other, not wanting to look at her but knowing that I must. I slide her body gently out.
A gut-punch of disbelief, of horror and grief and confusion all mixed together.
Not Mia.
Not a body. A doll. Just a baby-sized doll dressed in a white sleepsuit, blue eyes staring up at the ceiling, tufts of synthetic blonde hair brushed neatly to the side.
I collapse back onto my heels, the relief rushing over me like an avalanche, blanketing me, a held breath bursting from my lungs. The relief is so powerful it’s almost unbearable, a high more intense than any drug. Mia is not here, which means there is still a sliver of hope. I shift the rest of the bedding to double-check she’s nowhere beneath it. No.
I go over to check Angela again. Her pulse is still there but the sheet next to her wound is soaked with blood. I pull out another clean sheet from a drawer and press it on, slide a cushion under her head.
The 999 operator is still on the line when I retrieve my phone.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I tell him. ‘Second-floor bedroom, female victim in her seventies, critically injured. Please hurry.’
I hang up and lean down close to Angela’s ear, hoping she can hear me.
‘Hold on, Angela. I’m going to find Mia.’
It’s what she would want me to do. What she would do, in my place.
I grab the shotgun and stand up. The smell of petrol is overpowering, sharp and oily and burning into my nostrils. Mia’s nursery is soaked with it, the cot, the chest of drawers, dark splashes on the carpet. One spark and this whole room would go up like a bomb, everything ablaze within seconds.
So why hadn’t it been lit?
I look into the other rooms on this floor. Spare bedrooms and a bathroom. All untouched. As far as I’ve seen, the nursery is the only room that has been turned upside down and soaked in petrol. Not methodically but fast, rage-fuelled destruction as he searched in vain for the one thing he’d come here to find. I stand in the middle of the debris, trying to make sense of it. There’s enough petrol poured in her room to turn it into an inferno, her guardians dead or injured, and no sign of Mia.
So why not light the fire to cover up the crime?
Then it hits me.
Because he wasn’t finished.
He hasn’t found her. He has to find her, to be sure the job’s done before he lights the match. Even a burned body would yield DNA, wouldn’t it? Unless it was completely incinerated, and he could never be sure of that in a house fire. Too many variables. He can’t risk leaving a body to burn. He has to be sure that no trace of her is ever found. Take the baby and burn the rest, the clothes, the sheets, the muslin cloths, the bottles of formula, anything that might hold a trace of her DNA. Extinguish all traces of her, as if she never existed.
But if he hasn’t started the fire, he hasn’t found her. I pray that I’m right. Had I disturbed him when I arrived a few minutes before? Had he fled before he could finish what he came here for?
I go across the hall into a spare bedroom. Check under the bed, behind a desk. Nothing.
The urge to shout Mia’s name is almost overwhelming, but I can’t risk it. Instead I will search every inch of this mansion if I have to.
Think.
Angela was doing what Kathryn did when she got off that train five days ago. Drawing the danger away from Mia. Away from the baby. Right from when Mia was born, Angela had been doing exactly this – consciously or otherwise. That was why the nursery was on the top floor of the house, rather than next to their own bedroom on the first floor, or next to her mother below that in the annexe. They had done what parents have always done, put the precious child in the topmost branches of the tree, to be further away from predators on the ground. In their walled estate in the middle of the countryside, as far away as possible from a predator they knew was out there. But it hasn’t been far enough.
I turn to face the stairs and drop into a kneeling position, the shotgun tight into my shoulder. Close my eyes and listen for five seconds. Ten.
There. Was that something? I stay perfectly still, my breath held,