Perfect Crime

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Instead, the man at her door was looking sombre and professional.

‘Mrs Hawksmith,’ he said, holding up a badge dangling from a brightly coloured lanyard. ‘I’m from a family reintroduction charity. We have information about your daughter, Alice. Could we talk, if it’s not a bad time?’

She hadn’t given it a second thought. Thirty seconds later, she was brushing crumbs off her couch so he had somewhere to sit without ruining his smart trousers. Her head had been reeling. News of her daughter, after so long … So she wasn’t dead. If she’d been dead, it would have been the polis at her door.

Standing in the middle of her tiny sitting room, Fenny had shifted from foot to foot, wanting to hear the news, dreading what it might be, clinging on to hope she’d long since forgotten existed.

‘Is there anyone here who might support you or are you alone today?’ the man had asked.

‘No, it’s just me …’

Fenny realised in her excitement that she hadn’t even asked the man’s name. Now she wasn’t sure how to backtrack, not that she wanted to waste any time. There was news. It was suddenly worth every birthday and Christmas, every Mother’s Day, every morning when her daughter’s bed hadn’t been slept in. Finally, there was the prospect of something other than the void of loss.

‘Just to clarify, you aren’t cohabiting or flat-sharing at the present time. It’s important to establish that any information we share with you will remain confidential, you see.’

‘Yes, absolutely,’ Fenny had gushed. ‘It’s just me here. If you have some news, I promise not to talk to anyone else about it.’

‘Good,’ he’d said reassuringly. ‘That all sounds fine. Finally, I need to assess your current mental state. We often find that people have very strong reactions to being given news about loved ones who’ve been missing for a sustained period, and the process of attempting a reintroduction can be fraught with difficulties and disappointments. That’s not a journey we recommend people embark upon unless they’re in a good place emotionally.’

Reintroduction. She hadn’t imagined it. He’d said the word. Her daughter was not just alive but was somewhere accessible and in a fit state to make contact. In that moment, she believed in everything. Karma, kismet, destiny, God, four-leafed clovers – the whole shebang. There was a reason she’d decided to blow money on a hotel room to end it all. There was a reason the housekeeping woman had come in at the worst – now the best – possible moment. The endless stretches in yoga had been worth every second of humiliation and fake smiles. The tranquillisers that had made her feel nauseous. The therapy where she’d poured out every sordid or boring detail of her life. They’d all led her here.

She crossed the room – just three steps, but her legs were jelly and she worried she might not make it – to pick up Alice’s photo from the windowsill. In it, her precious seven-year-old had just won a drawing competition. She’d had a real talent, certainly not inherited from Fenny. Drawing faces was what she’d been best at, spending hours of her young life at a table, getting through notepad after notepad.

Fenny still had some of those drawings tucked away in an envelope, hidden in a box with her wedding photos and Mother’s Day cards so dearly prized that she dared not take them out and handle them any more. Inside were the childish declarations of forever love that had become screams of hatred as drugs had made her daughter’s world a place where the only warm arms she welcomed were delusions that came from plastic wraps, and where only handing her money was enough to induce her to profess love.

‘Where is she?’ Fenny had whispered, the muscles in her face rising to produce an unfamiliar picture.

Smiles had been absent from her outlook for so long that forming one was an alien sensation.

‘I don’t know,’ the man said, ‘do you think you deserve to see her?’

Fenny’s smile drooped a little.

‘Deserve?’ she asked slowly. ‘Yes, of course, why would I not deserve to see my baby?’

‘Have you treasured your life, Fenella?’

‘Of course I have. My husband’s gone. He’d have done anything to have looked into our girl’s eyes again. Now I’m the only one left and I’ll have to do that for both of us. She doesn’t even know her daddy’s passed. I’m not sure how I’m going to break that to her.’ Fenny’s legs finally gave way and she lowered herself onto the sofa, taking deep breaths.

‘Your husband couldn’t have prevented his death though, could he? It was cancer that took him, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘Um …’ she stalled.

The last thing Fenny wanted was to be impolite to the man who was trying to help her, but she wasn’t sure quite where he was getting his information. Alice would have had no way of knowing about the tragedy that had struck in her absence and Fenny didn’t recall giving any of the reunification agencies the details of her husband’s illness.

‘Yes, lung cancer. I signed up with a few agencies when I was trying to find my daughter. I was a bit surprised when you turned up and I missed the name of the one you’re from.’

‘But you …’ – he continued as if she hadn’t said a word – ‘have taken the gift of life for granted. You thought you could throw it away. You decided your need to be rid of the responsibilities that come with your place in this world was more important than valuing what you were given.’

‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about,’ Fenny said. ‘What does this have to do with my daughter?’

‘Are you still taking your medication, or did you decide you knew better than the people who were trying to help you?’ he asked.

Fenny put the photo of Alice that she’d been clutching down on the coffee table with a shaking hand.

‘Who sent you?’ she asked quietly. ‘Was it someone from the hospital? Is this part of their follow-up regime? Am I being tested? Only if this is all just part of their scheme to make sure I’m still in recovery, then using the information I gave them about my daughter is …’

She couldn’t finish the sentence. There was no phrase that was strong enough to express the disgust she felt at what was happening.

Fenny looked the man up and down. He didn’t have a file with him. No papers at all. Surely if he’d come to talk about her daughter, he’d be making some notes, or asking her to sign a document, or even check her identity. Looking around the sitting room, she tried to recall where she’d left her glasses so she could read the awfully small print that was currently just a blurred mass on his ID badge.

‘Fenella, we need to have a conversation and I need you to give me the right answers,’ he said, standing up. ‘You’ll need to concentrate. I’m going to help you with that, okay? I’m going to make it all much easier for you.’

‘I want to see my daughter,’ Fenny said, looking at the bulge in the man’s trouser pocket.

It certainly wasn’t mobile phone-shaped and the broad curves suggested something other than a set of keys.

‘Do you?’ he asked. ‘How much time do you spend actually thinking about her? Once a day? Does she even get that much from you? Isn’t it more realistic that you think about her maybe once a week?’

Fenny stood up, closer to him than she was comfortable with, lifting her face several inches to look at him directly.

‘There’s not an hour of the day that goes by when I don’t think of my girl,’ she said, tears filling her eyes and rage tensing every muscle.

‘Do you?’ he smiled. ‘Does a mother who actually loves her missing child really attempt suicide? I think not. I believe that you’d wait for her as long as it took, because if there was the most minuscule chance that your daughter might come home, or get arrested, might end up in a hospital and ask for you, you ought to be there for her. Why would you attempt to deprive that poor girl of her only surviving parent? That’s just not right.’

He reached out and took hold of Fenny’s left hand with his right. Something about his touch felt off, too cool, fake. She raised her hand in his grasp to get a better look.

Gloves. Whoever this man was, for some reason he was wearing clear plastic gloves.

As she opened her mouth to put the question she was thinking into words, she felt a thump that was punctuated by a metallic snap over her left wrist. The dangling handcuff was closed but not overly tight. Ridiculously, she wondered if he was police, after all – not there to notify her of her daughter’s death but to arrest her for some parenting offence she hadn’t even known she’d committed. The wrongness took a few seconds to sink in.

‘What the fuck do you think you’re up to? You’ve got to get out of my place right now. Do you hear me?’

The man laughed.

Fenny tugged at the handcuff. She didn’t even want him to get the cuff off. That would mean him touching her again and she really didn’t want that. Not with those creepy gloves on.

‘You want me to leave already? But you haven’t heard what I came to tell you about Alice yet,’ he said.

‘You’re not here to talk to me about my daughter,’ Fenny said. ‘Now get the fuck out of my flat, you friggin’ weirdo, or I’m calling the police.’