The Missing Hours (2 page)

Her girls, Selena Cole’s girls, aged three and seven.

Sophie shrugs. ‘As okay as they can be, I guess.’ She sighs, nods towards the house. ‘The neighbour is in there with them. I’ve got a call in to their aunt and she’s on her way.’

‘The father?’ I ask. My gaze moves from the swings across the gravel, the grass, down towards the road. Where did Selena Cole go? What happened? Did something just snap in her? The demands of parenthood or marriage or just life suddenly overloading her, so that in the end she couldn’t remember exactly who she was, couldn’t push through the noise and the responsibilities and the chaos. Did she stand here, one daughter on the swing, the other playing, and then just turn, walk away? The road is right there. Did she get into a car, drive off, leaving her children behind?

‘The father is dead.’

I look at Sophie. ‘He’s dead?’

‘Do you remember that terrorist attack in Brazil last year? He was there – Ed Cole. Apparently they ran some kind of consultancy business together, he and Selena. Pretty successful by all accounts. They were at a conference when it was hit. She survived. He didn’t.’

‘God!’

‘I know. Those poor kids.’ Sophie says it abstractly, like it is a story she has read.

I study her for a second. Decide that she doesn’t have kids.

I look back at the house. Think of the weight resting on Selena, the grief. Was that it? She was her girls’ world, their security, their sanctuary. But a support beam can only hold so much weight. Did Selena collapse in on herself, her knees buckling from the pressure of it all?

I glance at Sophie. ‘We need to get the word out. We may be looking for a body.’

She nods slowly. ‘Suicide?’

I stand where Selena stood, reach out my fingers, touch the chain of the swing that she touched, imagine that I can hear the belly laugh of a little girl, the flip-flopping footsteps of another.

Selena. What have you done?

I pull my coat tighter around me. The rain has finally decided to put some effort in, large drops softly plunking against the swing in an easy rhythm. Even though it is early in the day, the sky is the colour of battleships. ‘I need to speak to Heather and Tara.’

The lights are on in the house. All of them, it seems. The wide-eyed bay windows gaze outwards, spilling an orange glow into the small walled garden. I can see the children inside, bundled together, still wearing their coats and buried so deep inside the cushions on the sofa that it is hard to distinguish them from it. The elder holds the younger within her arms, her long biscuit-blonde hair spilling over her like a shawl. Her lips are moving and I study her, trying to make out what it is she says. Then her face is transposed with that of my Georgia and suddenly I realise that she is singing, her mouth shaping the words to ‘Let It Go’. Tears prick at my eyes. I think of Georgia, spinning around the kitchen, a clumsy pirouette, singing the
Frozen
song loudly and keylessly. But it’s not Georgia. I shake my head, a sharp, hard movement that makes Sophie look at me, curious. It is not Georgia, but Heather Cole, seven years old, cradling her sister, Tara Cole, three years old. And their mother has vanished.

‘Shall we?’ Sophie gestures to the door.

I nod.

The house is warm, uncomfortably so after the chill of the outside. The hallway wide, autumnal Victorian floor tiles giving way to hard-wood trim, the walls a deep luscious red. I cannot help but feel that this is what it must be like to stand inside the ventricle of a heart. There is a strip of pictures in heavy iron frames. Heather and Tara, two slender blonde girls, their heads together, smiles all but identical. Heather and Tara again, but this time they hang off a woman – late thirties, her hair dark, cut into a chin-length bob so that it swings, trailing across her lips. I stand, transfixed by the image of Selena Cole. I wouldn’t call her beautiful, rather striking, with her large eyes, her full lips, her slightly uneven features. I stare at her, wondering where it is that she has gone.

There is another picture, a third to complete the triptych. Heather and Tara and Selena with a man. Ed Cole, I presume. I breathe in, inhaling the loss this family has had to bear. He is handsome in an offhand kind of way, broad and rugged, a nose that looks like it has been broken once, or even twice, his head shaved, lower face swathed in a beard, light veering to red. There is a sparkle to him, so much life that it seems impossible he could be dead.

I find myself thinking of Alex. We have a photo on our mantelpiece, the four of us knotted together, Georgia on my lap, Tess on Alex’s, taken when the girls were eighteen months old, everyone laughing even as Tess tries to squirm away, her eye caught by a nearby cat. It was a good day. A bright day. Before I came back to work, when I could still legitimately claim to be a mother, a detective. After all, it was a career break. A break. That means you are returning, that you will come back exactly as you left, not as some impoverished facsimile, there in body but not in spirit.

I hear Sophie enter the living room ahead of me, realise that I have taken too long.

The girls are still huddled together on the sofa, an elderly woman perched beside them, her back straight, fingers plucking at her thick wool trousers. She looks up as I enter, expression serious. The neighbour, I guess. The one who found the children.

‘Mrs Charles? I’m Detective Constable Leah Mackay.’

She nods her head once, firmly. ‘Vida Charles. I live a couple of doors down. Their neighbour,’ she adds, redundantly. ‘Mind, my house isn’t like this. Only a little one, mine. My husband was a postman. Retired now, of course. So, you know, we couldn’t afford a big house. Not like this one …’ She trails off as if she has forgotten how the thought ends.

I nod, smile. But I’m not thinking about her. I’m thinking about the children. The little one, Tara, isn’t looking at me. She is holding her sister’s hand, her gaze far off, as if the enormity of what has happened is simply too much for her little mind to process. But Heather is looking at me; her gaze has not left my face.

I sink down, sitting on the sofa beside her.

‘Heather? I’m Leah.’

She studies me appraisingly. ‘Are you a policeman …’ she catches herself, ‘lady?’

I nod. I keep the smile, as if it will somehow ease her pain.

‘You’re going to find my mum.’ It isn’t a question. It is a statement. She says it as a mantra, one hand stroking her little sister’s hair. ‘She’ll come back then.’

She is Tess, asking another police officer where I have gone. She is Georgia, instructing another police officer to find me, to return me to her.

I nod again. Try to forget that I want to cry.

A Start in Kidnap and Ransom

Dr Selena Cole

(Originally published in
London Us
magazine)

It began with a kidnapping. A woman, thirty-five-year-old Astrid, readies herself for work one fine London day. She kisses her husband, Jan, and her four-year-old son, Gabriel, goodbye, and then hurries to catch her train. By the time she returns, a little over eight hours later, both her husband and her son are gone. Vanished into thin air.

Astrid is my sister.

You do not go looking for kidnap and ransom. It comes looking for you.

I was on the train when she called me, watching the sun sink on a satisfying spring day. It had been a day like any other, my world replete with the walking wounded, returning servicemen fresh from war, trying to make sense of the world they had returned to, how much of themselves they had left behind. It is about finding a new normal, I would tell them. Learning to live in the world as it is now, in the body you have now.

The words are easy. Empty. You do not understand the weight of them until your normal also disappears.

‘Selena … my baby. He’s gone.’

The police tracked them as far as Poland. Have there been any problems? they asked my sister. In your marriage? Your lives together?

I thought we were happy. I thought we were all Jan wanted.

Is parental kidnapping still a kidnapping?

Looking at my sister, her world ripped from beneath her, I would have to say yes.

I have never been known for my patience. I began to examine my brother-in-law, to look at his life in a way I never had before. Did you know about the other women? About the drugs? But Astrid was too far gone by that point, sunk so far into herself that my words failed to reach her. What did she have to live for now? Her whole world had vanished.

You reach out when you are in darkness. You grasp at any hand you can find. In reaching, I found Ed’s hand. I took it and never let go. That, however, is another story.

I know people, Ed said. Let me make some calls.

Two weeks after the vanishing of my brother-in-law and my nephew, Ed and I boarded a flight to Krakow. They are staying in a house in Katowice, Ed told me, a couple of blocks from Jan’s parents. There is a woman with them, young, attractive. I’m putting money on it being a girlfriend. How about we pop over for a visit? Have a little chat with your brother-in-law?

I didn’t tell my sister I was going. Now that I have children of my own, I wonder at that, at the temerity of it. But then it made sense to me. I had to keep this clean, clinical, unassailed by the emotional baggage that my sister would inevitably bring.

We can simply take Gabriel, you know, said Ed. Rent a car, scoop him up, make a run for the border. If it comes to it, we can get him out.

I looked out of the aeroplane window at the rolling greenness below. No. It’s too dangerous. If it were to go wrong …

So, asked Ed, what’s the plan?

I shrugged. I’m going to talk to Jan.

It would be my first ever negotiation.

I think I knew, as soon as Jan opened the door, what the outcome would be. In retrospect I would see it written plain across him: the exhaustion, the fear, the sense of one who has gone too far, walking too heavy on a ledge that will not hold much longer. Ed calls it my gift. My ability to sense the pressure points, to see where my opponent will give, where they will stand firm. But I still think it all came from that day, from the desperate need to make this right. It had to work. There was simply no other choice.

We talked for hours, Jan and I, as my nephew lay sleeping in the next room, Ed sitting watchful and waiting. Until, in the end, an accord.

He had only meant to leave. He had a girlfriend. He wanted to be with her. He hadn’t meant to take Gabriel, that had never been the plan. But when push came to shove …

You know how it goes.

But my nephew had cried for his mother every day for two weeks. Had dug his heels in, becoming recalcitrant, intractable, as only a four-year-old can.

He needs to go home, Jan had said finally. I made a mistake.

We left early the following morning. Jan drove us to the airport. Kissed his son goodbye.

In the years that followed, I have often questioned what I was thinking when I went there. How far was I prepared to go? Would I have kidnapped Gabriel in return?

Yes.

I would have done that and more.

And yet I learned a powerful lesson. That persuasion can work better than force. That words can ease the road to freedom, can allow the kidnapper to believe that a release is for their own greater good. That not all manipulations are bad.

And when I doubt myself, I think of Astrid, her suddenly small figure curled on the sofa, barely glancing at us as the door opened and we walked in, and then something, some mother’s instinct, telling her to look up, to see me carrying her son’s sleeping form, and that change – relief, ecstasy, wholeness – flooding through her. When I fear that I will fail, I think of my sister. And then I know that I will not.

The body

DS Finn Hale: Tuesday, 9.55 a.m.

YOU DON’T FORGET
the smell of death. Not ever. It has a familiar quality; even if you’ve never smelled it before, there’s a sense that you’ve known all along what it will be like.

I study the body, a corpse in name only. Because from here, on the narrow road on the mountain, all I can see is grey fabric, a flash of skin, shockingly white against green grass.

It has been dumped, there is no other word for the end of this human. The road is narrow, used only rarely and then with care. On one side, steepness, leading higher and higher until the rocky crags vanish into a net of cloud. On the other, a narrow shelf of grass and shrubs and then the fall. The body lies on the shelf. Like someone has driven by, opened a car door, shoved it out and then left.

That irritates me, more than the rain, the mist, the frigid cold. The laissez-faire of it all. That whoever did it, ended this life, was too busy, in too much of a hurry, to hide the body. I look to the curve of the road, where a car would have traced the lines of it, slowing, stopping, a door opening, and the deceased – whoever they were – pushed, lifeless, to the roadside. Death should be about more than that.

I walk slowly along the tarmac, feet squelching with each step. The rain has started, moving straight into high gear. It bounces off the surface, plopping on my suit sleeves. A heavy mist is rolling in across the valley with the inevitability of the tide, pressing down on top of me, everything beyond the next few feet a blur. I balance my steps, a boy walking along kerbstones, my overshined shoes keeping tight to the black line of the road, and it feels like a game, that if I lean a little too far to the left then I will be gone, tumbling into that bowl of greenness.