After Anna. Alex Lake

Not likely.

      She kept her headlights on full beam and drove slowly, scanning the streets for any sign of her daughter.

      At the park, she switched off the engine and the lights cut out. She was glad; she’d found that the yellow pools disturbed her. They illuminated only a portion of the world and it reminded her of the futility of this search. Anna could be anywhere, but Julia, like the beams of light, could look in only one place at a time.

      She was reminded of a conversation she’d had with a friend, Prissy (short for Pricilla, a boarding school nickname used only by her intimates, and retained as the name had a certain irony: Prissy had shown herself to be anything but, a reputation sealed by an affair with a young teacher, Sarah, who lost her job over it). The conversation had taken place a year or so back, just after a teenage girl had been found in the basement of a house only a few streets away from her home in some dusty Middle-American city. She’d been there for a decade; Prissy had declared that, if her son (she had a son the same age as Anna) went missing there was no chance he could be hidden for so long so close to home, because she would search every house in the vicinity from top to bottom, whether the occupants and police liked it or not. Julia had agreed. She would do the same. It was an easy thing to say, fired by indignant parental fervour, and it carried with it an implicit criticism of the mother of the American girl. Why hadn’t she done that? A good mother would have.

      A good mother would have been there to pick up her daughter, as well.

      It wasn’t as easy as she and Prissy had imagined, however. Firstly, there were a lot of houses, and secondly, it seemed that the police and occupants had more say over who entered them than expected.

      But at least she was doing something.

      ‘Anna!’ she called. ‘Anna!’

      She did not have a torch, so she used the one on her iPhone and swept the park. The swings were empty, the slide a silhouetted dinosaur.

      ‘Anna!’ she shouted. ‘Anna!’

      ‘Who’s Anna?’ a voice said, the accent strong: ooze Annoh?

      She jumped and pointed the beam in the direction of the voice. Two teenage boys were sitting on the roundabout. What the hell were they doing out here at this time? One of them was holding a bottle. He took a swig from it and passed it to his friend, then lit a cigarette.

      She smelled the smoke: make that a joint.

      ‘My daughter,’ she said.

      ‘Is she cute?’ the boy with the joint asked.

      ‘Yes,’ Julia said, then realized her error. ‘I mean, no, not in the way you mean. She’s five.’

      ‘You’re cute,’ the boy said. ‘You’re all right, anyway. Want to suck me cock?’

      ‘What?’ Julia said. ‘No!’

      ‘Then what are you doin’ here, at this time?’ the boy said. ‘That’s why people come down here.’

      As far as Julia knew people came down here to play on the swings with their children, but apparently not. When Anna was home she doubted they would be playing here again.

      The other boy, the one who had not spoken, stood up. He was older than she’d thought, maybe nineteen, tall, and thin, and had a pock-marked face, the result of bad, untreated acne at some point in his early teens. He sniffed, then hawked and spit on the roundabout.

      They were definitely not coming down here again.

      ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come wi’ me.’ He grabbed his crotch and thrust it towards her, then nodded towards the bushes. ‘You can have some of this. You’ve been missing it, I can tell. Don’t get much off your old man, right? I’ve met some of your type before, not so old you’ve give up, still need your hole busted from time to time.’

      His voice was flat and toneless and he was staring at her, his face drawn in a slight sneer, as though he was looking at something faintly disgusting.

      He took a step towards her. It was quick, and purposeful.

      ‘Come on,’ he urged, ‘you’ll like it once we get started.’

      And then she imagined Anna, wandering into this park and encountering the pock-marked boy and his friends, or people like them.

      If that was the world her daughter was in, she didn’t stand a chance.

      Julia turned and ran towards her car. Thankfully, she’d not locked the door, so she was inside in a couple of seconds. She slammed it behind her and locked it, then fumbled in her pocket for her keys.

      They weren’t there.

      She put on the cabin light and looked around. She checked her coat pockets again, then patted her jeans. Nothing.

      There was a knock on the window. The pock-marked boy had his face pressed to the glass. He waggled his tongue from side to side in a gross imitation of oral sex.

      ‘Well, well,’ he said, his voice faint through the window. ‘Seems you might have a little problem, doesn’t it?’

       iv.

      He pulled his face back an inch from the window. There was a smear where his lips had been pressed to the glass.

      ‘Want these?’ He held up Julia’s car keys. ‘Dropped ’em, didn’t you?’

      ‘Give them to me,’ Julia said.

      ‘Open your door. They’re all yours.’

      She picked up her phone. ‘I’m calling the police.’

      The boy shrugged. ‘I’ve done nowt wrong,’ he said.

      She dialled 999, her eyes fixed on the boy’s pock-marked face. She thought he would leave now that she had the phone to her ear, but whether he did or not she wanted the police there. She was not getting out of the car on her own.

      The boy examined the keys. He held a Yale between his thumb and forefinger, the bunch dangling from it.

      ‘This your house key?’ He unwound it from the bunch. He threw the rest of the keys into a bush and put the Yale in his pocket. ‘Maybe I’ll pay you a visit.’

      ‘Hello,’ Julia said, when the operator answered. ‘Police, please.’

      The pock-marked face disappeared. She heard laughter as the boys went back through the gate into the park.

      When the police dispatcher came on the line, Julia was shaking so violently she found it hard to keep the phone to her ear.

      ‘I need help,’ she said. ‘I’m at Queen Mary’s Park.’

      One of the police officers found the house key by the roundabout, where the pock-marked boy must have discarded it. He handed it to Julia. She didn’t like to touch it. It felt contaminated.

      ‘Looks like they were just trying to scare you,’ he said. ‘A lot of them are like that. Big talkers.’

      He took out his notepad. ‘Can you describe them?’ he asked.

      Julia had a clear picture – a picture she thought she wouldn’t forget in a hurry – of a sneering, acne-scarred face at her car window. She described it to the officer.

      ‘Sounds like Bobby Myler,’ he said. ‘And sounds like the kind of stunt he’d pull.’

      ‘You know him?’ Julia asked.

      ‘He’s what we call “known to the police”’, the other officer said. ‘In other words he’s a bloody yob who’s been in trouble since he first drew breath.’

      ‘Can you arrest him then?’ Julia said.

      The officer pursed his lips. ‘What did he actually do?’ he said. ‘He was an offensive little turd, for sure, but he didn’t touch you. And