After Anna (20 page)

She was in bed. She had not been in bed when she had taken the pills, which meant someone had brought her up here. It also meant that there was water nearby, in the en-suite bathroom. It would be nice to have water. Clear, cool, life-giving water.

She’d get it in a minute. As she lay there images came back to her. Broken memories. The bitter taste of the pills. The burn of the vodka. The phone ringing, then ringing again.

DI Wynne’s voice.

Mrs Crowne, we’ve found Anna.

The dream again. She pushed it away but it was persistent. Fuzzy, clouded by the booze and pills, but persistent. And it felt real. Specific, tangible.

She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling.

It
was
real. Anna was alive. She knew it somehow. Something in her body felt different.

Anna was alive.

She pushed back the covers and swung her feet onto the carpet. She stood up too quickly for her hangover to handle and the blood rushed from her head. Faint, she sat back down.

Downstairs she heard a laugh. It was man’s laugh, a laugh she knew well. It was her husband, Brian. The laugh came again. And again.

Brian was laughing, and there was only one reason for that.

‘Anna!’ she called. Her voice was high and croaky. She cleared her throat. ‘Anna!’

There was a silence, then she heard fast, heavy footsteps on the stairs. She recognized the footsteps; it had always amazed her that someone so light and delicate as her daughter could tread so heavily, as though she was stamping instead of walking.

‘Anna,’ she said, to herself. ‘Oh God, Anna. Is it you?’

She didn’t believe it – couldn’t believe it – until the bedroom door was flung open and there she was, fresh and smiling and beautiful and Anna, so perfectly Anna, her daughter, her child, the love of her life, there, in the doorway, then running across the carpet towards her and then, finally, in her arms.

Her daughter was in her arms.

It was like nothing she had ever felt before. Everything – the smell of Anna’s breath, the heat of her body, the taste of her tears, the sound of her repeated cries of
mummy, mummy
as she ran from the door to the bed – was hyper-real. It was as though Julia’s senses did not trust what they were presented with, and so had turned themselves up to a new, more intense level that allowed them to see and smell and taste more deeply so that they could not be deceived. She saw the cracks and valleys in Anna’s lips as they quivered, picked out individual hairs on her head, saw the tiny flakes of skin on her ears. And she loved every detail.

The closest she had come to this sensation was on the day Anna was born, when the midwife had placed this tiny, mewling, blood-and-mucus-coated, alien creature onto Julia’s newly empty abdomen, and Julia had fallen instantly in love with it. She could bring it back to mind still, as though the memory was minutes and not years old. It was the clearest, most significant, happiest memory of her life.

But it was nothing compared to this.

Back then, she had rejoiced in the gaining of something wonderful; now, she was regaining something wonderful. She had been as low as it was possible to be; had lost everything, had known the heights of being a parent, and fallen to the depths of having lost a child, a loss made worse by the fact it was her fault. She had been so low she had been in the process of killing herself, and now she had her daughter back. The swing from utter despair to rapturous joy was incredible. She was aware, as she held Anna, that she was one of the very few people to have known such extremes; one of the very few unfortunate enough to have known them.

She tugged her daughter against her chest and pressed her lips to her cheek. Anna was thin, her shoulders sharp and the bones in her face more prominent, but she was smiling as she hugged her mum; she was ok, she was alive and here and that was all that mattered.

‘I’ll never let you go again, Anna,’ she said. ‘I promise. I’ll never let you go again.’

iii.

‘Julia?’ Brian’s voice came from outside the bedroom. He had not – at least, as far as she knew – crossed the threshold of their former marital inner sanctum since Anna had disappeared.

‘Daddy,’ Anna said, lifting her head from Julia’s chest. ‘Come in and cuddle. We can all cuddle together.’

There was a long pause. ‘I don’t know,’ Brian said. ‘I—’

‘Come
on
, Daddy!’

Brian stepped into the room. His eyes were still sunken and surrounded by dark circles, but there was a lightness in his expression that had not been there since the day Anna disappeared.

‘It’s ok,’ Julia said. She shifted herself to one side of the bed. ‘Sit down.’

Brian took a few hesitant steps across the room, then lay on what had been his side of the bed, propped up on his elbow. He reached out and put his hand on Anna’s hip; she turned from Julia and flung her arms around his neck.

‘I
love
you, Daddy,’ she said.

‘I love you too,’ he murmured. ‘So much.’

For a moment Julia wondered whether she had judged him too harshly, whether he was a better, kinder,
fuller
, husband and father than she had given him credit for. Had she expected too much of him? Had she been blinded by the glare of what she wanted him to be, left unable to see the muted light of Brian’s qualities, qualities that might have found – might find, still – a fuller expression away from the sunless undergrowth around his mother?

She put her hand on his forearm and smiled at him.

‘Brian,’ she said. ‘She’s back.’

He turned his shoulders so that his forearm twisted away from her.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing. Like a dream.’

‘Where was she?’

‘They don’t know. She woke up in a bus shelter this morning and walked into a newsagent in Tarporley. No one saw her until she was nearly there.’

This morning. While Julia had been drinking on the couch her daughter had been returning to the world. She looked at the alarm clock. Three p.m. So she’d been out six hours.

But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Anna was here. ‘Is she ok?’

‘Fine, physically. The police said … ’, he paused, and nodded at Anna,. ‘can we talk about this later? It’s better, I think.’

‘Ok.’

‘You should come downstairs. DI Wynne is on her way. You need to get dressed.’

Anna rolled away from Brian. ‘Can I stay up here with you, Mummy?’

‘Of course.’ Julia put her hands out and folded them around Anna. She was so warm, so present, so
alive
. Julia had not expected this, had not believed that she would ever see her daughter again. She had accepted that Anna was gone; taking with her the only thing that gave Julia’s life meaning and purpose. Julia had faced what that meant, had stared at a life lived without her daughter and with the knowledge that she was to blame for her loss and decided that it was not a life she could live.

She felt goosebumps prickle on her arms. She hugged Anna tighter, grateful for the throbbing in her temples and the pain at the back of her eyes. It meant she was alive; here to welcome her daughter back to her home.

But, despite her joy, a thought nagged at her.

Someone, for some reason, had abducted her daughter. They had taken the risk of whisking her away in broad daylight, had found a way to keep her hidden during a national – an
international
– hunt, only to return her a week later.

It was a huge risk; if they were caught then the implications for them were obvious. If they had had killed her or sold her on then Julia could understand why they had done it – they presumably got whatever pleasure they got from killing, or they got paid, and then they disposed of the body. As long as the police had no leads then they were safe. The motive was also obvious: a random poaching of an unwatched child. It was an old story, well understood.

But that was not what had happened. Whoever had done this had taken all that risk, and then they had taken some more: they had returned Anna. Why? What did they gain? It didn’t make sense. There was something missing, something Julia did not understand.

And it worried her. What if it was not random after all? What if they had selected Anna – specifically Anna – for some reason?

Anna wriggled against Julia. Julia squeezed her hard against her chest.

‘Mummy,’ Anna said. ‘You’re squashing me.’

‘Sorry,’ Julia said. ‘But I just don’t ever want to let you go.’

And she didn’t, because if they had selected Anna, if there was some reason for this, then it might not be over.

And whoever had done this was still out there, with whatever reason they had done it for still known only to them.

And they might be watching right now, planning their next move.

iv.

‘Mrs Crowne,’ DI Wynne said. ‘What fabulous news. I’m so pleased for you.’

Wynne’s smile was the first truly genuine expression Julia had seen on her face. She was always the same: steady, professional, measured. Bland, almost. So bland that it had to be an act. No one without passion could do her job, but no one who could not control their passion would be able to stick at it. If you let yourself get too involved, it would devour you, Julia could see that.

And the smile: relaxed, relieved, full, was proof that DI Wynne was human after all.

‘Thank you,’ Julia said. ‘For all you did.’

She, Brian, and DI Wynne were sitting in the living room. Julia’s hair was wet from the shower; she felt cleaner, but her headache was still sharp, despite taking two doses of ibuprofen. Still, it didn’t matter. The world had taken on a soft glow. Anna was sleeping, her head on Julia’s lap.

DI Wynne shrugged. ‘I wish I could say that we’d done more, but this was really not down to us. She just … well, she just showed up.’

Brian had filled her in on what she had missed. Despite the magnitude of the events, there really wasn’t all that much: the police received a call around nine a.m. from a newsagent in the Cheshire village of Tarporley to say that a girl calling herself Anna Crowne had walked into the shop, declared she was hungry, and asked for her mummy. The shopkeeper gave her water and a Crunchie bar, then called the police. By nine fifteen Anna was in the hands of the local police; by ten a.m. she was at the police station with DI Wynne and Brian. Her mum was passed out at home, but nobody needed to know about that.

Anna was fine, Brian said. Lost some weight, but unharmed and quite cheerful. She was very interested in the police station and asked to see the cells; a woman police officer took her down there. When she came back she was eating a choc ice from the canteen. She declared to Brian, DI Wynne, and the doctor who had showed up that she was going to be a policeman when she grew up.

Or a policewoman
, DI Wynne said.

No
, Anna said.
A policeman.

I’m afraid it might be my fault
, the woman police officer said.
I told her that I didn’t eat many choc ices
but that the male officers ate them all the time.

So Anna was fine, except for one thing: she had no memory of what had happened to her. She had no idea who had taken her or where she had been. All she remembered was waking up in the bus shelter and then walking across a field to the buildings she could see, because she was cold and wanted to get warm. DI Wynne pressed gently, asking whether the person was a man or a woman, tall or short, had a nice voice or a nasty voice, but there was nothing. She didn’t have any memory of the events at all.

Julia asked how that was possible.

‘She was probably given some kind of memory inhibiting drug,’ DI Wynne said. ‘There are plenty about.’

Julia wondered, briefly, – before she forced the thought from her mind, although she knew it would intrude again, late at night or first thing in the morning – what had been done to Anna that was so bad it needed to be erased from her memory. She could think of a few things, and none of them were anything other than awful.

‘
A child psychologist will have to see her’, DI Wynne told Brian, ‘but there don’t seem to be any signs of emotional trauma.’

There were also no signs of sexual abuse. It didn’t mean there hadn’t been something, but if there had it was not violent or invasive and it had left no trace. Julia found this both reassuring, and disturbing. She didn’t want there to be signs of sexual abuse, but she also wanted to know for sure that there hadn’t been any. The thought that someone might have abused her daughter so cleverly that they left no evidence of having done so was cold comfort.

‘So you don’t know who took her?’ Julia said. ‘Was there anything on her clothes? Fibres? DNA?’

DI Wynne shook her head. ‘Nothing. Someone did a very thorough job of removing all traces of themselves. Her clothes had been washed. My guess is that whoever did this handled them with gloves from the moment they took them from the washing machine. Then they put them on Anna before leaving her in the bus shelter this morning.’

Julia nodded. ‘So you have nothing?’

Wynne sipped her tea. ‘Very little.’

‘And will you keep the investigation open?’ Brian asked.

‘We will,’ Wynne said. She glanced up at the ceiling; it was an odd, evasive gesture. She looked back at Julia. ‘We are still interested in finding the person who did this.’

‘In case they do it again?’ Julia said.

‘That,’ Wynne said. ‘And also … well, this is a bit of a confusing situation. I’ve never come across something quite like this. I’d be happier if we had the perpetrator behind bars.’

‘Right,’ Brian said. ‘The child rarely shows up. If they do it’s often years later.’

He was an expert now, Julia thought. It was an unpleasant thing to have needed to become an expert in, but at least now it was just knowledge, and not his own experience.

‘Exactly,’ Wynne said. ‘But to just return the child, unharmed, well, it’s unheard of.’

‘Perhaps they felt sorry for us,’ Julia said. ‘Maybe they saw our press conference.’

‘It’s possible,’ Wynne said, although it was clear she didn’t think that was the case. ‘But we don’t know for sure. We don’t know much. Why they would do this, for example. Why they would take such a risk, when there’s nothing in it for them.’