Lost

After two days I went home for just long enough to shower and change my clothes. I found Daj snoring at the kitchen table with her head between her arms and a Siamese cat curled up on her lap. A glass of vodka was wedged between her fingers. Her first drink every day was always a revelation, she said, the juice of angels copulating in flight. Gin was too English and whiskey too Scottish. Port made her teeth and gums go crimson. And when she vomited it looked like black currants shat out by sparrows.

Daj had become more like a Gypsy as she grew older (and drunker), reverting to type; wrapping herself in layers of the past like the layers of her petticoats. She drank to forget and to deaden the pain. She drank because her demons were thirsty.

I had to prise her fingers from the glass before I carried her to bed. The Siamese slid off her lap and settled like liquid filling a puddle. As I pulled the bedclothes over her, she opened her eyes.

“You'll find her won't you, Yanko?” she slurred. “You'll find that little girl. I know what it's like to lose someone.”

“I'll do the best I can.”

“I can see all the lost children.”

“I can't bring them back, Daj.”

“Close your eyes and you'll see her.”

“Shush now. Go to sleep.”

“They never die,” she whispered, accepting my kiss on her cheek. A month later she went into the retirement home. She has never forgiven me for abandoning her, but that's the least of my sins.

The hospital room is dark. The corridors are dark. The world outside is dark except for the streetlights, shining on parked cars that are covered in icy white fur.

Ali is asleep in a chair beside my bed. Her face is ashen with weariness and her body held stiffly. The only light is from the TV flickering in the corner.

Her eyes open.

“You should have gone home.”

She shrugs. “They have cable here.”

I glance at the TV. They're showing an old black-and-white film—Kind Hearts and Coronets with Alec Guinness. The overacting is more obvious with the sound turned down.

“I'm not obsessed, you know.”

“What do you mean, Sir?”

“I'm not trying to bring Mickey Carlyle back from the dead.”

Ali brushes hair from her eyes. “Why do you think she's alive?”

“I can't explain.”

She nods.

“You were sure about Howard once.”

“Never completely.” I wish I could explain but I know I'll sound paranoid. Sometimes I think there is only one person in the world who I know didn't kidnap Mickey—and that's me. We conducted more than 8,000 interviews and took 1,200 statements. It was one of the largest, most expensive abduction investigations in British policing history but still we couldn't find her.

Even now, periodically, I come across posters of Mickey stuck on lampposts and building sites. Nobody else seems to note her features or stare at her wistfully but I can't help it. Sometimes, in the dark hours, I even have conversations with her, which is strange because I never really talked to Claire, my own daughter, when she was Mickey's age. I had more in common with my son because we could talk about sports. What did I know about ballet and Barbie dolls?

I know more about Mickey than I did about Claire. I know she liked glitter nail polish, strawberry-flavored lip gloss and MTV. She had a treasure box with polished pebbles, painted clay beads and a hair clip that she told everyone was decorated with diamonds instead of chips of glass.

She loved to sing and dance and her favorite driving song was “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream and if you see a crocodile don't forget to scream.” I used to sing the same song to Claire at bedtime and chase her giggling around the room until she dived under the covers.

Maybe this is guilt I'm feeling. It's something I know a lot about. I have lived with it, been married to it and watched it float beneath an ice-covered pond. Guilt I'm an expert at. There are other missing children in my life.

“Are you OK?” asks Ali, reaching over to rest her hand on the bed next to me.

“Just thinking.”

She puts an extra pillow behind my back and then turns away, bending over the sink and splashing water on her face. My eyes are now graded to the darkness.

“Are you happy?”

She casts her face back to me, surprised by the question.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you like working for the DPG? Is it what you wanted to do?”

“I wanted to be a detective. Now I chauffeur people around.”

“But you're going to sit your sergeant's exam.”

“They'll never put me in charge of an investigation.”

“Did you always want to be a police officer?”

She shakes her head. “I wanted to be an athlete. I was going to be the first British-born Sikh sprinter to compete at the Olympics.”

“What happened?”

“I couldn't run fast enough.” She laughs and stretches her arms above her head until her joints crack. Then she looks at me sideways along her cheek. “You're going to keep investigating this, aren't you, despite what the Chief Super says?”

“Yes.”

A streak of lightning breaks through the gloom outside the window. The flash is too far away for me to hear the thunder.