Gemma stooped to gather the mail scattered on the tile floor. There was nothing more personal than a few advertising circulars and credit card solicitations – one still addressed to Dr. Antony Novak – and a couple of bills. The postmarks bore Thursday’s and Friday’s dates, so Gemma assumed the mail represented both Friday’s and Saturday’s deliveries.
On a narrow table against the wall, more mail was neatly stacked, but when Gemma examined it she found only envelopes marked “Resident” and a few pizza delivery menus.
An umbrella stand in the corner contained a large black umbrella and a cricket bat, while a few pegs mounted on the wall held a woman’s fleecy jacket and a smaller Gap anorak in dark green. Harriet’s, Gemma thought, her heart contracting. Kit had one that was identical.
Doug moved forward, opening doors, peering into empty rooms, and Gemma followed. The house was long and narrow, with the same beautiful proportions and detailing as the neighbors’ next door, but here no effort had been made to highlight the period features. A sitting room faced the front of the house, then came a dining room, then the kitchen – all neat enough, but none showing any evidence of visual or sensual flair. The furniture was of good quality, and a few pleasant prints were hung haphazardly on the magnolia walls, but Gemma saw little that reflected a personal life. The house obviously belonged to a woman whose interest lay in other things. For the first time, Gemma wondered about Laura Novak’s background. There were no family photos, not even of Harriet.
“No sign of a struggle or of a hurried exit,” she said as they reached the kitchen. Nor was there any obvious sign that a child inhabited the house. The refrigerator, unlike her own, held no school reports or drawings, and there was no sign of a calendar marked with family schedules. “Look, Doug,” Gemma added, frowning, as she drew closer to the sink. “This is odd, don’t you think? For a woman this tidy, she’s not done the washing up.”
Two plates, two glasses, and a saucepan had been stacked and hastily rinsed. The pot still bore traces of what looked like marinara sauce, and there was a very faint smell of spoiled food.
“Maybe she meant to come back and finish up?” suggested Doug. “That’s what you do, when you’re in a hurry. Or at least that’s what I do.”
Was this Thursday evening’s supper? wondered Gemma. Mrs. Bletchley said Harriet had already eaten when she arrived. Had Laura meant to come straight back after she’d dropped Harriet at the sitter’s? And if so, what had prevented her?
“Let’s have a look upstairs,” she suggested, and let Doug lead the way back to the stairs in the entrance hall. The first floor contained two bedrooms and a bath, the front-facing room obviously Laura’s. It was more feminine than Gemma had expected, papered in pale blue and cream, with cream curtains at the window and a cream quilt on the double bed. The bed was made, but a blouse and trousers had been left tossed across a chair. Beneath the chair lay a pair of shoes, one turned over on its side. There was no sign of packing, or indication that anything had been removed from the room or the wardrobe.
A white-painted dressing table held a few cosmetics and a hairbrush, and in a silver frame, a black-and-white photo of a toddler with curly dark hair. Harriet, wondered Gemma, or Laura herself?
Lifting the brush with a gloved hand, Gemma saw hair nestled in the bristles. “Doug-”
“I’ve got it,” he said, opening the evidence collection bag he’d brought with him and taking the brush from her.
Gemma thought of all the times she and her sister had sat at their mother’s dressing table, using her hairbrush and trying out her lipsticks. “We can’t be sure that some of the hair doesn’t belong to Harriet,” she said.
Using a pair of tweezers, Doug carefully transferred the dark, curling strands into the bag. “It should be a close enough match, regardless.”
Leaving him to it, Gemma glanced briefly into the bathroom. Towels hung on the warmer, bottles of shampoo and bubble bath crowded the tub’s edge, and on the basin, a ceramic cup held two toothbrushes.
She carried on into the back bedroom, undoubtedly Harriet’s. The hastily made bed sported a navy coverlet with gold stars. Under the window, brightly colored plastic crates held a jumble of books and school projects, and above the desk, a corkboard was jammed with drawings and photos of pop singers and movie stars, cut from glossy magazines.
Next to the desk stood a wardrobe, one of its doors half open, spilling out a jumper and a pair of frayed-bottomed jeans. Opening the doors all the way, Gemma checked the built-in drawers and found them stuffed to bursting with T-shirts and panties and mismatched socks – all expected, and all heartbreakingly ordinary.
Hearing a step behind her, Gemma turned as Doug came into the room. “I’ve had a look upstairs,” he told her. “There’s a box room and an office. The boffins will have to have a go at the computer, but I found this under the desk blotter.” He handed her a piece of scratch paper. In blue ink, in a neat, firm hand, was a list of women’s names.
Mary Talbot. Amy Lloyd. Tanika Makuba. Clover Howes. Ciara Donnelly. Debbie Rufey.
The first three and the last had been checked off; the fourth and fifth bore tiny penciled question marks.
“It could be anything,” said Gemma. “An invitation list for a birthday party, or a school outing. A professional group…” She took out her notebook and copied down the names, then glanced up at Doug. “But it was under the blotter?”
“Just a corner showing. There was nothing else obviously interesting on the desk itself, just the usual bills and household paperwork, and stacks of literature from different causes, mostly neighborhood things – meals for the homeless at St. John’s Waterloo, the food bank, family violence outreach. Oh, and the file drawer containing personal documents was standing half open. Seems to support Novak’s story about the passport.”
Gemma’s phone rang. Even from her pocket the sound was unexpectedly loud in the quiet house. Her first guilty thought was of the boys, needing her at home, but a look at the ID told her it was Kincaid.
When she answered, he said without preamble, “I’ve just had a call from Konnie Mueller.”
Gemma felt her doubts dissolve, leaving a hard and implacable certainty, and a spasm of grief for a woman she would never meet. “It’s not Chloe Yarwood, is it?”
“How did you know?”
She thought of the dirty dishes in the sink, the kicked-off shoes, the unopened mail, all the small telling details of a life interrupted. “Because Laura Novak didn’t run off with her daughter,” she said. “Because when Laura Novak walked out of this house on Thursday night, she had every intention of coming back.”
“We need to talk,” said the message from Kincaid as Gemma checked her voice mail an hour later. “Ring me and we’ll meet somewhere… How about the Anchor, Bankside.”
Gemma stood by her car in Ufford Street, having just come away from an exhausting visit with Winnie and Fanny Liu. When she’d told Fanny that Elaine Holland’s DNA did not match that of the victim of the warehouse fire, Fanny had pressed a hand to her mouth, stifling a sob of relief.
But Fanny’s relief soon turned to dismay when Gemma explained, as gently as she could, that they thought Elaine might have abducted ten-year-old Harriet Novak. She told of Elaine’s masquerading as the mysterious “Beth,” of her affair with Tony, of her agreeing to help him kidnap his daughter, then of her disappearance with Harriet on Friday morning.
As Gemma spoke, Fanny seemed to retreat further and further into herself, mutely shaking her head and clutching at the shawl in her lap. “No,” she whispered when Gemma stopped. “No. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe any of it. She was… we were… I thought we were… happy.”