“But . . .” I felt the color drain from my face. “How long has she been gone?”
“About forty minutes. As I said, we did try to call you, but—”
I hung up and rushed back into the kitchen, my heart pounding. The last time Hannah ran away from school, I’d found her sitting in the back garden on the bench below our kitchen window. It was a warm day today and our kitchen had a stable door, the top part of which I’d left open. Nervously I went to it and looked out, terrified that I would find her there, that she had been there all along. But she wasn’t; the garden was empty, and I exhaled, relief crashing over me.
And then I turned back to the kitchen and I screamed. Because there was Hannah, standing in the door of the little pantry room that adjoined our kitchen. She must have been hiding in there—must have been there all along. She would have heard everything. She knew everything.
My legs felt weak. “Hannah,” I said. “Oh, Hannah.”
She held my gaze for what seemed like an eternity. I don’t think I breathed the whole time. And then she walked past me and up the stairs, while I stared after her, fear pounding through me.
The rest of the day was nothing less than torture. I knew I couldn’t tell Doug what had happened. He’d told me never to make contact, had been furious at the very idea, and would never forgive me for going behind his back. And now this had happened. What if Hannah told Doug? What if she told a teacher what she’d overheard? I could lose everything. Hannah, my marriage, my home . . . maybe even Toby. And the thought of life without my little boy was like a knife to my heart.
During the hours that followed, I scarcely took my eyes off my daughter, my heart clenched with panic as I waited to find out what she’d do. But the strange thing was she seemed entirely unaffected by what she’d heard. Maybe she hadn’t understood, I told myself desperately. But I went over and over what I’d said in the kitchen, and knew there was no way our conversation could have been misconstrued. How could it? The things she’d overheard were dreadful, horrifying; surely she would have been traumatized to discover what she did.
That night when I tucked her up in bed, I lingered for a while on the pretext of tidying her room. I remembered how excited we’d been when we first moved to the house, how we’d looked forward to making our little girl’s room perfect for her. Glancing around now—at the walls we’d painted a cheerful yellow, the string of fairy lights draped over her mantelpiece, the large dollhouse Doug had built, at all the other touches we’d spent ages picking out for her but which had always been met with total indifference—I tried to find the words to begin. “Hannah,” I said. “Darling?”
She looked at me and waited. At seven years old, she was small for her age still, yet she seemed in that moment to have changed, her face a touch less babyish than it was before: one of those moments you have with children, those startling flashes of realization that they are growing up and away from you right under your nose, that time passes so very quickly. Her hair fanned out across the white pillow, her watchful eyes were fixed on mine.
I made myself take a deep breath, my mouth horribly dry. “What you heard in the kitchen earlier, sweetheart, it must have sounded so crazy, so silly,” I began, my smile so forced it hurt my face, my voice shrill. “We were just playing a silly game, that’s all! That was Mummy’s friend and we were pretending we were in a film or something!” Hannah continued to watch me silently. I licked my lips. “The thing is, darling, it needs to be a secret. What you heard, what you heard Mummy and her friend saying, the game you overheard, you mustn’t mention it to anyone. Do you see? You mustn’t mention it to anyone at all, not even Daddy. Do you promise?”
Hannah blinked, her face without expression as she considered me. And then she turned over and closed her eyes, leaving me to stare silently down at her, cold with fear.
TEN
LONDON, 2017
As Clara walked to the police station, a memory came to her of a year or so before, when she had fallen and badly twisted her ankle. Fearing that she’d fractured it, Luke had taken her to the hospital, where they’d waited long into the afternoon to be seen. It had been unbearably hot, the waiting area full to bursting with the sick and injured, a palpable cloud of frustration and boredom hanging in the stuffy air.
She’d sat, her leg propped up on a chair, while she’d waited to be seen, Luke pacing to and fro like a caged tiger. When she’d finally been called to X-ray, she’d returned some time later to find him engaged in a noisy conversation with several waiting patients, including a very drunk man with a tattooed face, a middle-aged woman with a black eye, a couple of pensioners, and a teenager who reeked of weed. They’d all laughed uproariously as she approached, Luke clearly in the midst of a long and apparently hilarious story about how he’d broken his leg as a teenager. It seemed that the pall of wretchedness had entirely dissipated, a party spirit in the air now.
She hadn’t broken her ankle, but the pain was still eye watering. “Wait here a moment,” Luke had said, and off he’d vanished, only to appear five minutes later with a wheelchair.
“Are you sure we can take this?” she’d asked, looking at it doubtfully.
“Yep, all sorted,” and he’d raised his hand to wave at a nurse at the other end of the
