I’ve seen her properly. Usually she says hello and her face pops fleetingly in front of me, barely looking at me before she’s gone again, busying around the equipment, taking her readings and making her evaluations.
‘I’m Nancy. They’ve put me on this ward permanently now, so you’ll be seeing quite a bit of me. Hope that’s OK.’
I try to widen my eyes, to make her see I am there, behind them.
She frowns down at me. ‘They tell me your sister visited just the once. The names and details she left for herself and for you don’t match up with anything. It’s like the two of you don’t exist.’
I stare back at her. She’s looking intently at me, as if she’s really puzzling over something.
‘Let’s see now.’ She moves away. I hear her shuffling around in the cabinet next to me, where they put my handbag. ‘What have we got here? Maybe something that can show us who you are? Has anyone gone through your things with you?’
No. Most of them have written me off.
She rattles some keys and I hear paper crinkling. I love this woman for trying, for even considering I might be present. I feel the tiniest burst of hope inside.
‘A photograph,’ she murmurs, and a second later her face is in front of me again. ‘So, who’s this?’
She holds the small portrait directly in front of my eyes.
It’s the photograph of Evie that she had taunted me with. She must have dropped it when Dr Chance came into the room unexpectedly. Someone, probably the cleaner, has put it in my handbag, thinking it belongs to me.
Evie had obviously refused to smile for the camera, but that doesn’t matter. Her hair is a beautiful chestnut-brown colour and she’s wearing a dress I’ve never seen before, a fancy affair that looks as if it cost a fortune. A soft cream fabric, patterned with red swirls and dots, like winter berries on snow.
I wait for the adrenaline rush to my head, that electrical charge that powered me to blink before. But it doesn’t come. As the nurse stares down at me, I am completely and utterly unresponsive.
Something inside me shrivels and it feels like I have just stepped a little closer to letting go of the thread that tethers me to the real world. The world I no longer exist in but haven’t fully left.
Soon, it will be time for me to let go, to fade away. If only I can do this one last thing for Evie first, to put right all my terrible mistakes. Then my job will be done.
Yet despite everything, my heartbeat remains steady, pumping life around what used to be my body but is now a strange land filled only with loss and regret. I am bursting with pure disdain for myself, and especially for her, my recent visitor.
‘Is this your daughter?’ The nurse’s voice sounds strange and her forehead wrinkles above me. ‘She’s beautiful and she – she reminds me of someone.’ She twists the photograph this way and that, studying it. I watch as her brow furrows, her jaw sets. I am willing her to join up the dots.
‘Oh my God,’ she whispers, her features contorting. Her eyes slide to my face again and narrow slightly, as if she is trying to focus, to understand the impossible. ‘Oh my God.’
She grips the photograph tightly and runs from the room. Relief washes through me like a cleansing balm.
At last, someone has realised the truth.
Someone knows who I am.
59
Present Day
The Nurse
Nancy sits in the back of the police car and watches as the familiar houses and shops whizz by in a washed-out blur. She sees them every day, but this afternoon they look strange to her. She registers the shapes and colours through the myriad raindrops that stream relentlessly onto the window and it feels like she has never seen them before.
This is the day that the world has turned upside down and inside out.
As soon as Nancy had alerted the powers that be, the hospital management contacted the police, and they had asked her to accompany them. All in the space of a couple of hours. It was an unusual step for them to take, DI Manvers had explained, but this was an extraordinary situation and it would help, they felt, Nancy being there.
The car slows to turn the corner and the memories rush back into Nancy’s mind. She squeezes her eyes closed against them, for all the good it does.
‘You OK, love?’ DI Manvers glances at the uniformed officer driving the car and turns in his seat to look at her. ‘We’re almost there. We can pull over if you want to take a minute?’
‘No,’ she whispers, her voice catching in her throat. ‘This is not about me.’
But even as she utters the words, Nancy knows it is very much about her. What she knows is about to make someone’s agony even more unbearable.
If that were even possible.
* * *
The police car travels over the big roundabout, swinging onto Cinderhill Road and finally turning into Muriel Crescent. A delivery man hesitates in getting back into his van, watching the police vehicle approach.
Nancy closes her eyes and feels the car slow to a stop. DI Manvers opens the door and she opens her eyes and climbs out of the car. The air outside is damp and hangs heavy, almost sticky, around her face. She feels a sudden rush of nausea and steadies herself by holding on to the car door.
‘Nancy, are you OK?’ DI Manvers asks again.
She nods.
But she is not OK, not really.
Nancy bends forward, trying to catch her breath. She sees the cracked, damp pavement and suddenly she is back there, back to that awful day when Evie stood sobbing in the street, covered in wasp stings.
Nancy had given just a few minutes of advice that day. After that, she’d seen the Cotters on the odd occasion when she’d either been on her way out or coming back home from work. It had only happened now and again. She’d wave hello and they’d wave back. It had never been anything more than that.
Six months after the wasp sting day, Nancy had started her new job at the QMC, and moved from Muriel Crescent to take a rented apartment on the outskirts of the city. She hadn’t known the Cotters well enough to say goodbye and, she readily admitted, she had never given them another thought.
Until she’d seen those horrific newspaper headlines.
Police appeal for help to find missing five-year-old girl
Girl vanishes from classroom after mother is late to collect her