‘It won’t take long, Mrs Mason. I think Daisy was writing a fairy tale at school recently?’
Sharon blinks, then looks past Everett to the cameras. If she’s calculating whether it would be better for her public image to be seen talking to the police or slamming the door in their face, she apparently decides on the former. ‘So?’
‘We were just wondering if you have it? Her teacher can’t find it.’
Sharon makes a face; she’s clearly no great fan of Kate Madigan. ‘I can’t think what you want that stupid thing for.’
‘She did a lovely drawing to go with it. There was a princess and a prince and a monster that looked like a pig – ’
‘Oh, don’t talk to me about pigs. She’s been drawing nothing but pigs for weeks. Pigs going shopping, pigs driving cars, pigs getting married.’
‘How strange. Did she say why?’
Sharon shrugs. ‘Who knows. Children never do things for logical reasons. Like who’s friends with who. One minute it’s Millie Connor then all of a sudden that’s off and it’s all Portia and that Chen girl. I try to ignore it most of the time.’
‘So have you seen the story?’
‘I saw it a couple of weeks ago. She was just finishing it. I checked it through to make sure there weren’t any mistakes.’
‘You don’t remember what it was about?’
‘Oh, the usual silly sort of thing. It was all a lot of nonsense.’
‘I see. Could you have a look for it for me? It might be in her school bag.’
‘I don’t think Barry would – ’
‘It’s not here.’
The voice is Leo’s. He’s at the foot of the stairs, swinging on the bottom banister. ‘Her school bag. It’s not here.’
Sharon frowns at him. ‘Are you sure? I’m sure I saw it in her room.’
She turns and bustles past him up the stairs. Leo is still swinging on the banister. They can hear Sharon moving things about upstairs.
‘Portia wasn’t.’
Everett blinks at him. ‘Sorry? Portia wasn’t what?’
‘Portia wasn’t Daisy’s best friend. Portia didn’t like her.’
Everett opens her mouth to say something but then there’s a clatter of heels on the stairs and Sharon has come back.
‘He’s right, for once. It’s not there, but how – ’
But then, behind her, Everett hears the sound of a car drawing up and a clamour of cameras and questions. She turns to see Adam Fawley and Gareth Quinn striding up the path towards her.
‘Where’s your husband, Mrs Mason?’
Sharon’s eyes narrow. ‘Why? What do you want him for?’
‘We can do this here,’ says Fawley, ‘in front of the media, or inside – it’s really up to you.’
Sharon turns her head slightly, but her eyes never leave Fawley’s face. ‘Barry!’
When he emerges, he has a can of lager in one hand and a tabloid newspaper in the other. ‘This had better be bloody good.’
‘A call was passed through to our incident room this evening, Mr Mason,’ says Fawley. ‘From a Miss Amy Cathcart. It seems you and she have been corresponding by email for the past three weeks.’
Sharon grips him by the arm. ‘What are they talking about – who the bloody hell is she?’
‘No one,’ says Barry, shaking her off. But his face is white. ‘I’ve never met anyone called Amy Cathcart.’
‘That’s true, Mrs Mason. Strictly speaking your husband has never actually met Miss Cathcart. But that’s clearly what he had planned. I mean, why else join a dating site?’
‘A dating site?’ Sharon is incandescent. ‘You’ve been on a bloody dating site?’
‘I’m afraid so, Mrs Mason. Using a false name and a pay-as-you-go mobile phone I suspect you know nothing about. Am I right?’
Quinn only just intervenes in time as Sharon hurls herself at her husband’s face. Christ, thinks Everett, feeling the flashes at her back, the press must be absolutely beside themselves.
‘It occurs to me, Mr Mason,’ says Fawley as Quinn pulls Sharon back into the house, ‘that you might prefer to continue this conversation at the station.’
Barry throws Fawley a look of pure hatred. There’s a scratch below his left eye. Then he squares his shoulders and thrusts the can and the paper into Everett’s hands before turning to Fawley. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
*
7 June 2016, 10.53 a.m.
42 days before the disappearance
The Pitt Rivers Ethnographic Museum, Oxford
It’s a bright summer day and three teachers from Bishop Christopher’s are attempting to shepherd an unruly line of pupils into something resembling a queue. One of them is Kate Madigan, another Melanie Harris, and the third is Grania Townsend, who’s wearing an eclectic mixture of clothes ranging from a pair of Doc Martens to a floral cardigan with a lace collar. The older children look bored already, having no idea what ‘ethnographic’ means and clearly sceptical about anything that calls itself a ‘museum’. ‘Just bear with me, OK,’ says Grania. ‘This is nothing like any museum you’ve ever been in before – I promise. There’s a toad stuck with pins, and voodoo dolls, and a witch in a bottle, and a totem pole. A proper, big totem pole. You remember, like we saw in that book about the Native Americans?’
There’s a flicker of interest at that. One of the smaller boys squints up at her. ‘Is there really a witch in the bottle? How did they get her in?’
Grania grins. ‘I don’t think anyone knows. The bottle was given to the museum about a hundred years ago by a very old lady who warned there’d be no end of trouble if they ever opened it.’
‘So they never did?’
‘No, Jack, they never did. Best to be on the safe side, eh?’
Up ahead the queue begins to move and Kate Madigan starts to guide the younger children through into the main gallery, where they stand in a group looking up into the dim cavern of a room. There are African shields and Inuit skins hanging under the ceiling and the floor before them is a maze of glass display cases, crammed with every conceivable type of human artefact – Musical Instruments, Masks, Featherwork and Beadwork, Funerary Boats, Weapons and Armour, Pottery, Coiled Baskets. So far, so organized, but inside each case is a glorious chaos of dates and places of origin, with Samurai jumbled with Surinam, and Melanesia with Mesopotamia. Some items still have their original labels – minuscule Victorian handwriting on yellowing paper attached with string. It’s as if time stopped in 1895. And in some ways, it did. At least in here.
Kate Madigan comes up to Grania. ‘Mel just had to take Jonah Ashby to the Ladies. He’s got a nosebleed, poor little man – I think all this excitement was a bit too much for him. But I know what he means. This place is amazing.’
Grania smiles. There are children everywhere now, pointing and gasping and racing from one case to the next. ‘I know. I love bringing classes here. The weirder the stuff is, the more the kids seem to like it.’
‘No surprises there then.’
Grania nods towards one display where at least a dozen children are thronged round. ‘That’s the tsantas. Never fails to draw a crowd.’
‘Tsantas?’
‘Shrunken heads.’
Kate makes a face. ‘Rather you than me.’
Grania grins. ‘It is an acquired taste, I’ll give you that.’
She makes her way over to the display, to find Nanxi Chen reading out the sign on the case with obvious relish, while a crowd of boys stare inside. There are a dozen heads in the case, most the size of a fist, but some much smaller. Several have rings through their noses and their original hair, out of all proportion to the tiny blackened elongated faces.
‘Shrunken heads were made by taking the skin off, and removing the skull and brain,’ Nanxi is saying. ‘The eyes and mouth were sewn up to prevent the spirit of the dead coming back to haunt its killer. Then the skin was boiled in hot water, which caused it to shrink. Wow, that’s seriously disgusting.’
Grania Webster smiles. ‘They’re very old and they come from South America. Back then the tribespeople thought that taking your enemy’s head would capture their soul and give you their power. They’d wear the heads round their necks at ritual ceremonies.’