“‘Lies in a holy place’?” repeated Strike.
“Yes. I suppose she thought that would be comforting, but I’m not a churchgoer. The sanctity or otherwise of my mother’s final resting place—if she’s buried—I mean, it’s hardly my primary concern.”
“D’you mind if I take notes?” Strike asked.
He pulled out a notebook and pen, which Cagney the cat appeared to think were for her personal amusement. She attempted to bat the pen around as Strike wrote the date.
“Come here, you silly animal,” said Kim, getting up to lift the cat clear and put her back on the warm wooden floor.
“To begin at the beginning,” said Strike. “You must’ve been very young when your mother went missing?”
“Just over a year old,” said Anna, “so I can’t remember her at all. There were no photographs of her in the house while I was growing up. I didn’t know what had happened for a long time. Of course, there was no internet back then—anyway, my mother kept her own surname after marriage. I grew up as Anna Phipps, which is my father’s name. If anybody had said ‘Margot Bamborough’ to me before I was eleven, I wouldn’t have known she had any connection to me.
“I thought Cynthia was my mum. She was my childminder when I was little,” she explained. “She’s a third cousin of my father’s and quite a bit younger than him, but she’s a Phipps, too, so I assumed we were a standard nuclear family. I mean—why wouldn’t I?
“I do remember, once I’d started school, questioning why I was calling Cyn ‘Cyn’ instead of ‘Mum.’ But then Dad and Cyn decided to get married, and they told me I could call her ‘Mum’ now if I wanted to, and I thought, oh, I see, I had to use her name before, because they weren’t married. You fill in the gaps when you’re a child, don’t you? With your own weird logic.
“I was seven or eight when a girl at school said to me, ‘That’s not your real mum. Your real mum disappeared.’ It sounded mad. I didn’t ask Dad or Cyn about it. I just locked it away, but I think, on some deep level, I sensed I’d just been handed the answer to some of the strange things I’d noticed and never been given answers to.
“I was eleven when I found out properly. By then, I’d heard other things from other kids at school. ‘Your real mum ran away’ was one of them. Then one day, this really poisonous boy said to me, ‘Your mum was killed by a man who cut off her head.’”
“I went home and I told my father what that boy had said. I wanted him to laugh, to say it was ridiculous, what a horrible little boy… but he turned white.
“That same evening he and Cynthia called me downstairs out of my bedroom, sat me down in the sitting room and told me the truth.
“And everything I thought I knew crumbled away,” said Anna quietly. “Who thinks something like this has happened in their own family? I adored Cyn. I got on better with her than with my father, to tell you the truth. And then I found out that she wasn’t my mum at all, and they’d both lied—lied in fact, lied by omission.
“They told me my mother walked out of her GP’s practice one night and vanished. The last person to see her alive was the receptionist. She said she was off to the pub, which was five minutes up the road. Her best friend was waiting there. When my mother didn’t turn up, the friend, Oonagh Kennedy, who’d waited an hour, thought she must have forgotten. She called my parents’ house. My mother wasn’t there. My father called the practice, but it was closed. It got dark. My mother didn’t come home. My father called the police.
“They investigated for months and months. Nothing. No clues, no sightings—at least, that’s what my father and Cyn said, but I’ve since read things that contradict that.
“I asked Dad and Cyn where my mother’s parents were. They said they were dead. That turned out to be true. My grandfather died of a heart attack a couple of years after my mother disappeared and my grandmother died of a stroke a year later. My mother was an only child, so there were no other relatives I could meet or talk to about her.
“I asked for photographs. My father said he’d got rid of them all, but Cyn dug some out for me, a couple of weeks after I found out. She asked me not to tell my father she’d done it; to hide them. I did: I had a pajama case shaped like a rabbit and I kept my mother’s photographs in there for years.”
“Did your father and stepmother explain to you what might have happened to your mother?” Strike asked.
“Dennis Creed, you mean?” said Anna. “Yes, but they didn’t tell me details. They said there was a chance she’d been killed by a—by a bad man. They had to tell me that much, because of what the boy at school had said.
“It was an appalling idea, thinking she might have been killed by Creed—I found out his name soon enough, kids at school were happy to fill me in. I started having nightmares about her, headless. Sometimes she came into my bedroom at night. Sometimes I dreamed I found her head in my toy chest.
“I got really angry with my father and Cyn,” said Anna, twisting her fingers together. “Angry that they’d never told me, obviously, but I also started wondering what else they were hiding, whether they were involved in my mother disappearing, whether they’d wanted her out of the way, so they could marry. I went a bit off the rails, started playing truant… one weekend I took off and was brought home by the police. My father was livid. Of course, I look back,
