Page 51 of Good Bad Girl

Police are still searching desperately for the six-month-old baby stolen from the Tesco supermarket in Notting Hill, West London. Eleanor Kennedy was taken from her buggy on Monday morning.

“It was terrible, really terrible. This woman just started screaming ‘Where is the baby?’

Over and over again. I rushed to help, a lot of people did. The supermarket doors were locked almost immediately, but whoever had taken the child must have already got away. I’ve got two kids of my own. I can’t imagine what that family are going through,” said one eyewitness.

The baby’s mother, Clio Kennedy, 34, from Notting Hill, spoke briefly at a police press conference yesterday. Clearly in a state of distress, her only words were: “Please bring her back. Please.”

CCTV captured the moment baby Eleanor was taken. Despite showing the kidnapper removing the child from her pushchair and leaving the supermarket, the images were not clear enough to identify the assailant.

“We’re unable to speculate on the age or sex of the kidnapper. It’s impossible to be sure from the images we have so far,” said a police spokesperson. They are appealing to members of the public who might have noticed anything suspicious that day to come forward.

Edith picks up the next newspaper article, dated one month later.

Still No News on Missing Baby Eleanor

Police say they won’t stop looking until baby Eleanor is found, despite it being a month since she was taken. The child’s parents have offered a reward of £10,000 for any information leading to them being reunited with their daughter. New images of the abducted child, who had distinctive freckles on her nose, have been released.

Edith takes out another article from the box. The stories always got shorter, the more time that passed.

Where Is Baby Eleanor?

One year on since the kidnapping of six-month-old baby Eleanor, and the police say they won’t close the case until she is found. Despite a special task force and thousands of police hours, they are no closer to uncovering the mystery of what happened to the missing child.

The last one has a picture of Clio, her husband, and their baby girl. The child has curly blond hair like her father, big green eyes like her mother, and freckles on her nose. The freckles were the reason Edith called her Ladybug. The reason she gave Patience the same name.

When you lose a child you see them everywhere forever.

Edith is even more certain than she was before, shemustspeak to the police now, this can’t wait until morning. She has an impossible choice to make, but if she can fix this maybe it will help fix what got broken all those years ago and history won’t keep repeating itself.

Patience

“You okay?” asks Liberty.

“No.”

“You will be, promise. Do you need anything else before I turn in for the night?” She switches on a torch and holds it beneath her chin like a child.

“I thought it was lights out?”

“It is. But I’ve got to take my makeup off—bad for my complexion if I don’t, innit—and I like to read a book beneath the covers for a while before I go to sleep. Helps me unwind. The guards don’t mind, so long as I’m not doing anything bad.”

I wonder what bad things a person could possibly do when locked in a cell.

I watch as Liberty ties back her curly blond hair before cleaning her skin with a face wipe.

“You have freckles on your nose, like me,” I say.

“Yes, we are freckle twins. But I like to hide mine with tinted moisturizer. You must be knackered; you should try to get somerest, the first night in here is always the hardest. Wake me up if you can’t sleep. I’m off to Bedfordshire.”

She disappears under her duvet with a novel. Invisible were it not for the dim glow of her torch, silent except for the occasional sound of a page turning. A short while later, the light goes out and the cell is pitch-black again.

I don’t understand how anyone can sleep in prison. There are constant noises, some of which I can identify while others remain a mystery. I am afraid of all of them, and I have never known terror like the one I feel now. I am scared of the dark, of things I cannot see. I think everything that has happened is finally sinking in. Liberty was a welcome distraction and I’m tempted to wake her, this place is too loud without her to drown it out. My fear seems to rush around my body just like my thoughts collide inside my mind, until I can’t think straight. Can’t seem to see a way out of this or even understand how I got here.

In the last twenty-four hours I have lost my dog, my only friend, my job, my home, and now I have lost my freedom too. It’s hard to comprehend how things went so wrong. Forty-eight hours ago I was okay. I didn’t know it at the time, but my life was actually all right. I was safe, I had a roof over my head, I could afford to eat rather than accept the charity of sharing someone else’s dinner. Maybe people don’t know they have a good life until life turns bad.

I hear another sound my ears can’t interpret. Metal against metal. A key in a lock perhaps? My eyes dart to the cell door but there is nothing there, only darkness. I close my eyes and try to sleep again but I can’t. I hide inside memories of happier times, anything to distract myself from the present. It will be my birthday soon and I wonder if I’ll still be in here.

My mum loved birthdays. She would decorate the narrow boat with paper chains and balloons, and buy far too many presents. She always gave me a gift for each year of my life, so last year there were eighteen parcels wrapped in pretty paper and tied withribbons. It must have taken her ages and so much thought went into each gift—some big, some small, all perfect. Nobody knows me like my mum. Each gift was labeled with a number, which indicated the order they were to be opened in, but with a slight twist. When I was four years old, there were four gifts but they were labeled one, two, three, and five. There was no gift number four, because Mum worried that it was bad luck.

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