Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
The blue light is the first thing I see.
The patrol car is parked at the kerb outside our house, and the sight of it hits me so hard I nearly stall the Land Rover.
It’s stupid to be shocked, I knew they were coming, I heard Alex speak the words while I was sobbing in a ditch on a Welsh dual carriageway – but knowing it and seeing it are different things. Knowing is a fact. Seeing is a fist.
I pull Jeff’s Land Rover up behind the patrol car and kill the engine.
My coat is still damp from the hill, and there’s mud caked up my boots and into the seams of my jeans.
I’ve been driving for over three hours, white-knuckled, hunched over the wheel of a car that rattles above fifty, and the whole way here I kept telling myself: get home, get through the door, fix this.
As if fixing it were something I could do with my hands, like mending a fuse or patching a wall.
The note is still in my pocket, against my thigh, folded tight, the paper probably soft now from the heat of my body.
The street is quiet – late on a weeknight, our neighbours’ curtains drawn, their houses dark except for a Christmas tree glowing in next door’s front window.
The front door is open, light pouring out across the step, and I can see the hallway and hear voices inside.
I walk towards it on legs that don’t feel like mine.
Alex meets me in the doorway.
He looks like he’s been dismantled. Shirt creased, sleeves shoved to his elbows, face grey.
His eyes are red, and his jaw is set in that rigid way it gets when he’s holding himself together by force.
When he sees me, he doesn’t speak. He just puts his arms around me, pulls me in, and holds on so tightly I can feel his ribs through his shirt.
His chin is on the top of my head, and he’s shaking – we both are – and for three seconds the hallway disappears, the blue light disappears, and it’s just us, holding each other upright in the doorway of our own house while our daughter is somewhere in the dark.
Then he lets go.
‘They need to talk to you,’ he says.
Two officers are in the kitchen. A woman – PC Heywood, her badge says – is sitting at the table with a notebook open and a pen lying flat beside it.
A man is standing near the back door with his arms folded, younger, watchful.
The kettle has boiled recently; steam still clings to the window above the sink.
Someone has made tea. There are mugs on the worktop, and the overhead light is too bright.
Everything in this room looks exactly the way it always looks – Olivia’s school planner on the side, the hook where she hangs her coat – and the familiarity of it is unbearable.
‘Mrs Stiller?’ PC Heywood stands. ‘I’m glad you’re here. Your husband’s filled us in on some of the background, but we need to hear it from you as well. Can you sit down?’
I sit. Alex pulls a chair out beside me and drops into it. His knee touches mine under the table, and he leaves it there.
‘Your husband tells us you’ve been staying at a rental property in Wales,’ she says. ‘And that something happened there tonight.’
‘Someone tried to break in.’ I sound hollow.
‘This evening while I was watching a film – they tried to force the back door. I thought they’d gone, but I was wrong.
’ I stop. I sound like someone reading a report, not someone who was crouched on a kitchen floor four hours ago with her back against a door and her hands over her mouth.
‘They threw a brick through the window before they left.’
PC Heywood writes. The male officer shifts his weight but doesn’t speak.
I reach into my pocket to check the note is still there. The paper is creased and warm. I should pull it out, unfold it on the table, smooth it flat with my palm, and hand it over to the police. I should. But I don’t.
COME TO OUR OLD SCHOOL TOMORROW NIGHT. ALONE. NO POLICE.
YOUR CHILD’S LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.
PC Heywood studies me from across the table. ‘Is there anything else we should know about tonight, Kim?’
The way she says Kim, not Mrs Stiller makes me flinch. Is she trying to put me at ease, or charm me into revealing something she suspects I’m holding back?
‘I’ve already given you some background,’ Alex says.
His voice is tight. Controlled in the way Alex gets controlled when he’s furious – every word placed, every syllable held between his teeth.
‘There’s a man – Ross. I never got a surname.
Someone from Kim’s past. He’s been turning up, contacting her, and she didn’t tell me about it until recently.
He’s the most likely person to have been at the cottage tonight.
But if he was in Wales, who’s with Olivia? Is she alone somewhere in the dark?’
PC Heywood doesn’t react. She turns back to me. ‘Can you confirm what we know of your daughter’s movements today?’
‘She was with Alex’s mum,’ I say. ‘In Leicester. She’s been staying with her grandparents while I was in Wales.’
‘And what happened this afternoon?’
I look at Alex. He nods once, a short, tight movement, and takes over the story.
‘She went out,’ he says. ‘Around three, maybe half past. Told Mum she was meeting a friend. She seemed fine. Happy. Had her phone, said she’d be back by six.
’ He stops. Presses his hands flat on the table.
‘She didn’t come back. Didn’t answer her phone.
Mum called me at seven, and I’ve been ringing everyone we know since then.
Nobody’s seen her. Her phone goes straight to voicemail. ’
‘And she didn’t mention this friend’s name to anyone else? No texts, no messages?’
‘Not that we know of.’
PC Heywood writes something down, turns a page, writes again. The room is too quiet. The fridge hums and the clock ticks on the wall above the oven, and the note is in my pocket, pressing against my skin and making it crawl.
‘Kim,’ she says. ‘I need to ask you about this man from your past. It’s possible he could be involved and we need to explore every avenue here.’
‘Right.’
‘Your husband could only give us a first name. Perhaps you could give us the rest.’
Ross something. That’s all Alex has ever had – the surname slid past him at the party, and when I confessed at this table, I only ever said Ross. He never asked for more. I let him not ask.
PC Heywood knows I’m stalling. ‘Mr Stiller said you’d been in contact with someone, a man, and that this person has been—’
‘Kim.’ Alex’s voice, beside me. Quiet but hard. ‘Tell them.’
I look at him.
‘Tell them everything,’ he says.
The expectation sits unwanted in the middle of the kitchen table.
PC Heywood pauses, pen hovering. The male officer by the back door unfolds his arms. Alex is staring at me with an expression I know – the same expression I imagine he wears in meetings when a client has been caught lying, patient and relentless and already three steps ahead.
‘Kim knows more than me,’ he says to PC Heywood. ‘About this man. He grew up here. They were together as teenagers, and he’s been contacting her again. As I’ve already told you, she kept it from me for weeks. He could be the one who’s taken Olivia.’
The kitchen is very still. PC Heywood looks at me. The male officer looks at me. Alex looks at me.
And the note is right there in my pocket.
NO POLICE.
YOUR CHILD’S LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.
I read those words standing in a ruined sitting room with glass on the rug and cold air pouring through the broken window.
I read them in Jeff’s Land Rover on a dark verge with my daughter’s face behind my eyes.
I read them at every red light and every junction, over and over, until they stopped being words and became a sound – a low, steady hum beneath everything, a warning I can feel in my bones.
The person who wrote that note has Olivia.
The person who wrote it walked up to a cottage in the middle of nowhere, circled it in the dark, tried both doors, and threw a brick through the window.
That person got close enough to my daughter to make her leave her house willingly, on foot, without a fuss.
He’s patient. He’s close. He planned this.
And he told me not to do exactly what Alex is asking me to do right now.
If I say Ross’s name, these officers will run it.
They’ll search for him, find him, pull him in.
They’ll knock on doors and make calls and leave a trail a mile wide, and Ross will know we’ve involved the police.
Ross knew where I was staying in Wales, he knew how to gain my daughter’s trust. He knew when she’d be free to leave the house.
He might be watching us now, but if he isn’t – if there’s any chance he doesn’t yet know the police have been called, Olivia is still safe.
The note said no police.
PC Heywood speaks gently. ‘Mrs Stiller. Kim. Who is this man we should know about?’
I look at Alex. I look at the officer’s pen, poised above the page, ready to write a name that will set everything in motion.
I think about my daughter. Thirteen years old.
Long-limbed, always in those oversized hoodies, hair she’s started caring about but still forgets to brush.
The way she rolls her eyes at me and then curls up beside me on the sofa ten minutes later.
The way she says ‘Mum’ – two versions, one for when she wants something and one for when she’s frightened, and I can tell the difference from another room.
I would do anything for her. Anything.
Even this.
‘That’s nothing,’ I say. ‘The truth is, I kissed a guy in a bar and made it sound like I had some sort of stalker to make it easier for my husband to forgive me.’
Alex goes rigid beside me. I can feel it – every muscle in his body locking at once, his knee pressing hard against mine under the table, his breath catching.
‘Kim, why don’t we—?’
‘My husband’s upset,’ I say, staring at PC Heywood and not at Alex, because if I glance at him I’ll break. ‘We’re both upset. He’s confused. There’s no old boyfriend, the guy I kissed was a stranger, nobody. I don’t know who broke into the cottage. And I don’t know where my daughter is.’
My voice is level. Steady. Not mine.
PC Heywood holds my gaze for too long. I can see her weighing it – the unspoken name, the husband insisting and the wife denying, the missing child between them.
She writes something on her pad. The male officer shifts by the back door.
Alex’s breathing is audible now, short and controlled, the sound of a man biting down on something he can’t swallow.
‘All right,’ PC Heywood says. ‘Let’s focus on Olivia.’
She turns the page and starts asking about recent photographs, clothing, known friends, usual routes. I answer. I answer everything she asks, clearly and calmly, because I can do that – I can be the mother who helps, the mother who cooperates, the mother who gives them what they need to search.
Alex doesn’t look at me again. He sits beside me with his hands on the table, his jaw clenched, and his silence fills the kitchen like pressure before a storm.
He’ll ask me the moment they leave. He’ll corner me in the hallway, or the bedroom, or the dark space between the landing and our daughter’s empty room, and he’ll want an answer I can’t give.
But that’s later. That’s not now.
Now there is only the note, and the lie, and the small, terrible hope that I’ve made the right choice.