Free Lullaby by Claire Seeber Page A

ready, if you’re feeling up to it, DI Silver would like you to do a TV appeal. Jog people’s memories.’
    He appeared silently in the doorway.
    ‘Who was on the phone?’ I found myself addressing the wall behind his ear.
    ‘I think it’s your sister’s husband.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Someone must have seen
your
husband, Mrs Finnegan, when he left the Tate. We’re waiting for the CCTV tapes now, but the appeal is a really good idea. They usually generate a lot of public support, especially when there are kids involved.’
    ‘Whatever you think,’ I said dully.
    ‘We need witnesses to the struggle Mr Finnegan must have had.’
    ‘The struggle with who?’
    ‘With—with whoever took Louis.’
    My chest tightened further. Scrabbling for my inhaler, I caught the warning look Deb shot Silver.
    When I’d recovered myself a bit, I asked them totake me to where Mickey had been found. ‘I want to check it for myself.’
    ‘And you’ll do the appeal?’
    ‘I’ll do anything, everything it takes.’ I looked at him steadily and he looked back.
    ‘Good lass.’
    I nearly retorted that I was hardly a lass, but instead I said, ‘I’m going to get dressed.’
    ‘Great,’ said DI Silver. ‘Then Deb’ll make you some toast, you need your energy, and then we’ll go.’
    I paused at the foot of the stairs. Leigh was still simpering down the phone.
    ‘Oh,’ I said icily, and for once I got to look down on Silver. ‘Don’t you do toast then?’ I swept up the stairs and slammed my bedroom door behind me.

CHAPTER EIGHT

    When I first had Louis and I went out without him, I used to panic. Not because I didn’t want to be alone—the truth was I did, quite badly. And not that I got to leave him very often, but whenever I did, I’d suddenly remember him with a gut-wrenching lurch. I’d scrabble around desperately, wondering where the hell I’d put him. I’d be queuing for coffee, or buying a magazine, and my heart would suddenly stop. So quickly did I get used to being tied to this other little body that being alone—much as I did yearn for it from time to time—seemed strange, alien even. And each time the sense of relief when I remembered he was safe somewhere was overwhelming.
    I waited for that wash of relief again; every time the phone rang or DI Silver’s mobile chirruped, I clenched my hands, my stomach, my heart, and I waited for Silver to punch the air and shout, ‘He’s found.’ But inside, really deep down in a place I daren’t go, I waited for the words that would finish me forever. And I tried desperately to dispel the memories of the lust for mylost freedom I’d felt quite often since Louis’s birth.
    DI Silver and Deb took me to the street where Mickey had been found last night. Just an innocuous little alley on the way to Tower Bridge, dirty and grey in the cloudy morning light. I looked nervously for bloodstains, I craned my eyes for clues—but of course there was nothing. Just a pile of dried old dog-shit on the corner, and a week-old page-three girl idly flapping her wares in the sticky summer breeze.
    And then we went back south to Lewisham, to the monstrous new police station, where Leigh awaited us. We trooped into a room where T-shirted men with TV cameras lay in wait, looking bored, and young women with expensive flicky hair and tight, anxious faces clutched microphones and notepads and checked their watches all the time. They reminded me of the squirrels that darted across our garden foraging for that last hidden nut, and I felt very alone as I waited to walk up onto the small stage, though DI Silver was with me. Before we took our seats, he gave me a reassuring wink, and for the first time I was glad that he was there.
    ‘They’re just doing their jobs, kiddo,’ he murmured, reading my mind, ‘you’ll thank them in the end,’ and then he adjusted his shirt cuffs almost imperceptibly, the smooth white fabric immaculate above his suntanned hands.
    Leigh came up with us, as