Free After Anna by Alex Lake Page B

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 you dropped your keys. ’
    ‘So he just gets away with it?’
    ‘I’m afraid so. I’m sorry. I wish it were different, I really do.’ The officer folded his notebook open. ‘Just for the record,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’
    ‘Julia Crowne.’
    ‘And what brought you to the park at this time of the morning?’
    ‘I’m looking for my daughter.’
    His hand paused mid-word and he looked at her. ‘That’s your daughter? The little girl who’s missing?’
    ‘Yes,’ Julia said. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’
    He nodded. ‘There are a lot of people looking,’ he said. ‘We’ll find her, Mrs Crowne.’
    He did a good job of reassuring. Julia supposed he’d had plenty of practice. But she didn’t believe him. In between hearing that she was Mrs Crowne, mother of Anna Crowne, and his smile of professional reassurance, there was a gap. It was a fraction of a second, but it was enough for an emotion to cross his face, and it was the worst emotion a mother in her position could witness: it was pity.
    So it’s you who’s going to go through hell , his expression said. God help you.
    And then it was gone, replaced by that studied reassurance, but she’d seen it. The same thing had happened once before so she knew what she was looking for. The first time she’d been pregnant she and Brian had gone to a gynaecologist for the first scan. A nervous first-timer, she’d pressed for it as early as possible, and they’d gone at eleven weeks.
    Well , the doctor, a woman in her fifties who smelled vaguely of cigarette smoke, had said, the baby is due on February 3 rd .
    No, Julia replied , it’s mid-January. I got pregnant on April 24 th . I was ovulating then.

    Foetal development is uniform in the first twelve weeks, the doctor said , so we can tell the age from the size, give or take a few days on either side. So we can predict the due date accurately. You probably got pregnant some other day. You can get pregnant at any time in the cycle. It’s less likely, but possible.
    She was wrong. Julia knew exactly what the age of the foetus was, because it had taken over a year for her to get pregnant and she had been monitoring the dates of her ovulation and ensuring that they had sex around those dates, and then she noted it all down. On this occasion, she had left on a work trip the week after she had ovulated, so she knew precisely the day she had got pregnant.
    She explained this to the doctor, and for a second the mask slipped and she saw concern on the doctor’s face, the kind of puzzled concern that meant something was wrong, and then the professional countenance reasserted itself.
    Let’s plan for Feb 3 rd , she said, and if baby comes early, then so much the better.
    From then on, she had a bad feeling about her pregnancy. Two weeks later, she miscarried.
    And now she had the same bad feeling again.
    v.
    It was light when she pulled up outside the house. The parking space she’d left was taken by a red Toyota Matrix. Her mother-in-law, Dr Edna Crowne, eminent cardiologist (retired), St Hugh’s College, Oxford alumna, self-elected family matriarch and all round pain in the backside, was visiting.
    Edna would never admit it – possibly not even to herself – but Brian was a disappointment to her. Edna viewed herself as one of the great and good of the country, and, by extension (since England was self-evidently the greatest country on earth), of the human race. People like