Elisabeth Carpenter - 99 Red Balloons

I reached into the bowl and wriggled my fingers in the little pieces of paper. They felt so light. I picked the one that wouldn’t go away, that kept sticking to my fingers. I handed it over to her.

She looked so excited as she opened the piece of paper – her whole face changed, like she could be a nice person if she tried hard.

‘I can’t wait to see what it is, can you?’

‘No.’ Her smile made me smile.

‘There it is. Do you want to know your new name?’

I nodded. I wished she’d hurry up.

‘Stephanie! Do you like that?’

‘I suppose I do.’

‘Oh, you suppose, do you?’

When she said that I thought she was mad at what I’d said, but she smiled.

‘Come on, Stephanie,’ she said, getting up from the floor. ‘Oh, it really suits you, don’t you think?’

‘Yes.’

Catherine has opened the car window and the wind is blowing in my face. It makes the tears on my face cold. I need to stop crying all the time – soon she’s going to notice.

Stephanie.

My name is Stephanie.

I don’t think anyone is going to call me Zoe ever again.

David has been talking for an hour. After he left Kent, he went to Jersey. He’d heard rumours in Dover that a girl had been seen there; one who didn’t look like the rest of the family. He spent months there, he even got a job behind a bar. He only left when he’d spoken to nearly everyone on the island after hearing vague mentions of Germany. It was always a friend of a friend who’d told him.

Years later he was still in Germany after travelling to different regions. There were mentions of RAF bases, but no one knew anything or anyone in person – again it was all speculation and rumour.

‘The thing was, Maggie,’ he says now, ‘the same name kept coming up again and again. This was over years. It’d been nearly twenty years since Zoe had been taken and I realised I’d heard his name too many times: Jürgen, Jorge, Yorgos. I had to do something about it.’

‘Hang on, David. Twenty years? I thought you’d moved to Hull by 1999 – when Sarah died? Did your girlfriend not mind you travelling so much?’

‘Ah.’ His phone starts buzzing. He reaches over to his coat pocket and takes out his mobile phone, pressing a button to stop it vibrating. ‘Like I said to you before, there was no new family. I told everyone all of that so you wouldn’t worry about me any more… so you’d think I’d stopped looking for Zoe. I told a few of the villagers here – the ones with blabber mouths – that I’d moved to Hull to start again. You know what they’re like round here – love a good gossip. I knew it would get back to you. I couldn’t bear the idea of letting you and Ron down. He said he was proud of me. I thought I’d be a disappointment to him if I didn’t find her.’

My hand goes to my mouth. ‘Oh, David. All these years… I thought you’d forgotten us, that you’d moved on. And all this time I could’ve been helping you. I’ve been rattling round in this house for such a long time.’

He looks down at his hands. ‘There are lots of things I regret, Maggie, but I have to start forgiving myself.’

‘You’ve nothing to forgive yourself for. You haven’t stopped searching for your daughter.’ I pour him another cup of tea. ‘Go on, love. You’ve been waiting years to tell me this story.’

‘I’d heard about this man, from the people that came to the bars I worked in – ex-pats, you see – there are loads of English people scattered around the world. But the world is slightly smaller when they have such close communities around Europe – at least one of them knows someone else in another country. I’d heard that this man had been in Cyprus. Apparently, he’d been bragging for years about what he’d done. So I headed over there.

‘I’d been there for so many years, working in the same bar so people would know where to find me if they had any information. I’d become almost famous for being the man looking for Zoe. I even had her picture up in the bar.

‘But one night, a month or so ago – late, about eleven – a man walked in. The place was beginning to wind down as it was out of season – the only customers were residents. Anyway, he looked worse for wear, but the first words he said were, I hear you’ve been looking for me . I just stared at him. He was older than I expected – in his late sixties maybe. Even before he told me his name, I knew it was him. There was this tiredness behind his eyes. He held his hand out to me, but I didn’t shake it. How could I? He just shrugged and pulled out a stool at the bar. Are you going to get me a drink? I think this is going to be a long night .’

‘And you got him a drink? Who was he? What had he done?’

‘He was the man who took Zoe.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘George. His name’s George.’

‘Oh.’

‘He used to do favours for people – he worked in the NAAFI on the base in Germany – though many jobs he took on were gardening, getting English food items, things like that… it was the eighties – there was a market for all sorts of stuff. It must have been the money that tempted him to do something so awful – that and the booze he was so fond of.’

It hasn’t sunk in. It’s too much information.

I get up and walk to the window. Is Zoe hiding somewhere outside, waiting for the big reveal? I see nothing, not even John having a smoke next door.

‘What else did this George tell you?’

‘He said a woman had offered him ten thousand pounds, thirty thousand Deutsch marks – to find her a girl. A five-year-old girl who looked like a photo she had. He said her name was Catherine, and that her little girl, Stephanie, had died a year before. Desperate was the word he used to describe her. George was brought up in Preston, so he came back to the town he was most familiar with. He watched her for days.’

I don’t need him to finish. ‘And Zoe looked like this girl. She was a replacement daughter for this Catherine woman.’

‘That’s right. She would’ve had my sympathy if she hadn’t done what she’d done. Who does that? Replace one child in your affections with another? It’s like two children have gone, not just one.’

‘Why didn’t this George go to the police – it was on the news, in the papers?’

‘He wouldn’t go to the police, would he? He’d taken a child off the street. And it wasn’t in the papers much over in Germany. He delivered my little girl to their door.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘He took Zoe to them in a suitcase. He had made her crouch down into a ball, and he said she had done it without asking questions. My poor little girl.’

A single tear runs down his cheek. He’s had weeks to take this information in, yet he speaks as though he’s just heard it.

‘Why has he told the truth now?’

David wipes his face with his arm.

‘He blew all the money he got from them on drink. I don’t know what he’s been living off since, but he’s dying, Maggie – said he’s got only months to live. He said it must’ve been a sign that he saw my poster of Zoe just after his diagnosis. Perhaps he thinks it’s divine retribution that he told me – as if saying it out loud was enough to make up for what he’d done. Believe me, I wanted to kill him after he told me all of this. But that would have made me the same kind of person he was, wouldn’t it? I told him I’d go straight to the police when he left. He just shrugged and said, I know how to disappear. I’ve done it for thirty years .’ David shakes his head slowly. ‘You know, Maggie. I’m just so happy that’s she’s alive. My gut feeling… intuition… whatever you want to call it, wasn’t wrong. I’ve felt my little girl here.’ He puts a hand to his chest.