Blink(68)

Soon, it will be time for me to let go, to fade away. If only I can do this one last thing for Evie first, to put right all my terrible mistakes. Then my job will be done.

Yet despite everything, my heartbeat remains steady, pumping life around what used to be my body but is now a strange land filled only with loss and regret. I am bursting with pure disdain for myself, and especially for her, my recent visitor.

‘Is this your daughter?’ The nurse’s voice sounds strange and her forehead wrinkles above me. ‘She’s beautiful and she – she reminds me of someone.’ She twists the photograph this way and that, studying it. I watch as her brow furrows, her jaw sets. I am willing her to join up the dots.

‘Oh my God,’ she whispers, her features contorting. Her eyes slide to my face again and narrow slightly, as if she is trying to focus, to understand the impossible. ‘Oh my God.’

She grips the photograph tightly and runs from the room. Relief washes through me like a cleansing balm.

At last, someone has realised the truth.

Someone knows who I am.





59





Present Day





The Nurse





Nancy sits in the back of the police car and watches as the familiar houses and shops whizz by in a washed-out blur. She sees them every day, but this afternoon they look strange to her. She registers the shapes and colours through the myriad raindrops that stream relentlessly onto the window and it feels like she has never seen them before.

This is the day that the world has turned upside down and inside out.

As soon as Nancy had alerted the powers that be, the hospital management contacted the police, and they had asked her to accompany them. All in the space of a couple of hours. It was an unusual step for them to take, DI Manvers had explained, but this was an extraordinary situation and it would help, they felt, Nancy being there.

The car slows to turn the corner and the memories rush back into Nancy’s mind. She squeezes her eyes closed against them, for all the good it does.

‘You OK, love?’ DI Manvers glances at the uniformed officer driving the car and turns in his seat to look at her. ‘We’re almost there. We can pull over if you want to take a minute?’

‘No,’ she whispers, her voice catching in her throat. ‘This is not about me.’

But even as she utters the words, Nancy knows it is very much about her. What she knows is about to make someone’s agony even more unbearable.

If that were even possible.



* * *



The police car travels over the big roundabout, swinging onto Cinderhill Road and finally turning into Muriel Crescent. A delivery man hesitates in getting back into his van, watching the police vehicle approach.

Nancy closes her eyes and feels the car slow to a stop. DI Manvers opens the door and she opens her eyes and climbs out of the car. The air outside is damp and hangs heavy, almost sticky, around her face. She feels a sudden rush of nausea and steadies herself by holding on to the car door.

‘Nancy, are you OK?’ DI Manvers asks again.

She nods.

But she is not OK, not really.

Nancy bends forward, trying to catch her breath. She sees the cracked, damp pavement and suddenly she is back there, back to that awful day when Evie stood sobbing in the street, covered in wasp stings.

Nancy had given just a few minutes of advice that day. After that, she’d seen the Cotters on the odd occasion when she’d either been on her way out or coming back home from work. It had only happened now and again. She’d wave hello and they’d wave back. It had never been anything more than that.

Six months after the wasp sting day, Nancy had started her new job at the QMC, and moved from Muriel Crescent to take a rented apartment on the outskirts of the city. She hadn’t known the Cotters well enough to say goodbye and, she readily admitted, she had never given them another thought.

Until she’d seen those horrific newspaper headlines.

Police appeal for help to find missing five-year-old girl

Girl vanishes from classroom after mother is late to collect her





That had made her sit up and take notice alright. Nancy had thought, at the time, how eager the press had been to criticise Mrs Cotter right from the off.

Now nobody knows if Evie is even alive anymore.

Nancy takes a few more breaths in, the cold air sticking to her nostrils. She is painfully aware they are watching her. Waiting for her.

Of course, Nancy had sent a card at the time and followed it up with a couple of short letters to Toni Cotter, saying she was a good listener and if there was anything she could do and so on . . .

She’d heard nothing back, hadn’t really expected to.

DI Manvers waits until Nancy stands up straighter and gets her bearings again. ‘Sure you’re OK with doing this?’

She nods and he turns, walking towards the house. Nancy follows, strands of pure dread writhing in her stomach like a nest of vipers.

The door is the only one on the street that has been obviously repainted; cheap white gloss on top of the original pale blue PVC. The faint shadow of spray-painted words are still evident; daubed accusations that have not been thoroughly masked by the repaint.

DI Manvers raps on the door and they wait for what seems to Nancy like forever.

The sound of someone unlocking the door on the other side forces Nancy’s fingernails into the soft flesh of her palms. Her breathing grows even more erratic and her heartbeat thunders against her breastbone.