Kate Hamer: The Girl in the Red Coat

‘Oh, no, no.’ Now I felt a rising panic at the thought of leaving this place. It would be an admission: arriving as two and leaving as one.

‘Beth, I want you to remember.’ His pale brown eyes — soft, vestigial lashes — looked right into mine. ‘You need to know that you are not alone. There is this.’ He gestured behind him, the torches, the muffled voices through the fog, the blue police lights raking the sky. ‘There is us on your side.’

I relinquished my keys and let myself be led to a waiting police car. Andy held onto my arm and carried a torch to light our way. It lit up the scene in fragments — the gouged-up mud filthy with litter, the flapping empty tents; the festive day now a Somme wasteland. The crew had had to hold off de-rigging and as I drew closer I could see the outlines of their shapes, smoking and kicking their heels around the entrance. I saw the orange points of light from their cigarettes through the fog and heard laughter, then, ‘Sshh, sshh — she’s coming through. It’s the mother.’

In real life bad things can be fascinating, or very hard to look at. Some turned their eyes to the ground and others stared as I walked past. One, with a trilby-type hat and a Polish accent, called out, ‘Bless you mother; bless you and your little girl. I pray to the Virgin …’ Then I was in the back of the police car. Andy slid in beside me, splashes of blue and red light from the cars on his face.

‘Try not to panic,’ he said very quietly and calmly. ‘Children sometimes wander off.’

‘She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t leave me. Not for this long.’

He turned and smiled, tight at the corners. ‘Then that means she’ll be alright, doesn’t it?’

*

But nothing was alright. At the police station it was clear nothing was alright at all. Andy’s platitudes were just a ruse to calm hysterics down. Already I could see some kind of action plan had swung into place. They knew … they knew a bright little girl of eight years doesn’t just wander off and not come back. They didn’t know how it had happened before. I wasn’t going to tell them that. And at the station there were more eyes, sheathing their looks of fear and pity or reproach with their lids: the woman behind the counter; the man unlocking the interview-room door; the woman passing me in the fluorescent-lit corridor, going off duty after carefully applying her eye make-up in the locker-room mirror. Two quick flashes of turquoise as she rounded down her lids and looked at the floor.

‘We need to take a proper statement,’ Andy said. There was a woman already sitting behind the desk in the interview room: round-faced, pretty.

‘This is Sophie, she’s what we call a family liaison officer. She’s there just for you, Beth, for whatever you want …’

She looked at me. It lasted only a moment but the look was deep, deep. I could tell she was reaching in and making some sort of assessment. Moment over, she smiled. ‘Beth, any questions, ask. Anything you need, you must tell me.’

What I need is my little girl back. ‘Hello Sophie,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

I sat facing them at the scarred wooden table and they began questioning me and writing my answers in their notebooks and recording my words on a machine. I tried to answer as best I could, I tried to keep my brain focused on the task, but it kept veering off at steep tangents of rising panic, so I would have to refocus and ask them to repeat the question.

‘Tell us about Carmel’s father, we’ll need to get in contact with him quickly. We’ve tried the number you gave us and we passed by the house earlier but there was nobody home.’

I felt such pity for them then — for Paul and Lucy. The rosy flush of their lust was about to be transformed into something hard and brittle — one of those horrible wreaths of ceramic roses in a graveyard, a filthy sepulchre.

‘Oh God — shall I call him?’ I started scrabbling in my bag for my diary, where his mobile number was scratched on the front page. I realised it was the only one I had — no landline — and it seemed such a tenuous thread. Sophie gently put her hand on my arm.

‘We’ll keep on with that. You say you are separated. Any issues with that?’

‘No, not really. I mean he’s stayed away a lot. He’s supposed to see her every weekend but we didn’t see him for months, then all of a sudden he came round and took her out.’

‘So there have been disagreements with access?’

‘I suppose so. No, not really, it’s nothing to do … it’s just that he’s got a new girlfriend and he’s more wrapped up in that. We’ve only just started communicating again, I mean properly. It’s been difficult.’

They exchanged glances.

‘Is there any way, do you think, that he might have taken her?’ Andy asked. ‘I know it’s hard to fathom, but dads can act in funny ways after divorces. Take kids off out of the blue and not tell a soul about it.’

‘It couldn’t have been Paul. He’s too … too lax to do anything like this. Besides, I’m not sure he even knew we were there. No, no, no, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick, it’s not him. You must look elsewhere.’ All the same I grasped at the possibility that perhaps I had told him, and he’d taken it into his head to spirit her away.

I looked through the window at the dark. ‘He’ll probably be home now. I don’t think they go out much in the evening.’

Sophie left the room briefly, I assumed to give instructions about hunting Paul down. Soon there would be a police car at their door. Blue lights through the window, sliding down their sitting-room walls.

My watch: eight hours now. I found it hard to sit still. Impossible. Every so often I would feel as if I’d been wired to the grid, a surge of electricity would jolt me forward, or even up to standing, so I was looking down at them. The rising panic — I forced it into my body so my mind could keep functioning and giving them what they needed to know. Kindly, they didn’t comment. They let me pace or bang my head with my hand or slump in the chair with my arms hanging loosely by my sides, as long as I kept talking, kept telling them: when; who; school; friends; dads; any boyfriends of mine; eyes: blue or brown; hair: what colour — thin, thick, curly, straight, short, long.

When the photo albums arrived, it seemed peculiar to see them there, uprooted from the shelves at home to lie beside the blinking voice recorder.

They came just as I was describing, screwing up my forehead and trying to be as accurate as possible, the colour of her hair. Not blond, not brown; it was, I finally decided, ‘the exact colour of a brown paper envelope’.

‘Quick, quick.’

We’re running towards the car park and he’s telling me to go faster. He’s tall with long legs so he can run much better than me. He keeps looking back over his shoulder and saying in a panicking voice, ‘No time to waste. Quick as you can.’

I do run as fast as I can but I can’t help it if I keep stumbling. It’s hard when I’m crying and my nose is running and I don’t even have time to find the tissue I know’s in my pocket. Then we get to his car that’s white. I don’t see it till we’re right next to it as it’s the same colour as the fog.

‘We’ll go straight to the hospital,’ he says. Then he unlocks the door.

I slide into the seat next to him. The car’s very clean and the seats are shiny and white too. It starts up and I rub my hands up and down my face and try and get rid of all the snot and tears. But it just mixes together and goes hard so it’s like I’ve got a mask on.

We drive slow because there are other cars in front of us trying to leave.

‘What h-happened?’ I ask. I feel like the whole world is folding up around me and I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my whole life. I feel like I’m living in a programme inside the telly or in a different country where they have bombs and volcanoes.