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two years and nine days missing
chapter 38
alex
South Weald House closed thirteen years ago, long before Lottie disappeared.
The woman who was with her couldn’t be a current member of staff there. And when the police finally track down a retired employee, they discover there was never a uniform of any kind. Whatever I thought I saw embroidered on the woman’s sweatshirt, it couldn’t have been their logo.
Another dead end.
I want to cry with frustration. How can we have come so close to finding Lottie, closer than at any point since she disappeared, and be back where we started?
For two years, there have been mythical sightings of my daughter that we can never pin down. We don’t have a single verifiable piece of evidence to prove she didn’t vanish from that beach in a puff of smoke. And now we finally have a solid fact, one thing we know for sure: Lottie washere, in London, just seven days ago. We should be drowning in new leads, overwhelmed with information to follow up. And we havenothing.
The UK is one of the most surveilled nations on the planet, with more CCTV cameras per head of population in London than anywhere in the world, except China.
And the woman who has stolen my daughter managed to avoidallof them.
In the last week, the police have trawled through hundreds of hours of footage from the Tube and haven’t found a single frame of a young blonde girl matching my description boarding a train.
Not at Victoria; not anywhere on the underground system.
No witnesses who saw either her or the woman in the fleece, despite extensive appeals. We have no proof either of them were ever on that train, let alone that the child I saw was Lottie.
It’s clear the police think I imagined the whole thing, and I’m starting to wonder if they’re right. Maybe the Valium messed with my head, taking fragments of memory and longing and jumbling them together.Wishful thinking. When you think of the strain she’s been under …
Jack Murtaugh is the only person who doesn’t question my account or my sanity. ‘Don’t start second-guessing yourself now,’ he says when we meet at his office. ‘Trust your gut. The woman you saw must have known where the cameras were and avoided them, which is why she didn’t show up in the footage. No one gets that lucky otherwise.’
‘Why was she in London with Lottie?’ I ask. ‘How did they get here?’
‘We may know the answer to that soon,’ Jack says.
As improbable as it seems to look at him now, shambling and rumpled as he is, Jack was in the SBS before he became an MP. His special ops unit was responsible for intelligence gathering and maritime counter-terrorism operations, and he still has friends in dark places.
He fiddles briefly with his phone and then turns the screen towards me. It’s paused on the opening frames of a grainy black and white video. I’ve seen it a thousand times since itwas first shown to me in Washington, but Istilldon’t know if it’s my daughter in the man’s tattooed arms.
‘This man was your friend,’ Jack says. ‘I need you to be sure you want me to do this, Alex.’
‘He was never my friend,’ I say coolly.
When the video came to light, myfriendfled the jurisdiction of both British and American law enforcement without even attempting to clear his name. In my eyes, that makes him guilty until proven innocent.
I don’t care about the niceties of the law any more. How he’s connected to the woman in London, to Lottie, I have no idea, but if he knows something about my daughter, where she is, I want that information.
And I don’t give a damn how we get it.
