After Anna. Alex Lake

pinched her chin with her thumb and forefinger.

      ‘And the other parents who were here to pick up their kids?’

      ‘We’ve started talking to them. We’ll get to most of them tonight, the ones that agree to it. Most will.’

      The other officer spoke. ‘We’ve started knocking on doors. Asking homeowners if they have any information. We’re rounding up as many bodies as we can to start searching. And we’ll get a general appeal on local radio.’

      They’ve done this before, Julia thought. Oh God, they’ve done this before. This really happens. And it’s happening to me.

      ‘Can I come?’ she asked, suddenly. ‘Can I come with you?’

      ‘To knock on doors?’ the officer said.

      ‘Yes. I’ll know if Anna’s there. I’ll just know. And if I call out her name then she’ll answer.’

      The officer shifted his weight from foot to foot. He glanced at DI Wynne.

      ‘I think it will be better if we leave PCs Joyce and Bell to deal with that,’ Wynne said. ‘It might help things to go smoothly.’

      ‘Why?’ Julia said. ‘I can help.’

      ‘Mrs Crowne, it’s better if you stay here. In case Anna does show up. She could be quite distressed.’

      ‘I’d like to go.’

      ‘I think it’s better if you don’t.’

      Why was this woman obstructing her? Julia thought. Why would she not let her look for Anna?

      ‘I’m her mum!’ she said, all of the emotion of the last few hours finding an outlet in righteous anger. ‘I have a right to go! If I want to go, I can! What if she’s in one of those houses? She needs me to be there!’

      ‘Mrs Crowne, we don’t think that she is in one of the houses. We’re just asking for information.’

      ‘But what if she is? You need to search them! All of them!’

      ‘We can’t just barge into someone’s house without a warrant.’

      ‘Why the hell not? If my daughter might be there, why the hell not?’

      ‘I fully understand your frustration, Mrs Crowne, but we are not allowed to enter a member of the public’s house without a warrant to do so. It’s not something we have any control over. It’s the law.’

      ‘Fuck the law! If you won’t do it, I will!’ Julia stood up, her knee banging on the underside of the table. Her china coffee cup rattled on its saucer, bitter liquid spilling over the desk. She marched to the door, pushing between the two police officers, and turned down the corridor. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but she was going to do something; she couldn’t just sit here and wait, not while Anna was out there. Doing that was accepting her powerlessness, and she wasn’t able to do that, not by a long chalk.

      Behind her she heard DI Wynne’s footsteps on the tile floor.

      ‘Mrs Crowne!’ Wynne called. ‘Mrs Crowne! Where are you going?’

      ‘Out!’ Julia shouted. ‘I’m going out!’

      ‘Mrs Crowne, it’s not a good idea to do anything rash. We need the goodwill of people in the vicinity.’

      Julia knew that the police officer was correct, but she didn’t care. She was beyond reason, in the grip of something animal and irresistible. It was the same thing that drove a mother to protect her young in the wild; that drove an eland to defend her calf from a lion, or an elk to fight a wolf to save hers, even when this came at the cost of the mothers’ own lives.

      When she was a few feet from the front door, it swung open. Brian stepped inside. He was pale and his eyes were red. It was clear that he had not found Anna. He looked at Julia, and then transferred his gaze to the police officer.

      ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, and looked back at his wife. ‘Why’s she shouting at you?’

      ‘She’s trying to stop me looking for Anna,’ Julia said. ‘I want to go and look for Anna. I want to knock on people’s doors and ask them if they’ve seen her. Look them in the face. She could be in one of these houses.’

      ‘Then go,’ Brian said. ‘I’ll come with you.’

      ‘Mr and Mrs Crowne,’ DI Wynne said. ‘Could we talk for a minute, before you go?’

      Julia turned round. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘A minute.’

      ‘In the office?’

      Julia shook her head. ‘Here.’

      ‘We have police officers going door to door,’ Wynne said. ‘They have experience in the right questions to ask, and if anyone has seen anything concerning your daughter then they will find it out and follow that lead wherever it takes them. At this stage we need to be systematic in our search for Anna.’

      ‘What if one of them has her?’ Julia said. ‘How will they know that?’

      ‘It’s unlikely.’ Wynne shifted uncomfortably. ‘I have to be honest with you. At this stage there are two main possibilities for your daughter’s whereabouts. Either she wandered off on her own – in which case she can’t have gone far and someone will almost certainly have seen her – and is now hiding in some place we haven’t found or … ’, she paused and looked away for a second, before looking back at Julia and Brian, ‘or someone took her.’

      ‘Took her where?’ Brian asked, his voice hoarse.

      ‘We don’t know yet, Mr Crowne,’ Wynne said. ‘But for now, we have to focus our efforts on the immediate vicinity, in case Anna is out there, cold and frightened and hurt, and that means that we have to be as methodical as possible to ensure that we miss nothing.’

      ‘She’s out there,’ Brian said. ‘I know she is. I can’t believe anything else.’

      ‘And we will have officers searching all night for any sign of her. Clothing, footprints, her belongings.’

      ‘I want to be part of it,’ Brian said. ‘I’ll help. We have friends who’ll help as well.’

      ‘Excellent,’ Wynne said. ‘We’ll set up a base in the community centre. Call around and get as many people as you can.’

      Brian’s hands were clenching and unclenching on his thighs, bunching his chinos up and exposing his paisley socks. Anna had bought them – or chosen them, at any rate – for him last Christmas, Julia recalled, along with a pair of Homer Simpson socks. Brian had worn one of each, Homer on the left foot, paisley on the right. He had told Anna he loved them both so much he couldn’t choose between them. Anna had made sure that he kept them on all day.

      The memory of her daughter checking that her dad was wearing the mismatched socks she’d bought him overwhelmed Julia. Her hands started to shake and then she started to cry. She had not cried like that – uncontrollably, her chest heaving – since she was seventeen and she had been dumped by Vincent, the first love of her life. She had believed, as teenagers will, that he was the one, the only one, and when he had told her it was over – it’s not you, he’d meant to say, it’s me, except the prepared lines had come out wrong and he’d actually said, in a moment of unwitting honesty, it’s not me, it’s you – she had cried for days. It had felt like the end of the world, like nothing would ever be the same again. After a while, though, it had passed, and she’d seen that maybe life would go on without Vincent.

      And now, for the first time since she was seventeen, she had that feeling again, only this time she was thirty-eight, and old enough to know that it was for real, and that it would not pass.

      She pushed her chair back, suddenly weary beyond belief. ‘Come on,’ she said, looking at her husband’s