After Anna Read online

  ‘Do you, Mrs Crowne?’ he said. ‘A simple yes or no will suffice.’

  ‘Leave me alone, you fucking piece of shit,’ Julia said, her voice rising. ‘Leave me alone!’ She turned the key in the door and pushed it open. Once in the hallway she turned to face the reporter. ‘You’re disgusting!’ she shouted. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’

  The man smiled. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t me who didn’t bother to show up for my daughter, was it?’

  She slammed the door shut. The window above the door rattled so hard she thought it might break.

  She leaned against the wall, her forehead pressed to the cold paint.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  And, as if the universe was playing with her, she realized she’d left the milk in the car.

  ‘What the hell was all that?’ Brian said. He was standing in the door to the kitchen and he looked, Julia realized, like hell. Ordinarily, he was handsome, with his mother’s high cheekbones and dark, wide set eyes, and even though he had put on some weight – had started to collect the puddling fat that settled on the stomachs and chins and chests and backs of many of his friends, and which would require increasing levels of effort, if it were possible at all, to shift – he was still good-looking.

  His looks were a large part of what had drawn her to him in the first place, which was shallow, she knew, but at Leeds Metropolitan University he had been one of the male students that the female students talked about. It whet Julia’s competitiveness and so she set herself to making him hers, which she did with some ease. An approach in the student union, suggestion of a coffee, sex on the second date. She realized early that he was not a man of great ambition, but at that stage of her life Julia did not know that she valued ambition in a man. In fact, if pressed she would have said the opposite: ambition was a sign of something a little bit wrong, a sign of too much interest in money and status and not enough in the really important things in life, which were – what? Doing good? Making a difference? Having fun? Whatever – it wasn’t chasing after money and job titles.

  So Brian had been perfect, if a bit passive. Liberal minded; not interested in preparing himself for a life in corporate Britain or in a political think tank, very handsome (and good in bed to boot, much more attentive than the other boyfriends she’d had). His personal and political beliefs had fitted right in with Julia’s and her friends’. Unlike them, though, he’d kept them all as he got older. Their friends (and Julia herself) had quietly dropped their professed interest in doing good instead of making money. Their attitudes had hardened (what was the saying? If you weren’t a socialist in your twenties, you were heartless, and if you were still a socialist in your thirties you were stupid? Julia and her university cohort were living proof of that) and careers had flourished. Not Brian. Ambition had found that Brian was fallow soil and had not taken root in him; he was still the same socialist twenty-something he had always been, with – almost – the same good looks.

  Not now, though, not today. His skin was sallow, his face thinned out. The wide-set eyes were dull. Scruffy patches of facial hair sprouted seemingly at random. There was a hint of slackness in the skin on his neck that could have been the start of a double chin. He looked, she thought, old.

  ‘It was a reporter,’ she said.

  ‘A reporter? What do they want? They know to go to the police for information.’

  ‘They came here.’

  ‘Why? They know to leave us in peace. It’s not like we’re the bad guys. We’re the victims.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Julia said.

  She threw the torn paper onto the table. She folded her arms. She didn’t want him to see her hands shaking. He picked it up and read it.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, then, with renewed emphasis. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Can you believe it?’ Julia said. ‘It’s awful.’

  He studied it for a long time. ‘It’s true, though,’ he said. ‘We can hardly deny it.’

  ‘I know. You don’t have to tell me. I know.’

  ‘That doesn’t bring Anna back.’

  ‘Brian,’ she said. ‘Why are you doing this? Are you trying to make me feel bad? Because it doesn’t work. Nothing you can do or say can make me feel any worse than I already do. Our daughter is missing. Probably abducted. If not dead, then maybe in the hands of a paedophile ring, or sold into slavery. I’ll think about that – wonder where she is and what’s happening to her – for the rest of my life. And it’s my fault. I’ll think about that too. So do you think you can make me feel any worse?’

  He didn’t reply. Eventually, he looked at her. ‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I don’t care how you feel. You did this. You chose divorce; you failed Anna, and I feel like I’ve lost everything. And I blame you. I can’t help it. And since our daughter disappeared the week after you announced you want a divorce, we don’t even have each other to help us get through this.’ He looked at her. ‘You really screwed up, Julia.’ He shook his head, as though scolding her. ‘You really screwed up.’

  Julia was not an angry person. She got frustrated or upset or irritated, but rarely angry. She could remember only a few occasions on which she had felt real, boiling anger of the kind that diminishes your capacity for self-control, most of which were when she was a teenager and felt that her mother was thwarting a totally reasonable wish of hers to shave her head or go to a nightclub or sleep at her boyfriend’s house. Back then, her anger was intensified by the raging hormones of the teen years, but it was nothing compared to what she felt now.

  Who the hell did Brian think he was? She didn’t need to be told that she had screwed up; she knew. She thought about it every minute. Worse, she got the distinct impression that he enjoyed pointing it out to her. By all means blame her; she expected that, but to take pleasure in it? To gain some advantage in their marital fight from their daughter’s disappearance? That was not on, and it added the fuel of self-righteousness to her rage. While Brian was in the right it was hard for her to feel angry at him; if he was in the wrong the dam was breached, and her anger surged through the gap.

  ‘I might have screwed up by not picking Anna up,’ she said. ‘And I don’t need you to tell me that. But there’s one thing I didn’t screw up. One thing that I got exactly right. And that’s getting divorced from you. You’re even weaker than I had thought, Brian, and trying to use my daughter to make me feel bad so that you can feel good proves it.’

  The shock on his face encouraged her; it was like a target, and her fury zeroed in on it.

  ‘I knew marrying you was a mistake a long time ago. I should have known when I was seeing Chris that if I truly loved you I wouldn’t have been with someone else, but I ignored the signs.’ She was aware that this was not exactly true; the reasons she had the affair with Chris were complicated and not really to do with Brian, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was hurting him, and this was working. ‘And I wish I hadn’t, because I made the biggest mistake of my life. The only thing which made it right was Anna, and now she’s gone.’

  He licked his lips, then swallowed. ‘Marrying me wasn’t the biggest mistake of your life,’ he said. ‘You made the biggest mistake of your life three days ago when you didn’t bother to pick up Anna. That was the biggest mistake of your life, Julia. Losing our daughter. Maybe killing our daughter.’

  There are arguments that are easy to get over, and arguments that are hard to get over, and arguments that require marriage guidance counselling to get over. And then there are arguments that can never be got over. This was one of those, and they both knew it. Part of the problem was the gravity of what they had said; the more important part was that a lot of it was true. Julia would not be able to say that she hadn’t meant it – she’d already declared that she wanted a divorce. In those circumstances, saying that the entire marriage was a mistake was entirely believable. And as for what Brian had said: well, if it turned out that Anna was dead – or as good as – then it might not be literally tru
e that Julia had killed her, but it was true enough as to make no difference.

  Julia didn’t know what to say. Should she acknowledge the moment, or let it pass? Should she scream that she hated him or just turn and walk away and never speak to him again?

  She was saved from making a decision by her phone ringing.

  She glanced at the screen. It was DI Wynne.

  iv.

  ‘Mrs Crowne,’ she said. ‘Have you seen the news?’

  ‘Yes,’ Julia said, then paused and looked at Brian. She didn’t want him to hear this. She didn’t want him to hear anything. ‘Hang on a minute.’ She walked into the dining room and closed the door behind her.

  ‘I was at the petrol station,’ Julia said. She lowered her voice. She was pretty sure she had heard a floorboard creak outside the door, and an image of Brian, his ear pressed against the wooden panels, came to her. ‘I saw the Daily World.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it. That’s not what you need right now.’

  ‘It’s ok.’

  ‘I want to reassure you that none of the team working on the case spoke to the press,’ the detective said. ‘I’ve spoken to all of them to confirm it. I also want to reassure you that we don’t operate that way.’

  Julia realized that the DI had not called to commiserate – how could she, the story was true – but to make sure that there was no hint that she or her team were implicated in the leak of the story. Ironically, Julia hadn’t thought they were. She might have, had she wondered how it had come out, but she had not got that far, yet. The shock of finding out and then finding a reporter outside her house still hadn’t worn off. She was still coming to terms with the fact that she was the story now; the narrative had moved on from a missing, probably abducted, possibly murdered, child to a missing, probably abducted, possibly murdered, child with a neglectful mother. It was a familiar movement in the public mood: from sympathy to head-shaking disapproval: how could they let that happen to their child?

  Julia didn’t begrudge them. Perhaps people needed to think that it was the fault of the parents – or in this case, the mother – so that they could feel that their children were safe, immunized to a similar fate by the fact of their good parenting. After all, if Anna’s disappearance was the result of bad parenting – how could they let it happen? – then their children were safe, as they would never let it happen. Better blame it on a crappy modern parent in the soup of Broken Britain than accept that the world was random and they were not in control of what happened to their children. That was a terrifying prospect, and if people needed to be insulated from it by the belief that they could stop bad things happening to their children then there was nothing wrong with that.

  ‘Have you any ideas where the story came from?’ DI Wynne asked.

  ‘No,’ Julia said. ‘But quite a few people knew. The school staff, the parents. One of them could have said something.’

  ‘We’ll try and find out, not that it matters too much now.’

  ‘Does this affect the investigation?’ Julia said. ‘Does it make it harder to find Anna?’

  ‘Not really,’ Wynne said. ‘It might make it easier. More publicity. But it might make things harder for you. Let me know if there is anything I can do.’

  ‘There was a reporter outside the house,’ Julia said. ‘He might still be there. Could you get rid of him?’

  ‘I’ll send someone along to have a word.’

  Julia looked at the sideboard. On one end was a picture frame with two photos in it. One of them was Anna as a baby; the other was of Edna and Jim, just before he disappeared, and next to it was another frame containing a photo of her and Brian on holiday in Turkey, and next to that was one containing a photo of her parents, on their wedding day. With Anna gone, and Brian and her divorcing it seemed as though the whole family was going to come to an end with this generation.

  Unless, of course, Anna was alive, and managed to grow to adulthood and have children of her own in some faraway country. Then the family would live on, but in fact only. No one would know, so, to all intents and purposes the family would be finished.

  ‘Have you made any progress?’ Julia asked. ‘Did you find the janitor?’

  Wynne’s pause was answer enough. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We haven’t found him – his name is Lambert, Julian Lambert – but we are making some progress. He had no car registered in his name, but he does have a driving licence, so right now we’re trying to see if he rented one. We’re also speaking to anyone who rented a car in the area, but nothing has come up yet.’

  ‘Nothing else?’ Julia urged. ‘How does someone just disappear like that?’

  ‘It’s unusual,’ Wynne admitted. ‘But we’ll find him.’

  ‘I think he has Anna,’ Julia said. ‘He must. Or why would he vanish? There must be a reason.’

  This was it, she thought, this was the lead that would end with the return of her daughter.

  ‘It’s suspicious,’ Wynne agreed. ‘But we don’t want to jump to conclusions prematurely. We’re also concerned about the absence of your husband’s father. We haven’t been able to locate him.’

  ‘He’s been gone a long time,’ Julia said. ‘I don’t think Brian and Edna – his mum – really know anything.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they do,’ said Wynne. ‘But we would expect to find some trace of him, and of Miss Wilkinson—’

  ‘Miss Wilkinson?’ Julia said. ‘Is that the teacher?’

  ‘Yes,’ Wynne said. ‘We contacted the school. They have no idea where she’s currently living; neither do any of the people we talked to. We can’t locate her, either.’

  ‘Do you think they have anything to do with Anna?’ Julia said. ‘I see why it’s odd that you can’t find them, but I don’t see the connection with Anna.’

  ‘I don’t, yet,’ Wynne said. ‘But anything unusual is of interest in a case like this. We have to explore every channel.’

  ‘They’re probably living abroad somewhere,’ Julia said.

  ‘Normally we can find people,’ said Wynne. ‘Tax returns, police records, bank accounts. It’s not especially difficult.’ She paused. ‘Unless, of course, they don’t want to be found, for some reason.’

  ‘For some reason,’ Julia echoed. ‘Like—’

  ‘Like anything,’ Wynne interrupted. ‘And everything. Let’s say that Mr Crowne’s father was up to something he shouldn’t have been – perhaps something involving underage pupils – and let’s say Miss Wilkinson was also involved, under the sway of a charismatic older man. Let’s also say that they were found out and decided to disappear.’

  ‘But I don’t – I mean, I knew Jim. He wasn’t that kind of man.’ Jim Crowne wasn’t a paedophile, Julia was sure of it. But then, you never knew. You never knew.

  ‘We’d still like to talk to him,’ Wynne said. ‘I was wondering whether you would have any objection to us issuing a statement asking him to come forward?’

  Julia hesitated. She had no problem with it, but Brian might, and Edna almost certainly would.

  ‘I – I don’t know,’ Julia said. ‘I’d have to ask Brian.’

  ‘I think it’s important for us to do it,’ said Wynne. ‘I wouldn’t want there to be any reason we couldn’t. And – if I’m honest – we’ll do what we have to, to aid the investigation.’

  So it wasn’t really a question, Julia thought, in which case she might as well give her assent. And if it helped get Anna back she’d deal with the fallout with Edna.

  ‘Ok,’ she said. ‘Do it. Is there anything else you need from me?’

  ‘Not right now,’ Wynne said. ‘But I’ll let you know if there is. And I’ll send someone down to help shift the press. You might want to lie low today, take it easy. Stay home.’

  Wynne’s tone suggested that she thought staying at home was a warming, welcoming prospect. A safe place. A place where whatever comfort was available in this godawful situation could be found. Perhaps it was for DI Wynne. It was not for Julia. For Julia home meant memorie
s of Anna and the looming presence of her failed marriage.

  But where else was there?

  ‘Ok,’ she said. ‘I’ll do that.’

  v.

  ‘Well,’ Brian said, ‘nice of you to come. Just a shame that this is what it took.’

  His brother, Simon, put down his bag and folded his arms. He was taller than Brian, maybe 6’ 2”, and thinner, and he was going bald. His face was lean, and he had two deep lines running from his cheekbones to his jaw. He looked like an actor who might play a Second World War army officer: distinguished, severe, yet kindly when in the right mood.

  ‘I’m here to help,’ he said. His voice was similar to Brian’s but a shade deeper, a tone richer, and it had a North American suppleness to it. ‘I’m your brother.’

  Brian tried to look unimpressed, but it was clear to Julia that he was both desperately happy to see Simon and desperately sad that he did not see him more often. He could not disguise the longing – for approval, companionship, friendship – in his eyes. He was in awe of Simon, perhaps because Simon had not stayed around long enough to lose the aura that a big brother had for his younger sibling.

  Julia began to get a glimpse of just how damaged her husband was, just how badly his family had let him down: his father and brother had both deserted him, leaving him with Edna, of all people. It was hardly a recipe for a happy life. To put it in terms that Laura’s therapist would have understood: his shelves had been stacked with a whole supermarket’s worth of problems for the future.

  Simon turned to Julia. ‘Good to see you,’ he said. ‘I’m just sorry it’s in these circumstances. What happened is awful.’

  ‘They have a lead, at least,’ Julia said. ‘That’s something.’

  Simon tilted his head. ‘Oh? Can you share?’

  Brian told him about the janitor. As he did the mood lifted slightly.

  ‘Sounds promising,’ Simon said. ‘Let’s keep our fingers crossed.’ He caught Brian’s eye. ‘How’s Mum?’