brightness of the afternoon, the room is in semi-darkness. Curtains half-closed and blinds pulled down against the cold autumn sun. She points to a corner of the room and I realise there is a man there in the shadows, slumped in an armchair. He is around her age or perhaps a little older, with a thick white moustache, his head bald except for a neat semi-circle of white hair at the back and sides. There is a large book open across his lap. A photo album.
‘My husband,’ she says quietly. ‘Gerald.’
He nods vaguely in my direction but doesn’t say anything.
She gestures to a long leather sofa and I sit down. She remains standing in the middle of the room, squinting against a single shaft of sunlight slanting in through a gap in the curtains, motes of dust suspended in the air.
‘I’m Angela, by the way. I’ve got some coffee on; would you like a cup?’
‘Thank you.’
She disappears back into the hallway, her footsteps silent on the thick carpet. Distant kitchen sounds reach me from a long way away. Apart from that the house is utterly still, as if it has been frozen in time like an old photograph. I glance at her husband in the corner again, but he is simply staring at the book in his lap and seems to have forgotten I’m here. Family portraits line the mantelpiece showing him and his wife with two young women. I recognise Kathryn. She’s pretty – very – but the woman in the picture next to her is on another level, like a Hollywood film star. Long dark hair, flawless skin, laughing brown eyes.
There is no sign of Mia anywhere. None of the usual debris of small children that Tara battles on a daily basis, no brightly-coloured plastic, no toys, no high chair pushed into a corner.
Dominic Church said she would be here.
Dominic Church is a liar.
I’m suddenly overcome by a cold wash of fear, a terrible sense that I’m about to discover something unbearable.
This is a house in mourning, a family shell-shocked with grief. And Mia is not here.
Angela returns and hands me a steaming cup of coffee in a white china cup. She sits straight-backed in the armchair opposite me, hands on her knees, blinking rapidly as if she’s fighting hard to hold it all together.
‘So, Mrs Devlin,’ she says quietly. ‘You met Kathryn. Tell me what happened.’
I gather myself and describe the events of Tuesday afternoon as briefly as I can, from the moment Kathryn sat down opposite me on the train to my arrival at the police station several hours later, barefoot and desperate, with Mia in my arms. When I’m finished, Angela’s face is creased in concern and she is wiping away tears with a balled-up tissue she has pulled from the sleeve of her cardigan.
‘How was Kathryn?’ she says. ‘When you spoke to her, how did she seem?’
‘She was scared,’ I say. It might not be what Angela wants to hear but she deserves the truth. ‘Scared for Mia, and for herself. But she was determined, too. She knew what she was doing.’
‘She rang me,’ she says. ‘As she was getting off the train, she called me and said Mia was safe, she was with someone safe. So that was you.’
I nod, holding her gaze. ‘Yes.’
‘She wouldn’t say who it was, she said ‘people’ might be listening in. Asked me to drive over and pick her up, take her to Marylebone by car. But when I got to the station she was gone. Vanished. No sign of her at all.’
‘Angela,’ I say as gently as I can. ‘Where’s Mia now?’
She seems not to hear me.
‘I should have listened to her,’ she says, more to herself than to me. ‘Should have talked to her, believed her.’
A drumbeat of fear in my head. ‘Isn’t Mia here with you?’ I ask again.
‘I still can’t believe she’s gone,’ she says softly. ‘My baby.’
My heart is suddenly in free fall; all the blood draining from my chest. I have to grip the coffee cup tightly to make sure I don’t drop it. Mia is not here. Images flicker in front of my eyes. A curl of white blonde hair. Tiny white fingernails. A little bubble of milk on rosebud lips.
The breath is stuck in my throat.
‘Who’s gone, Angela?’
She closes her eyes on fresh tears that roll down her cheeks unchecked.
‘You must have been one of the last people to see her alive. My little girl. My beautiful Kathryn.’
53
I blink, trying