‘Where is Bobby James now?’ All eyes fell on Vanessa as she began walking to the door. ‘I need to talk to him, I need to know exactly what happened and what he said to Alice before he let her go.’

  The police constable who had broken the news of Alfie James’s death looked at his superior.

  ‘Well, lad, where is he?’ snapped Detective Inspector Mills.

  ‘They’re taking him to the station for questioning, sir, but his dad has just been killed so he’s in shock – he ain’t saying much so far.’ The young constable was wide-eyed, and despite his thick coat and gloves, he was shivering from the cold.

  ‘I need to see him.’ Vanessa angrily wiped away the tears that were falling.

  ‘Mrs Hilton, I assure you that if he has any information, we will get it from him.’

  ‘No! I know this boy, I need to speak to him. I’ll know if he’s hiding anything. I’m coming with you to the station.’

  ‘Mrs Hilton, please, it would be much better if you were to stay here. We will update you as soon as we have any news.’ DI Mills stepped in front of her.

  ‘I want to know exactly where they found Alfie James. Are your officers looking there? She’s fallen down and hurt herself looking for that puppy, I know it. Oh God, she’s out there. He left her out there in the snow.’ Vanessa started crying again.

  ‘There are officers covering every inch of the area around where Alfie James’s body was found,’ the detective insisted.

  ‘I want you to take me there. I want to help look for her. I can’t sit here any more, I’m losing my mind.’ Vanessa pulled on her boots and grabbed her fur coat from the stand in the hallway.

  DI Mills looked over at his colleague. ‘Porter, call the station and tell them we’ve gone to the field by The Vicarage. Then track down Richard Hilton and tell him to meet us there.’ He opened the front door, and a gust of bitterly cold air blasted in.

  ‘Where is Leo?’ Vanessa looked at Dorothy, who was at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘He’s probably gone out with Richard to join the search,’ said Dorothy. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll let him know where you are if I see him.’

  ‘Oh God, Alice, please, please be there,’ said Vanessa out loud as she followed DI Mills outside towards the police car that was parked next to the lights for the party, which had taken all of her and Richard’s attention when she saw her daughter for possibly the last time in her life, running across the front of the house in her red dress. She would give anything, anything on God’s earth, to go back to that moment; to run to her daughter, grab hold of her and never let go. DI Mills opened the passenger door for her, then climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. It coughed into life, and as they headed down the driveway, Vanessa looked up and saw that, in the distance, the crimson dawn was beginning to break.

  The short journey through the winding lanes that she had done a thousand times since she had lived at Yew Tree Manor seemed to go on for ever. She sat clutching her seat as the car skidded twice on the black ice before righting itself again. As they took the blind bend that led to The Vicarage, the road narrowed and they met the headlights of another car that came hurtling towards them. Mills slammed on the brakes, screeching to a halt just before they hit the other vehicle head on. He wound down the window, waving his hands frantically and shouting ‘Move!’

  As Vanessa glanced over at the detective, she felt her heart shatter. She had tried to ignore it, but it was obvious as the hours passed that DI Mills’s concern was growing. The questions that had revolved around Alice being naughty and running away had stopped, replaced by the quest for another explanation. A much more disturbing one. She had wanted him to take Alice’s disappearance more seriously, but now that he had, his concern was terrifying her: asking for Alice’s nightie so the sniffer dogs could try and track her down; officers going door to door, waking the villagers from their sleep to check their sheds, bashing at the snow-covered hedgerow with their canes. It was suddenly agonisingly obvious to her that they had stopped looking for a missing little girl and were now looking for a body.

  Mills swore under his breath as the oncoming vehicle backed up into a gateway opening on Vanessa’s side, plunged into the dawn shadows as it waited. It was almost impossible to identify the driver, but as they passed, Vanessa realised it was a vehicle she knew. The flickering headlight and the canvas roof that leaked whenever it rained identified it as Richard’s Land Rover that had been hurtling at speed away from The Vicarage.

  Mills stopped, and Vanessa wound down her window. ‘Any news?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Richard called back.

  As Mills ploughed on, Vanessa glanced into the cab of the Land Rover. It was only a second, but the sight of two figures sitting there staring straight ahead made her stomach turn over. Leo was in the passenger seat, and next to him her husband. Leo didn’t look up, his head was hung; it was obvious to her that he’d been crying.

  In a split second, they were gone.

  Vanessa bit her lip hard, her fingers white from gripping the seat. She couldn’t bring herself to think about how cold she was, a grown woman inside a car, wrapped in a fox-fur coat. Alice had been out in the bitter cold all night, in a red dress and shiny red shoes. If she had fallen into a ditch, there was no way she could have survived in these temperatures, but if she was trapped somewhere inside, there could be hope – if they found her soon. Maybe she had made it as far as The Vicarage and had gone into the barns to look for the puppy and fallen. ‘Please be there, Alice, please be there, please be there,’ Vanessa chanted under her breath in an effort to try and stop herself from losing her mind.

  As they turned the corner into a narrow lane caked in snow, DI Mills slammed on the brakes again. ‘There are fresh tyre tracks,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Someone’s just driven up here. They could have taken Bobby James in already.’ He climbed out and trudged over the uneven ground towards the gate ahead. As he wrestled with the bolt, bursts of his frozen breath punched out with the strain of trying to open it.

  Vanessa couldn’t help but picture her little girl struggling with the gate in the snow, her small hands shaking with the cold, desperate to find the puppy; abandoning the bolt, perhaps, climbing over and running the rest of the way. She shook the image away from her mind’s eye as the detective finally got the gate open and rushed back to the car. He put the vehicle into gear, and its snow-covered wheels skidded into life again.

  ‘I can see blue lights by the house. That might be them bringing Bobby James in now,’ he said, pointing to where the red dawn met blue police lights ahead of them.

  Vanessa’s eyes fizzed from exhaustion as the car rocked like a boat over the uneven ground. She looked around frantically for any sign of her little girl’s footprints in the snow. Mills pressed the accelerator, and the hedgerow cleared as The Vicarage came into view around the bend ahead.

  She hadn’t visited it for years, and as she looked at it now, she saw that it was much deteriorated. It was a beautiful house, warm, with exposed oak beams, carved wall panelling, pretty tiled fireplaces and flagstone floors. But in the past six years, it had lost its sparkle and stumbled into neglect as Alfie struggled to run the farm and look after the children. Now the honeysuckle around the door was straggly and untended, the paintwork was chipped and peeling, and the path was covered in months’ worth of mud and leaves.

  Her eyes followed the tracks in the snow to the far side of the cottage, and the field beyond, where lights were pulsing out into the morning. She held her breath as the figure of a young lad appeared through the mist-filled dawn, dressed in a long black coat and woollen hat. His head and shoulders were hunched, his arms locked behind him, and he was flanked by two large police officers who half walked, half dragged him across the snow to the waiting police car. The sight of him knocked the air from her lungs, and as he walked past the car’s headlights, she could see he was shaking violently. At that moment, he looked up and saw her, his face as white as a corpse, his eyes unblinking.

  Bright blue eyes, Vanessa thought to herself as her belly burned with rage. Eyes that had been the last to see her little girl.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Vanessa

  Friday, 22 December 2017

  Vanessa lay on her bed watching the snow come down outside her bedroom window. She could hear the sniffer dogs barking and the police whistles piercing the woods where they had been searching for Sienna since dawn.

  She looked over at her alarm clock, which told her it was two in the afternoon. It would be getting dark soon; another day was slipping away and they hadn’t found Sienna. The house had been packed with people for two days – first the removal men and then the police – but now it was still and deathly quiet. She knew that Helen and Leo had gone out, but she couldn’t remember where, or when they were coming back.

  Watching the snow falling was making her sleepy, but when she closed her eyes, all she could see was Alice and Sienna holding hands, side by side, calling her name. She had hardly slept; she needed to doze just for an hour, and then she would go out and join the search before it got dark.

  Her eyes were heavy. She had gone upstairs on the pretext of lying down, but her main motive had been to get away from the family liaison officer who had been assigned to her. She was a blonde woman with very straight white teeth and a scraped-back shiny ponytail. She kept going over and over the minutes before Sienna went missing, none of which Vanessa could remember clearly. When she had finally given up, she had started asking questions about the family. Was Sienna a happy child? Did Leo and Helen ever argue? Would Sienna be scared to come home for any reason? She had made endless tea and smiled warmly, but it was a smile that reminded Vanessa of the crocodile in Peter Pan.

  The days and nights when Alice had gone missing were a blur, but the behaviour of the police had stayed with her to this day. As she’d paced the house, inconsolable about her missing daughter, the female police officer assigned to them had comforted her, held her hand, built up her trust and convinced her that she was her friend. The police had spent a great deal of time telling her and Richard that they were working with them, that they would update them immediately on any developments and on how the search was going. They were charming and comforting and warm, and they slowly cajoled her into talking, sharing, confiding.

  But it had dawned on her as the hours and days dragged on without success that she was the one doing all the talking, the over-sharing, the confiding, and the police were telling them nothing; less than the press, in fact, who would often know about any developments before they did. They would read in the newspaper, or see on the news, that an item of clothing had been found, or there had been a potential sighting of Alice somewhere, and Vanessa would break down and shriek and cry about the fact that they were the last to be told anything.

  Now, laying down in her bedroom, she heard the family liaison officer talking quietly on the telephone at the bottom of the stairs. ‘She’s asleep, she’s exhausted . . . No, nothing really, she’s very closed off, won’t talk about either of the parents. Any developments with Bobby James? . . . Have forensics gone over his flat and his car yet? . . . Shit. Maybe he’s hiding her somewhere else.’

  Bobby James’s face as a thirteen-year-old boy jumped to the forefront of her mind, he was unrecognisable to her – apart from his bright blue eyes, which were as piercing now as they were then. She remembered that he had been here, in Leo’s study, just before Sienna went missing. What had he wanted? She hadn’t seen him for nearly fifty years, not since she had been taken down to the police station to watch through a one-way mirror as he was questioned. She had begged repeatedly to see Bobby, accused them of keeping information from her, but they had refused to let her speak to him. Eventually, when she had completely broken down and threatened to stop cooperating with them altogether if they didn’t give her the opportunity to talk to him, they had agreed to let her listen in on his interview for five minutes, after warning her that it could be very distressing.

  She had sat in the hot, stuffy observation room with six police officers, all crowded round peering in at the detective inspector chosen to interrogate him. The table and chair in the middle of the interview room were empty, and Bobby, still in the clothes he’d been wearing when she saw him last, was pressed up in a corner by the detective. He looked awful, his eyes bloodshot and bruised, his lip swollen and covered in blood, and he appeared to have a cut on his head too.

  ‘You need to tell us what happened to Alice, Bobby. This is a very serious situation and you’re not being honest with us.’ The man had stood so close that Bobby had to turn his head away.

  ‘I’ve told you, I don’t know! Please can I sit down, sir? I’ve been standing for hours,’ he pleaded, his face so dirty that Vanessa could see the tracks of his tears.

  ‘You can sit down when you tell us where Alice is.’ The man pushed his face right up to Bobby’s. The detective had slicked-back black hair and a tattoo on the side of his neck, partially hidden by his shirt collar. He was holding up a picture of Alice that Vanessa had given the police. ‘Look at her, look at this little girl. What have you done to her?’

  ‘Nothing, sir, I wouldn’t hurt Alice. Please let me sit down, my legs are going to give way.’

  ‘No.’ The detective slapped Bobby around the head, hard, and Bobby yelped in pain and started to cry. ‘We know you were the last person to see her, so you’d better tell us the truth. Where did you take her?’

  ‘I didn’t take her anywhere, she ran off to get help,’ cried Bobby.

  ‘Which way, boy? Which way did she run?’ He shouted in Bobby’s face, bits of spit escaping from his mouth.

  ‘I don’t know! I’m sorry, I was trying to help my dad.’ Bobby sobbed, before the man slapped him again.

  ‘We need you to focus, Bobby. You were seen with Alice; what were you doing with her? Do you like playing with little girls, Bobby?’ The man leaned in even further.

  Tears streaked down Bobby’s chin and dripped onto the ground. ‘She was upset, her head was bleeding. I gave her my handkerchief.’ His voice began to shake and he started to cry again. ‘That was when I saw my dad trapped under the digger. I told her to run and get help.’

  ‘Why are you crying, Bobby? Are you ashamed of what you’ve done? Was Alice crying when she died? Was that what you wanted? To see her suffer?’ The detective glared at him.

  ‘No! I went to help my dad. I didn’t hurt Alice. She ran away, I didn’t see her again. Why do you think I did something to her?’

  ‘Because there was a handkerchief in the snow with your initials on it, covered in her blood. And your hands were covered in her blood when we found you. You’re known to us, Bobby James. This isn’t the first time you’ve been in trouble. You have clearly got a problem with the Hilton family; you set fire to their barn.’

  ‘No, that wasn’t me, it was Leo. Mr Hilton told me to say it was me, but it wasn’t.’

  ‘So you lied to the police? That’s a very serious crime, Bobby. Are you lying to us now too, Bobby? What did you do to Alice? Why was there so much blood?’

  ‘Her head was bleeding before I got to her, she was upset. I put my handkerchief on her head to soak up the blood. Then I saw my dad. Oh God, Dad. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What are you sorry about? Did you hurt her head? Did you hit her, Bobby? How did she hurt her head? Did you kill her and put her somewhere?’

  ‘No! No, I told you I would never do anything to hurt Alice. Please let me sit down.’

  The officer slapped Bobby hard again, then held up the photograph. ‘Look at her face, Bobby, look at it. We know there was a legal dispute going on between your dad and Alice’s father; we know everything.’

  ‘I didn’t hurt her. Please let me go. I’m sorry I didn’t take her home, but I had to help my dad. He was trapped. I didn’t hurt her, I promise you. Please.’

  Vanessa woke with a start as the front door slammed so hard the house shook. She heard Helen’s voice on the landing; she sounded different, hysterical.

  ‘It’s starting to get dark, I can’t do this for another night. She’s dead, I know she’s dead. I’m never going to see her again.’

  ‘Helen, that’s not true, we will find her.’ Vanessa heard Leo’s voice, coming up the stairs.

  ‘How? How will we find her? She could be anywhere! I can’t bear this. Where is she?!’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ Vanessa heard the liaison officer say.

  ‘Just give us a moment,’ said Leo, trying to keep the anger out of his voice.

  ‘Leo, help me. I don’t know what to do. I can’t stand it, I’m losing my mind.’ It sounded as though Helen was pacing up and down outside Vanessa’s room.

  ‘Helen, don’t do this, please. If you fall apart, it won’t help Sienna. She needs us,’ Leo begged.

  Vanessa pushed herself up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She stood up slowly, shaking away the sleep, then walked to the closed door and stood by it, listening to Leo and Helen’s conversation.

  ‘It’s just like Alice all over again. We’ll never find her and we’ll be stuck here and never able to leave. We’ll rot in this godforsaken house waiting for her to come home, going mad, just like your mother. I’m being punished. We’re both being punished. For what we did.’

  ‘Helen! Keep your voice down, someone will hear us,’ Leo hissed.

  ‘So what? Why does it matter? Nothing matters now. Sienna’s gone,’ Helen cried. ‘She’s dead, I know it.’

  ‘She’s not dead! We will find her, I promise.’

  ‘No, we won’t. Don’t touch me! Leave me alone!’ she screamed. ‘I hate this house. I hate this house!’

  Vanessa heard a crash outside on the landing and opened the door. A silver-framed photograph of Alice had smashed into splinters where Helen had thrown it against the wall.

  ‘I don’t care about anything any more,’ said Helen, glaring at Vanessa then back at Leo. ‘The worst has happened, I’ve lost my baby. I don’t care what you do or say to me; you can’t bully me any more.’ She collapsed on the floor, shards of glass from the portrait cutting her hands, and as Leo tried to pull her away, she screamed like a vixen caught in a trap and clawed at his face, the blood from her cuts leaving trails on his skin.