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chapter 10
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The child Paul has found is not Lottie.
It turns out he has confused my daughter with one of the other bridesmaids, five-year-old Olivia Everett, who’d fallen asleep in the hotel recreation room. It takes a moment for the significance of his mistake to register and, when it does, I feel as if an abyss has opened at my feet.
‘Was it you or Paul who saw Lottie at the ice-cream station, just before I came back from the beach?’ I ask Zealy urgently.
She looks at him and then back at me as she, too, realises the seriousness of the error. ‘It was Paul.’
Paul, who has mistaken Olivia for Lottie. He’s been muddling them all night. They don’t look alike: Olivia’s hair is much darker, a dirty blonde close to mouse, and she’s far skinnier than Lottie. But to a childless man in his thirties, one fair-haired little girl in a pink dress is much like another.
Which means it wasn’t my daughter he sawheaded back towards the ice-cream station with some of the other kidsan hour and ten minutes ago.
It was Olivia.
The timeline from which we have been working, the blue dot at the centre of the circle of possibilities, is not where, orwhen, we thought it was. Everything must be recalibrated. We must retrace our steps from the very beginning.
Fear shears the thin thread of hope to which I’ve been clinging. I know,I know, Lottie has been abducted. The guilt is a physical sensation, a constant, nauseating drumbeat of pain in my ears: I left my child, and now she is missing. I have failed her in the most basic and fundamental of ways: I couldn’t keep her safe. And my failure is amplified by the appalling revelation that I don’t even know when she was taken. I’ve fallen into the same trap as Paul, blinded by the pink skirts.
When did I last see Lottie forsure? Not just a glimpse of pink taffeta, flitting between the buffet tables or disappearing around corners, but Lottie herself?
I realise, with a chill, that I haven’t seen her with absolute certainty since the wedding ceremony on the beach, when she was sitting on her gilt chair a few rows away from me.
Not an hour and fifteen minutes ago.
Fourhours ago.
My child may have been missing for four hours andI didn’t even notice.
Even as I suppress my panic, I fix that snapshot in my mind, knowing it may be the last time I ever saw my daughter alive: Lottie glaring ferociously at the sea, clutching her empty flower basket on her lap, her platinum hair whipped free from its fishtail braid by the breeze.
It’ll be the first question the police ask when they arrive: when did you last see your daughter? And when I tell them this new truth, it will affect every aspect of their investigation.
In any case like this, a disappearance or a murder, the first person under suspicion is always the victim’s nearest and dearest. But when the police learn I lost sight of my child four hours ago, their consideration of me will transition from routineto serious. They’ll waste time delving into my history, my record as a mother, when they should be out there, looking for her.
I’ve failed my daughter twice over.
‘For God’s sake, where are the damn police?’ Zealy exclaims, just as two uniformed officers enter hotel reception.
The adversarial nature of the legal system means that, as a lawyer advocating for some of the most disadvantaged people in the world, I’m used to viewing the police as the enemy. I’ve seen the aftermath of dawn raids: children wrenched from their parents, decent people treated like criminals, property destroyed. But I’ve never been so glad to see a police uniform as I am now.
One of the officers hangs back, talking into the radio at her chest. The other introduces himself. ‘Officer Spencer Graves, ma’am. I understand your daughter is missing?’
‘Someone’s stolen her,’ I say.
‘Did you witness the abduction, ma’am?’
‘No, but we’ve looked everywhere. I know she’s been taken!’
‘How old is your daughter, ma’am?’
‘Three. She’ll be four next February.’
‘We’re wasting time,’ Zealy interjects. ‘You need to send out an alert and set up roadblocks before it’s too late!’
‘Ma’am, we just got to establish some facts,’ Graves says. ‘Is it possible she’s wandered off on her own?’
