The Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Now?”
    â€œYou’d be surprised.” He didn’t mean to sound patronizing. “You wouldn’t believe the number of missing children we find still at home; kids hiding in the closet. Making a point.”
    They looked upstairs, Ted showing the way. They went into the loft, the cabinets, and the closets. They were methodical and quiet, so thankfully the boys slept on. They looked in the garden shed and the garbage bins. I waited in the kitchen, my hand resting on the phone. When they had finished, they looked tired.
    â€œSomeone from the force will come back later.” Sue Dunning was faintly embarrassed. “You will have to be eliminated from the inquiry. Routine measures.”
    She didn’t need to be embarrassed. They were being thorough; that meant they would find her.
    Ted asked what would happen next and she reeled off a list: file the report, contact the school and the theater, visit Nikita for a witness statement, look at Facebook, examine her laptop, and the cell phones of friends for texts, interview the teachers, go to clubs, pubs, restaurants, garages, railway stations, seaports, airports. Interpol. And, if she’s not back in twenty-­four hours, get the media involved.
    Airports? Media? Ted put his arm around me.
    â€œOne final thing. We’ll need her toothbrush,” Steve Wareham said quietly. “In case.”
    The pink toothbrush looked oddly childish in the yellow plastic mug in her bathroom. Sue Dunning slipped it into a little plastic envelope and it wasn’t Naomi’s anymore. It was DNA from a missing person. In case.
    â€œThank you for your cooperation.” Steve Wareham stood up stiffly, hand in the small of his back. The lines on his face looked deeper. I wondered what it must feel like to face parents like us, and for a fleeting moment I felt sorry for him.
    â€œWe will fully inform the day shift, which starts at seven A.M. There will be a meeting with the senior manager of the Criminal Investigation Department, not, of course, that we know there is any criminal activity involved at the present time.” He took a breath and continued: “In the meantime, it would help us if you searched for clues here in your house, in case there’s anything you might have overlooked. Go through everything that’s happened in the last few days and weeks. Anything that seemed different about your daughter. Write it down and tell us. I’ll take the laptop away with us for now.”
    He smiled at us as he picked it up, and his face became gentler. “Michael Kopje will be in contact. He’s the family liaison officer for this area. He’ll be around in a ­couple of hours.”
    A ­couple of hours. What about the next five minutes, and the five minutes after that?
    They have a picture. It’ll help.
    But it doesn’t show the way her hair shines so brightly it looks like sheets of gold.
    She has a tiny mole, just beneath her left eyebrow.
    She smells very faintly of lemons.
    She bites her nails.
    She never cries.
    Find her.

 
    Chapter 3
    DORSET, 2010
    ONE YEAR LATER
    T he faint morning bustle that washes up the lane from the village has faded. The morning sinks into a dull afternoon and, unannounced, grief settles closely around me. It will pass as long as I stand quite still. On home visits in the past, I could tell from the door if patients were sick by how still they lay. Appendicitis, a ruptured abdominal aorta, meningitis—­the muscles become rigid to shield the disaster unfolding inside. In the summer I lay motionless as the hours dissolved, watching the dust dance in glittering columns as the sunlight slid through each window in turn. I wanted to die, but I knew then as I do now that one day I might look up and she could be there, framed in the doorway. And, of course, I would never abandon the boys; besides, her dog sleeps in my kitchen.
    On cue Bertie yawns, climbs out of his basket, and wags his