Christmas on Primrose Hill (46 page)

What had she
done
?

She sobbed, her heart feeling small and hot and tight. Her mother knew how to disappear. She would slip below the radar again, surfacing in some other random pocket of the city – or maybe not; maybe she’d travel farther afield to York or Warwick, Bath or Plymouth. Quite literally, anywhere.

Her father sank into the chair again, his hand grabbing hers now. ‘We have to try,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s Christmas Eve and we have a location for her – someone might know where she’s staying. We can’t give up now, not when we’re so close.’

‘Dad, I
turned my back
on her. Don’t you get it?’

‘No, Button, don’t you? She is your mother. She loves you above all else; she’ll understand. Of course she’ll forgive you.’ He smiled.

Nettie stared back at him. How could he have such faith after all this time?

He shook her hand lightly. ‘Tell me where she was.’

She sighed, her breath shaky. ‘It was at Clifton Nurseries, Maida Vale,’ she sighed eventually. ‘But it’s easy to miss. You have to look for a—’

‘You can show me yourself.’

‘
I’m
not coming!’ she said urgently, recoiling as her father stood and held out his hand. ‘Dad! I’d do way more harm than good.’

‘We are a family, Nettie. That didn’t stop just because your mother changed address. Now, upstairs and get changed.’

‘But—’

‘Now.’

Nettie exhaled heavily, pulling her tears off her cheeks with the flats of her hands. ‘I can’t go past all those reporters,’ she said quietly.

‘I quite agree.’

She frowned. ‘So then . . . ?’

Her father winked, jerking his head towards the back garden beyond the kitchen window.

‘You’re mad,’ she gasped.

‘I’ve begun to think so recently, yes.’

Nettie laughed. It was futile, this, but her father was right – they had to try.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

‘She didn’t turn up today.’ The woman scowled, her gloved hands holding a potted gardenia. ‘God knows she picked her day for it. Christmas Eve, I ask you? We’ve been run ragged all morning.’

Nettie looked around the nursery. Yesterday’s snow had thawed to a lace, but it wasn’t the white-webbed plants and pin-lit trees her eyes found. She was searching the crowds again – her expert gaze looking for familiar gait and pose, hands or clothes. She would recognize her again in an instant now, having committed to memory from that one agonizing moment the 1970s shag-cropped hair, wary eyes, hunger-hollowed cheeks.

‘Well, do you have an address for her?’ her father asked in a polite, gentle voice, his entire world resting on this stranger’s kindness. ‘It’s very important that we speak to her.’

Nettie glanced at him, before looking back at the woman who had no idea of the gravity of her words – the fact that lives would be changed by her answer.

The woman looked at them both suspiciously for a moment, clearly wondering who they were – police? Social workers? Debt collectors? ‘That’s confidential. I can’t give out that kind of information,’ she replied disinterestedly. She turned to carry the potted plant to
. . . somewhere.

Nettie put a hand on her arm to stop her, feeling a rush of anger at her diffidence. ‘Please.’ Her voice was firm, her eyes flinty. ‘She’s my mother. She’s been missing for four years.’

The words had their intended effect – there was no way to dilute them – and the woman stalled like a car thrown into the wrong gear. ‘How do I know that’s true? You could be anyone.’

Nettie flipped open her purse and pulled out a photo of their little family, taken at a fairground when she’d been ten – her father, mother and herself all sitting on brown hessian mats at the bottom of a helter-skelter, mouths wide with laughter, eyes bright. She watched the woman scan it, her eyes flicking over them both. It had been taken a long time ago – but her father still had his beard; his hair wasn’t entirely grey yet. And she wasn’t so different, was she? But then again, maybe they had all changed more than they realized?

She handed over the laminate of the ‘missing’ poster she kept in the purse too – safely impervious to time, ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice on her weekly walks, to show anyone who might know, anyone who might be interested.

The woman considered, her jaw sliding to the right as she looked them over. Something must have come across in their eyes – desperation? Despair? Hope? – because eventually she nodded. ‘You’d better follow me, then,’ she said with a tiny nod of her head.

Nettie inhaled deeply, smiling at her father as the woman led them towards an office based in the back of one of the buildings, a clematis trailing up one of the walls outside, the bare arms of a summer bower overhead.

They stood awkwardly at the door as she set the gardenia down on a desk – soil sprinkling onto the paperwork like cake crumbs – and opened a grey filing cabinet. The woman paused, staring at the ceiling as if for inspiration.

‘Sian . . .’ she muttered.

‘Watson,’ her father supplied.

‘Jones,’ the woman said at the same time. The woman immediately looked embarrassed at the conflict. She shrugged. ‘That’s the name she gave us.’

‘O-of course . . . I suppose she would,’ her father nodded, before taking to staring at his feet.

Nettie took a step closer to him and rested her cheek against his arm, hoping to comfort him. The realization that her mother had taken a new surname was like a hard slap that left their ears ringing. Was it a manifest rejection of her old life? Of them? Or just an alias to hide behind and keep her new life a secret? After all, the police had checked her bank account almost immediately after she disappeared and it hadn’t been used since the day before she left. It would have been so easy to trace her if she’d kept her own name.

‘Right,’ the woman said, scribbling down an address on a piece of A4 paper. She held it out to Nettie’s father. ‘This is what she gave us. I can’t verify if it’s real or not.’

‘Thank you,’ her father replied, taking it with reverence, but he didn’t look at it. He was looking at the woman, conveying something of the significance of her actions.

Hope was still alive, a flickering flame.

‘I hope you find her,’ she said more quietly as they turned to leave. ‘She kept herself to herself for the main part, but . . . well, she seemed like a nice lady.’

They walked back through the narrow paths of the nursery, the shadows of the trees passing over their skin like spectres, the sheet of paper a sacrament in their hands.

Not until they were standing on the pavement of Clifton Villas did they read its contents:
19a Shirland Road, W9.

Nettie looked at him, aghast. ‘The same street as the shelter. I would have walked straight past there on Tuesday.’

Her father nodded, smiling gently. ‘No doubt – but you weren’t looking for an address then – just a person who looked like your mum. You couldn’t check every flat in the city.’

A taxi – its light on – turned into the road and her father shot out his hand, watching as it indicated and did a U-turn in the road to idle beside them.

‘Where to?’ the cabby asked.

‘Number 19a Shirland Road,’ her father said, opening the door for her to climb in.

‘But that’s just round the corner,’ the driver protested, calculating the paltry three-pound fare.

‘Exactly. We haven’t got a moment to lose.’

Even with traffic, they were there in under two minutes, the cab pulling up outside a run of forbidding Victorian flats – four storeys high with dirty brickwork, a steep flight of steps up to the raised ground floor and another down to the basement flat, heavy painted lintels like bushy white eyebrows over the windows.

She looked up at the building above as her father overpaid the driver for his trouble. The sash windows were tall and narrow, hung with limp nets or St George’s cross flags, the front doors an austere black.

Nettie ran up the steps to read the names on the entry buzzer.

She ran back down again, meeting her father at the halfway point.

‘It’s “B” to “F” up there. “A” must be the basement flat,’ she said, slightly breathless. Was this really it? The moment the past four years had been building towards?

Her father took her hands on the steps, slowing her down, recognizing the haste in her actions. ‘Are you ready?’

She swallowed. ‘Yes.’

They stood like statues for a moment, poised between worlds – not up, not down, hovering somewhere in the middle. Then holding her hand in his, they walked down the steps to the pavement, turned and walked down to the basement. They stopped in front of another black door.

Her father raised his hand to the door – she noticed how blanched he was – and knocked. The sound echoed inside and out, slowing time. Nettie looked around them. A wheelie bin stood in the corner by the steps, the black bags inside bulging beneath the lid; a slick of brown ice covering the small patch of bald concrete, weeds growing in the cracks of the walls, newspapers pasted to the lower halves of the windows . . .

She turned back to the black door, her eyes scaling the building. But it had a roof, and walls. It was out of the wind, out of the rain, the snow, the ice. She flattened her palm to the cold bricks, grateful.

The door opened.

A slight woman with thin hair, blonde at the tips, dark brown at the roots, stared back at them. Her body was wiry but muscular, as though maybe she’d once been a gymnast, her skin sallow, with dark crescents hanging below her eyes.

‘Yes?’ She didn’t smile, suspicion hovering around her like a scent.

‘Is Sian here?’

The woman looked between the two of them, taking in their clean, pressed clothes, shampooed hair, soled shoes, nourished complexions. ‘Who’s asking?’

‘Her husband and daughter.’

The simplicity of the words was unnerving and the woman’s grip on the door tightened, her fingertips pressing to white.

‘No one of that name lives here.’

Her father didn’t argue. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the photograph of him and his wife on their wedding day – she was looking up to him, her hands folded across his chest as he said something that made her laugh. The look in her eyes was one of absolute adoration, the bond between them as visible as a golden thread. It had been love, true love. The truest kind.

‘Then does this woman live here?’ He wasn’t going to be distracted with semantics.

The woman at the door stared at the photo, her lips thinning slightly, her nostrils flaring by a degree. She didn’t meet their eyes as she span out the lie. ‘Never seen her—’ she said, just as a sudden crash emanated from inside the flat. ‘Oh my God, Charlie! What you doing?’ the woman cried, running back in.

Her hand flung the door to swing closed as she disappeared, but Nettie’s father’s foot was already just over the threshold and it bounced back again.

Without a word or a look to her, he walked in. Nettie followed, feeling her pulse quicken. She had never searched with her father before. In the early days of her mother’s disappearance, it had been more important to cover distance and they had split up, each searching pre-agreed areas they had blocked out on maps. As time had passed and their expeditions transitioned from active searches to general looking, they had each taken comfort in the solitude of their lonely walks, lulled by the repetitiveness of putting one foot in front of the other and feeling they were
doing
something. But this wasn’t a look or even a search; it was a hunt, and she was both proud and intimidated by her father – quietly determined, polite but dogged.

They found themselves in a single room. The carpet was matted flat and stained, but the room was a reasonable size. A white sheet, which had been tacked up at the window, was pulled back on itself like a sail; three single mattresses were set back against the two side walls, a cot in the corner; and a kitchenette area was set up at the rear, just off the room and partitioned by a break in the carpet to lino flooring.

The woman was in the kitchen, her back to them, and scooping up the fragments of a plastic plate that had been swept off the tray of the blue high chair before her, most probably by the impish-looking child sitting in it and staring back at them, his spoon raised like a sword.

Nettie looked around the room again. Where was her mother in this set-up? She wasn’t here now, that was evident, but had she ever been? Had this woman been telling the truth? Was this just a random address her mother had given her employer at the nursery?

The walls were bare save for a Banksy poster of a little girl releasing a heart balloon. There was a cardboard box at the end of one of the mattresses, filled with neatly folded clothes. Another box contained some toys – a brightly coloured octopus with squeezable legs, a wooden bus, a cloth ball, a plastic doll with one eyelid closed shut.

‘Hey!’ the woman cried, turning as she stood up and found them standing in the room, assessing her home with ruthless, expert eyes. They knew how to look. ‘You can’t bloody come in here! Get out!’

‘We’re just trying to find Sian. We know she’s been living here. The nursery gave us this address.’

‘
Who?
Listen, I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, but you can’t go around barging into people’s houses like this! Get the hell out or I’m calling the police.’ Hostility shimmered around her like a heat haze, a jagged edge of plastic plate held in her hand.

But Nettie’s father didn’t move – not an inch forward or back. ‘I know you recognized her. I saw it on your face when you looked at the photograph.’ His voice was calm, quiet, unthreatening. Nettie kept very still, even though her heart was fluttering like a wild bird trapped in a cage, only her eyes moving and taking in the patch of damp on the ceiling, the cracked cornicing . . .

‘You’re delusional, you are. Get out!’

‘We only want to see her, make sure that she’s all right.’

‘And I’ve already told you – I ain’t never seen her before.’

‘She’s missing, you see.’ Her father drew his own laminated copy of the ‘missing’ poster from his coat pocket, refusing to listen to her lies, to be drawn into her heat and shout back. ‘Four years last month. And we miss her very much. We love her very much.’