Lost - Michael Robotham [8]
Finally, I calm down and they take me back to my room. Maggie gives me a small plastic cup of syrupy liquid and soon I’m like Alice in Wonderland shrinking into the room. The white folds of the bedclothes are an arctic wasteland.
The dream has a whiff of strawberry lip gloss and spearmint breath—a missing girl in a pink-and-orange bikini. Her name is Mickey Carlyle and she’s wedged in the rocks in my mind like a spar of driftwood, bleached white by the sun—as white as her skin and the fine hairs on her forearms. She is four feet tall, tugging at my sleeve, saying, “Why didn’t you ever find me? You promised my friend Sarah that you’d find me.”
She even says it in the same voice that Sarah used when she asked me for an ice-cream cone. “You promised me. You said I could have one if I told you what happened.”
Mickey disappeared not far from here. You might even be able to see Randolph Avenue from the window. It’s a solid, redbrick canyon of mansion blocks built as cheap Victorian housing, but now the flats cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. I could save for ten years or two hundred and never afford to buy one.
I can still picture the lift, an old-fashioned metal cage that rattled and twanged between the landings. The stairs wrapped around the lift shaft, turning back and forth as they rose. Mickey grew up playing on those stairs, holding impromptu concerts after school because the acoustics were so good. She sang with a lisp because of the gap in her front teeth.
Three years have passed since then. The world has tuned out her story because there are other crimes to titillate and horrify—dead beauty queens, the war on terror, sportsmen behaving badly … Mickey hasn’t gone away. She is still here. She is like the ghost who sits opposite me at every feast and the voice inside my head when I fall asleep. I know she’s alive. I know it deep down inside, where my guts are tied in knots. I know it but I can’t prove it.
It was the first week of the summer holidays, three years ago when she entered my life. Eighty-five steps and then darkness; she vanished. How can a child disappear in a building with only five floors and eleven flats?
We searched every one of them—every room, cupboard and crawl space. I even checked the same places over and over again, somehow expecting her to suddenly be there, despite all the other searches.
Mickey was seven years old with blond hair, blue eyes and a gap-toothed smile. She was last seen wearing a bikini, a white headband, red canvas shoes, and carrying a striped beach towel.
Police cars had blocked the street outside and the neighbors were organizing searches. Someone had set up a trestle table with jugs of ice water and bottles of cordial. The temperature reached 30°C at nine o’clock that morning and the air smelled of hot bitumen and exhaust fumes.
A fat guy in baggy green shorts was taking photographs. I didn’t recognize him at first but I knew him from somewhere. Where?
Then it came back to me, like it always does. Cottesloe Park—an Anglican boarding school in Warrington. His name was Howard Wavell, a baffling, unfortunate figure, who was three years behind me. My memory triumphs again.
I knew Mickey hadn’t left the building. I had a witness. Her name was Sarah Jordan and she was only nine years old but she knew what she knew. Sitting on the bottom stair, sipping from a can of lemonade, she brushed mousy brown hair from her eyes. Tiny crosses clung to her earlobes like pieces of silver foil.
Sarah wore a blue-and-yellow swimsuit, with white shorts, brown sandals and a baseball cap. Her legs were pale and spotted with insect bites pink from her scratching. Too young to be body conscious, she swung her knees open and closed, resting her cheek against the coolness of the banister.
“My name is Detective Inspector Ruiz,” I said, sitting next to her. “Tell me what happened again.”
She sighed and straightened her legs. “I pressed the buzzer, like I said.”
“Which buzzer?”
“Eleven. Where Mickey lives.”
“Show me which button you pressed.”
She sighed again and walked