Finally, I came to a picture that depicted the room I’d looked down in on. I squinted at the image. I could just make out the child’s hand at the side of the sofa. I scrolled through the remaining shots and there was his arm and shoulder, there the blond-haired top of his head.
There was only one photo remaining. My heart drumming, I prayed for it to show some or all of the boy’s face. It was possible. I’d kept pressing the button right up until I’d had to jump down from the wheelie bin. But, as the picture loaded, I saw it revealed only the merest edges of the boy’s hair and hand.
I slumped in my seat. It was frustrating but I had to go. My meeting with Mr McDonald was in fifteen minutes. I put my key in the ignition and started the engine.
As the motorway flew by in a blur of bleached grass verges and low, grey cloud, I let my thoughts go back to what I had seen through that window. In my head I rewound the boy’s hand reaching out for the racing car and tried to freeze-frame the millisecond advance of his forehead, nose and chin as it emerged from behind the sofa. I found myself willing him to keep going, to keep pushing the toy further than he actually had. As if, by doing so, I could fast-forward to the point at which he fully showed himself and get the photo I needed.
The faint line of the Cleveland hills appeared on the horizon and I noticed that the other side of the motorway had emptied of cars, while my lane was congesting into long, lazy lines of traffic. I pressed gently on the brake pedal and soon I was bumper to bumper with the blue BMW in front. I could see the outline of the back of a bald man in a grey suit behind the wheel. My eyes travelled down the length of his car to the boot. On reflex, I began to wonder who or what might be inside.
And then, like toppling dominos, my thoughts went back to the day Lauren went missing.
That Saturday, Lauren had been playing outside the caravan on her bike while I stood at the caravan’s tiny kitchen sink, washing tomatoes and boiling eggs for lunch. Mum and Dad were in the small living room, doing Sudoku. The meal all set, I went to call Lauren in. But she wasn’t there. I found her bike abandoned, a few feet from the steps that led down from the caravan’s front door. Tipped onto its side, the front wheel was still going, the spokes making a tick-tick-tick noise every time they brushed past the brake pad.
At first, I’d tried not to be too frantic. I’d wanted to believe it wouldn’t be long before we found her underneath one of the caravans’ crawl spaces, hiding behind the brick stacks the cabins rested on. But then, as the minutes had slipped by, a feeling had started to harden inside me, a feeling I knew to be true but that I wanted to ignore. A feeling that the moment to act had gone, that something tectonic had already shifted and changed and that there was nothing I could do to shift it back.
In the distance, on the other side of the motorway, I could see flashing lights and the backed-up traffic beyond. There had been a crash. One car was flipped onto its roof, the seam of the exhaust pipe running along its metal underbelly like the spine on an upside-down roast chicken. Behind it were four other cars, concertina-crushed into each other. The usual fire engines, ambulances and police cars littered the scene, but there were also other people in fluorescent yellow vests busy erecting a hoarding between my lane of the motorway and theirs. I wondered what they were doing, and then I realised. They were blocking the view. Martin had once told me how the emergency services had made this a policy after they discovered that a crash on one side of the motorway means an 80 per cent increase in the chance of a crash happening on the opposite side within half an hour. ‘They can’t help it,’ he’d said, ‘the drivers take their attention off the road to have a quick look and before you know it – bam!’ He’d slapped his hands in the air. ‘It’s happened all over again.’
I cruised past the last of the