Margot was standing up now. Her heart leaping at the sight of any vaguely small, vaguely white dog in her line of vision, but none of them were Blossom.
She turned to Will. ‘Where’s Blossom?’
He frowned. ‘What do you mean? She was here a minute ago.’
‘And now she’s not,’ Margot said, taking a couple of steps forward so she could properly investigate the birthday celebrations. There was an awful lot of picnic debris and Blossom had yet to find a food that she didn’t like, except celery, but there was no small Staffy with her head in a Sainsbury’s bag or tarting herself about in the hope of a belly rub. ‘I can’t see her anywhere.’
Will got to his feet and put a hand over his eyes to shield them from the setting sun as he too looked over the wide expanse of grass. ‘Over there!’ He pointed at the far end. ‘She’s giving that football a good shake.’
Margot’s heart leapt.
‘Oh no, it’s a Jack Russell,’ Will said.
Her heart sank again.
‘Well, she can’t have gone far,’ Margot decided. ‘She never wanders off. Unless there’s a squirrel but then she always come back. Always.’
‘Always,’ Will agreed. ‘The café’s closed. So she’s not scrounging food at the kitchen door. You don’t really get a lot of squirrels on the field.’
‘I read somewhere that if your dog runs off, they usually come back to the last place they saw you.’ Margot scrutinised the bushes that lined one side of the green. ‘She’s going to come waddling back any minute now, looking very pleased with herself.’
They waited for a good five minutes. Margot could feel her heart racing faster and faster as each minute passed and there was still no sign of Blossom.
‘Right,’ Will said, standing up again. ‘You stay here and I’m going to check out her favourite haunts. Squirrel alley, that place near the water fountain where we found the dead bird that time, and the clearing where they have the children’s parties. Anywhere else?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Margot said, because apart from Sunday handovers, she tended to walk Blossom on the Heath. ‘Call me when you find her ’cause I’m starting to panic now.’
‘Look, she has to be somewhere in the woods. It will be fine,’ Will said, but his face was tight and he was already striding away, leaving Margot to sit there with nothing to do but fret and ask anyone in close vicinity if they’d seen ‘My dog. A little fawn and white Staffy. She’s very friendly.’
Nobody had, until finally! A middle-aged couple with a majestic Bernese Mountain dog said they’d passed a Staffy about five minutes ago.
‘Maybe it was tan,’ the woman pondered. ‘Would you say it was tan?’
‘More brown than tan?’ her companion decided. Margot wanted to scream, but instead she pulled out her phone and showed them her screensaver, which was Blossom wide-mouthed and smiling and unmistakeably fawn and white.
‘Oh, no, not the same dog and this one was being walked by a young fella. Or rather the dog was walking him!’ the man said with a smile because he really didn’t know how to read the room.
They left. Margot wandered as far from the bench as she dared, calling Blossom’s name. The sun was properly setting now. Then she heard the bell signalling that the woods would be closing in fifteen minutes. Because it wasn’t the kind of wood you could just wander into. It had gates. Lots of gates. Gates that led straight on to the busy Archway Road, with buses and lorries thundering past. Gates that led towards East Finchley. Gates that led out onto Muswell Hill Road and more buses.
Blossom wouldn’t wander out of any gate. She wasn’t an adventurer and she hated to lose sight of whoever was walking her.
Any news? she texted Will, though if there was any news, he’d have texted her back.
Unless . . . for one awful moment, Margot wondered if Will had found Blossom and decided that if anyone was going to have full-time ownership of her, it was he. Then her phone chimed.
No news. Coming back to you now, Will texted back.
He was there a minute later. She knew that he didn’t have Blossom with him, but even so, the sight of him coming back without their little shadow made Margot burst into tears.
Will’s arms were around Margot in an instant, tightening as he felt her shake with the force of her sobs.
‘We’ll go to the woodkeepers’ office,’ he said, one arm still round Margot to guide her down a little path on the other side of the café, where there was one woodkeeper ten minutes away from finishing her shift.
Still, she was very kind, taking down their details and calling one of her colleagues. ‘We have to do a complete perimeter sweep to lock all the gates, so I’ll see if you can hitch a ride on the buggy.’
‘She’s so friendly that she’d go off with anyone,’ Margot said, though her words were mangled by the shuddering sobs that she couldn’t tamp down. ‘She’s a Staffy, so they’d want to use her for dogfighting. But she would never fight another dog, so they’d make her a bait dog instead.’
‘Nobody’s going to make Blossom into a bait dog,’ Will said, but he didn’t sound at all convinced. ‘Shall I call the dog warden? Shall I call the police?’
There was a ‘beep beep’ as the little motorised buggy that the woodkeepers used arrived. Normally, Margot would have been thrilled to ride in the little cart, but not now when she was doing her best not to fall out every time they went over a bump and scanning the lengthening shadows for a flash of white.
It was impossible. There was so much foliage and night was coming in fast. Blossom could be anywhere and even though they called her name again and again, there was no sign of her trotting back towards them with that ridiculous grin on her ridiculous face.
The last gate to be locked was Gypsy Gate, which came out at the top of Muswell Hill Road, opposite Highgate Tube Station and, even at this time on a Sunday night, the busy and bustling Archway Road.
‘I’m really sorry,’ said the man who’d been driving them round with the patience of a saint; there’d been several false alarms when Margot or Will had thought they’d seen a sliver of white in the distance.
‘Maybe I could stay in the woods overnight?’ Margot suggested desperately, because she couldn’t bear the thought of Blossom in there, all alone and frightened.
‘You can’t do that,’ Will said very gently, and Margot knew that he was right, and even if Blossom was trapped in there until the morning, then it was preferable to her being out of the woods, in traffic, prey to someone without her best interests at heart.
There were a couple of benches at the top of the road. Margot sat down, her phone clutched in her sweaty hand. ‘I’ll call the dog warden, shall I?’
Will nodded. ‘I’ll call the twenty-four-hour vets. There’s one in Hampstead, right?’
‘I think there’s one in Finchley, too.’
They were quiet as they both googled the appropriate numbers. When Margot got through to the dog warden, it went straight to voicemail. She left a message. Then she called the police who told her to call the dog warden. She could also call the dog wardens for all the neighbouring boroughs, Camden, Islington, Barnet . . . In the background she could hear Will giving his details to someone, then he stopped and frowned.