Page 97 of Days You Were Mine

Samuel is everywhere in this room – the clean bottles on the draining board, the bouncy blue chair he is now too big for, the hand-painted fruit bowl, irregularly stamped with his tiny newborn feet. We laughed so much that day, dipping his naked feet into pots of paint, the look of haughty disgust that spread across his face when flesh met gloopy cold.

‘When did you notice he’d gone missing?’

My mother puts her hand to her forehead as if checking for fever.

‘I always put him down for his morning nap at ten thirty, and I wake him at around eleven fifteen. I never let him sleep more than forty-five minutes. But it was such a beautiful day, I thought I’d get on with some gardening. And when I went to get him up …’ her voice catches, ‘he was gone. I tried to ring you, but the receptionist wouldn’t interrupt your meeting. So then I rang Hannah.’

I look at my watch; it’s already 1.30. He could have been missing for almost three hours.

Hannah cries, ‘Luke, they could be anywhere by now. On a plane, boat, train. How will we ever find him? What are we going to do?’

‘I will find him,’ I say. ‘Trust me, Hannah. We need to be out looking for them. Did you try the café, the playground?’

‘I rang Stefano at the deli, but he hasn’t seen Alice for weeks. Sarah and all her mum friends are searching the park and the library and the high street. But it’s pointless, they won’t be anywhere obvious.’

‘We have to think why Alice would have done this. Is it vengeance? To give us a fright? Or is she actually thinking she can steal him?’

‘Do you think she’s capable of that?’ my mother asks. ‘She seemed a very reasonable sort of person to me.’

‘Dressing our baby up in weird clothes so he looked like Luke? Hardly reasonable.’

‘But not dangerous,’ my mother says. ‘That’s what we need to hang on to.’

There’s a knock at the door, short and aggressive. All three of us jump.

‘I’ll go,’ I say.

I throw open the door to find Rick, still in his painting clothes, smears of colour on his cheeks, his hands, his hair.

‘Christ, Luke, I’m sorry.’

He opens his arms and we embrace, and now, for the first time, I am able to cry, unexpected tears that run down my face. I am unselfconscious here in the arms of a man I briefly thought was my father, a man who still holds all the clues.

When we part, he says, ‘I’ve checked Alice’s flat and studio and, of course, I’ve rung her mobile countless times. I also did a whistle-stop tour of all the places that mattered to her. Soho basically. Bar Italia. Kettner’s. The French House. No one has seen her.’

We go through to the kitchen, where Rick apologises to my mother and hugs Hannah, who, like me, finds herself weeping in his arms.

‘It’s definitely Alice, isn’t it?’ she asks, and he nods.

‘I’m sure it is. She’s been increasingly unwell these last months, and since you guys fell out, she’s sort of lost it a bit. All she could talk about was Samuel and how she wanted to say goodbye to him properly. The thing is, in some strange way, Ithink she’s reliving what happened with you all those years ago. She has tipped over into fantasy.’

‘But where would she go? Do you have any idea?’

‘I think I do. It’s a gamble and I could be wrong …’

He hesitates for a second or two, and Hannah cries, ‘Tell us, Rick. Please.’

‘I think she’s gone to Southwold.’

‘Southwold!’ Hannah and I speak at the same time.

‘That’s miles away. Why on earth would she go there?’

And it’s the strangest thing, because Rick is looking at my mother and not us, and she is staring back at him with an expression I cannot read. As if they know something that we don’t.

‘Cards on the table time, I think, don’t you, Christina?’ Rick says, and my mother nods. ‘You see, Alice did this once before. Only that time the baby she stole was you.’

Then

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