Free Her by Harriet Lane Page B

out in the concrete plaza, one trailing an IV stand.
    Here the streets are a little busier, people coming home from the tube or changing buses. Pizza-delivery signs, the cold white of cyclists’ LEDs. Up the hill, a snaking impatient chain of ember-red brake lights.
    It has been several years since I’ve been out alone at this time of day, able to notice such things. These are sights I seldom see.
    The radio crackles now and again, officers checking in, nothing to report.
    ‘You’re in Carmody Street, aren’t you,’ says Lauren, consulting her notes. ‘So we could just head down there, just to make sure.’
    My face is wet with tears, and the sensation makes other tears come faster. He’s not quite three. Last week, I forgot the bananas in Sainsbury’s, so I left him in the checkout queue with the basket, I said I’d only be a minute, but he came to find me. ‘I was scared,’ he said, ‘I was scared you wouldn’t come back,’ and even as I picked him up and hugged him, I felt a rush of irritation. Just thirty seconds, is that too much to ask? I squeeze my eyes shut; and then, quickly, I open them again, because I might miss something, and I mustn’t miss anything.
    Bus stop. Railings. Postbox. All the familiar things.
    The tick of indicators as the police car pulls out, crossing the main road and taking the first right down Carmody Street. Sunil Faradosa lifts his bike through the front door, Kay Callaghan is hauling Morrison’s bags out of the boot. ‘Nothing,’ I say, as the front step of our house comes into view. ‘Can we go back to the park?’
    ‘I think we should probably go down to the station,’ Lauren says, and I close my eyes, just for a second, unable to bear the implications, assailed by an overwhelming sense of him – the softness of his skin, his hand sticky in mine, the way he smells when he is asleep, Blue Bunny tucked under his cheek – and I think I’m going to be sick. I open my window and inhale. In, out. In, out. I see John stretching up to check me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Just hold on,’ he says, switching on the siren.
    The radio crackles again, and a man’s voice says something very quickly, I can’t quite understand what, but Lauren has picked up and says, ‘Ten-four, that’s good news,’ and I can hardly accept it, not at first, it feels like the sort of luck I’m not in any way entitled to; but when she leans back towards me, the handset still held close to her mouth, I see the expression on her face.
    They keep the siren on so we get to the police station in maybe four or five minutes. But I won’t believe it. I won’t believe it when we’re pulling up in the car park, and I won’t believe it when Lauren stands back so I can run on ahead, into the bleak illumination of the reception area, where Christopher is sitting with a woman in uniform who is placing a little plastic cup of hot chocolate on the table in front of him. He glances up eagerly when I call his name, and he looks fine: exactly the same, as if nothing has happened. Behind him, the clock on the wall says it’s not quite six. He has been missing for just under an hour. Fifty minutes, maybe.
    I kneel down in front of him and wrap him in my arms, and he lets me, for a moment, and then he starts to struggle, and he says, ‘Look, hot chocolate,’ and I allow him to wriggle away from me, just for a moment, so he can take a sip, and then he looks up, distressed, It’s too hot , and Lauren laughs and says she’ll go and top it up with some milk from the fridge. So I sit down and pull him onto my knee and press my head against him while he eats another biscuit, and I can feel the detonations as he crunches through the Bourbon Cream.
    When she comes back with the cup, Lauren tells me he was found just outside the park at the top of the hill, about ten or fifteen minutes ago. He was on the street, sitting on someone’s front step, playing with their cat. Lady was on her way out, so she called the