She arranges fresh flowers in vases, washes and dries the girl’s hair and then brushes it until it shines. Later, she will make tea and cakes and sit with the girl to wait.
This is Miriam’s domain. Yes, there are nurses, and a doctor visits occasionally, but she is the one who spends the most time here and has done for over thirty years, since before that awful day. Since before the girl’s mother became a virtual recluse and the girl ended up like this.
Perhaps if it had never happened, Miriam wouldn’t have stayed. She would have moved on, made a life of her own. But they both depended on her so much. Mother and daughter. She couldn’t desert them. She always feared what might happen if she did. So, she had stayed and, in many ways, this was her family now, her life. She doesn’t begrudge it. In fact, often Miriam feels that she is here for a reason.
She reaches into her pocket and takes out a piece of paper. Soft and much folded. A child’s face stares out. Have you seen me? Miriam sighs and looks back at the girl. Then she leans forward and gently pats her still hand.
“Soon,” she whispers. “Soon.”
Gabe drove. It was all he could do. Maybe if he was a detective or a private investigator, someone with “a team” and experts to summon, he would be doing something more productive.
But Gabe was neither of those. He didn’t know what he was any more. No job, no home, no longer a father or a husband. A driver with no destination and empty passenger seats.
But now he had something. The photo. The scratch. As he drove, he went over and over it in his mind. Prodding and pulling at his memory, trying to pick holes in his recollection. Was it really that morning he had applied the plaster? Could he be getting confused with another morning? No. You did not forget something like that. You did not forget the last time you saw your wife and daughter alive.
And that Monday morning had not been like any other morning. It wasn’t normal for him to take Izzy to school. In fact, he remembered arguing with Jenny about it.
“It’s a bit short notice. Can’t you change your meeting?”
“No. It’s a big client.”
“But I’ll be late.”
“So? It’s just one morning. Maybe you could actually leave on time, too—push the boat out.”
“Jesus, Jenny.”
“I am serious, Gabe. You missed Izzy’s birthday party at the weekend.”
“One party. I had to catch up on work.”
“You almost missed her bloody birth.”
“Oh, here we go.”
“Here we go. Always work, isn’t it? Yet whenever I call you, you’re never there. You’re always at a client’s, on the road, or your mobile is turned off. Where were you last Monday, Gabe? Work didn’t know.”
“Christ. I thought we’d been through this. All the accusations.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything.”
“Then what are you saying?”
A long pause. A look on her face that almost tore the truth from him. Almost.
“I’m saying—I want you home on time tonight. Just once a week. That’s all I ask. One night when we eat together, you read your daughter a bedtime story and we pretend we’re a normal, happy family.”
Leaving that barb buried deep, she had shrugged her coat on, flung her bag over her shoulder and gone to say goodbye to Izzy.
Gabe had started after her then almost fell over Schrödinger, who was winding around his feet and mewling for breakfast. Gabe had cursed, shoved the cat roughly aside with his foot and picked up his phone.
That was when Izzy had emerged into the kitchen, sleep-tousled and red-cheeked.
“Hi, Daddy!”
She’d yawned and bent down to pick up the cat…
“Owww!”
It had definitely happened that morning. He remembered the bright red blood welling in the shallow wound. Soothing her a little impatiently. Fumbling for the small Disney bandage to stick on the scratch. He remembered it all.
So where was the scratch on the photo?
He turned the question over and over, wrestled and wrangled with it, but he still kept coming to the same conclusion: if there was no scratch, the photo must have been taken later. After the scratch had healed. After the day that Izzy had supposedly been killed.
Which meant…the picture wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
So, what was he saying—someone had set it up? Faked the photograph—to convince him Izzy was dead?
But why? And if Izzy’s picture was fake, what about Jenny’s?
His throat tightened. He felt an ache somewhere in the region of his heart, or where it used to be. Gabe had thought about this before. Many times. In his long treks up and down the motorway he had had very little else to occupy his mind. So he would run through all the possible scenarios in which Izzy could still be alive. The ways in which a mistake could have been made.
It always came back to one answer. One painful, brutal truth.
The only way Izzy could be alive was if Jenny was dead.
There had to be no doubt, not one iota, that the female body in the house was Jenny. Only then would the police have assumed that the little girl was Izzy. Of course, she would have to be the same age, build, coloring. But it wasn’t actually that difficult to confuse one child with another, if you didn’t know them.
He remembered Izzy’s first school nativity (or, should he say, Jenny never let him forget) when Izzy had told him she was playing Mary. He had arrived late, so had to sit at the back, several rows behind Jenny. But he had spent the performance dutifully snapping away with his iPhone and applauding every mumbled line. Afterward, he told Izzy what a brilliant Mary she had been.
She had burst into tears.
“What?” he had asked.
“I wasn’t Mary. I was a shepherd!”
Jenny had hugged Izzy and hissed at him. “She was Mary last night. I told you. They take it in turns.”
The memory still burned. But the point was, if he could mix up his own daughter with another child, then so could strangers. So could the police. They would have no reason to believe that the little girl in the house wasn’t Izzy.
It’s about your wife…and your daughter.
And, of course, the real rub: Izzy had been positively identified by her grandfather. Harry. A respected retired surgeon. But also, the more Gabe thought about it, a man who was hiding something; something that was eating away at him.
He gripped the steering wheel tighter. Harry. Fucking Harry. All this time. Lying. Pretending to everyone that Izzy was dead.