Her One Mistake(10)

“Oh.” I paused and tried to think. “I don’t know. I didn’t see.” I didn’t even notice my own children taking off their shoes or putting them back on again.

“You’d better go check,” Officer Fielding said to Shaw, who nodded and walked off briskly in that direction.

My heart was beating so hard it rang through my ears. I looked over at Audrey and the kids, then back at him. Why wasn’t he promising me she’d be found soon instead of asking me more questions? Now they were about Harriet and Brian, and he needed me to give him their phone numbers.

I fumbled through my bag and pulled my phone out, scrolling until I found Harriet’s number. There was no point in looking for Brian’s. I’d never had it, but I made a pretense of checking anyway.

I described Alice’s pink frilly skirt with its little birds embroidered around the hem that I’d seen her wear so often. It was getting shorter against her growing legs, but it was obviously one of her favorites. I told him she had a plain white T-shirt and white ankle socks and light blue shoes with Velcro straps. The shoes had tiny stars pinpricked into a pattern on the toes. I was relieved I could so accurately remember what she was wearing.

I told him Alice was roughly the same height as Molly, with blond, wavy hair that comes to just below her shoulders. She didn’t have any clips in it and wasn’t wearing a hairband. I scrolled through the photos on my phone to see if I had any of her, but I didn’t, and even though the image of Alice was as clear in my head as if she were standing right next to me, I wasn’t sure how well I’d managed to get it across.

“We need to be out there looking,” I said. “She could be anywhere by now.”

“Don’t worry, there are officers out there,” Officer Fielding said. “Where are the parents?”

“Her mum is taking a class at a hotel.” I couldn’t tell him which one. There are a number of small hotels scattered along the coast, and I’d never thought to ask Harriet.

“And Dad?”

“Fishing. He goes every Saturday morning.”

“Do you know where?”

I shook my head. Fishing was as much as I knew.

“Okay.” He beckoned to Officer Shaw, who was returning. “We need to get hold of the parents. Find anything?”

She shook her head as she reached us. “No shoes, and the woman manning it says none have been left behind.”

Officer Fielding looked at me blankly. He didn’t have to tell me what he was thinking: the mood was heavy with the sense of my incompetency. “So, very possibly she didn’t get on in the first place,” he said.

? ? ?

I JOINED AUDREY and my children while Officer Shaw tried to call Harriet. I stared at the woman’s back as she paced away from us, straining to hear if the call had connected, imagining my friend on the other end listening to the officer tell her that her daughter was missing.

“You’re shaking,” Audrey said. “Sit down. I’ll go and get you another bottle of water.”

I shook my head. “No, don’t go anywhere.” A ball of bile lodged in my throat and I desperately didn’t want Audrey leaving me.

“Alice is going to be fine. You know that, don’t you? They’re going to find her.”

“But what if they don’t?” I cried. “What if it’s the same guy who took little Mason last year? And if we don’t find her, and we don’t know what’s happened . . . Jesus!” I sobbed, feeling Audrey’s arms catch me as my legs buckled. She pulled me into a hug. “I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t live with myself if she never comes back.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t do that. She will be found. This has nothing to do with what happened to Mason. Alice just wandered off and got lost. No one’s taken her, for God’s sake. If that happened, someone here would have seen something.”

“We can’t get hold of the mum,” Officer Fielding said as he walked back. “I need to ask some more questions, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to come over to this Jungle Run with me, if that’s okay?”

While Audrey stayed with the children, I followed the officer across the field. He wanted to know more about Alice’s family—asking me again if Harriet and Brian were still together, which I confirmed they were. Did any grandparents live nearby? I told him they didn’t and the questions stopped when we reached the Jungle Run, where a couple of policemen were hovering around the back.

“There’s no gap or gate in the fence,” one said, walking to meet us. “The other side of the trees is the golf course and the parking lot to the golf club, which is pretty busy.”

“Any CCTV?”

“That’s being checked out.”

“Good.” Officer Fielding nodded, looking around. The crowds had clustered into small groups huddled by stalls, those nearby watching the commotion around the inflatable with undisguised interest. “She could have slipped off in any direction,” he murmured.

Alice wouldn’t do that, I wanted to say, but I held my breath as I waited for him to decide what to do next. She wasn’t the type of child to just slip off. But if I was right, then I couldn’t think about what that meant.





HARRIET