Page 73 of Stolen

chapter 32

alex

The phone buzzes again.

A text. The identity of the sender is withheld.

‘It’s a video,’ I say, showing Pitt. ‘There’s no message. Should I open it?’

He takes the phone from me. ‘We’ll be back in a few minutes.’

I get up and pace the sitting room, too agitated to sit down. I understand why they’ve taken the phone but, whatever the video shows, it can’t possibly be worse than what I’m imagining.

‘There are some things no mother should see,’ Gina says, quietly. ‘I know you think you’ve prepared yourself, Alex, but you can’t. No one can. If they think you need to see whatever Radomir has sent you, they’ll show it to you.’

It seems to take a lifetime, but Pitt returns in less than ten minutes. ‘We’ve hooked up the phone to a larger screen,’ he says. ‘We’d like you to come and view the video.’

‘What is it? Is it Lottie?’

‘We’re not sure,’ he says. ‘But it’s not bad news. Whoever it is, they’re alive.’

Please, God, let it be Lottie. Please, God, let us find her.

We go downstairs to a room that seems to be used forsecurity monitoring, judging by the array of screens along one wall. A video is paused on one of them. It’s hard to make out what it shows: it’s been shot at night, and the picture is grainy and grey.

‘It doesn’t last long,’ Pitt says. ‘Maybe twenty seconds. We’ll play it in real time, and then we can slow it down and take it frame by frame.’

Pitt’s colleague plays the clip. A man carries a young child from a terraced house to a nearby parked car, the pair partially illuminated by a streetlamp a couple of metres away. A second figure, a woman, is a few paces ahead of them. The footage has been shot covertly: the angle is odd, framed by the edge of a brick wall, and the video ends abruptly, with the camera swinging wildly towards the ground.

‘Play it again,’ I say.

I step closer to the screen, focusing intently on the child. She – or he – is wearing a woolly cap, so it’s impossible to see the colour of the hair, and their face is buried in the man’s shoulder. The child looks to be about three or four, but the footage is such poor quality I can’t be sure.

‘Again.’

Pitt’s colleague taps a few keys. I strain my eyes trying to see something that isn’t there, but I still can’t tell if it’s my daughter. I don’t recognise the man or woman, either. Both are wearing baseball caps and androgynous jeans and trainers, and they have their backs to the camera. They could be anyone. There are no street or traffic signs visible; the number plate of the vehicle is obscured by the angle from which the video’s been shot. We can’t tell what country this is or if the car is left- or right-hand drive. This could have been taken anywhere.

‘Wait,’ Pitt says, as the camera swings towards the ground for the third time. ‘There. Go back.’

This time, I see it, too. As the footage tilts wildly, for a brief moment a bus shelter is visible in the far left of the frame.

Pitt reaches past his colleague and pauses the footage on the image of the bus shelter. The advert on the end of it is clear, even in the darkness.

‘Marmite,’ I say.

‘It’s in the UK,’ Pitt says. ‘Nowhere else would have an advert for Marmite.’

‘How could Lottie be inEngland?’

‘We still don’t know it’s Lottie,’ Gina reminds me.

Pitt leans forward on the desk, staring intently at the screen. ‘Let’s take another look at the child, frame by frame,’ he says. ‘See if there’sanything you recognise.’

How can I not know my own daughter? But there’s nothing to distinguish this toddler from any other. Maybe if the child was walking by itself, there might be something familiar that chimed with me: a way of moving, perhaps, or a certain gesture. But held in the man’s arms like this, the face turned away, there’s nothing for me to go on.

‘Our analysts will go over this,’ Pitt says, finally. ‘They’ll look for reflections, fragments, things we might have missed. If there’s anything there, we’ll find it.’

His tone is upbeat, but I feel as if I’ve failed yet again.