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He gestures towards the interior of the house. ‘I’ve just got to grab something.’
She nods. He runs upstairs. At the sight of Abi’s room, nausea rises again, so strong it seems impossible he won’t be sick. He pulls the covers from Abi’s cot bed and pushes his face into the soft folds. They smell of her, though he can’t say in words what that smell is. He grabs her pyjamas. Ava has folded them neatly on the mattress. Abi doesn’t have a pillow; she threw it out with a scowl the first time she tried it –me no like!The pyjamas are pink with little grey cartoon elephants. The smell of her is more intense – her skin, her baby soap, sweat from her sleeping body, oh God.
He carries them downstairs. Ava is facing away from him, but still he hurries past, the pyjamas behind his back. She can’t see this. No mother should have to see this. Even he has to look away while the dogs take turns to sniff at his daughter’s pyjamas. It is an invasion. A violation. It can’t be real. It cannot.
Ian, the dog handler, hands him back the pyjamas and thanks him.
Understanding himself dismissed, Matt returns to the house and somehow manages to get the pyjamas back upstairs. When he returns to the kitchen, Ava is crying. The family liaison officer – Lorraine, was it? – has moved to sit beside her and is holding her hand. It is a strangely intimate sight, a woman he doesn’t know sitting so close to his wife, holding her hand.
‘Do you need anything?’ he asks, feeling something dropping inside him – the weight, perhaps, of his own helplessness. ‘I could make some tea or something.’
Ava shakes her head. ‘No. No tea.’
He hovers. He wants to say something to comfort her. More, he wants to bring Abi home, bring her home in his arms and say, look, Ava, I found her. I found our little girl.
He meets Lorraine’s eye and cocks his head:I’m going.
She nods.
‘I’ve got my phone,’ he adds.
Outside, a German shepherd sniffs and circles at the end of the Lovegoods’ drive while his handler looks on. Ian Mitchell is at the front of Matt and Ava’s house, his dog sniffing and pawing at the back tyre of their old Volkswagen. The rain has started again. Not lashing down, but heavy enough. No one appears to notice.
‘Have they found something?’ Matt asks.
‘There’s a scent here.’ Ian nods at the gutter. ‘Your mate Mr Johnson found her toy here, is that right?’
Matt nods. ‘Yes. Yes, he did. He brought it in. It’s in the house. Or they might have taken it.’
‘No!’ It’s Ava’s voice. Matt turns to see her running from the side return; she is at the front of the house now, pushing past him, heading for the other dog. The other dog is sniffing the ground at the end of Johnnie Lovegood’s driveway.
‘You’re wasting your time,’ Ava is yelling, all trace of her usual cool demeanour utterly gone. ‘That’s where she fell. She fell there, she cut her knee right there and got blood on the pavement. Trust me, you’re wasting your time; please, please, you’re wasting your time.’
The dog handlers exchange a glance. Matt doesn’t like what he reads there.
‘Mrs Atkins, if you can just come back inside…’ Lorraine is ushering his wife away with a carefully placed arm around her shoulder. The air fills with the crackle of walkie-talkies. Lorraine’s persuasive tone reaches him without the sense.
Ava bucks, her arms flail, her hands close into fists. She shakes Lorraine off, turns to him, her face desperate. ‘But she fell! Matt! Tell them! They could be out looking for her instead of sniffing round here. They need to search up by the river. Tell them!’
‘My wife is right,’ Matt says. ‘She fell exactly there, this morning. I was there. She cut her knee and it bled all over. She grazed her hands too. But that was before. Look, shall I show you the way to the lock? I think it’d be better to look where she’s most likely to have gone.’
Both dogs are sniffing now in the gutter; one jumps back a little, barking.
‘That’s where we found her toy – you know that,’ he says to the handlers, fighting to keep his voice level. He knows he should let them do their job, but they’re going backwards and they don’t know what he knows and they’re not listening, for Christ’s sake, they’re not hearing what Ava’s telling them. ‘Surely we’re wasting time here?’ he insists. ‘Didn’t you hear my wife?’
They nod, but it’s a kiss-off. The dogs sniff around, trail back, back along the pavement. At the end of next door’s drive they stop again, sniffing, circling, sniffing, barking. Another female officer swabs the pavement, puts the swab in a tiny vial.
‘You’ll find blood there, I can tell you that right now. It’s Abi’s. From her knee. She fell. How many times?’ Feeling his temper rise, Matt bites his tongue.
The dogs and their handlers continue to the end of the road. The end of the road where he last saw his daughter. They stop at the corner, bark, sniff the ground like crazed coke addicts.
‘That’ll be her blood too. She sat down right there earlier this morning.’
A raindrop drips from his brow. The rain has thickened. How far could she have gone? Quite far, if she took off at a clip, if she knew she was being naughty. At the thought of her in mischievous mode, his eyes fill. That gleam in her eyes – he can see her, oh God, he can see her as if she’s right there, the challenge of her cheeky smile, the smile she always gives him when he pretends to look away while she takes a bite of his toast, when he looks back and pretends to be shocked and says, ‘Hey, who’s been eating my toast?’ Oh God, he can see her laughing hysterically, mouth full, shaking her head: not me, Daddy. Not me.
He grabs his bike and cycles towards the river, tears running with the rain. Outside a terraced house adjacent to the chandlery, two women in expensive wellies and raincoats are deep in conversation, their dogs on leads.
‘Hi, hi, sorry, excuse me, I’m looking for my little girl. Have you seen a little girl? She’s two years old. Blue coat. Cream woolly hat?’
