Blink(79)

She walks down the overgrown path at the side of the house and opens the squeaky wooden gate, automatically bracing herself, even now, for her mother’s sharp instruction to ‘get those hinges greased’.

But, of course, the voice doesn’t come. The squeak will get worse and the wood will dampen and rot without its annual stinking preservation treatment and Harriet will enjoy watching its descent into ruin.

She pulls the gate closed behind her until it catches on the latch and turns left, to walk up to the top of the street and the bus stop. In just over a week it will be Bonfire Night. The smell of burning will carry on the air and groups of students will let off isolated bangers and rockets, scattering in the street in clouds of smoke and laughter that will chip into the stillness of Harriet’s front room.

When you are a bystander to life, rather than an active player, the rota of events can be disturbing to witness. Halloween, Bonfire Night, then Christmas. New Year brings talk of holidays, spring brings Easter and then there are the long summer months before autumn once again draws near and the whole cycle begins again.

When she’d still been teaching, Harriet had liked the autumn term the best – the start of a new school year with new pupils to guide and support in her own inimitable way. After so many successful years, her career had ended very badly. She doesn’t want to think about that at the moment, though. It is more important to keep focused on the task in hand.

The digitised display at the bus stop tells her the next bus will be arriving in just three minutes. This particular one will take her into the heart of the hospital’s vast complex, which she knows very well due to frequent visits over the years to address her mother’s countless ailments.

There is nobody else waiting. Indeed, the street is even quieter than usual.

Harriet stares across the road at the familiar Victorian villas that, on the one hand, seem very similar to her own, but on the other have been changed beyond all recognition.

The small, walled front gardens invariably contain torn, rotting bin bags that bulge with dissolving cardboard packets of cereal and empty beer cans and wine bottles. Single light bulbs illuminate sparsely furnished rooms, all of them inadequately screened behind draped sheets or paper-thin curtains that fail to meet in the middle. The student properties look cold and isolated, forgotten by the bustling lives around them. Hiding their grubby secrets like weeping sores under flimsy, inadequate dressings. No more families, huddled in front of their log burners and soft pools of elegant light, like in the old days.

Harriet turns away and watches the digital update, the glowing amber numbers ticking down to the arrival of her bus.





71





Present Day





Toni





I feel so twisted up inside myself. How could I have failed to suspect her? I’d thought through the possibilities of it being a thousand people, but most of them had been strangers.

Harriet Watson had left Evie alone in the classroom that night, neglecting her for a length of time that was long enough for my daughter to be abducted. At least, that was what I’d believed, and it was what everyone else had believed, too. Most theories – and everyone was an expert – had run along similar lines.

All alone, Evie must have wandered outside, looking for me, and been whisked away into oblivion by an Eastern European trafficking gang, or a paedophile living nearby.

I haven’t emerged from the tragedy as an innocent party, not by a long shot.

I am the ‘uncaring bitch’ who arrived late to school.

I am the ‘drugged-up excuse for a mother’ who relied on sedatives to get through her crippling grief.

I am the ‘inadequate failure’ of a woman who must not be trusted or believed under any circumstances.

But it seems so obvious, now.

Since Evie had gone, Harriet Watson has attempted to contact me many times. The police warned her off at first. For a couple of weeks she was actually a suspect in Evie’s abduction. But in the end, the police were satisfied that she was merely negligent. Everyone agreed she should never have left a five-year-old child unattended in a classroom, no matter how late a parent was to collect her.

Mr Bryce, the school caretaker, gave evidence stating that when he checked the classroom doors, Rowan Class was unlocked, including the French doors leading directly out into the unsecured grounds.

To all intents and purposes, it looked like my Evie had just walked outside looking for me and was picked up by an opportunist.

The struggling school budget did not support a CCTV system and a local football match had ensured that most people living nearby were away from the surrounding homes, supporting their local team.

The local media – which quickly gravitated to national media, and then back again, when the big newspapers lost interest – condemned Harriet Watson and specifically St Saviour’s School.

But they saved their real vitriol for me. The single mother who’d been unacceptably late that day.

After the ‘Find Evie’ publicity had started to die down, surprisingly quickly, Harriet Watson began writing me letters. Crazy, rambling, handwritten letters where she would start by condemning my parenting skills, or lack of them, and then graduate, over a few pages, to offering me her friendship and her self-proclaimed counselling skills.

In one letter, she told me she had already begun to counsel Evie on the loss of her father, encouraging her to discuss her feelings in the group. This was apparently going to ‘prepare her for her future’ and ‘help her grow a thick skin for when she moved up to the local comprehensive school’.