After Anna

‘Did you find her?’ Julia asked, even though she knew from their expressions that they hadn’t.

‘No ma’am,’ the one on the left said. ‘Not yet.’

DI Wynne followed them in. She had her phone to her ear. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll let you know if anything changes.’ She cut the connection and looked at the officers. ‘Nothing?’

The one on the right shook his head. ‘Nothing. We’ve covered everywhere she could have walked to. Every street, every park. We’ve interviewed a lot of people – kids, adults, anyone – but no one saw her.’

Wynne pinched her chin with her thumb and forefinger.

‘And the other parents who were here to pick up their kids?’

‘We’ve started talking to them. We’ll get to most of them tonight, the ones that agree to it. Most will.’

The other officer spoke. ‘We’ve started knocking on doors. Asking homeowners if they have any information. We’re rounding up as many bodies as we can to start searching. And we’ll get a general appeal on local radio.’

They’ve done this before, Julia thought. Oh God, they’ve done this before. This really happens. And it’s happening to me.

‘Can I come?’ she asked, suddenly. ‘Can I come with you?’

‘To knock on doors?’ the officer said.

‘Yes. I’ll know if Anna’s there. I’ll just know. And if I call out her name then she’ll answer.’

The officer shifted his weight from foot to foot. He glanced at DI Wynne.

‘I think it will be better if we leave PCs Joyce and Bell to deal with that,’ Wynne said. ‘It might help things to go smoothly.’

‘Why?’ Julia said. ‘I can help.’

‘Mrs Crowne, it’s better if you stay here. In case Anna does show up. She could be quite distressed.’

‘I’d like to go.’

‘I think it’s better if you don’t.’

Why was this woman obstructing her? Julia thought. Why would she not let her look for Anna?

‘I’m her mum!’ she said, all of the emotion of the last few hours finding an outlet in righteous anger. ‘I have a right to go! If I want to go, I can! What if she’s in one of those houses? She needs me to be there!’

‘Mrs Crowne, we don’t think that she is in one of the houses. We’re just asking for information.’

‘But what if she is? You need to search them! All of them!’

‘We can’t just barge into someone’s house without a warrant.’

‘Why the hell not? If my daughter might be there, why the hell not?’

‘I fully understand your frustration, Mrs Crowne, but we are not allowed to enter a member of the public’s house without a warrant to do so. It’s not something we have any control over. It’s the law.’

‘Fuck the law! If you won’t do it, I will!’ Julia stood up, her knee banging on the underside of the table. Her china coffee cup rattled on its saucer, bitter liquid spilling over the desk. She marched to the door, pushing between the two police officers, and turned down the corridor. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but she was going to do something; she couldn’t just sit here and wait, not while Anna was out there. Doing that was accepting her powerlessness, and she wasn’t able to do that, not by a long chalk.

Behind her she heard DI Wynne’s footsteps on the tile floor.

‘Mrs Crowne!’ Wynne called. ‘Mrs Crowne! Where are you going?’

‘Out!’ Julia shouted. ‘I’m going out!’

‘Mrs Crowne, it’s not a good idea to do anything rash. We need the goodwill of people in the vicinity.’

Julia knew that the police officer was correct, but she didn’t care. She was beyond reason, in the grip of something animal and irresistible. It was the same thing that drove a mother to protect her young in the wild; that drove an eland to defend her calf from a lion, or an elk to fight a wolf to save hers, even when this came at the cost of the mothers’ own lives.

When she was a few feet from the front door, it swung open. Brian stepped inside. He was pale and his eyes were red. It was clear that he had not found Anna. He looked at Julia, and then transferred his gaze to the police officer.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked, and looked back at his wife. ‘Why’s she shouting at you?’

‘She’s trying to stop me looking for Anna,’ Julia said. ‘I want to go and look for Anna. I want to knock on people’s doors and ask them if they’ve seen her. Look them in the face. She could be in one of these houses.’

‘Then go,’ Brian said. ‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Mr and Mrs Crowne,’ DI Wynne said. ‘Could we talk for a minute, before you go?’

Julia turned round. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘A minute.’

‘In the office?’

Julia shook her head. ‘Here.’

‘We have police officers going door to door,’ Wynne said. ‘They have experience in the right questions to ask, and if anyone has seen anything concerning your daughter then they will find it out and follow that lead wherever it takes them. At this stage we need to be systematic in our search for Anna.’

‘What if one of them has her?’ Julia said. ‘How will they know that?’

‘It’s unlikely.’ Wynne shifted uncomfortably. ‘I have to be honest with you. At this stage there are two main possibilities for your daughter’s whereabouts. Either she wandered off on her own – in which case she can’t have gone far and someone will almost certainly have seen her – and is now hiding in some place we haven’t found or … ’, she paused and looked away for a second, before looking back at Julia and Brian, ‘or someone took her.’

‘Took her where?’ Brian asked, his voice hoarse.

‘We don’t know yet, Mr Crowne,’ Wynne said. ‘But for now, we have to focus our efforts on the immediate vicinity, in case Anna is out there, cold and frightened and hurt, and that means that we have to be as methodical as possible to ensure that we miss nothing.’

‘She’s out there,’ Brian said. ‘I know she is. I can’t believe anything else.’

‘And we will have officers searching all night for any sign of her. Clothing, footprints, her belongings.’

‘I want to be part of it,’ Brian said. ‘I’ll help. We have friends who’ll help as well.’

‘Excellent,’ Wynne said. ‘We’ll set up a base in the community centre. Call around and get as many people as you can.’

Brian’s hands were clenching and unclenching on his thighs, bunching his chinos up and exposing his paisley socks. Anna had bought them – or chosen them, at any rate – for him last Christmas, Julia recalled, along with a pair of Homer Simpson socks. Brian had worn one of each, Homer on the left foot, paisley on the right. He had told Anna he loved them both so much he couldn’t choose between them. Anna had made sure that he kept them on all day.

The memory of her daughter checking that her dad was wearing the mismatched socks she’d bought him overwhelmed Julia. Her hands started to shake and then she started to cry. She had not cried like that – uncontrollably, her chest heaving – since she was seventeen and she had been dumped by Vincent, the first love of her life. She had believed, as teenagers will, that he was the one, the only one, and when he had told her it was over – it’s not you, he’d meant to say, it’s me, except the prepared lines had come out wrong and he’d actually said, in a moment of unwitting honesty, it’s not me, it’s you – she had cried for days. It had felt like the end of the world, like nothing would ever be the same again. After a while, though, it had passed, and she’d seen that maybe life would go on without Vincent.

And now, for the first time since she was seventeen, she had that feeling again, only this time she was thirty-eight, and old enough to know that it was for real, and that it would not pass.

She pushed her chair back, suddenly weary beyond belief. ‘Come on,’ she said, looking at her husband’s expressionless eyes. ‘Let’s go home and get ready.’

vii.

The search was organized quickly and efficiently. The police knew what they were doing, and they set about it calmly.

They’ve done this before, Julia thought. This is the kind of thing that happens, which means this is real.

The local community centre – a wood and glass structure built a few years previously with lottery money – was the base of operations. A large, detailed map of the area was stuck to a wall, lines made with marker pens delineating the streets that volunteers had been assigned to search.

And there were a lot of volunteers: friends of Julia and Brian, other parents, concerned locals. Julia had rung through her address book; many others had called the police asking how they could help and had been directed to the community centre, and then out to their search areas.

Alongside them, police officers pointed torches into alleys or knocked on doors or quizzed the homeless. Dog teams roamed the parks and copses and fields and woodlands. If none of these things worked, in the morning divers would search the waterways.

It was a thorough search. They were searching places that Julia knew Anna could not have got to on her own.

Which meant she had been moved by somebody, and that somebody would not want her to be found.

Brian was out with the searchers; Julia waited in the community centre with DI Wynne; waited for the triumphant smile as the detective heard that Anna was lost and cold but alive and well. But as the night wore on the volunteers came back with their news that there was no news, then went home to their beds and dreams of the poor parents who they had left behind. Julia thanked them for their effort, accepted their well wishes, their don’t worry, I’m sure she’ll turn ups.

But there was no sign of Anna, so how could she not worry? She was that woman, the mother whose child was lost, who was at the centre of a storm of sympathy and community spirit. So how could she not worry?

It was around midnight when the door opened and Brian came in. He looked at DI Wynne.

‘Nothing?’ he asked.

‘Not yet, Mr Crowne,’ she replied. ‘You and Mrs Crowne should go home. Try and get some rest.’

‘I’d prefer to stay,’ Julia said. ‘I can go out and look myself.’

‘If anything changes I’ll call you immediately,’ Wynne said. ‘The best thing you can do is to preserve your strength. Tomorrow will be a busy day.’

‘If you don’t find Anna tonight,’ Brian said.

There was a long, uncomfortable, pause, then DI Wynne nodded. ‘If we don’t find her tonight,’ she said. ‘That’s right. But go, and get some rest.’

Julia was pretty sure that rest would be an elusive quarry, but she nodded. She took her car keys from her pocket. She looked at Brian. ‘I’ll drive,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

They climbed into the car, silent. There was nothing to say. For the first time in a long time they were both feeling exactly the same things. Fear. Worry. Dread. Panic. One after another in a horrific spin cycle.

Julia turned the key in the ignition. She almost expected the car not to start – everything else was broken, so why not that, too? – but it fired and the engine came to life. It was a short drive home – maybe a mile – but to Julia it felt like the most important journey she had ever taken; as if she was crossing an invisible border into a new land, a land in which everything had changed.

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