‘Henry,’ I call and he turns, smiling. ‘Where were you?’ I try to keep my voice light. ‘I couldn’t find you.’
‘In the park,’ he says.
‘Dylan said you were talking to a lady.’
‘Yes. She liked trains. She was asking me all about Thomas.’
My heart rate slows. Maybe she was just a mother, or a granny who’d brought her grandchildren to the park.
‘Where is she?’
‘She said she had to go. I was just waving to her.’ I look across the park. In the distance I can see a figure in a dark coat walking towards the main exit.
‘Did she not have any children with her?’
‘No, she was by herself.’
‘How old was she?’ I ask, knowing as I do so what a pointless question this is to ask a four-year-old.
‘Twenty?’ he says, but that could mean anything from a teenager up to an OAP. Including a woman of my own age.
I am too shaken to stay any longer, and manage to persuade Henry to come home without a fuss by promising hot chocolate in front of the telly. As I strap him into the car, my phone vibrates in my pocket. I ignore it until I am in the driver’s seat, Henry safely stowed in the back. Praying for it to be a work email, I tap the screen to wake it. It’s Maria. As I read and re-read the Facebook message, the sound of Henry humming happily and tunelessly to himself in the back, full of pure joy at the thought of hot chocolate, feels like needles being driven into my ears.
Henry seems like a nice little boy. I hope you watch him carefully. It’s so easily done, isn’t it? You turn your back for a second and they’re gone.
Chapter 29
2016
I decide to drop Henry at school myself today, and after I watch him running across the playground and into the classroom, I walk round to the office, where gimlet-faced Mrs Harper sits as usual behind her glass screen. Her assistant Miss Wallis is nervously putting documents away in a huge filing cabinet at the other end of the office. I wait for the obligatory minute or two while Mrs Harper taps away furiously at her keyboard, attending to something infinitely more important than me. Eventually she swivels to face me.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m Louise, Henry Parker’s mum.’ I have to say this every time I come in here. I don’t know whether she genuinely doesn’t recognise me, or if she’s punishing me for something: not being a regular at the school gates, or having a different surname to my child. ‘I just wanted to double check the safety procedures around pickup.’
‘Yes?’ If she was wearing a lorgnette she would be lowering it. The temperature around us drops a few degrees; I have done the unthinkable and questioned the school’s competence.
‘It’s just, I have reason to be especially concerned at the moment, so I wanted to make sure that no one else apart from me can pick him up without my permission.’
‘But you don’t usually collect him yourself, do you?’ she asks, her tone hinting at her disdain for me. It’s all right for you, I think, with your nice little job in a school, working school hours only.
‘No, he goes to after-school club,’ I say, forcing my voice to remain neutral. ‘But obviously that’s a regular arrangement that the school knows about. I’m talking about other people picking him up.’
I catch a glint in her eye at the hint of a scandal. ‘Do you mean his father?’ She lowers her voice. ‘Perhaps I should make an appointment for you to see the head…’ She turns to her screen, clicking on the appointments diary.
‘No! His father is fine.’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘I just mean anyone else.’
She sighs. ‘Mrs Parker, I can assure you that we will not let —’ she pauses for an infinitesimal amount of time, just long enough for me to register that she can’t instantly call to mind which child belongs to me ‘— we will not let Henry go home with anyone other than a parent, childminder or usual carer without express permission from you.’
Williams, I think as I always do, my name is Williams; it’s not the day for that particular battle though. I have no choice but to accept what she is saying, but I walk away with a heavy heart. I wish I could keep Henry with me all the time. When he’s away from me the anxiety is a physical pain that runs me through like a sword.
However, there’s no avoiding today’s appointment in Norwich. I spent so long keeping away from this part of the world, building a new life for myself in London, and now it won’t leave me alone, exerting a magnetic pull that I am powerless to resist.
Somewhere inside the glass-fronted building in front of me, DI Reynolds is waiting for me. What is she thinking? Is she wondering about me at all, or am I merely one of the many witnesses that she has to interview, the latest on a long list? Perhaps her training precludes her thinking like that. Maybe she has been drilled to always assume every witness knows something that could prove vital to the case. Or worse, maybe she has sensed something in me, a certain hesitation or guardedness. Is she going to grill me today, to come at me in some completely unexpected way? I have to be ready. I must be so utterly sure in my own mind of my story that she will not be able to trip me up.
I am shown to the interview room by a young woman in uniform who chats inanely to me as we walk through the corridors. We cover a lot of very British topics – the weather, traffic jams, the merits or otherwise of one-way systems. I can’t work out if this is a calculated way of relaxing me before I get pounced on, or if she’s just really boring.
Under the harsh lights, I perch on the edge of the moulded plastic chair, turning my cardboard cup around and around on the beige tabletop. I look around surreptitiously, trying to work out if there’s a secret two-way mirror hidden somewhere like on TV, but I guess the CCTV camera on the wall is doing that job.
DI Reynolds is talking on her phone when she opens the door, but she finishes the conversation quickly and smiles at me. She is bigger than I remember, although everything is amplified in this tiny room. I notice a raised mole on her cheek and red patches on her eyelids.
‘Louise. How are you doing?’
‘OK, thanks.’ ‘Very well’ would be pushing it.
‘This is DS Stebbings.’ She gestures at the suited man who has followed her in, a tall man in his fifties who sits down next to her, opposite me. I recognise him as the man who was with Reynolds the day I saw them driving away with Pete outside the offices of Foster and Lyme.
Reynolds plunges straight in with her questions; there’s no chitchat about the weather with her. We go over the ground we’ve already covered, but this time I’m prepared for the questions about Pete. Yes, I spoke to him earlier in the evening. He seemed perfectly fine, in a good mood. I saw them argue, but then I don’t think I saw him again after that; he must have left. She’s clearly pursuing this as a line of enquiry, but when she realises she’s not getting anywhere, she gives up and moves on.
‘OK. We have witnesses who mentioned that Sophie spent a lot of time talking to Sam Parker and Matt Lewis. Would you agree with that?’