C.J. Cooke - I Know My Name

I shake my head, but then an image jumps into my mind: the Swiss passport. I tell Welsh and Canavan that it’s gone, but that I haven’t seen it in a long time anyway. ‘She never used it,’ I say. ‘More a token of her heritage than anything. Besides, if she’d used it to travel overseas I’d see it on the credit card statements. But I thought I’d mention it.’

Both Welsh and Canavan react to this a lot stronger than I’d have anticipated. ‘She could have used cash to travel. You don’t keep any at home?’

I tell him we do, but it’s all still there.

Magnus and I begin to draw up a list of everyone El’s ever had any association with, while Canavan writes up his notes. He interrupts Magnus and I to ask more questions: addresses and telephone numbers, a list of Eloïse’s support network. I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t recall the names of many of her friends and have no idea where they live. I promise to get the information off Facebook, but he tells me there’s no need: they’ll do their own investigation of my wife’s social media activity and check out her emails. For this, they require every device she has access to: her laptop, tablet, and mobile phone. They’ll check our bank accounts, Eloïse’s charity, and they’ll be speaking to our GP.

‘So, what happens now?’ I ask as the interview comes to an end. I feel wrung out.

‘There are a number of steps in cases of missing persons,’ Canavan answers. ‘Eloïse is what we call high risk, given that she may not be fully recovered physically from the birth of your daughter. First, we’ll need to do a search of the property.’

I stare at him. ‘A search of the property?’ Is he insinuating that I’ve murdered my wife and buried her under the gladioli?

DS Welsh must spot whatever crosses my face because she jumps in to explain. ‘We’re aware that two small children are without a mother right now, and that Eloïse recently gave birth. Both things combined make this case a high priority. We really want to make sure we can locate her as fast as we can. Searching the property is standard procedure.’

Welsh is convincingly sympathetic, and her role in this partnership becomes clear. She has a soft manner, the kind I usually associate with early years’ teachers and childminders.

Once I’ve ascertained that I’m not about to be dragged from my children in handcuffs, I step away from the doorway, granting them entry to the stairs. Swiftly and efficiently they move throughout the house, peeling back the layers of our lives.

The search takes most of the afternoon. After some debate over whether or not I should send Max to nursery, Gerda and Magnus drop him off on the basis that his routine ought not to be too disturbed. Then they pack a baby bag and take Cressida to the park while I pace back and forth from the playroom to the kitchen, listening to the noises of strangers upstairs trawling through our cupboards and drawers, emerging every now and then with a box of toys or paperwork.

In the kitchen, I go through our family paperwork in the oak dresser to find anything that might indicate a reason for all of this, something concrete and reasonable. Receipts, birth certificates, Max’s paintings from nursery. Still no sign of the Swiss passport, and so I phone our bank to make sure that there aren’t any payments pending, no airline tickets booked. Then I turn yet again to El’s laptop and phone, before the police have a chance to take them away. It takes me a while to work out her email password, but finally I crack it: MaxJan11. I spend ages searching carefully for train or flight tickets, but there’s nothing. I sign into her Facebook account. Her most recent status update hardly suggests anything out of the ordinary:

Big smiles from Cressida all morning! Love this girl

She had sent text messages to her friends Rachael, Mimi and Niamh about meeting up for coffee and the park and an eBay offer for a toddler bed. She’d made recent calls to the dry cleaner’s, Gerda, and me. Her phone contains hundreds of photographs, a vast percentage taken by Max, it seems – these images are mostly of Max’s nose, hand, and the carpet, with a few blurry shots of Cressida in various states of discomfort. There are several blurry ones of Eloïse, too, and on seeing these images I can’t help but fall into a chair and wrestle with the urge to turn into a big mushy puddle of emotion. It’s more out of frustration, or perhaps a concoction of extreme emotions, that I find myself with tears running down my face.

Max must have taken these. El seemed unaware that they were being taken. In one she is asleep in Max’s bed, his Thomas the Tank Engine bed covers visible. In another she is sitting cross-legged on the floor by his Peppa Pig set. In another she is captured from behind as she stands at the back door, her head turned to the right. I flick to the next image, then go back.

She is holding something in her hand.

I zoom in to it. The image is blurry, and at first I dismiss the small white object as a pen, but on closer inspection I can determine that the ghostly white spiral above her hand is smoke winding upward like a thin white ribbon. A cigarette.

The date stamp is 7 February 2015. This year. A month ago. I study it for a long time, wondering if it is Eloïse in the picture or someone else, maybe one of her friends. El has never smoked. She was staunchly opposed to the whole concept of smoking, would choke and wave her hands if anyone lit up close by. It was actually embarrassing how vocal she’d get about it. I quit soon after we got together because she threatened to dump me if I didn’t.

If for some reason she suddenly decided to take it up, surely she would have told me, of all people? And why when Cressida was barely eight weeks old? Eloïse decided to become more or less vegan to ensure that Cressida got the best nutrition while being breastfed – so, smoking? I’m amazed. It doesn’t seem to fit the picture, and yet here she is. Smoking. I almost want to laugh, it’s that bizarre. I have no way of even beginning to interpret what this discovery means.

I flick through all the images, studying them for any signs of anything equally mis-fitting. One of the videos shows El laughing and clapping as Cressida kicked her legs on the play mat. This is consistent with the woman I know and love, and so I give a big sigh of relief, as though I’ve found her again. Another clip shows her in the living room sleeping as Max tells the camera to be very quiet and not wake Mummy up.

I make a mental note to think carefully about how to ask Max about Mummy smoking.

As I’m figuring out how to work the dishwasher, DS Canavan comes into the kitchen holding out a baby monitor. ‘We’re going to have our technical team look over these, if that’s OK?’

I nod. ‘Yes, of course.’ I tell him I’ve already checked them in the hope that they might tell us where she’s gone. He perks up at this, and I feel gut-kicked all over again when I tell him they were turned off.

‘Have you the one set of monitors, or are there any more around the house?’

This, I can answer.

‘We have four. A camera in each of the kids’ bedrooms, one in the playroom and one overlooking the landing upstairs. They’re wireless.’

‘And did you link up the babycam to any online account?’

‘My wife had them synched to her phone. I’ve already checked. She had the monitors switched off.’

Canavan nods.

‘We’ll get our tech team to check it out.’

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