A police doctor, a woman, arrived halfway through her statement and insisted on dressing Nina’s wrists. Nina sat still, not heeding the sting of antiseptic and refusing to halt the question and answer session with the police officers. Any one of these questions could be the one that helped find Naomi. Before she was finished news came in that the police had found the house she’d been held in, but there was no sign of life there. Paul’s own flat in Newport Pagnell was deserted too. Nina shuddered. Paul, by his own admission, had spent the past year tracking down paedophiles. Not only that, he now wanted Naomi to ‘help’ him – he was going to put her photo on some ghastly website… Suppose he had taken Naomi to another place he thought wouldn’t be found? This place could easily be connected to one of the ‘kiddy-fuckers’ he’d been meting out his self-justice to.
Saliva rushed back into Nina’s mouth and she swallowed it down to churn around in the tea and toast mess in her stomach. Never in all her life had she been so afraid; even breathing was painful. Suddenly she remembered something.
‘Paul spoke of a girlfriend. Melanie.’
David nodded. ‘We’ll check that too. We’ll be searching his home.’
Nina sat back. There was nothing left to tell them; nothing more that could help find Naomi. This was worse than any nightmare, a hundred times worse than the fear for her own safety was the previous day. Waves of numbness were alternating with waves of panic. This very minute her child could be tied to a kitchen chair somewhere, helpless and terrified. The mass in her stomach shifted and Nina ran for the toilets.
Sam was waiting in the corridor to hug her after she’d been sick and dear God she needed someone to hold on to. Sobbing, Nina clung to his jacket.
‘I should never have left you,’ he said into her hair. ‘Nina, I wish I’d been there for you.’
‘It wouldn’t have stopped him,’ said Nina, hearing the dreariness in her own voice. ‘Paul wants revenge and he wants money, and me coming here and involving the police stopped him getting both and it’s made him mad, Sam. Why the hell didn’t I notice sooner? I was so caught up in this bloody finding-family thing that I wasn’t thinking straight, it was all cousins together, and I wanted a cousin, I wanted a family, and shit, why didn’t I notice?’
Sam led her back to the interview room. ‘He was clever. He said all the right things.’
Nina sat down again. The police officers had gone, and there was another cup of tea waiting for her. She pushed it away. ‘Do you think he’ll let me buy her back?’
She rocked back and forward on the police station chair, and Sam rubbed her back without speaking. Nina was grateful for his silence. There was no reassurance anyone could give her right this minute.
David Mallony came back in and leaned on the table. ‘We’re going to drive around with you, see if we can find where you changed cars,’ he said. ‘Paul may have a base of some kind nearby.’
Nina, David, Sam and a policewoman drove around for over an hour before Nina admitted defeat. They found the district where she and Paul left the first car, but she couldn’t remember enough to pinpoint the correct street. They were all so alike, with their identical council terraces and scrappy front gardens. She’d been absorbed in Paul at that point; she hadn’t been watching where they were going. There was no sign of the car, either; Paul must have moved it.
‘Okay – at least we’ve got the area,’ said David eventually. ‘We’ll get a house-to-house inquiry going. Someone may have seen Paul. You should rest, Nina. You’re exhausted.’
David drove them back to John Moore’s house, where the first thing Nina did was have a boiling hot shower. Not that she cared how she looked or smelled, but all that was keeping her going now was the thought that any minute, Naomi might be found. Which meant she had to be ready to go at a moment’s notice to help her child. She emerged from the bathroom to find Sam packing her things into her case and two plastic bags.
‘You’re not staying here another minute,’ he said.
All she wanted was to leave this house forever, but – ‘What if he comes back here? What if he phones?’ she whispered.
‘He won’t, he knows the landline’s bugged. And it’s up to the police to watch the place. They’re going to seal it, anyway. Come back to my flat, Nina. Or Mum and Dad’s.’
The memory of Naomi happily preparing to paint Glen Harrison’s fence flashed into Nina’s mind and her legs turned to jelly. She fell to her knees, head bent to the floor, sobs shaking her body. Sam knelt by her side, patting her back but not attempting to stop the tears.
‘Nina, there are dozens of police officers out searching,’ he said. ‘Don’t give up, they must find her.’
Sniffing, Nina allowed him to help her to her feet. How very much she wanted to believe what he had said. But how often did you read about little girls being taken and then found later in ditches, raped, bleeding, dead. And Paul would be angry about what had happened, he’d be looking for revenge not only on his own abusers now, but also on her. On the other hand, he knew from his own experience what sexual abuse did to a child. So he wouldn’t allow the same thing to happen to Naomi, would he? He was a victim – but then weren’t paedophiles often victims first, and then lost themselves in a never-ending vicious circle, repeating the abuse they’d been subjected to?
The numbness was returning, replacing pain with blessed nothingness, though Nina knew if suffering would bring her girl back, she would take it all. She grasped the handle of her suitcase. ‘Let’s go to yours. And I should phone Beth. And Naomi’s Dad. But first I want to call David; there might be more news.’
Unlikely, in the forty-five minutes since she’d seen him last, or he’d have phoned and told them. But David was all the contact she had to Naomi at the moment, and oh, what a frail thread of contact it was.
Sam handed over his mobile, and she called David on the way to Sam’s flat.
‘Nothing yet. We’ve got dogs out in the areas you were taken to,’ he told her. ‘Mrs Harrison gave us Naomi’s nightgown for the scent. Rest up for the moment, Nina. I’ll call you back in an hour or so.’
Sam’s flat was comfortable and modern, an enormous blue L-shaped sofa dominating the living room, and crammed bookshelves round two walls. Nina sank into the sofa, dread weighing her into the cushions. Thoughts of Naomi were circling round her head in a quite unbearable spiral; but she had to bear it because, oh fuck – she had caused it. She had caused whatever was happening to her child today.
Why the hell had none of Paul’s teachers or social workers seen that he wasn’t normal? The abuse he’d suffered as a child must have unhinged him, but no one had helped him, and heaven knows how long he’d been like this. Nina shivered. She must have been affected too, how afraid she would have been, a poor little wide-eyed three-year-old who didn’t understand what was happening to her. Incredible to think she’d managed to block out something as momentous as sexual abuse. She had no memories of it – how had she been abused, and how often, and by how many people?
A lump rose in Nina’s throat. Claire had told Morag that John Moore had been ‘hitting them both around’. Had Claire known about the sexual abuse and simply not told Morag? It didn’t sound like Claire, and she and Morag were such good friends. So either Claire knew nothing or… the thought was like a sudden breeze of fresh air…
…or little Nina hadn’t been abused. Was that possible?
Fighting the weakness that was still threatening to overcome her, Nina thought about her three-year-old self. According to what she knew, she’d been a talkative, confiding child. Wouldn’t she have spoken about it to Claire, or Lily, if anything bad had happened to her? And as paedophiles normally abused either boys or girls, but not both, it was actually unlikely that both she and Paul were victims of any one group of abusers.