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‘Mrs Harding, your husband called me,’ she says. ‘My name is Rebecca Miller. I’m a criminal lawyer.’
‘I don’t need—’
‘Please, Mrs Harding. Let me do my job. I don’t know who you people are,’ she adds, as Quinn appears at the end of the hall behind us, ‘but you need to leave.’
‘Catherine, please,’ I beg. ‘If you know anything about Lottie—’
‘Now.’
I’m about to protest, but the words die on my lips. I exit the house without another word.
Quinn has no choice but to leave with me. But as soon as we reach the street, she grabs my elbow, furiously spinning me towards her. ‘You’re going to give up, just like that?’
I shake her off. ‘I told you before, this has nothing to do with you. You’re not my friend, Quinn. You’re a bloody jackal. Call yourself a fucking Uber and go home.’
I leave her standing in the street and go back to my car.
Quinn yells something after me, and then scowls and pulls out her phone. I wait till I’m sure she’s not watching and then flip over the silver frame I just stole from Catherine’s hall table.
Carefully, I prise off the velvet hardboard backing to extract the photo. There’s a note scrawled in Biro on the back of the picture:Ellie & me, South Weald Bay, summer 2019.
It’s the woman from the train.
In the wake of your friend’s arrest, our hearts go out to you, but the truth is it’s time to find some peace …
By Hannah Foster for theSunday Post
Dear Alexa,
Can it really be two years since your little daughter Lottie disappeared? Since her three-year-old face first began to haunt us?
Who can forget her fierce expression blazing out at us from posters that went up everywhere, from airports to village shops.
Could she still be alive? Is she the prisoner of some twisted individual? I know that must be your deepest fear – indeed, it doesn’t bear thinking about.
The fact that the evil sickness of paedophilia has now reached your inner circle must have shocked you to your core.
A man you trusted, who worked alongside you in the search for your daughter, turns out to be a monster.
How devastating that must be.
The scandal now engulfing the Lottie Foundation will pass, however soul-destroying it must seem now.
It’s to your eternal credit that you’ve remained so resolutely optimistic, restating at every opportunity your unswerving belief that somehow, one day, Lottie will come back to you.
Over the years we’ve shared your hope and your nightmares. We’ve obsessed over the events of that fatal evening she went missing along with you. You must have relived those hours a million times and so have we.
So I hope it doesn’t sound too callous to suggest that two years later, the world has moved on. Not because we have forgotten Lottie, but because time helps us heal and we forget, whether we want to or not.
No doubt that’s what motivated you to give your impromptu press conference on the front steps of your house yesterday. To remind us. To shake us into caring again.
Clearly you are still tormented by not knowing what happened to your daughter and it’s obvious that your agony is caused not just by loss, but by guilt, because you weren’t there when she needed you most.
How else to explain what happened at Victoria station in London two weeks ago?
No one blames you for grasping at straws, but it’s become painfully obvious to those who care about you that your pain has simply become too much to bear.
You saw what you wanted to see.
